It’s Not All Hard Luck with Shay Skinner

The Illusion of Skill and How to Make Better Predictions

Imagine being faced with the daunting task of predicting the future with nothing but incomplete information and a handful of hunches. Perhaps you're considering new experiences, like travel or moving to a different town. When I imagined quitting my job, I envisioned a happier world, free from the perceived burden of corporate work. In the following months, however, my expectations were shattered upon realizing that I still largely felt the same despite my newfound freedom. In recent years, this recognition has remained vivid, sparking my curiosity about why predicting outcomes in the face of uncertainty is so difficult.

Whether anticipating a geopolitical event, forecasting stock market trends, or simply contemplating life’s next move, accurate prediction is an ever-present challenge. As I began to journal in earnest some years ago, I uncovered a fascinating trend hidden between the mundane details: my predictions were fraught with overblown concern and startling inaccuracy. Delving into the complexities of prediction and expertise, it becomes clear that many factors—from biases and cognitive distortions to the whims of randomness—shape our perceptions of certainty and accuracy. Despite these hurdles, new research offers a glimmer of hope.

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What Two Writers Taught Me About How to Think

In 1949, a college junior named Barbara Beattie wrote a letter for a school journalism assignment. We can only speculate on Beattie’s youthful expectations: Was she so naive to expect a response, or were these different times? She’d written playwright Arthur Miller at a time when the Broadway run of his most famous work, The Death of a Salesman, was in full swing. He had every reason to ignore a college student’s inquiries into the “formal genesis” of his now-legendary work. What Beattie received–a sprawling and deeply thoughtful essay on man’s common and timeless tragedies–must have impacted her greatly. After all, she’s kept it for seventy-five years. Beattie’s daughter found the letter when helping her mother, now 94, move out of her home.

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Is My Rent Too High?

In normal times, rent prices, like most everything else, slowly yet surely increase at about 2-3% per year. This is inflation. But in terms of the housing market, these aren’t normal times. In the pandemic era, as demand surged in supply-restricted markets, both sale and rent prices soared, with year-over-year inflation rates at 30% or more in some markets. To speak generally of the world of pricing, what goes up might come down. So, when I approached our landlord a few weeks back about lowering the price of our rent, she wasn’t so surprised.

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An Emerging Revolution in the Treatment of Chronic Pain

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic pain—pain lasting at or beyond three months—affected over 20% of U.S. adults, or 51.6 million people, in 2021. Symptoms were severe enough to substantially restrict daily activity for 6.9% of Americans that same year. And with chronic pain comes soaring medical costs, pharmaceutical over-reliance, and addiction.

Mounting multidisciplinary research suggests that most chronic pain is not of structural origin. In other words, most chronic pain can not be directly attributed to injury or physical abnormality. Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting signals from the body as if they were dangerous. We habituate to pain, creating behaviors that either avoid pain or alleviate symptoms.

Encouragingly, those undergoing a psychological treatment known as Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) are showing vast improvements in pain management without pharmaceutical or other medical interventions. One major study found that two-thirds of chronic back pain patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free after four weeks of PRT interventions. In addition, patients showed visible changes in the prefrontal brain regions associated with pain after therapy. While psychological treatments are effective in managing chronic pain, this does not imply that the pain is imaginary.

My guest today, Miriam Gauci Bongiovanni, suffered needlessly until she discovered the concept of neuroplastic pain. Today, now pain-free, she works from her home in Malta as a Certified MindBody Practitioner and Trauma-Informed Coach. But beyond her skills as a wonderful teacher and educator on chronic pain, I found her story of embracing a nontraditional career fascinating. Today we dive in on everything from how our personalities and fears inform our pain cycles to living a good life.

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Topics Discussed with Miriam Gauci Bongiovanni

• Miriam’s history with debilitating pain and the methods she used to cure it
• What is neuroplastic pain?
• Cycles of worry that feed neuroplastic pain: How fear contributes to body tension and muscle spasms
• Why neuroplastic pain often develops from real injuries
• Why emotional experiences are creating real physical changes in the body
• The role of personality on neuroplastic pain and who is most likely to suffer
• Conditioning and pain triggers
• Key indicators of neuroplastic pain
• How neuroplastic pain can imprint on structural pain
• The nocebo effect, expectations of pain
• Why continuing to see practitioners (PT, etc) can contribute to neuroplastic pain
• Why exercises aimed at injury prevention may not be useful
• Somatic tracking and learning to explore painful sensations
• The importance of play on pain mitigation
• Miriam’s personality and personal journey. How frustration at work resulted in pain
• The importance of accountability and individual agency in pain management
• The danger of hiding our stress
• Living a nontraditional life and career: challenges and rewards
• So much more!

A Therapist on Satisfaction in Sport, Life, and Love

If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I searched for and implemented solutions to the wrong problems. Meanwhile, what truly mattered—mainly my relationships—withered on the vine. The journey toward rectifying these tendencies continues today.

My guest today, Lincoln Stoller, is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services. Lincoln holds a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from UT Austin, including a post-doc assignment at UC Berkley. Lincoln eventually moved from quantum physics to create a management and automation software platform for businesses, learned to build Norwegian log homes, traveled and lived abroad in far-flung foreign lands, and is even a certified pilot. To say Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy is probably a half-truth at best. As he says in the interview, we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren't calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”

Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life. While these individuals hold our collective attention and admiration, Lincoln outlines how their psychological roots run shallow. They often struggle to stay satisfied with themselves or those around them. Lincoln might even say he holds an anti-hard-man philosophy. I think you’ll see why.

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Topics Discussed with Lincoln Stoller

• Quantum physics to therapist/coach
• Lincoln’s history in mountaineering amongst some of the legends of the sport
• Why almost all climbers are “high-risk”
• “Resilience is not throwing yourself at a climb until you are torn and bloody, it’s exploring your limits and working them gracefully.”
• Why some people crave risk
• Emotions on the rock and exploration and mastering of triggers
• Getting past societal expectations of productivity
• Can satisfied people be high performers?
• How dissatisfaction can lead to pathology: “If you’re not satisfied with yourself, you won’t be satisfied with anyone else, either.”
• Is competition healthy?
• Is personal growth selfish?
• What is productive suffering and why is it important?
• Taking ownership: the dysfunctional mental model that experts can solve our problems
• How high performers can assess mental health concerns that might not be apparent
• Relationships with parents and why these are often commonly fraught
• “You can’t change people directly. You can only change people indirectly by changing yourself.”
• The importance of doing out-of-the-box stuff and why it’s okay to be considered different
• High achievement and the difficulty with love and long-term relationships