The Lawyer’s Well-Being Brief

What can a Nobel Prize winner teach us about Well-being?

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”- John F. Kennedy

Welcome back or welcome to, the Lawyer’s Well-being Brief. Every week, I share insights and tools to help us improve our well-being. This week we look at Daniel Kahneman’s thinking and how we can use it to help us on our well-being journey.

Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American author, psychologist, economist, and Nobel Prize winner. Kahneman and his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996, were both trained as psychologists. Together they challenged the academic orthodoxy that people’s economic behavior is strictly guided by rational thought. They identified many examples where decisions are shaped in ways that are irrational, but understandable — such as judges who grant parole more often after lunch than when they’re hungry.

In 2011, Kahneman wrote the best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. It debunked the notion that people are rational beings who act out of self-interest — they act based on instinct, he argued. The book’s main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: “System 1” is fast, instinctive, and emotional; “System 2” is…