The Japanese Railway Trick That Could Make You Better at Everything

In My Mind #23

This week: positivity, where you work and sleep, and what Japanese train drivers can teach us about paying attention.

Positivity wins more, even if there's reason to be negative

With everything in life we have the opportunity to look at it from a positive or negative mindset. For there are no things that are objectively bad and there are no things that are objectively good. It is merely our appraisal of the situation that labels it as good or bad.

With this in mind we should try and engage with everything in life with a positive mindset. Henry Ford is quoted as saying, "Those who believe they can do something and those who believe they can't are both right." What he's saying is that it's the belief that you're able to do it that tends to push you towards actually achieving something. The contrary is true as well. If you believe you can't do it then you tend not to achieve the thing.

This isn't purely down to the belief itself but it's down to how you appraise challenges in the lead up to achieving something. It's very rare that things we plan to do happen exactly the way that we planned them. There tend to be hiccups, bumps in the road, and challenges that we have to go through in order to achieve. If you approach all of these challenges with an optimistic mindset from the get-go, you are more likely to take that challenge on board, push through, and get out the other side. If you go into those challenges with a negative mindset, you are more likely to think: "Why is this always happening to me? Is it really worth the challenge? Should I just give up now?" That is why both people are correct.

There is a specific location for everything

Our brains enjoy having rules to follow. One of those rules is the context of where things happen, where activities happen. For example we travel to work, we complete work at the office, and then we come home and we rest. This is why if you try to work from home from your bed, the quality of your work is a lot lower than if you had a workplace even in the home, such as a home office. This is because there should be a place for everything and that place can be specific for you. One person's sofa might be where they read, while another person's sofa might be where they rest.

Part of the reason why technology in bed is so damaging is because every time that you are lying in bed on your phone scrolling through social media, you're diluting the signal to your brain that the bed is where you rest and where you sleep. Every time that you pick up your phone you are signalling to your brain that it's okay to be on your phone in bed and so over time you have more urges to pick up your phone when you are lying in bed as opposed to falling asleep as you probably once did.

There was a study completed with people suffering from insomnia. They were told that they were only allowed to get into bed when they felt tired and if they stayed in bed for more than 10 minutes without falling asleep they had to get up, leave the room, go somewhere else until they felt tired again, then go back to bed, and the process followed again and again. Eventually the people that were part of the study who were previously struggling with insomnia were able to re-associate bed with sleep and so were able then to start sleeping better.

The point and call safety system

The point-and-call system is something that was brought into Japan's railways in the early 1900s. It's used as a method to stop accidents and mistakes from happening because people aren't fully engaged in the task that they're doing. The way that it works is they point at the thing that they're going to be engaging with. They call it out for what it is and then they enact the action. For example a train driver might point at his controls as he engages with them, as well as pointing at signs and indicators outside of the train. By pointing using visual aids and calling them out using auditory senses, you engage fully with the thing that you're doing.

Imagine your route to work. You may have driven it a hundred times. You may have driven it a thousand times. Over the past seven days, can you point out anything specific about the route that you took? Probably not because it's so ingrained into your everyday life that it just comes and goes without much thought at all. You've become numb to what that route is and therefore you don't have to pay full attention to it. You're able to switch off slightly while you're driving because you know the route that you're taking but is that the safest way of driving? Someone could jump out in front of you at any point, an animal could run across the road - suddenly your brain is back engaged but had it been engaged from the start you might have spotted the animal from further away and been able to slow down accordingly. By using the point and call safety system, the Japanese railways were able to reduce errors by 85% and cut accidents by 30% simply by taking an action from being unconscious to being conscious.

Try it tomorrow on your way to work. Rather than just driving the same route that you always do, disengaging or listening to the radio, call out everything that you do. I'm now turning right. I'm now indicating to go round the roundabout. There is a roundabout coming up in 100 m. See how much more engaged you are with the route that you're taking and the driving that you're doing. I'd be interested to see what your experience of this is and whether you find it helpful or not.