NDSM

Session 02: Loss Aversion Exercise

Atley George

Atley George 62210621

NDSM exercise 2 reflections
The list of goals that I had selected to achieve in my personal and professional life are listed below:
• Learn the sitar.
• Meditate daily.
• Learn to organize and prioritize work better.
Of the above options, I decided to analyze my goal of learning the sitar. Previous attempts to pick up
a new instrument was thwarted by lack of time management and laziness, and also my
apprehension about how the Sitar was a much more difficult instrument to pick up, compared to the
acoustic guitar(which I was a novice at)
Some of the interventions and preventions that could have helped me commence and make
progress in this front would have been:
• Assigning fixed time slots daily for learning and practice
• Paying for lessons from a master
• Sharing with my social circle my intention to learn the instrument.
Below are some ways in which I can leverage the biases discussed in class to help accomplish this
goal:
• Loss Aversion – I would like to utilize my craving for non-veg food as a potential loss
aversion tactic to motivate me to go for sitar classes regularly. An agreement of having to
abstain from non-veg food in the event of missing a sitar class, enforced by having my flat
mate keeping a check on me is a methodology I would like to pursue.
• Probability Weighting – Setting up reminders in the form of postid notes, regarding my
moderate success with learning the acoustic guitar will help me narrow the gap between the
objective probability of success in learning the sitar and my perceived probability of success.
• Reference Dependence – I would like to make a list of reasons why being comfortable with
the existing status quo, although it my look attractive now, might prove to be a source of
regret at a later stage in my life. Taking some time to think about how my future self might
look back at this day, hoping I had picked up the new instrument will motivate me further to
get started with the goal, as my status quo looks less attractive now.