Thinking about the choices I regret, by far the worst mistakes I have made came from not fully understanding myself and how my own "Elephant" works.

The Elephant in your brain represents the unconscious drives that move you.

Because it's a constant in your life, you almost don't notice it. But in fact it exerts a huge pull on your decision-making.

The reason it's hard to fix this with advice is that different people have DIFFERENT elephants with different foibles.

And then some of the common elephant foibles aren't taught to people and you have to learn them the expensive way.

Or, they are taught, but along with a whole bunch of anti-advice that pollutes the information environment.

Sometimes your elephant has some really bad ideas:

- fear of failure
- signalling when you should actually communicate
- too much greed
- too little confidence/rejection sensitivity

etc.

The elephant/rider metaphor helps you to understand how there are essentially two "minds" in your brain - the conscious/verbal brain and the automatic emotional brain.

(Image credit to @waitbutwhy) https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221