Common Mental Illnesses and Declines

This article is part of a multi-part series on human misjudgment by Phil Ordway, managing principal of Anabatic Investment Partners.

Common mental illnesses and declines, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse

Update

Also known as “Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency,” and related to man with a hammer tendency.

• Use the functional equivalent of the flight simulator
• “Throughout his life, a wise man engages in the practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self.”
• A reduction in the number of skills encourages a drift toward man with a hammer syndrome, along with a reduction in learning capacity.
• “It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist.”
• High-level skills can be maintained only with daily practice. The pianist Paderewski said that he could notice performance deterioration if he failed to practice for a single day, and that after a week the audience would notice too.