I recently finished Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. I don’t read much historical nonfiction, but I now plan to change that. The story of Lewis and Clark is riveting and full of lessons for modern life.

Ambrose focuses on Meriwether Lewis and the outsized role Thomas Jefferson played in Lewis’ life before, during, and after the expedition he co-led with William Clark. Lewis was a man with a highly diverse skillset: he was an experienced woodsman, a practiced naturalist, an engaging writer, and a brilliant company commander. He and William Clark were undoubtedly, unquestionably, the right men to lead the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific Ocean and back (with lots of help and luck). Indeed, Lewis’ entire life up to that point seemed to be in preparation for such a mission.

I’m befuddled.

I’m taking a couple of undergraduate courses this semester, Basic Statistics and Experimental Psychology. In Statistics, we’re learning a statistical programming language called R. I’ve been interested in learning R for a while, and I was happy to see it on the syllabus.

Two weeks in, it turns out R is hard.

Yes, Captain Obvious: R is hard

R has a notoriously steep learning curve, and it’s especially challenging if you’re new to programming. I’m comforted by that. But the real problem here isn’t R.

Most arguments consist of two people repeating the evidence they find most convincing.

I have my talking points, you have yours, and never the twain shall meet. Try as we might to persuade each other, your ideas don’t much move me and mine don’t convince you. It’s almost as if we’re two different people! At best, we give up and agree to disagree; at worst, we leave the discussion thinking the other person is dumber than a bag of sand.

Most semesters, I teach a college study skills class. This semester, I’m taking a class instead (two, actually: Basic Statistics and Experimental Psychology). This means I get to test all the advice I’ve been giving my students for the last five years.

And one piece of advice I give to my college students is to take notes by hand. That’s right—leave the laptop in the backpack and kick it old school with a pen and notebook.

I’m pretty sure you and I are on the same page.

As smart, hard-working people who want to get smarter, we’re on a lifelong quest for personal development. No, we’re not into woo-woo mysticism or law-of-attraction nonsense, but we are interested in making a conscious effort to get better at life. We want to improve, not just pass the time.

And if we want to get better at life, we must learn to make better decisions. That means learning to recognize a major cause of poor decisions: cognitive biases.