Today after I watched a TED video on my ipad, which titled “处乱不惊”in Chinese attracted my eyes, with my deep interest I watched this video show for 3 times.

The most impressive words across the whole video is pre-mortem, equal to the word pre-check, means think ahead of everything, the so called prospective hindsight for everything else.

The speaker Daniel Levitin at first told a story of his own.In a cold winter night in Montreal, he forgot to bring his key. In that situation, instead of finding a locksmith, he broke up his basement window and crawled through and got his passport and suitcase. However, the next morning when he drove to the airport, he still forget to bring his suitcase and passport, which later bring him a series of bad luck and so on. All these he attributed to his brain was crowned with lots of stress and urgency things.

From this little trivial thing, as a neuroscientist Daniel said when people under stress, their brain will releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. The word pre-mortem was first put forward by one of his friend Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, he said in pre-mortem you can look ahead all the things that could go wrong and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening or to minimize the damage.

So Why Daniel give us the speech, Daniel want to tell us that if we can use pre-mortem form to do some things, some of them are obvious,some of them are not so obvious. As there is a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, it can keep track of the locations of important things, where the well is, where fish can be found ect, that is rather obvious things,however when you are confronted with a medical decision to make or other important decisions to make, you would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts, the facts sometimes may not obvious especially when you under pressure.

So, learn to be pre-mortem, learn to train yourself to pre-think ahead of the time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. Then you don’t want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot, you can have more time to think other things like quality of life. Everyone had a defect, everyone may fail in some place, but we need to think ahead to what those failures might be.

Your life will be more beautiful after you learn to bepre-mortem.