42 Laws You Should Know (Part 1)
“Give a man a thought and you feed his brain for a day. Teach him how to think, and you feed his brain for life.”
If you’re the observant type, you’ll notice that life occurrences tend to repeat.
For example, why is it that every plan you make overruns?
Or that adding more of something doesn’t seem to improve things past a certain point.
Despite experiencing these phenomena multiple times, you probably don’t have the exact words to describe them.
Don’t worry.
After reading the following list, you will.
The below aren’t laws in the legal sense, I.e. they are not rules that anybody enforces.
Instead, they are valuable rules of thumb for the way things and people tend to behave.
They come from a variety of disciples, but most have broader applications.
Knowing them allows you to add to your collection of mental models, which helps you understand the world better and solve problems more easily.
Sounds good?
Then, let’s get started.
1. The Backwards Law
The more you pursue something, the less likely you will achieve it.
This ‘law’ was introduced to the West by the English writer and philosopher Alan Watts, although its origins are in the Eastern philosophy of Zen Buddhism.
It explains the ironic phenomenon of feeling less satisfied the more you chase something.
For example, pursuing happiness can often make you feel less happy because it reminds you of your unhappy state.
In other words, seeking something reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
Instead, it is better to focus on the process, not the outcome.
Or, as Henry David Thoreau put it, “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
2. Brook’s Law
Adding more staff to a late software project only makes it later.
Brook’s law is an observation about software project management, but it applies more broadly.
If a project runs late, it’s tempting to add more people. The assumption is that additional bodies will complete the task faster.
Brook’s Law describes what occurs typically: adding more people to a project that’s late only delays it further.
Fred Brooks first observed this phenomenon in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month.
He explains that "adding people to a software project increases the total effort necessary in three ways: the work and disruption of repartitioning itself, training the new people, and the added intercommunication".
3. Hofstadter’s Law
Things always take longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
More commonly known as the ‘planning fallacy’, Hofstadter’s Law describes the phenomenon of never allowing enough time to execute a plan.
Everyone on the planet is susceptible to this law.
Even the king of cognitive bias himself, Daniel Kahneman, spent seven years on a book project that he anticipated would take less than two!
4. Parkinson’s Law
Work expands to fill the time available.
Have you ever noticed that you invariably put off doing anything until the last minute if you have a distant deadline?
Parkinson’s Law, named after the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson, describes the tendency to use up all the time available even if you can do the task more quickly.
Or, as the man himself wrote in an opening line for an essay in The Economist in 1955, “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
5. Jakob’s Law
Users spend most of their time on other websites, so they prefer your site to work the same way as all the others do.
Jakob Nielsen is the Danish co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.
He was named the “king of usability” by Internet Magazine, and his life’s work has focused on how humans can better interact with computers.
One of his most important observations is that internet users like consistency.
If your site works in unexpected ways, it will increase their cognitive load by forcing them to learn something new.
Increases in cognitive load cause friction, making your product harder and often less enjoyable to use.
Remember, don’t try to be too fancy.
Users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they use.
6. Law of Unintended Consequences
When solving one problem, we inadvertently cause others.
Unintended consequences occur when you apply simple solutions to complex problems.
One of the most famous examples involves snakes in British colonial India.
An infestation of venomous cobras forced local officials to respond to the problem.
Their solution?
They put a bounty on cobra heads to incentivise locals to reduce the population.
Initially, this seemed to be successful as the heads started rolling in.
However, it wasn’t long before everyone realised the snake population wasn’t reducing. In fact, the numbers were steadily increasing.
The reason?
Incentivised by the cash reward, enterprising locals began breeding cobras to kill them.
Instead of solving the issue, the authorities had inadvertently made it worse.
7. Hick’s Law
The more options someone is presented with, the longer it takes them to decide.
In the early 1950s, two psychologists, William Hick and Ray Hyman conducted several experiments to establish the mathematical relationship between the number of choices given to someone and how long it takes them to decide.
Unsurprisingly, they discovered that the more options you give a person, the longer it will take them to choose the best option.
Practitioners in user-experience design frequently refer to this law, but it applies to more than just the number of choices presented on a website.
Related to this is the ‘paradox of choice’, a phrase coined by the American psychologist Barry Schwartz to explain that an abundance of choice can cause anxiety, making it difficult for the individual to make any choice.
