Today's Wisdom - Zeigarnik, Fintech and Paradise Lost

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. Leonardo da Vinci once said, "Learning never exhausts the mind." Embracing that spirit of endless curiosity, today’s wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In the 1920s, a Soviet psychology student named Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a bustling café when she noticed that the waiters, despite never writing anything down, could remember sprawling tables of complicated orders with remarkable precision. However the moment a bill was paid and the table cleared, that same information vanished from their memory almost instantly. Intrigued, she brought the observation into the laboratory. In a series of experiments she gave participants a set of puzzles, arithmetic problems, and simple crafts to complete, then interrupted half of them before they could finish. When she later asked participants to recall the tasks, the interrupted ones were remembered significantly better than the completed ones.

The reason lies in how the brain allocates cognitive resources. When you complete a task, your mind files it away and releases the tension associated with it. But an unfinished task creates an open loop, a low-level background process that keeps running and demands resolution. It is the same mechanism that makes a half-read thriller impossible to put down, that replays an unresolved argument in your head at 2am, or that makes a song feel unbearable when it stops just before the final note. Advertisers and screenwriters have exploited this for decades. The cliffhanger was engineered for psychological compulsion. When a Netflix episode ends mid-scene, or breaks away at the moment of peak tension, they are simply activating the Zeigarnik Effect, making your brain treat the next episode as unfinished business it desperately needs to close.

What makes the effect genuinely useful rather than merely interesting is that it works just as well for the person who understands it as for the one being manipulated by it. Psychologists studying procrastination have found that one of the most effective techniques for overcoming it is simply to start a task you have been avoiding, even for just two minutes. The simple act of beginning opens the cognitive loop in the brain and writers have known this intuitively for centuries. Hemingway's most famous working habit was to stop each day's writing mid-sentence, not at a natural break but in the middle of a thought, so that the incomplete sentence would pull him back to his desk the following morning with the momentum already built. Write the first line of the report. Play the first few bars of the piece. Sketch the first corner of the design. The brain will treat the incompleteness as unfinished business and quietly work on it long after you have walked away, making the return to it the following day feel less like starting and more like continuing. The Zeigarnik effect is ultimately a description of something the brain does automatically with every unfinished piece of business in your life and it is down to you to use it to your advantage.

Below - New findings from Yale show that we have a "Visual Zeigarnik Effect". Our eyes and memory spontaneously prioritize information that is unfinished over things that are already done.

For most of the twentieth century, your relationship with money was mediated by a building. You drove to a branch, waited in a queue, spoke to a person behind a counter, and left with a paper receipt as proof that the transaction had happened. The entire architecture of personal finance was built around physical presence and institutional trust. Then smartphones arrived, and within a decade, that architecture changed. In 2026, one of the leading fintech apps, Monzo, has 22% penetration across the UK population, up from 7% in 2020. Another, Revolut operates in over 50 countries. India's UPI (an instant online payment system) processed 170 billion transactions in 2024 alone. The global fintech market was valued at $340 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach over $1 trillion by 2032. The speed of this transformation has very few parallels in financial history.

The first wave of fintech was about taking existing financial services and moving them onto a phone. Apps like Revolut, Cash App, and Monzo stripped out the overhead of physical branches and passed the savings on to users in the form of fee-free transfers, real-time spending notifications, and exchange rates that legacy banks had quietly been skimming for decades. The second wave, which is happening now, is more ambitious and considerably less visible. Embedded finance describes the practice of tucking payments, loans, and insurance directly into apps that have nothing to do with banking. When you split a dinner bill inside WhatsApp, insure a package inside a shopping checkout, or receive a salary advance through your employer's HR platform, no fintech brand announces itself. The money simply moves. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this further, with the most advanced platforms now making credit decisions in seconds using live spending behaviour rather than a static credit score. This is a shift that could open up lending access to the estimated 49 million Americans the traditional scoring system currently leaves out entirely.

And yet the story has a twist that the fintech industry did not see coming. There is something that Peter Aiken at Kantar dubbed the Lamborghini Paradox: everyone is drawn to the beautiful, thrilling object until they remember they have two kids, a weekly shop, and a road full of potholes. Fintechs are masterpieces of design and enormously useful for specific moments, travel, splitting bills, daily spending. But when consumers were surveyed in January 2026, the two banks that topped the UK's Customer Satisfaction Index were First Direct, famous for answering the phone quickly, and Nationwide, which has pledged to keep its branches open until 2030. Consumers are not abandoning their traditional banks but adding fintechs alongside them. What makes this more striking is that Monzo and Nationwide are the only two UK banks to appear on the FT and The Banker's global list of the fifty banks most likely to grow in the coming year. One achieved that by pursuing digital excellence without compromise. The other achieved it by doubling down on human connection at a time when every competitor was retreating from it. The fintech revolution is real, and its scale is not in question. What it has revealed, unexpectedly, is that people still want someone to answer the phone when something goes wrong.

John Milton began dictating Paradise Lost in the early 1660s, blind, politically disgraced, and fortunate to be alive. He had spent two decades as a senior official in Oliver Cromwell's republican government, writing fierce pamphlets defending the execution of King Charles I. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 he spent time in prison, watched his books burned in the street, and escaped execution largely through the intervention of friends, including the poet Andrew Marvell. A lesser man might have spent his remaining years in quiet obscurity. Milton, who had been planning an epic poem since his twenties, sat down in the darkness and began. He would compose hundreds of lines in his head overnight and dictate them to whoever was available each morning, family members, friends, and occasionally paid assistants, correcting and refining as he went. The result, published in 1667, was ten books of blank verse retelling the story of the Fall of Man. Milton depicts the moment in Genesis when Satan tempts Eve, Eve and Adam eat the forbidden fruit, and humanity is expelled from Paradise forever. It is, by almost any measure, the most ambitious poem ever written in the English language.

Milton's Satan is one of the most compelling characters in all of literature, a former archangel of immense beauty and intelligence who leads a rebellion against God, loses catastrophically, and is hurled into Hell with a third of the angels of Heaven. What makes him so difficult to dismiss is that Milton gives him the best speeches. Lying in the burning lake of Hell, Satan rallies his defeated army with a defiance that is genuinely stirring: better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. He is vain, self-deceiving, and ultimately pathetic, his grand rebellion collapsing into the petty act of corrupting a garden and two people who had done him no personal harm. But he is also articulate, courageous in his refusal to submit, and possessed of a self-awareness about his own damnation that gives him a tragic dimension. God, who is depicted as a distant and rather cold cosmic authority, entirely lacks this. The Romantic poets, Byron and Shelley especially, read Satan as the true hero of the poem, a revolutionary crushed by an authoritarian God. While Milton would have been horrified by this interpretation, it is not entirely without basis in the text he actually wrote.

What Paradise Lost is really about, beneath the celestial warfare and the theology, is the question of free will and what it costs. Milton was a deeply serious Protestant who believed that God gave humanity the freedom to choose precisely because love or obedience extracted by force means nothing. Adam and Eve had to be capable of falling, or their innocence would have been merely ignorance. Eve's decision to eat the fruit, which Milton treats with far more psychological complexity than Genesis does, is driven by a desire for knowledge and a kind of autonomous selfhood. The poem ends as Adam and Eve leave Paradise hand in hand, the world before them, and his final lines carry both loss and a quiet, hard-won hope. Milton wrote those lines in darkness, in a country that had rejected everything he believed in, and somehow made them feel like the beginning of something rather than the end.

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Until next time... A Little Wiser Team