Earth and Sun
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View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) “It is difficulties that show what we are.” —Epictetus
One of my favourite anecdotes about perspective comes from Wittgenstein as retold in a play (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00C9DVLC2/) by Tom Stoppard.
One day, the philosopher is talking to a friend who remarks (and I’m paraphrasing): “isn’t it absurd that people once believed the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way around?” “Maybe,” says Wittgenstein. “But how different would it have looked if they had been right?”
There is paradox to honing your craft as a problem solver.
The more you do it, the faster you work, the more certain you become. You fall in love with both your best ideas and worst assumptions too easily.
We assume that by knowing more now than we did before that we’re less immune to mistakes.
We get overly confident in our knowledge—that the earth revolves around the sun, for example—never stopping to the realize how easily it is to believe something different that simply isn’t true.
It’s an effect German philosopher Heidegger once observed: that as we begin to know something, we are prone to a dual process of revelation and concealment. Learning something new comes at the expense of knowing something else.
You and I are creative pros, so we try to safeguard against this. We establish a process that codifies how we work, we state our assumptions and confidently predict outcomes.
And yet if left unchecked, it’s what takes our best asset—the ability to be flexible in our thinking—and renders us rigid, rule-based and kinda dull.
The inability to recognize our mistakes is the biggest obstacle to success and to overcoming the past. That’s how Matthew Syed sees it in his book “Black Box Thinking (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00RTY0E74/) : The Surprising Truth About Success.” He cautions that it’s important we don’t fall victim to closed loop thinking: ignoring and minimizing errors of judgment, or even projecting our mistakes onto others, rather than seeing the unvarnished truth.
How do we do we escape this?
Well, for starters it helps to remember what physicist Richard Feynman once said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Have compassion for yourself.
To that end, one of the most helpful mental models I’ve found is one prescribed by Wharton Business School professor and organizational psychologist Adam Grant. He talks about adopting “mental time travel.”
Take any problem you are dealing with today and ask yourself if you’ve tackled something similar in the past. Odds are good that you have in some manner. How did you overcome it? What mistakes did you make before that you don’t have to repeat again? What would the you of the past say to the you of today?
You are wiser not just from what you know, but from your ability to understand where you went wrong before. And how.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. You know what’s not a mistake? Sharing CreativeBoost with friends. Do that now using either of the green buttons below.
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