Know nothing
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) “What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.” —Muhammad Ali
My friend, it has become popular to say we live in an age of great uncertainty. This does as much as disservice to the arc of human history as to our own truth earned in the lives we live. Things are always uncertain. Experience is meant to teach us that we can only begin to make sense of events in hindsight. We pretend otherwise. We assume that experience makes us better at predicting things.
In fact, there is never a point where the future is knowable. If it were, we’d have a steadily improving track record. A few years ago, Leonard Cohen was asked what makes a great song. “If I knew where the good songs came from,” he said, “I’d go there more often.”
Ideas, like any other choice in front of us, are best guesses.
We are not owed certainty of their success as some kind of birthright. But more often than not, we behave as though the opposite is true.
We are each slaves to the fear of loss.
We assume that the more data we collect, the better our decisions will be. This is irrational. No amount of raw data in volumes can compete with polished insights culled with greater discipline from smaller batches of information.
We ignore this because we fear loss (i.e., “maybe we’ll miss something”).
Similarly, we assume our creative work will only matter if it first meets some kind of arbitrary internal test in which we ask ourselves “is this any good?” It holds us back from trying, again because we fear the sting of loss and failure. This explains why most book projects are unfinished (or unstarted). Most canvases painted are half empty. Ambitions are unrealized.
We are terrible judges of decision making.
Our irrational thinking explains why we tend to judge our decisions based on eventual outcomes when in fact we should be judging them based on the quality of information we had in front of us when the decision was being made.
Those who study human behavior call this outcome bias. And like all biases, the best we can do is acknowledge them and stop lying to ourselves that they don’t exist.
“Our natural tendency to avoid the pain of loss,” Ori and Rom Brafman argue in their book Sway (https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0013TTK1W/) , “is most likely to distort our thinking when we place too much emphasis on short-term goals.”
Seek the correct truth.
This takes us back to the quote at the top of this newsletter: “What you’re thinking is what you’re becoming.”
If you spend all your time making decisions driven by fear, you will be fearful.
If you convince yourself that you know everything about a problem that’s in front of you, you’re bound to wind up surprised when things turn out unexpectedly.
If you think your ideas are terrible, you will have nothing to show for your efforts.
Change your thinking by challenging it. There’s a Zen teaching that I’m quite fond of, called shoshin, or beginner’s mind. It invites us to seek the correct truth: to have an openness to how we look at problems, as unburdened as you can be of preconceptions.
The best sign of growing wisdom and humility is to regularly ask yourself “what if I am wrong?” Not in the sense that your point of view has no value, but rather that you accept that you have an incomplete picture of things. You always will.
Very best, Patrick
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