Obvious But Effective, Not True But Useful
Obvious But Effective, Not True But Useful
Reticular Activating System, Default Behavior, Diagoras's Sailors, False Realities
“Success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time.” - Shane Parrish
"Only Homo Sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist and believe six impossible things before breakfast.” - Yuval Noah Harari
Obvious but Effective
A lot of the concepts in the realm of self-development get dismissed as being “obvious.” While this may be true, it doesn’t mean we always act on these insights. In fact, our default behavior often acts against these ideas. Cognitive biases, instant gratification, and societal influences are a few factors that hinder our ability to act with common sense. That’s why we need to inculcate these ideas in our brain. Mastery comes from repetition. Repeated exposure to positive mental models will make our everyday thinking align with these concepts. There is even a region of the brain that deals with this directly. It is called the Reticular Activating System. Essentially, the more you pay attention to something, the more your brain will subconsciously be looking for it as well. That is why after we are introduced to a novel concept, we frequently will start seeing it everywhere. It wasn’t that it wasn’t there before, our brain just hadn’t been programmed to notice it yet. An example of a concept that is obvious but effective is compound interest. We all know that if we dedicate a small amount of time every day to a task we are trying to accomplish, over time we will make tremendous progress towards that goal, even if the payoff isn’t evident from day-to-day. As Sahil Bloom says, “Everything above zero compounds. Small things become big things.” We all know this to be true, but how often do we actually bring this mindset into our daily decisions? Just because something is obvious does not diminish its validity. Aldous Huxley once said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Just so, ignoring a piece of advice because it is too “obvious” does not make it any less effective.
Not True, but Useful
Also in the realm of self-development are ideas that we tell ourselves to motivate us, that may not be entirely true. However, belief in these ideas spur on better behavior than not believing in them. One such idea is that if you find your passion, align your goals with it, and dedicate 100% of your effort to it, you will be successful. People point to the success stories of entrepreneurs who started in their garage and constantly pulled all-nighters before they went on to become global successes. While inspiring, this ignores the fact that over 9 out of 10 startups fail. This is the survivorship bias. The Greek philosopher Diagoras was an outspoken Atheist. To try to convince him of the existence of God, a friend of his showed him a painting of a group of sailors who had prayed to God in the midst of a terrible storm and managed to make it home safely. Diagoras’s response was, that is great, but where is the painting of all the sailors who prayed and still drowned anyway? For every success story out there, there are countless more examples of people who took a similar path but failed. This means that the mantra I described above is not true. By believing in it, you are undergoing a form of self-deception. The wrinkle is that in most instances, this self-deception is actually a good thing. The person who falsely believes that giving everything he has to a project will guarantee that project’s success will go a lot further than the person who believes he is doomed from the start and doesn’t try at all. This could be an explanation for why society looks at a lot of successful people and calls them delusional. The ideas that they believe may not survive a litmus test, but if they did not believe in those delusions, they would not have reached the level of success that they did. These ideas all fall under the category of things that won’t guarantee your success, but believing in the inverse will guarantee your failure. It is a unique trait of the Homo Sapiens species to believe in false realities. We might as well take advantage of it if we can.
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Thomas