Challenge Your Perspective

This comes from a part of a blog post I wrote on my personal website (see here) and thought more people needed to see it

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It’s interesting to consider a lot of who you are as a person, your interests, your psychology, your decision making, how you process emotions, your self-talk, etc. comes from when you were a kid. Most people don’t recognize that the things they tell themselves come from their parents or the people they were around between the ages of 0–5. It makes sense when you deconstruct it because the process of becoming an adult involves a collection of experiences, observations, and things you’re told as a kid. If that’s internalized and you see that as normal growing up, you’re just going to consider that normal.

Look at Tiger Woods and his extra-marital affairs. It’s exactly what his dad did and what he saw his dad do for years. It was so open and his dad basically got away with it his whole life. Even if Tiger didn’t do it consciously, it was always there; in front of him, all the time. Eventually, that’s going to change your subconscious and make you make decisions you don’t even really have much control over.

This is why unlearning is so hard. The people at peace and the ones that are happiest are the ones who understand their story and thoughts much better than anyone else does. They figure out why they make decisions and the real reasons behind them, not just what their conscious mind is telling them. It’s hard though because people don’t want to confront their own thoughts. They don’t like sitting by themselves and doing the difficult work of understanding themselves.

To me though, if you don’t understand yourself, how are you supposed to make sense of the world? If you can’t take an objective look at yourself and understand how you look from an outside perspective, how are you supposed to trust your opinion on something? Because bias overlays everything you look at. You’re always looking at something through your lens and if you don’t understand your lens, how are you supposed to know if it’s right?

The best way I think about it is to imagine you have terrible eyes, yet you can’t afford glasses. Everything looks blurry to you but to someone else, that thing may be as clear as can be. However, if the way you see the world has always been blurry, how are you supposed to know anything different? To you, blurry is normal.

So how do you break out of that? In my opinion, it’s endless learning. It’s understanding and listening to other people’s stories and how they see the world. It is about understanding their decision-making process, actions and stories. Because although it’s not the way you see the world, getting a lot of different inputs on how people see a certain topic is healthy. Then when you come to a conclusion, at least you have a lot of data points.

Without the evidence, how are you supposed to trust a conclusion? You really can’t. If you only look for evidence that already confirms what you’re seeing, you’re not really learning. You’re not taking a holistic view. The problem is most people think they’re seeing all the evidence to confirm their point of view. They don’t actively look for evidence that they disagree with.

Disagreement though is the only way to be objective. Diversity of thought is the only way to progress. For example, if you see articles talking about how great Trump is and how he’s done an amazing job for America, you think he’s great. But if you don’t look for the counter-evidence of what else he’s done, you’ll always believe he is great.

Actively looking for things that tell you you are wrong is scary. In some ways it feels like you’re challenging your identity. No one likes to be told they are wrong, but you have to take an objective look at the evidence and reality. For example, if you’re selling a product to 100 people and 90 people hate it, but 10 people like it, a lot of people will say my product is great because look at the 10 people that like it. But if you don’t look at the whole picture, you miss the 90 people. Objectively, 90% of people dislike your product. That’s what’s real. Not the 10 people that like it.

Examine the totality of evidence before you come to conclusions. The other thing is if you make a decision without all the evidence, which you have to do a lot of the time, you need to examine the process to get to that decision, no matter the outcome. Understanding the decision-making process is more important than the outcome because a lot of things will be completely outside your control. You can’t control everything, no matter how much you stress or are anxious about something. You can only control your reaction to something and your feelings. That’s within your control so that’s what you should focus on. But you can reflect on the process that got you to make that decision.

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Keep going, you’re doing great

-AK

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