How We Think
“I don’t jump to conclusions. I cannonball into them like a boss.” - Anonymous
My wife likes to rearrange the furniture every so often. She just gets bored with the same old look and feel after some period of time.
When the time comes for us (me) to move the furniture around, I usually ask silly questions like: “We decided together that this was the best placement of the furniture, right? That’s why we put it this way.”
Affirmative. And then: “Nothing that went into that decision has changed, right?” Correct.
I know. Silly questions. But I’m the man of the house, so I put my foot down.
And then we move the furniture.
Often (to my satisfaction and dismay), the furniture ends up going back the way it was — eventually. But sometimes we discover that we missed something the first time. Or we decide we want new furniture. Either we confirm that we have the optimal arrangement and that makes us happy, or we come up with an even better idea.
My wife is just better at mixing things up than I am. I’m better at creating order out of chaos.
Another example. When my wife and I go on a trip, I’m usually the one who does most of the driving and navigating. I enjoy the trip more if I have something to do, and I’m better at navigating from point A to point B.
When we get to our destination, though, we have learned over the years that it’s way more fun when she takes the wheel. She’s much more apt to find something new as we wander and discover and “follow our noses.” She’s much more likely to stumble across something I would never have noticed because I was focused on a destination. Of course, if we get too lost, I take over and we navigate home again.
Our learned and inherited tendency to rely on heuristics — shortcuts in thinking — is efficient. It gets us to proper furniture arrangements, and it gets us from A to B. But it can cause us to overgeneralize, miss important insights due to out-of-date assumptions, or outright resist new information in the interest of efficiency.
By acting quickly and automatically, we optimize for safety. But we may miss opportunities for growth. Perhaps what appears to be a tiger in the grass is really a new food source, a friend or ally — perhaps even one in need, a new place to hide, or just the wind. Perhaps it really is a tiger, but it’s only there to make us flee to the other tigers that are lying in wait, elsewhere.
Most of the tigers we see in the grass are not tigers anymore. We need to evolve to deal with new threats — particularly those within us.