We've all been there, you've got 3 minutes to leave the house or you're going to be late, but reality is playing another cruel joke on you, you can't find your keys.
You know that you had them last night because you drove home, so they must be in the house somewhere. They can't be in the shed because you stayed inside the whole night. You've got limited time to search, not enough to check the entire house so you have to think quickly to look in the most likely places first.
Normally you put your keys on the table by the door, but they are not there. Sometimes you leave them in the kitchen, and it's possible someone moved them to the cupboard. You make a quick list in your mind of the most and least likely places, and stake your future on it.
The seconds tick by, only 1 minute to go and you've checked the most likely areas. Time to get desperate and start looking in places that you didn't think it was going to be. Did they fall down the back of the couch? Nope. Well I did get a drink as soon as I came in the house, could I have been so stupid as to leave them in the fridge? No luck there either.
Tensions rise, and as the deadline approaches the search gets more and more frantic. Maybe they are in the shower? No of course not, what was I thinking?! A bead of sweat forms on your forehead, a moderate rage starts welling up from somewhere deep inside of you. And then that's it, you're out of time. You've passed the deadline, you are officially late now.
At this point it's normal to declare something along the lines of "I can't find my **** keys!" This is however, not strictly true. You will eventually find them. It would be much more accurate to say that you could not achieve your desired objective given the resource constraints (i.e. time and man-power) you were operating under.
So where were the keys? To make the analogy work for the point of this article, the keys were in the shed. As you later discover, your significant other accidentally picked them up while tidying last night and they ended up in a cardboard box and making their way down the garden.
Why did you not check the shed?
Because of course, you knew they could not be there!
I'll spare you the maths of how this works here and include it in another article. The basic point though is that the more certain you are of a belief, the less likely you are to change it, even when presented with evidence that contradicts your belief.
Another issue is, due to your limited resources (i.e. time), you have to prioritise. And so you focus your energies on the areas you perceive to be the most promising areas to investigate, based on your current beliefs about the situation.
How does this apply to other areas?
Problem solving in life
This type of thing actually happens all the time. As we experience life, we start to make conclusions based off previous successes and failures. We weight information we receive from others usually by how much we trust or admire the person giving it. We form a complex web of conflicting beliefs about the world around us.
It's this belief system that then guides how we perceive reality and how we go about solving life's problems. Life is always resource constrained, and so this belief system will also dictate where we will even be willing to consider looking for an answer to the problem.
Let me give you an example from my own life of what can happen when you fall for this trap. I hope to demonstrate this fundamental rule - the longer you fail to get results in any area, the more likely it is you have high level of conviction, in a false belief. But why?
I used to suffer from quite extreme social anxiety as a younger person. From my viewpoint now, I believe this stemmed from a false belief that people were judging my behaviour much more harshly than they actually were. What I believe to be true now is that people will often mirror the energy you put in, so if you are pleased to see someone else, often they will be pleased to see you as well.
So my belief led me to think that any minor social faux pas I made would essentially result in other people thinking I am a total dork, and therefore they would not want to spend any more time with me. This made each interaction I had with people a very high-stakes operation, one that of course made me very nervous as I believed even the smallest mistake could have catastrophic consequences.
What this ended up creating however was a self-fulfilling prophecy, since I was so nervous and obviously unable to just relax and enjoy myself, other people would respond to my energy in a negative manner. Maybe they felt bad for me, or I just made them uncomfortable, but through my lens at the time each experience seemed to just confirm my existing hypothesis.
So I ended up feeling totally trapped and unable to solve this problem. What was happening here? To draw a parallel - the keys were in the shed and I knew there was no way they were in the shed, and so I could never find my keys.
The thing I was most certain about (that people were extremely critical of my behaviour), was actually the wrong assumption. But due to my high certainty, I was interpreting new evidence as supporting that, and so I actually became more certain of it.
This of course was making it impossible to solve the problem, because the solution to the problem would require me to do something that I would never even consider under this belief system.
Why people don't notice this
I think this is because when things aren't going right people will check the things they are the least certain of first. And sometimes you are uncertain of something that isn't true, and then changing that assumption leads to a result.
For example, if I am not sure how long my commute takes, and I am often late. I might quite quickly check over the route and calculate the average time, and then leave my house 5-10 minute before it is necessary to do so. That problem does not last long because the thing I did not know was also something I was willing to reconsider. So very often when you lack a strong belief in your incorrect assumptions, you quite quickly revise them and self-correct.
But if I am absolutely convinced that a 90 minute commute is actually only 30 minutes, then I will never be able to understand why I am always late even though I'm leaving a full 45 minutes before I need to be in the office.
It won't "make any sense" to me and I won't be able to see the most obvious solution to the problem. In fact I always find this one funny because it's usually said in an accusation, that the other people or the situation is somehow wrong for not being understandable, wherein the fact is if you don't understand something, then quite simply YOU don't understand it. It is a flaw in your capacity to understand, not a flaw in the other thing for being non-understandable.
Things to watch out for
So my experience has taught me that if you have any of the following:
- Long-standing problems that don't seem to resolve
- Things that "don't make any sense"
- Areas you are unable to be effective or get the results you want
Then you are likely dealing with a hidden assumption, that you would never even think to question because it's so obviously true, that is in fact probably the complete opposite of the truth.
And the longer the problems take to resolve, the less sense they make, or the worse your ability is, the bigger and more wronger the assumption is, and probably the higher your belief in it as well.
Put simply, the better you understand reality the more effective you are. And so conversely you have to face the fact that when you are being ineffective, you have a wrong concept of reality.