4 Powerful Ways To Be Wrong Less
I've always been obsessed with finding ways of being wrong, less.
Not the douche, I'm-always-right-type fueled by an egotistical personality. But instead, working through mental blocks that prevent me from thinking clearly and making well-informed decisions.
Being wrong causes a lot of suffering.
You marry the wrong spouse, make a costly business mistake, or say something shitty because you made the wrong assumption when the opposite was true.
Early in my sales career, I was driven by converting large purchase orders.
That's all I wanted to do—convert big deals. It was exciting, thrilling, and had anything to do with money (shockingly, not more core motivation).
At the time, an account I was managing needed about $500,000 in aircraft brakes for their then Boeing 727 fleet.
I offered them an alternate part number, assuming they could accept it, and they did. However, I didn't provide any advice to verify if they could accept the alternate part or information on the differences between the models.
I just wanted the f'ing order.
Weeks later, the client called me after I invested $300,000 into the project, saying they ordered the wrong part.
The relationship with the client and the bank account took a massive hit until I found ways to minimize the disaster.
I was wrong because I didn't take the time to work through my emotions and think clearly.
Humans love to interpret information in a biased way.
Gabriel Weinberg says it best in Super Thinking,
"Individuals still hang on to old theories in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence—it happens all the time in science and in life in general. The human tendency to gather and interpret new information in a biased way to confirm preexisting beliefs is called confirmation bias."
Confirmation bias causes people to ignore information that isn't consistent with their beliefs.
That's why assumptions are so disastrous because they are our firmly held beliefs that we cling to, regardless of the facts.
We declare, "my opinion is right; therefore, yours is wrong."
Our beliefs bleed into our identity. Changing our mind means changing who we are–which is why disagreements become fueled with anger.
We rarely reflect on what we're saying. We never test our opinions. Instead, we avoid counterarguments and label them as misinformation.
It's a vicious cycle of consumption, forming an opinion, and repeating.
We ignore information that is inconsistent with our beliefs. Due to our conditioning, we hold on to what we believe to be true.
When we hear information that supports our assumptions, "the brain activates two areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with other rewards, like food and money. We look for information that supports our beliefs because we receive a reinforcing boost when we find it."
Even when we're 99% wrong, our brain seeks the 1%.
Here's how to avoid that:
You can overcome confirmation bias in four ways.
1/ Questions your assumptions.
Assumptions create blind spots that prevent you from seeing the truth.
To work past your assumptions, you recognize you hold assumptions to either confirm or refute their accuracy.
Here's how:
Step 1: Be aware of your assumptions.
Step 2: List out all your assumptions.
Step 3: Think through the opposite of what you assume is true.
2/ Embrace new ways of thinking.
Refute the notion that you must cling to your long-held beliefs like it's your last supper.
Fight the instinct to dismiss new information. Instead, embrace new ways of thinking. Learn to observe and put yourself in other-people-shoes.
Just because something doesn't fit your model doesn't mean it's wrong.
It might be even better.
3/ Think grey.
In The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, Steven Ample forces the reader to push beyond issues as black or white and embrace the grey:
"Most people are binary and instant in their judgments; that is, they immediately categorize things as good or bad, true or false, black or white, friend or foe. A truly effective leader, however, needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation in order to make wise decisions as to how to proceed. The essence of thinking gray is this: don't form an opinion about an important matter until you've heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts (which happens occasionally, but much less frequently than one might imagine). F. Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function."
4/ Be the Devil's advocate.
You become the Devil when you hold fast to your ideals and reject everything else.
Learn to take the opposing side of your assumptions. If you believe X, create better arguments for Y, the opposing view.
"One approach is to force yourself literally to write down different cases for a given decision or appoint different members in a group to do so."
As Charlie Munger says,
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do."
If you want to be wrong less, break through the mental barriers that try to confirm your long-held beliefs—just because you assume something to be true doesn't mean it is.
