human behavior – Page 5 – My Mental Model

Solutions that Create More Solutions

I was reading a Harvard Business Review article a while back and it was talking about the dynamic of a self-perpetuating business. An easy example is the classic ‘customer first’ strategy:

If you always put the customer first, the customer is always happy and if the customer is always happy, then they’ll keep coming back and every once in a while, they’ll come back with a friend. As more friends become shoppers, the business grows and more locations can be opened to serve more friends. As more locations are opened and the business scales, it can reinvest in itself, ultimately leading to better customer service. And the cycle continues.

Good customer service is a solution to the problem of bad customer service, but it’s also a solution that creates more solutions. There are other solutions that create more problems. Cost cutting can be an example:

Revenues are down so you look to cut costs to maintain profitability. You realize you can fire your top performing employees who are being paid the most, and replace them with new talent who will work for half as much. Next year’s forecasts are now back in line with corporate targets. Solution?

Probably not. Firing your top performing employees is a quick way to decimate your organizational culture and that leads to lower levels of acquisition, retention, and production. It was a solution in that it was able to achieve reduced costs, but it also created a problem by way of significantly reduced revenues over the long-term.

This isn’t a business concept. It’s a universal concept. It persists in the laws of physics as well as in the truths of philosophy, and it’s one which the world desperately needs to understand.

You have the compassionate crowd who actively fight racism with racism, and actively fight against free speech to protect free speech. It won’t work.

You have the intelligent crowd who spend most of their time picking apart bad solutions, and then defer to whatever benefits them personally, lacking the understanding that this is all a collective effort. That won’t work either.

I’m still trying to understand why intelligence and compassion are at odds with one another, because they also share a very significant connection:

The most intelligence decision you can make is a compassionate one, and the most compassionate decision you can make is an intelligent one.

This isn’t neutral territory between the left and the right, this is the guiding star that we should all be following. Compassion is the compass, intelligence is the map.

Me Too?

I appreciate the perspective that I have on sexual harassment, not because I understand it, but because I am making progress in understanding it.

Back when I was working at the banks, we had a training program that they would send us out to Toronto for. By the third trip, our cohort had gotten to know each other and one night we were on the hotel rooftop having drinks. A bunch of us were standing in a circle and one of the ladies decided she would show some interest. She walked over to me, started whispering things in my ear, then started rubbing my chest, then her hand went in the shirt, then down the pants.. all while I kept up a conversation with the others in that circle. I was obviously getting a lot of looks, but I kept pulling her hand out my clothes, politely told her to settle down, and laughed it off. It took about 20 minutes, but she eventually moved on and took someone else back to her room.

This was 5 years ago and I want to share what I’ve learned. It was only recently that my experience occurred to me as an example of sexual assault because it didn’t feel like it.. and I think I know why.

Part of it is that I’m quicker to compassion than I am to fear or hurt. She had a husband and kids at home, but she was on a work trip, drunk, tying to bed a guy half her age in front of a small crowd of coworkers.. I knew she was probably going through a rough patch so I tried to handle the situation with dignity. I wanted her to be better off than when we met.

I genuinely think we could all use a little more compassion in our lives, but it’s important to understand that it was easy for me to arrive at compassion because I never lost power or control of that situation. I was twice her size. Even if she were twice my size, I wouldn’t be concerned that she could force herself on me. In my mind, I was safe from what she was trying to do, and it let me act with compassion.

Most women aren’t twice the size of the men in question. All that safety that I felt likely wouldn’t exist for a woman in that same situation. For many, I’d wager that safety becomes fear. As we continue to discover/understand what gender equality really means… physical stature and the physical safety that comes with it is still a very real inequality.

That doesn’t mean that we should feel bad for being men, but it is a reminder that as men, we need to step up. If you have the power to harm, you probably also have the power to protect. Imagine if instead of hearing about a high profile sexual harassment case once a week, we heard about how the men around that person stepped up and shut it down? That’s a future I’m willing to help create.

I Think I Just Figured Out Flat Earth

So a good friend of mine, who most would assume is an otherwise intelligent individual, brought up the flat earth thing to me a few weeks ago. It’s not that I was unaware of it, it’s just that I didn’t expect it coming from a friend. After a bit of teasing, I humored him and asked him why he thinks the world is flat.

As it turns out, he didn’t necessarily think that the world was flat, it was simply a fun exercise in challenging the widely held belief that the world is round.

He asked me how I knew the world is round. I told him that nobody falling off the edge was a good start. He said that if they had fallen off, they weren’t exactly in a position to tell everyone about it. Then I suggested using spatial reasoning to understand how someone could travel due east in a plane and end up at where they started. So he asked how I knew a compass would take me due east. I said by tracking the magnetic poles and letting you know where due north is. He suggested that with a flat earth, the north pole would be a center point and where we think we would be moving in a 3 dimension circle around the planet’s equator, we would be moving in a 2 dimensional circle around the north pole. Ok, but that would mean that someone couldn’t circle the globe by flying due south. Has anyone?

I don’t know any off the top of my head but that seems like something that someone would’ve done. He said that from what he’s read, apparently nobody does. Huh.

I was tempted to start digging for sources to see if that was true but we were at a dinner with others so I tried a different angle. What about satellites? He said he didn’t know enough about satellites to know either way. What about pictures from space? You can CGI just about anything these days. Huh.

So l asked us both to try and wrap our heads around how many people from all around the world would have to be in on this for evidence to have not leaked. Astronauts, government officials, physicists, pilots, military, Redbull, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking… and the list goes on. Now consider how the scientific community has laughed this off while the flat earth community is absent of anyone with a PhD in physics. I told him that it all seemed very unlikely. He replied, “But it’s possible”. I agreed, and then asked, “have you ever thought that we might be in the matrix?”

I think poker should be taught in school simply for the purpose of teaching probability.

I had to concede that we might actually be on a flat earth, not because I thought we were, but because I didn’t have all the necessary information to confirm otherwise. What I did have though, was a strong enough understanding of other related factors which created a very strong case for a round earth. The probability of a flat earth being kept secret from the general public for decades, if not centuries, is an extremely unlikely scenario. If we hold the flat earth to be true, it literally undoes the laws of physics that we’ve come to understand.

I suppose that’s the beauty of it all though, it doesn’t matter how much you know, you can never truly confirm or deny anything. Even if you have all the evidence you think is necessary, you still have to concede that none of this may be real. Huh.

So if you can’t confirm or deny anything, if nothing is concrete, if everything is on a spectrum and nothing is entirely real, how do you proceed? Probability. Is the world round? Probably. Take one step forward.

What that conversation also highlighted for me was that most people probably believe the earth is round for the same reason that people used to believe the world was flat – because that’s what they were told and they assumed it to be true. If it’s in our nature to challenge our beliefs, why are we so surprised that we’re challenging the belief of a round earth?

From my research on the flat earth theory, there seem to be two camps. There’s the camp of people who genuinely believe that the earth is flat and aren’t interested in seeing evidence to the contrary. Then there’s the camp who are saying that things don’t add up, and are looking for alternative explanations. That’s legit. There are plenty of things that don’t add up in this world and history would suggest that governments aren’t always the most accurate sources of information. Alternative theories to explain events like 9/11, JFK or the moon landing are a healthy measure to keep people accountable to what they tell us. If we just blindly accepted what people told us, we’d all still believe the world was flat, or round, or in a VR simulation operated by advanced aliens.

I just wish that for the sake of conversation, we could reach a point where we could speak a little more honestly about this stuff. Is the earth flat? Probably not, but did you know that Antarctica is bigger than Canada and barely anyone flies over it? I wonder what kinda cool stuff has yet to be discovered there… wouldn’t that be the perfect location for a secret Hydra base?!

Honest Modesty

There’s a fantastic quote from Bruce Lee, “If I tell you I am good, probably you will say I am boasting. But if I tell you I’m not good, you’ll know I’m lying.”

By most people’s standards, Bruce Lee wasn’t just good, he was one of the best to ever do what he did. But if he were to say that, then he risks being labelled as boastful. Why?

The Rick side of me wants to say that those with insecurities about their own abilities would prefer that high achievers understate their skills and accomplishments to minimize feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. They key word there being feel.

The more patient side of me thinks there’s another level to this. Honesty is communication in it’s most accurate form. When you’re being honest with others, you’re giving them the most accurate version of the information you have. When you’re being honest with yourself, you’re looking at the most accurate version of yourself. As working with accurate information is always more efficient than working with inaccurate information, honesty is key to an efficient life.

I also value modesty. For me, modesty is a perpetual state of mind in which I remind myself that there’s always more room to grow and that what I’ve accomplished isn’t nearly as important as what I’m working towards. Google’s definition of modesty is an unassuming or moderate estimation of one’s abilities. I can work with that.

Unassuming and moderate are worth exploring here. For me, unassuming means knowing your value, but also leaving your mind open for the things you don’t know. For example, an unassuming fighter would know the techniques they’re best at, but wouldn’t assume to know how successful they would be against a hypothetical opponent.

In a universe with nearly infinite variables – most of which are unknown to us – any prediction of the future is an assumption. Being unassuming is simply a more honest and accurate understanding of yourself and the universe you exist within. Being moderate, in this case, could probably be defined as without bias. Without a desire to understate or overstate one’s abilities, the middle ground would be a moderate estimation – again, the most honest and accurate understanding.

Perhaps there will always be people who would prefer that high achievers keep their achievements to themselves to minimize feelings of insecurity. For the rest of us however, I think it’s important to understand that modesty isn’t a function of class, or making others feel better about themselves, it’s a function of honesty and accuracy.

If you’re great, be great, do great.

Random Inventions: The Nice Horn

I often observe behavior on the road and try to use that behavior to better understand the driver behind the wheel. What does it say about a person when they’re weaving from lane to lane without signaling? What does it say when they don’t notice that the light has turned green? What does it say when they’re content cruising along at exactly the speed limit? I find human behavior to be fascinating and seeing how we interact on the roads is certainly a unique glimpse.

It occurred to me a while back that despite how well coordinated drivers have to be with one another to avoid accidents and maintain order on the road, we’re not given much to communicate with. For the most part, it’s just the horn. The horn is not the most pleasant sound. When most people use it in anger and frustration, most people probably perceive it as an aggressively unpleasant sound. When our only mode of communication with one another on the road is aggressive unpleasantness, I wonder how that impacts how we drive.

So why not a secondary horn, with an audible sound that implies ‘thanks!’? I know there’s the double tap of the standard horn, but still, why not a secondary horn? No one blink screw you, two blinks for thanks, a genuinely happy sound that says I appreciate your conduct on the road. Simple mechanics, simple market research effort to determine the sound, and a meaningful step towards more positive lines of communication with one another. I’m looking at you Elon..