Five For Your Hive: Keep Your Identity Open

Daniel Kahneman, The Education of The Imagination, Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge, Matthew McConaughey, I Have No Sunk Cost

Keep Your Identity Open

In 2017, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman was asked about the role of education in changing our thinking and perspective. He was pessimistic. There have been numerous studies that reveal how highly-educated people were unable to accept a new truth despite being presented with clear evidence. “Our mind,” Kahneman said, “is constructed so that in many situations where we have beliefs and we have facts, the beliefs come first.” Instead of accepting it as the new-found truth, we would interpret the evidence in illogical and contradictory ways. “So,” Kahneman continues, “education by itself is not going to change the culture. Changing critical thinking through education is [a] very slow [process].” One of the reasons why society finds it hard to change their beliefs is because the ideas that we had painstakingly adapted over the course of our lives become part of our identity, “especially if they get invested publicly and identify with their idea. So there are many forces against changing your mind.” Changing your mind—flip-flopping of ideas—may signal weakness, a trait people tend to avoid exhibiting. But it shouldn’t be. “Within sciences,” Kahneman says, “people who give up on an idea and change their mind get good points. It’s a rare quality of a good scientist, but it’s an esteemed one.” Whether you’re a scientist, a teacher, a lawyer, an AI researcher, an entrepreneur or a coach, all professions, it pays to follow this piece of advice from Paul Graham: keep your identity small. The less you identity with, the weaker the forces against you. The weaker the forces against you, the more likely you’re open to new ideas. The more open you are to new ideas, the more likely you’ll change your thinking and perspective—and that’s how we get better. Keeping your identity open and educating your mind, that’s the idea for today.

The Education of The Imagination

In his authoritative book on self-mastery, the 20th-century French psychologist Émile Coué wrote that man’s inability to get satisfactory outcomes in life is the result of our misplaced priorities in two fundamental aspects of human psychology: the will and the imagination. “When the will and the imagination are in conflict,” Coué wrote, “the imagination always wins, without any exception.” In this case, “will” refers to the purposeful and determined efforts to bring about a desired outcome, and “imagination” refers to the hidden ideas, convictions, feelings, anxieties, and emotions working beneath our awareness. When both aspects go head-on with each other, the imagination wins. For example, the harder you try to remember a forgotten name (will), the more your mind fixates on the blank space (imagination), making it even more difficult to recall. The more you attempt to avoid looking nervous during a presentation (will), the more you focus on your anxious thoughts (imagination), the harder it becomes to stay calm. When this happens in our everyday lives, “not only does one not obtain what one wants,” Coué wrote, “but exactly the reverse is brought about”—known as the “law of reversed effort” which “explains why we get such unsatisfactory results when we aim at the reeducation of the will.” “What we have to work for,” Coué concludes, “is the education of the imagination.”

Accumulate Cyclical Knowledge

In 1881, just four months after he took office, President James Garfield was shot twice at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station in Washington, D.C. Though the shots were not fatal, he eventually died because of the treatment methods he received from the medical professionals. They examined his bullet wounds with ungloved, unwashed fingers that eventually led to an uncontrollable infection throughout his body. “They found the notion of invisible germs to be ridiculous,” wrote historian Candice Millard in Destiny of the Republic, “and they refused to even consider the idea that they could be the cause of so much disease and death.” And since the assassination attempt was followed closely by the media, the doctors stood firm in their beliefs of the “correct” practice in fear of being ridiculed, identifying and taking “pride in the particular brand of filth that defined their profession.” Fortunately, times have changed. Everyone gained knowledge about new medical practices, which was widely embraced and passed down through generations, who are now better off as a result. “But take something like money,” Morgan Housel wrote, “I can imagine a world in 50 years where things like cancer and heart disease are either non-existent or effectively controlled [due to new discoveries and technological advancements]. I cannot ever imagine a world where economic volatility is tamed and people stop making financial decisions they eventually regret—no matter how much history of past mistakes we have to study.” Scientific knowledge is cumulative, built on the past to create a better future. But financial knowledge is cyclical. We remember the periods in our lives where we over-invested, where we took on too much debt, where we made rash decisions in the moment of impulse. Society learns the dangers of a poor financial habit, that greed will eventually backfire, that accumulating more money will not solve our problems. “But it quickly forgets and moves on,” Housel wrote, “Again and again. Generation after generation,” forming a cycle of repeated actions that never gets solved from experience. The reason is simple—science involves facts, money involves emotions. And issues like marriage, philosophy, ethics or anything that involves the human will involves feelings, where mankind has proven themselves incapable of taming the emotional beast inside them. If left alone, “they’ll follow the natural path of cyclicality.” But, if we want to get better at life, if we don’t want the same things to happen to us again and again, it will require us to accumulate as much cyclical knowledge through “constant intervention and management—managing your expectations, managing your reputation, managing how you advertise yourself and who you surround yourself with,” and you stand a chance of sustaining something positive for as long as possible.

My Hero is Always Ten Years Away

At the 2014 Academy Awards , Matthew McConaughey won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of HIV-infected rodeo cowboy Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. After sharing a kiss with his wife and a wave of applause, McConaughey walks up stage to accept his accolade before gazing at the audience on ovation. “When I was fifteen years old,” McConaughey said, “I had a very important person in my life come to me and say ‘who's your hero?’I said ‘I got to think about that.’ I come back two weeks later, this person comes out and says ‘who's your hero?’ I said ‘it's me in ten years.’ Then I turned twenty five, that same person comes to me and says ‘so you're a hero?’ And I was like ‘not even close! No no no!’ This person said ‘why?’ My hero is me at thirty-five! So you see, every day, every week, every month and every year of my life, my hero is always ten years away. I'm never gonna be my hero. I'm not gonna attain that, and that's just fine with me because that keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.”

I Have No Sunk Cost

“When I work,” Kahneman said, “I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea.” These words can be good advice for anyone of any profession or background: be aware of your beliefs and its influence in preventing you from progressing. It pays to keep your mind open to new approaches, but it requires humility to gain the cyclical knowledge beyond academic books, and courage to admit you were wrong. It’s not a sign of weakness to flip-flop ideas, and as you seek to educate your imagination, it indicates strength, resilience, intelligence and adaptability. Remember, the less you identity with, the weaker the forces against you. The weaker the forces against you, the more open you’d become. The more open you’d become, the more likely you’ll change your thinking and perspective. That’s how we get better.