thought process

Jan 27 2012

Life is not a TV series

When there are problems, life doesn’t stop. Things still happen. Life goes on.

So it turns out that it’s not a good idea to stop everything else and work on just one problem.

That means that even when a really big event happens in life, you can’t just focus on that. The everyday things still happen. You still have to go to school/work, you still have to eat and drink, you still have to do the dishes and laundry, you still have to spend some time every day with friends and family. You can’t ignore any of these ‘tiny’ things just because something ‘big’ happened.

In TV series’, there’s usually only one big problem every episode that the hero needs to fix. He can afford to forget about his daily chores while he figures out how to solve that one thing. Life doesn’t happen like that. Everything else still goes on.

It took me a long time to realize it; that you don’t have to solve the problem before you can get back to your life. This way of thinking is one of the cores of the perfectionist mindset. This mindset was slowly destroying me.

If I don’t complete it, I can’t move on from it, and therefore, I can’t move on with life.

False.

It turns out that any problem can be ignored and life will still go on. It might not go on well, but it will still go on. You can fail exams and life will go on. You can have cancer and life will still go on. Loved ones might die and life will still go on. Your life will go on and the life of everyone around you will go on.

Right at this moment; as you’re reading this; a whole bunch of different thoughts are flying through your head. Most probably you’re disagreeing with what I just said. That’s okay; it’s what I call your ‘first reaction’ to whatever I just said. Catch as many reactions as you can, write them down before you forget. What did your mind say to counter the concepts I just mentioned? Here are some common ones (and by common, I mean what went through my own head):

  1. That’s not fair.
  2. I shouldn’t have to deal with other things when I’m down/vulnerable.
  3. Why isn’t the universe stopping for me? I need time to deal with this heavy stuff.

Life might have its own rules, but I don’t think anyone has figured them out yet. So what makes you think that one of those rules is for life to be fair? What makes you think that when you’re down for the count, the whole boxing match should stop until you fix your life and you get back up? Why does everyone need to be “understanding” of what you went through and treat you specially?

These were the questions that I asked myself when these ideas first occurred to me. This is an example of me “taking the red pill”. Ask the questions that might make you realize that all this time you might have been living your life wrong.

I realized then that I had somehow started believing that I deserved some of these things I just mentioned. That it was somehow a right that the world was obliged to give me. That the world should ‘pause’ for me. And if I didn’t get it, I felt betrayed by… by ‘something’. And I didn’t know why…

When problems happen, we press pause and tell ourselves that we need to fix this issue before we move on.

Pressing “Pause” for the big problems

At this point, you’re probably thinking to yourself,

That’s ridiculous, people don’t try to “pause” life. And even if they do, I never do this kind of thing.

Well, let’s see then. Have you ever crammed for an exam? Crammed to the point where you didn’t bother socializing or doing your laundry or thought about your family for a few days? Then yes, you’re ignoring normal life and expecting it to “pause“. After a few days, you expect to come back to normal life and “un-pause” and just continue on your merry way.

Or have you spent a few weeks working on a big project and ignored everything else in your life during that time? It’s the same thing. You’re “pausing“. You expect to “resume” life later.

Or perhaps you have a family problem where you need to be off from work or school for a while. You expect everyone and everything to let you off, and that you can just forget everything in life while you take care of this problem. You feel that you deserve it because if not life “wouldn’t be fair”. Ok, so let me ask you again:

Do you think you might have “paused” life before?

Now, let me make it clear that I actually agree that it’s great when people make allowances when you have problems. And help you out. Or give you space. But it becomes a problem when you start to expect it and feel that the universe is obliged to pause for you and help you out when you are down.

When we start to feel like this, we start to behave as if life “pauses” for us automatically when we have a problem.

Everyday pausing and procrastinating

We do this on a smaller scale in our everyday life. When a small problem comes, we don’t move away until we deal with it. Then another problem comes and we rinse and repeat.

Let me tell you a story:

This is the story of a young man who wanted to get into shape. So he told himself that he would, just as soon as the time was right. After a few months, New Year’s rolled around and he finally said to himself, “This is the perfect time to kickstart my exercise with a New Year’s resolution“. But then, he has to find a good gym to join.

So he looked for one, and after many weeks, found one. Then he thought to himself that he needs the right workout clothes (because you can’t just look sweaty in any old clothes now, can you?). So he went out and got himself the right ones.

Then, of course, he wanted to make sure he was doing the right exercises, so he just HAD to spend a few weeks first researching an exercise regimen online.

That vaguely fictional story is a story that’s repeated around the world. We lie to ourself. We procrastinate. We ‘pause’ our exercising because we convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before the plan can go on. Just like we sometimes convince ourselves that we have to solve a problem first before life can go on.

Don’t forget the big picture

Life is killing you, one detail at a time

Okay then, here’s what I’m really trying to say from all this. Don’t forget the big picture.

Don’t get caught up in looking for a job so that you can save up money to buy exercise clothes so that you can exercise. When you worry about those details and put everything in a sequence like that, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll waste so much time worrying about the details that in the end you forget that the whole point of this whole thing was to get some exercise…

Small problems occur all the time. This means that your time will be so filled up with handling the details that you miss the big picture. This is the humdrum of daily life. Everyday, you’re focusing on these small small things and worrying and obsessing over every single one.

Like in this xkcd comic here, sometimes we find a method to solve the problem. Then, rather than solving the original problem, we zone in on that ONE SINGLE method and spend an ungodly amount of effort trying to execute that method perfectly. We forget that we can just ‘ring the doorbell’. We forget that the original purpose is to get the guy to unlock the door, instead of trying to figure out how to remotely change the volume on a computer through the internet.

Conclusion

Let’s recap.

Life doesn’t happen in a nice sequence like a TV series.

  1. Problems don’t come to you one by one and you can’t ‘pause’ everything in your life to solve this episode’s problems.
  2. When you tell yourself that you HAVE to do something first before you move on to the next step… check again. Maybe you can already do the second step even if you haven’t completed the first.
  3. Make sure you’re solving your original problem. If you find yourself fixated on sending out resumes when your original purpose was to exercise, then you just might have a problem…
  4. Yes! Have priorities. No, don’t forget everything else.
  5. It’s ok for the world to pause for you and give you space when you have big problems. Just don’t expect it and then feel betrayed when it doesn’t happen.

Well…. so far this made sense in my head. I wonder if it made sense to you?

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Making Plans • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Dec 5 2011

You control your future?

Mindset by Carol Dweck is a book that says we sometimes develop a fixed-ability mindset. A mindset where who we are can’t change. This mindset says that our level of ability and skills are determined from birth and are constant, and since most of us define ourselves by our skills and what we do, it means that we ourselves can’t change.

This happens when we start believing that the reason we are good at something is because of natural talent. Unfortunately, I had that mindset for years and years throughout school. When people tell you you’re smart, you start believing it. You also start shying away from areas where you’re not smart. I carefully and methodically avoided languages, history and woodwork because it didn’t come to me easily and because I had a “bad memory”.

If I wasn’t smart at it, it wasn’t worth putting effort into especially when I might fail. At least if I failed without trying, I had an excuse that I hadn’t given it my all.

But having a hobby, an obsession, a martial art, an anything really; it gives you an example of how your skills can change and can grow. For me, in Form 4 (something like grade 10) I started playing basketball.

Basketball taught me that I can grow

Before this, I’d always defined myself as the smart kid. Why? Because I didn’t really have anything else. It sounds a bit nerdy now, but it really was true at the time. I’m not saying this for pity, that part of my life is done and over with now and I have very little, if any, regret about it. I embrace it as part of my past.

My parents are awesome. They never said they wanted results. Rather, they continually stressed that they wanted effort. “If you work hard and do badly, it’s fine. It’s not about the result, it’s about the effort. Remember that.”, my mom repeated again and again. But I just never really got it, not least because other people kept piling on the “praise”.

So in Form 4, the apartments that I stayed in built a basketball court. Afterwards, it was only natural for all the kids in the area to go down and test out the court. We had no experience mind you. None of us knew anything about basketball. My dribbling (bouncing the ball to move it around), my shots, my knowledge of basketball rules, they were all zero. I vaguely knew who Michael Jordan was but had never watched even a single NBA game.

But we learned. It was just a bunch of kids playing around without much skill involved, but I stuck to it. 6 pm, the kids would usually come down. I was usually there every day from 5pm to 7pm. I’d practice throwing shots in, over and over again. Then somebody told me something that hurt. He said that I should just stay near the ring and wait for the ball, because my shooting was alright but my dribbling was horrible. I was hurt, but it made me think that I wanted to show him up. I did. And my dribbling improved. (P.S. It was stupid of me to feel hurt because he told the truth, but there you go)

An odd thing about basketball was that there were no real metrics for me to keep track of. It wasn’t as if my goal was to be able to dribble the ball 80 times a minute and if I was below that count then I had failed. No, it was much more subjective, and that subjectivity meant that I could feel myself improving, but without the existence of numbers that would distract me from the game itself. I couldn’t fail.

This was completely different from my normal “intelligence” and being “smart”. We had tests and exams, and every time there was a grade that went along with it. When I did well, it was just because of my “natural (and fixed)” intelligence, while low grades just proved that I wasn’t “naturally talented” at that subject. I was fixated on those grades.

I would look at them and keep looking at them to reassure myself that I was “smart”. I wasn’t proud of my effort. I was proud of skills that I had never had to work on. It’s like being proud to be a guy. Or proud to have fingers. Yes, they were (and still are) integral parts of me, but the pride I had in them was extreme and distracted me from the skills I was weak in and needed to work on.

I’ll be honest, I played basketball because I wanted to play with friends. But then I got good at it. I don’t mean tournament-worthy good, but good enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to play any more.

After 2 years of this, I finally realized that I’d slowly adopted a growth mindset.

The growth mindset

I suddenly noticed that I believed I could change. It wasn’t on a conscious level mind you. I just suddenly wanted to do things to break out of my shell. After 2 years of basketball, I graduated from high school and went to pre-university. Matriculation, they call it here. And crazy me, I volunteered when they asked for names to be the student representative.

Here’s why it’s so crazy. I was a guy who was timid. No, that doesn’t even begin to describe me. Timidity, shyness, social anxiety; I had those in bucket loads and more. I barely knew all the people in my classroom and I couldn’t begin to even look at girls or talk in front of  a room of people. My voice was so low that you couldn’t hear me if you were 3 feet away. And the worst part here is that I’m not exaggerating… not even a little.

And the job of the student representative was to stand in front of nearly a thousand students (if my memory serves me) and recite the student oath loudly for them to repeat. Needless to say, I didn’t get the part. (The person who did get it though, Aiman,  is an awesome person who ended up being my classmate and a good friend.)

But playing basketball, having that hobby; it drilled into me that I can change, that I can improve, and that natural talent isn’t the only thing I have.

I made it into a goal for myself to be able to speak, and speak well dammit!

I changed myself and I’m pretty proud of it

4 years later, I found myself in the ESL championships of the World Universities Debate Tournament, speaking in front of around 2 thousand people from all corners of the world, while being recorded.

And guess what? I was fine with it. I was worrying more over whether our case would win than I was over the huge number of people watching us. Unfortunately, me and Danial didn’t manage to take the prize. But it still goes to show,

People don’t DO change

We can change. The only downside is that not enough people have the growth mindset, and so they treat you through that filter and treat you as if you can’t change either.

Believing the world is constant

I believe that most people who feel like they are “failing” at one thing or another are operating out of a fixed mindset. We start believing that our skills are constant because that’s what we’re born with, or maybe even because we believe that it’s wrong to change who we are.

Change is the only constant

I’m sure you’ve heard this many times, but I don’t know if you’ve ever really thought about it and internalized it.

If you have, then not only does it start applying to you, it also starts changing your worldview. You’ll now start viewing other people as having the ability to change too.

In a fixed mindset, people won’t believe that you can change and in fact they’ll want you to stay the same. Imagine you were about to make a huge change in your life now. How many of your friends do you think would tell you:

Don’t change, just be yourself

or if you’ve already made a change, how many would say:

I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed.

And they say it as if it’s an insult.

Here’s the thing. To them, it is an insult. You’ve insulted their entire reality and worldview. You’ve just told them to their faces that what they believe in is not true, that people DO change and that their talents and skills are not fixed.

There’s a crazy consequence to this as well. If your talents and skills can be changed by your effort, then your failures are your responsibility. And most of us just can’t handle that fact.

I need to clarify something here very quickly. I didn’t say that your failures are your “fault”. I said that your failures are your “responsibility”. I honestly didn’t notice the language I used until I noticed how it could be misunderstood. This is a great example of how your beliefs determine the word choice you use. Anyway, what I mean by your failures being your responsibility is that even when your failures are caused by something or someone else, it is still your responsibility to make sure that you fix it and get it back on track.

After all, when you have a growth mindset, it also means that you are in control and that even when it’s his fault, you can still do something about it.

So yes, you’ve just insulted your friend because you’re saying that you’re changing to become better, so if your friend isn’t changing, he must be bad and at fault for his life problems.

On a deep subconscious level, I believe this is why we don’t want to change. By having a fixed mindset, we can easily pass off our problems as not being our fault. After all, even if you tried really hard and did your best, your limits are already set. So it’s not your fault if you can’t succeed at life or whatever project you have, because it was just too much for you.

A growth mindset, however, would make you try really hard and when you failed, you’d just try again. Like they say:

It’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get back up

Without a growth mindset, you’ll just never get back up. After all, if you’ve failed once, that’s already showed you your limits right?

Conclusion

Ok. So that fixed mindset you have might not completely destroy your life, but it will keep you from changing it. In fact, it won’t just keep you from succeeding at changing; on a deeper level, it will tell you that change is bad.

Planning to make a change in your life but you’re not sure if you should change or be yourself? Here’s a question (and I want you to think deeply about the answer to this): Why is that change bad? When you get your answer, using a growth mindset, figure out a way around that problem, even if it’s not your fault.

A growth mindset means that you believe you have control over your future, and also that you are just a little bit responsible.

Guess what? I don’t believe I have a “bad memory” any more.

By Lutfi Torla • Featured, Understanding Behaviour • 3 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Jul 5 2011

Good Defaults

The human mind is lazy. Most times we will simply go with the default option presented to us.

This won’t be true if you’re a geek about that topic (like me and phones, or my dad and cars). But most of the time, we just have too much to think about that we don’t bother doing proper research before buying “the best pen I can get for 2 bucks”. I mean, who DOES that?

We shy away from financial mumbo jumbo

But what happens when it’s a bigger issue? Like what kind of medical insurance to take? Or how to pay off your study loan? People will spend ages deciding which university to study in. And that’s how it should be. But we’ll spend virtually zero time deciding on a good insurance on ourselves and our future health.

I think it’s because most of us don’t understand the language of having good criteria to make a decision. Therefore, most of us make decisions based on how “pretty that laptop is” (most girls I know) or “if that car can be shown off to my friends” (most guys I know).

Buying a car? Or a house? These are decisions that will affect your life for years to come. It will affect your life because most people will

  • spend a huge chunk of their money on it, sacrificing other luxuries.
  • buy them on a bank loan, which will mess with their monthly finances.
  • keep this purchase for a long time. They’re not easy things to change.

Knowing this, the large purchases in life should therefore be based on well-reasoned criteria.

Criteria and how it affects decision-making

It’s a bit obvious that having criteria will affect the decisions you make. But what you need to be sure of before hand is that you have GOOD criteria that is relevant to what you’re spending on. The criteria for buying clothes might be how good it looks, but the criteria for a laptop should be whether it overheats, how long the battery lasts and how light the laptop is.

To know the criteria you need, you just need to spend a little time to think. To know which product has your criteria, you’ll have to spend time and do your research.

And herein lies the problem. We can’t be bothered to spend that much time on each and every decision in our lives. Especially when it’s such an abhorrent (hateful) topic as losing your money. So the best way is to provide “good defaults“.

Good defaults

This term is taken from website design (which I’m sure took it from somewhere else too). In site design, it comes out when people are asked to fill in a form. I’m pretty sure all of us hate filling in forms right? It’s one of those things that we evolved as a species, the gene that hates forms.

To make sure that people weren’t turned off by it and wouldn’t leave their websites, designers had to do something that reduced the pain of typing in each and every one of their forms, clicking over and over again to make a choice. So they used good defaults.

90% of people would choose “the free account” and “that they wouldn’t want promotion emails”. Leaving those options as default means giving the user a “good default”. (*understanding dawns on the readers* Ahhhhh! Now the title makes sense!)

Why government (and anyone in authority) should use good defaults too

You’ll often have to have your people make decisions. How many percent of your wages to put into EPF? How to pay back your student loan? Whether to have car insurance? You’ll want to ensure that your people make the best choice. You also don’t want to be an evil dictator. What to do?

Solution: Give good defaults. 11% of your wages, the maximum, into EPF. Pay back teh student loan RM100 per month starting 1 year after graduation. Take car insurance. BUT! But give them the option to change their minds. Most people can’t be bothered (or are too dumb) to change their minds about every little thing to come along. The ones who do care will take the time to research and change their minds if they don’t like it.

This is why I really believe setting up organ donation as a default would really work. Nowadays the default is that we as citizens DON’T donate our organs. That default could be changed. And if that were the default, 90% of us would leave it as it is. Some of us would change from the default, opt-out and say no (although I have no idea why). That’s fine. That choice would be there.

Pushing people to make the right choices

Let’s be honest. Us humans make the wrong decision all the time. Sometimes, we make those choices despite knowing it’s the wrong one. And most of the time it’s because we’re too lazy to make the right decision. I want to donate my organs but can’t be bothered to find a day to go and test myself and fill the forms up (I hate forms!!!) and wait in line at some unknown location that I haven’t even looked up yet. Don’t bother inviting me either. I would still probably give excuses (I really hate forms).

But making it a default would be good and would push most of us to make the right choice.

Tadaa! And that’s what is meant by “good defaults”.

By Lutfi Torla • Understanding Behaviour • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

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