Quotes About Perspective

Some of these terms had startlingly wide ranges, which I imagine you experienced in your four-person survey. For instance, "real possibility" had a range of about 20% to 80%. A quarter of the people taking the survey thought the term meant 40% of the time or less. A quarter thought it meant 40% to 60%. A quarter thought it meant 60% to 75%. Finally, a quarter thought it meant over 75% of the time.

People didn't even agree on what the terms always and never meant! If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.

The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision.

In fact, losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us.

Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don't have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live.

If our only options are being 100% right or 100% wrong, with nothing in between, then information that potentially contradicts a belief requires a total downgrade, from right all the way to wrong. There is no "somewhat less sure" option in an all-or-nothing world, so we ignore or discredit the information to hold steadfast in our belief.

But, while a group can function to be better than the sum of the individuals, it doesn't automatically turn out that way. Being in a group can improve our decision quality by exploring alternatives and recognizing where our thinking might be biased, but a group can also exacerbate our tendency to confirm what we already believe

When people complained that Nate Silver did his job poorly because he had Clinton favored, I thought, "Those people haven't gotten all their chips in a pot with a pair against a straight draw and lost." Or, more likely, they've had those things happen throughout their lives and didn't realize that's what 30% or 40% feels like.

What is hopefully (crystal ball) clear by now is that your beliefs create a bottleneck to good decision-making. It doesn't matter how good the quality of your decision process is if the input into that process is junk. That input is your beliefs, and there is a lot of junk in there.

When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact.

Now imagine if you had gone for that night of blackjack a year ago. When you think about the outcomes as having happened in the distant past, it is likely your preference for the results reverses, landing in a more rational place. You are now happier about the $100 win than about the $100 loss. Once we pull ourselves out of the moment through time-traveling exercises, we can see these things in proportion to their size, free of the distortion caused by whether the ticker just moved up or down.

When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.

The outside view disciplines the distortions that live in the inside view. That's why it's important to start with the outside view and anchor there, considering things like what's true of the world in general or the way someone else would view your situation.

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

Now for the bad news: Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to the inside view. If anything, it makes it worse. It straps your beliefs into the driver's seat more firmly. Research across a variety of settings has shown that being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire.

Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space. When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature

Be thankful when people disagree with you in good faith because they are being kind when they do.

That's why we naturally end up in echo chambers. The inside view feels especially good when it's sold as the outside view, in the guise of someone supposedly offering an objective perspective that merely confirms what you believe. But that only serves to amplify the inside view, strengthening your view of the world because it feels certified by others.

Seek out the outside view with an open mind. You'll be more likely to find out about the KICK ME sign on your back, the spinach in your teeth, and all the things you're having trouble seeing from your perspective. That will help you clear out the junk, which will improve your decisions.

Resulting makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

When it comes to the bad stuff, the inside view tends to lead you to blame luck rather than your own decision-making. After all, luck is the easiest escape hatch for keeping your self-narrative intact. But identifying luck as the primary culprit for your situation won't help you much in addressing the situation.

Hindsight bias, like resulting, makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

Goals can also cause a myopia that makes it so we can't see other paths that are available to us, the other opportunities we might be able to pursue instead.

Merely pursuing a goal can cause us to fail to notice what's right in front of us. That's certainly what happened to Stewart Butterfield when he had Slack under his nose. He couldn't fully appreciate its potential until he quit Glitch, closing that account and forcing him back into exploration mode.