How cognitive illusions prevent you from building the life you want (intro)
There’s a weird phenomena where so many smart, accomplished, hardworking people…
Who have great intentions and amazing capabilities and all kinds of resources and qualifications…
…Accidentally end up creating the life they didn’t want.
This happens so often that Clay Christensen wrote about it in the prologue to his book How Will You Measure Your Life?
In describing his twenty-five and thirty-year school reunions, he writes:
“Personal dissatisfaction, family failures, professional struggles, even criminal behavior—these problems weren’t limited to my classmates at Harvard Business School. I saw the same thing happen to my classmates in the years after we completed our studies as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University.
I know for sure that none of these people graduated with a deliberate strategy to get divorced or lose touch with their children—much less to end up in jail.
Yet this is the exact strategy that too many ended up implementing.”
If this only happened to one or two people every year, you could say that it was their fault, or just bad luck.
But when this happens systematically to large swaths of the population year after year, you know something else is going on.
Let me tell you what I think is happening.
There are some areas where your brain has no cognitive illusions.
In those areas, you can learn a skill once and then trust your automatic brain to execute it correctly on its own.
How to type on a keyboard. How to back a car out of a driveway.
How to find the area of a circle. How to balance a T-account.
Even complex skills like how to do open-heart surgery or deliver a great tennis serve.
All of these are things that, once you LEARN them and gain enough experience, you can trust your brain to just DO them.
It might take you time and practice to learn them.
You might forget them and need to brush up on them if it’s been a while.
But once you’ve learned the skill or brushed up on it, it’s fully internalized.
The lesson has been absorbed into your automatic brain and can be applied again and again without any internal resistance or confusion.
There are some areas where your brain has persistent cognitive illusions.
In those areas, you CANNOT learn a skill once and then trust your brain to execute it correctly on its own.
This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your brain, or that you’re stupid, or that you can’t trust yourself, or anything like that.
A cognitive illusion is just like an optical illusion.
This is a well-known optical illusion that you’ve probably seen before.
The two orange circles are exactly the same size.
But to your eyes and to your automatic brain, the orange circle on the right SEEMS larger.
You can know intellectually that the orange circles are the same size.
But you can’t make your eyes see the image differently.
No matter how long you stare at it or how much you learn about eyes and shapes and visual processing…
When you see this image, your automatic brain will ALWAYS tell you: The circle on the right is bigger. And that will alway FEEL true.
And that doesn’t mean that anything is going wrong or that you have bad vision.
That’s just how your eyes work. No big deal.
And if you don’t want to be fooled by an optical illusion, you just need signposts to let you know that you’re in the “visual illusion zone”…
(In this case, you’ve probably seen a lot of pictures of optical illusions, and you can tell when an image is probably set up to trick you.)
…and you need external structure to help you navigate the illusion.
(In this case, measuring the circles to confirm their size rather than just relying on what your eyes are telling you.)
So, just like with optical illusions, when it comes to cognitive illusions…
No matter how well you learn the lesson, your intuition will always give you the wrong answer.
In those areas, you need signposts to let you know that you’re in the “cognitive illusion zone”…
And you need external structure to help you navigate through the illusion.
Now, optical illusions aren’t a big part of our lives. No one is divorcing their spouse or quitting their job or planning their day based on which orange circle is bigger.
But cognitive illusions ARE a big part of our lives.
Every day, people are making real life decisions, big and small, while being totally in the grip of cognitive illusions that they don’t even realize are affecting them.
And making decision after decision over the course of a lifetime based on faulty thinking…
…is how you accidentally build a life the exact life you DON’T want.
That’s what I think was happening at Clay Christensen’s 30 year reunions at Harvard and Oxford.
And that’s what I think is happening now, every day, in millions of brains and lives all across the world.
Over the next several posts, I’m going to break down the cognitive illusions that I think lead people to accidentally create lives they hate.
I’ll tell you what they are, WHY they lead you astray, and the signposts and external structure you can use to combat them.
And the best external structure you can use to shake off cognitive illusions and create the life you actually want?
Hiring a coach.
When you have a coach, you can lean back, relax, and let someone else do the work.
You don’t have to spot the illusion yourself. Your coach will just tell you.
You don’t have to figure out how to combat it alone. Your coach has tons of suggestions.
You don’t have to worry that you’ll fall off track. Your weekly meeting ensures that you can NEVER backslide. You’re always learning, analyzing, and making progress.
I don’t want you to go to YOUR 30 year reunion feeling nervous and competitive, wondering where it all went wrong and how your life turned out like this.
I want you to stride in there, head held high, happy and proud of the life you built.
Not because you “hit your marks” or “did everything you’re supposed to do” or followed the prescribed life path.
But because you like yourself and you’re proud of what you’ve done and you know that you lived a life in line with YOUR values and priorities, even when it was hard.
That’s what we work on in coaching.
And if you’re ready to get started, come talk to me, and let’s go.
Part 1 ➡️
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