Contact
Remember being a teenager, and being painfully awkward? Just me... okay fine. As an embarrassing teenager, what stuck out to me was how every awkward interaction I had felt fine when I was doing it, but only when looking back was it embarrassing.
After realizing how consistently awkward interactions were ruining my social life, I asked my brothers to point out whenever I did something strange. Let's just say... they had a lot to say. To this day, I'm very aware of how incorrect your self image can be, especially when most people don't tell you what they think. But in becoming an adult, I realized that more people than myself have imperfect images of themselves.
When Mark Zuckerberg first released the newsfeed, there was some uproar. People originally interacted with each other by directly visiting each other's profiles. You only got notifications when an individual posted an image with people tagged. Newsfeed changed all of this and there was a newfound anger as details that were once only found by directly visiting a profile were automatically pushed to everyone, and many people could find out what was going on with the entire platform at once. Steven levy describes the experience:
"Inside Facebook there were calls to pull the product, but when employees analyzed the data, they discovered something amazing. Even as hundreds of thousands of users expressed their disapproval of News Feed, their behavior indicated the opposite. People were spending more time on Facebook. Even the anger against News Feed was being fueled by News Feed, as the groups organizing against it went viral because Facebook told you when your friends joined the uprising."
In the world of product design, these stories are countless. "Watch what people do, not what people say" is an oft repeated quote from the Lean Startup. There are countless articles on what this means for product design, but I'm interested in what this means for designing our own lives.
How many of your daily thoughts are devoted to understanding your idea of yourself? How much of that consciousness can be trusted?
Your brain is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe, and it's the result of billions of years of evolution. Do you really think you will be able to understand all of it in 20, 30, 50, or even 90 years?
If you can't trust your own idea of yourself, how do you find the right job? How do you find the right partner? What habits should you adopt, and which should you drop?
Luckily there is an antidote to bias: awareness. By understanding how you tend to be wrong, you can be less wrong. Here are some habits you can adopt in your life to help you live more peacefully with the lies in your head.
If you are like me, thoughts come into your head, like flies to honey. Borrowing a lesson from Buddhism, that mess of thoughts only becomes problematic when each mental impulse becomes a passionate opinion you are arguing for at a family dinner.
One of the key goals of the mindfulness found in meditation apps is actually to adopt a more passive relationship with your thoughts. A metaphor I've heard is siting on a bench watching cars pass.
Have you seen those dogs that go chasing after every car that passes on their street? That's what a mindless mind is. By taking a step back, and allowing ourselves to passively experience a thought before acting on it, you create room for skepticism, and more control over your actions.
I've met an astonishing amount of people that refuse to even consider a possibility that they might be wrong about something.
It is common to have an automatic reaction to realizing we are wrong, as a sign that we are also stupid.
A common automatic response in this situation is to justify that thought. This is one of the most common defense mechanisms out there, and I'm definitely guilty of it. However, this basically just means doubling down on your own intrinsically false perceptions of yourself.
Reframe your persuit of truth as the process of becoming less wrong over time.
People talk about low ego work places, but the actual creation of a workplace like this is more complicated than just saying: "don't have alot of ego."
Every single human has an ego, because we have a need to feel accepted within a society. Saying not to
I remember in my early days of imposter syndrome, I wrestled with this a ton. If someone didn't like one of my ideas, I took it personally, and gradually an arrogance built to defend my sensitivity until I had to snap out of it.
The trick is to stop fighting it, and acknowledge what it needs.
When you have negative reactions to the realization of your own inaccuracy, your brain reacts with defense mechanisms and justifications. Allow yourself to be less than your expectations of yourself. The conscious awareness that you haven't reached your potential yet is how you reach your potential.
Simply labeling any of my over-confident ideas as ego, helps me live more peacefully with them. Example: "Don't mind anything I just said, that was probably just my ego." I've noticed as a side effect that people respect the authenticity and self awareness.
We are all born imperfect, and we will all die imperfect. Knowing this consciously is one thing, but practicing it is another.
Much of self help is about accepting your less than ideal qualities, but... what if you took it a step further and rewarded yourself for seeing them. This is what self love is all about, and it has the wonderful benefit of giving you a more accurate look at yourself.