If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?
On and off I’ve been reading both Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits and a book about unconscious judgments called Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell. Covey’s book cautions that one should not expect change without hard work and rigorous, honest self-appraisal. He specifically writes that it may be useful to read through cover to cover once to get a basic understanding of the ideas presented, but that really one cannot read a book to trigger change and that anyone wishing to benefit from the Seven Habits will want to work on developing each of the habits over time and will likely revisit sections of the book again and again
Blink is an illuminating book. It explores the snap judgment and unconscious knowledge. I’m finding myself identifying many of the patterns in my own thought life that I’ve had trouble putting my finger on.
First is that there’s more going on in our minds than we’re aware of on the surface. This isn’t so hard to believe but I understand that there are those who reject the idea that the brain generates no activity below the immediately conscious. Whatever.
Next is that sometimes these unconscious judgments can be better than conscious analysis. This certainly isn’t always true, but Gladwell sets forth a number of examples from studies of the subject and it seems true that especially for certain kinds of information for which direct evidence is hard to find, impressions can be more accurate. You might take months to catch someone in a lie while something told you within ten seconds that he could not be trusted.
Most interesting to me is that often the ability to quickly read information is totally opaque. It may not be possible to determine why one comes to a “gut feeling” even if it is accurate. An example given was a famous tennis coach who had the ability to predict with stunning accuracy when a player would double-fault. This coach had all the experience and analytical background one would expect necessary to see things that non-experts missed, but could not himself identify what he noticed that alerted him to a double-fault. Even after successfully predicting them for years and analyzing the information he saw, he could not pinpoint any one aspect nor a combination that would be alerting him. Perhaps it was a set of boundary conditions too complicated to consciously process; no one is suggesting this was magic or precognition. Nevertheless, he made predictions he could not analytically account for.
This is all very interesting to me because I know I often have difficulty explaining things that I know to be true. Once at a job I held several years ago I put a set of tasks in a queue in the order that made sense to me. I worked the order one item at a time until I had a complete list. My supervisor looked at the order, and asked why I put one customer’s work before another, more important customer’s tasks. I honestly had no idea. I looked and could not see any reason. Instructed to put the big customer’s job first, I set to reorganizing the tasks and found that the equipment changes necessary to do the big customer’s tasks first would add extra time to the jobs. Ordering the work in the way I’d been instructed would not only add several hours to the total, it would make the big customer’s job itself later than my original schedule. I “felt” that I had scheduled the work correctly, but was unable to show a reason why.
In fact, I tend to be pretty good at seeing the way things work and how to go about solving problems, up until the point at which I consciously start trying to figure out their solutions. I play a halfway decent game of chess, yet even the most basic explanations of strategy are beyond me. Sudoku puzzles take a lot longer for me to finish than it takes other people. I have yet to solve even a puzzle rated as easy in under seven minutes.
What’s the point of all this? I think I’m identifying some important strengths and weaknesses. I’m apparently a very intuitive thinker, but I’m not all that good at figuring things out. Perhaps the weakness can be addressed, but neither it nor the strength should be ignored.
