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Whether it is Steve Jobs building the iPhone, Bob Dylan giving voice to a generation, John Lassiter creating Toy Story, Mother Teresa giving the untouchables a sense of being precious and loved, or a more personal and less famous hero, all of us have had our breath taken away by extraordinary human accomplishment. But our own lives usually feel more mundane. We find roles that seem interesting and do good work, but the possibilities feel more limited. We end up calling people who accomplish extraordinary things geniuses and saints, different in kind from the rest of us.
But what if the dichotomy is false? What if we are much more capable than we realize of stretching the world in new ways – ways that we cannot even see ourselves yet? Steve Jobs viewed the world this way, and he believed that understanding it can change our lives. In an interview with PBS, he said:
When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use….
That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it….
However you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
If Jobs is right that world-changing creative potential is accessible to many of us, why do so many of us not “bash against the walls?” We all want to live the richest lives we can. Jobs had an intuition that this situation was a function of the way our brains are wired. In an interview with Playboy, he said:
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.
His thinking here echoes that of leading cognitive scientists. One of the most consistent findings in that field has been that the vast majority of mental processing is automatic. Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman summarizes this research by describing two types of thought, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 is automatic thought, and researchers have shown just how much of our attention, our interpretations of situations, our visceral feelings and attitudes, and even the goals we set happen without intention or awareness. System 2 is the conscious, deliberate thought we generally associate with thinking. In general, we think System 2 is in control, but it rarely intervenes after we are familiar with a situation. If System 1 creates a coherent approach, then System 2 is comfortable. As Kahneman says, System 2 is “lazy.” Social psychologist Timothy Wilson has called consciousness “a snowball on top of the tip of the iceberg” of automatic thought. Very much like grooves in a record, our brain develops a reflexive, automatic relationship with the world and its possibilities.
Kahneman calls this situation “What You See Is All There Is.” We operate as if our automatic mental model is all that is relevant and miss the diverse possibilities beyond it. The bias affects us at very subtle levels, as well as in our broad perspectives on the world. When we hear a leader is “intelligent and strong,” we tend to judge him as good. We do not notice that we have no information about his moral character. Only when we hear he is cruel and corrupt do we take that information into account. We are ready to run with a working model as soon as we get a gut feeling about what is going on. In an early series of experiments, Kahneman and colleagues presented a short vignette about an independent, socially conscious young woman. He then asked which is more likely: (1) Linda is a bank teller or (2) Linda is a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement. In study after study, more people picked the second option, even though (2) is obviously a subset of (1). The description just fit better with Linda as a feminist bank teller, and so we go with it. Our mind closes in around what feels right.
The kinds of information that lead our gut to embrace a story as feeling right, whether valid or not, include ones that pull towards a fixed view of what is possible. Of course, other people’s perspectives have an enormous influence, even if we know they have no more information than we do. The Stanford Prison Experiment illustrates how powerful the influence of social context can be. Stanford students participated for a fee in a study that placed them in a simulated prison. Many of the students suffered severe psychological distress and were desperate to be released. They were willing to go before a parole board that would decide whether they could leave if they were willing to forfeit their pay. Not one of them realized that they could leave any time that they wanted; the pay was the only incentive for them to be there. If those students could forget they were free citizens in a matter of a few days, how much easier is it for us to lose our own freedom to diverge from the established way of doing things over the years of our lives?
Familiarity itself often becomes a source of spurious information. The “cognitive ease” with which we can process information makes it feel truer. We are more likely to believe a well-written paragraph than an awkward one. Even a font that is more readable can make something feel truer. And familiarity results in cognitive ease. Seeing the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” repeatedly makes a person more likely to believe the statement that “The body temperature of a chicken is 144°” or any other temperature. The ease of processing one part of the sentence makes the whole thing feel more right. Is it any wonder that we do not diverge much from what is routine? There is a feeling of rightness to the easy paths that we travel often. Trying to “bash against the walls” means starting down a path that is awkward, stumbling, and uncertain.
The tendency of our mind to fall into grooves has a direct effect on real world performance. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has studied exceptional performance in a wide range of human endeavors, and one of his most notable findings has been how much the norm is not to reach our potential. Whether the area of accomplishment is music, medicine, sports, writing, or chess, most people get better while they are learning the basics, but then they fall into a groove and cannot break out of it. Musicians or tennis players may continue to play for four or five hours per day for years, but their performance stays much the same.
Ericsson has given the example of Benjamin Franklin’s love of chess. Franklin made a serious interest of the game but was frustrated that he never could get better. Like any other chess player, his System 1 mind had learned to recognize patterns and automatically produced ideas about best moves. No matter how much he tried, the automatic processes would put the same options in front of him in the same contexts, and so he continued to play at the same level. Even though he played with world-class chess players, hoping his abilities would stretch to meet theirs, they never did. Just playing against better players is not adequate for us to internalize their moves. It is like the difference between learning a symphony by listening to a recording of it and actually learning how to play it. What Franklin needed to do was study the games between masters. If he could not anticipate their next move, he could have taken the time to struggle to recognize patterns his mind did not yet comprehend automatically until he could. He would have been forcing System 2 to stay as active as it is early on, when any automatic patterns that are present are clearly inadequate for the task. In so doing, he could have kept optimizing his pattern recognition. As the new recognitions became automatized, his System 1 mind would have produced better ideas for moves.
When I think about Steve Jobs’ perspective on creative possibilities, I have to think it played a causal role in him developing his “genius.” He explicitly believed in doubting what felt familiar and “right,” seeing it as a screen masking possibilities beyond it. That framing demanded System 2 to stay active, searching for more. “The world is messed up in a lot of ways” and “you can change it” mean that we have to turn towards the awkward path of continuing to search for what could be better.
When people have come up with effective strategies for keeping System 2 active, they continue to develop to an extraordinary degree. Ericsson’s research on expertise emphasizes the fact that people who reach towards their potential do so by using a method he calls deliberate practice. The method uses feedback that brings a person face to face with the limitations of their current approach and forces them to discover new approaches until they find something more successful. A chess player struggling with the games of a master until she could re-create them is an example.
How to reach for more in the most effective ways possible is the subject of this blog. We will explore stories and research about how people have identified areas of life that were deeply inspiring to them and the specific ways in which they have developed the skills to shape and improve their world. It starts with a basic tenet: What We See Is NOT All There Is.
What this would look like for each of us, as individuals, will take further exploration. We may not know what is deeply inspiring to us. That is natural. If we have not spent time investigating possibilities that take us past the familiar, we will not easily be able to distinguish which ones could lead somewhere interesting. Just like a foreign language, looking at potential directions will seem like gibberish until we have attended to it for a while and learned how to understand it.
Or we may know what we love, but we feel an inexorable pull back to the routine that keeps us from cultivating and achieving our potential. Like Franklin with chess, the automatic can have a power that limits us. An executive may be thrilled by a vision of what her company could be, but daily responsibilities, the pressures of investors, and the expectations of employees and clients reinforce her habitual way of doing things. She will have to learn ways to bash against walls that can lead somewhere new. As Franklin could have done, she can look for heroes – people who have achieved something similar to what she hopes to achieve – and study their process intimately, until she herself can make decisions that produce similar results. Even if she does not take this specific tactic, she will have to find some way to set System 2 against the routine and explore beyond it.
Taking a new path will never flow as naturally as the life that is familiar to us and easily recognizable by the people around us. But maybe, like Jobs, we can decide that the mental grooves are not all there is and that living within a specious container is not good enough. If we do, we can begin the journey to discovering the extraordinary possibilities beyond our automatic, familiar approach to the world.
