“In the absence of a story, people will write their own.”
Jon Acuff
The world is full of the unexplained and the unexplainable, so we happily write the narrative, script the drama, conjure the heroes and villains.
Let’s not let the truth get in the way.
The bigger the void, the more ridiculous the claims. The bigger the gap, the more room for creativity, the more room for conspiracy.
It’s almost instantaneous. You see somebody walking down the street, through your neighborhood, and immediately the backstory comes together.
How did they get there?
“I bet their car broke down.”
Reasonable, but not enough to satiate. Could they be a runaway? Did they rob the neighbors?
“Bad home life in the Midwest no doubt. They moved west, got strung out on smack, and now they are walking my streets on the hunt for our children. Save the children!”
Much better. We can work with that.
Some people do it for sport. It’s called people watching.
And it’s not just the boomers in my family filling in the gaps for runaways and tramps. This is a natural human tendency, and we all do it. Yes, you do it as well.
In the same way our brain triangulates the landing spot when someone tosses us a frisbee, our brains are triangulating all the things around us. They are working to predict outcomes at every turn.
“Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination,” writes Lisa Feldman Barrett, “constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.” Your brain is a prediction machine. It’s constantly guessing what will happen next, and those predictions don’t just come from you and your experiences. They come from all our inputs. From books to news to blogs. From music and TV. Our brains cobble together and curate, which is why the country bumpkin who grew up ‘damn near’ Colville predicts and interprets the world differently than someone from inner city Berlin.
Country Girl, City Boy, makes for a great RomCom too. All those silly miscommunications.
If we’re being honest, and I think we are, predicting machine sounds an awful lot like making shit up. But it’s what we do. It’s how we make our way in the world. People who do it well navigate the world like they have the key to the test. Green lights all the way.
Charlie Munger has made some good predictions over his career and he still admits they’ve missed a lot of great investments at Berkshire Hathaway. What is his secret?
“We don’t miss them all.”
In a world of abundance, that might be enough.
“The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.”
Charlie Munger
So “not missing them all” is a function of focus. It’s understanding that our brains are prediction machines, but these machines are spitting oil and coughing up black smoke. They need a tune up. They need proper care. And one way Charlie does this is through focus.
You think that the wallflower at the party is stuck up, but really, she’s shy. Nervous.
You see the football player as a dumb jock, but he dreams in numbers.
You might think the English major is a teacher in the making, she spends her evenings playing rock shows.
Maybe our triangulation machine is off? Maybe we should stick to frisbees. All of us.
No need to predict the backstory of the new neighbor. We have an excellent mechanism for this, it’s called asking. Or try the alternative, ignoring. Both are time-tested improvements to our human operating system.
Because these gaps can create misunderstandings. Miscalculations. What is really going on? We must know!
When North Korea starts shooting off missiles, brings Dennis Rodman to town, and hacks into Sony Entertainment, everybody’s got a theory as to what it’s all about. Worst case scenario. The problem is nobody knows for sure.
At the office, you don’t follow up, so people think you are a slacker. The truth is, you’re uninterested, or you started working on other priorities. If they knew the truth, they might appreciate it, maybe those are shared priorities, maybe they can see why you’d go that route. Communication can be your ally. Transparency, working in public, these are tools that help you signal to others, so you don’t leave a gap.
It’s two ends with the same stick. You pick up one, the other is coming with it. We do it to others, and they do it to us. Nobody has a clear view of what the other person is all about. They are guessing, we are predicting, it’s all the same.
What can we do to mind the gap?
Awareness. That we are all making it up as we go. That is just part of our wiring, part of our charm, and what we think we think is just part of the story.
Diet. Not what you put in your face but what you put in your head. An information diet. If all you watch, read, and hear is about the coming zombie apocalypse, guess what, little Timmy down the street might start looking like he’s dragging his leg a bit. Certainly seems like zombie behavior to me.
Communication. We’re not going to stop every person on the street and to download their backstory, although the queen of Point Loma would have tried, but we can make it easier to understand each other. Help others fill in those gaps with what’s real and allow them to do the same.
Focus. An educated guess has the edge over the wild one. Relax, predict what’s important, predict in areas where you have some expertise and experience. Don’t run yourself ragged trying to guess the backstory of every person you see in the mall. Part of operating an efficient prediction machine is keeping an eye on the gas mileage.
Mind the gap, stay vigilant, aware of this human desire to predict. Control your information diet, communicate, focus, and you’ll see the world more clearly. And you’ll help others see clearly as well.
