Win With Flynn

It was late summer at a neighborhood pool in Walnut Creek, California when a young lifeguard had her moment. The moment she had trained for. She reached for her whistle, cleared the pool, and dove headlong into the deep end under the watchful eyes of swimmers and club members.

Her fellow lifeguards gathered supplies. One went for the phone to call the paramedics. Parents held their kids back, unsure of what they would see next.

The last few feet to the pool floor were agonizing. A few small bubbles crested the surface. Just one more strong pull and she’d be there.

The pool was silent for the first time in months.

Finally, our hero was kicking back to the surface, arms full.

But when she arrived, no child was with her. No swimmer. No injured club member. She had nothing but a tattered old pool towel. Discarded, waterlogged, but safe now on the pool’s edge.

Looks can be deceiving. From the lifeguard tower, the towel looked like a small boy, lifeless at the bottom of the pool.

Nobody else seemed to notice.

Or they did, but from their point of view, a unique perspective, it appeared differently.

Sometimes we see what we want to see, what we are trained to see, instead of seeing what is right there in front of us.

Cops see bad guys with guns, instead of good students with cell phones. Why? They are trained to see it. A kid in that neighborhood, with those clothes on, acts this way.

The impact of bias:

Chris Rock thinks we come to different conclusions based on bias, seeing what we want to see. He said, “I play Startin’ Somethin’, it’s a party. I play Bump and Grind, now you an activist.” Why? Even though Michael Jackson and R. Kelly have been accused of the same crime, “One of them just got better songs.”

People see the two artists differently. R. Kelly didn’t write Thriller, which explains some of it, but there is more to the story.

One of them was the cute little kid from the Jackson 5. For years, we were trained to see Michael that way. We love the music and the story, so we choose to keep seeing him in that same light, despite further evidence.

I can’t be the only one that noticed Michael had changed just a bit.

Our experience and our desires are having their way with us.  Impacting the way we see the world.

We see the world as we are:

Anais Nin said, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” And it’s hard as hell to change who we are, how we’ve been programmed, and how we see the world. Those opinions, training, and perceptions become engrained.

Changing means swallowing your pride. Admitting that you had it wrong.

Changing takes some practice.

The lifeguard could have stuck to her guns when confronted with new information. She could have rushed that towel off to the ER or performed CPR on it.

That might sound crazy, but we do it all the time.

Masks and vaccinations?

Weapons of mass destruction?

Crypto, nuclear power, rap music, video games?

What thoughts and ideas are you performing CPR on instead of just admitting it’s not what you thought it was?

Some people would rather grow gills than come to the surface. Accepting mistakes seems scary but it’s a relief, like that first breath of fresh air after coming up from the deep end.

“You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Richard Feynman

I see clients chasing products with no customers because they like the technology or the market size.

I see leaders propping up people they hired, that show no promise, because they like the resume and references.

Our brains are constantly attempting to use our past experiences to predict the future. Our brains are trying to keep us safe. Trying to help us survive. They are damn good at it too, but they have some obvious flaws. Because what we might call predicting is really pattern matching. We can’t see the future. We are just projecting from the past.

And when the future varies from the past, we make mistakes. We guess wrong.

Lisa Feldman Barrett tells a story about this in her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

“A FEW YEARS AGO, I received an e-mail from a man who served in the Rhodesian army in southern Africa in the 1970s, before the end of apartheid. He’d been drafted against his will, handed a uniform and a rifle, and ordered to hunt down guerrilla fighters. To make matters worse, before the draft, he’d been an advocate for the same guerrillas that he was now required to treat as the enemy. He was deep in the forest one morning, conducting practice exercises with his small squad of soldiers, when he detected movement ahead of him. With a pounding heart, he saw a long line of guerrilla fighters dressed in camouflage and carrying machine guns. Instinctively, he raised his rifle, flipped off the safety catch, squinted down the barrel, and aimed at the leader, who was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t shoot,” whispered his buddy behind him. “It’s just a boy.” He slowly lowered his rifle, looked again at the scene, and was astonished by what he now saw: a boy, perhaps ten years old, leading a long line of cows. And the dreaded AK-47? It was a simple herding stick. For years afterward, this man struggled to understand the unsettling episode. How had he managed to mis-see what was right in front of his eyes and nearly kill a child? What was wrong with his brain? As it turns out, nothing was wrong with his brain. It was working exactly as it should have.”

What can we do to combat bias?

So how can we break the cycle of confusion?

1.) We need help. We need friends willing to tap us on the shoulder and tell us they are not seeing what we are seeing.

2.) We need to help ourselves; we need enough humility to listen and put the gun down.

3.) We need to get over ourselves. We need to understand that predicting is natural and getting a few wrong is natural as well.

Our lifeguard wasn’t going to save that towel from anything except the lost and found and she had no choice other than coming up for air and facing the music. Facing some embarrassment.

Delaying that moment was constrained to the capacity of her lungs, and in our day-to-day, we shouldn’t wait much longer.

How did the crowd react?

Some laughter, of course, some good-natured ribbing, but mostly applause. Mostly cheers and gratitude. All the patrons would rather the lifeguard err on the side of caution, make that quick decision to save something, whether it be a towel or a toddler.

Our lifeguard did all the right things, and she was wrong. That’s okay. Take a deep breath.

Becasue of our bias, looks can be deceiving.

If you’d like to see the world more clearly, you can. But it’s not an upgrade to your eyes. It’s an upgrade to your attitude. Understanding your own bias, and how your history is coloring what you see and perceive in the present.

Being wrong is easily excused. Staying wrong is not.