The easy way out

 One fact I wish more people knew about is just how lazy their brains are, especially when it comes to analyzing events and drawing conclusions. Our brains will always seek the easiest solution to avoid having to do a lot of work purposefully so to save on energy, time and resources. What this means is that in every occasion we have to make use of our willpower to push our brains not to limit itself to the basic conclusion but to go beyond.

The world isn’t a straight forward place, things aren’t just that easy to figure out, some people go as far as sitting in their rooms thinking that they can understand the universe from there just by some logical interpretation of the limited information they have. The world is a complex place with multiple layers of complexity to peel through, even though a quick logical interpretation may seem obvious, the truth is far more complex than that and isn’t always what we want to hear.

Let’s take an example, when an accident between two cars happens, the easy way out will be to just look at who wasn’t supposed to be there, traffic laws dictate who should be where at what moment, so your brain can easily go like “that person wasn’t supposed to be there so they are guilty” but now with a deeper look we can peel through a deeper layer of complexity, did the traffic lights malfunction, was someone distracted or drunk, were the cars working properly and some other factors which might have played a role. Eventually we come to the understanding that the problem wasn’t just caused by one person being in the wrong place, but rather by a combination of factors which all played a role. At the moment and considering how little we are involved in the whole situation, we don’t care about thinking that much because we aren’t, that invested into it, but when the problem concerns us, then we can give it more of a thought.

I say all this because that’s the same reasoning we apply to other problems, especially the ones which don’t touch us directly, our brains seek the easiest solutions to explain why conflicts arise or why things didn’t work out and this unfortunately leads us to the wrong ones.

How many times have you taken to analyze the backstory of a conflict happening at the other side of the world, or have you taken time to study the backstory of maybe a friend struggling, probably not, but you are confident in your analysis of the source of their problem.

Another instance is how people are confident about knowing how the country is run, you feel like you could probably tell the leaders the right things to do, but how much of your own history do you know? Does the information you have come from years of studies or just from random conversations and content you viewed online?. This leads you to make a logical analysis with a limited amount of information, which eventually leads you to draw a false conclusion as to what needs to be done. When you don’t have the right information, it’s difficult to make the right decision.

Off to a wrong start

When you don’t have the full facts, don’t know everything or at least a sufficient amount of a situation and when all you know are just random facts here and there you collected from unverified sources, you are already setting yourself up for failure. A manager can not possibly know everything about everything and so relies on the information and guidance provided to him/her by his/her team and is on the basis of this he makes a decision. In your case, unless you have such a trustworthy team who can do that research for you, then you can confidently make the right decision, but often times we are left just in our heads with no feedback or correction for our wrong ideas, and so we rationalize them and try to make sense of the wrong information which eventually leads us to the wrong conclusions.

What we need to do

The simple truth of the matter is that there is no easy way out, you aren’t that smart enough to figure things out in an instant or just on your own, and it is pretty arrogant of you to think that you know better than the thousands of people who came before you and failed. The solution isn’t going to be found in an instant, at least not a lasting one and whatever solution you think you can cook up in seconds best believe many people have already had the same idea and tried it and if it isn’t already implemented then it’s because it failed at some point or was never implemented to begin with. Don’t let your brain put you in that false sense of confidence with a cheap solution to a complex problem, take the time to do research and get all the facts right before drawing a conclusion.

An example to illustrate what I am saying is for you to imagine a student who has difficulties in school. You can easily just assume that he or she is being lazy and just into games, if that person isn’t related to you in any way you can quickly come to that conclusion but when that person is related to you then you will have more facts to work with, you will better understand the circumstances which lead to that person’s failure in school. To have a full understanding of the situation and propose a viable solution will require for you to know that person and investigate the reasons for their failure in school, then maybe you’ll realize they have always had difficulties in school, at home and socially, they never had help from anybody and the failure is just a consequence of all this. From there you can easily propose a sustainable solution which will help them, aside from this the only solution you will propose would be for them to stop being lazy meanwhile laziness was never the issue, not being able to understand something doesn’t make you lazy.

Conclusion

Problems are way more complex than a 5-minute reflection can solve, take the time to gather the correct information before drawing conclusions, especially when these can impact the lives of so many.

Thanks for reading ☺️

If you enjoyed the article, you could support by buying me a coffee.