Is there one simple thing you could do that would make a tremendous positive impact in your life?
Yes!
If you are willing to do this one thing – if you would make this one change – it would help lead to greater and greater success and happiness in all facets of your life.
Hindrances
One of the most effective ways of getting a result is by removing hindrances. We can observe this in many facets our lives and experiences.
For instance, at home, you don’t make a refrigerator colder by adding cold air. You remove the hot air. In the shower, you don’t make the water hotter by adding hot water. You make it hotter by removing cold water. Think about that the next time you take a shower.
In business, if you want to make a process faster, you may be able to make some gains by increasing the speed of individual steps or tasks of a process. But, in practice, this normally produces very little improvement. Instead, the best speed improvements to processes come from eliminating the slow parts.
Similarly, if we want to be more effective and successful in life, then some of our best improvements are going to come from removing or minimizing personal and mental hindrances.
The Problem
One of the biggest root-causes that keeps people stuck in average beliefs, average attitudes, average behaviors and average outcomes, is that they are blind to learning about things they think they already know. And this manifests itself as a subtle closed-mindedness to different information or ideas pertaining to a topic they think they understand.
Now, as soon as I say “closed-minded,” many people might automatically think of someone they know that reflects a stubborn, obstinate personality. We all know people we could describe as “closed-minded.” But this is the problem. This IS the hindrance. For the overwhelming majority of people, the reflex reaction is to look outward, instead of inward. We don’t think of ourselves as being particularly closed-minded. And we don’t usually ask ourselves if we are “open to change” when we are exposed to new or conflicting information about something we already think we know and understand.
Instead, what most people tend to do in the face of being exposed to thoughts, ideas and information – unless it is totally new to us – is to think we already know it, and we stop listening. We summarily dismiss the thought without further consideration. This is especially true of the topics we think we are highly knowledgeable about. The more we think we know something, the more we are inclined to think there’s nothing new to learn here.
Let me demonstrate what “knowing” does to us. I’ll use mathematics as an abstract example to make the point.
Let’s talk about some two’s.
What’s 2+2?
If you answered 4, you are correct. Everybody knows that. We learned that years ago. In fact we memorized it when we were young and now it’s automatic. We don’t even think about it. We just know it.
How about another one? What’s 2 X 2?
Again, the answer is 4. And you probably just know that too. You probably didn’t perform a calculation in your head. You just knew the answer.
OK, so let’s do this again.
What’s 10 + 10?
What’s 10 X 10?
Most people would answer, 20 and 100.
But what if I said you were wrong? What if I said the answers are 100 and 100?
Are you thinking, “Whaaaat? Is he crazy? Did he flunk math in school?”
Observe yourself carefully. In your reflex reaction, did you reject my assertion that 10 + 10 = 100?
Most people did. And even if you took the time to double-check and make sure you read it correctly, you (most people) still believe 10 + 10 = 20. You think you’re right and I’m wrong.
Now let me explain. You see, in our world, the day-to-day handling of math is with the decimal number system (Base-10). But we use many number systems other than Base-10 in our daily lives and we don’t even recognize them. We’re oblivious to it. I happened to be doing binary math (Base-2) with the second example. If you’re not familiar with binary mathematics, don’t worry. Most people aren’t. But many computer programmers are. And anyone familiar with binary math will recognize that my answers are correct. If you want to learn a little more about different number systems you can read more about it here.
You see, I tricked you, kind of.
Before we did any math, I said, “Let’s talk about some two’s.” And I knew that this statement would not be seen as anything but a trivial passing comment. And I knew that 99.9% of all people would walk through these little math questions assuming decimal numbers. Even though I expressly told you we were going to be dealing with “two’s.” When you saw a 2, you thought “two.” And when you saw a 10, you thought “ten” and not “two.”
Forgive me, because this little exercise was contrived. But forget the math example and keep you’re your eye on this main point: Moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, we human-beings are predisposed to thinking we already know about the things we are familiar with. And this sets us up with a tendency for us to think we already understand, to think we’ve got it, and we already know it. And this mindset – this reflex reaction that is common to us all – is a major barrier to change.
So what can we do about it?
Before I give you the answer, I want to make one more point that will help make this clearer.
When a young child begins to learn to walk, we don’t start them off with a 5 mile run. When they start to talk, we don’t have them recite the Gettysburg address. When they start to learn numbers, we don’t begin with calculus. In all areas of knowledge and skill development, people learn in stages. They begin at simple and basic levels, and they build upon that as they gain proficiency in the knowledge or skill.
At every stage of the child’s development, the expert who is far ahead of them knows things the child does not. And the child has no idea that there are things they don’t know. For instance, the 6 year old who is learning basic addition and subtraction, doesn’t know algebra. They probably don’t even know the word exists. Let alone understand how to do algebra. From the parent’s or the teacher’s perspective, it’s not just that the child doesn’t know how to do algebra. The child doesn’t even know that they don’t know how to do algebra.”
It’s easy for us to recognize this as we look at younger or more inexperienced people. But this circumstance, this reality, exists with every human being on earth until the day we die. That is, “We don’t know what we don’t know!”
This should be an epiphany for us. When understand and accept that we don’t know what we don’t know, then we are one very important step closer to open-mindedness, and willingness to change.
You should say this sentence to yourself every day for the rest of your life, “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
Do We Know It All?
At the beginning of this article, I asserted there is one thing you can do to make a huge impact on success and happiness in your life. I mentioned the key is to remove or minimize a hindrance to change. The hindrance is that we think we already know [something], and that this usually blocks us from considering further change. And here’s how to deal with it:
Be constantly aware of how open-minded you are.
Be aware morning, noon and night. And be especially aware when you are exposed to information that might conflict with what you think you already know. Be alert to reflex reactions of rejecting some kind of new or conflicting information. Be aware of that mental flipping the switch to the “off” position.
If you are honest with yourself and if you pay close attention to how open-minded you are about something, you can dramatically increase your openness to learning, and your willingness to change.
Why? Because this will increase your willingness to listen and may even increase your curiosity. Whereas in the past your reflex reaction may have closed the doors to useful information or advice.
But…
But some may say, “There are wild and crazy ideas everywhere, and some of it is just plain wrong. To do this means to become wishy-washy and to potentially fill your head with nonsense.”
Don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting that you no longer think for yourself, or that you must abdicate your life’s decisions to anybody and everybody who has an opinion about something. But rather that you be mindful of your reflex reaction to close yourself off from potentially useful information. Our problem with actually changing, is not that we are always changing to line up with the idea-of-the-day. The bigger problem is that our habits and reflex reactions are keeping us from changing very much at all.
In life, moving forward, progressing in one way or another, is most often met with some form of negative response. And all too often, the negative response is coming from inside us.
Change this, and you change your life.