Faulty
Assumptions
by
Paul W. Schenk, Psy.D.
[Biodata and picture of contributor will be found by clicking here]
One
Friday night when I was in the waiting area of our local hospital’s emergency
room, an ambulance arrived. The crew wheeled in a stretcher carrying a young
teenage driver who was looking quite pale. As the ER physician came out to meet
them, the crew explained the teen had been in a bad car accident and had lost
considerable blood. The ER physician gave the boy a quick once over and said,
“He needs to get into surgery. Immediately. But I can’t operate on him, he’s my
son!”
Here's
a brain teaser. The
physician was telling the truth. Who was the physician?
I
like to use this story to teach my clients about the power of the assumptions we
make. Why? I frequently find that
people unwittingly block themselves from succeeding at their goals and dreams
because of logical, but faulty, assumptions. If you’re like most
people, you’re probably unwittingly thwarting yourself from succeeding at some
of your goals too. Later I’ll be dealing with four major types of faulty
assumptions and a simple exercise you can use to identify them – and then get
rid of them. With these illusory obstacles out of the way, you’ll find it
easier to achieve the goals you set for yourself.
Wouldn’t
it be obvious if you’re falling into the "assumption trap"? No. Not when they’re your own faulty
assumptions. It’s much easier to spot other people's. Ever watch someone get
frustrated trying to push a door open that you know needs to be pulled? All it
takes is one inaccurate belief to stop the person from getting through the
doorway. Once the error is realized, the person can open the door easily.
Assumptions are always based on our best logic. In turn, that logic is a
combination of personal experience and the information available. Faulty logic inherently produces incorrect assumptions.
At times, incorrect assumptions can have serious consequences. Even a
single faulty assumption can turn an opportunity into an unsolvable dilemma.
Here’s one more brain teaser for you to help you understand how easy it is to make an assumption that is logical but wrong. Connect the 9 circles in the box below with four straight, continuous lines. Do not lift your pencil off the page once you begin drawing. (For the answers to both puzzles click here.)
Time,
talent, money, and energy
There
are four kinds of faulty assumptions that I find regularly block people from
succeeding at their goals. These
include assumptions about time, talent, money and energy. Let’s take a look at some of the ways that faulty
assumptions about these four issues may show up in your life. Then I’ll deal with what you can do to identify and get
rid of them.
There
are some common core qualities that characterize such assumptions.
They tend to be vague or generalized in some way.
They may be based on an implicit belief that “other people can, but I
can’t.” They typically involve a belief that something else must change
first, something that is beyond the person’s control. [Add more of these core
characteristics after I write the examples.]
Assumptions
about time:
“I
don’t have enough time.” As a senior in college I looked forward to the
illusion of having an abundance of free time once I graduated.
Without the demands of nighttime and weekend studying, I would have lots
of time on my hands. I don’t
remember exactly when that belief crashed in flames, but it happened long before
the next New Year’s Eve. I
replaced it with the belief that when I retired I would finally have more free
time. My 90-year-old father, who
retired at 87, has long since helped me dispel that myth.
When we talk, he sometimes still muses about how he had too little time that
week to work on his hobby. With concerted practice, I’m continuing to get
better at finding short but satisfying windows of opportunity for my own hobby
of model railroading. Success became much easier when I stopped looking for big
blocks of time and noticed what I could do with even fifteen minutes.
The
“80 – 20” rule refers to the phenomenon that 80 percent of the work gets
done in 20 percent of the time; the remaining 20 percent takes 80 percent of the
time. That means that in a 40 hour
work week, most of the work is done in 8 hours!
You can see how transforming just one hour of time pays big benefits.
Let me offer two examples. When
I replaced some of my office furniture a few years ago, I bought a desk with
file drawers. Previously, my clients’ charts were stored six feet away in
a file cabinet. Now I keep the
charts within reach. As a result,
paper gets filed immediately instead of going into the ubiquitous “to be
filed” stack. That one change has eliminated countless hours of thumbing
through the stack looking for a particular piece of information. Though I
took a typing course in 8th grade, my speed has never been terrific.
With the advent of dictation software, I now dictate at something
approaching 90 wpm. Just these two changes went a long way towards creating the
time that I now use for writing.
Assumptions
about talent:
“I’m
not smart enough to learn how to do that.”
“I’m not a creative person like she is.”
The most common form of faulty assumptions about talent centres on
personal insufficiency. Notice some
of your friends’ talents that you admire.
Have you been assuming that their talent was genetic, and somehow emerged
fully developed like Zeus from his mother’s womb?
Most people rarely see the hundreds (or thousands) of hours their friend
has spent nurturing the development of that talent over a period of years. Much
of what is labeled as talent is primarily the application of persistence. A lot
more seems to be accomplished when the focus is on the enjoyment of being
engaged in the activity rather than on the gap between the current level of
ability and the desired final goal. When I run into assumptions about
insufficient talent, I find it helpful to play with the question, “What would
I do next if I did have the talent?” This came in handy when I began to
contemplate whether I had the talent to write, and publish, a book. A
colleague suggested I would have more credibility with publishers if I had
already published several articles. Further, she noted, an article involves a
much shorter time commitment than an entire book. It proved to be good advice.
Since I began setting aside time for writing in 1998, I’ve had 18 articles
published. A number of those became the basis for one book that I published last
year, Great Ways to Sabotage a Good Conversation. A second book is now in search
of a publisher.
Assumptions
about money:
“I
can’t afford it.” “It would
cost too much.” The common core
of these assumptions involves a belief that there is only one solution that must
take a particular form. A variation
of this occurs in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
One day while teaching mathematics at Princeton, Professor Nash closes
the windows because of nearby construction noise.
With no air conditioning, the students begin to complain, to no avail.
Then an attractive co-ed opens the window, leans out, and politely asks
the men working below if they could work somewhere else for the next hour.
When they willingly oblige, Professor Nash pauses for a moment before
commenting, “Multivariate problems have multiple solutions.”
Using a mathematician’s logic, he realizes that he had assumed the
problem had only one solution. His
student’s action had quietly demonstrated the flaw in his thinking.
It
is easy to make a faulty assumption about a goal if the solution requires a
specific amount of cash. Several years ago, the 13 year old daughter of a friend
of mine told her mother she wanted to attend a private boarding school. As a single mother, the woman’s income could not stretch to
cover the school’s expenses. Knowing
how resourceful her daughter was, she invited her to find an alternate solution.
The girl drafted a detailed letter to the school’s headmaster in which
she explained her circumstances, her credentials, and her reasons for wanting to
attend the school. She was awarded
a full scholarship.
Assumptions
about energy:
In
our society, a sense of fatigue is typically at the core of assumptions about
insufficient energy. “I’m just
too tired by the time I get the children into bed.”
One contributing factor often involves an implicit belief that there is
no way to reduce the energy required for other tasks. I find that the fatigue is
often iatrogenic, that is induced by the treatment being received: Because there is too little time set aside for leisure
pursuits, the person begins to burn out and lose energy for the required tasks.
Setting aside even small amounts of time for personal pursuits serves to
re-energize. It is not unlike turning off a cell phone for awhile and plugging
it into the recharger.
The
Threshold of Believability:
Here
is a simple exercise to help you identify whether you are holding faulty
assumptions about one of your own dreams or goals.
If you are, the exercise can quickly help you identify and release them.
To demonstrate how it works, I’ll apply it to a problem my son, Matt,
faced when he was nine. He was jealous that his older brother made money mowing lawns
for some of the neighbours. He also
wanted a way to earn money, but knew that he was too young to use the
lawnmower himself. Identify
something you want which you believe cannot happen now.
Ask yourself if you believe that what you want could happen 30
years from now. Matt had no doubt
that 30 years hence he would have a job with a good income.
It is critical that you begin with a time frame far enough in the future
that your answer is an unhesitating, “Yes.”
If there is any doubt or hesitation, select a time period even farther
out in the future. Once you get a
convincing, “Yes,” then begin working backwards in five year intervals. Matt
continued to have no doubt at five year declining intervals until we reached a
time five years hence. At that point he stopped being sure of the answer. Your
own doubt may emerge in any of several ways. “I hope so.”
“Probably.” “I would
like to think so.” The only
acceptable answer before moving to the next time period is a convincing,
“Yes.” Anything else defines
doubt or uncertainty.
Once
you cross that threshold yourself, examine the interval between the last point
where you answered “Yes” and the point in the future where you begin to have
doubts. For Matt, it happened
between six and seven years in the future. Looking
seven years ahead, his answer was a clear, “Yes.”
Looking six years ahead, he wasn’t sure. Notice what assumption emerges
for you when you identify this first “threshold of believability.” Matt had
assumed that he could not get a real job until he was 16.
I asked him to notice if that assumption was, in fact, true.
He quickly identified a few things some teenagers do to earn money before
they reach 16, such as babysitting, pet sitting, and mowing lawns like his older
brother. Carefully question any assumptions you identify to be sure
they are valid in your particular case. If
you have trouble recognizing the assumption, remember that it can be very
helpful to do this exercise with your partner or a good friend whose perspective
may shed important light on your assumptions.
With
that faulty assumption identified and eliminated, return to the process of
slowly working back one or two years at a time towards the present until you
again encounter some doubt about succeeding at your goal within that time frame.
Then repeat the step of noticing the assumption that
triggered the doubt. For Matt, the next threshold occurred between four
and five years away. This was based on the fact that his older brother began
mowing lawns when he was 14, and Matt doubted whether he would be allowed to do
that when he was only 13. Eliminating this doubt meant expanding his range of
possibilities to include other things that children 13 and younger can do to
earn money. To test the waters, I told him about how I used to bake cookies and
sell them to neighbours when I was about his age. I paid my mother for the
ingredients and cleared 50 cents for my efforts. (Good money for a half hour’s
work in 1957!) He wasn’t interested in baking cookies, but his eyes lit
up when he thought about our bread maker. He had his answer. By dinner that
night he and I had put together a one page flyer offering nearly a dozen
different varieties of home made bread. The next day we calculated the cost of
the ingredients at our local supermarket and then revised some of the prices. By
the weekend he had his first order. While his interest lasted, he and I had
found another way to spend fun time together (since I supervised all the
mixing), and he enjoyed being a successful entrepreneur (even too successful
some weeks!)
If
you get stuck on a particular assumption, experiment with these questions: What
if that assumption happens to be wrong? What would I do next about my goal? Who
might I talk with to learn if there is something faulty about that
assumption? Do
any other obstacles emerge at this particular time interval? Has
there ever been an exception to this obstacle (such as a dollar
amount or an age requirement?) There
will certainly be times when you are unable to find a flaw in your logic or
assumptions. In such cases, I
invite you to experiment with pursuing a variation of the original goal. One of my long-standing dreams has been to travel to outer
space. Aside from my age and the
ease with which I can develop motion sickness, there are a number of very good
reasons why this dream would seem impossible to achieve.
Then, for my 41st birthday, my wife sent me to NASA’s Adult
Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama where I spent a long weekend sampling the
daily routine of an astronaut. I haven’t made it all the way to outer space,
yet, but I have some wonderful memories of getting part way there!
ER
solution: The
physician is the boy’s mother. People who have trouble finding the solution
don’t realize that they have made a faulty assumption that all physicians are
men. Once this assumption is made,
there is no solution to the puzzle. Once
the faulty assumption is identified, most people instantly recognize the
solution. 9
dot solution:
Hint: Most people think that the solution has to lie inside the boundary defined
by the four corner dots. Let go of
this faulty assumption and let yourself think outside the “box.”