I used to live in an apartment complex next to a beautiful park. The apartments were built in the mid-1960s, which made them slightly older than me, but they were well-constructed and in good condition. I would have been very happy there – except for the neighbours.
Not long after I moved in, I discovered there was a long-standing fight going on among the owners of the other apartments. The supposed issue would be tedious to describe (it was to do with the unusual legal format of the ownership of the property). I suspect, though, that by the point at which I came in, it wasn’t even what was driving people any more.
The real problem was that two sides had spent so many years fighting over it that they thoroughly despised each other, and weren’t going to yield an inch of ground to the hated enemy under any circumstances. It was like living in the Middle East, or, occasionally, a seagull colony.
On one side were mostly elderly residents who controlled the governing board and were, to put it mildly, stubborn and curmudgeonly in their resistance to change. On the other side were a middle-aged couple and their few allies, who wanted to change the legal structure.
The reason that couple had few allies is that they consistently alienated people by their behaviour. I probably would have voted with them if they’d gone about the whole thing in a measured and reasonable way (in fact, they probably would have carried the issue years before I got there). Instead, they periodically put ranting letters in everyone’s mailboxes accusing the Board, and especially the chairman, of a long list of crimes and heaping personal abuse on them. (One particularly memorable letter compared the chairman to Adolf Hitler and Slobadan Milosevic, which wasn’t well calculated to help them hold on to the support of one of their few remaining allies, a holocaust survivor.)
I left that apartment complex years ago, basically to get away from the fighting. I’ve wondered a few times what’s happened since I left. One thing I’m confident of, though: the leader of the opposition will not have changed. I know this, because he was always right.
I foolishly got involved in the fight at one point and tried to mediate, pointing out that there were faults on both sides. “Nothing,” he declared, “could be further from the truth.” As far as he was concerned, he was totally right and without fault, and whatever tactics he used were justified by the righteousness of his cause (the noble moral issue of the legal structure by which some apartments were owned, let’s not forget). His many defeats by fair democratic process never dented his confidence even slightly. I never saw him retract, apologise, concede a point or back down in any way.
Progress by mistakes
Personally, I’ve learned some of my most important lessons by being wrong. No, I’m wrong there. I’ve learned some of my most important lessons by being able to admit that I was wrong.
Let’s face it: we all screw up. There’s not a person alive today who hasn’t made mistakes, often significant ones. Read any successful person’s biography. If it’s an honest biography, there will be at least one major mistake in there, I guarantee. And the other thing I guarantee is this: That person learned from their mistake. It was an important step on their path to success.
Looking back on my own life, I can identify many of these. The time I decided that I wasn’t cut out to be a youth worker. The inappropriate joke I posted on the office door, and confessed to when my scary boss hit the roof. Several times when I’ve offended my wife. All the times when people have criticised me and my first action has not been to defend myself, but to listen.
Confirmation bias
Confirmation bias works by discarding, dismissing or reinterpreting any evidence that you’re wrong, and keeping only the evidence that you’re right. It’s seen in science, in journalism, in politics, and in everyday life. When we see it in people who we disagree with, we think less of them, but we all do it. It’s part of how we get through life. If we changed our opinion every time we got new evidence, we’d be all over the road.
At the same time, confirmation bias is a problem when we get too good at it. On the one hand, there’s the person who’s convinced they can never do anything right, and will discard any evidence to the contrary – and they definitely have a problem. But on the other hand, there’s the person – like my former neighbour – who is convinced they can never do anything wrong, and they are dangerous. You can’t work with them. It’s their way or the highway.
And they are deliberately cutting themselves off from one of the most important pathways to change – the feedback of other people.
Feedback
In engineering, a feedback loop works like this. You have a target setting, say on a thermostat (that’s the classic example). You also have a range around that target setting that’s “close enough”. When a measuring device, such as a thermometer, detects that the situation is outside that range – it’s too hot or too cold – it provides feedback to the machine, which then works to return to the target. When it’s there, again it gets feedback, and shuts off.
The reason feedback from others is so important is that we can’t always trust our own judgement. Our measurements are biased, and they come from only one perspective. This isn’t to say that every criticism you receive is correct, of course, but every criticism (or praise) is worth listening to for what you can learn.
(Sometimes, what you learn is that the other person is an idiot. But that’s their problem.)
Action Now
Who do you have around you who can help you to get things right by telling you how they think you’re getting them wrong?
Talk to that person. Ask them to be honest, and listen carefully, without defending. Then go away and think it over. They could be right.
This seems like a good moment to mention that I’ll be offering half-hour free consulting sessions, for a limited time, starting next week – more about that in next week’s post.
And, of course, feel free to disagree with me in the comments.
This post is part of a series, How Not to Change Your Life.
