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Recognize Your Two Barriers

3.1 Recognize your two barriers.

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots. Together, they make it difficult for you to objectively see what is true about you and your circumstances and to make the best possible decisions by getting the most out of others. If you can understand how the machine that is the human brain works, you can understand why these barriers exist and how to adjust your behavior to make yourself happier, more effective, and better at interacting with others.

a. Understand your ego barrier.

When I refer to your “ego barrier,” I’m referring your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept your mistakes and weaknesses. Your deepest-seated needs and fears—such as the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering—reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala, which are structures in your teamporal lobe that process emotions. Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you. They oversimplify things and react instinctively. They crave praise and respond to criticism as an attack, even when the higher-level parts of the brain understand that constructive criticism is good for you. They make you defensive, especially when it comes to the subject of how good you are.

At the same time, higher-level consciousness resides in your neocortex, more specifically in the part called the prefrontal cortex. This is the most distinctively human feature of your brain; relative to the rest of the brain, it’s larger in humans than in most other species. This is where you experience the conscious awareness of decision making (the so-called “executive function”), as well as application of logic and reasoning.

b. Your two “yous” fight to control you.

It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though your higher-level you is not aware of your lower-level you. This conflict is universal; if you pay close enough attention, you can actually see when the different parts of a person’s brain are arguing with one another. For example, when someone gets “angry with himself,” his prefrontal cortex is sparring with his amygdala (or other lower-level parts of his brain). When someone asks, “Why did I let myself eat all that cake?” the answer is “Because the lower-level you won out over the thoughtful, higher-level you.”

Once you understand how your a) logical/conscious you and b) emotional/subconscious you fight with each other, you can imagine what it’s like when your two yous deal with other people and their own two “thems.” It’s a mess. Those lower-level selves are like attack dogs—they want to fight even when their higher-level selves want to figure things out. This is very confusing because you and the people you are dealing with typically don’t even know that these lower-level beasts exist, never mind that they are trying to hijack everyone’s behavior.

Let’s look at what tends to happen when someone disagrees with you and asks you to explain your thinking. Because you are programmed to view such challenges as attacks, you get angry, even though it would be more logical for you to be interested in the other person’s perspective, especially if they are intelligent. When you try to explain your behavior, your explanations don’t make any sense. That’s because your lower-level you is trying to speak through your upper-level you. Your deep-seated, hidden motivations are in control, so it is impossible for you to logically explain what “you” are doing.

Even the most intelligent people generally behave this way, and it’s tragic. To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.

c. Understand your blind spot barrier.

In addition to your ego barrier, you (and everyone else) also have blind spots—areas where your way of thinking prevents you from seeing things accurately. Just as we all have different ranges for hearing pitch and seeing colors, we have different ranges for seeing and understanding things. We each see things in our own way. For example, some people naturally see big pictures and miss small details while others naturally see details and miss big pictures; some people are linear thinkers while others think laterally, and so on.

Naturally, people can’t appreciate what they can’t see. A person who can’t identify patterns and synthesize doesn’t know what it’s like to see patterns and synthesize any more than a color-blind person knows what it’s like to see color. These differences in how our brains work are much less apparent than the differences in how our bodies work. Color-blind people eventually find out that they are color-blind, whereas most people never see or understand the ways in which their ways of thinking make them blind. To make it even harder, we don’t like to see ourselves or others as having blind spots, even though we all have them. When you point out someone’s psychological weakness, it’s generally about as well received as if you pointed out a physical weakness.

If you’re like most people, you have no clue how other people see things and aren’t good at seeking to understand what they are thinking, because you’re too preoccupied with telling them what you yourself think is correct. In other words, you are closed-minded; you presume too much. This closed-mindedness is terribly costly; it causes you to miss out on all sorts of wonderful possibilities and dangerous threats that other people might be showing you—and it blocks criticism that could be constructive and even lifesaving.

The end result of these two barriers is that parties in disagreements typically remain convinced that they’re right—and often end up angry at each other. This is illogical and leads to suboptimal decision making. After all, when two people reach opposite conclusions, someone must be wrong. Shouldn’t you want to make sure that someone isn’t you?

This failure to benefit from others’ thinking doesn’t just occur when disagreements arise; it occurs when people encounter problems that they are trying to solve. When trying to figure things out, most people spin in their own heads instead of taking in all the wonderful thinking available to them. As a result, they continually run toward what they see and keep crashing into what they are blind to until the crashing leads them to adapt. Those who adapt do so by a) teaching their brains to work in a way that doesn’t come naturally (the creative person learns to become organized through discipline and practice, for instance), b) using compensating mechanisms (such as programmed reminders), and/or c) relying on the help of others who are strong where they are weak.

Differences in thinking can be symbiotic and complementary instead of disruptive. For example, the lateral approach to thinking common among creative people can lead them to be unreliable, while more linear thinkers are often more dependable; some people are more emotional while others are more logical, and so on. None of these individuals would be able to succeed at any kind of complex project without the help of others who have complementary strengths.

Aristotle defined tragedy as a terrible outcome arising from a person’s fatal flaw—a flaw that, had it been fixed, instead would have led to a wonderful outcome. In my opinion, these two barriers—ego and blind spots—are the fatal flaws that keep intelligent, hardworking people from living up to their potential.

Would you like to learn how to get past them? You can do it; everybody can. Here’s how.

* Source: Principles by Ray Dalio

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