Thinking Fast and Slow — The Hope, The Hopeless

I’ve always liked to consider myself as someone who is uniquely special. Not just special — no no, we’re all special. Uniquely special.

In particular, I’ve always thought of myself to be someone who enjoys the game of thinking. Thinking more than others is something that I’ve always thought separated me from normal human beings. Myer’s Briggs says I’m an ENTJ, where J stands for “judging.” I guess I really do relate to the fact that I am a judging individual.

And then here, we have this Dr. Kahneman telling me that I am — in fact — not special at all. Kahneman splices our minds into two categories, which he calls System 1 and System 2. Now, if there’s anything my friend Robert Pirsig has taught me, it’s that categorizations are almost always rough approximations. Kahneman’s dichotomization of thought into these two categories seems like a heavy statement, and it’s one that I don’t necessarily agree with. But as much as I’d like to fight with him, I really do think he has a point: people live their lives on the fringes of their conscious minds, where their intuition meets rationality. On numerous occasions, Kahneman cites examples of how human intuition is actually deeply flawed — in fact, completely absent of the rational concepts of probability. And even when we are informed of our psychological shortcomings, we still fail to reform ourselves. In fact, studies suggest that most people continue going about their lives influenced by the same biases, regardless of whether they are informed of not.

This fact concerns me. In particular, I’ve always believed in the cliche that accepting you have an issue is the first step to reform. Setting aside the fact that I am uniquely special, how are we able to overcome the biases we face in our daily lives to become the best individuals we can be?

I was watching a video of Anthony Robbins some years ago, where he stated the interesting fact that the difference between success and failure is 1%. Minute changes in our perception can cause drastic changes in our character and personality. The question I ask myself is how I can make that 1%.