More generally, when you find yourself thinking, “I can do this in my sleep,” watch out! Overconfidence is a precursor to complex failure, just as it is to basic failure.
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I felt embarrassed and afraid that my colleagues wouldn’t keep me on the research team. My thoughts spiraled out to what I would do next, after dropping out of graduate school. This unhelpful reaction points to why each of us must learn how to take a deep breath, think again, and hypothesize anew. That simple self-management task is part of the science of failing well.
The instinct to exhort people to do their best work in challenging times is understandable. It’s tempting to believe that if we just hunker down, we can avoid failure altogether. It’s also wrong. The relationship between effort and success is imperfect. The world around us changes constantly and keeps presenting us with new situations. The best-laid plans encounter problems in an uncertain context. Even when people work hard and are committed to doing the right thing, failure is always possible in a new situation. Sure, sometimes failures are caused by people who are careless or don’t work hard, but even hard work can end in failure when a situation is new and different or some unexpected event happens. Finally, and most perversely, sometimes sheer luck allows you to mail it in and succeed anyway.
It starts with framing. Explicitly emphasizing the complexity or novelty of a situation helps put you in the right state of mind.
1.3. The Ego Default
Our ego tempts us into thinking we’re more than we are. Left unchecked, it can turn confidence into overconfidence or even arrogance. We get a bit of knowledge on the internet and suddenly we are full of hubris. Everything seems easy. As a result, we take risks that we may not understand we’re taking. We must resist this kind of unearned confidence, though, if we are to get the results we desire.
And because they’re ready, their confidence doesn’t crack. The venture capitalist Josh Wolfe likes to say, “Failure comes from a failure to imagine failure.”
The bottom line: people who think about what is likely to go wrong and determine the actions they can take are more likely to succeed when things don’t go according to plan.
A smart way to assess your options is by using the following principle.
The Second-Level Thinking Principle: Ask yourself, “And then what?