Recently I took a transforming journey. Not a travelogue through Italy, India and Indonesia to heal wounds, discover profound truth, and find my place in the universe. Just a trip to the mall and dinner at Red Robin.
Endless Fries, Campfire Sauce, and My Moment of Truth
I was with three of my children, Ross, Jess, and Liz. It was two weeks ago. Sandy was home preparing for Thanksgiving and wanted us to get out and enjoy ourselves. My other children were scattered in the Northwest winds, blowing about town doing their thing.
The four of us went shopping at Bellevue Square near Seattle for a couple of hours, got hungry, and surveyed our options. The kids are 20, 18, and 17, which means they prefer Red Robin than the finest steak house, so Red Robin it was. We filled our faces with endless baskets of signature steak fries and, of course, campfire sauce as addicting as meth and crack.
When the food arrived, I said a quick prayer and we started in. Somehow the conversation got around to people who talk with their mouths full.
“I’m glad I don’t do that,” I said.
“Oh yes you do,” they said, almost in unison.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “That would be so rude to do that. I would never.”
“Well, you do,” they said. “All the time.”
I thought they must be joking so I threw down a challenge. “Okay, every time you see me talking with food in my mouth, I’ll give you a dollar.” I thought this would prove my point. Months from now, after I’d gone for meals and meals without giving up a single dollar, they’d see how wrong they were and how right I was.
It took me all of ten seconds to lose my first dollar. “Right there,” said Ross, pointing as if he’d spotted an endangered species. “You owe me a dollar.”
Holy smokes, he was right. Yes, I was talking, and yes, there was food in my mouth.
Shocked, I said, “Are you kidding me?” Of course, I said it with my mouth full. “There again,” said Jess. “You owe me a dollar.”
It wasn’t fifteen more seconds when Liz chimed in. “There again,” you owe me a dollar.
So it took me all of thirty seconds to lose three dollars.
The Most Ignorant Man in the World
In that moment I saw myself as “The Most Ignorant Man in the World,” the shameful myopic twin of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World.” I imagined the commercial campaigns they could do with me, the blind idiot, as the central character.
Actually, I’ve always been that man. But at least now I knew I was that man.
That’s progress.
Of course, I’ve been teaching this concept to leaders for years, so I’ve known I’m that man for a long time. But it’s easy to forget, and always nice to get a reminder. Thirty seconds and three dollars was a small price for my rediscovered perspective.
Sure, there’s a trivial insight in the mix: Get better table manners. I’m working on that. But the mind-boggler is, You don’t often see how you really are. You think you see, but you’re blind.
It’s human nature to believe we’re seeing everything there is to see. But the truth is the polar opposite. In my book Automatic Influence I invest a chapter to show how selective our attention truly is, and people are shocked when they read it. “The capacity of [conscious thought] at any single moment is surprisingly limited,” writes Bernard Baars, senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “We cannot read this sentence and listen to a conversation at the same time. Nor can we pay attention to the s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g of a word without taking a risk that we will miss some of its meaning.”[i] When we lock our focus to one thing, we instantly and automatically block out every other thing.
Like the habit of talking with our mouth full.
But we don’t think of ourselves as blind. We have what psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes as an “almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”[ii]
The Great Irony: Admitting Ignorance is the First Step Out of It
The faster we realize our persistent blindness, the faster we’ll see better. It sparks a new attitude toward listening and learning.
When we’re quick to admit we’re massively unaware, we open ourselves up to corrective feedback. We listen when others hint at things. Where before we were quick to talk and slow to listen, now we’re the opposite. We want truth because we see ourselves missing it. We’re quicker to admit our error and limitation, which means we’re quicker to the truth.
Ask my wife about this, and she’ll tell you these ideas have changed me. My new view automatically influences growth and harmony. Where before I would have insisted how right I was, I’m not that way anymore. Sandy brings something up and I’m quick to consider it. “I could be wrong,” I say, “and I often am.”
It works for leading as well, because others pick up on this attitude and become more open to my input to them. They see me modeling the openness to feedback and become more open in exchange. It’s an approach to leadership that proves Gandhi right when he said, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” We live in a world where “confident ignorance” and “automatic arrogance,” are abundant. All it takes is a look around and a look online to see it’s a massive problem. We need a humility revolution.
[i] Bernard J. Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 39.
[ii] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking: Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 201.