During World War II, a mathematician named Abraham Wald was tasked with saving bomber planes. The military showed him planes riddled with bullet holes and asked where they should add armor.
Look at the photos. Count the holes. Cover those spots.
Wald disagreed. He said, “Protect the areas without holes instead.”
Everyone in the room must have thought he’d lost his mind. The military only ever photographed the survivors. The planes that got hit in the engine, the cockpit, the fuel line? Those never made it home. Nobody photographed the wreckage at the bottom of the English Channel.
The empty spots weren’t empty. A bullet there meant the plane never made it home to be photographed.
This is called survivorship bias, and once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. We ask centenarians their secret to long life, as if the two pack a day guy who died at 95 doesn’t disprove the whole theory.
Long before anyone wrote a psychology paper about it, my mom figured it out.
As a kid, I hated vegetables. Didn’t matter which one, I’d push them around my plate and hope nobody noticed. Instead of asking “do you want to eat your vegetables,” she’d ask, “do you want 3 pieces or 5?”
I always said 3. Every single time. And every single time, I ate the vegetables, feeling like I’d won something.
That’s the trick. You don’t give someone the option of doing something or not doing it. You hand them the option of how to do it. The brain feels like it’s making the decision, even though you already made it.
Managers do this. “Do you want to send the report Tuesday or Wednesday?” Nobody asked whether the report was happening at all.
Your mind has an incomplete loop that’s like an open tab. It’s the Zeigarnik effect, named after Bluma Zeigarnik, a psychologist who observed that waiters could recall orders they didn’t get paid for more easily than ones they did. When the bill was closed, so was the memory.
Same with a song stuck in your head. It gets stuck because your mind cuts it off in the middle, and you can’t get it out of your head until you hear the end. Play the last 30 seconds in your mind, wait for it to solve itself, and you’re free.
Before we move on! This post is public so feel free to share it.
A bar owner was sick of patrons getting aggressive as the night wore on. He didn’t know why. It was bad for business.
He put up a large mirror behind the bar.
At first, no one noticed. But after a couple of drinks, people began to see themselves. Their scowl, their body language. No bouncer’s warning is as humbling as seeing yourself in the middle of a tantrum.
The bar calmed down. Just because of a mirror, and they didn’t like what they saw in it. They didn’t like themselves.
You don’t need a bar for this. Before you send the angry text, picture yourself from across the room.
This one is from C.S. Lewis, and I wouldn’t expect a British theologian to give me relationship advice, but here we are. As he wrote about how difficult it is to show goodwill toward people we don’t like, he offered a surprisingly practical insight.
He wrote:
“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
It’s better to like things than it is to not like things. That’s it. That’s the whole insight, and it’s almost embarrassingly obvious when you say it out loud.
So, I began to like more people. More food. More music I would otherwise turn a blind eye to within a matter of minutes. Choose curiosity over judgment, and I guarantee you’ll notice the room feels different, your mind feels lighter, and you approach things with less stress. And it’s just less fatiguing than resenting everything.
Insecurity. Poor self-image. If other people surpass them, they feel like failures.
Most people believe that if one person wins, another has to lose. That’s not true. Everybody can win. So when someone else does well, they feel like there’s less for them.
Even the ones who smiled and said ‘Congratulations’ aren’t always happy for you. You succeed, and they think: that’s what I haven’t done yet.
I’m not saying trust no one. I’m saying, don’t be surprised if a friend turns cold when everything begins to go your way. It’s not always malice. Know who your real 10 percent is, and stop expecting the other 90 to clap.
There are a hundred ways you can do things right. Be early. Be reliable. Be good. But mess up once, memorably, and that’s what sticks.
When you snap at someone, it’s because you were tired and overwhelmed. When someone snaps at you, they’re rude and have anger issues.
See how that works?
I don’t think the answer is to become paranoid about every flaw. I think the answer is to stop being shocked when it happens, and to stop letting one bad day erase the good ones. They counted. We remember storms to survive, not the calm.
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