Last week, my wife and I got into our car to visit our friends. As soon as we started, we realised that there was a fly in the car, desperately banging her head against the windshield, in a multitude of attempts to escape. Having a fly around you in an enclosed space is very irritating. Seeing that fly banging her head mindlessly added agony to our exasperation. We slid down both the front door glasses, to give her a passage, but the fly won’t pay any heed. This was very distracting so I slowed down and shifted to the slower lane, while still driving. My wife started using her hand to shovel her away; I followed her act soon. This vigorous act made the fly even more desperate, as she started dodging the ‘shovels’, and banging her head against the wind shield even more vigorously. This lasted for a while, till I finally pulled over the car, opened all doors, waited for the fly to escape, which she eventually did.
As we started driving again, our exasperation gave way to snigger & sneer. “How stupid of the her!”, I claimed. “How could she keep banging her head against the windshield when all she needed to do was to look around for other way outs!” My wife laughed and said, “Yeah, and even when we were trying to shovel her out, she was almost resisting, and adamant at banging her head like a broken record!”
While we never discussed that again, when I was free subsequently (as I happen to be mostly), It struck me that we do this ourselves all the time dealing with our problems. I showed this behaviour myself so many times. While my wife and I had a hearty laugh at the fly, I subsequently realised that all of us, I included, do the same. We frame our problem in a way and keep banging our head brainlessly. We restrict our worldview in that frame and keep trying.
You’re that fly, if you’re aimlessly stuck in a rat race in a corporate job. You’re that fly, if you’re stuck in a dead end relationship with your spouse and having daily squabbles. You’re that fly, if you’re overweight and wondering how some people manage to be so fit. You’re that fly, if you’re in a financial mess. You’re that fly, if you get duped all the time. You’re that fly, if people keep making fun of you.
Mindless Head Banging
Perseverance is a great trait. It is through perseverance that people like Thomas Alva Edison drilled through thousands of attempts in search of a filament for his electric lamp. I read the following quote somewhere…
“What if they told you that the best way to go to point B, without bumping into walls, would be to bump into the walls, and not to worry about getting to point B, but just to enjoy bumping into the walls.”
– Source unknown
Or this one by Winston Churchill…
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
These, and similar ones, are great quotes emphasising the importance of perseverance in life. However, as with most, they are contextual. To derive correct inference out of them, it is imperative that you get the full context.
Yes, perseverance is a great trait. But, it is only half the story. The act of perseverance is aimed at intent; the iterative action needs to be guided by feedback. Feedback is an essential part of the endeavour.
The spirit of perseverance needs to be backed by the wisdom of course-correction based on feedback.
The fly needed to learn at some stage that simply banging her head was not working. She needed to…
Zoom Out
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”
– Italo Calvino, Italian author
Step out of the situation and look at it from outside. My wife and I were able to find a simple solution to the problem that the fly faced, because we could see the problem from outside. However, most of us, most of the time get entangled in the quagmire of our problems and struggle to zoom out.
Here’s an excerpt from the iconic book, “The Seat of the Soul” by Gary Zukav
Some ways you can zoom out:
- Seek advice with someone close enough to know you, far enough to see an outside view and wise enough to offer good advice! If the fly could have sought our advice, she could have sorted out her problem so easily.
- Narrate your story in 3rd person. Fictionalise your problem like a business school case or a movie plot. That frees up your imagination. I have expounded on this idea in detain in this Twitter Thread of mine – Human thought is inherently dialogic!
- Take a break from the mindless head banging. See what’s causing the problem. Look for feedback. Think your way through.
- Explore different vantage points – The point of view of your spouse, your colleagues, your competitors, your customers, your vendors, your parents. Invert the problem, see if you can address it backwards.
- Take the problem to the logical extremes – either to the smallest, easiest, simplest; or the largest, biggest, tallest. A problem, concept, challenge is way more clear at the extremes. For more understanding, please refer to the attached Twitter Thread of mine – One Easy Hack to Understand Any Complicated Concept
- Look for patterns. History may not repeat, but it rhymes. There is some regularity in the way things transpire. It is possible to pick patterns from different domains, different time frames. We are pattern seeking & recognising machines. “The strategy is to look for patterns everywhere.” said Dave Snowden, Director IBM. “Or rather, the idea is to allow the patterns to surface and trust your guts to recognise them.”
“If we understand A, and recognise something in B that resembles A, then we are well on our way to understanding B. Learning new concepts has less to do with a change in a person’s learning abilities than with the existence of commonalities. We do not learn new subjects because we have become better learners, but because we have become better at recognising patterns.”
– Edward Thorndike
You don’t even have to rely on your own experiences only. You can learn from others’ experiences as well. You can draw upon history to learn patterns.
“Many surprises come because things that happen as surprises just never happen in one’s lifetime before, so sometimes it’s advantageous to look beyond one’s own lifetime to understand how the world works.
– Ray Dalio
Zooming out is a great way to wriggle out of difficult problems. Take your foot off the pedal. Take some time off. Think. Talk to yourself. Listen to yourself. All answers lie deep within….only if you step back, zoom out and observe!