Think One Step Deeper

It puzzles me sometimes that many of us oversimplify the world in our minds.

I would challenge you to consider that when you think you have something figured out, to continue to search one step deeper.

Often when we think we understand something, we really don’t.

Much of our thinking goes: A causes B, and I want B, so A is good. This may be true, but what if B causes C, which is a terrible outcome? Many of us don’t think this deeply, but we should.

This seems obvious when laid out in abstract form, but this is a common error in our thinking, where we did not think deeply enough. Of course, we cannot always predict what will happen so easily, but at least take the time to consider what the likely outcomes will be. Then, what will the outcomes of those outcomes be?

For example, a political science professor at Purdue taught me that it is quite easy to think superficially and fail to see the bigger picture.

He once discussed that, of course, we all want to be good and help to feed the starving, especially in different nations that are not able to provide this assistance to their own citizens. Yet, I was left in disbelief when he explained a rational outcome of feeding them, at least on a mass scale. As we feed them and nourish them, they tend to reproduce more, and then because there are probably not good systems in place for them to get jobs, we end up with even more poor and starving people than we began with. Eventually, at this pace, we cannot continue to feed the starving.

By feeding the starving, we end up creating more starving people eventually.

I do not claim to have all the solutions – I am not someone who would say we should not feed the starving. Clearly, it is very human to want to help the people who need it. But we have to admit it is quite odd to have goals where even if we accomplish them as we hoped, we will cause new problems that refute the original goal.

Human thinking is often shortsighted, where we tend to have one goal in mind. Yet, we fail to understand that by accomplishing that goal in the way we wanted, we will create new circumstances that contradict our original goals.

Here are some examples that could apply to you:

• If you pay someone to help you with simple favors, they may happily do favors for you when you pay for them. Yet, the one time you ask for a favor and cannot pay for it, they may refuse to help. They have come to view their role as performing a job rather than as performing favors.

• If you always pursue what makes you feel ecstatic, you may find your life highly enjoyable and pleasurable. But when something happens that does not go your way, you may not manage it and fall into a depression or anxious state.

• If you comment on a child’s weight frequently, you may get him to lose weight as you would like. But eventually, the child may become obsessive about his weight and develop an eating disorder.

• If you study hard just with the motivation of getting good grades, you may perform very well in your classes. Yet, you may find that you do not have a solid understanding of the material in time. You only memorized exactly what was supposed to be on the exams, but you never truly understood it.

• If you dislike a particular bug that often invades your house, you may hire exterminators to kill it. This makes you happy because the bugs are gone. Yet you may find in years that the exterminators killed some exotic and rare bugs critical to the ecosystem. The lives of multiple species may be threatened because many residents such as yourself exterminated these bugs.

• If you tell yourself positive lies to yourself to motivate yourself to do better, this may help you to succeed and give you a motivational boost in the short run. But in the long run, you may find that you are good at making people think you are highly skilled, yet in reality, you struggle to accomplish basic tasks in your field.

Train yourself to think at least one step deeper than you normally would. Do not settle for the type of thinking that goes: If A leads to B, and B is good, then A is good. The reality may be much much more complicated.

Ask yourself: Does A cause other problems? Does B cause other problems? Is there some C variable we haven’t even considered, which would cause other problems? Do some of these problems refute the original goal we were striving for?