This Mind Shift Can Make You More Humble

This change in perspective can also make you a nicer person

Let’s face it, to some degree or another we are all egoists.

Egocentricity is wired into human nature like the desire to tuck into a succulent gazelle is wired into a lion.

When we succeed, we like to kid ourselves that it’s all down to our own genius.

Conversely, when others struggle, far too often we ascribe it to their perceived failings as people.

If someone is poor, well it’s because they’re too lazy to improve their financial circumstances. If they had a bit more get up and go, a little more grit and determination and applied the requisite elbow grease their finances would be in a much healthier place.

The truth

But the truth is our circumstances are to a large extent determined by factors that lay beyond the borders of the areas in which we are sovereign.

Sure, there are plenty of factors we can control, and it makes sense to strive to do so in order to make our lives and those around us better.

Nevertheless, more often than not, life happens to us instead of us happening to life.

Randomness

In addition to that, much of what happens is utterly random.

As a species, we very often allow ourselves fooled by this randomness, and this happens to be the subject of a book by former bond trader and New York Times bestselling author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

In his acclaimed modern classic Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets the probabilist and scholar explores the xyz of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and the ways in which they shape events.

Taleb wrote the book in the wake of 9/11 and the dot-com bubble.

Those who foresaw these events are few, yet they were profound in their impact, which continue to reverberate to this day.

We suck

We humans do not particularly excel when it comes to making predictions.

Not only that, we ascribe to ourselves the ability to predict events that we could not possibly know.

In essence, we are delusional.

We mistake luck for skill, and we vastly underestimate the influence of happenstance on our lives.

We think we’re good at predicting but we are most certainly not.

Dude, we suck.

Mind-boggling

The mind-boggling variability that encompasses our existence on this planet is far too great and multitudinous for the collections of neurons in our skulls to comprehend.

In the book, Taleb sharply puts it like this:

Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette — and calling it by some alternative ‘low risk’ game.

Markets

One arena in which luck is very often mistaken for skill is the financial markets.

A trader will make what is no more than an extraordinarily lucky bet on a stock and forevermore they will be hailed as a genius with gifts of perception far beyond that of us mere mortals.

As the character of Mark Hanna, played by Matthew McConaughey, in the 2013 Martin Scorsese film The Wolf of Wall Street, said:

Nobody knows if a stock is gonna go up, down, sideways, or in f***ing circles. Least of all stockbrokers, right?

Life

What applies to markets can be applied to life in general.

If a person was issued with a stock price, no one would really know where it is going to go either.

Indeed, the principle could be even more applicable because all that agglomerates to make up what we call life is subject to far more variance than the relatively limited yet still extraordinarily expansive arena of financial markets.

It is even more difficult to predict.

What is probability?

Though we cannot predict, we can assess some measure of probability.

But what it is?

Taleb puts it like this:

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Ignoramuses

Effectively what we need to do is accept there is much of which we are completely ignorant.

We must, not only make peace with, or come to terms with, but embrace the fact that we are ignoramuses.

Casting aside the chains of our own conceit will imbue us with a lightness that will enable us to embrace the nature of our humble reality.

If you have succeeded wildly, you will be able to confidently acknowledge the role of luck in its manifestation.

When assessing those who have not been quite so lucky you will be able to do so through the clarifying prism of that humbleness.

If we become more humble, the chances are will become nicer people as a result.

Not only that, but it will help us to better navigate life’s vicissitudes.

So if you can’t embrace your own ignorance as part of an effort to become more humble, do it out of cold-eyed self-interest.

You just may become a nicer person by accident.