No B.S Friday: Lean against you’re hardwiring.
If its one phrase I’ve learnt to treat like a massive red flag it’s “You could probably get away with…”
I’m at a stage in life now (partly because I’m wiser, but mostly because I’m not resource constrained) that whenever I hear that phrase, I just do the exact opposite.
“You can probably get away with not redoing the roof for another five years.”
“You can probably get away with not changing the timing belt for another 20,000k’s.”
“You can probably get away with fixing your teeth with some Selly’s No More Gaps and some Whiteout.”
You possibly could. Maybe even probably. But ‘probably’ is only something slightly more likely than a coin toss.
And yes, I’m lucky now. I don’t have to take that gamble. I have the money. I can just fix stuff. I can just do what needs to be done. I don’t have to see if I can ‘get away’ with anything.
But it wasn’t always the way. And in my twenties, I was rolling the dice every day of the week. Seeing if I could get away with driving into work without filling up. Seeing if I could get away with replacing vegetables in my pasta with saw dust.
And I think it speaks to a primal instinct. Our hardwired default setting is to do nothing and hope we get away with it.
And this is actually pretty smart design.
Because we are also hard-wired to have an overactive threat-detection system. All organisms are.
The cost of missing a threat is catastrophic, so all of our threat detection systems are over-clocked. We are designed to see threats where they don’t actually exist.
And given that’s what’s going on with our threat detection system, it makes a lot of sense to just do nothing for a while and see how it plays out.
I mean, you hear a rustle in the hedgerow behind you. It could be a tiger. You could break into an energy-intensive run immediately.
But it makes more sense just to freeze and go on high alert, and see if the threat is real or imagined first before you do anything.
Do nothing, hope that you can get away with it.
(Turns out it was just a sprinkling for the May Queen.)
The problem is that we apply this mode of thinking to clear and known threats. When your dentist says, “We can probably get away with not putting a crown on that tooth for another six months.” That threat is real, it is known and it’s not going away.
Doing nothing and hoping to get away with it is just not the right strategy.
But it’s the strategy we’re hard-wired for.
But if it’s one thing you’ve taken from these blogs, I hope it’s that biological hard-wiring is not destiny. You’re a smart individual. You can be in charge of your life.
Be conscious with the gambles you’re taking.
JG.