Cm's video: Black Box Thinking Summary

Black Box Thinking reveals that all paths to success lead through failure and what you can do to change your perspective on it, admit your mistakes, and build your own black box to consistently learn and improve from the feedback failure gives you. We’ve talked a lot about deliberate practice on Four Minute Books already. It’s the concept many books debunking talent and looking at world-class performance promote, some including So Good They Can’t Ignore You, The Talent Code, Talent Is Overrated and the very predecessor of this book, Matthew Syed’s Bounce. If deliberate practice is the way to become world-class, then failure is the way to get there. Learning from your mistakes is the whole idea of deliberate practice, but doing so is hard. Why? Because most people don’t like mistakes. They shun them, they hate making them and if they do, they hate admitting them. Black Box Thinking is about changing that, so you can do what’s necessary to get where you want to go. Here are 3 lessons about failure: We hate admitting mistakes even more than we hate making them. Look for opposing evidence by treating your ideas as hypotheses. Develop a positive relationship with failure to stop avoiding it. Are you ready to make failure your friend? Let’s do this! Lesson 1: The only thing we hate more than making mistakes is admitting them. What’s worse than forgetting to send off your monthly status report to your biggest client? Having to show up the next day and admit it to your boss. Failure is never cool when it happens, even though the culture of entrepreneurship is trying hard to tell you otherwise. Having a failed startup has almost become a badge of honor, but what it really means is that you let too much small failures accumulate, until you eventually had to suck up a huge one: that your company’s not working. Imagine having to tell your investor that you just cost them $3 million. Shouldn’t make for a good day. While the goal remains to avoid failure on a grand scale, this can only happen if you admit as many small mistakes as you can. Case in point: Juan Rivera was falsely convicted for rape and murder in 1992 and spent the following 13 years in prison. Even though DNA testing had been used as early as 1984, it took until 2004 until police finally agreed to test the evidence from the case – and found he was innocent. Incapable of admitting their mistake (because it was a grave one), it took another 7 years until Rivera was finally released (and paid a $20 million settlement). For the prosecutors, admitting their serious mistake would probably have meant they’d lose their jobs, on top of destroying their confidence – so they didn’t. Admitting mistakes is tough, but it’s the only way to prevent making even worse ones. If you can start by admitting to yourself that you made one, you’re one step ahead. Lesson 2: Treat all of your ideas as hypotheses so you can look for opposing evidence. So how can you make it easier to admit your mistakes? One way would be to treat all of your ideas and conclusions as hypotheses. The world is a scary and complex place, so naturally, we tend to oversimplify things. If we considered every problem in our lives all the time, we’d probably end up paralyzed and not doing anything. Simplifying is a way for us to survive everyday life and navigate the world. But sometimes, it doesn’t work. For example, bloodletting was a common medical practice for centuries, but it actually ended up killing people, instead of curing them. Doctors never tested the validity of the practice, assuming that this “cleansing act” must be the right way. It never occurred to them that people might need their blood the most when they’re sick. Their view was flipped: If someone couldn’t even be saved with bloodletting, they were probably doomed from the outset. Don’t be a bloodletting doctor. If you think of a new kind of faucet that you think is the best in the world, test it. Build a prototype and let people tell you if you’re right. Maybe it’s not as intuitive as you think, or your reasoning was faulty when designing it. Seek opposing evidence instead of confirmation, so you can improve your hypotheses over time, instead of assuming what you know is a given fact.