Easy to underestimate
Knowledge alone doesn't protect us. Even after reading this, you’ll likely still underestimate these things. Without clarity and constant reminders, we remain vulnerable.
These things are invisible, as though designed to be overlooked.
We underestimate how quickly we adapt.
Put someone in a different environment for a year, surrounded by people, stories, and experiences, and you may be surprised at how they've transformed without knowing it.
Yesterday's beliefs become tomorrow's afterthoughts. What was a core part of their identity may no longer matter. We shape our environment, as we are shaped by it. It often shapes what we believe about ourselves and the world. A slight change in environment sometimes surprises the person we are becoming.
This is neither good nor bad - it just is. You can turn it to an advantage or not.
We underestimate the strength we truly have
It is easy to underestimate how generously resilient the human spirit is. Facts often convince us of false limits. But reality is more nuanced. We are more resilient than we imagine.
We often forget this until our strength surprises us. Inspires us, even. The difficulties, wars, pandemics and now-trivial experiences we’ve seen should remind us of this; yet, we often choose to remember the hardship, not the strength it reveals.
We underestimate our attention
We underestimate how hard it is to manage our attention. Willpower isn’t enough. Most people agree that directing attention is an important skill, yet few master it. Like many skills, it gets better when we practice and improve upon it.
Many claim to control access to their attention. But the gap between what they say and what they do tells the difference.
We still underestimate how incentives work
Incentives shape us - both the ones we create and the ones created for us. Yet we often underestimate its influence on all we do.
Incentives drive behaviours; behaviours drive outcomes. An incentive may seem right because it allows you to show up in the world exactly the way you want to. It may align the outcome of an action with what you believe, until the action itself becomes almost questionable when viewed from a detached lens.
We underestimate things that compound
We understand that a snowball grows by rolling downhill. But we forget how that applies to the things we do that go uphill - learning, building, creating, relating, investing, and doing work that matters.
Trust compounds. Focus too. What makes us often avoid staying with what grows exponentially is that progress looks insignificant at first, it feels like we are either stupid or wasting our time (we don’t like that feeling). But staying on course, doing the work, and improving with each input leads to results that happily surprise us.
We underestimate how things change
We know this intellectually but still overlook it. It is easy to underestimate how much and often things can happen. Sure, we often underestimate what can happen in a day and overestimate what can happen in a decade. But the reverse - in some cases - is equally true.
It’s not enough to know that change happens fast, we must bank on it. And when this happens, the world shifts in ways we can’t predict.
We underestimate what stays the same
On the flip side, we underestimate the importance of things that hardly change. We can expect change, knowing that some things will remain the same. Many of the things that fall in this category have to do with what it means to be human - our drive to love, our thirst to dream, and our desire to feel and be seen.
We can underestimate how cycle of boom follows a cycle of bust, and boom and bust again. How history rhymes. How noise will never cease to exist. And how valuable useful work will always be.
We underestimate how relevant history is
Not so we can remember facts about some dead folks. But, so we can learn from their stories and choices. Especially what they believed, did and why. Because sooner than we think, we will face some of the timeless questions they had to answer.
It doesn’t matter if you lived in the 1700s, the 2020s or the 3200s, some questions transcend time, available technology and culture. People have been answering them since the beginning of time. People will till the end of time - if that ever comes. Today, each of us still has to answer them.
History is filled with how others have answered life’s questions. Even if their answers aren’t useful for us, we can at least learn how not to answer the questions life asks of us.