Kids live in a world of placebo effects. Stub your toe? Graze your knee? Minor cat-scratch? Kid on the playground give you the evil-eye?
Get the biggest baddest band-aid from the bathroom.
And just you try explaining that it makes no objective difference to the injury or the perceived pain. Your reason and facts have no place here.
They aren’t interested in knowing the difference between a symptom and a cause. They just want to feel better, and the bandage is the catch-all go-to solution.
It’s cute when kids do it. Grown adults are a different matter. Grown-ups are “supposed to be” smarter, capable, and competent.
In theory.
Even the most intelligent, educated, and capable among us are liable to get stuck in deep ruts of habit, habits of thinking, wanting, and behaving, which do not serve our best interests.
If you’ve ever spun your whitewalls in knee-deep mud, metaphorically speaking, wondering why you aren’t getting traction and forward motion out of your awkward predicament, you’ve experienced this.
When you get locked into familiar habits of thought and behavior, you get good at solving one kind of problem. That’s the good part. The same habits that fine-tune you to one situation come with an opportunity cost, rarely working well for another problem. That’s the bad part.
It’s okay. We all do this. Getting stuck is a perennial feature of human life. I’m stuck on several things in my life right now and I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t.
Challenges are normal and expected. The only question is how you’re going to face them.
Here’s where it often goes south.
Attention naturally turns to the source of the pain.
Problem? Fix it.
This thing is broken -> Let’s fix this broken thing.
It’s an intuitive strategy.
If the house catches fire, you might ought to grab the fire extinguisher. No argument there.
But if you don’t figure out that there’s dodgy wiring in the wall behind the stovetop, you’ve only slapped a band-aid on your axe wound.
The symptom of a problem is not the cause of the problem.
I’ve often preached of the need to think in systems instead of linear, straight-line, piece-by-piece problem-solving.
Linear thinking focuses on the painful symptoms. Each event happens in total isolation from other events.
This can be useful, sure. You want to put out a fire before it burns the place down.
But linear thinking has limited usefulness.
Most interesting things in our world are systems made up of many moving parts, which are each interconnected. Change one thing and you change the whole thing.
Systems are functional. The essence of a system is what it does.
And there you find a powerful lesson. Systems work better when you focus on the outcome instead of futzing around with the individual pieces and steps.
Pains, headaches, frustrations, and headaches are symptoms of hidden constraints.
Zooming in to the individual pieces and parts cannot show you this. Constraints appear at the system level, when something blocks the natural flow of energy and resources.
This leads to a weird paradox.
The more focus on symptoms and immediate pain-relief, the worse the overall outcomes.
Symptoms are linear. Fix them all you want, you aren’t touching the true causes of the problem.
This is abstract, high-level, strategic thinking. Small thinkers will complain “I can’t do anything with this” and go back to putting band-aids on their knee.
Big thinkers will get it. Abstract it may be, this idea applies to nearly anything you do that is more complicated than breathing and chewing.
If you find yourself with a spare 28 minutes today or tomorrow, this is worth a watch.
Matt Perryman