Ness Labs: The Self-Consistency Fallacy 🪜


Edition #191 – June 1st, 2023
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Hello friends! I'm going to send the very first draft to my editor soon, and I'm both excited and anxious. I've published hundreds of articles, but there's something extra scary about writing a book. While I can go back and edit a blog post, I'm not going to run around after printed copies to fix my mishaps. It's the permanency of the words that scares me. But it's the good kind of stress :) I actually have a quick request for the book: if you have been using my Plus Minus Next method, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you! — Anne-Laure.

The self-consistency fallacy

Would you want to watch the same play with the same actors repeating the same lines over and over again, with just some small variations in their tone each time? You’d probably get bored pretty quickly. And yet, that’s what we often unconsciously do when making career and life decisions.

If you ever applied for a job, you probably did the little retrospective dance of editing your resume so it followed a consistent narrative. When you get a job interview, you may get asked: ā€œWhere do you see yourself in five years?ā€ and you’re supposed to have a coherent vision that’s aligned with your current self.

This is the self-consistency fallacy at play: the misguided assumption that ā€œI have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.ā€ It’s an invisible yet powerful force that affects our path whenever we find ourselves at a crossroads.

When our past dictates our path

While it’s undeniable that our past influences our future, we tend to place more rigid limits on ourselves than actually exist. This phenomenon is so widespread that it has many names. Psychologists refer to it as the ā€œcontinuation biasā€, economists talk of ā€œpath dependenceā€, and philosophers might frame it as a battle against determinism. I call it the self-consistency fallacy.

The self-consistency fallacy is why you may choose a new job based on your past roles and why you may stay within your field of study even when your interests have evolved. It’s also why we maintain the same roles and behaviors in our relationships, such as always being the ā€œquiet oneā€ in our circle of friends even when we feel a desire to express ourselves more openly.

The same goes for our health choices. You may stick to your running routine and miss out on the potential benefits of other activities like swimming, yoga, or weight training. Or you may hold onto dietary habits because it’s ā€œwhat I’ve always doneā€ā€”such as a meat-eater automatically disregarding plant-based diets.

Some of these may seem unimportant, but when you add up all of the ways the self-consistency fallacy affects your decisions, it all adds up to the equivalent of a monorail guiding the overall direction of your life. Fortunately, we don’t have to stay slaves to these mental shackles.

Breaking free of the self-consistency fallacy

We can’t deny that our previous choices and current beliefs form an important part of our identity, but they should not become an artificial boundary that guides our choices.

As John Maynard Keynes puts it: ā€œThe difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.ā€ You are a dynamic being capable of change and growth. You are a verb, not a noun. When exploring potential paths forward, you can ask yourself the following questions to let go of preconceived expectations and allow yourself to expand your horizons beyond who you have been so far:

  • Are there opportunities that I have dismissed because they don’t fit my existing trajectory?
  • What new paths might I be able to explore if I were not bound by my past choices?
  • What would my ideal career look like if I could start from a blank slate?

The role of these questions is not to make you abandon your current path. Rather, it’s to make you more open to opportunities that are not obviously aligned with your present priorities: the ā€œweirdā€ projects that pique your curiosity, the fun ideas that present no clear professional benefits, the collaboration with a long-time friend that has nothing to do with your career.

​We don’t know what we don’t know, so it is often from those tangents that arise the best opportunities for learning and growth. The stories we will share in the future may be squiggly, and strange, but at least they won’t be boring.

šŸ› ļø Tool of the Week

Ben Wisbey is the co-founder of Pylot, the very first wearable to track your productivity so you can know when you’re ready for deep work, shallow tasks, or need a break. In this interview, we talked about the fallacy of time management, how to quantify work quality, the key questions to achieve deep work, the science of cognitive performance, how to manage mental fatigue, and much more. Enjoy the read!

šŸ‘€ Brain Picks

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šŸ¤ Brain Trust

Lots of amazing events happening soon in the community:
• Creative Purpose Workshop: Your Childhood Creativity hosted by Mariela (Fri, Jun 2 2023)
• Our Relationship to Ambition hosted by Gosia (Mon, Jun 5 2023)
• Workshop: Flipping Self-Development on its Head hosted by Anita (Fri, Jun 9 2023)
• Rethinking Change: How to Own Change in your Life hosted by Eleanor (Mon, Jun 19 2023)
• Two co-working sessions covering all timezones so you can make progress on your projects, hosted by Lukas and Javier

All of these and future workshops are included in the price of the membership ($49 per year), as well as access to the recordings of all our previous sessions and past cohort-based courses.

🌊 Brain Waves

If you enjoyed this edition, please share the love with fellow curious minds on Twitter or Whatsapp, or simply forward them this email.

Until next week, take care!

P.S. Don't forget to send me a picture of your Plus Minus Next if you use it regularly :)

Ness Labs by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

A weekly newsletter with science-based insights on creativity, mindful productivity, better thinking and lifelong learning.

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