First Three Flaws! — Quotidian — 493

(Transcript of video originally posted on 21 Aug 2023)

Is this the Mind or is this the Brain? There are books written about this difference.. tutorials, articles, videos, experiments.. There is much literature about this distinction. I read one book recently where, in just two sentences, they explain this nuanced difference. What’s the brain? What’s the mind? Probably because of my technical background, I was able to relate to it better, but it said “Your brain is the hardware and your mind is the software!” So far so good. But you know what was the punchline? The punchline was “The mind is like software, like no other. You can’t see software of that sort ANYWHERE ELSE. Nor is it possible in the future too! And, why so? The mind is software that is constantly rewiring the hardware. Imagine! A software that is constantly rewiring the hardware it is running on! The brain is being constantly rewired by what’s happening in the mind. Isn’t that really beautiful?!

Namaste! Four hundred and ninety three is about THREE flaws. First three. For.. some more is coming same day because we are going to have a double Q today.

And, the first three of how many? Well, of Seven. From this book. Winning the Brain Game. There are seven flaws. Each is a fatal flaw. Try to chop these off from your thinking process. Says Matthew May, the author. What are those seven? Let’s dive right in. But before that, let’s see a problem.

It’s called the Shampoo Problem. Seems this story really happened. There is this gym, a fitness center. And the fitness center has these equipments. And you get to work out, you get sweaty, tired, dirty. You want to freshen up before you leave. And so, as a perk, as a special offer to people who come to that fitness center, the organisers, they give them a special shampoo, a world class shampoo with an exquisite fragrance, as a little perk. But, that leads to a problem. What problem? Well, The shampoo is so good, so good that people steal it home.. as much as 33% theft! Of ten bottles they supply every day, three are stolen! They struggle much.. They don’t they want to stop this though. They want to brainstorm and come up with a solution. It has to work a hundred percent. “We have reduced theft” — shouldn’t be the end result. “It shouldn’t cost us extra money.” And of course, “It shouldn’t inconvenience the users.” There are good people! The ones who don’t steal! They should not be put to discomfort. “What can we do?” they brainstorm.

And, come up with a long list of ideas. All kinds of outlandish ideas come up. One person says, “Let’s install cameras in the bathroom!” Another person says, “Well, let’s introduce RFID chips in the shampoo bottles.” And so on, it goes. But is there an elegant solution? We are going to come to that, but before that, what are these seven pitfalls?

Number one, he calls it Leaping. Every chapter, .. there are seven of them. Each chapter begins with a quote by Albert Einstein. This quote is about, “If I had one hour, I would spend fifty-five minutes asking the best question. Refining, until I have the best question.” And so this chapter is called Leaping, and that is one of the fundamental traps we fall into. We leap to a conclusion. We jump too fast. We start “acting” too fast. That is the first trap.

Specifically, what do we do? Take the shampoo case for example, we didn’t even stop and wonder, “Why did they steal it? How can we stop the theft without even first understanding why they are even stealing it in the first place? Hey, wait, there is an even more fundamental question. Is this even theft? Are they really stealing? Or, are they thinking it’s being given to them for free? Did you even wonder about that? And, remember that oft-repeated management-maxim? Thinking out of the box? Most consultants say that? Thinking out of the box, you know what’s the fundamental thing? You need to know what’s inside the box. What comprises the box? What are the limits of the box? What is the boundary? Only then you can even place yourself outside the box and start thinking.

Do you remember Soorpanakha? From the Ramayana? That lady, with her severed nose, when she complained to Ravana that this human has done this to her, .. what Ravana did was Leaping, because Ravana didn’t ask why. Why would a man just like that cut the nose of a demon woman? “Why? What did you do wrong, to provoke him? They are not ones to go looking for trouble!” If Ravana had asked that question to Soorpanakha, probably the whole of Ramayana could have been averted. She didn’t. He didn’t. And another kind of ‘leaping’ happened. Hanuman leaped!

So what’s the escape out of this? Every chapter, he also provides an escape. In this case, the escape for Leaping is “Framestorming”. Before you start Brainstorming, first consider Framestorming. Before you start working on a painting, you wonder, “What are the measurements of the frame? What is my painting going to sit inside of? What are the constraints? What is outside? What is inside? Start with why. Why did they steal? Is it even stealing? Start with why. And come up with many scenarios of could this be, could that be.. play around with it, weigh those options, and then, only then start thinking about what’s the right action. That is trap number one.

Trap number two is Fixation. A quote about Reality! Einstein about reality! It is so believable, and that is the real problem with it. It is an illusion. It’s merely an illusion. But reality, seems so believable! And, you fall into that trap. And, it is the same trap that we all fall into.

What is it? We recognize patterns everywhere. Even when there aren’t any. When you are playing with a pair of dice, it is random, but you are refusing to believe that. When I roll it, every fourth time, I get an even number. But, that’s what YOU think. Foolish. You look up into the sky and there you see clouds. But you refuse to see them as just random puffs of water vapor. Horse, Doggie, Flower, don’t we all do it?! It seems the human brain (not the mind!) brain is hardwired into recognising patterns. Which is why, for a car, two lights.. like eyes. A grill, just like teeth. Because we are such suckers for patterns. And, if we take a thing, we think there has to be one function for it. Every object, has one function. We refuse to submit that it can be used for something else too. That is “Functional Fixedness”. You need to snap out of these two.

He gives us a puzzle to solve. Three squiggly lines. What is this? Did you know? You can’t even survive a day without this. And so on, he gives us additional clues. Nobody gets it. And then he reveals the answer. It’s basically the letter E with light coming in and hence a shadow. And hence, those edges are shown. But he says, “Now that I have shown you the E, you can’t unsee it! Can you, can you unsee the E and see it as three squiggly lines ever again? No way! This is the problem with human beings!

And he gives us another example. They call it the Stroop Effect. This puzzle, you might have even received it as a WhatsApp forward. You’re supposed to read out the colour of the lines forming the letters and not the name of the color written using those letters. So, you shouldn’t be reading it as YELLOW, you should read it out as GREEN! Not as BLUE, but as RED! Very hard! This is a test.. your right brain thinking, left brain thinking, your creative cognitive layers of thinking.. the scientists will say. And, how do we escape Fixation? You need to do inversion. Here is an example of inversion. In fact, in this case, it is a real inversion. Now that you have turned it around and reflected it, try now?! Black Purple Brown Green Blue Yellow. How beautifully, effortlessly, we are able to read it now! ! Because we are taking away those distracting influences that have been drummed into us. To escape from that Fixation, jump out! Look at it from another viewpoint, a different vantage point, he says. The Stroop Effect.. Inversion.

Then we come to overthinking. We don’t really need an introduction to this, do we?! All of us.. we are pastmasters in this matter. We don’t just stop thinking, don’t we? We keep on thinking beyond the point of no return. Beyond limits. Overthinking. Einstein says, “A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new!” Go, do it! Just do it! Be an action-oriented performer! It’s not about dreaming things up. Facebook, probably 40 people had the idea of a social network. Friends, meeting each other online, sharing updates, status.. 40 people probably, and if you watch the movie, you will notice that right within the hostel, somebody else had the same idea already! The social network. So it’s not about who gets the idea, it’s about who implements it. So, stop thinking about things unendingly, get down to business. Enter the battlefield with an unsheathed sword!

What are the common traps we fall into with respect to overthinking? We keep wondering. We keep adding stuff to our bag of ideas. This too, seems to be hardwired in our brain, says the author. How often do we see this situation? We still have little trinkets and tchotchkes from our childhood. Hoping that we will return to them someday. Hoping to use them someday. We seem to collect not just physical objects, but also.. when an idea strikes us, we start collecting reasons on why an idea could fail. And, also, when an idea strikes us, we look for an extension to the idea. And a further extension to it. A giant hairball grows in our hands even before we realize it. We keep adding on. If you invite a friend to play a game of chess with you, and if he sits frozen at the table, not making the first move… you ask him, “Hey, what happened!? Come on! Make your move!” and he responds with, “Wait, there are 69,352,859,712,417 chess opening options available for me, I need to pick!!”.. Sounds silly, but that is a problem that reflects the situation in most of our minds today. Do you remember Buridan’s Donkey? If you want to starve a donkey, place two exactly identical bales of hay, one on each side of the room.. And the donkey, the logical donkey, wouldn’t know which side to go because.. “Fear of missing out.. partiality.. bias. I can’t decide. So I starve to death!” That problem, risible, silly problem, affects every one of us in our daily lives. We don’t seem to know when to draw the line to stop thinking and start acting.

Project ARA, it was called. Brought to us by Google. But, it is only a perception that Google brought it. Even before that, for four long years, this was a secret project under development by some entrepreneurs, some hardware engineers who wanted to create a phone that was modular. You are going on a photo shooting trip? Oh, no problem. Let’s remove the speakers. Let’s add additional megapixel cameras. You’re going on a long drive? You don’t need the camera, but you need battery. So I will add, add-on batteries. Got a scratch on the front glass? No problem. I’ll remove the glass alone. You don’t need to throw the phone away. That was the whole philosophy behind the modular phone idea. Amazing idea, actually. To look at, it resembles a bar of chocolate! Individual replaceable pieces! But, the problem? Even after Google acquired this product, it didn’t sell.. Because people didn’t want modularity. They wanted a status symbol. They wanted a lifestyle accompaniment. Something.. an accessory.. that will be with them that they can flaunt. Instead of understanding that, instead of going out into the world and showing it first-hand to people, they kept “building” phone up, and what happened? It bombed. Nobody even bothered. Until I told you all about it, many of you perhaps didn’t even know that such a project called Ara even existed!

So what’s the escape for it? Both of these peoples divided by probably 60, 70 years of time. World War II General, Mr. Patton. American General, Patton. Patton has said, “No plan ever survives first contact with enemy.” Until you meet the enemy, your plans can perhaps be current. But once it is contacted by the enemy, it changes. It has to change. Mike Tyson. Amazing boxer, from the 1980s, 1990s. He has said.. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!” So planning should be done only to a limited extent. And, shouldn’t be going past it and enter the realm of overthinking! Switch to Prototesting. Prototesting is an evolution from prototyping. Small-scale experiments, low budget, very few people, short duration, churn fast, fail fast, learn. We have seen these before! Reinject into the next iteration of the project. That is Prototesting. Don’t overthink! Prototest instead!

We have seen three till now. Leaping, Overthinking and Fixation. We are going to see four more, but other before that, let us look at the Shampoo Solution.

What did they do? Well, the answer is pretty interesting!
Of all those ideas, none of them succeeded, but one person came up with this amazing idea. One hundred percent effective. Theft was made zero the next day. Doesn’t inconvenience the users and does not cost anything. All they did was they removed the bottle covers and left those shampoo bottles in the bathroom stands. Every day, 10 bottles were used. So no leftovers really, but nobody could really take those capless bottles and hide them in their gym bag. Elegant,? Interesting? Very soon, we will look at the remaining four too. Thank you.