“It Doesn’t Make Any Sense”
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A week ago I heard something on a podcast that I had never heard before:
“Be aware when there’s a voice in your head or when someone else says the following words: ‘It doesn’t make sense.’”
When I first heard that, a voice in my head started to say, “Well, hold on a second, because that doesn’t make any sense. Why would you want to listen to something that doesn’t make sense”…So I kept listening. I paid even closer attention.
The speaker was Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review and a chess master, among other things. He continued: “That’s always a sign of something really powerful…that’s where the gold mine is.” I think he might be right.
For example, a year and a half ago, Donald Trump announced his candidacy and one of the first things he said was (I’m paraphrasing of course): “We’re (the U.S) going to build a wall, and they [Mexico] are going to pay for it.” Immediately, his numbers shot up in the polls, and many of the pundits on TV said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Take another example: in the economic and investing world where Adam works, he told the story of how in November 2015, U.S. interest rates were 2.23%.
Janet Yellen, the head of the Federal Reserve, was set to raise the rates in about five weeks. Adam knew this (because it was in the news) and sent an email to his clients telling them that interest rates were about to plunge to multi-year lows. Many of his clients responded, “that doesn’t make sense.” What happened? Rates were raised in December (as expected), and by July, interest rates were at all-time lows just as Adam had told his clients.
So what’s happening here? Why do the things we see as “not making sense” trend even further in the nonsensical direction?
Adam has been analyzing this and what he realized is that the world always makes sense. The reason we think it doesn’t is because there’s something missing from our mental models. There’s an X-factor that we’re not considering when we say, “this doesn’t make sense.”
The more I thought about it, the more this made sense. So I started observing and looking for things that I or others say “don’t make sense.”
For example, this semester I’m in a class about virtual reality. The reason I’m taking the class is because while working for SpellBound, I’ve learned that augmented reality is expected to be a $90 billion industry by 2020, which is three times as much as virtual reality’s expected $30 billion value. Yet, virtual reality has been searched significantly more on Google than augmented reality in the past few years — almost 20 times more at its peak.
This didn’t make sense to me, so I wanted to know what might be the X-factor in virtual reality that I might be missing.
Here’s another example that I’ve already seen play out in my life. Pizza. People (myself included) will line up 20, 30 people deep for a slice of mediocre pizza even if we aren’t hungry. Why? This doesn’t make any sense…unless you consider the X-factor of the pizza being free.
We feel a charge of excitement when we discover something is free.
Seeing the world with this lens of everything making sense is like having a superpower. It expands our curiosity and opens us up to possibility. I’m going to keep looking for and noticing things that seem to not make any sense. Will you join me?
Question of the day: When was the last time you said or heard someone say, “that doesn’t make sense”?
Hear the podcast episode that inspired this post: Tim Ferriss podcast — Becoming the Best Version of You (skip to the 29min mark to hear Adam start to explain the concept and examples).
