Peak Performance Newsletter # 15 | Hindsight Bias & Phase Changes in the Developmental Process
Problems are a sign of evolution, not error. Breakthroughs are actually quite disorienting. Why negative capability is prerequisite to greatness.
Hindsight Bias in the Developmental Process
One of the primary errors I see in people's perception of their own personal development is the misattribution of the emergence of novel problems to past errors.
That's a mouthful. What I mean to say is that we mistakenly believe that new problems mean that we did something wrong. It comes from a belief that if we did things right, we wouldn't encounter new problems. This is the crowning myth of perfectionism. Let me provide some examples to show you what I mean:
An artist spends years obsessively focused on honing her craft. Her perception of what's important shifts to building a business and generating revenue. She feels regret for her prior maniacal focus on craft, believing it to be a mistake and that she "should" have focused more on building a business.
A polymath craftsman spends years developing skills under various masters and within the enterprises of others. During this period he has a growing craving to set out on his own. When he finally does, he finds that he has a missing skillset for navigating the uncertainty that comes with going from zero to one. He experiences regret for the years he "wasted" developing skills rather than setting out on his own.
A bodyworker finds a new modality that changes her life and the life of those she works with. She gives herself fully to it, internalizing and embodying every aspect of the modality. Over time she realizes that certain aspects of the modality hold more truth than others and perceives her prior surrender as a mistake.
An entrepreneur spends years building skills, a network, and a business. As he begins to experience success he feels a hollowness in his heart and a deep craving for community. He feels regret for focusing so aggressively on his business and neglecting building a strong community, believing this focus to be a mistake.
There's a predictable pattern here: intense focus on what is perceived to be the most important thing, followed by an experience of success or shift in perspective which reveals a new most important thing. This new revelation is interpreted as an indicator that the prior focus was the wrong thing to be focused on.
I want to be polite here, but I also want to be straightforward. I believe this lens of development is downright wrong. It misunderstands the fundamentals of not only development, but of reality itself. Here's why:
In development, sequencing matters. Assume that your intuition is right about the most pressing thing at any point in time. As you work on that thing, it improves and ceases to be the most pressing thing as a result.
🎉🎉🎉 Hooray 🎉🎉🎉!!!
Now something else is pressing. That thing may be novel or it may be something you neglected. Either way this is a sign of healthy evolution, not that you should've been working on this new thing all along. The truth is that if you had been working on the new thing you would have been avoiding the thing that was immediately in your way. You would've put the cart before the horse and had to wage a psychic battle with yourself to do it. Precious energy would've been wasted.
Put another way: what is most catalyzing in one stage of development is not what will be most catalyzing in another. As a result, what works best in one phase may seem insane in the next! The proper takeaway isn't that the prior catalyst, be it a belief, process, or way of being, was wrong for that phase of development. It's that that prior catalyst was the perfect catalyst for that point in time but isn't useful for this point in time. From this perspective, one could argue that the more violently a given catalyst needs to be done away with, the better its specific fit for that developmental period and the greater the phase shift it facilitated.
The point is this: the emergence of novel problems is a sign of evolution, not error. A healthy developmental process is not one which moves toward perfection or the eradication of problems but one which facilitates an ever-increasing ability to perceive and adapt to higher classes of problems.
There are two reasons why I prefer this relationship to development:
I believe it to be more true
I believe it creates the ingredients for the optimal developmental process: presence, acceptance, and compassion as opposed to projection, perfection, and opposition. Namely, this way of relating is more useful.
In domains where our ability to get to the truth is questionable, I say choose the view which is most useful.
Phase Changes in Learning & Development
I want to zoom in on an idea I mentioned above, that of phase shifts.
The pace of learning & development can vary wildly. At times learning can be linear, slowly and consistently building on the foundation of knowledge, tools, tactics, techniques, and strategies that we use in our day-to-day.
At other times learning and development can be explosive. In these moments there's something which catalyzes us to a breakthrough, enabling new ways of seeing the world, new echelons of performance and achievement, and access to new ways of being.
I want to double click on the latter of these two, as it's the type of change that I consistently find us most woefully unequipped for.
In linear learning, changes are gradual. Change is easily processed and metabolized for what it is as it happens. This grants a general sense of control in the process. At any point in time we can generally see where are, where we came from, and where we'll be going. It feels good. It is akin to sailing on a sunny day with a modest but favorable breeze.
Breakthroughs, on the other hand, can be incredibly disorienting. This is because they can happen nearly instantaneously.
Note that I intentionally avoided using the word exponential above, as I find the realities of development are that breakthroughs are NOT the result of an exponential process. An exponential process would give us some sense of acceleration, or increasing velocity of change. Breakthroughs are more often stepwise: we begin somewhere, some whiplash-inducing catalyst is introduced, and then we are somewhere else entirely. This may result from an exponential process, but I find that its phenomenology (how we experience it) is more often stepwise.
This stepwise leap can cause us to lose sight and access to where we came from. We may have little sense of exactly where we are and we may also have absolutely no idea where we are going. This is akin to sailing during a relentless storm. It feels dangerous and disorienting, but at the same time if we wield it well it can move us ten times faster and further than the sunniest of days.
The stepwise nature of breakthroughs is also why I refer to them as phase changes. In chemistry, a phase change is when a material shifts between different phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas). When a material move from one phase to another, what you need to work with the material changes entirely. It's not that the laws governing reality have changed, it's that the material itself has changed in such a way that the tools and techniques that work for one phase are entirely inadequate, nay incapable(!), of working with the other.
This an apt analogy for breakthroughs. Developmental breakthroughs often precipitate breakdowns. Why? Because all of our old tools, techniques, strategies, beliefs, and mental models operate at a comprised effectiveness at best for our post-breakthrough self.
Breakthroughs plunge us into novel territory where uncertainty abounds. Our automatic reaction is to reach for our old tools and patterns, which we quickly find are woefully inadequate for the new territory. We may even desire to go back to pre-breakthrough as a result, despite the breakthrough being precisely what we originally wanted!
The reality is that you can't go back. You broke through. You weathered the storm and are hundreds of miles away from your original location. You couldn't find your way back if you wanted to.
So what's the point of me writing this if I'm not to propose a specific solution to the dilemma? Because I believe that a great deal of the struggle arises from our rebellion against the disorienting nature of the process, and that this rebellion is largely fueled by us thinking that it means something is wrong, which largely happens because we didn't expect for it to be so disorienting.
I believe that the fundamental shift that needs to be made is to be at peace in the storm, and the first step toward that is to cultivate awareness and understanding within the process.
To facilitate that, consider this during your next breakthrough moment:
Breakthroughs precipitate breakdowns
Breakdowns indicate the next echelon of opportunity
The sooner you can let go of those things you know in favor of embracing uncertainty, creativity, and creating new tools, the better off you will be
One Idea: Negative Capability
I decided to include negative capability as I felt it strongly linked to the discussion above. From wikipedia:
Negative capability is a phrase first used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 to explain the capacity of the greatest writers (particularly Shakespeare) to pursue a vision of artistic beauty even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty, as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability to perceive and recognise truths beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning.
Negative capability is the capacity to bear confusion and uncertainty in the pursuit of vision and beauty. This contrasts with the need for philosophical certainty or clarity commonly associated with the sciences.
Why negative?
In the same way that chameleons are 'negative' for colour, Keatsian poets are negative for self and identity: they change their identity with each subject they inhabit. This is a kind of personal Tao, and like the cosmic Tao, negative capablity can be difficult to grasp because it is not a name for a thing but rather a way of feeling or of knowing. This intuitive knowing of the inner life of, for example, a nightingale or a grecian urn, cannot be grasped as a concept; as with Tao, it is known through actual living experience of one's everyday changeable being. This capability depends on being negative to what Keats called 'consequitive reasoning'.
Another explanation of the word negative relies on hypothesising that Keats was influenced in his studies of medicine and chemistry, and that it refers to the negative pole of an electric current which is passive and receptive. In the same way that the negative pole receives the current from the positive pole, the poet receives impulses from a world that is full of mystery and doubt, which cannot be explained but which the poet can translate into art.
While Keats identified negative capability as an attribute of the greatest artists, I surmise that negative capability is actually prerequisite to all human greatness. What we humans view as great is the accomplishment of those things believed to be impossible (or at least improbable). Anyone mad enough to pursue the impossible must have a stomach for uncertainty and an eagerness to adapt their being to whatever the challenge calls for.
5 Questions
What have you attributed to an error in hindsight that is actually a healthy evolution? How can you have more compassion for yourself in that?
Where are you using old tools, tactics, and strategies in ineffective ways? How can you embrace uncertainty in service of creative leaps? Where are there opportunities to create new tools, tactics, and strategies?