[MUSIC]
For as long as I can remember,
there have been two people inside my head whispering to me.
Now, I wanna introduce them to you, and
I think the best way to do that is with an experience I had last year,
in probably my least favorite place in the entire world.
The customer service line at United Airlines.
[LAUGH].
Now I had gotten to SFO and
hour early to have plenty of time to make my direct flight to JFK.
I was looking forward to landing late that evening and
getting a good night sleep before my friends wedding the following afternoon.
Instead, as I was going through security I got a text from United saying
my flight was cancelled for airplane maintenance.
I rush to the customer service line where after waiting my turn, the woman
behind the counter told me there was no way I could get to New York before Sunday.
My response?
Wait, you're telling me it'll take two days to get from San Francisco to
New York?
That can't be right, please check again.
The woman did not take kindly to my tone.
[LAUGH].
And pushed a few buttons before telling me I could take a two layover trip, and
make the tail end of the reception, take it or leave it.
I tried after the fact to be friendly, but
couldn't get any other options and I took it.
Later I found out a friend behind me in line had patiently managed
to get a one lay over trip and make the ceremony.
So that's what happened outside my head out in the world, but
here's what happened with those two people inside my head.
Now the first person, imagine him whispering to me from my left shoulder,
I call the eager updater.
I got to the airport, saw the cancellation text, and
the eager updater chimed right into my head.
He said, hm, you know, it looks like the plane we
expected to take us to New York isn't going there after all.
[LAUGH].
Good to know, what's our best option now?
As I dealt with the customer service lady, the eager updater immediately noticed,
she wasn't the instant ally I had been counting on.
[LAUGH].
He said.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Good to know.
Now we can adjust our approach to get the best outcome
from the woman who is in front of us and not the woman we thought she'd be.
Pretty mature, right?
Kind of suspicious though.
Like, if the eager updater was whispering all of this useful stuff to me,
how come I acted so ineffectively.
Well, that's where the second person in my head comes in.
[LAUGH].
I call him the king of wishful thinking.
Imagine him whispering to me from my right shoulder.
Now, the king of wishful thinking saw the cancellation text and
he too chimed right into my head.
He said this shouldn't be happening.
We were just about to be on our way to New York and
now we have to deal with a frustrating day of travel hassle.
Every minute I stood in the customer service line,
the king of wishful thinking was whispering reminders to me.
You know we'd expected to be in the air by now.
[LAUGH].
By now, we'd be over Colorado on our way to a nice warm hotel room.
As I dealt with the customer service lady, the king of wishful thinking said to me,
if someone competent was back there, we would, they would have fixed this by now.
This shouldn't be happening.
[LAUGH].
So those are the two folks whispering in my head all the time.
The eager updater with his various forms of, good to know.
And the king of wishful thinking riffing on his awesome catch-phrase,
this shouldn't be happening.
And if these guys are starting to sound familiar to you, they should because
these two characters are whispering in your head all the time too.
The eager updater and the king of wishful thinking are just
two ways our brains are wired to receive and process information.
Over the past couple of years, I've gotten really interested in the neuroscience and
psychology behind how we handle situations.
And I've been studying in particular this duality between perception and
expectation.
I gave names and
personalities to these mental processes really just to help me more easily apply
what I've learned to begin to make better decisions in my own life.
And I wanna share them with you because I think that getting
more acquainted with these guys in each of our heads can help us handle,
be, be more effective in handling a wide variety of situations we face every day.
So I think of the eager updater as this guy that openly seeks
out new information to update our view of what is happening in any situation.
He plugs into our five senses to, to add more data, so we can better understand,
accept and respond to the real world in which we operate.
The king of wishful thinking, on the other hand,
filters every experience we have through the lens of our expectations.
Our hopes, our beliefs, our anticipations about what will happen, or
what should happen in any situation.
Now maybe you're having visions right now of old cartoons with an eager updater
angel on one shoulder and a king of wishful thinking devil on the other.
That's not fair to the king of wishful thinking.
[LAUGH].
We evolved this expectation lens for very good reasons.
For one being able to set a future goal and
hold it in mind, keeps us motivated and proactive as we work to achieve it.
It also keeps us mentally efficient.
Allowing us to focus on just the most relevant parts of our surroundings.
The neuroscience research for
example, suggests that our eyes actually use our expectations to fill out most
of what we see with just small amounts of new data informing the picture.
The problem,
though, is that even though the king of wishful thinking is useful and necessary,
he does have a tendency to get much louder than our eager updater and drown him out.
And that's what happened with my experience with United Airlines.
But this tendency applies well beyond changing travel plans.
So for example, an over assertive king of wishful thinking,
contributed to my staying in relationships too long.
When I clung to an image of the girl I hoped I was dating, and filtered out
the information the real world that was showing me something different.
Or beyond my own personal experience,
I was chatting about this topic last month with an entrepreneur here in the Valley,
who immediately recognized the king of wishful thinking in himself.
As the number one reason his first startup hadn't taken off.
For one thing,
he said, he had really wanted all of his early employees to be high performers.
And so, didn't acknowledge soon enough that some of them were not and
act quickly to course correct.
Similarly, he said he had expected that the product offering he'd come up with
would be very difficult to replicate.
And so it wasn't attentive to the competitors that started to enter and
gain market share.
Now, hopefully, each of these experiences reinforces that our king of wishful
thinking can be a loud and damaging part of our psychology and our neurophysiology.
But that doesn't mean we just have to throw up our hands.
The research suggests there are two relatively simple steps we can take
to bring him more inline.
And the first step is simply to recognize that we all have
a king of wishful thinking whispering inside our heads all the time.
And be aware when he might be getting too dominant.
Now here the signs suggest there are five emotions that are the most useful red
flags for this.
And as I list them think about a time you recently felt these.
Frustration, anger, jealousy,
irritation, disappointment, recognize those?
[LAUGH].
I know I felt three or four of them before breakfast.
[LAUGH].
Well, it turns out these are signals of an overaggressive king of wishful thinking,
basically telling us that there's something that we were hoping for or
expecting from reality that isn't there.
Basically telling us this shouldn't be happening.
The second step then is, in those situations, to summon a more attentive and
assertive eager updater.
And the main strategy here is to open out our perceptual field, by asking questions
like, how might I respond differently now, given the new information available?
Or by responding to the King's, this shouldn't be happening,
with this is happening, good to know.
[LAUGH].
With just these two steps, we can change the way we experience the setbacks and
opportunities in our lives, with the benefit of a more clear-sighted and
constructed view of what's going on around us.
And that's my hope for myself, and it's my hope for each of you,
that next time you're working hard to solve a complex problem, or
grow a promising company, or take the next step in a relationship, or
heaven forbid, reschedule a flight on United.
[LAUGH].
I hope you stop, take a mental step back, and readjust the volume
setting of the two companions whispering from your shoulders.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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