Only Seen When Looking Back
The Dangers (And Power) of Post-Rationalisations
No two things bias the mind more than success and failure. The former is particularly warping. The problem, as so often, is luck or randomness. We can never know for sure when or where the hand of chance pushed a piece across the board. The human mind, when asked to straddle the line that sits between agency and fate, falls willingly on the side that flatters it. Better to be a captain of your destiny than the beneficiary of a fortunate tide.
It is a joy to share success. When something goes our way, we’re in a rush to tell people about it. This becomes dangerous when we start to advise others on how they can do it too. You see this all the time from successful people. In many cases, they do this with good intentions, but the tendency to misattribute the cause of success to particular tactics, strategies and decisions inevitably creeps in. It’s an area filled with rampant post-rationalisations. It’s far better to listen to people talk about their failures.
When we fail, our biases point in the other direction. Other people got in our way. The economy downturned. The world wasn’t ready. Suddenly, outside causes — though curiously absent as factors in our success stories — made all the difference. As a person looking to learn, these narratives are a lot more useful. People do get in the way. The economic environment might make a huge difference. Even if this is an overly negative lens to see things through, it’s more useful.
As a person prone to a positive approach in life, I advocate an odd alchemy of chronic optimism and brutal self-appraisal. When taking action, operate from a place of boldness. When reviewing the effects of your actions, be a second-guesser, a self-skeptic with an eye for moments that were, in all likelihood, beyond your capacity to affect, though they felt under your control at the time. It’s possible you were the orchestrator of events, but be mindful of that assumption. Most of the time, we’re jockeys eking out a tiny influence over the horse or the driver of a Formula One car — fundamentally reliant on the engineering of our vehicle.
What is the next big thing about to happen in your life? Maybe you have an answer to that. I’m glad if you did. But let’s look back at your life. How many of the dramatic events or major pivots were predictable to you ahead of time? Not many, I bet. We look ahead in life with dreams and aims and hoist those up on what we swear to be solid things, like choice, intention, and a sense that two hands grip the wheel — that we are steered ships. Wise as it might be to cling to what agency is afforded to us, we remain vessels on tides that hold a near unstoppable sway. Why not, then, let the tumult do its work? Post-rationalisation is not all bad. In fact, it’s one of the best strategies we have. Let’s start off softly (that will make more sense and sound a lot worse shortly).
Viagra was originally for angina pectoris, a type of chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart. There is a number of stories about how people eventually realised its other, more uplifting consequences. One is that the nurses noticed that when the men came in for their checkup during the trial, they were sitting in strange and uncomfortable positions. Another is that at the end of the (inconclusive) trial, participants were asked to hand back their medication. In every previous trial, participants responded with an “of course, here they are”. In this case, they were greeted with a chorus of “God no!!” An even more famous example was the discovery of penicillin (but that’s a less sexy one, so let’s not dwell on it).
In those examples, it’s easy to see how we learnt something, or indeed solved a major problem, through an unexpected discovery. We realised how it worked in retrospect (i.e., rationalised it after the fact). We weren't quickly kicking luck under the rug for self-serving reasons but instead lauding what it gave us. What is the prescription (pun intended) based on this information? Simple: try many things, see what works, find out why it works, and use the thing that works. Delete the temptation to rewrite luck as foresight. Being wise after the fact is still wisdom.