Look At Yourself Objectively
By; Aaron Swartz
We all know people don't like to hear bad news
about themselves. In fact, we go out of our way to avoid it—and when we do
confront it, we try to downplay it or explain it away. Aaron Swartz, founder of
nonprofit political action group Demand
Progress, illustrates how this habit hinders growth. As he explains,
if you want to work on getting better, you need to start by knowing where you
are.
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places.
Mothers who went in to give birth often didn't make it out. For example, at
Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers
died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at
the Second Clinic, the number was just 4%. Expectant mothers noticed this—some
would get down on their knees and beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic.
Others, hearing new patients were being admitted to the First Clinic that day,
decided they'd rather give birth in the streets.
Ignaz Semmelweis,
an assistant at the First Clinic, couldn't bear it. He began desperately
searching for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested many things
without success. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis's friend Jakob Kolletschka was
performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him with a scalpel. It
was a minor injury, but Kolletschka got terribly sick and ultimately passed
away, with symptoms rather like the what the mothers had. Which got Semmelweis
wondering: was some "deathly material" on the corpses responsible for
the deaths?
To test this, he insisted the doctors begin
washing their hands with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the
stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were shocking.
In April 1847, the mortality rate was 18.3%. Semmelweis instituted handwashing
in mid-May and by June the mortality rate had crashed to 2.2%. The next month
it was even less and later that year it reached zero—for the first time ever.
You'd think doctors would be thrilled by this
incredible discovery. Instead, Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was
fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. "In published medical works
my teachings are either ignored or attacked," he complained. "The
medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in
which my teachings were rejected." Even in his native Vienna, hundreds of
mothers continued to die every year.
Semmelweis turned to alcohol and his behavior
became increasingly erratic. In 1865, he was committed to a mental institution.
There he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straitjacket, and locked in a
dark cell. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 47, from an infected
wound.1
We don't like making mistakes
Why did doctors so stubbornly reject Ignaz
Semmelweis? Well, imagine being told you were responsible for the deaths of
thousands of your patients. That you had been killing the people you were
supposed to be protecting. That you were so bad at your job that you were
actually worse than just giving birth in the street.
Cognitive dissonance psychologists have proven in
dozens of experiments that people don't like bad news about themselves: Force students
through an embarrassing initiation to take a class, and they'll insist the
class is much more interesting. Make them do a favor for someone they hate, and
they start insisting they actually like them. Have them make a small ethical
compromises and they'll feel comfortable making bigger and bigger ones. Instead
of just accepting we made a mistake, and shouldn't have compromised or done the
favor or join the class, we start telling ourselves that compromising isn't so
bad—and when the next compromise comes along, we believe the lies we tell
ourselves, and leap at making another mistake. We hate hearing bad news about
ourselves so much that we'd rather change our behavior than just admit we
screwed up.2
It doesn't help much when our friends point out what
we did wrong. If we're so scared of hearing from ourselves that we made a
mistake, just imagine how much we hate hearing it from someone else. And our
friends know this: the answer to "Does this outfit make me look fat?"
is not supposed to be "Yes." We may joke about our friends' foibles
behind their back, but we rarely do so to their face. Even at work, a lot of
effort goes into making sure employees are insulated from their superior's most
negative assessments. This is what we're taught: make five compliments for
every criticism, sandwich negative feedback with positive feedback on each
side, the most important thing is to keep up someone's self-esteem.
But, as Semmelweis showed, this is a dangerous
habit. Sure, it's awful to hear you're killing people—but it's way worse to
keep on killing people! It may not be fun to get told you're lazy, but it's
better to hear it now than to find out when you're fired. If you want to work
on getting better, you need to start by knowing where you are.
You can't beat reality
Semmelweis was defeated about as much as a man
can be defeated. But nothing the other doctors could do to him would change the
facts. Eventually scientists proved the germ theory of disease and Semmelweis
was vindicated. Today, he's an international hero: universities and hospitals
are named after him, his house has been turned into a museum, Austria even put
his face on a €50 gold coin. Meanwhile, the doctors who opposed him are now
seen as close-minded killers.
Try as you might, you can't beat reality.
Semmelweis was right: those doctors were killing people. Firing him, driving
him out of the country, writing long books disproving all his claims—none of it
could change that frightening fact. The doctors may have thought they were
winning the argument at the time, but they were big losers in the long run. And
so were all the families that lost a loved one because they refused to admit
their mistake.
But imagine if they had. When you're being
attacked, conceding you screwed up seems like the worst thing you can do. If
even you won't stand up for yourself, how can anyone else believe in you?
Admitting your mistakes seems like giving up; it just proves that your
opponents were right all along. But is it really so bad?
When Oprah started defending fabulist James Frey,
she was savaged by the press. So she invited her critics on the show and
apologized, saying "You were right, I was wrong." It didn't destroy
her reputation; it rescued it. When the space shuttle Columbia exploded, launch
manager Wayne Hale took full responsibility: "The bottom line is that I
failed to understand what I was being told…I am guilty of allowing Columbia to
crash." He was promoted. When JFK admitted the responsibility for the Bay
of Pigs fiasco was "mine, and mine alone," his poll numbers soared.3
Imagine the same thing in your own life. If your
boss started taking responsibility for your organization's problems instead of
blaming others, wouldn't you like him more? If your doctor told you honestly
that she had screwed up a procedure, instead of trying to cover up the mistake,
wouldn't you prefer that? If a politician came clean that their policy
proposals had failed, wouldn't you be more likely to trust him?
In moments of great emotional stress, we revert
to our worst habits: we dig in and fight harder. The real trick is not to get
better at fighting—it's to get better at stopping ourselves: at taking a deep
breath, calming down, and letting our better natures take over from our worst
instincts.
How to see yourself objectively
Even if seeing ourselves objectively is the best
option, all our natural instincts all point the other direction. Not only do we
try hard to avoid bad news about ourselves, we tend to exaggerate the good
news. Imagine you and Jane are both up for a promotion. You want it bad, so you
stay late, you work weekends. Sure, some things still slip through the
cracks—but even those mistakes have really good reasons! Jane never does
anything like that.
But if she did—would you even know? We see the
world from our own perspective. When we have to cancel hanging out with friends
to do extra work, we always see that—and feel the sacrifice. But when Jane does
it, we see and feel nothing. You only get to see your own perspective. And even
our mistakes make sense from our perspective—we see all of the context,
everything that led up to it. It all makes sense because we saw it happen. When
we screw up, it's for a reason. When other people screw up, it's because
they're screwups.
Looking at ourselves objectively isn't easy. But it's essential if we ever want to get better. And if we don't do it, we leave ourselves open to con artists and ethical compromisers who prey on our desire to believe we're perfect. There's no one solution, but here are some tricks I use to get a more accurate sense of myself:
Embrace your failings. Be
willing to believe the worst about yourself. Remember: it's much better to
accept that you're a selfish, racist moron and try to improve, than to continue
sleepwalking through life that way as the only one who doesn't know it.
Studiously avoid euphemism.
People try and sugarcoat the tough facts about themselves by putting them in
the best light possible. They say "Well, I was going to get to it, but
then there was that big news story today" and not "Yeah, I was procrastinating
on it and started reading the news instead." Stating things plainly makes
it easier to confront the truth.
Reverse your projections. Every
time you see yourself complaining about other groups or other people, stop
yourself and think: "is it possible, is there any way, that someone out
there might be making the same complaints about me?"
Look up, not down. It's always
easy to make yourself look good by finding people even worse than you. Yes, we
agree, you're not the worst person in the world. That's not the question. The
question is whether you can get better - and to do that you need to look at the
people who are even better than you.
Criticize yourself.The main
reason people don't tell you what they really think of you is they're afraid of
your reaction. (If they're right to be afraid, then you need to start by
working on that.) But people will feel more comfortable telling you the truth
if you start by criticizing yourself, showing them that it's OK.
Find honest friends. There are
some people who are just congenitally honest. For others, it's possible to
build a relationship of honesty over time. Either way, it's important to find
friends who you can trust to tell to tell you the harsh truths about yourself.
This is really hard—most people don't like telling harsh truths. Some people
have had success providing an anonymous feedback form for people to submit
their candid reactions.
Listen to the criticism. Since
it's so rare to find friends who will honestly criticize you, you need to
listen extra-carefully when they do. It's tempting to check what they say
against your other friends. For example, if one friend says the short story you
wrote isn't very good, you might show it to some other friends and ask them
what they think. Wow, they all think it's great! Guess that one friend was just
an outlier. But the fact is that most of your friends are going to say it's
great because they're your friend; by just taking their word for it, you end up
ignoring the one person who's actually being honest with you.
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