We Close Our Eyes To.....

"We cannot learn if we close our eyes to inconvenient truths...," Matthew Syad, Black Box Thinking

I stumbled across a book called Black Box Thinking a few months ago. In it I found a lot of ideas that I think most of us actually do know, but we close our minds to.  It is the human experience. We want our thoughts to be received positively and we don't want to fail.  This need is a deep instinct imbedded in our genetic makeup that only hard work can change. 

This leads us to place the blame outside ourselves. Sometimes we choose to place it onto our childhood, the government, our workplace, or our personal situation.  Many times we place the blame onto other people.  If not for their actions we would be doing just fine.  Blame is a pointless exercise in futility. I have known a few people that embrace it. They are never wrong. They are never at fault.  It is always someone else who has caused their trouble.  All blame does is create conflict. And it holds us back from looking inward, stunting our personal growth.  

Fear of failure drives us to create a closed loop system where we surround ourselves with people or a community that all think the same as us.  Our ideas are never challenged then. We can feel secure in knowing everybody agrees with us. It lets us deny any failures or spin it in a way that allows us to place the blame outside ourselves.  Being in a close loop system also means there is no opportunity for growth. We are stuck in that place, limited to the accepted behaviors and thoughts the group has created.

To grow and to achieve success requires us to let go of our safety net and step outside the box we have placed ourselves in. We need to quit looking in tightly through a microscope at the minutia that surrounds us, and change our view to a wide angle lens that allows us to see the wider possibilities the world offers. And most importantly we must allow ourselves to try without knowing the outcome. Whether our attempts lead to great success or cause us to go back to the drawing table and start again, a valuable lesson was learned.  We now know what doesn't work.  

Time to turn our efforts in a new direction.  I dislike the word failure as it implies we did something wrong and that just isn't true. Try to think of life like a laboratory where experiments are repeated and adjusted over time until they bring us to a breakthrough.  It might take 2 attempts, or it might take 200, but each step was an important learning experience that draws us forward. 

It requires opening up to the process of trial and error that will bring about personal growth and that leads us to success.  This process offer the strong foundation we need to build on it. Without it, all we have is a house of cards that will be blown about by fickle opinions of others in the closed loop group we have surrounded ourselves.  

Time to offer ourselves the freedom that is our birthright, the freedom to discover who we are at our core, and build a life that is meaningful for us.  This requires us to let go of fear and our need to be right all the time, but the rewards are worth it.