One of my most-read articles for Forbes has been “Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need to Succeed.”
It drew millions of readers, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it reprinted in publications around the globe. Even more intriguing were the many hundreds of comments I received from its cosmopolitan audience. And I am not talking about people just thanking me for an article they enjoyed, but readers who were provoked, even outraged, by what I had to say.
Often we are not able to handle truth. This sometimes manifests itself in a phenomenon I call the “emperor’s new clothes effect,” from Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale about a vain emperor tricked into thinking his “sumptuous new wardrobe” visible only to ”the very best people.” In fact he’d been given no clothes at all; unwilling to admit he couldn’t see this, he paraded about in his non-existent finery: naked. In other words, we may so strongly believe in some supposed or asserted “truth” that we’re blind to reality.
Five centuries ago, the world’s leading scientists proclaimed that the earth was situated at the center of the universe, and that the sun, moon, stars and planets all circled around it. This was widely, almost exclusively considered as truth for a very long time before the facts became broadly known and accepted. Five hundred years earlier, the wisest and most venerable members of the Viking tribes stated with great certainty that the earth was flat, and that to pass beyond its edge was to plunge into an endless abyss. So here again, something a society’s best and brightest declared as immutable truth turned out to be utterly false.
On a recent visit to Thailand, I was enjoying breakfast with friends and talking about how hard it’s become to have a decent discussion, ever since the rise of Google. If we disagree about anything we simply “google” it and settle the argument. The world is no longer enlightened. Yes, we can easily search for information. There’s a vast wealth of it right at our fingertips. But hey – hang on a moment. What if some apparent gem of information we fish up on Google isn’t true. What if the sages of our modern times believe and teach us things that just aren’t so. What if some of our most firmly-held conclusions and beliefs are just as far from the truth as those of the best minds in societies past?
Scientific research represents our most reasonable and responsible method for satisfying our wish to know more and to discover truth. However, I would urge more people to challenge widely-held ideas and supposed truths. A truly intelligent individual knows what he or she doesn’t know – and that there is plenty that isn’t known.
What “facts” are we being told today, and embracing as truth, that are actually inaccurate – or even wildly untrue? Things we may, 50 or a hundred years from now, look back on as the fondly held delusions of older generations?
One area of potentially unfounded certainty I often encounter is the subject of negotiation. Many people seem to think they know all about how to negotiate. They believe they’ve got a monopoly on negotiating knowledge and skill, and that their way is the right way, period. Some of these people are unconsciously incompetent – the scariest state a human can be in. They are a serious danger not only to others, but to themselves as well. They believe they know, when in reality they’re in the dark.
Often we do not seem to even perceive things we don’t understand, or things we are not purposely looking for. We miss opportunities because we don’t know they exist.
A famous study called “the invisible gorilla” demonstrates this very effectively. An audience is told they will be shown a short film of a group of people playing basketball, and that they are to count the number of times the ball is passed from player to player. The movie is started, and the audience members begin making their counts. During the film, a person dressed as a gorilla appears and walks across the basketball court while the game is in progress. When the film is over, the viewers are asked if they noticed anything unusual or strange about it. The majority noticed nothing strange at all – including the gorilla. They weren’t expecting to see it, weren’t told to look for it, and were intent on counting the number of passes. (If you like, you can see the video yourself, on YouTube.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
This experiment reveals two things: that we miss much of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we’re missing it. This is so surprising that the experiment has become one of the best known in the field of psychology. It’s been described in most introductory-level psychology textbooks, featured in exhibits in more than a dozen science museums, and used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters – not to mention characters on the TV show C.S.I. – to demonstrate how much we miss in our surroundings. It’s potent food for thought, and gives cause to consider how much of what we suppose we know, and how many of our firm beliefs, might just be mistaken. Ideally, its lesson will also prompt us to take care to observe and question more closely.
*SMARTnership is a negotiation philosophy I developed and created. Its a choice of strategy aiming on creating additional value for parties involved in a relationship. Watch this short video – describing the thinking behind the strategy.
Follow me on Twitter , like me on Facebook, or visit www.KeldJensen.com to sign up for my newsletter, “Finding SMARTnership.” Author of The Trust Factor: Negotiating in SMARTnership
