10 Surprising Truths You Must Accept About Yourself - Based On Science.
In the journey towards better understanding ourselves, our colleagues and the businesses we work for, certain truths must be acknowledged. Here are 10 of them, based on science:
Your career, your wellbeing—and often your life—depend upon the person next to you. Behavioral scientists established some time ago that your career growth, salary and even your happiness on the job are connected with your social network. What’s surprising is how increasingly important this network has become in the 10 years since that research first appeared. Apart from the rise in virtual social network usage, the recent pandemic has shown that even survival can depend upon communicating with those around you.
You can love the company, but it will never love you back. Steve Jobs created Apple, but then Apple’s board fired him. Brendan Eich created Javascript, but was fired from Mozilla—the company he founded—solely because of his political beliefs. In fact, there's a long list of CEOs, company presidents and top executives whose companies discarded or demoted them. In other words, companies have their own objectives and agenda. As long as your goals align with theirs (and you can demonstrate that alignment) they will employ you, compensate you fairly or give you adequate loan of control. But if the agenda changes, you may need to be changed or let go. Common sense then says for you not to plant seeds you’re unwilling to later uproot, if necessary.
You cannot trust your thoughts, judgments, decisions or opinions. Several Nobel Prizes have been awarded to behavioral researchers for demonstrating that human beings are not rational creatures. We make rush judgments, wrong judgments and harsh judgments—so much so, they are predictable. Furthermore, emotions further challenge our judgment since they influence our thoughts and result in clouded, rash judgments. The upshot is that we should never completely trust our own thoughts, judgments, decisions or opinions. We should always seek data that run counter to what we believe—not what supports it The cognitive inhibition (or ability to control our thinking) we inherit by doing so is tremendous.
If you judge others, you lose. When we judge others or are critical of their decisions we make assessments without all the facts. This creates a “bias blind spot” to the judgment errors we just mentioned. In other words, our mistakes are hard enough to discern without being critical of others. When we start judging (our colleagues, our friends, etc.) we make it even harder to correct our own mistakes. For example, a surgeon critical of another surgeon is more likely to make surgical errors of her own. Indeed, experiments have shown that 99.8% of us suffer such blindness due, largely because of our pervasive (often, cultural) tendency to criticize others. The upshot is that we erode the quality of our decision-making and our performance when it’s preventable. Resist judging and criticizing and, evidence shows, the blind spot diminishes proportionally.
Real bonds require compassion. Whether it’s with your boss, your spouse a family member or a person on the street—your bond with that person is only genuine if you have empathy, in the form of compassion. Researchers have found that the areas of our brain most genuinely connected with emotion can “connect” with others (bond) but only when we show compassion.
We cannot accurately predict the future, only signs of what might be coming. Meteorologists research spends collectively billions each year on sophisticated machine- and human-types of forecasting. Yet, even with such efforts, weather is nearly impossible to predict. Only certain conditional signs can give any indications besides random (50/50) guesses. For similar reasons, human forecasting without the benefit of machinery that makes perfect data assessments and extrapolations are necessarily more flawed. Thus, we must accept that, no matter how much we try, we cannot predict the future. At best, we can prepare based upon indicators of what’s more or less likely to come. .
Your life is not your job and your job is not your life: confusing the two can destroy both. Evidence suggests the best way to achieve a work-life balance is not to try. Redefining success with clear limitations in terms of what you want/do not want in career in life is far more satisfying. As a result, successful managers tend to focus entirely on meeting certain work objectives which are achievable without compromising their objectives in having a home life.
Beautiful looking people get better jobs and have more success. Despite our own evaluations, numerous studies show that good-looking people earn more, get hired and promoted more often. That’s the bad news, since we’ve got what we’ve got. The good news is that dressing better or more professionally and with better hygiene improves our career success chances substantially.
Worry does get you somewhere: Downhill. Considering some of the above truths—your decisions are often wrong, you are unable to forecast the future accurately, etc.—it should be obvious worrying does little to help you. Nonetheless, with stress levels generally rising over time (and that was before COVID-19) worry has become a major health danger. Indeed, studies show that 7 of the leading 10 causes of death are stress and anxiety related. So indeed, worry does get you somewhere: To an early grave.
Death and taxes. No explanation needed.