Three personal barriers to growing as a person are perspective, ego, and accountability. Our perspective is limited. Think about the relative velocity. A person in a moving car throws a ball into the air and only sees the ball’s vertical move. A person observing from outside sees the ball’s vertical and horizontal movement. We’re often limited to our perspective and need different ones to understand reality. It also allows us to reduce the ego effect. Our egos prevent us from opening ourselves to being wrong. We don’t want to be seen as stupid or wrong. Yet, when we accept that we can’t know everything and rightfully be wrong, we leap forward and can grow and learn other perspectives and new information to make better decisions. Lastly, the distance from the results of our decisions should be as short as possible. When we hit our small toe to the corner of the bed, that’s the most immediate feedback we get. The distance between the result and our action is tiny. In decisions, we must keep the distance short of increasing accountability because we learn from the results. If the distance is big, we can’t tie our actions to them and remember clearly what we did. As a consequence, we ignore the result and don’t learn.
- Related Note(s):
- 7: Confident Humility;
- 12: Engineer Autonomy;
- 14: Experiences are like compound interest on money;
- 19: Decision-Making Strategies;
- 29: Uncertainty is needed to stay open-minded;
- 31: Accountability and Learning Culture in Organizations;
- 44: Understanding Differences in Opinions and Perspectives;
- How to Get to The End of a Pile of Unread Books;
- Source(s): The Great Mental Models Vol. 1 by Farnam Street
