As we come new to the close of 2020, we're thinking about a category of information that's hard to think about come naturally.
What we're talking about in today's episode are the invisible events that happen around you.
Finding clarity and perspective deals with invisibility, and when we say invisibility, we're talking about the events that haven't happened yet.
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As we come near to the close of 2020, we're here in the last two months of the year, I want to help you frame your thinking around a category of topics, a category of information that is hard to think about, I'm naturally. Hopefully I will push you towards thinking about this category of topics more because it really can change the way you see the world. It can change the way you see the world and your participation in it, regardless of your role in your job or in your personal life, the values you have, this kind of information that we're talking about today, it applies to everybody. And what we're talking about in today's episode is the invisible events all around you. My name is Jonathan Cutrell listening to Developer Tea and my go on this show is to help driven developers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. And in today's episode, we're talking about all three of those things, some in a more roundabout way than others. Finding clarity and finding perspective deals very much so with invisibility. So what do we mean when we talk about invisibility? Well, really we're talking about everything that doesn't happen or hasn't happened yet in our particular universe. And we're not going to dive into any kind of multiverse theories. We can imagine that they exist without them even existing and the things we talk about today are still going to play out and be useful even if we don't have multiversives. So that's not an important part of the discussion, but the important part of the discussion is around invisibility. So the invisible events are the vast majority of things, the vast majority of possibilities that never actually occur. If you're listening to this episode, I want to do a very simple exercise while you're listening. You can choose a number from one to ten or find a die, a game die, and roll it. Number one to six. Now, here's what's interesting. You probably chose one or the other or none of these options. Even that choice leaves an invisible event that never occurred. If you don't have a die, for example, you chose to pick a number between one and ten. And so there was some possible event you finding a die or you having one to begin with because something else happened before that so that you had a die. Those things never happened. So there are invisible events and then of course the number that you pick itself. Now, here's the thing that I want you to focus on because this can get a little bit confusing but I want you to focus on this very simple reality. If you rolled, let's say you rolled a three. Does you rolling a three mean that you could not have rolled a four? This is somewhat of a philosophical question but in terms of being able to predict for the future, when you have that same die in your hand, assuming it's a fair die, it's not weighted or anything like that, it has all the numbers, it has all six sides. Would you imagine now going through life thinking that three is the only number that you would roll? Of course not. Every number has equal probability of being rolled given perfect randomness. And so it would be relatively absurd to imagine that you're always going to roll a three. And so the invisible events that could have occurred, there are at least five other events rolling in one, two, four, five or six. And those events had equal probability of you rolling the three. Now in hindsight, very often, we cannot imagine a different result than the one that we got. It feels as if it was the only thing we ever could get. Now setting aside all philosophical questions, this is a very convincing thing to our brains. Right? Going forward. That's a very convincing thing to our brains. Because what we're really talking about here is understanding the invisible reality. Right? This is very important. Understanding the invisible reality that produced the actual event that occurred. So the invisible reality in this case was that you had six sides, each had an equal opportunity or equal likelihood of being rolled and you rolled one of them. It happened to be a three, but that wasn't an unusual event. It was equally probable that any number one through six would be rolled. Now, so why are we talking about this? This game dies so much. Well because very often we try to interpret the events that have occurred through a thwarted lens, we don't really think through the other possible events that could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, the likelihood that they could have occurred to begin with. You can see very obvious examples of this even with game dice in a casino. You can imagine that somebody has rolled a three, five times in a row and they imagine for some reason that they're on fire. Right? That somehow they're going to roll a three again. Now, this is true if they're actually benefiting from the three, but on the flip side, let's say they don't want to roll a three. Well, perhaps they're believing that certainly this sixth dice roll will break the curse that these threes have been following them around and somehow they have attached themselves and we've finally kind of paid up our price of rolling the wrong number. But none of these things are true. Just because we've rolled a three, five times in a row, has no bearing on whether we're going to roll a three again. And yet we still attach meaning to events that thwart our understanding of the likelihood that that event was going to occur or that another event like it will occur again. Another very simple example of this might be lottery tickets. Let's imagine that someone on your road who visits the same gas station that you go to, they buy a lottery ticket at that gas station every Friday and they win the lottery. Well, it might be easy to believe that the next lottery ticket, the next winning one, could show up at that particular gas station. And so that gas station might see an influx of purchases. But here's where things get really interesting. What we've talked about so far is the idea of connecting three or four distinct events together as if they are connected, even though they're actually not. But this kind of thinking, the kind of thinking where we imagine all of the possible outcomes. And then we imagine what are the likelihoods of those outcomes? This kind of thinking can absolutely change the way you see the world. Not only can we think this way when we think forward, but we can also change the way we think about the past. We're going to talk about how, right after we talk about today's sponsor, New Relic. Using a complex digital architecture takes a dozen different tools and troubleshooting means jumping between dozens of dashboards and data. New Relic wants to change that and they've designed everything you need in three products. A telemetry data platform, which creates a fully manageable, schemalist time series database of all your data from any source, full stack observability for analyzing, visualizing and troubleshooting your whole stack and applied intelligence that seamlessly automates anomaly detection and instant intelligence correlation using AI and ML. Best of all, you can get it free. New Relic for free. There's no host base pricing and no constant upsell for more functionality with 100 gigabytes a month to one full access user. Check it out at new relic.com. New Relic is observability made simple. Thanks again to New Relic for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. If I had one hope for the people listening to this podcast, it would be for you to think about things that never happen. Things that never occur. Because the vast majority of the options that we face, the decisions we make, the vast majority of the things we're making those decisions about, they never happen. When we choose one option from five, we're not choosing four options. There is so many more options that we say no to in our lives than we say yes to. And so I want you as an engineer, I want you as a manager to think more about the things that never happen. And we've been talking about thinking about invisible events, thinking about the things that may have happened that could have happened but didn't or that could happen in the future. But perhaps they won't. I want you to think back now. And the way that we can improve our thinking about the past is to understand through a different light the things that we've experienced. For example, let's imagine back to a very good event that you experienced. Maybe it was getting a job or perhaps it was winning a game, maybe in sports that nobody expected you to win. These are all memories that many of us have shared or we've had something similar like this happen. Maybe it was a very good grade on a test that you didn't study very well for. These kinds of events they have many different possible outcomes before they occur. The day before you took that test, when you weren't studying, you could imagine that you could fail that test for not studying. But then once the following day occurs, looking back on those events, it's very hard to imagine that anything else could happen. And so in those kinds of scenarios, when we ace a test that we didn't study for, it's easy to attribute that to luck. It's easy to try to rationalize it because it's very difficult to understand that things happen that rationally speaking are very unlikely to happen. It's very unlikely for you to ace a test that you never studied for. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible. In fact, in the case that it is a multiple choice test, it's possible for you to absolutely guess every single answer and get a perfect score. But I want you to think back on this particular event and try to remember the narrative that you have in your head about why that thing occurred the way that it did. Now, it's possible that you had an event that went well because the odds were in your favor. You were supposed to roll a one through a five. And the only way to lose is to roll a six. And so in that case, you have a very good chance of things turning out well. And when you post rationalize that, it's easy to see how things line up. But it's not always so easy. Let's imagine that you had to roll a one ten times in a row. It's easy, unfortunately, for our brains to imagine that we are just very good at rolling a one. But I want you to revisit whatever rationalization you have for that particular event and imagine that something else is true. Imagine that, let's say, luck played a greater role or randomness played a greater role. Chants played a greater role in that particular event. Or maybe you had a greater chance of succeeding than you thought you did. Whatever the case is, we very rarely have a perfect understanding of the kind of probabilities around a given subject. But just because we don't often think about these things perfectly doesn't mean that we can't get better. Specifically, most people don't think about probabilities at all. They don't imagine the probability of asing the test if they don't study versus studying and maybe getting a little bit better of a score versus asing the test after a lot of studying. And so if you want a leg up in your career, in your personal achievements, in the things you're trying to do in your personal life, if you want a leg up, you can have a major advantage, a major advantage. If you think a little bit more about the invisible things around you, if you think more about the probabilities of various outcomes, both in the past and going into the future. Having some idea of the probabilities and playing your decisions off of those probabilities is going to eventually, not in every case, because unfortunately that's how probabilities work, but eventually this is going to pay off. I encourage you, as you begin to round out this year and think more into the next year, as you review, for example, your personal values and your goals, to think about the probabilities, think about the invisible things around you more often. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to New Relic for sponsoring today's episode. New Relic is observability made simple. Head over to NewRelic.com to get started today. This episode and every other episode of Developer Tea can be found at spec.fm. If you want us to continue being able to do this show, then the most important things you can do is number one, share this with someone that you think will find this episode intriguing or valuable in their lives. Number two, leave a review in whatever podcast platform provider that you use. For example, iTunes. This is one of the most important things that we have to keep the show alive because it helps other developers find and trust the show. Trust that they are not wasting their time or the space on their phones by downloading these episodes. So please, if you can do either one or both of those things, it really helps the show stay alive. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. This episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.