What are you most likely to be right about, and how do yo know?
In today's episode of Developer Tea, we're talking about what it means to be right about something.
Thanks to Monday.com for supporting the show!
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What are you most likely to be right about? And how do you know? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This question is a difficult question to answer. Because it's somewhat vague. What does it mean to be right about something? I'm going to give you some boundaries to kind of consider this question a little bit further. If you had to predict some nearby future and that future, you're wanting to predict about a subject that you are likely to predict correctly. For example, you're going to predict what kinds of tests are likely to fail given a particular scenario. Maybe that's something that you feel confident in predicting. I want you to think about that subject, whatever it is that you feel like you are most likely to be right about. There's a bit of a paradox that happens in our own prediction abilities. Specifically, the paradox has to do with the fact that the more that you know about a given subject, the more likely you are to be convinced even when you're wrong, that you're right. This doesn't mean that you are more likely to be wrong. Of course, as you gain experience in a given subject, that experience does help in you predicting more accurately, but when you are wrong, you are less likely to believe that you may be wrong. In other words, another person may have the same guess as you, you're both wrong, that person has less experience in the subject and they're more likely to say they're not sure if their guess is correct. Again, just to clarify what this means from a practical level, someone else who is less educated or less experienced in a given area than you are, is more likely to learn when they make a mistake. They're more likely to be open to being wrong. I'm going to give you one suggestion in today's episode that hopefully can help you start to recalibrate the way that you think about your own decision making, your own prediction abilities, and what to do about this paradox. But first, I want to talk to you about today's sponsor Monday.com. One of the reasons I became a developer is because there's this huge open possibility that I could build an app one day, I could build some kind of product that impacts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and I could do it from my living room. And now is your chance to do exactly that. Monday.com is an online teamwork platform that just launched a contest to develop apps for the over 100,000 teams that use Monday.com for their daily work. The prizes are incredible. Head over right now to Monday.com slash DevT. That's Monday.com slash DEVTIA to learn a little bit more. Monday.com is a work OS that powers teams to run processes, projects, build custom workflows and one digital workspace. It's easy use, it's flexible, it's a visual teamwork platform. So 100,000 teams are using this in all of their different ways of working. It's not opinionated, so you can bring your process to Monday and it can accommodate. You can customize it, right? Monday.com brings teams together so you can plan, manage and track everything your team is working on in one centralized place. And here's the incredible part about this because all of this information is available on this one place, the kinds of things you can build on top of this, right? The Monday Apps Challenge is such a huge opportunity. There's so much information, so much of invested user interactions that you can take advantage of. So it's already an exciting prospect that your app could be used by hundreds of thousands of people on over 100,000 teams. But on top of that, Monday has incredible prizes. $184,000 worth of prizes, including, for example, 10 MacBook Pros and three Teslas, head over to Monday.com slash DevT to get started today. Thanks again to Monday for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So here's what I want you to do. To kind of try to overcome the situation where you know a lot about something and you're less likely to admit or know when you're wrong. Very often what happens when we find out that we were wrong about a subject that we're very skilled in or that we have a lot of experience in is we attribute it to some kind of external factor, some kind of luck. And the reason for this is because it's very difficult for us to accept that even if we have a lot of experience, we can still be wrong. It's much easier to accept that we could be wrong. We don't have a lot of experience, but the reality of the matter is that we can always be wrong. We can always predict, and correctly, there's always the opportunity to screw something up. And a lot of this is because we can't control the outcomes. We can't control that. We can make our best guess and that guess can be informed. Right? There's a lot of reasons to believe our guesses when we have experience. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to imagine that the person that's making this guess isn't you, that it's someone else. And you can even create a persona in your head or think of a real person and try to substitute that person in for yourself. And imagine what would their guess be? How would they go about making that guess? What kind of information are they drawing on? Try to pick a part the guess that they would make. Because you are externalizing this, right? Because you are taking that guess out of your head and you're attributing it to a different entity, then you're able to inspect it a little bit better. You're able to detach from it and look at it from all kinds of angles. And imagine the ways that that guess could go wrong. You're also explicitly removing the kind of gut or intuition type guess because that external person, whoever that is, doesn't have your gut. They don't have your intuition. Now, that's not to say that those tools are not useful, but it makes sense to know when you are relying on your gut or when you're relying on your intuition. Those are much more volatile tools that we use for decision making. And so it makes sense for us to understand and only put a certain amount of confidence when we are relying on our gut or our intuition, rather than when we're relying on something that's much more reliable. So once you've kind of created this external persona or you've imagined a real person, you're trying to imagine how would they go about making this guess, then compare your guess to their guess. Why is yours different? When you can find the differences between those, and by the way, you created both guesses in this scenario, right? You are the one who has created one guess that you attribute to this external character and then one guess that you would attribute to yourself. Why is your guess better or perhaps is it possible that your guess is worse? Now, this isn't just about predicting the future, right? That sounds like a very narrow use case because we don't really feel like we're needing to predict the future on a regular basis. But predicting the future looks like a lot of different things. For example, trying to figure out what's causing a bug. You're trying to predict what you will eventually learn about that bug. And so when you predict that you're going to learn something on a particular path, you're kind of chasing down that path to figure out what the bug is, that is a type of prediction. And in fact, most of the decisions that we make are in a roundabout way a predictive exercise. We imagine that the decision will take us further towards something that we want. And so learning how to predict better is fundamental to making better decisions. And so if you can figure out this externalization, this exercise of externalizing your prediction and trying to criticize your own prediction or criticizing that external prediction and comparing them, it's going to provide you a better basis for thinking about the future. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Monday for sponsoring this episode. Remember, $184,000 in prizes and over 100,000 teams are using this platform. So you have the opportunity to get into the Monday.com apps store, head over to Monday.com slash DevT to get started. This episode and every other episode of Developer Tea can be found at Spike.fm. And this episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.