In which Wolf discusses a better way to look at bad things. Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/nOpm8sd3NMo
Bad things happen to us all the time. We get fired, or we have to fire someone. We get in arguments with loved ones. The car we rely on breaks down. Money we expect to come in fails to materialize.
One of our first reactions when bad things happen is to find out who’s to blame. And sometimes, we immediately jump to blaming ourselves. When we blame, we assign full responsibility for a bad outcome to someone. They did something wrong, and they're the one who must be shamed, punished, cancelled, or sued. If we blame ourselves we might feel shame, or fear of what others think, or tell lies about what happened to cover our tracks.
Blame is a pretty bad way of dealing with most situations, whether we want to blame others, or blame ourselves. I’m going to give you a way of thinking about bad situations that you can use to actually make your life better, and even help prevent a lot of bad things from happening.
When my sons were younger (Bevan was about 10 and Auryn was about 6), we played a lot of Minecraft together. We’d all sit at the same table and build a world together; it was an amazing time. One day Bevan built a large hotel which had a number of separate rooms, each with its own bed, for all of the friends he wanted to invite to play in our world. Of course he had a deep mine underneath the hotel, where he was delving for all the raw materials he wanted. The main part of the hotel, however, was built from wood. The hotel had a large main hall with a fireplace; I was quite impressed.
Auryn, my younger son was working on his own projects, but when he saw what Bevan had built, he wanted to contribute. Bevan was deep in his mine at the time. Well, Auryn decided that it would be a great idea to improve Bevan’s fireplace.
Yeah, you know where this is going, and every time I tell this story, Auryn rolls his eyes. And since Auryn is my video editor now, I know what he’s doing this very second.
So I happened to be looking over Auryn’s shoulder as the fire jumped its containment and started burning the floor nearby. Auryn immediately attempted to put it out, but it spread rapidly across the floor and up the walls. As the fire got bigger he started making desperate noises, and this called Bevan’s attention. I walked over and looked at Bevan’s monitor as he made his way up from the depths of his mine, and emerged into the main hall of his hotel, which was completely in flames!
When Bevan learned that the fire had escaped due to Auryn’s meddling, he was, understandably, furious. A lot of his hard work just went up in smoke, and he was ready to throttle Auryn. Fortunately, I realized that this was moment where I could teach them both something of value.
Auryn, of course, apologized. The game was new to all of us, and he didn’t have a clear idea of how fire in the game behaved. “Well, if you’d never touched it this wouldn’t have happened,” Bevan said.
I then asked them what I consider to be a truly magic question. I said, “Bevan, Auryn: obviously this is something that no-one wanted to happen, but it did. What I want to know is: what can each of you do so something like this doesn’t happen again?”
Of course, Bevan’s first reaction was that Auryn should just stay out of his stuff. “But there are times when you guys have worked together happily, right?” I said. “Yes,” said Bevan, “but he didn’t have my permission to do that.”
“I thought what I was doing was OK,” said Auryn. "I’ve done other things to help him without asking and it’s been OK."
“OK, so maybe both of you could learn to communicate better about what each of you are planning to do, so stuff doesn’t happen without permission of the owner. Bevan, you can make it clear that Auryn has to ask before changing something, and Auryn, you can propose ideas and get Bevan’s approval before working on them, right?” They both agreed.
“So what else could either of you do differently here? Wood burns, and you wanted a fireplace, right Bevan?”
“Yes, I guess I could have used stone instead of wood to build.”
As we talked about ways to prevent this bad outcome in the future, my sons both calmed down and Auryn offered to help Bevan rebuild, but this time with stone.
What I was showing my sons is that bad outcomes are usually the result of a number of regrettable decisions. When you think about almost any bad outcome you’ve experienced in life, you can probably identify a “proximal cause:” a particular person making an unethical or boneheaded decision that led to you or someone you love suffering. Let’s face it: crimes have perpetrators. At the same time, if we don’t step back and ask ourselves the magical question, “What did I contribute to this outcome?” then we’re probably setting ourselves and others up for more suffering in the future.
We also shouldn’t be blinded by idealism: just because we think the world ought to be a particular way doesn’t mean it is. The way to deal with this is to set up systems in our lives and businesses that prevent whole classes of mistakes and bad outcomes.
For example, in my career I’ve spent a lot of time writing software, and one super important thing I’ve seen change over the years in the tools software developers use, is that they’ve evolved to keep programmers from making whole classes of common programming errors. Errors in coding that used to be very common (and costly) are now, in modern programming languages, much harder or impossible to make. This didn’t come about from blaming programmers for being incompetent (many aren’t, some are.) It came about from recognizing human limitations and asking over and over, “How can we keep this from happening again?”
When you ask this question, deliberately move away from the “blame frame”: don’t blame others, don’t blame yourself, and don’t let others blame themselves either: blame is the easy answer and won’t give you sustainable solutions. Be sure to consider all the contributions to what happened.
On the job, in your relationships, or when dealing with your own shortcomings: this is one of the most constructive questions you can ever get in the habit of asking yourself and others:
“How can we keep this from happening again?”