What’s Reality?
After I wrote about Trader Joe’s finally opening in Columbia and all of the great snacks my daughter and I are going to buy there when it does, Kelie, who you should absolutely hire to recruit your next great employee, knowing I’m not on Facebook, sent me this image of what the new Columbia Super Joe’s was supposedly going to look like that was getting our little city all in a tizzy:
But it’s “hilariously false and obviously an AI-generated picture that about 80 of my friends reposted with no fact checking whatsoever,” she said.
“I mean, I’d want to believe that’s what we’re getting too,” I replied.
And that’s the situation where any of us are most likely to fall for a ruse: when we are told that something we want to believe to be true, in fact, is.
Similarly, I was talking to a business owner recently who was thinking about hiring a consultant to help him better present his business to the world. In advance of hearing pitches, he sent me a deck that he was planning to send to the consultants that detailed exactly how he thought about his business and brand and was it enough to get them started he wanted to know.
I looked through it and said even though it was great that I wouldn’t send it. That’s because I thought that if he told them what he thought about his business and brand then they would anchor to that rather than do novel work and tell him what they might actually think. In other words, if you tell people what you want to hear, then odds are that what you want to hear is what people are going to tell you.
I’m known around the office for giving frustratingly vague answers to specific questions. For example, if you were to ask me what types of investments I like us to make, I’d probably say “good ones.” One reason I do that is because there are lots of different traits that make for a good investment, and I like to hear what other people think is a good investment rather than hear back what I think is a good investment.
One question our CEO Brent likes to ask when things start getting confused and chaotic is “Ok, what’s reality?” And that’s an important question to ask when reframing a situation. Because rarely is reality exactly what you want or think.
– Tim
