Our brains are infected.
They are infected by the thoughts of those around us.
And what does it cause us to do? It causes us to play small. It causes us to see the world as smaller and more dangerous than it really is.
Let me tell you a little story to illustrate what I mean…
When I started the research for my walk across Turkey, I actually began by asking what it would take to walk across Iran.
At that time in the US, Iran was in the news for detaining 3 American hikers who strayed across the border. So when I would mention I was looking into walking across Iran, 4 out of 5 people would bring up that hiker issue and start fearing for my life.
But at the same time I was reading a book written by a Scotsman who in the early 2000s walked across Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I was also learning about an Australian who walked across Iran at the very same time those American hikers were in prison. I also watched a Rick Steves special on traveling in Iran. For those of you not familiar with Rick Steves, he is one of the most popular travel writers around. His specialty is traveling in Europe — for decades he has been writing about it, speaking about it, and leading tours around the Continent. For him to diverge from his well-worn path of teaching Americans how to travel through one of the most familiar parts of the world to teaching Americans how to travel through Iran is to send a pretty loud signal that “hey, this place isn’t all that bad.”
So I looked into it further. I learned that about 1,000 American tourists travel to Iran each year. They have nice vacations. They don’t get arrested.
If 1,000 American tourists travel to Iran every year and don’t get arrested, why were we giving the experience of 3 of them so much influence over our opinions? In the year those three hikers were arrested, they represented three-tenths of one percent of American tourists in Iran. The experience of the other 99.7% of American tourists in Iran suggested our opinion should actually be, “Iran is a safe country to travel to.”
Giving more weight to the experiences of 3 people than to the experiences of 1,000 people is kind of a screwed-up way to evaluate our surroundings, don’t you think?
Why does this matter?
It matters because it causes us to let our actions be driven by the experience of the unrepresentative 3/10 of one percent of the population, rather than the experience of the 99.7% of the population we should really be looking at. In this example, it causes us to not experience Iran.
It causes us to play small.
One the one hand, this social dynamic is a good thing. After all, humans are social animals, and if they could not infect each others’ brains, they would have become extinct as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago.
But on the other hand, it’s a bad thing. It’s a bad thing when you need to see the world as it really is.
For example, when you expand your business into another country, you need to see the people there as they really are, not as you think they are. So in that case, it’s a bad thing.
It’s also a bad thing when you are a scientist, and you need to see the world as it really is, not as others think it is.
Just look at the famous scientists we know and love, they who have changed the way we see the world. Newton. Edison. Einstein. They all looked at the exact same thing everyone else was looking at, except they saw it differently, and now they are our heroes because of it.