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How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Education Never Stops, with Maria Konnikova, psychologist
Overconfidence is something that we need to be more and more afraid of the better we get at something. It’s one of those things—most biases come when we aren’t quite sure what we’re doing. But overconfidence is something that strikes the most competent of us. What happens is we become so good at something, and we are able to do it so well, so frequently, that we—we stop realizing that we’re capable of making mistakes. We stop realizing that there was ever a time when we were still learning, when we weren’t as good. And so we stop listening to feedback.
There becomes a disconnect then with the environment and with how good we actually are. And Holmes is incredibly prone to this as well. He’s such a good detective that sometimes he’ll just take his past success, he’ll take cases that seem to resemble the cases that he’s solved successively in the past, and he’ll say, “Oh, I know exactly how this ends. A, B, and C. That’s it.” He knows that he’s prone to this, so in one story, he tells Watson, “If I should ever prove to be overconfident, just whisper Norbury in my ear.” And Norbury is a keyword from the story where Holmes was alas incorrect in his conclusions.
He says, “Please remind me, I’m capable of making mistakes. I’m going to do this again. Tell me and try to prevent me from doing this.” But you see this, not just with Holmes, you see it all the time with CEOs, with traders. You see it in politics. You see it in the military. You see it in academia, where people become incredibly successful and then stop learning because it’s very easy to just keep doing what has worked up to this point, and then the environment changes, you don’t change, and so your confidence is at a mismatch with what’s going on.
Stay humble.
One of the things that we can do to counteract overconfidence is to always try to remain humble. It’s easier said than done. Most people stop listening to feedback when they think that they know something. But if you know that about yourself, you can almost stop yourself midsentence. So when you’re Holmes telling Watson, “No, no, I’ve got this,” you could say “no, no, I’ve got – okay, what is it that you were saying?” You know, you can almost step back and say, “All right, I’ll listen to you. I don’t think I’ll learn from you, but I’ll listen.” If you at least make that gesture, then you’re more likely to actually listen and to let that inform how you act.
Avoid complacency.
The other thing that Holmes does is he makes sure to really stay curious about the world. He doesn’t say, I know all there is know. He keeps taking cases that are more and more challenging. He keeps doing things that are different from anything he’s done before. He keeps challenging himself, so he keeps – the stakes keep getting higher. He’s not okay to keep the stakes at the same level. He says, okay, if I’m able to reach this goal then why not this goal, then why not this goal? So he keeps setting the bar higher and higher and higher. It’s exhausting to do that because you can never really rest. You can’t let yourself say, okay, I’m done, but that’s how you stay sharp. And the moment you decide to rest is the moment that you will be overconfident and that you will become complacent.