Loserthink
by Scott Adams

  • Behaviour
  • Ashto = 6/10
  • Jonesy = 6/10
Loserthink

Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains. BUT – most of us have never learned how to think effectively. We’re not talking about IQ or innate intelligence, we’re talking about thinking as a LEARNED SKILL. We’re talking about a productive method of thinking and reasoning, avoiding Loserthink.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, author of How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big and Win Bigly, calls this ‘Loserthink’. Loserthink doesn’t mean ‘dumb’ or ‘uninformed’, it simply means unproductive or ineffective. It’s not a value judgement of a person as a whole, just on this specific method of evaluation. Plenty of ‘smart’ and ‘well-informed’ people are culprits of using Loserthink (and in some cases, they are MORE susceptible). You use Loserthink because you’ve never learned or practiced the SKILL of thinking effectively.

What this book presents is a method for thinking. By borrowing some fundamental techniques from various different fields, we can develop our thinking skills and become much more effective. If we borrow ideas from how to think like a historian, how to think like an entrepreneur, how to think like an engineer, how to think like a scientist – we can cobble together an effective process for thinking.

 

Think Like A Psychologist

The Mind Reading Illusion

We’ve all been in this situation before: we get an email from a boss or a colleague, and we can just tell that they’re angry at us. Their email seems blunt, maybe even a little rude. It was short and to the point. No “hi, hope you’re well”, no niceties, no “warm regards” at the end. We think we’re going to be pulled off the project or fired. Or at the very least, we think they’re going to blast us the next time we see them.

But funnily enough, we’re almost always wrong. Generally they were just in a rush or had other things on their plate. Or they were just having a bad day, but it had nothing to do with you.

We humans think we can read people’s minds. But this is an illusion. We’re AWFUL at knowing what someone else is thinking.

This can get us into trouble. One funny (but disturbing) story was the PizzaGate incident back in 2016. The conspiracy theory goes that a pizza shop in Washington DC was actually a front for an underground paedophile ring. Ordering “extra sausage” meant you wanted little boys penises.

Well, some people thought they could read minds a little too well. One young bloke in his 20s stormed into the pizza shop with an assault rifle, demanding that the owner take him to the basement so that he could free the poor children from this horror. Thankfully, there was no underground peadophile ring, there wasn’t even a basement. This young bloke was a victim of the mind reading illusion in a couple of ways. Firstly, “underground” doesn’t literally mean below the ground. There was no basement. Secondly, sometimes if someone asks for “extra sausage”, they just want some more pepperoni on their pizza… If we think that when someone says “extra sausage” they actually mean a child’s penis, if we think we can read someone’s mind, we’re committing Loserthink.

A psychologist would know that you can’t read peoples’ minds. Borrowing this thinking technique can help you avoid Loserthink.

How To Use Ego

Loserthink is believing that Ego is a bad thing. Loserthink is also believing that Ego is a good thing. A psychologist realises that Ego is neither all bad nor all good, but is a tool that you can use in certain situations to dial up or dial down your confidence.

If you see your “ego” as a representation of who you are, that is Loserthink. Instead, recognise that you can use your ego to your advantage.

When used effectively, you can dial up your ego to improve your confidence. You can also dial your ego down so you don’t end up with self delusions about your abilities. Scott Adams’s ego could tell him that he is good enough at basketball to play NBA. But when he is five-foot-eight and 50 years old, this Ego just leads to self delusion. His ego could also say that he might one day be rich enough to OWN an NBA team. While this is also extremely extremely unlikely, it is not outside the realm of possibility, because he already has a proven track record of making solid amounts of money.

Or think about a job interview. If you’re not feeling very confident, you need to dial your ego up. By telling yourself that you’re the best candidate for the job, you’ll be able to put your best foot forward by confidently articulating your skills and experience. But if you’re already super confident, you’d be well served reminding yourself of how tough the competition if for this role and how unlikely it is that you’ll get the job. That way, you’ll be more humble and won’t come across as an arrogant self-entitled douchebag.

Think Like A Leader

The Directional Truth Filter

Let’s say that you hire a personal trainer. The PT says that they can get you down from 35% body fat to 15% body fat. You work together, doing a couple of sessions a week, and after six months you measure your results. You’re now at 20% body fat. What do you think?

If you’re using Loserthink, you might say that the PT was a liar and a crook who stole your money and ripped you off. But that means you’re failing to realise that you’re now WAY better off than you were six months ago.

Truth has two important elements: DIRECTION and ACCURACY. You need to understand that one of these is far more important than the other.

In the personal trainer example, direction was far more important than accuracy. Setting a lofty goal served as inspiration and something to work towards. While the exact prediction wasn’t accurate, it was directionally correct.

Or, perhaps you’re an engineering making projections on the stability of a new building. You predict that under normal load, the bridge will collapse in 2 days. If the bridge collapsed in 2 months (not 2 days) you weren’t accurate, but it was directionally true – even though you were off by a factor of 30X, you detected that the structural wasn’t safe.

Or, perhaps a doctor says that if you stop smoking and start eating a little better and exercising a little more, you could live an extra 20 years. This is directionally correct and could motivate you to improve your daily habits. Even if you only squeezed out an extra 10 years of life, you’re still 10 years better off.

It’s Loserthink to look at an inaccurate prediction and say that the person was a liar. It is a much more effective tool to recognise the importance of direction over accuracy – it’s not lying to set an ambitious target and motivate people to start working in the right direction.

‘Stay In Your Lane’

Scott Adams has a nomination for the most Loserhinkish advice in history: Stay In Your Lane. This is the type of advice you should send an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed this advice, we wouldn’t have a civilisation. Every great innovation and development has come from people who DIDN’T stay in their lane.

It’s vital that from time to tie your step out of your lane. It’s the only way you can learn a new skill that you can add to your skill stack. (Side Note: For more on the idea of ‘Skill Stack’, check out another book by Scott Adams that we’ve reviewed, How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big).

Right now, the two most important people in US Politics are a real estate developer and a bartender. Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. These are clearly two people that DIDN’T stay in their lane, and so far it has served them well.

Instead of this loserthink advice, Scott Adams has a better suggestion for you: LEAVE your lane as early as possible. The only way to WIDEN your lane is to step outside of it. Learn something new and different. Add something extra to your skill stack. Expand your boundaries and increase your comfort zone.

Sticking to what you know ensures you stay where you are. Learning to take sensible chances outside your lane is one of the best life skills you will ever acquire.

Think Like An Economist

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

The “sunk cost” fallacy is a massive one that traps us all. We throw good money after bad, we keep banging our head against a brick wall because we’ve already spent so long trying to crack the solution. You need to know about “sunk costs” – the money you’ve already spent is gone, you can’t get it back, so it shouldn’t impact upon your future decisions.

If you’re half way through a project you should assess it from RIGHT NOW if it is worth continuing. Forget about the time and money you’ve wasted so far. Ask – is the ADDITIONAL time and cost in the future going to be worth the outcome? Ignoring everything that you feel would be “wasted”, you may need to let it go and move on to something else.

Straight Line Predictions

“It’s going to keep going up”. Or as Adam Jones keeps trying to tell me, “the Tesla share price is going to the moon”. This is clearly Loserthink. Looking at a trend or a trajectory and extrapolating that out to infinity is Loserthink. Things always change. The current conditions and trends won’t continue forever, so we can’t expect the current results to continue unchanged forever either.

If you think “our market share has grown by 10% in each of the last two years… in another eight years we’ll own 100% of the market”… you’re using loserthink.

There are some funny loserthink lines form very intelligent, famous and successful people throughout history who have fallen victim to this:

  • The President of Michigan Savings Banks advised Henry Ford’s lawyer NOT to invest in Ford Motor Company in 1903 when he said :“the horse it here to stay – the automobile is just a novelty, it’s a fad”
  • IBM told the eventual founders of XEROX that there wasn’t a market large enough to justify increasing production when they said in 1959 “the world potential market for copying machines in 5,000 at most”
  • “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home”, said Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp, in 1977
  • “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” – Yale economics professor in 1929 (just before the Great Depression)
  • “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out” – Decca Record in 1962, rejecting the Beatles

A terrible way of predicting the future is to assume things will keep going the way they have been going. Of course, this is the most common way, because it is the easiest to imagine. Trying to predict specific “surprises” along the way would be an equally absurd thing to attempt (if we could predict surprises, they wouldn’t be surprises). So why you can;t predict the exact surprise, you need to be open to the fact that there will be SOME surprise coming your way. You shouldn’t hold too much confidence in your conservative predictions of the future, if they’re only based on current trends. History rarely travels in a straight line for very long.

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