The Power of Insight to Change Our Maps of Reality
Constantly, always, we are construing our maps of reality, developing them gradually to be a closer fit to actual reality, although never quite reaching that perfection.
‘All models,’ as George Box said, ‘are wrong, but some are useful.’
And some models of reality are more useful than others.
Sometimes something painful can break our models of reality.
And sometimes, luckily, we can have a non-painful breaking of them. That is often called insight.
A strange one happened to me while sitting on my balcony a few years ago.
I, like so many others, feel pain at the knowledge that our systems don’t reward merit as much as almost all of us would like. Education is not equal; we don’t have equal access to it; parental upbringings have different stresses and strains in different parts of the country (and in different houses in a single part).
And so the archetype of Good Will Hunting (and many other stories) does exist: the untapped genius never released. The people having to fight their way through a system that others never even have to touch.
I of course knew about that. And I thought often of the people less fortunate than me who had to suffer in that way. Who had extra struggle that I didn’t have put upon them by some chance of their birth and my birth.
And then the insight on the balcony: that I, too, suffered the same fate.
That I, too, was someone left behind by a system, not afforded the advantages that others got.
I remember well the interviews I went through at a University of Cambridge College. On some days I would tell you they correctly identified my lack of passion for mathematics. But on others, I am very aware that had I been coached as many might be, I would have had answers prepared for their questions, instead of floundering in the face of them.
Not that the University of Cambridge is everything. More, this: my story was that other suffered in a system which I had benefited from.
And yet my belief was broken by a key idea: proof by scales. Almost everything is shades of grey, not black and white.
Whilst I had had more advantage than some, I had definitely had less than others.
The shift for me was actually quite profound: a lessening of my feelings of inferiority around those who had been through certain places or done certain things.
The sudden trusting of my intellect in a new way.
On a very surface level, before I had believed: the cleverest people go to Cambridge or Oxford. I didn’t get in, so I am not as clever as them.
An impossibly simple story, I now see… but I had carried it for years.
And instead, a more nuanced, more reality-fit belief: that I am almost certainly more clever than some people who go to those amazing institutions. But I, like many others (some in far more dramatic ways) am someone left behind because of the place they joined a system.
These shades of grey, this new construing of reality, changes things for us.
The way we see ourselves.
The way we see others.
The way we relate to the world.
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PS Check out this beautiful audio version of my last article, which reader Lynda Thompson made. It brought tears to my eyes. https://soundcloud.com/lynda-thompson-979791811/robbie-swale-240606-blog-m4a/
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
Buy the 12-Minute Method series of books, written 12 minutes a week over three years, here.