In this age of social media, because we have become unplanned audiences to people who show up on our feeds, we’ve developed a fundamental attribution error bias that hurts us more than it helps us.
When we see someone succeeding, we naturally assume it is because of ‘who they are’, their character, etc. Deliberately underemphasizing other environmental and situational experiences (privilege, timing, network, capital) that could have gotten them there. On the other hand, we look at our successes and think we are where we are because of our circumstances.
When you flip it to failure, notice how people then assume that when a person who used to succeed experiences failure, they blame the person’s character, but when it is their own failure, they blame circumstances for it. At what point do we understand that the idea of failure or success is not limited to a person or circumstance but a combination of both?
Also, there is a natural talent bias that derails the intensity of the effort made by people who succeed in areas that we may admire that I think is quite unfair to them. You notice Chibuzor is making millions in sales weekly from selling a product/service, and instead of trying to understand the circumstances that got him there, we try to downgrade the actual effort it takes to build something from zero to one, then to millions by attributing Chibuzor’s success to a gift of selling.
I think we as humans have a conditioning that makes us pick the easiest explanation over the reality of a thing because it forces us to reflect on our own reality, and that reflection in itself is hardwork. People don’t like to work hard, we want the easy.
I hear conversations during football games where people talk about how players like Messi and Ronaldo are only successful because they have talent. Is it the same talent that millions of people have, but it hasn’t gotten them anywhere? Talent to me is the most minimal thing you can possess as a human being, discipline to develop it makes all the difference.
Ronaldo trained so much and always showed up early that one of his teammates Carlos Tevez in an interview said no matter how early they showed up to the training field, Ronaldo was already there. You think it is talent that got him out of bed?
What percentage of talented people you know personally are thriving in their talented fields? Talent is good, but without any effort, community, and spices of deliberate conditions, it goes nowhere.
Social media has not helped the conversations either. Some people come up with too many grass-to-grace stories that push the agenda that they made it because of who they are, and even sometimes try to hide the privilege that got them to a high point in their career, business, etcetera, which I find a tad bit dubious.
At the end of the day, maybe we need to focus on all the elements that can lead us to what we define as success. Those whom we consider successful had their own conjuring of conditions that directly and indirectly aligned with their achieved goals. You do not need to make the people who are succeeding feel different from you in the first place to call it success.
Maybe the focus should be on the process, more than the goal…So the hard mornings can make sense at the end of a journey.
#viekieo
