Trust In Understanding

We do what is rewarded

To continue our exploration on how to become the most impactful person we can be, we will now focus on the importance of the second required mindset trait - the ability to think independently and trust our capacity to understand.

One of the things that is very interesting to note about this attribute is that it is often a part of us at a younger age. As kids, most of us had an insatiable drive to analyze everything and ask all sorts of questions. We were driven to explore and figure things out on our own all while not being afraid of making mistakes and learning from those mistakes.

In most cases, this aptitude does not seem to last for too long though. Even though our brain is continually reshaping itself to accommodate more and more information even at later stages of our life, a phenomenon often observed in psychology and also once famously described by Carl Sagan is that we tend to become less and less inclined to engage in independent inquiry as we grow up.

Different factors have been shown to play a role in this unfortunate outcome but perhaps the most influential is how we tend to learn and shape our behavior through what is called instrumental conditioning. Much like a dog learns to sit down if such action is followed by a treat or to stop peeing at home if such action is followed by a penalty, the same mechanisms of reinforcement and punishment are present in the reward system of the human brain. If our natural tendency to logically question things is discouraged, we will learn to give up on it. And if we are instead rewarded for other actions that we might not even know the meaning of, we will instinctively do more of those.

This, of course, raises a big concern. Society nowadays is structured in such a way that we are being continuously compensated for the latter. In school, we are not rewarded for independent thinking but for reciting back what we have read in the textbooks. At work, we are not rewarded for our contribution to the world but for our ability to make the company more money. Online, we are not rewarded for worthwhile initiatives (or very rarely are) but for posting appealing pictures and witty comments. We live in a society where we are constantly being rewarded for actions that do not stimulate independent thinking and, one could argue, even drives us away from it.

As a consequence, we become inevitably caught up in a delusional understanding of the world. Not only do we start believing that whatever society rewards must be the right thing to do, we also begin measuring the significance of our actions based on the rewards that we get. If we are, for example, getting good grades at university, earning a substantial amount of money at our job or amassing a lot of likes on our photos, we will intuitively assume that we are doing considerably well in life even though, in reality, we are just trapped in a bubble of rewards that have no real substance.

Under these circumstances, our sense of worth and accomplishment becomes increasingly dependent on external recognition. If our actions succeed in garnering other’s appreciation, we feel better about ourselves. If not, we try to find something that does. Having never learned to derive feelings of self-regard from one’s own independent thinking, we become hostages to what society rewards. But since each reward only stimulates our reward system for a fraction of a second and does not therefore lead to enduring feelings of pride and self-esteem, we become perpetually trapped in a loop of constantly seeking more and more recognition.

And while we may not be aware of it, this is merely the result of the conditioning from our contemporary culture. We might even have good intentions while young, of wanting to understand and think independently, but in a setting where such traits are not rewarded and occasionally even scolded, we let go of our critical thinking and become disproportionately dedicated to seeking approval of others.

However, it doesn’t have to be like that. Once we are aware of these dynamics, we can reclaim control. We can recognize that with constant reinforcement to behave in ways that we probably didn’t even understand, we have been conditioned to seek the recognition of those around us to feel better about our actions and ourselves, and that it is by bringing back our capacity to think independently that we can ultimately generate those feelings in a much more sustainable and healthy way.

Ultimately, the only reward that has some real substance is not the one steaming from society’s appraisal but the one coming from our actual, measurable impact in the world. This is, in truth, one of the principles that differentiates a visionary from someone who simply follows the system. A visionary couldn’t be less worried about what other people might potentially think because he or she knows that, at the end of the day, more than rewards or reputation, the only thing that matters is the difference one made in the world.