Bias and Change

“Inviting bias into the equation is a bit like closing your eyes for just another minute after you’ve shut your alarm off for good — it’s riskier than it feels.” Tim Urban, What’s Our Problem

Last month, I sat down to write a piece reflecting on my past year of travel. A vague idea had been bopping around in the ol’ noggin for a few months, and I wanted clarity. In classic fashion, the process left me with more questions than answers.

It turns out this was because the idea was one I didn’t much care for — that my travels were having a net negative consequence on my life.

The symptoms were clear.

I had less in common with the most important people in my life and noticed my connection with them slowly degrading. In January, I was “forced” to turn down a job opportunity that I would’ve scooped up in a heartbeat two years prior. I did it because I felt I’d lost the intellectual ability to do the job well. Maybe most importantly, I found I’d surrounded myself with people moving me further from my goals instead of towards them.

I was regressing.

And yet, when faced with this reality (It wasn’t until the words were sitting on the page in front of me that I recognized it), I vehemently denied it — the past year had been undoubtedly the best of my life. I refused to believe that the wonderful set of experiences I’d had was anything but, well, wonderful.

And so, as many of us do, I began looking for patterns and reasoning to justify my belief.

I laid out a short story of my life, arguing that Harrison’s Pursuit of Travel was just another chapter in the longer book of Harrison’s Pursuit of “Non-Traditional Things.” I related my experience pursuing VC as a 20-year-old in college with no business entering that field and fostering a romantic relationship from high school all the way to entering the workforce.

In both of these instances, people told me they were bad ideas, they wouldn’t work, and that I should adhere to the status quo. In both instances, I knew what I wanted and pushed forward regardless. In both instances, those were the right decisions.

I then extrapolated that to my current situation, which had striking similarities.

In the past year, I encountered judgment, worry, and doubt about my travels. I was told I couldn’t start a business AND travel at the same time — Boy, was I keen to prove them wrong. After all, up to this point, non-traditional decisions had been the cornerstone of my life. There had always been a middle ground before… Why would this time be any different?

I found myself arguing against the overwhelming evidence that this time around, maybe I was wrong. My writing had turned from a process granting clarity to a process deliberately clouding my mind.

I’d succumbed to bias, and worse, I hadn’t recognized it.

Clarity finally came tonight, thanks to a conversation with an old friend and a book I started called “What’s Our Problem.”

The book’s first chapter lays out “the ladder,” a theory about how humans form their beliefs. The ladder has four rungs, each representing a form of thought—the Scientist, the Sports Fan, the Attorney, and the Zealot. I’ll skip details on the first three because they aren’t relevant to this discussion.

The bottom rung, the Zealot, represents thought in its most primal and delicate form. On this rung, thoughts and ideas are a part of our identity; thus, an attack on our ideas is an attack on us. Furthermore, because our identity is tied so strongly to ideas prevailing here, we instinctually resist change. A changed idea represents a change in ourselves, and change is fucking hard. No way.

This method of thinking is illogical.

Change is a constant in life and should be a constant in our ideas and thoughts. I share very few beliefs with my 18-year-old self. That’s a good thing. In the past 8 years, the world has presented me with a metric fuckton of new information, which has greatly adjusted my lens of the world. The beliefs I once related to at 18 are ones I'm glad I no longer hold.

This train of thought painted a clear picture: I’d become a zealot. I was thinking irrationally. At some point, my identity had become so intensely intertwined with my travels that I'd become blinded by the idea “travel is good; therefore, it cannot be bad.”

I wanted so badly to continue the life I’d led the past year while pursuing the future I see for myself. I see now these are separate paths. Even while writing this, the conclusion is difficult to accept. Frankly, I hate it… It means closing my favorite chapter in the Book of Harrison so far.

However, a theme I’ve noticed throughout my life is that somehow, even through life’s ups and downs, each year ends up better than the last. It’s hard to imagine how I’ll top the past year… But then again, I’ve said that every year for as long as I can remember. If that’s the case, maybe closing this chapter isn’t such a bad thing after all.

So here's to change. Life is awesome, and while I'm feeling a bit down tonight, I'm sure the best is yet to come.

Until next time ✌🏽

— Harrison