I went for a walk this morning and I passed by a small public park. The gate was closed. On the gate, hand-written in white paint, was a quote in Spanish. It said something about a man sitting in the shade, and it was attributed to actor Warren Beatty.
I’m a big Warren Beatty fan, going back to the movie Shampoo. As soon as I saw this quote, I imagined this handsome, confident, and yet accommodating Hollywood star smiling at me as he said whatever the quote said.
But what did the quote say?
My Spanish is still not so good. I googled “warren beatty tree quote” on my phone, hoping to find the original. Amazingly, the quote popped right up:
“‘Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.’ With this quote, Buffett was speaking to long-term investing…”
That was the original quote all right. But Warren Buffett? Giving a metaphor for investing? I did a double take.
I checked what I had googled. Sure enough, I had searched for “warren buffett tree quote.”
I looked at the handwritten quote on the gate. It too was attributed to Warren Buffett.
And yet, in spite of processing “Warren Buffett” on some level, the conscious part of my brain had confidently seen actor Warren Beatty’s face and heard Warren Beatty’s voice — not Warren Buffett’s.
That might seem like a trivial mistake. But to me it’s not. Consider another anecdote:
A couple years ago, I was driving a car on a mountain road. Turn after turn, all I saw was forest around me.
It got a little monotonous but I kept my eyes on the road and kept focused — the way was windy and narrow.
And then, as I was staring ahead at the next turn, straight into some bushes, in a flash, the bushes metamorphosed and became a deer that was standing in the road.
Of course, I realize the bushes probably didn’t jump into the road and turn into a deer.
What I guess happened is that my brain kept predicting “bushes, trees, turn, trees, bushes, turn…”
But then that monotonous picture became unsustainable, and a more useful picture — there’s a deer in the road — popped into my consciousness.
I’d like to suggest to you this is what the human brain does all the time. It makes up guesses, predictions, images, stories, in line with what we expect and what we hope. But it does something else also.
The brain also gives us an incredibly powerful feeling of certainty that whatever we are seeing right now, right in front of our eyes, is real and right — even when it’s far from what the “reality” is. We just don’t usually see the counter-evidence as clearly as I did today or on that mountain road.
Anyways, these are things I like to think about.
I also like to think about how to play with that feeling of “certainty of rightness” that we all experience at the core of who we are.
And that’s connected in some subtle way to my Most Valuable Email.
Today is the last day I will be promoting that program for a while. That’s not any kind of real deadline, except for the benefits you could be getting if you went through this course today.
Maybe you’ve been interested in Most Valuable Email. Maybe you’ve been telling yourself you want to go through it and apply it. But maybe you’ve been postponing it because you think there’s time and I will keep reminding you day after day.
If so, then your brain might be fooling you with certainty that isn’t very useful.
In case you want to get a jump on your brain while the image of MVE is still in your consciousness, here’s where you can get the Most Voluble Email: