“A book that changed how I think” guest post by Kevin Greto

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

-Upton Sinclair

Above is one of my favorite quotes. It points out a glitch in human thinking that has the ability to stop a person from making an informed decision due to his or her previous experience.

“it has to be great for me; otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.”

“The _ is an awesome product; otherwise I wouldn’t have paid all that money for it.”

Fill in the blanks with whatever past decisions you want. Your previous choices have a great effect on the decisions you make in the future and how you feel about them. This isn’t always a bad thing either; it just has to be something you’re aware of. A great way to get a quick education on the psych theories that explain this type of thinking is by reading Mistakes Were Made: but not by me, a favorite book of mine.

Besides making me laugh with an awesome title, MWM has had a great effect on my thinking and life.

It discusses cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias, and other cognitive biases that effect how individuals view their decisions, and the thinking that goes behind justifying foolish opinions and choices. I read MWM during my first year at college. I still remember the swing set and fresh air I finished the book on. I was lucky to have finished the book at such a critical point of time in my life because it resulted in me taking a more informed, open-minded view of the decisions I was making with my life. A year and a half later I switched my major to something I’d much rather be doing, not worrying about the dissonance of time and work put towards my old major; I became an apostate to a worldwide training organization that I now believe is justifying weakness and poor movement quality in their customers with hype over a superficial product and saved myself from putting more money into their school of thought, all because I was able to view my decisions with a more critical, unbiased eye.

I learned my past decisions didn’t have to define me.

I was able to fix my old way of thinking with one that is leading me towards better every day. I think that’s one of the main reasons I joined The Movement; I wanted something that would let me make informed decisions and not be stuck in a style of thought that would let me justify crappy training choices. I’ll leave you guys with one of my favorite analogies from MWM:

Imagine you’re on the top of a pyramid. You have two choices, walk left or right. Every step you take is a decision. The different sides of the pyramid are opposite extremes of a style of thought. Each step you take in one decision puts you closer and closer to an extreme. Each step is easy to make, but if you look back and think to when you were 20 steps back, you realize how crazy the leap would be from that step to where you are at now. After all the steps you take and decisions you make to get to the bottom of the pyramid, your world view is completely different from when you were at the top of the pyramid.