Saying What You Know When Everyone Else Is Laughing At You

Thinking Outside The Box Mind Map by creativeinspiration

I didn’t know who Peter Schiff was and I don’t particularly like predictions when it comes to economy but I found the following video very valuable. Peter Schiff predicts correctly almost every single issue in the current financial crisis from 2006 and everyone else around him is laughing at him.

I am not emphasising the economic prediction here. I’d like to underline the fact that it’s really difficult to say out loud what you know or what you think you know when it doesn’t make sense to any one else. Nobody  believes (wants to believe) what this guy is saying true and everybody is strongly opposing to him.

Think about similar cases in your life. How many times do you hear someone saying something so different from the conventional wisdom or something that does make no sense to you at all? What do you think in such a case? Do you think “This guys is a nutjob”? May be he is right. May be he knows something that you don’t know and may be what he is saying does not make sense to you because your brain cannot bend like that just yet.

I think this is how we are wired. When we hear something new and unconventional we mentally look around and try to find a confirmation that it may be true. We try to make sense out of it. When it doesn’t immediately make any sense, we usually think the new information is not correct. The degree to which we oppose to the new piece of information is proportional to how unconventional and diverge it’s from the norm. I think this is where open mindedness comes in.

A lot of us are claiming to have an “open mind”, but do we really? A lot of us are claiming that we can think “outside the box”, but can we really?

Watch the video below and think about how you react to new information in your lives:

(via Signal and Noise)