It is fascinating to see how many spelling mistakes, grammatically confused sentences, and plain wrong numbers in my work appear after I initially thought that I have created a masterpiece article.
Deflated for a second or two, then angry at myself but eventually fascinated.
I was fascinated by how something so visible was invisible to me but not to others.
So luckily, I can remember an experiment I either read about in “Blink”, “Thinking fast and slow” or one of Nassim Taleb’s fantastic books.
The experiment was the “invisible gorilla experiment”.
In an experiment approximately 20 years ago where participants were asked by two teams to pass a ball to each other, one wearing a black shirt and the other white, and then to count how many times the white shirt team passes the ball. And then there was the black gorilla.
Halfway through the video, a man in a gorilla costume walks past, stops, beats his chest, and walks away. Only when participants were asked if they saw the gorilla most did not know what the researchers were talking about, since it would be impossible to miss something so obvious.
Yet they did.
And I do too. Actually, all of us can miss the gorilla.
When we, especially entrepreneurs, have been so focused on a certain task, combined with some mild sleep deprivation, we tend to not see our own obvious mistakes. As humans, we are naturally blind to them. Psychologists call this inattentional blindness.
And that’s ok.
That is where a team comes in; your mental blindness guide-dogs.
Or, alternatively, take a forced break, step away from the computer for as little as a few minutes, breathe, and review. (Or you could run up and down the stairs, before evaluating your work again.)
So today my mad idea, be more mindful of your mental blindness and maybe just maybe say that one word that is the enemy of all pride “Help”.
#MadMonday #Help #MentalBlindness #InvisbleGorilla #SustainableEntrepreneurship #mindfulleadership #inattentionalblindness
