“As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things.” –John W. Gardner
1: Imagine we are going to visit our doctor.
We already know how it will play out. We will check in with the receptionist. Then, sit in a chair in the waiting room and look at our phone. At some point, someone will call our name, and we will follow them into an examination room, where we change into a hospital gown.
“In a seminal 1979 study, cognitive scientists asked participants to describe the components of a particular ‘scene,’ such as going to the doctor,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. “Participants largely produced the same responses, mentioning similar characters, props, and actions, as well as the order in which these actions should occur.”
This is an example of what psychologists refer to as a cognitive script.
“Since then,” she notes, “researchers have expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions, and decision-making—from work to relationships and education—giving rise to a branch of cognitive science known as Cognitive Script Theory.”
Over time, we create scripts for how things should play out in many areas of our lives.
“We follow these scripts because they provide us with a sense of confidence: established norms and predictable patterns reduce the fear of the unknown,” Anne-Laure observes.
Being on auto-pilot may be okay when we visit the doctor’s office, but not so much when we need to make important life decisions.
If we are not actively aware, our cognitive scripts can confine us within certain defined boundaries. Which in turn limits our perception of what’s possible.
“Their insidious influence can lead us to ambitions that are really just adjuncts to the old linear goals we’ve clung to,” she explains.
2: Anne-Laure outlines three types of scripts that we should be aware of when considering what comes next in our lives.
The Sequel Script: When We Follow Our Past: “Psychologists refer to it as the continuation bias, economists talk of path dependence, and philosophers might frame it as a form of fatalism,” she notes. “I call this phenomenon the self-consistency fallacy: the assumption that ‘I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.'”
We think this way when we see our lives as “a continuous journey toward a single purpose,” Anne-Laure writes. “While it’s undeniable that our past influences our future, we can create an artificial sense of purpose by placing more rigid limits on ourselves than actually exist, trying our best to make our decisions conform with our past behaviors. We effectively keep on writing sequels based on previous experiences.”
For example, we typically enroll in college immediately after graduating from high school rather than considering a year of volunteering or travel.
The Crowd-Pleaser Script: When We Follow the Crowd:: “Although our friends, family, and colleagues may not explicitly push us toward a specific career, society at large has ingrained in us certain standards we can’t help but measure ourselves against,” she observes.
“These standards take the form of milestones we feel are crucial to our story,” Anne-Laure writes, “finishing a school, getting a job, meeting a partner, starting a family.”
The idea of choosing a different path often generates anxiety—both in ourselves and others: “Shouldn’t we focus on our studies instead of working on a side project? Are we sure we want to switch careers when we have a mortgage? Is it reasonable to start over in a new city at our age?”
When Anne-Laure quit her job at Google, her mother was terrified. “I was jumping into the unknown while renouncing a prestigious and, most importantly, secure job many people aspired to. It took years for her anxiety to subside—and only after I had proven I could keep a roof over my head and food on the table.”
After all, no one likes to make their loved ones nervous. “Social conformity may seem to offer the path of least resistance,” she notes. “But it isn’t without costs. For the sake of external validation or simply to appease other people, we may find ourselves following the Crowd-pleaser script and pursuing a conformist path instead of following our curiosity. . .
“We might live a dream life, but whose dream is it?”
The Epic Script: When We Follow Our Passion: “Even if we perform the miraculous feat of freeing ourselves from the past and from the crowd,” Anne-Laure explains, “we face the risk of falling prey to another type of script, which is omnipresent on our bookshelves: ‘Do what you love!’ ‘Chase your dreams!’ ‘Follow your passion!'”
The Epic script centers around an imagined destination far from where we are now. The downside? We may take needlessly risky actions rather than small but meaningful experiments that lead to unexpected learnings.
“The popularity of the Epic script is largely due to survivorship bias,” she notes, “when we mistake a subgroup as the entire group, overlooking those who failed. This phenomenon is particularly common in entrepreneurship, where we try to emulate the success of a few successful founders without realizing that the purpose-driven narrative they promote doesn’t take all the other factors involved—luck, money, support network—into account.”
And what if we don’t have a clear passion we want to follow?
“The Epic script also implies that following your passion will automatically lead to success, which makes any difficulty much harder to manage,” Anne-Laure notes.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck‘s research indicates that sayings like “find your passion” also increase the likelihood that we won’t persevere when we encounter the inevitable challenges. “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry,” she writes.
3: There is good news, however. With effort and awareness, we can unlearn these scripts. The world is changing, and so are we.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” says futurist Alvin Toffler.
One successful approach is to embrace tiny experiments rather than linear goals. When we do so, we realize our past does not define us. We can go off-script. We can have multiple passions.
Anne-Laure writes, “As we consider our next experiment, three questions can help us avoid the trap of the Sequel, the Crowd-pleaser, and the Epic:”
- Are we following our past or discovering our path?
- Are we following the crowd or discovering our tribe?
- Are we following our passion or discovering our curiosity?
“Equipped with these principles,” she writes, we “can actively challenge our cognitive scripts and rewrite our own narrative to design a life that’s truly experimental.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I aware of the cognitive scripts that influence my decisions, and how can I begin to challenge and rewrite them to discover my true path?
Action: I will start small experiments to explore new possibilities beyond my past, the crowd, and passion-driven scripts, embracing curiosity and flexibility in my life.
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