Everything You Think is Wrong Day is March 15th.

The idea is that, because any decision we make on that day will be wrong, we shouldn’t make any decisions at all on that day.

Good luck with that. Even getting out of bed in the morning is a decision we make, whether we like to think so or not.

And, as I’ve noted before, that’s only one of the 35,000 we make every day without even realizing it, because so many of them are unconscious.

As for getting everything wrong, we don’t need an ‘Everything You Think is Wrong Day’ for that. Every day is filled with getting things not exactly right. Please indulge while I repeat from my recent CEOWorld mag article that:

The human sense organs send 11,000,000 bits of information to the brain every second—which we mistakenly think of as reality—when it is really only a drop in the bucket of the 6 × 10^80  (or 6 followed by 71 million zeros) bits out there in the universe for our senses to pluck from. 

Alas, our brains have to make some sense out of this limited information or we would feel crazy and unable to function. So, we make up a story…

And that story is not quite right of course, but it works—and wouldn’t work nearly as well if we knew it was just a story we made up. Or would it?

 The Case of Rosa

Rosa* was at a crossroads, trying to figure out which way to go in work and life. I could have said, and it would have been more accurate to say, which “ways” she might go, but that was not how Rosa thought about it.

Rosa, like so many others believed there is a right decision out there, and she just has to wrack her brain thinking, thinking, thinking…too much, until she finds it. It’s exhausting, instead of the fun it could be to plan the adventure that is her life.

In fact, when I told Rosa that I did not think it was even possible for her to know with any real certainty how things would turn out with any decision she might make, she was stopped in her tracks at how wrong she had been about exactly that.

The upside was that, after she dealt with feeling bad about being wrong—humans typically do not like to be wrong—she breathed a sigh of relief about not having to know and to be right all the time anymore.

So, what replaces knowing and being right? Exploring, of course.

2 Ideas for ‘Everything You Think Is Wrong Day’

1) An App

2) A Log

Harvard psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, wants us to know that humans are notoriously poor at predicting how anything will make them feel in the future.

In Stumbling on Happiness, he suggests finding like-minded others who share your values, maybe even exemplify your values, to show you how and cheer you on. Mentors are good. So are friends and loved ones to the extent that they are either pointed in the direction you want to go, if not already there with some know-how to share.

And, of course, to inform your decisions about the direction of your life, by all means look inward for what it is that brings you peace, joy, excitement… from the inside out.

Turns out that Gilbert’s co-author and colleague, Killingworth, has an app to help you with that.

Gilbert and Killingworth found that we are out of the present moment almost as much as we are in it, and that ‘out of it’ typically makes us feel bad.

The App can help determine when we are in or out. And, if an App is not your thing, you can keep a log, let’s say every hour on the hour noticing and jotting down what you are doing, whether you are focused on it, and what kind of mood you are in.  

Emotions are data that you can use to help you 1) understand who you are, and what does and does not inspire and ignite your interest if not passion, and, 2) guide your decisions on which ways to go next in your life.

It is not the decision we make as much as what we make of that decision once we have made it that makes or breaks our lives. Remember that.

And, remember also that March 16 is ‘Everything You Think is Right Day’—and you can decide what to do with that. 😉

Practice, practice, practice…and see what happens. To work on this or something else, would love to hear from you. Contact me at Madelaine Weiss

*Examples and illustrations are fictional composites inspired by but not depicting nor referring to any actual specific person in my practice or life experience.

Photo by Pexels Fabian