Wheelbarrows

The story my Dad told me when I was a little boy had to do with wheelbarrows, but the same parable has been told about donkeys. Doesn’t matter, the point is the same.

In any event, there was a man who worked in the factory, back in the day, and every night he would leave work pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with straw. Who could imagine anything more suspicious?

Of course the guards would stop him and poke through the straw, sometimes making the worker spread the load out on the floor. They shone lights on the straw, they weighed it, and once they had the brilliant idea to burn the load, but even the ashes revealed no clues.

Nothing. Poking, prodding, sifting, sorting, burning, soaking, this way and that way, once even x-rays– nothing was to be found. And so it was that every night for forty years the same man left the factory with a wheelbarrow full of straw.

Finally the worker retired and got his gold watch. In making the presentation, his boss said, “Listen, no worries, no repercussions, but we all want to know. What were you sneaking out every night?

“A wheelbarrow,” replied the employee.

A Lebanese friend has told me the same story, but this time it involved a border guard post and donkeys with loads of straw. Same point.

Humans are funny creatures. We see what we expect to see, not what is really in front of us. Ditto for hearing. Ditto for ideas. Technically, this is called confirmation bias. Paul Simon, in The Boxer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3LFML_pxlY) , puts it this way: “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

Most of the time, perceiving the expected is beneficial, an energy-saver for the busy brain. But perceiving the expected can also be dangerous, robbing us of seeing a danger which is clearly in front of us, but we overlook it because it isn’t what we were expecting.

Advertisers are very adept at telling us what we want to hear and showing us what we want to see. Smart negotiators will let you set the terms, because they know you are usually writing or speaking with confirmation bias, that is, you’re setting ideal terms for your idealized outcome and not thinking about the rocky road ahead.

In so many interpersonal exchanges we make the mistake of hearing what we think the other person is saying, not what they are actually saying. By not hearing what was actually said, we set ourselves up for disappointment when we are later faced with a reality we should have and could have seen, but blithely chose to overlook.

And that can cost us more than forty years of wheelbarrows.