Temporary insanity

How often do you end up in a bad situation, and at the end think "oh, yeah, I could totally have seen that coming"? More often than not, I bet. Part of the reason that surprise is useful in risk management is that so few problems are genuinely unpredictable. This is similar to but different from wet floors, where you know something's a problem but do nothing about it. This is when a little voice whispers "you know, I don't think this is a good idea" and you say "shut up, little voice, I'm doing it anyway".

It's the niggling feeling that maybe this person isn't actually compatible with you, but you ignore it and forge ahead into a bad relationship. It's when you catch yourself wondering "is this job killing my soul?" and immediately think about something – anything – else. It's when you're playing a game and all your strategic understanding says to wait, but you go all in anyway. It's when you say "ha ha isn't this a bad decision" while you make exactly that decision. It's the part of you that, every time you're near a ledge, wants to jump just to see what happens.

Where does this come from? I mean, what possible purpose could there be in an instinct that causes us to take what we know and throw it away? I think the problem comes down to something I touched on in Concentrate: we don't trust logic. That part of us that has to make the decision in the actual moment is emotive and instinctive – basically, a child – and to it our logical self sounds like a boring grown-up: "don't go there because blah blah danger responsibility something about mortgages".

So maybe one solution is to treat your logical ideas as a Higher Power and learn to trust them even when you don't feel like it. But I also wonder if there's a way to make those logical ideas more palatable to your instinctive self. In other words, maybe the right answer is to translate the things you learn logically into emotional or associative ideas so you can react instinctively to them in the moment. On the other hand, maybe all that's needed is to associate that "maybe this is a bad idea" feeling with actual negative consequences, and let that little voice speak out.