Garbage In, Garbage Out
The flowers that your partner plants in the garden are data. The phone call from an old friend is data. Your child studying after school is data. A colleague sending a follow-up reminder about a meeting with the boss is data. The check received a few days late is data. Everything happening around us is data. And, I don’t mean that it’s captured in a computer.
Fascinatingly, it’s possible that over the long run the value of the data is greater than the value of the things themselves. The flowers in the yard will be eaten by bunnies in a few weeks, but the data — the observation and memory of your partner’s generous choice to spend her time planting those flowers — that is useful … forever.
Every action by everyone around you is pure information about them, unalloyed with the garbage-data of the gentle little lies everyone tells about their values and priorities and tastes. In the data world, we talk a lot about data quality — the reliability and usefulness of a piece of information — because, garbage input data leads to garbage output or conclusions. The fact is that the data quality of what we say about ourselves is often pretty poor, mixed in with delusions and deceptions. Actions have radically higher data quality; they actually happen.
So, we need to trust our eyes a lot more than we trust our ears. Simple as that.
More importantly, even when actions don’t produce the desired outcome (a closed sale, a received donation, a promotion, a promised vote in the boardroom, a first date, a helping hand with a project around the house), they still provide something valuable IF we pay attention: someone’s actions give us uniquely unvarnished information about the person with whom we are dealing, irrespective of the success/failure in terms of outcomes.
A great example is integrity. Observing someone’s actions allows us to build a more reliable emotional model of that person regarding the degree to which their words can be relied upon to align with their actions and vice versa (aka, integrity). Understanding someone’s integrity is essential to minimizing bad surprises that happen when your hasty trust causes you to be left hanging or embarrassed by someone who proves themselves unworthy of that trust.
So, focus on actions — yours and others — and avoid relying too much on the words.
Have a great week!
Scott
Keep reading on this thread…
Aspirational Values Are Not Actually Valuable
Parenting Imperative #1: Pay Attention
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