Question your assumptions

George Chingarande | Monday September 22, 2014 16:27

By every account he was not the best in his class and certainly he was not considered to be better than Jerzy Neyman, his professor, for a student cannot be greater than his master.  One morning George arrived late for the class, as he was wont to, he found three mathematics problems on the black board.  Assuming that the problems were homework for the day, he quickly jotted them down.

After class George went to work on the problems.  A few days later, George took his completed homework to the professor.  In his own words George later said, “I apologised to the professor for taking long to complete the homework because I found the problems to be a little harder than usual.”  Three weeks later, Jerzy Neyman informed George that he had actually solved two of the mathematics problems to which no man had managed to find a solution.  What had happened is that before George arrived for the lecture, the class had a discussion on unsolvable maths problems.  Jerzy Neyman had written two of these on the blackboard.  George, having been late for the class, had missed this part of the lecture and therefore assumed the problems on the board were the homework. When George saw the problems without the professor’s assertion that the problems were unsolvable, he assumed that they were  homework that students like him were expected to solve within reasonable time.  By his own admission, if he had known these problems to be examples of unsolvable problems he, like the other students, would never have attempted to work them out.

This true story illustrates the great power that is embedded in assumptions. Let us pause here and ask a question: What is stopping you from attempting to achieve greater things? The difference between George and the other students that morning in 1939 was that the other students had inside knowledge.  Unfortunately, this so called knowledge was not knowledge at all, but just an assumption.  They had been told by the professor that these problems were not solvable, and George did not know this.  George assumed that the problems were solvable, while the other students assumed that they were insoluble.  That assumption was the defining factor. Our assumptions are more powerful than we will ever realise. They direct our internal conversations, and dictate our choices. They define what we see as opportunities and what we perceive to be threats. Ultimately our assumptions inform our choices, and in turn our choices shape our lives. Often we assume, to our own downfall, that our problems or challenges are much more complex than they really are.  Often we assume that our challenges are greater than we are.  These assumptions dissuade us from applying ourselves wholeheartedly to our tasks every day.  Yet it is in applying ourselves fully and diligently that we have our best chance at becoming the very best that we can become and achieve more.  It is very important to constantly challenge our assumptions.  The fact that something has never been done before does not mean that it cannot be done.  The fact that a task seems difficult does not mean that it is impossible.  The fact that you are experiencing problems does not mean that there is no hope.  The fact that you are down does not mean that you are out for good.  One of our greatest enemies as human beings is overgeneralisations that are not supported by facts.  Our assumptions, in a sense, are fetters and chains by which we enslave our selves.

The difference between George and the others could be found in the small words “unsolvable” and “slightly more difficult”.  The internal conversations that George held within himself were based on the assumption that it could be done.   When he discovered that the challenge was slightly more difficult than usual, he did not give up because he believed that it could be done and furthermore every student, him included, was expected to do his homework correctly. Most importantly he did not give himself the option to fail because he believed it was expected of him. Quite to the contrary, the rest did not believe that it could be done and did not believe that they were expected to provide the solutions. In fact, they knew that they were not required to even attempt to solve the problems. They gave themselves an option not to try and also to fail.  Their internal conversations went something like this, “the problems are unsolvable so why bother to attempt them.  If Einstein and other great minds have already tried and failed, who am I to try the impossible?” Most of human failures can be traced to a decision to make failure one of the available options. When we erase failure from the list of options we always amaze ourselves as George did.

Assumptions are more powerful than ability. Here is the great truth about life and human behaviour.  Every waking moment, each one of us has a running commentary in his mind.  We are continuously engaged in self-talk.  And the exact things that we tell ourselves are based on assumptions and most of these are based on incorrect information.  These assumptions have more power to shape our destinies than our abilities.  They also have more power to dictate what we do with our lives than reality.

The tragedy with most assumptions is that they are based on incorrect information and overgeneralisations. People often talk of the average man. But who is the average man? There is no such thing as the average man. Most people have two eyes, two ears, two arms and two legs. The average man should therefore be that person with one eye, one arm, one ear and one leg. Are averages not the result of division? There is no such thing as the average man. The only type of man out there is the unique man, and every man is unique in his own way. It is this uniqueness that we bring to life every day. It is because of this uniqueness that we should never allow ourselves to be misled by assumptions based on the average man.