Fasting Space

the illusion of understanding more,
fascinating psychological insights from the book that I've been walking through with you, thinking fast and slow.
The goal,
that we're doing,
with this book and with so much of what we're doing, trying to get insights into how do our minds actually work so that we can dial in on an effective health path, whatever your vision is, do you have a path that you're seeing? You're seeing the distant point on the horizon where you're saying, I'm trying to walk forward in that space?
Here we are heading toward 2026, going to be navigating through the holidays in the most effective and powerful fashion.
So illusion of understanding. And then I just kind of subtitled, the session
The Humble Foundation of Lasting Success or of our success
we can understand there's lots of things we don't know. We get that
lots of things we don't understand.
But it doesn't have to be the case. Or is it the case that even things we understand could be an illusion? This be like, hard to take? That's what I was saying as I was reading this session. I was like, oh man, are you kidding?
is even something that we do understand could be an illusion. We've seen in past readings how it has shown us that we can have emotional illusions.
How things that we can interpret a certain way. It might not really be that way, because we build a mental model of the world that isn't necessarily perfectly accurate. And our brain is taking shortcuts to try to make things easier for us, which it does do. We didn't have the shortcuts. We would be overwhelmed by all the decisions,
that we have to make.
But the downside of the shortcuts is it can lead to errors. It can lead to non-rational thinking. And then we've also seen how it can form the foundation of habits that don't necessarily serve us. Then the flip side, we can use some of these
pathways to help build in and program
ways of being, meaning our habits that we do want with the goal of getting into a flow state where we're flowing through our days
without having to think so much about it, the health processes, because we've put in the work of building a foundation.
They just flow naturally. We don't have to struggle with it. We find a place of ease and peace and contentment with it. That can be a long term, sustainable path.
So any time, if we're learning something, we say, hey, this is not right. The way I thought it was. That can be a humbling experience. So that's what it was like for me reading the book.
Maybe you experience that, okay, a humbling experience, or maybe there's some things I don't know.
Okay. But humble beginnings, getting down to a base layer, a root level, a very healthy thing to do if we want to find truth, say we're really trying to ground our selves in reality, how are things really so that we can build from a really solid foundation?
So let me share
from this, book here. We're working our way through chapter 19, The Illusion of Understanding. Here's some select parts to frame our thinking.
And if it hits hard, it hit me hard when I was reading. Oh man, I just realize this whole session is designed to be encouraging. We kind of get through the difficulty. This is what we got to do in our life, right? We have our obstacles. We have our struggles that we're trying to effectively navigate, move through, overcome.
This section is about a narrative fallacy describes how flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations of the future.
So already, as soon as that's right at the start of the chapter, already when I was reading it, I was dialed in because we've talked before about how we have stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, about the world, and that these shape our experience.
And in many cases, I have I have said that before. The stories aren't really accurate. This is what they're dialing in on. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably
from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.
The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple,
concrete, rather than abstract.
Assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck.
What they're talking through here is that something just happens. The world is random, might be a lucky thing happen, might be an unlucky thing, some something happened. And we interpret these with causal interpretations. Like the person was really smart, or maybe it was us, or the person was really stupid, but okay, it just happened.
We interpret the causal intentions,
and we tend to focus on a few striking events that happened, rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.
Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.
We humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing that they're true.
Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions, and you're always ready to interpret behavior
as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits.
Causes that you can readily match to effects.
So we do that to ourselves.
Things happen to us in our life, and we don't see them as discrete things that happened. We interpret them as personality traits. We personify all of it, and we build it in, in the context of this story that we tell about ourselves. Can you see this is how we end up being judgmental with ourselves and of fitting information that comes to us into a pattern that just reinforces a cycle that we're in.
We fit it into the story that we tell ourselves. Anything that we do or that happens to us.
A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability, and here they tell a story about Google and how, you know, once there was no Google and then there was.
Consider the story of how Google turned into a giant.
A series of decisions happen that worked out well within a few years, a company
that was started turned into one of the most valuable in America.
The founders were willing to sell the company for less than $1 million, but the buyer said the price was too high. Can you imagine what a lucky event for them? They didn't sell out.
When they were ready to do it, mentioning the single lucky incident makes it easier to
underestimate the multitude of ways
where luck affected the outcome across the entire time.
Fleshed out in more detail, the story could give you the sense that you understand what made Google succeed. You would make you feel that you learned a valuable lesson about what makes businesses succeed.
Unfortunately, there's good reason to believe that your sense of understanding and learning from the story is largely an illusion.
The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance, and no story of Google's unlikely success would meet the test, because no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome.
Doesn't that make you think?
What do we really know about it? We might know a story of what happened, but you see that the story is a collection of little discrete data points that have been weaved into a narrative that do not include the incredible complexity of life in the world and what happened. And so a certain thing happened. But knowing these few points and what happened, you couldn't predict it ahead of time.
It's a story that we tell ourselves to help make the world make more sense. And so there's an example dish with a common company that we know
But what do we really know about it? And then take that model from ourselves, to our life.
You can't help but dealing with the limited information you have. As if it was all there is to know.
You build the best possible story from the information available to you,
and if it's a good story, you believe it.
Paradoxically, it's easier to construct a coherent story when you only know a little bit when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle.
Here's the really tough line that is framing this for me.
Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation.
Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our own ignorance.
Ouch. I say,
that's a tough line. Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our own ignorance. We just ignore the fact that there's very few things that we actually know that we're constructing a story of the world through a few points into a story
that just takes into account the few things that happened, and not the millions that did not.
They tell a bunch of stories in here that illustrate that point,
about a few of the people.
Who knew things ahead of time, who knew that 911 was going to happen, and who knew that the housing crisis was going to develop. Right. They knew these things, but we can't know the future.
They can have opinions. And then in retrospect, we say, oh, we knew it was going to happen.
This this is the core of the illusion, is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable.
Do you ever feel that way?
We have a lot of, you know, wisdom, like sayings like
they probably have some truth to them, failed to learn from history, doomed to repeat. It's kind of coming to mind.
We think that if we know the past, we can know the future. What this is suggesting to us do we, even if we know the past, right. We studied our history. What are we seeing? Discrete data points. We don't know it like we think we do, even on the level of ourselves. And this is what I said is really humbling.
If anybody should know,
myself should be me, right? I'm the only person who lived this experience.
Oh, see, we can create narrative illusion stories. We tell ourselves about who we are and what we think and what we do and why.
In fact, we understand the past less than we believe that we do.
The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense. Making Oregon just trying to make sense. For us,
a general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge or beliefs that have changed.
Once you adopt a new view of the world or any part of it, you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed,
and just think how many experiences can get brought into something like that.
I think, you know, as I'm reading that, that that's a big in our face.
Trauma comes into our life. That's what we've been talking a lot lately. Some traumatic event happens,
changes us, changes our emotions, our experience.
We kind of have this present story that we're telling ourselves
and what we're seeing here very hard. When our opinions change, when our experiences change, we rewrite the story that we're telling.
Many psychologists have studied what happens when people change their mind.
They choose a topic on which many minds are not completely made up. Like the death penalty. The experimenter carefully measures people's attitudes, and next the participants hear or see a persuasive message, pro and con, and the experimenter measures people's attitudes. Again. They usually are closer to the persuasive message they were exposed to.
And finally, the
participants are asked to report the opinion they had held beforehand. And this turns out to be very difficult
as to reconstruct their former beliefs. People retrieve the current ones instead, an instance of substitution, and many cannot believe they ever felt differently.
Isn't that interesting to try to unpack? You know, we're trying to get deep into these spaces. Why do we think and feel the way we do?
Our thinking and feeling a huge part of our decision making,
a huge part of how we see the world, which means what we interpret as normal.
So we're trying to create an experience that feels normal, right? What does, what does it mean to have a flow state
where we're moving through a health practice
without struggle and to feel normal?
Right. It wouldn't feel strange.
We'd feel like this is the way things are. And so if you're seeing through this perspective that they're bringing to us,
the way we see things as the way it is,
is a story that we might be telling ourselves. I was telling a story that isn't reflecting reality.
It says here the tendency to revise the history of one's beliefs in light of what actually happened produces a very robust cognitive illusion called hindsight bias.
And then many stories he gives you that I'll just give, one.
The sense making machinery of system one, which he described. System one, which is like our intuitive, fast acting thinking that kind of bypasses our rational centers, makes us see the world as more tidy, simple, predictable, and coherent. And it really is
the illusion that one has
understood the past. Feel feeds the further illusion that we can predict and control the future.
The illusions are comforting. They really reduce the anxiety we would experience if we allowed ourselves to acknowledge the uncertainties of our existence.
So, like there's a real positive of the stories, like the stories maybe have some adaptive purpose that give us comfort,
help us to feel like we understand the future and the
that we're seeing here. Okay, so if that's true. Are we telling ourselves stories about ourselves so that we are feeling comfortable about the future in some fashion? Is that why does it feel uncomfortable to you to say, oh,
am I making up some story about myself?
Does that feel disconcerting? It felt kind of disconcerting to me.
So what I was thinking here though. So if we say, if these stories aren't quite what we thought, if they're not trustworthy and reliable, they were just we need to gather in the present moment by a lot of this priming and experiences that we're having
by other big experiences, like he said, a few big experiences really shaping this.
And so if we're trying to get underneath all that, what is the root layer? The thing like, that's what I said. That's the humbling part. And then the encouraging part that I'm seeing flowing out of it is it opens up so much possibility when we realize
we aren't defined by our past,
that actually the future is completely open.
Very, very encouraging to me, actually, as we start to get there, that's where we're going.
Things are already different, so we want to change. I think things are already different than we are thinking, because it's just a story that we were telling ourselves.
To appreciate what's going on, imagine that business experts, such as other CEOs, are asked to comment on the reputation of the CEO of a company and they're keenly aware of whether the company has recently been thriving or failing.
As we saw in the case of Google, this knowledge generates a halo. The CEO of a successful company is likely to become flexible,
methodical and decisive.
Now imagine that a year has passed and things have gone sour. The same executive is doing the same things
is now described as confused, rigid and authoritarian.
Both descriptions sound right. At the time. It seems almost absurd to call a successful leader rigid and confused, or a struggling leader flexible and methodical.
The halo effect is so powerful, you probably find yourself resisting the idea that the same person and same behaviors appear methodical when things are going well, and rigid when things are going bad.
Because of this halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward, and we are prone to believe that firms fail because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.
Can you see how we can do this to ourself?
Things are going badly.
We're in a season that that's the way it is. And so we bring that judgment on ourself. It's we start hitting ourself with the same behavior
rigid, confused, like we bring all that on ourselves,
just like the same behavior when we say, okay, we hit the upswing. Remember our graph we're looking at the other day. We have lower seasons, higher seasons.
There's variation with this experience. Can we use that knowledge of this variation to get behind these stories that we are putting behind it, that lead to the judgment and reinforce the negative cycles of thinking that keeps us trapped in discouraging behavior?
I thought that story of the CEO just seeing when, okay, we put it there every time. We're not looking at ourself or seeing the CEO seeing behavior, seeing leadership during one season, they look brilliant. During another season they look terrible. One season they get praised. One season they get criticized for the same sort of situation. And then things, things were bad.
This guy is an idiot.
Things improve through random fluctuations of the environment. Now they're brilliant again. They're really turned it around.
Do you ever do that to yourself? Do you think you understand what is going on? I think I understand what's going on. I don't tell myself
I really screwed that up. Like, can we have humility and realize, okay, let's bring things back down to a level.
Realize things are very complex,
very hard to understand exactly what is happening here. But from this base layer, very humble,
very calm
and centered as possible, realizing even the stories we tell ourselves maybe can fade away opens up a huge opportunity for the future. We know less than we think,
and for even the stories we tell about ourselves are not necessarily real, and they certainly don't have to define us.
Traumatic things that have been difficult that we have struggled to get over. We can see
these can fade away. The future is not defined by our past. We can open up an incredible experience of the future as we start allowing the illusions, the past, the things to dissolve, pass away. We build a powerful mindset. We start creating the future that we want.
We load in prime every positive experience of strength, health, life, vitality, flourishing, and every good thing that we can possibly load into this experience. And we use that as the paint and the canvas to
paint our beautiful expression of health,
the presence that will bring
healing to trauma, health to the body,
vibrancy,
and joy to our life.
Stepping forward toward that beautiful vision day by day is 44 days today, until 2026, 44 steps. We are on the journey. We are moving. Toward it in as effective and positive a way as we can.