Failure to apply a lesson is usually failure to register its relevance to your life. Don’t look for the moments where you try and retry but your effort doesn’t bear fruit, look for gaps between what you learn/know and your world-model.
This is one reason to make beliefs pay rent in expectations, and to ensure that all the nodes in your model of the world are hooked up to something. The go-to example of this being Feynman’s story of students who understood the math of refraction indices but not that water was a refraction index, leaving them unable to use what they’d learned. I read that example years back and then fell into the exact same trap, because it’s a story about science education and not general thought.
In my own experience, the most powerful moment of this so far was realizing my trans-ness, which is also my greatest “oops” moment. I’d found some internet content centered around trans people, including lists of potential signs that a person is trans and hasn’t realized yet. I knew these signs applied to some people, but I also thought the net they cast was far, far too broad because, after all, half of them even applied to me! (Looking back, I sometimes laugh at the utter lack of self-awareness present in that thought.)
I already knew people could be trans, and I don’t think more information on that front would have helped anything. The realization that changed the course of my life really was just that I counted as people too.
I think the logic behind this is that we handle many many concepts and not all of them will apply in our lives, so the onus tends to be set pretty high for a piece of information to become relevant to us. There’s a default sense of immunity or exclusion to new concepts, even when we take them on knowing they surely must apply to something.
To handle catastrophizing, you have to first grasp that the thing you’re doing that seems to have traits in common with it probably isn’t a special edge case or a false alarm—and that the reason it hasn’t jumped out at you sooner as an example of catastrophizing is that you weren’t focusing on it. And if you read a guide to something like negotiation, the techniques involved will avail you nothing until you find reason to believe that you’re engaging in negotiations. Application rests on these kinds of understanding.
Failure to apply a lesson is usually failure to register its relevance to your life. Don’t look for the moments where you try and retry but your effort doesn’t bear fruit, look for gaps between what you learn/know and your world-model.
This is one reason to make beliefs pay rent in expectations, and to ensure that all the nodes in your model of the world are hooked up to something. The go-to example of this being Feynman’s story of students who understood the math of refraction indices but not that water was a refraction index, leaving them unable to use what they’d learned. I read that example years back and then fell into the exact same trap, because it’s a story about science education and not general thought.
In my own experience, the most powerful moment of this so far was realizing my trans-ness, which is also my greatest “oops” moment. I’d found some internet content centered around trans people, including lists of potential signs that a person is trans and hasn’t realized yet. I knew these signs applied to some people, but I also thought the net they cast was far, far too broad because, after all, half of them even applied to me! (Looking back, I sometimes laugh at the utter lack of self-awareness present in that thought.)
I already knew people could be trans, and I don’t think more information on that front would have helped anything. The realization that changed the course of my life really was just that I counted as people too.
I think the logic behind this is that we handle many many concepts and not all of them will apply in our lives, so the onus tends to be set pretty high for a piece of information to become relevant to us. There’s a default sense of immunity or exclusion to new concepts, even when we take them on knowing they surely must apply to something.
To handle catastrophizing, you have to first grasp that the thing you’re doing that seems to have traits in common with it probably isn’t a special edge case or a false alarm—and that the reason it hasn’t jumped out at you sooner as an example of catastrophizing is that you weren’t focusing on it. And if you read a guide to something like negotiation, the techniques involved will avail you nothing until you find reason to believe that you’re engaging in negotiations. Application rests on these kinds of understanding.