Tonight I found an old notebook of mine and decided to look what's inside. One page was full of quotes and one of them made me think a little bit more than others. The quote goes as follows:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman.
I started googling some more information about Mr. Feynman and it turns out the man was a famous american physicist. With his first principle he is actually trying to warn scientists, that they may believe they are making a scientific discovery, when it is only so in their heads. Because in the last century some experiments were not conducted twice, the first experiment was usually used as a solid background and its theories and hypothesis were not being questioned. They were only changing the conditions in the experiment, without bothering to do it again and get to the same results first. People were fooling themselves. And those were scientists. What about us ordinary people?
We are also fooling ourselves on a daily basis. I could give up smoking, I just do not want to. I will start studying in 20 minutes, just one more YouTube video. I could start a new life tomorrow, in fact I am, when I wake up tomorrow, I will be kinder and generally a more positive person. Bullshit. I could go to the fitness, no problem, I just do not feel like it today, I'll go tomorrow. And this we repeat a couple of months until eventually giving up and telling ourselves that it is not THAT important. If your health is not important enough for you, I don't know what is, but this is another topic.
Or when we tell ourselves that "we deserve more" in a particular relationship, although we are not giving the same. Or you may fool yourself about not liking a potential partner after they have rejected you. Yes, your ego comes in play to keep you and your insecurities safe, to protect you from your own thoughts about yourself.
We all have a story in our heads about who we are and fearlessly try to protect it from another person who has a different opinion. We often refuse to admit something unpleasant about ourselves when it comes from our social environment. After all, who knows me better than I know myself? Well, a lot of people, it turns out. Because they could have (of course not always) an objective whole view of who you are, what personality flaws you have, and believe me, you do have some, everybody does. What is wrong with our own stories is that there is a lot of wishful thinking in them after repeating them so many times and defend them in front of others ("This is who I am!"). We fail to see that a lot of the time, we are fooling ourselves, that we could do stuff, just because we want that to be true. We really could be millionaires in our heads, we have great ideas, it is just a matter of time. And then the time passes and you still have a job that pays the bills but is far from those six zeros.
We are the easiest people to fool. Nobody wants to be fooled and yet we seem to be letting our own kind of thinking fool us. We keep thinking we are special in a way and if others do not see it, it is their problem. Well, everybody thinks they are special! That's what our loved ones tell us all the time as well. And that is all right. I tend to believe that everyone has a potential to achieve great things, has a hidden talent and insecurities that prevent them of showing it to the world. Just do not fool yourself, just like you are special, so is everybody else. Do not fool yourself that you work harder than the others or that you are better than them and therefore deserve more from life. Everyone has a different criteria when it comes to themselves, "I am not like this" you may say. Well you are a person and this alone makes you similar, in some ways, to 7,5 billion other people.
I do not know if we could escape this mind mechanism. It surely does differentiate us from the other animals. A lion is not sitting there, thinking he could chase and eat that gazelle for breakfast. He just does it, it is an instinct. I am not trying to say that we should not think and just act on our instincts (then we won't have enough time to fool ourselves...hmm, interesting). Anyway, I just wanted to say, now you know, that you fool yourself all the time (it is not nice to hear, I know) but how could you escape it? By trusting your surroundings and that includes loved ones, relatives, friends, parents, children (yes!) etc. Otherwise nothing big would happen, you would just keep fooling yourself. But let me guess, you want something big, right?
