Pike Syndrome and the path to better choices

How often do we look for our answers “out there” instead of internally, using self-awareness and investigation? Whether we look for best practices or ask someone to “pick their brain,” we often default to the expert rather than our own firsthand experiences.

Why?

I think we have Pike Syndrome.

Imagine a pike swimming around a tank. If you drop some minnows into the water, the pike will eat them immediately. But if you lower those minnows into the tank inside a glass cup, the pike can’t see the glass, and so he starts smashing against it. He’ll do this for hours until he trains himself into thinking he can’t eat minnows. Then, you can remove the glass, and the minnows can swim freely around the tank, undisturbed by the pike.

Tasty little morsels are right in front of his nose, and he doesn’t even notice anymore.

This is a science experiment that helps explain a concept called “learned helplessness.”

I think we all suffer from a degree of learned helplessness in our lives. School trains us not to pursue those minnows: sit in rows, stay silent until called on, and most of all, embrace that there’s a right and wrong answer — and don’t ever be wrong. We become so unwilling to assume we can find a better answer than the accepted “right” one, that we learn to devalue our own ability to problem solve. We are taught to HAVE the answer. We aren’t really taught to figure out a way forward when there isn’t one.

So naturally, because thinking for yourself and becoming an outlier and sticking your neck out all get trained out of us, we adopt this sort of learned helplessness from a young age.

As adults, this persists. We want the right answer even still, despite most of our jobs having no single right way, and most of our work requiring far more creativity than rote repetition and memorization — the skills one who masters school must be good at. (I should know. I never met a class I couldn’t ace. Was I “smart”? Maybe. Was I good at the game of school, the game of having correct answers? Much more so. I remember discussing that with friends in honors classes. We didn’t have to work hard anymore. We figured out the system, the tests, the answers we needed. Why else would we ask, “Will this be on the test?” We’d ask that constantly. We never once thought to ask, “Why is this important to learn?” Oof…)

Thanks to this learned helplessness developed in school and perpetuated into adulthood, we go seeking our answers “out there.”

But.

Tasty little insights float right in front of our noses every day — if only we would reach out and incorporate them into our work. If we did, we might make better choices based on firsthand evidence and self-aware ideas instead of secondhand generalities. We might be willing to say, “I don’t have the answer / don’t agree with theirs. But I know how to push forward anyway.”

Doom and gloom aside, some good news…

It turns out the best remedy for learned helplessness isn’t to be irrationally confident and self-assured. It’s much more attainable and reasonable for all to try: ask more open-ended questions.

When we ask questions which can’t be googled and have no one right answer, we can’t seek information “out there.” Instead, we have to reflect, test, and figure it out ourselves.

Ask yourself: What if I stopped seeking the “right” answers from everyone else and started asking myself better questions?

If we all did so, we might unlearn our learned helplessness.

Imagine what we might achieve if we did.

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