The best ideas are counterintuitive.
Concepts that aren’t immediately obvious are just interesting. They change your perspective once you think hard enough about them, and make everything more nuanced. The good thing about them is, if you look hard enough they’re all around you.
This happens when our brains trick us into seeing things in ways that don’t match reality. Understanding these mental traps makes you better at almost everything: work, relationships, decision-making.
Here’s a few examples.
Being first in the local race feels better than being last at the Olympics
If you are racing in the Olympics, you’re better than most at your sport.
You should feel great about yourself and accomplished. But if you come in last, you won’t.
Instead, if you can barely run but come in first at your neighborhood amateur race, you’ll be elated. Even if you are a thousand times worse than that last olympian.
It’s all about context.
When I worked at Amazon this was an actual thing: some people I know were really good engineers, but they would still struggle at Amazon. They felt terrible, in spite of being probably in the top 10% of all engineers. They often changed jobs and reported that was the best thing they ever did. Same skill level, completely different emotional experience. This is why choosing your team and company matters as much as choosing your role. You want to be somewhere you can win, not just somewhere prestigious.
History is all shrunk down
We are closer to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
We tend to flatten really large periods of time so that they feel essentially a single time. When Cleopatra was the queen of Egypt, the great pyramid of Giza was 2400 years old. That makes the Pyramid 300 years older to her than she is to us.
Time perception is weird that way.
You think almost certainly too short term
Imagine your car breaks down. While it’s raining. On your way to a job interview.
If you’re like me, that will fuck up your day. You’ll start thinking that your life sucks, and this kind of shit always happens to you, and on and on. But, in one year, or even two weeks, you won’t even particularly remember that event. It will just be a crazy story for drinks with friends. All of that despair for nothing.
Similarly, when you need to take a hard life decision, you generally go with the immediate or near-term rewards, and that includes (but isn’t limited to) “feeling good right now”.
Ask yourself: when I’ll be 80, will I regret taking/not taking this opportunity? Which I might regret more?
That last one is a tip from Jeff Bezos - the “regret minimization framework.”
Short-term thinking makes you optimize for this quarter’s metrics instead of building something that lasts. It makes you avoid difficult conversations because they’re uncomfortable now, even though they’d save months of problems later. It makes you choose the quick hack over the proper solution.
Your brain is wired for immediate threats and rewards. It treats a difficult email today as more urgent than your career trajectory over five years. The fix is to deliberately zoom out. Ask “will this matter in a year?” for daily decisions, and “will I regret this at 80?” for life decisions.
The Pattern
Notice how all three of these are perception problems?
Your brain is lying to you in predictable ways. Once you know the patterns, you can correct for them. That’s the real value of counterintuitive ideas - they help you see clearly when your instincts are wrong.
What counterintuitive ideas have changed how you see things?