We Don’t Evaluate Things Objectively. We Evaluate Things Relatively.
Many people feel poorer, less productive, and generally worse off than they really are. Many people are more stressed than they really need to be. And many people are less happy than they really should be. “The problem,” Dr. Laurie Santos (a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and a leading researcher on happiness and fulfillment) explains, “is that one of the ways we evaluate pretty much every situation is that we don’t do it objectively, we do it relatively.” Rich people evaluate their financial status relative to even richer people. Productive people evaluate their productivity relative to even more productive people. Smart people evaluate their smarts relative to even smarter people. Accomplished people evaluate their accomplishments relative to even more accomplished people. “This is just a fundamental way we evaluate stuff in life,” Dr. Santos continued. “We don’t do it in objective terms. We do it relative to those around us. And that can have a huge hit on people’s perception of their happiness levels, their stress levels, and their overall satisfaction with their lives.”
The way we tend to evaluate things not objectively, but relative to those around us—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Relative Deprivation
As a child, Caroline Sacks loved science. “I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a magnifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and drawing them,” she said. “I was really, really into bugs…Science was always a really big part of what I did.” Sacks excelled in high school, getting A’s in every class and graduating at the top of her class. She got into every college she applied to, ultimately deciding to attend Brown University, a small college in Providence, Rhode Island, filled with students who, like her, had been academic standouts in high school. In her first semester at Brown, Sacks took a Chemistry course and after struggling through the first few weeks, the professor recommended that she drop the class and reenroll in it the following year. That year, she finished the Chemistry course with a B—her first B of her entire academic career. Next, she took Organic Chemistry. In class, the teacher would ask questions, and Sacks usually sat in silence, having no idea, while her classmates rattled off brilliant answers that left her feeling completely out of place. “It was just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy,” Sacks said. “I guess that was when I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t pursue this any further.” Experiencing what’s known in sociology as “relative deprivation,” Sacks gave up on pursuing a career in science, her first love. In the context of education, the phenomenon of relative deprivation is called the “Big Fish-Little Pond Effect.” The tragedy of Sacks’ story, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in David and Goliath, is that “if you were to rank all the students in the world who were taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably have been in the 99th percentile. But…Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid,” even though, objectively, Sacks wasn’t stupid at all.
The Dreaded Question
The great biographer Robert Caro almost gave up on writing his would-be Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, The Power Broker. In 1966, when Caro left a job in journalism to start writing it, he had little money saved, a wife, and a young son. He had always met his journalistic deadlines. In his book proposal, he told the publisher the biography would be done in nine months. After a year, Caro writes in *Working,* “the book was barely started, and we were completely out of money.” He sold his house on Long Island and moved his family into an apartment in the Bronx. After four years, he had written about half the book. And every day, he doubted more and more in the project that was supposed to only take nine months. “I was bothered,” Caro writes, “by the length not only of the manuscript, but also of the time I had been working on it. That was the thing that made me doubt the most.” At the time, he didn’t know any authors, and the people he did know, not knowing much about the process of researching and writing a book, fed into his feeling of doubt by asking, again and again, if he was “still doing that book.” “Yes,” Caro would reply. “How long have you been working on it now?” “When I said three years, or four, or five, they would quickly disguise their look of incredulity, but not quickly enough to keep me from seeing it. I came to dread that question.” He came to evaluate his writing pace as the slowest in the history of writing. One day in 1971, worn down by doubt and seriously considering abandoning the project entirely, Caro came across an article about the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, a private resident writers room in the New York Public Library. One of the eleven desks was open for applications. The only requirement to apply was a publishing contract. Caro applied, and a few months later, he received admission to the room. There were many wonderful things about the Allen Room: he got to keep his research and writing materials there at his desk, he had the guidance and support of “the always helpful librarians,” and he had access to what seemed like every document, report, and book he could possibly need. It was none of things, “however,” Caro writes, “that were the most wonderful things I found in the Allen Room.” At the desk next to Caro’s was the desk of Joseph P. Lash, author of what had been one of Caro’s favorite books, Eleanor and Franklin. **Another desk belonged to the author Nancy Milford. Others belonged to the authors Ferdinand Lundberg, John Demaray, Lucy Komisar, Irene Mahoney, Susan Brownmiller, and James Thomas Flexner. One day, Caro was sitting at his desk there in the Allen Room when he looked up and Flexner was standing over him. After Flexner asked Caro what he was writing about, “the next question was the question I had come to dread: How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when Caro replied, “Five years,” the response was not a look of incredulity. “Oh,” Flexner replied, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington biography for nine years.” “I could have jumped up and kissed him,” Caro writes, “as the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash.” When Lash asked Caro the dreaded question, after hearing “five years,” Lash said, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” “In a couple of sentences,” Caro writes, “these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt,” for relative to them, Caro’s biography was right on pace.
Wouldn’t That Be A Little Ridiculous?
About a year into working with Ryan Holiday, I was really frustrated by the gap between his writing abilities and my own. We often work Google Docs, so if I was in a Google Doc at the right time, I could watch him write in real time. And it was incredible: the way he could draft a high quality piece of writing, getting what was in his head onto the page without hesitation. The speed in which he wrote sentence after sentence—it was just a continuous train of thought, as if he were transcribing something already in existence—was staggering. I’d see that, and then I’d go off to do my own writing. And I was painfully aware that I was much slower and worse. At the time, I was also reading a bunch of stuff about the idea of early inclinations and natural aptitudes being these sort of clues, signaling whether or not one is on the right professional path. Seemingly having no natural aptitude for writing, I was considering alternate paths. I remember calling my Dad, and after I explained all of this to say I was thinking about quitting and pursuing other lines of work, he said, “How long has Ryan been writing?” Like ten or fifteen years, I said. “How long have you been writing?” he asked. About a year, year and a half. “Imagine if when you were at Lehigh,” where I went to college and played lacrosse, “a kid who only picked up a lacrosse stick a year earlier came to one of your practices, and after watching you and your teammates, decided to quit the sport because they could see they weren’t as good as you guys. Wouldn’t that be a little ridiculous?” And, though I didn’t have this terminology then, it immediately clicked that I was not evaluating things objectively. That I was experiencing relative deprivation. That, relative to those who have stuck with writing for ten and fifteen years, I was right on pace. (I was recently reminded of this story when it came up in a conversation with Jackson Dahl for his podcast Dialectic, which I had been a longtime listener of—his interview with Henrik Karlsson is one of my all-time favorites).
Everyone Starts With Shit
The great screenwriter, director, and novelist Peter Farrelly was once talking to a group of aspiring artists. Asked his advice, Farrelly urged them to evaluate their work objectively, not relatively. “When you read a book or a screenplay,” Farrelly said, “and you think, ‘Wow, I could never do this.’ Well don’t forget: that person didn’t start with that. They started with shit—that they fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed…until it’s decent.”
The Comparison Effect
A famous study found that when the three medal winners are on the Olympic podium, silver medalists tend to be the most unhappy. Dr. Laurie Santos again: “Because who is your major comparison point if you win silver? They are not feeling like they are objectively better than all but one of billions of other people on the planet at something. No, they feel terrible because, you know, .2 seconds faster or whatever, and they would have won gold.” Bronze medalists, on the other hand, are often the happiest, even happier than those that win gold, “because their comparison point is all those who missed getting up on the podium at all. They’re feeling, like, ‘.2 seconds the other direction, and I wouldn’t even be up here, so relative to my comparison point, I’m doing amazing.” Dr. Santos refers to it as The Comparison Effect: “being in an objectively good situation might feel really crappy if you compare yourself to somebody else that has a slightly better objectively good situation.” So try to not do that. Try to not evaluate things relatively. Instead, try to evaluate them objectively.