We (human beings) love to explain things, inventions, practices, phenomena, math, science, and history. Our love of the explanation, and the story, skews our true understanding of events, reality, and other phenomena. We end up getting it all backwards, putting the cart before the horse because it sits more comfortably in our linear minds this way—and certainly makes for a better story. For example, penicillin supposedly was an accidental discovery in a laboratory setting. The truth about the actual use of penicillin dates back to ancient times, and although credit for penicillin seems to go to Sir Alexander Fleming (1928), it wasn’t successfully produced, synthetically as an antibiotic, until 1957, after much tinkering by many different people. The point is that it wasn’t science that set out to discover penicillin. It was the people on the street who had need of something, anything, that might help, who discovered that something through trial and error. We know that molds and plants were used to treat infections in ancient times. Of course, we had no idea why it worked, just that it did. Herein lies the dichotomy. We sometimes think that we must know why something works in order to be a practitioner of a skill or process … when the opposite is often the case. Take sailing for example; you can learn to sail just by doing everything on the sailboat, in relationship to the direction of the apparent wind. Through trial and error, you will figure out how to sail the boat. You do not need any lessons in aerodynamics or hydrodynamics to learn to sail a boat. But if we were asked to create a training course on learning to sail, wouldn’t we be tempted to fill the course syllabus with lots of this type of necessary information?

The point I am trying to make is that the true warrior understands that most of the human race suffers from bias and heuristics and that much of this predilection results in erroneous decision making—which that warrior can use to his or her advantage, as a more competent or experienced party. A bias is a belief that prevents consideration of reasonable alternatives, akin to not having an open mind. Heuristics is an experienced-based mental shortcut taken to avoid doing the hard work of actually solving the problem or equation properly—instead of calculating, use a rule of thumb or take an educated guess—because it is just that much less effort.Look for the presence of bias and heuristics at work, and then look to see if this doesn’t create an opportunity for you to profit. You are warriors and you will succeed beyond your wildest imaginings as a result of your dedicated and informed tinkering. So it is written.