Draw Little Conclusions, Not Big Ones

Not too long ago, I received a note from a woman who had just returned to work after having her second child. While she had managed life with one baby quite well, juggling two little ones and a burgeoning workload was wearing her out. After a rough patch of limited sleep, she wrote me that even though she liked her work, she’d been thinking about resigning, and accepting that “I can’t have it all anymore.”

I wrote back that the first few months with an infant aren’t easy on anyone. But when things go wrong, I try to repeat this phrase: Don’t draw too broad a conclusion. The human brain is wired to avoid pain, and one way to redeem a bad situation is to try to learn a lesson. That way, the brain thinks, you won’t experience that pain again. But if you’re not careful, you can learn the wrong lesson, or draw such a broad conclusion that you cut yourself off from a lot of good things. And that could be even more painful than the first problem.

If you look around, you see that the tendency to draw broad conclusions comes up again and again. Someone has a bad experience during an international trip and decides it’s better to stay close to home where they’re less likely to miss an important announcement on the train because they don’t understand the language (or eat something that disagrees with them). Back when the stock market tanked in 2008, a friend told…