Don’t Fall for the Faulty Logic of ‘That Won’t Work for Me’
To find your focus, learn to resist this self-sabotaging excuse
Imagine this: You’ve been diagnosed with a rare and serious disease. In hopes of keeping you alive, the doctor recommends a new, experimental course of treatment. It works for some people — maybe 60%. But it’s covered by your insurance, and if you are in the 60%, you’ll be successfully cured in six months. What do you do?
Of course you say yes. Maybe you’ll get unlucky and it won’t work for you, but it’s worth a try. You’d probably try the treatment even with only a 10% success rate. Of course, the reality is that even the best drugs don’t work for everyone, and yet we still take them.
But when it comes to finding our focus, so many of us are unwilling to apply the same logic. As someone who literally wrote the book on distraction, I’m constantly amazed at how often people turn up their noses at tried-and-true wisdom. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone say that no, they haven’t tried this strategy or that technique, but that’s just because they already know it wouldn’t make a difference. They insist they simply can’t be helped. “Sure, that works for most people,” they say, “but that just won’t work for me.”
