The Antithesis Principle
What Smart People Miss and Wise People See
A really important concept to understand in business and life: the Antithesis Principle.
It is best understood through some examples, so that’s where we will start.
First example.
Observation:
Most people learn better when the content / teaching is entertaining.
Many people *only* learn if the content is entertaining.
As a smart and ambitious person, if you think deeply about what you should take away from this observation, you have to conclude two things:
1) If you want to help people learn something, look into making it engaging / entertaining
This first one is the easier, more obvious conclusion.
2) It is actually not in *your* best interest to be the kind of person who can *only* learn from entertaining content. Nor to be the kind of person that needs any sort of entertainment as a prerequisite for learning.
The vast majority of smart people will never consider this second conclusion.
If you can be a person who does not need to be entertained very much (or at all) to learn, you will learn more things and different things than someone else who absolutely needs to be entertained for learning. For example: they will discard the profound book with a boring unsexy title, but you won’t. (three examples of such books: The Courage to be Disliked, Understanding Michael Porter, The Mom Test)
This is not an isolated example.
The Antithesis Principle is more widely applicable than might first be apparent.
Let’s look at our second example.
Observation:
A charismatic person will almost always influence people a lot more than a similarly capable uncharismatic person will.
A charismatic person will usually even influence people a lot more than a much more capable uncharismatic person will.
What you should conclude from this:
1) To grow your influence as a leader, it is better for you to learn the art of charisma (the obvious conclusion)
2) To be wiser, it is in your best interest to work towards not being swayed by other people’s charisma (the non-obvious conclusion)
Now, most smart people think that they don’t get swayed by charisma. But most of them are wrong. They do get swayed by charisma all the time. They just don’t like to think that (because accepting that would contradict their self-image of being a smart person).
Smart ≠ Wise
Third example.
I am sure you’ve heard at some point in your life that “Within the first 7 seconds of meeting you, people form a solid impression of who you are”.
Now, who knows if it is actually true, but let’s assume for a moment that it is true.
What you should conclude:
1) To be effective, you should consciously try to create a good first impression on other people (obvious)
2) It is in your best interest to work towards not being a person who forms a fixed impression of someone based on the first 7 seconds (non-obvious)
Fourth example.
Everyone talks about how a great manager is so important. Tweet out “Only work for great managers” and you’ll surely get hundreds of likes and reposts. But reality is different from social media.
Yes, a manager is important, but let’s apply the Antithesis Principle here.
To make a big impact:
1) You should try to be a competent manager so you can help people do really good work (obvious conclusion)
2) It is wiser to turn yourself into a person who does really good work even when you report to an average/absentee manager yourself (non-obvious conclusion)
Why can’t most people deal with the Antithesis Principle?
Two reasons:
1) People love consistency. The Antithesis Principle creates apparent inconsistency. Most people cannot process inconsistency.
2) People don’t question their default programming. And when other people are programmed similarly, that’s great validation for them to stay with the defaults.
We can now begin to see what’s going on here.
Some truths about human nature can be pointed two ways: outward and inward.
Pointed outward, such a truth gives you a tactic: it tells you how people work so you can be effective with them.
Pointed inward, it is a warning: it names the default you must eliminate in yourself until you are the antithesis of what it describes.
Everyone who’s smart finds the outward tactic.
Only the wise see the inward antithesis.
This in essence is the Antithesis Principle.
Armed with this context, you will find the Antithesis Principle in all sorts of places.
Take the idea that people love analogies. The Antithesis Principle says that you should explain by an evocative analogy (to help people understand your decisions) but you should not reason by an evocative analogy (to arrive at your decisions).
So keep the Antithesis Principle in the back of your mind next time you make an observation about the world around you.
You will not only reach the obvious conclusion that everyone who’s smart reaches, but perhaps also the non-obvious one that only the wise do.
- Shreyas
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This is great. It kind of feels like a variation on the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:
With Gell-Man Amnesia, people see how a journalist in a field they are familiar with doesn't
really understand a topic, but ignore the implications of that for the rest of the fields.
In this case, people tend to ignore the implications of how the "outward" principles of human nature would also apply to themselves, and hinder themselves from being more effective as a result.