How to not be 93% predictable

After E plopped down and we exchanged pleasantries she let the simple confession fly.

“My web design career needs to end. Soon. Maybe it should have stopped eight years ago when I started.”

It rolled off and out of her like a load of logs carried too long. Not angry, just exhausted.  You could almost hear them thud and come to rest at her feet. But she laughed as she said it.

E wanted to direct herself towards her passion but she wasn’t clear what that might be exactly.

I asked her what her big interests were that she perceived as “job-like”. She was all ready with those – Food and Psychology – came out immediately.

But she picked up the logs she just dropped and complained “But I can’t work around eating disorders and whenever I think about this that’s all I come up with.”

There is this wonderful blog post that shows how:

93 per cent of human movement is predictable. The researchers anonymised data culled from mobile phone service providers and found that it was possible to accurately predict movement and location up to 97 per cent of the time for the majority of people, and 93 per cent of the time for the entire set of data. The study also found that the majority of people did not stray outside a 6 mile radius for the bulk of the period investigated, and that at any one time people were 70 per cent likely to be at their most-visited location.

While that refers to the physical world I have no doubt that the same numbers would hold up for the mental world. We all have the mental tracks that our Express Thoughts run on (choo-choo…chugga chugga chugga chugga) over and over and over again. We so infrequently diverge from these preferred and habitual paths that we stop seeing what is actually there in front of us.

This was the case with E. Despite the weight she seemed to take on so quickly about closing the door on the connection between psychology and food she seemed open enough to me by her wide-eyed goodness that a simple jostling around of her interests I was confident would start the process at looking at the situation anew and find more possibilities.

I first asked her if she had heard of the book “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think” by Dr. Brian Wanasink. The book has a thoughtful and funny way of breaking down the psychological mechanics of eating. I told E about one of the many clever and cool experiments he did that I thought she would find interesting and started to break the mold of “food plus psychology equals eating disorders”.

Wanasink had volunteers eat soup from a bowl that filled up from the bottom via a tube. With each spoonful that the volunteers ate, unbeknownst to them, the researchers added back in 90% of a tablespoon. This was essentially making a bowl of soup that took a very long time to eat. Remarkably the volunteers largely kept eating the soup and consumed far more than they normally would have consumed because they had no visual cues that the soup level was going down and yet they mostly thought they had eaten one bowl of soup. It was a clever experiment with all sorts of implications. But most excitingly E’s eyes were popping out of her head. She had never heard of the book or Wanasink but was thrilled at the experiment and started seeing where that particular study could go and what it might mean.

She said with joyful conviction “I want to work for him.”

This was great.  I asked E “Do you fall in love easily?” her answer the sweetly predictable “Oh, yes!”

I told her that this was in theory certainly possible to work for Wanasink and she could certainly start towards that goal by reading the book and reaching out to him but that she might want to open up the possibilities a bit more.

So I asked her to make a list of all the food things and terms she is interested and then make the same list for psychological terms and ideas and then just combine them in different way and search them as two-word searches in google and see what other books or authors and find other people to reach out to and connect with and see where else she falls in love.

A few of the fun combinations we came up with:

Stone fruit Neuro Linguistic Programming
cookbook hypnosis
baking delta wave

E paid me a few bucks and left grinning with a list of terms that she was going to play around with but she was still sure that her future was with Wanasink. I wished her luck and reminded her to keep smashing your interests together and see what comes out. What better way to not be 93% predictable?