Are you eating dog food?
There’s a story behind that.
This is your daily message from Chad number 1,224 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Dan Bertsche.
Here’s the upgrade:
Words influence perception and upgraded thinking makes sure they’re helping me really see.
Here’s the story:
There’s a story often told about Alfred Korzybski, an engineer and the founder of the field of general semantics, which is about the way words work. During a lecture, the story goes, he pulls out a packet of biscuits wrapped in plain white paper. He eats one. He offers them around the room. Students take one. Then another. They’re chewing and nodding.
“Good biscuits, don’t you think?” he asks the students. Then he tears off a cover on the bag. Underneath is the original packaging. There is a picture of a dog’s head. And two words: “Dog Cookies.” Everyone stops chewing. Many immediately spit out what is left in their mouths. Two students ran for the bathroom to throw up.
Korzybski said, “I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.” Nothing about the biscuit changed. Not the flour. Not the crunch. Not the taste. Only the words changed. And the words won.
That’s you and me. We live in the label. We live in the words attached to our daily lives. We navigate with stories we are told and that we tell ourselves. Sometimes they are helpful and sometimes they aren’t. And unfortunately we aren’t even paying attention to them. We just react to them.
Korzybski is most famous for the phrase “the map is not the territory.” You’ve probably heard that line used before. That doesn’t mean maps are worthless. His fuller statement was, “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” He never said maps are worthless. He said they’re useful. But they can mislead us when they’re wrong—or when we mistake them for reality itself.
Maps have to be tested and interpreted against reality. When the map app says there should be a McDonald’s at the corner of such and such streets and it isn’t there, of course nobody stands in an empty lot insisting the restaurant must be there. But what about with the maps that matter? The McDonald’s map gets verified instantly; the “I’m bad with relationships” map, drawn decades ago, has never once been checked.
Along with a thousand other labels and stories like: “I’m not a morning person.” “I’m bad with money.” “That meeting is going to be a disaster.” “They don’t like me.” Those are maps. Some are good. Some were drawn years ago by a scared kid and never updated. You navigate by your map either way. Every day. Every decision. So the question isn’t whether you have a story. You do. The question is whether it’s any good, and whether you remember to check it against the ground.
There’s a saying for this: “When the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain.” Believe the terrain. The conversation you’re dreading might go fine. The person you’ve written off might surprise you. The thing you labeled “dog cookies” might be the best biscuit you’ve ever had. The better story to tell yourself is, “I draw my map from the terrain, then navigate by the new map.”
The story you tell yourself about your life is a map of your life. It isn’t your life. But you’re navigating by it either way — so the only question is whether the map is any good, and whether you remember to check it against the ground.
Tell me a story of a time the label turned out worse than the real thing to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s a story you told yourself that turned out to be wrong?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.
