Are you too attached to your ideas?

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Anais Nin
1903 – 1977

Do you get too attached to your ideas? Are you too invested in the way you think things should work? Do you believe you can be objective about your own plans?

Before we get too deep in a discussion of these questions, let me share a famous experiment that researchers conducted using a unique lottery. Half of the study’s participants were assigned ticket numbers, while the other half were allowed to select their own numbers. Just before the drawing, the researchers offered to buy back the tickets from all the participants.

How do you think the people who chose their own numbers priced their tickets?

Given that the lottery is a random drawing, most people would say that all the tickets should have the same value: there should be little or no difference between the value of a ticket with assigned numbers and one where the participant selected their numbers. But that’s not what happened.

In fact, the outcome was truly astounding. The experiment was carried out many times and the results were always the same: those people who chose their own numbers demanded at least five times more to sell back their tickets.

What does this mean? It’s pretty straightforward. When we take ownership of an idea, project, or item, we value it very highly — as much as five times higher.

How does this apply to life? When we want an employee, friend or family member to embrace some activity, we need to position it so that they share ownership of the idea. It’s only by taking ownership that they become fully engaged and assign the highest value to that activity.

If you struggle with getting others to do what you want, make sure you give them direction (a vision) and not directions. We can buy into a vision, but we all dislike following orders. We want to feel we have some sense of control, and taking directions means someone else is in control.

There’s a downside to ownership as well: we need to be careful about becoming too invested in our ideas. It’s very easy to become seduced by the brilliance of our own concepts. We cannot possibly look at our own ideas objectively.

Be very careful about your own ideas and plans. It’s too easy to fall into the lottery ticket trap, assigning a higher value than your ideas are really worth.

Credit you give yourself is not worth having.
Irving Thalberg
1899 – 1936

Copyright © 2018 John Chancellor