| When you are born on the bottom rung and now stand near the top, you ask,“How did I end up here?” When you grow up in trailer parks and now live in a beautiful home, you wonder, “How did I end up here?” When no one in your family went to college and you now teach at one, “How did I end up here?” The typical answer to these questions is “Hard work.” And while true, it is also grossly incomplete. The science behind how we see our own paths is fascinating. We remember our obstacles more than the help we receive. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are more important to us than the facts of them. We have a bias towards the influence of our own actions over the environment in which we were raised and live. But the most important research shows what can happen when we take the time to reflect upon where we truly came from. A guard becomes more humane to the prisoners he oversees. A CEO takes a pay cut to provide fairer wages to her employees. A politician promotes better policy at the expense of his own political future. People say the key to solving our problems is to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. But a more powerful exercise is to realize how we came to walk in our shoes first. |
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