Rome Wasn't Built in a Day

Several years ago, my neighbor took his and my dog for a run in the area. Twenty minutes after they had left, my family was surprised to find my dog scratching at our front door, sans neighbor or neighbor's dog. Puzzled, we brought her inside and went on with our lives. It was ninety minutes later that our very distraught neighbor came knocking on our door. I....I...I lost Pepper. I looked away for a second and she must have broken free. I am so... We cut him off and reveled in the advanced intuition of our then one-year-old puppy. My dog had found her way home, probably using her keen sense of smell.

My dog and I do not share this characteristic. Though I have a pretty competitive sense of smell, I am miserably lacking in the navigation department. Map or no map, I'm pretty much always at a loss. Let's just say the sound of an automated voice repeating the phrase, "Recalculating route," is not at all foreign to me. So naturally, driving somewhere for the first (second, third, and fourth) time is well, an ordeal for me.

This past Tuesday, rather than travel my usual eleven-mile (and forty-minute, thank you Bay Area traffic) route to work, I drove about sixty miles to a firm through which my company was doing a bit of research work. I bring up the sixty miles because this distance leaves pretty good opportunity for a person like me to get lost (though, luckily, I didn't). With worrying about directions, being on time, and morning traffic, the drive felt exceptionally long and obstacle-laden. But when I reached the parking lot at 9AM, I commented to a coworker (and had myself convinced) that it was an easy drive.

I distinctly remember a moment in the fifth grade when I was lying in bed thinking about college. No, not because Amy Chua came over and told me I was garbage, but because my friend had an older sister in college. My thoughts were interrupted by a paralyzing fear of what "college" entailed. Scary tests. Essays longer than five paragraphs. I mean to start out, I only knew of two colleges at the time: Berkeley and Stanford. What happens if I don't get into either? I just don't go to college?

Good news, this past May, I graduated from college (though it wasn't Berkeley or Stanford...sorry, fifth-grade Ro!). Much to my mother's dismay, I denied her the opportunity to throw me a huge blowout college graduation party. For some reason, I didn't feel like college graduation was that big a deal. What, during the course of the four years, had felt like an impossible course or the end of the world, seemed pretty casual in hindsight. Here on the other side, I think of courses like Game Theory and Cognitive Neuroscience or experiences like my senior thesis as breezy. I did it, so it must have been manageable.

A popular psychological phenomenon, hindsight bias refers to our tendency to see events that have already occurred as more predictable than we saw them before they occurred. Kind of how after graduating college, I'll never feel about college the way I did in the fifth grade.

Hindsight bias was a common topic in my Psychology courses through the years, but recently, I've been thinking about whether the bias has any implications on the appraisal on our own accomplishments. I wonder if when we reach certain milestones, we shirk them as "no big deal," because in hindsight, that's how we feel about them. Continually working towards some intangible, undefined "real deal" with no recognition of landmarks along the way. I can name countless examples in my own life. It certainly can't be healthy. Most of us enjoy congratulating others, but we overlook the fact that recognizing our own accomplishments (in some way or another) is just as important as recognizing those of others. Celebrating yourself is not always egotistical and self-aggrandizing. It's only when the behavior becomes extreme, as with too much of anything.

Could this mean we are just doomed to ignore our own achievements? My commute has given me a lot of thinking time, and I've reached a personal conclusion that no, we are not doomed, thanks to technology. Specifically, the social networking revolution. It's reworking the way we treat our own accomplishments. While critics of the movement blame Facebook and Twitter for encouraging shameless self-promotions and attention-seeking to make us the most narcissistic generation yet, I believe the revolution is helping us to share our accomplishments in a healthy manner (and I'm curious to hear how other millenials feel). Because our occasional self-promoting status updates are deserving of the support and "Likes" of our friends and community. Because our occasional self-promoting status updates are buried by our abundant "liking" of our friends' accomplishments and general promotions of others (that we know or don't know). It's a fine balance that most of my friends, at least, seem to have accomplished. It's building a team-oriented, supportive community based on sharing.

Of course, there's always going to be the person who overdoes the self-aggrandizement on Facebook. But chances are, he or she does it in person too. Facebook is not your second personality. It's an extension of your first.

I fully recognize that things could get out of hand. We could become an each-man-for-himself world where we truly care about no one but ourselves. But most of us are so far from this mindset that it's going to be pretty long first-drive (and I don't need a GPS to tell me that).

I encourage each one of you to share your accomplishments, no matter how seemingly minor they are to you. Your friends don't have to congratulate you the way your parents do. But they want to. So give them the opportunity once in a while because you know that in the end, you would want to turn around and do the same for them. And as long as we can maintain this healthy balance, I see no reason to recalculate route.