False positives are big problem in research. Sometimes you get a positive result for a test – but it’s false. The ‘positive’ result doesn’t actually mean anything.
And this happens in life all the time. Here are some false positives that I’ve encountered myself:
- I’m making money so I must be successful
- doing this work is taking a long time so it must be important
- I’m finding this really difficult, so I don’t have talent for it
- other people think this is a good idea, so it must be right for me
When you really examine your motives and the assumptions behind them, I bet you’ll find there are a lot of false positives hidden in your life.
It’s a challenging business to dust the cobwebs off your dreams and question what you’ve been doing so far. But it’s worth doing and often the answers you find can be unexpected.
Personally, I’ve found that the big important things, like contentment, family, listening, helping others, they don’t change. Listening to false positives just means that I lose sight of them sometimes.
False positives can send you racing down a rabbit hole in search of things like ’success.’ If you haven’t really defined what this means for you, it’s easy to default to lazy ways of measuring. Like using money as a measure of success. Or hours spent as a measure of productivity.
And this often leads to losing sight of the bigger picture.
Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz said it best:
“If the thing you’re looking for isn’t in your back yard, you probably never lost it anyway”
