What If Your Default Response Is Wrong?

Compound Emotion

Weekly essays on money, time, energy, and the decisions that compound over time.

Most weeks, I write about one idea that’s been on my mind. This week, three unrelated ideas kept coming back. One was about asking for what you want, another about finding information other people overlook, and the third about knowing when to stop pushing.

At first, I didn’t see much connection between them. Then I realized all three were challenging the same thing: our tendency to follow our default response without questioning whether it still makes sense.

I recently read an observation about why so many people never ask for what they really want. As long as you don’t ask for the raise, the introduction, the opportunity, or the meeting, you can continue believing you might have gotten it. Asking changes that because someone can actually say no.

There’s a strange comfort in uncertainty. If I never ask, I can tell myself I was underpaid without discovering what my employer actually thinks I’m worth, or assume someone wouldn’t take my meeting without giving them the chance to decide. The story remains intact because it has never been tested.

I’ve experienced this in my own life. Some of the conversations and opportunities I’ve valued most began with an ask that felt uncomfortable at the time. The answer wasn’t always yes, but I’ve learned that rejection is often less costly than the uncertainty we create around it.

Asking also has a practical side: a good ask should make sense from the other person’s perspective. What is in it for them, and why should they care? The clearer and more specific the request, the less work we’re asking the other person to do for us.

Maybe the courage isn’t in getting a yes. It’s in being willing to hear no.

I recently listened to a conversation with investor Chris Camillo about what he calls social arbitrage. The basic idea is to spot changes in consumer behavior, culture, and communities before they’re fully reflected in conventional financial information. What interested me wasn’t any particular trade, but the broader idea of information asymmetry.

Most of us respond to competition by trying to know more about the same things everyone else is studying. Investors read the same earnings reports, professionals follow the same industry news, and writers watch the same trends. But sometimes the advantage isn’t knowing more; it’s noticing something different.

A conversation with a customer may reveal something that doesn’t appear in a spreadsheet. A subtle change in how people behave may matter before it becomes measurable. Someone outside an industry can occasionally see something insiders have stopped noticing because it has become normal to them.

I’ve spent much of my career working with numbers, and I still believe deeply in data. But data often records what has already happened, while some of the most interesting signals begin as observations before they become datasets.

Perhaps part of having an edge is maintaining enough curiosity to notice what everyone else has learned to ignore.

A few weeks ago, I came across a quote from Anne Lamott that Tim Ferriss had shared:

I wrote recently about recovery, so I won’t repeat that argument here. But another part of the idea has stayed with me: when something isn’t working, our default response is often more. If the work isn’t progressing, work longer; if the answer isn’t clear, think harder; if growth slows, add another project, meeting, or commitment.

Sometimes more works. Other times, it makes the problem worse. I’ve noticed this most clearly when I’m writing: there comes a point when another thirty minutes staring at the same paragraph doesn’t improve it, and walking away often accomplishes what another hour at the desk couldn’t.

Ambitious people spend a lot of time learning how to push. We spend less time learning when pushing has stopped producing a return. Maybe stopping isn’t always the opposite of effort. Sometimes it’s what allows effort to become useful again.

I’ve been wondering why these three ideas stayed with me. One is about asking, one about noticing, and one about stopping. But all three challenge a default response: ask instead of assuming, look somewhere different instead of automatically following the crowd, and stop instead of automatically pushing harder.

We build routines because they make life easier. We develop patterns for making decisions, solving problems, and responding to uncertainty, and most of the time those patterns serve us well. The difficulty is that a useful pattern can quietly become automatic.

Perhaps that’s why seemingly simple ideas can occasionally change how we see something. They don’t necessarily give us a new answer. Sometimes they simply interrupt an answer we’ve been giving for so long that we stopped realizing it was a choice.

Lately, I’ve been trying to notice those moments a little more carefully. Not because every default needs to be changed, but because occasionally it’s worth asking whether the response that comes most naturally is still the one that serves us best.

P.S. Which of these three ideas resonates most with you—asking, noticing, or stopping? Just hit reply. I’d be interested to hear why.

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See you next Tuesday.

Bill