Our Filters and Biases

My earliest memory is of an old house and garden and a horrible face which scared me no end. In later years I was told that it related to my grandfathers house and someone scaring me with a mask. I was all of 2 and half years old, yet the memory lingers more than half a century later. It obviously is lodged somewhere deep and must have had some deleterious effect on my life.

Our filters based on events, shape our mind and our lives. This is so important; just imagine a psychotic becoming President of the US or China. In this blog, I recall few events which effected me and created some of my biases and filters.

Around the age of six, the only good chocbar in the city, was at the airport. Once a month my father would drive me down there. On this particular day, I was sitting sampling my choc, when a couple of yards away, a bedraggled kid, (maybe same age) stood up and stared at me. The look has remained with me these decades. It caused guilt of course, but it changed my thinking. I have forever leant left of centre and put it down to that stare and those few seconds. For me every human has rights to the same thing which I get and it is a travesty that I get to live comfortably, while many cannot put food on their table. Inequality is anathema and in a utopian world would not exist.

Some years later, an employee of my father made an error and was to be told off. In expectation of this I waited around, but my father sent me off, much to my disappointment. Later, my father reprimanded me for hanging around and said each person has their self respect, never take that away from them. Tell people off in private. It struck home and I have tried to keep peoples self esteem intact. There have been failures, but generally over an error prone life, I have managed to maintain that discipline.      

When I resigned from Pepsi and came back to Karachi, I rang up Avis asking them for a car rental. They flatly refused, as I was now a private individual, while in the past, they were giving me cars as CEO of Pepsi. It was a sharp lesson learned, about this world. Indeed, in this last decade since that event, I have not been surprised by human behaviour again. I hasten to add that there are colleagues, friends and relatives who have not been affected by the ups and downs of my career and those are of course real friends.

One of the big influencers are bosses. In life one will meet positive and negative people. Positive bosses will never stop you doing good work. While negative generally are restrictive and cramp ones abilities. The boss who has had the most influence on my life, treated me like a younger brother and taught me a lot about human management. Today most of my style of team building and close association with colleagues comes from him. It is now so in built in my personality, that I doubt if I could manage in a distant and unemotional style.

The most important of lessons I have learned is about our ego, the worst of destroyers. Its so not required in life and yet almost all our problems stem from this. Ego degrades a human, leads to delusion about oneself, makes one treat people badly and leads to sub optimal decisions. One striking event I would like to relate.

A certain very senior bureaucrat, after retirement was on a plane trip and I saw him seated in the Economy class. He was obviously uncomfortable and tried to be as unnoticeable as possible. This was confirmed when the plane landed. It was in the pre-landing tube days. He sneaked off quietly and made his exit through the Business Class, his whole movement surreptitious and scared. Scared of what? scared that someone formerly of minister level, in his retirement days would fly economy class and be seen by others. Obviously well below his self esteem. Extremely tragic and I remember feeling distraught about this for days on end.    

There are so many lessons learned in life. Every individual gathers these experiences and ends up a unique personality. All shaped by these filters and biases.