Entrepreneurial Mindset: Ditching Logical Fallacies

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both personal and professional life, especially for entrepreneurs or business owners who make numerous decisions quickly every day without time for deep reflection. Whether knowingly or not, we often fall into irrational fallacies that influence our decision-making. The more we let these patterns take the lead, the stronger the neural pathways in our brains become, turning distorted vision into habit. Thus, it's better to be aware of such cognitive biases to spot and avoid them. This way, we can improve our decision-making quality, make more informed choices, and get better results at work and beyond. Here's a list of the most common negative thinking patterns and how to avoid them:

1. Mental Filtering

Mental filtering happens when you focus only on negatives and ignore positives. For example, imagine you had a fantastic month in your business and increased revenue beyond your target, but failed to reach another KPI related to human resources. If you focus only on this negative aspect and forget the rest of your success, you're engaging in mental filtering.

2. Jumping to Conclusions

Coming to a final judgment without proper analysis or deciding too quickly what you think about people can be defined as jumping to conclusions. Of course, people will build impressions over time, but the point is not letting early opinions dominate signs given later.

3. Labeling Yourself and Others

Like jumping to conclusions, if you label yourself or others based on a single behavior, you might be making a wrong assumption. Let's say the person you recently hired was 15 minutes late on their second day of work, and you immediately label them an unpunctual person. But in fact, that was only the second time you've seen them, and they were on time on the first day, so the chances they're indeed unpunctual is 50%. Thus, labeling doesn't logically make sense because there's limited data to decide.

4. Overgeneralizing

"This approach didn't work on this project; it will never work."

Another cognitive distortion, overgeneralizing, happens when you see a single event as an invariable conclusion.

5. Using "Should" Statements

Phrases that include the words should, ought, or must may lead to unreasonable demands from yourself. When you're unable to meet those expectations, you might feel pressured and stressed. Moreover, this attitude may cause more severe issues like depression or other mental disturbances when done habitually. It's better to avoid such statements for a more peaceful state of mind.

6. Control Fallacies

In life, there are things we can and can't control. If you believe you can dictate all the events happening to you, you'll eliminate the impact of external conditions. Unfortunately, some external circumstances are simply out of your reach, and the best gift you could give yourself is to gain the ability to distinguish between the things you can and can't command.

7. Emotional Reasoning

Emotional reasoning can be defined as believing something based only on what you feel without a rational basis. For example, you might feel stressed about business expansion plans and think at the back of your mind that you'll never hit your targets.

8. Sunk Cost Fallacy

Another typical negative thinking pattern is the sunk cost fallacy — the inability to quit a commitment due to the enormous time or money invested. Whether it's a destructive relationship or a business venture you started long ago, despite being sure there's no merit to continue, you just can't quit because you don't want to waste the efforts made so far.

9. Catastrophizing or Minimization

When you exaggerate problems and make a mountain out of a molehill, you catastrophize. Similarly, when you don't give due credit to personal achievement or a positive outcome, you minimize it. Both are irrational tendencies and hold you back from seeing reality.

10. Black and White Thinking

Despite the thousands of shades of grey, you can't help but think in black and white. When you look at things in absolutes like either completely good or evil, new or old, weak or strong, etc., you miss the variations between such adjectives. The nature of life is rarely in absolutes but more complex and changing.

A higher awareness of your thought patterns will give you the chance to change them in the shape you wish. When you can notice what you think and why you believe in that way, you'll have better control over your mind. It feels very empowering when you save yourself from negative thinking patterns.