Spock Said "Impossible"... It Happened 83% of the Time...

Mr. Spock is the most logical character in television history. He's also wrong a lot.

Julia Galef went back through Star Trek and tracked the predictions Spock made. When Spock called something "impossible," it happened 83% of the time (Galef, 2021). The more confident he was, the more likely he was to miss. Galef calls Spock a "Straw Vulcan," Hollywood's version of logic, which isn't how good thinking actually works.

I often talk about how Vulcans couldn't exist because emotion and rationalization are almost always in front of logic. I WANT something, so I come up with the "logical" reasons to justify/rationalize it.

School owners do this all the time (and yes, I've done it too).

Thinking takes you down a "logical path." Every step makes sense. Then emotion moves the path in the direction of your anxiety or fear, to one end point... the one you were already worried about. The data and reality may be completely different.

The smarter you are, the worse this is.

Read this and find out why and what to do about it.

The logical path

A logical path is a chain of reasoning where every step sounds right, but nobody checked the end point against real numbers.

An owner on a recent coaching call described a street fair, and the logical path behind it goes something like this: "Parents at the fair are busy. Busy people don't want to commit on the spot. If they say they have to check their calendar, they're not that interested. If they're not interested, chasing the appointment wastes time. Next person."

Five steps, and each one sounds reasonable... but the end point is wrong.

He had a great event with over 100 leads and about half of them set an appointment. The other half got a promise of a phone call, and most of those never booked. Here's what I told him: "There's this assumption... that if you ask them for the appointment and they say, oh, I got to check my calendar... that that's a lower quality person. Like they're not as interested. I think that's a complete falsehood."

Think about where those parents were. They walked over so their kid could spin a prize wheel. They weren't calling you to set up lessons. Of course, their first reaction is "I don't know." That's a normal reaction at a fair, not a sign they aren't interested or not a good candidate. It's a sign that they weren't prepared to decide, so we have to help them.

The busiest parents are often your best prospects. Two working professionals with a crazy schedule have the hardest time picking a time on the spot, and they're often the families who can afford your program and stay through Black Belt.

The target at a live event is 90 to 95% of families leaving with an appointment.

DON'T say: "Okay, no problem, we'll give you a call."

SAY: "That's okay. We get really booked up. Let's pencil in a tentative time and you can get back to us if it doesn't work. I have Monday at 5 or 7 available. Which one's better for you?"

Fear picks the direction

Why does the path always end at the scary place?

Psychologists call it motivated reasoning. Ziva Kunda's review found that people reach the conclusions they're motivated to reach, then build a justification that seems reasonable to them (Kunda, 1990). While it's happening it doesn't feel like bias, it feels like being thorough.

Anxiety is an emotional response to the expectation of a threat. For a school owner the threat is usually rejection, an upset parent, a bad review or a lost enrollment. Your brain builds the logical path toward whatever avoids that threat, and it calls the result "being careful" or worse "I'm just being smart."

We're also bad at predicting how things will go. Research on affective forecasting shows people overestimate how strong a bad outcome will feel and how long the feeling will last (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). The parent who might say no feels huge in your head, and in real life it's usually a short conversation.

How often is the worry right? One study had people in treatment for anxiety write down their worries and then track what actually happened. 91.4% of the worries didn't come true, and the most common result per person was 100% (LaFreniere & Newman, 2020). The people who saw the most evidence that their worries were wrong also improved the most.

My own version: when we added the mailing address to our live event forms and our phone script, I expected a lot of people to refuse. "And then boom, 95% you'll get mailing addresses. I thought it was going to be lower when we started."

I was smart enough to build a reason why parents would protect their address. I was wrong! Anyone can look up a home address in 30 seconds, and parents don't mind getting information in the mail.

What the data said

All of these came up on a single coaching call, and each one had a logical path behind it.

What about price? Same thing, and it costs owners the most money.

Most owners worry a price increase will cut enrollments. The data we see usually goes the other way (parents often read a higher price as higher quality). Run the worst case anyway. If you went from $197 to $397 a month and lost half your enrollments (which is very unlikely), your revenue stays the same with half the students to serve. Lose a third and you're making about 34% more.

Then there's the renewal panic. An owner in a high-income area raised his renewal price a lot. A few months later he was in a panic: "Everybody's not renewing because of the price." We pulled his numbers for the quarter before the change and the quarter after. His closing ratio had improved by 20%, and his renewals were up even MORE. He was following the feeling, and the data said the opposite.

The smarter you are makes it worse

In one study, people solved the same math problem about a table of data. When the table was about a skin cream, the people best with numbers got it right the most. When the identical table was about a hot-button political issue, the people best with numbers were the most likely to get the answer that fit what they already believed (Kahan et al., 2017).

Another set of studies looked at the bias blind spot, which is seeing bias in other people but not in yourself. Higher cognitive ability didn't shrink it, and if anything, smarter people had a larger blind spot (West et al., 2012).

A smart school owner (and if you're reading this I can confidently say you're smart!) can often build a better argument for what they're afraid of (and then they believe it more).

I remember a specific owner who wasn't very analytical (I am being polite… he wasn't very bright). When we told him to raise his price, he raised the price. He didn't build a case for why his town was different. He just did it, and it worked.

Meanwhile, some of the smartest owners I know can spend months explaining why their market, their parents, their area or their style won't respond to something that works almost everywhere. All that thinking feels like work, but it is not producing any enrollments or other results.

If you've done this, you are not a bad owner. Smart, careful people do this when they're worried, and the fix is real numbers (also see my article Gretzky Couldn't Do It Either... on the related mistake of believing you're smart enough to invent your own business systems).

What to do about it

Our goal is to replace the logical path with a number.

• ☐Write down the prediction. "If I ask for the mailing address, people will say no." Once it's on paper, you can see it's a prediction and not a fact.
• ☐Ask what data you have. If the answer is "none," you're following a feeling.
• ☐Run a small test. One event or the next 20 families. Use the script exactly as written (we get a lot of "oh I did it exactly like you said!" and when we check it was nothing like we said… so we mean exactly!).
• ☐Track the outcome. Count what happened, not what you remember happening. Tracking is what helped the worriers in the study above.
• ☐Ask someone who has done it. Don't ask another owner who has the same worry. Ask a mentor who's run the test hundreds of times.

Gregg Hurwitz put it this way: "Maturity is graduating from the belief that the world misunderstands you to the awareness that you misunderstand the world." I love that quote!

Summary

Pick one prediction you've been making about your parents this month. Test it on the next 20 families and count the results. In the worry study, 91.4% of the worries didn't come true (yours may be different of course)... count yours and find out!

References