You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can’t predict the weather.

— Outkast, Ms. Jackson (2000)

The operative word in the title is plan. Don’t do a heist. 

If you need further persuading, watch the ending of Dog Day Afternoon. Besides, you can get much more money from bankers if you give them a colorful PowerPoint presentation.

A famous joke by the (former?) comedian Dane Cook begins: What a guy wants most — even more than sex — is to be in a heist.

This thought has hung around in my mind for over a decade, but for a different reason than the one implied by the joke. It is actually a useful metaphor for three things:

  • Trust
  • Temperament
  • Systems thinking

Let’s call this the Heist Heuristic. (Your imagination can determine the details of your custom heist scenario).

1. Trust

We like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes we end up giving them too much credit.

You can figure out the most trustworthy people in your life by asking, “If I just pulled off a heist, who would keep it a secret?”

Or, if you are interviewing someone, think to yourself, “Would I trust this person to _____?”

Fill in the blank with the job description, but assume that the job is their role in a heist scenario with you and if they mess it up, you spend the next 10-15 years in prison.

This started out as a joke, but over the years I have noticed the clarity this deceptively simple question can provide.

2. Temperament

Remaining calm under pressure is, in my mind, one of the ultimate human qualities, because of what it entails, including the preparation required, worldly benefits over time, and the pure authenticity of it.

Many things can be faked, but temperament — like wit — is not one of them.

In the financial markets, it has been said that temperament is more important than IQ.

If you have what it takes to stay calm in a heist, you most likely have what it takes to remain rational in stressful situations (e.g. deciding to hold a position while you are losing amounts of money that nearly make you throw up or while patiently watching others make money faster than you).

In more prosaic affairs, maybe you will calmly talk through disagreements instead of throwing plates? Now, planning a heist alone won’t make you calm. In fact, beyond having a natural disposition, experience in high-stress situations is usually the primary way to develop this trait, but the more you have thought through potential outcomes in a scenario, they are by definition less likely to surprise you, allowing you to maintain composure.

Plus, the world will often find a way to put you in such situations, giving you plenty of practice for increasingly stressful situations in the future. If you never have to use this developed skill, even better.

We will revisit temperament in future posts, especially once we introduce poker as a mental model.

3. Systems Thinking & Complex Adaptive Systems (“CAS”)

System: An organized entity made up of interrelated and interdependent parts

When I first heard the term “Complex Adaptive Systems” I thought a special kind of pretension was required to come up with something that douchey.

But, like many things seemingly esoteric, once you understand it, you can never go back. Nor would you want to.

This one takes a little more explaining, so you will have an opportunity to use your patience from the temperament section.

Initially, I planned on writing a separate essay on Systems Thinking, but Donella Meadows does such a good job in her book Systems Thinking: A Primer, that I would essentially be paraphrasing all of her thoughts without adding much value.

If you incorporate the lessons from her book I guarantee your understanding of the world and decision making will improve. Here, I will simply introduce the concept as a reference for future conversations about CAS and explain why a heist is a convenient metaphor for situations we face.

The idea underlying systems thinking is that there are a lot of factors to consider for any given situation and, with complex adaptive systems, they interact and change.

The reason this is important is because humans are necessarily reductionists and want things to be framed in the simplest terms (yes or no, good or bad, Mayweather or McGregor, and so on). Unfortunately, the world generally resists this simplification.

As soon as we say something like “Real estate prices always go up!” everyone adapts to this premise by bidding up real estate values and next thing you know it’s 2008 and home prices collapse like a European soccer player after getting grazed by an opponent.

The [people, in this case] adapting part is what makes it complex instead of complicated.

Let’s pause for a moment to make sure we’re together with the definitions in this context. Getting gasoline to make your car move is complicated, but it’s not complex. The gasoline doesn’t figure out that it’s about to be lit on fire to sacrifice itself for the greater good of your engine, then adapt by teaming up with the other gasoline molecules and finding a way out of your tank (wild if it did though right?). 

Complicated processes follow a set of (generally) unchanging rules — difficult to learn, but reliable once learned. A football team is complex because the players and coaches have personalities and the way those personalities interact and evolve is inherently unpredictable. We are watching that play out right now with Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Robert Kraft.

Many systems take a long time for the symptoms to show up (like the negative ones of the financial crisis or the the positive ones of worldwide internet access), but in a heist the timing is accelerated and the stakes are amplified.

This forces intellectual humility because as soon as we starting thinking through our plan, we realize how many factors are involved and how their interactions can drastically change the outcome. Even the simplest (most boring) of heist strategies, a note handed to a bank teller with the instructions “Put the money in the bag” could result in a wide range of outcomes depending on the teller’s mood, whether someone else notices it, and if so, is that someone a cop, and on and on we go.

The consequences have consequences.

Next, and equally important, is the idea of feedback loops.

Since the heist metaphor has served our purposes so far, let’s keep using it.

In the movies (my favorite being The Thomas Crown Affair, followed closely by Bandits), the robbers usually use one particular feedback loop to their advantage: the spread of fear.

This is an example of a positive feedback loop, where one person being afraid makes it more likely that someone else panics, which then means it’s even more likely the third person will get scared (a more tame case being more people use Instagram because more people use Instagram).

From here, they can take advantage of a negative feedback loop. The classic example for a negative feedback loop is a thermostat keeping your home a certain temperature, but that example is boring, so we’re going to pick up right where we left off.

Like any other working professional, random people screaming in our ear prevents us from doing good work, so after an intimidating shotgun blast through the ceiling, the hostages have gone from freaking out to being paralyzed by fear. Now we need them to stay quiet. Any time one of them opens their mouth, they are carted off to another room, never to be seen from again.

This promotes stability, which is exactly what we want given that there are so many other things that could go wrong.

Returning to positive feedback loops, be mindful they can go in both directions, which may sound counter-intuitive. Suppose a college — let’s pick a random one like Penn State — had a head coach that let another coach touch boys.

When people find this out, they stop wanting to play football there. The team gets worse and now even fewer people want to come play football there because no one wants to play with a bunch of losers and pedophiles (positive feedback loop to the downside). Positive feedback loops: instability (or big returns), negative feedback loops: stability.

There is much more, but as I said, I simply wanted to get you thinking about the topic if you don’t already.

While there’s still no way around sounding like a pretentious douche when saying it, adding this framework to your mental toolkit will probably be beneficial in your life, although it is impossible to say exactly how. You will start noticing complex adaptive systems and feedback loops everywhere, which will likely inform your understanding of situations you’re in and how to appropriately respond. Your curiosity from there will carry you the rest of the way.

Now, I don’t want to walk by a television in a few weeks and see there has been a 20% increase in heist activity. But what would be great is the next time you saw an armored truck, you thought about who you can trust, your ability to manage your mood, and the complexity surrounding us.

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