Montessori Mafia – is a nickname coined for the people like Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean “P.Diddy” Combs. These are well-known people who have been to Montessori. Now, my eleven-year-old nephew also goes to Montessori. His response was, ‘You know, there are lots of other people who graduate from Montessori.’ That one statement puts it in perspective.

Similarly, let’s say you are an inspirational speaker; all your events are jam-packed. At one event, you spot some empty seats – and suddenly you are not a successful speaker. All those previous full house events that you spoke at are out of the window. It does not take a lot for us to switch our views even in the face of glaring evidence.

We all do this – in our personal lives, in professional lives, in small ways, in significant fundamental ways.

Recently, I read the book, ‘Brave New Work’ where he talks about how there was a rigorous process for a factory worker to get gloves because at some point somebody stole a box of gloves. We obsess so much over losing that one box of gloves that we forgot about all the 99% of the time when it worked well. We plan for exceptions, we plan for things not going well – but do not take into account what happens most of the times. For example, in the glove example – we want to penalize all the other workers because one worker decides to swizzle the system.

How much of our own lives do we plan around the one thing that has a tiny probability of happening? We had one bad experience talking to a stakeholder at work, and we prepare ourselves to deal with such situations for eternity. We conveniently forget about a dozen times in the past when we have had no issues. We are trying to protect ourselves – I understand but admit it, it is a distorted view.

It’s like it rained hard when you had a garden party once – so now you wear a raincoat to all the garden parties. Silly, right? But, sometimes that’s how we live our lives too. That one time we had a heartbreak – we let it dictate all our future relationships – in some cases, we take it with us to the grave.

We have to prepare ourselves when things do not go as planned but live our entire lives assuming things are not going to be that way is a little extreme. What can we do about it? If a situation is causing us to worry, then it might worth checking to see if I am planning for the 1% that will rarely happen or the 99% that usually happens. If we focus on 1% that does not go well – since we are focused on it – it becomes our life.

What are you focusing on these days?