Why does a guy as smart as Tiger Woods act as though he has the IQ of a putter? Why is it that so many of us do stupid things that may ruin lives? There are recurring, recognizable errors that lead bright, decent people to make intentional or unintentional mistakes of a lifetime. Knowing those errors can help us all avoid them.
The first error often made is to believe that disaster is what befalls someone else, and never us. For example, hundreds of Americans each year have surgery performed on the wrong body part, but every surgeon thinks he or she will never be the one to make that mistake. The reality is that smart people commonly make catastrophic errors, and all of us live lives full of the potential for personal disaster.
The second error is failure to understand that the path to disaster is paved with small steps of little apparent consequence.
Because it is just one step, no alarm bells go off, no one hits you in the head with a three wood, and there are often no initial repercussions. But one step without consequence often leads to another, and a thousand small steps in a direction that started just a few degrees off course put us way astray, landing us somewhere we never intended to be.
A couple of friendly drinks with an attractive stranger and suddenly we are being divorced for infidelity. A single step ignored on a safety checklist and the wrong donor heart can end up in a transplant patient.
The third error is to think our transgressions will remain secret. For most of us, fear of exposure is a police officer to our conscience, a powerful force reminding us to do the right thing in the mental battles we fight between what’s right and what’s appealing but wrong.
When we think our secret will remain hidden we remove that fear from the equation and the balance of the decision may tip toward the transgression. But there are no secrets in life. A secret is a caged animal wanting to get out, and it almost always gets out, one way or another, one day or another.
That’s especially true if your life is a public one, your mistake breaks a law, or your secret involves another human being. Woods’ indiscretions involved two of those three characteristics, virtually guaranteeing his exposure.
In addition, few of us make catastrophic errors without someone around us seeing it happen. Some of Woods’ associates knew he was playing around, with women and with fire.
Health care is replete with stories of physicians and nurses making deadly errors that colleagues around them thought might be a mistake but did not stop. In fact, most personal disasters came at the end of paths strewn with obvious opportunities for someone involved to prevent them.
That involves two additional errors. First, we often ignore warnings from those around us that we are headed for disaster. Second, we forget that people around us — even people deeply committed to our best interests — often cannot or will not save us from ourselves.
Finally, we forget that primal energies impair our thinking in the heat of the moment. Our higher cognitive functions — judgment, conscience, reason, etc. — often keep us out of trouble when in control, but don’t work well when we are distracted by fear, anger, lust, desperation, greed and other emotions. That makes us dumber in the moment and smarter in retrospect, which is why most of us who screw up wish we had a do-over.
Tiger Woods’ painful lessons can be painless for us to learn. None of us is too smart or successful to mess up big time. Big disasters almost always start with small mistakes and can happen in a heartbeat to us all. Nothing remains secret forever.
Surround yourself with friends who care enough to try to stop you from screwing up, and pull the ego out of your ears so you can hear it when they try. Engage the best parts of your brain before you make decisions; lower body parts don’t think as well.
You’ve been an idiot, Tiger. The rest of us could be, too.
Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region. He is also the interim CEO at Blue Hill Memorial Hospital.