Here’re some loops for your consideration. They may be a bit simplistic, but they can be pretty useful, especially if you’re clueless about things, like me when I was younger.

I used to think that cool people never make any social mistakes. They seem to always say and do the right thing flawlessly in every imaginable social situation. That assumption turned out to be wrong. The fact is: what makes a person cool is not that he never makes mistakes; what makes him cool is that he never makes fun of people who make social mistakes in front of him. This makes a lot of people like him so much, and this likability makes him cool. And as we know it, people don’t make fun of people they like or perceive to be cool. So, even when he (the cool person) makes mistakes, others won’t make fun of him, and so he didn’t seem to be making any mistakes. This makes clueless people, like me, think that cool people never make any social mistakes.

I used to think that players never get rejected or friend-zoned. Here, I define player as a person who can navigate the dating game skillfully, not the one who plays with women trust.. I turned out to be wrong. They get rejections, too. However, when they get rejected, they don’t make a fuss out of it. They just accept it and move on to the next girl until they find one (or some) who receives them well. Plus, they minimize their time and effort with girls who are not that interested in them, and maximize their time and effort with girls who are interested in them. This different allocation of time and effort makes it so that they are always with a girl (or girls) who like them, and the girls who don’t like them just don’t exist in their life. This makes clueless people, like me, think that players never get rejected or friend-zoned.

I used to think that the experts never make any mistakes in their professions. I also turned out to be wrong. Yes, they make fewer mistakes than amateurs but they make mistakes nevertheless. However, when they do make mistakes they either correct it quickly (like mathematicians who can see errors in their paper and correct them before they publish it), ignore it and keep on going (like musicians do when they hit the wrong notes in their performance), or shift the blame to another person (I’m not going to call out any profession here ^_^). This makes clueless people, like me, think that experts never make any mistakes in their profession.

Now the question is this: what other examples of this loop do I miss? Well, I can’t answer it, since I don’t know what I don’t know. However, I know of a good guideline that I can use to answer it: whenever I think that one type of person is perfect and never makes any mistakes, I’m probably wrong.