We Act Before We Understand

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You act before you understand. That’s not a bug. It’s how your mind saves energy and keeps you moving.

This idea was inspired by Rob Henderson’s essay “We Act Before We Understand”, which explores how most of our actions emerge from ancient, unconscious systems long before we can explain them.

Most of what works in your life runs on automation. Birds sing, spiders weave, and you... reply with a certain tone in meetings, buy things that signal status, get angry when you feel slighted, blush when you mess up, and make choices you can’t fully explain. Conscious thought is slow and costly. So your brain pushes most behavior into the background. It learns patterns, stores them, then fires them when needed.

Two lenses help here. The proximate lens explains the immediate reason for a behavior. “I ate because I felt hungry.” The ultimate lens explains why that feeling exists at all. “Hunger evolved to keep me alive.” Both can be true. Day to day, we live in the proximate world. But if you want more leverage, you need to respect the ultimate one. Your mind pushes you toward behaviors that likely improved status, safety, or connection in the past... even if you can’t articulate it.

Emotions work like fast programs. Anger says, “Treat me better.” Blushing says, “I know I messed up.” Crying says, “I need help.” These signals land because they are hard to fake and mostly involuntary. You don’t plan them. They run you, then you backfill a story.

Self-deception also shows up. If you believed every hidden motive about yourself, you’d leak it through your face, voice, and timing. That would hurt your chances in groups. So the mind hides some truths from you. It keeps you functional and persuasive. This is uncomfortable, but it’s real.

There’s good news. You can partner with your unconscious instead of fighting it.

• Train it. Practice moves from effort to automatic. Like riding a bike, at first you overthink. Then it clicks. Reps rewrite default behavior.

• Prime it. What you feed your mind becomes raw material for “overnight work.” When you saturate your attention with a real problem, solutions surface later in the shower or on a walk.

• Protect it. If your day is full of doom-scrolling and hot takes, your mind will produce clever dunks, not deep answers. Your output follows your inputs.

The goal isn’t to drag every motive into the light. The goal is to notice patterns, shape the environment, and judge actions by results. You don’t need a perfect story about why a habit works for it to work. You need clear conditions that make the right action easy and likely.

Identity shift starts here:

Accept that the hidden part of your mind is powerful.

Then design for it.

Put the behaviors you want on rails.

Starve the ones you don’t.

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