Goldblum Effect
05 March 2021
You were so caught up with whether or not you could you didn’t stop to think about whether you should
This line always stands out to me in Jurassic Park, when it’s spoken by Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum).
I’ve now started to use this as a representation for when the potential of achieving something overwhelms the actual evaluative process of whether it’s worthwhile in the first place.
I think I sometimes slip into this tendency myself, when I become more focused on how I could achieve a particular outcome, I can sometimes become blinded to whether or not the ultimate objective of it is worth it or not.
I remember when coming up with my plan to win the Trivia Grand Final I got pushback from my friend Richard that my plan would actually result in a very strong negative reaction from the rest of the competitors.
I had been so focused on whether or not I would actually be able to win, that I hadn’t even considered other people’s reactions and whether that was reason enough to stop from attempting it. Thankfully, I found a solution, but I most definitely won’t have even considered it without Richard’s insight.
The lesson from this is when your brain gets caught up on figuring out how to do a particular thing, it’s good to include a step in your thinking process to ask yourself, should I be doing this at all?
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