A friend of mine — let’s call him Rajesh — is slightly overweight. Rajesh has been exercising daily for the past 5 years. He hits the gym regularly. He goes for his morning run daily. He believes he eats healthy as well.

According to Rajesh, he’s getting healthy slowly. It’ll take time — can’t be done in a day after all. One doesn’t get abs just like that, he says. He deliberately avoids any sort of feedback that doesn’t appreciate his efforts. Maybe he doesn’t do any proper exercise at the gym. Maybe he doesn’t eat right. Maybe he doesn’t really run more than a minute. But he isn’t ready to listen to any of that.

In his little bubble he has convinced himself that all is well and he is in the right path. After all, the dietician or his trainer can’t know about his body more than him — why hire them! All negative feedback is noise to him.

When I had left my job to start my own venture with a friend a couple of years back, it was exciting in the beginning, but all wasn’t so well later. I didn’t have an engaging product, and business wasn’t growing. I didn’t have any money to sustain the next 6 months. Things were actually bad.

Everybody except I knew that. If somebody tried to tell me, I always had some kind of explanation. This market is tough to crack. It’s a new thing we are doing — things are bound to get bad. All startups go through the valley — the night is the darkest before the dawn, etc.

All were plausible explanations, and none of them were wrong — at least to me. I most likely believed all of them. But it didn’t change the fact that things were getting out of my hand, and I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge them. I was just fooling myself.

Both the above are examples of The Ostrich Effect.

People who are worried they have fallen off track don’t want to know how they’re doing.

Want articles delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to the newsletter here.