A friend once relayed a simple but powerful piece of wisdom:

people make decisions irrationally and explain them rationally.

We forget this all the time. We get confused or frustrated when someone makes a choice that doesn’t make sense to us — when a company fires an all-star, when a colleague leaves a project right before launch, when an executive torpedoes a good idea.

But what looks irrational on the surface often hides other incentives. A new executive might fire a team that’s performing fine, not because of performance, but because they want to bring in their own colleagues. It’s not about the numbers; it’s about trust, comfort, setting themselves up for success.

Sometimes it’s even smaller: someone chooses a worse product because they don’t want the work of switching. Or because they don’t like the salesperson — not because of anything you did, but because you remind them of their uncle they never got along with. That’s not rational in the narrow sense, but it makes sense within their frame.

We are not machines. We are human.

And being human entails emotion, desire, bias, self-interest. None of that has to be exorcised. In fact, it can be acknowledged and harnessed. Ideally, we learn to ride the horse of our emotions without being thrown by them. But not everyone is striving for that ideal, and it’s unreasonable to expect that they will.

This is where our work lies — in careers, in sales, in music, in politics. Rarely will incentives be spelled out plainly. Rarely will the “real” reasons for a decision be written in obvious language. There’s a decoding process, like reading hieroglyphics, where you have to tune your antenna to what’s actually going on.

So here’s the invitation:

When you feel that frustration rising — why would they do that? it’s obviously wrong! — pause. Remember that decisions aren’t always made on the clean lines of logic. The rational explanation you hear may just be the cover story.

Your job is to read beneath it.

To understand that the jungle is thick with hidden incentives, emotional pulls, and unspoken preferences. To see that awareness not as cynicism but as equipment — the gear you need to navigate the nuance of everyday life.