I have been contemplating my thinking patterns for the last couple of years. While working as a software engineer in a large commercial bank, I noticed some common thinking patterns in many engineers. These patterns can result in excellent engineering work but hinder interpersonal relationships and psychological well-being. Perhaps you are not an engineer, but you observe similar patterns in yourself and your loved ones. Identifying which type of thinking pattern applies to which type of situation is crucial because no one key opens all the doors in life, and you need to know which aspect of your personality you should emphasize.

1- Dichotomous Thinking

Being an engineer or a result-oriented person requires you to show results. Your product is either working or not working, and your software contains crucial bugs that cancel the compile process. The primary prerequisite of engineering is producing that product. Fix that problem. Ultimately, your managers and customers will be interested in only one thing: whether the product works.

During the initial weeks of my job, I was constantly attacked by bugs. Since banking applications are large-scale, they include the codes of thousands of engineers and interconnected systems. It took me some time to learn that many bugs were typical and even expected. In real life, nothing goes perfect. What is working always includes small parts that are not working.

The stress you experience to please your clients/managers by creating a working product can make you work harder and better, but it might also spread to your personal life like a virus. You might have a conditional approach to different aspects of your life. If things don’t go as you expect, they will fail immediately. If your partner behaves undesired, it might be the end of all. You might find yourself giving ultimatums to control what is uncontrollable: life. Ones and zeros, successes and failures, are mostly relative and subject to change with time. We should all prioritize the process over the immediate results. As a wise man says: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

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2- Anxiety of Edge Cases

Imagine you are building a rocket. In its engine, there are many tubes that chemicals go into to combust into flames, you see. Among other things, that tube is responsible for the life of astronauts. It needs to endure when things go unexpected. An engineer’s responsibility is to predict (almost) everything that can go wrong, such as the atmospheric pressure on the launch day or the changing heat during the ascent.

Thinking about the worst thing that could happen is one of the daily responsibilities of most engineers. Such training can create habitual thinking about the worst. Cognitive behavioral therapy research shows that thinking patterns are just like muscles. If you practice them, they will grow. I’m not suggesting that the nature of engineering creates a mental pandemic, but it’s always good to keep in mind to separate between professional and leisure personalities.

3- Need for certainty

I’ve used this example too many times with my friends. I think I heard it from a reel or something, but I can’t remember the source. Okay, I want you to do a basic calculation: Multiply 23 * 35. When I ask people about this, I usually get two responses. Most of my friends in the technical fields almost always try to get the exact answer. If they can’t do it quickly, they give up!

On the other hand, most of the people I asked who are in non-technical fields (such as politics, law, or business) gave me an approximate answer, which is mostly correct. Life doesn’t offer exact results, and the habit you are trying to build isn’t going to be built by strictly following X days of trying. If you want to get things done, you must let go of the notion of certainty. If you want to start reading every day, you must let go of the “every day.” It’s always about the “most”. If you stick to your process and read most days, you’ll read more than ever. If your boss asks about your opinion, which you don’t have the answer but some data, you must guestimate realistically.

Being certain is required mainly in technical fields. Barack Obama says that the most important decisions are not 20-80%. They are always 49-51% decisions. Life is about approximates, not exact values. Although being conscious about certainty will help your technical career, like other points I’ve discussed, it may contaminate your personal life. The need for certainty may come from the need to control, which may come from fear of the unknown. Despite the career benefits of such due diligence, life is full of unknowns, and you must believe in yourself to deal with it. As Marcus Aurelius soothed himself about his fears of the future in his journal, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present”.