Decoding Self-Serving Bias: A Spy’s Guide to Clear Thinking
One Sunday morning early in my career, I arrived at work to find a colleague of mine already there. We were working on a critical piece of software for an upcoming covert operation. He approached me shortly after I sat down at my desk. “That code you were writing was supposed to be done two days ago,” he said. “The operation is tonight, and we can’t go without you. We still have to test. You’ve put the whole thing in jeopardy. People are relying on us.”In the post- 9/ 11 world, we were all working nonstop and were under a lot of pressure. No one was sleeping more than five or six hours a night. Our health was questionable as we injected ourselves with coffee and Jolt cola once or twice an hour.
We were writing complex, mission-critical software at the lowest levels of the operating system — -difficult stuff even in the best of circumstances. There was no manual for this stuff, and you couldn’t simply Google how to do it.We were breaking new ground. The time pressure didn’t help. We were doing all we could, yet it never seemed like enough. And after years of sixty-hour workweeks and constant pressure, our personal and professional relationships were strained and starting to crack.My response felt completely natural: “But . . . I had all of these meetings and got pulled into this other project the director said was top priority. And . . . I planned to work on it Friday morning, but the bus got stuck in the snow, and it took two hours to get to work.”
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