The Wrong Assumption

I make a lot of stupid assumptions - like that my wife is joking when she says she wants me to dress nice for dinner….91% of the 32,016 of readers we polled last month say, they too, assume wrongly, that assumptions have cost them relationships, money, their health and even their integrity. My first experience with assumptions remains ingrained in my brain…It was 6 o’clock at the ballfield, July 1980, my Lions down two to one to the undefeated Hawks in a 9-year-old little league game. Scott VanVleck stood on second with two outs in the bottom half of the last inning. You could hear the anxiety from the parents in the bleachers as Joey Larson’s fastball spun toward me like a comet shooting toward earth. I let it go by and thought it was high and outside, but the ump called strike two, full count. I looked at the ump exasperated as if to say, “cut me some slack, this pitcher is a foot taller than me and looks like he drove to the game.” Then I put my bat back on my shoulder, still shaking from Larson’s last fastball, and dug in for the payoff pitch like Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully might say. But before Larson even went into his windup the ump pulled off his mask and said, “You’re out batter.” He said I was “flicking him off” and was tossing me for unsportsmanlike conduct. Game over. I looked at my coach in disbelief. The truth is, I wasn’t flicking him off—when I was two, I stuck my middle finger into the wheel of one of those stationary exercise bicycles, only thing is my babysitter was riding it. The spinning spokes shattered my middle finger, saved only by an amazing surgeon, but the knuckle was gone and so when clenching my fist, like you do around a baseball bat, well it looks like I’m giving you the bird as the picture below shows. The ump later apologized after the game but at that point we were in the parking lot…. We make a lot of assumptions in the moment, about people we maybe don’t really know, about things we see and hear, about what AI says. In healthcare, doctors and nurses have to make assumptions all the time when they see a patient, their time to figure out the problem confined to a 20-minute visit. In business, we probably too often assume we know what the client actually wants before asking and that our investment in, let’s say a healthcare business, will undoubtedly be great because there’s no magic pill to make us healthy—unless there is? In society we often assume stuff without understanding – like that someone’s addiction is their fault or that someone is mad at us when in reality maybe they are just scared. In parenting, we often assume our kids are late bloomers when maybe shyness is a developmental condition and some of us assume our kids will get that Division 1 scholarship, when that line of thinking is probably more harmful than helpful. Assumption itself is an interesting word. You have an “ass” and an “ump,” which is pretty much what my dad called the umpire that night in 1980 after the Hawks beat my Lions 2-1.