Insight

Félix Got the Job — and That's Why He's Certain He's Right

Oli·Sunday, October 25, 2026 Edition

ONE GOOD OUTCOME, ONE BAD MAP

Félix Oduya got the call on a grey October morning, standing in his kitchen with the oven still on from breakfast. He had sent the application at an odd hour, written the cover letter in a single sitting after two glasses of wine, worn the navy jacket to the interview instead of the grey one his partner preferred. He got the job. By the afternoon he had assembled a theory: the odd hour, the unguarded tone of the letter, the jacket. He filed it under things that work.

The brain runs on narrative because narrative is fast. Data requires comparison, controls, a willingness to consider what did not happen. Story collapses all that into a single line of cause and effect, and the line feels solid even when it is drawn in air. The most dangerous explanations are the ones that arrived attached to a good result, because good results feel like proof. They are not proof. They are just what happened this time, and the brain will spend the rest of the year running the same script.

Psychologist Amos Tversky spent much of his career documenting how this plays out at scale. His work with Daniel Kahneman on what they called the availability heuristic showed that people judge likelihood by how easily a memory surfaces, not by how often something actually occurs. An outcome that was vivid and recent crowds out the dozen quieter outcomes that told a different story. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is doing exactly what it was built to do. The problem is what it was built to do.

THE STORY IN YOUR HEAD RIGHT NOW

You are an hour out from a difficult conversation — the one where you tell someone what you actually think, and the stakes are real enough that you have been rehearsing it since you woke. Notice what script is running. You have probably already decided how they will respond, and that prediction is built from a story about the last time you had a conversation like this, or the time before that. The script is not neutral. It is selecting for a particular outcome, and it will shape your tone before you say the first word. The question is not whether the story is comforting. It is whether the story is the thing that actually caused what you remember.

Félix still wears the navy jacket to important meetings. It probably does not matter. What matters is that he is now making decisions inside a story that closed before he understood what opened the door. Most of us are. The story isn't wrong because it feels true. It's wrong because feeling true is all it takes.

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Try This

Write down the explanation you carry for one good outcome in your life — a job, a relationship, a decision that paid off. Then list two things that were also true that day and played no causal role. Sit with how confident the original explanation still feels.

How?

Key Facts

*When something works out, your brain constructs a causal story automatically, and that story will feel like insight even when it is pure coincidence.

*The most dangerous explanations are the ones you never questioned because they arrived attached to a good result.

*Before a high-stakes decision, ask what would have to be false about your explanation for it to still have worked out — that gap is where the real cause lives.