Every one of us is two people. A younger self looking forward and an older self looking back. One plans. One remembers. Same person, opposite directions, and they never meet — whoever is making the plan is always working from what the other one handed over.
Which is fine, as long as what gets handed over is true.
You’re not standing on a floor. You’re reading a report from a dozen of them. And the report only knows what rang up. Nothing logs the people who walked out, so everything past the receipts gets filled in — by a district manager’s sense of it, by last quarter’s number, by whatever you already believe about that location.
Researchers Daniel Schacter and Donna Addis found that remembering the past and imagining the future run on the same machinery. The brain assembles a past out of fragments, the same way it assembles a future that hasn’t happened. Lose one and you lose the other.
And there’s a pattern.
Kahneman and Redelmeier showed we judge an entire experience by its peak and its ending, not by what mostly happened. One enormous sale and eleven walkouts gets remembered as a good Saturday.
We mistake the vivid for the frequent. The customer who made a scene stands out. The four who circled for six minutes and left ungreeted never do.
And we look away when it doesn’t feel good. Investors check their portfolios far more often in rising markets and stop looking when markets fall. One study of 1.1 million found the pattern worst among those with the most at stake. Slow week, nobody opens the traffic report.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a broken light at a busy intersection — everyone sits there blaming the other driver.
A grocery store runs thousands of transactions a week, so error washes out. Each of your locations gets a few dozen real opportunities. Misread those and the quarter gets remembered wrong, and the next one is built on it.
This is what real traffic data is for.
An accurate past. How many came in. How many were greeted. How many left unseen. The real conversion against real opportunities, not against the ones anybody remembers. The hours that were thin, as opposed to the ones that felt thin.
The same record in a bad week as in a good one.
Two versions of the same day–one remembered, one forgotten forever.
Reminds me of the story about the two wolves fighting inside a man, one good and one bad — and the one that wins is the one he feeds.
Both your Saturdays are still out there.
Which one are you feeding?
—
P.S. Trakwell 3.0 is coming soon. Ask the new Trakwell Assistant anything about your business in plain English and get a clear answer — with the data and visuals to back it up — in seconds. If you want to see what your last ninety days actually looked like — not the version anyone remembers — book a walkthrough
