Key Takeaways

  • Human perception operates at low resolution, prompting the brain to invent stories to fill data gaps and mistake those stories for truth.
  • Rick Rubin argues that professional wrestling is more honest than everyday business or social interactions because wrestling openly admits it is a staged performance.
  • When colleagues, customers, or partners mislead you, Rubin notes it rarely stems from malice; they are simply reporting their own low-resolution interpretation as fact.
  • Acknowledging that you operate with low resolution prevents knee-jerk overreactions to ambiguous operational setbacks.

The Low-Resolution Reality Trap

Rick Rubin looks at human observation and sees a resolution problem. Our senses capture only a tiny fraction of the available data in any given room or conversation. Because the human mind rejects ambiguity, it invents a story to connect the few dots it gathered. The trap occurs when we forget we invented the story and begin treating it as an absolute fact.

Rubin described this cycle directly to Andrew Huberman: “Our whole lives are reacting to things, making up a story of what we think may have happened without realizing that's what we're doing, and then living the rest of our lives as if that thing that we made up really happened.”

For founders, this cognitive reflex ruins strategic clarity. A top executive resigns with forty-eight hours of notice, and leadership invents an internal narrative about cultural rot or competitor sabotage. A sales prospect goes silent, and the team decides the pricing model is broken. In both cases, the team observed a fraction of the situation and fabricated the rest. Rubin points out that recognizing this blind spot is where clarity begins: “Our resolution is so low on everything. We're grasping at straws. We have no idea. We have no idea. And there's great power in knowing that.”

The Honesty of Staged Performance

This division between constructed narrative and reality explains Rubin's appreciation for professional wrestling. In media, politics, and startup boardrooms, people present rehearsed positions while insisting they represent pure, unvarnished truth. Professional wrestling does the reverse. It engineers dramatic conflict, heroes, villains, and storylines while making no secret of the fact that it is scripted entertainment.

“It's the reason that pro wrestling is closer to reality than anything else we can watch or any other content,” Rubin said. “It's we know it's made up. We know that it's a performance. It's storytelling.”

Wrestling achieves authenticity by refusing to lie about its artificial structure. Pitch meetings and quarterly reviews often operate under the same performative dynamic without the honesty. Executives present multi-year projections as mathematical certainties rather than guesses. Rubin prefers wrestling because it strips away that pretense: “It's the energy it creates in me and the reality that it's honest in what it is. In a world where seemingly nothing is honest at what it is.”

Unintentional Deception

When a market report turns out to be dead wrong or an advisor gives you flawed guidance, your default reaction is to suspect bad motives. Rubin argues that most bad information is far simpler: people genuinely believe their low-resolution stories.

“Because if you think you know what's going on, chances are you're being deceived,” Rubin explained. “Not because somebody's deceiving you, but because they're telling you what they see, and they don't know.”

When an enterprise buyer tells you they chose a rival because of a single missing feature, they are often reporting an invented post-hoc rationalization. When team members argue over why a product launch missed its target, each person defends a different fabricated narrative. Once you accept that human perception is low resolution, you stop reacting emotionally to confident opinions, including your own.

What to Do With This

The next time an unexpected setback hits your team, write down the verifiable facts on one side of a sheet of paper and your emotional explanation on the other. Delete every assumption, projected motive, and adjective until only concrete actions remain. Base your next decision purely on the factual column, completely ignoring the story your brain invented to fill the silence.