People are complicated. Life is complicated. Ecosystems are complicated. And despite our best efforts or intentions, we have a remarkable history of messing things up in unexpected ways.

One simple theory for why this may be is that unintended consequences are likely to happen whenever we try to regulate a complex system by using a simple system. This so often happens in any kind of large-scale or government attempt to control something within a complex system using relatively simple programs, regulations, laws, policies or other actions. Things will happen that we didn’t anticipate.

A policy of suppressing forest fires that goes on to cause even greater fires.

An attempt to reduce traffic in Bogotá by restricting who could drive each day based on licence plates that led people to simply buy more cars.

More open workplaces that cause people to behave more privately.

Elimination of predators that leads to the proliferation of grazing animals and a reduction in diversity.

The effects of literally any dam built anywhere.

Or social distancing policies that results in outdoor natural spaces being crammed with people at weekends.

Often, as with some of these, the outcome can be the opposite of what you intended, known as the cobra effect. Controlling complex systems is difficult.

The law of unintended consequences

How many books will you read in a lifetime? If you’re a pretty dedicated reader, you may be able to get through one book a week, so roughly 50 books a year. Over 70 years of reading at that pace, you’d read around 3,500 books—counting comfort rereads like Harry Potter for the third time. I only know a few people who actually manage to read like that, so presumably, for most of us, the likely book reads we will manage is much less than that.

To put that number in context, your local bookstore has around 30,000 books. So if you were to use your entire life’s reading in that store, you’d still only be a bit over 1/10th of the way through. That’s a lot of books you didn’t even get a chance to start.

I won’t deny that 3,500 books is a lot of books, but whatever you do, there will be far more books that you just don’t have time to get to than those you do find time for. So, like for movies, I think it seems wise to be at least a little thoughtful about what books you choose to pick up, and what books you decide to go on to finish.

As the author James Joyce said: "Life is too short to read a bad book."

In the course of making this, I learned that in 2010 the Google Books team estimated there were around 130 million books to choose from.

3,500 Lifetime reads

So often do we talk about speaking with passion, much rarer do we think about listening with passion.

Conversations are two-sided, they only work if one person is listening while the other is talking. Unfortunately, we tend to have a greater innate interest in making sure others know the smart, interesting and important things that we think than truly absorbing what someone else has to say. So I love this quote from Harriet Lerner:

Listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.

If we all could do this routinely with our colleagues, friends, family, children, and partners I’d guess it’d make quite a difference.

I learned about it from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead.

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Listen with passion