Recently, my wife and I went to an ATM to get some money. When we arrived at the ATM station, there was a single long queue of people who wanted to do the same. There were two ATMs at the station but no one seems to be using one of them. My wife, like all the other people probably, assumed that the other machine could not dispense with cash.

We waited patiently in the queue.  Then a woman walked up to the line of people and she bean staring hard at the other machine. It seemed to be working because we could see that the screen was on. However we had all made the inference that it could not dispense with cash. The lady stared again at the machine and then she asked me if that machine was working. I said that it probably could only not dispense with cash and that is why everyone had formed one queue and had not used that particular machine.

The lady still continued to stare hard at the machine and eventually she went up to it and tried to get some cash from the machine. And it worked! She was able to get her cash. I couldn’t help but laughed at the situation. I could see that most of the others in the queue either looked a little bemused or a little flabbergasted.

Meanwhile, the lady left the ATM smiling happily, probably thinking how dumb the rest of us had been for standing in the queue and not using the other machine. Honestly, she deserved her little victory because she had the thought to managed her impulsivity to think like the rest in the queue had done, and she thought of another possibility. This is what Art da Costa and Bena Kallick describe in their Habits of Mind framework about the need to manage impulsivity. They also talked about taking responsible risks. I failed as I had assumed the worst. But I consoled myself that I had passed too somewhat because I could still find humor in the experience. Finding humor is also part of the Habits of Mind framework.