Irrational

When people do things that make no sense, it doesn't mean they're stupid.

They just didn't make sense to you. It may have made perfect sense to them.

They see something you don't, be it right or wrong.

• Steve Jobs insisted on no keyboard and only a touchscreen, in a market where Blackberry was the leader in.
• Airbnb founders tried to rent air mattresses in their apartment to strangers. Investors called it creepy and unscalable; today it’s a global lodging platform worth tens of billions.
• Netflix bet the company on streaming while DVDs were still profitable, Blockbuster executives publicly laughed at them and dismissed it; Blockbuster went bankrupt in 2010 while Netflix became a dominant media platform.
• NVIDIA kept betting on GPUs for AI workloads when most of the market saw them as “just graphics cards”; now GPUs are the backbone of modern AI compute, driving one of the largest market cap increases in tech history.

People who do things that don't make sense to you don't share the same world view as you.

They either don't see what you see, or don't want what you want.

It could be status? Desire? Culture? Time? The need to impress their peers? The need to take care of a sick family member?

Whatever it is, if we hope to understand one's behavior (and ultimately to change it), we need to see the stories behind it.

We're all irrational beings at the end of the day.