Step into problems. Something bad happens, something needs to be done that is hard, that you don't know how to do? The best thing to do is to step firmly into it.,
That is how you learn. That is how you grow and advance. Avoiding it does nothing. Too many people try to avoid problems, ignore them, hope they go away, we they should pursue them, chase them down. Problems are opportunities. People are always amazed because when I find a problem, I step into it. Hard. By stepping into a problem you are then able to grow and you are forced to learn and take risks and be creative to solve problems. You make new connections both in your brain with new neural pathways being developed and externally through a network of new people and places and skills.Creativity is linked to problem solving. You want to be more creative? Solva some problems, everyday. Make a list, everyday. Head on. Stepping into a problem also gives you control. You go from being knocked off balance or at the mercy of the external forces of the problem and you spend your days hoping for it to go away or to magically improve or with you hoping someone will come to rescue you and solve your problem to a active person who is taking charge of your life and world. Most people feel stress when they feel they have no control over a situation. Once you take steps to modify the situation, your attitudes change and the stress level drops. I am one of those people who find a snake and then have to poke it with a stick. It means you learn a lot about snakes. It is how you learn, and how you find and make opportunity. D There are only 3 ways to make more money.
Of these, one of the ways is one that every one tries to do, one is a step always ignored and one of the ways is usually procrastinated on or avoided. 1. You can sell more - this is the one everyone wants to do. How do I sell more to more customers? How do I convert more? I do I sell more products to each customer? This step is the one we all want because we think it is the easiest, but getting new customers is hard and expensive and there is a limit to how much one customer will take. The more products, the more customers, the more potential profit, but there is more to it than this one step. 2. You can charge more. We all avoid this one. I have been through and help set up do many price increases and each and every time sales swore it wouldn't work. It always did. People avoid this one because you gave to lay the ground work, show customers why you deserve a price increase, and then sell it. It is done every day, trust me and you need to learn it. I know companies that haven't increased prices in four years! Do you know what the price if gas was four years ago? Think of the money left on the table by you avoiding the work. 3. This is the one everyone forgets, particularly when talking about on line business, and it is the most important one; you need to do it for less. You make money when you buy, not when you sell. Find ways to buy raw materials for less, improve freight, server costs, hosting, virtual assistants, travel costs, any that takes your hard earned money. Any money saved goes straight to the bottom line, aka, your profit margin. The more efficient, the more cost effective, the more money you make. D Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, it truly has just started, and starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. The best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Join the mailing list, give us siome ideas, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. In between the notes and the reading, let's also learn by doing. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Let's go. D These gentlemen are much smarter than I am, and certainly far more successful than I am, so perhaps my opinion matters a little less to you, but I am concerned that they are pushing a message that is wildly popular now, and it is one that is being misunderstood and I believe is dangerous to the individual and also our future.
Their simple message is, "it makes no sense to go to college, and instead you should just start a business." This is simply wrong. Their intentions are good, and I understand what they are trying to do, but I believe their message is at best, being misunderstood, or maybe it just isn't valid. This viewpoint on college will not make the world a better place nor will it make a person's life as rich as it could be if they follow that advice. Also each one of these men graduated college. We tend to undervalue what we have, and each of these men have a college education, and they are not thinking that each step they took built the path that lead them to make themselves succeed. Each of these men use the tools they learned in college, and probably they still know and work with some of the people they met there. Today, we do not need more people selling ebooks. That will not build growth or opportunity. The Internet is full of opportunity, and squandering it by promoting the latest lifestyle guide just isn't going to do it. You have to build something, you need to create. We do not need to reinvent the wheel each day. We all stand on the work and thoughts of the people born before us. To know those ideas, you need to learn them. I have made a career out of applying history to today's problems, because whatever problem you have, someone has had it before. Find out how they solved it. We need more people creating value and less people consuming mindlessly. The engine that drives the future and the economy is creativity and imagination, smart people taking risks. The elite group above are all stating that today you shouldn't even consider college but I believe that message serves no value. If you do not have a better opportunity, you should go to college, and stay in college until you find a better way to leverage your skills and learn. We don't need more ebook marketers. We need people to solve the world's problems and make this a better world. You are bigger than that and I think some balance in your life is important. I am sure they do not mean it this way, these are very smart men who have shown that they are curious and love to learn, but the message generally being copied and reported over and over on the internet, through blog posts and twitter, is that it is smart to reject education and start a business. The real goal is to get as much education as possible, to reject debt and to remember to always go with the best opportunity at hand that has the best opportunity cost for you. Here is why you should consider going to college. 1. The issue isn't that education is bad, or that you shouldn't go to college, it is that you shouldn't go into debt to get it. You should learn as much as you can, from anywhere you can. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, and I said I know a place where you can try many different disciplines and things and experiences, where you can meet people from all over the world, would you go? 2. Right now in all the other countries of the world, people in those other countries are getting as much education as they can. You are competing in a global market, and there are Phd's in India ready to do anything to succeed. Ignorance is not a competitive tool. Get as much education as you can afford. Always keep learning. Learn new skills constantly. Competition in China is brutal, and today we are in the same global market as they are. Are we ready to hustle as much as they are? 3. Take the "college is bad" thought to its extreme. Is the United State's biggest problem today is that we are too educated? No. We certainly do not suffer from over education. If anything, we need more education. Knowledgable people would not have thought that when the housing market was hot, that every house everywhere, was worth a fortune. They would know history and know about the tulip boom and bust. We need more knowledge not less. The biggest problem today is that we need better education regarding debt, something education can fix. You go in to debt because you are uneducated. I know this very well, as this is a lesson I learned the hard way. 4. If you don't know what you want to do, going to school is a great place to see the options and meet people. Don't quit school until you have better options. It is all about opportunity costs. 5. Most entrepreneurs went to school, maybe didn't finish, but went to school, including those in the subject line. They found the resources or met the people who would help them succeed at school. 6. Business is an art. Just like a writer, or film maker, and if you have nothing to say, you can have all the skills and talent in the world but in the end you say or accomplish nothing. Life is an art, and if you have a passion, a belief, and you are a well rounded person, you will always be more adaptable than some single minded individual. Survival is about adaption. 7. The world is more than just business. Business brings opportunity, but the world also has art, philosophy, and science. The more of the world you know, the better you will be at what you do. Going to school opens up doors that you don't know exist today, that you don't even think to look for, that you don't even know you want, until it is there. 8. View schools like stocks, look at the ROI on what you estimate that you think it will return. If you want to be a teacher, and start at $40,000 don't spend $200,000 going to Stanford, pay $20,000 at a smaller school, who will probably get you a more personalized education and help ou pay for it. Pick stocks that matter to you and will make you and your life better. Pick a school or program that makes your life better and gives you a good return on your money. 9. Colleges, all schools for that matter, allow the young in rural areas to see thoughts and ideas and other people that starting a business in their area wold never get them. The world is not all urban centers, most of the United States is not, and colleges allow young people a first glimpse of a world that is bigger than just Chickasha, Oklahoma. 10. You need to be careful about insulating yourself. In a world where you pick your reading, from your twitter feed, to Facebook, you pick what you search in Google which edits results based on what you previously liked, it is important to get information and other viewpoints you did not select. Most successful business people I know always have one advisor that is the opposite of them, to give them a viewpoint that counters their own. 11. The educational process needs to be improved, not ignored or rejected. Where there is a need to improve, there is business opportunity, and to find that opportunity, you need to know what needs to be changed, and how better than seeing first hand what needs to be changed. Get in it, see what needs to change, and then start your business to fix it. Each one of these men graduated college. So did I. D Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months by Robert Skrob
This book, that I am still reading, is more interesting than I thought it would be. It had a forward by Dan Kennedy, and I thought the book was by him. Once I started reading I understood it was not him, but the author is very knowledgeable, and the book is interesting, and as you can see below, I found many things to capture. The point is this: You make the rules. You bend this business to your preferences. You need sacrifice nothing for enormous financial success. How did that quote go? The world is made by unreasonable people. Make it the way you want it. It does take work. You won’t become successful or wealthy without work, but success is not a result of working harder than everyone else. It’s about building a business with specific attributes that enable you to accumulate wealth. People all around you are getting rich. Within your neighborhood. Why are they getting rich? Because they are doing things that generate more money than they spend, allowing them to accumulate wealth. Wealth isn’t produced by thinking, dreaming, or imagining what you want. Money doesn’t care what you think about most. Money is attracted to you when you create a business that produces value for paying customers. Before you launch a new business, you need to ask yourself these five questions: 1. Is it formulaic? Has the business been proven to generate wealth for others in the past? For instance, if you don’t see anyone getting rich as a plumbing contractor or by running a sandwich shop, it’s a good guess that you won’t get wealthy that way either. Instead, look for a consistent pattern of a good percentage of business owners getting rich within the industry; technology, real estate, and publishing are proven winners from the past. 2. Does it have a large business scope? Businesses dedicated to one community or one county can get destroyed with one flood or one plant closing. Instead, serve customers nationwide or even internationally to diversify and expand your marketplace. 3. Are there high margins? Selling products at higher prices with a low production cost allows you to do much more marketing. I had a client who sold frozen yogurt. With new customers spending only $5.00 to $10.00, it took a lot of them to pay for any advertising. Instead, get into businesses with high margins to make it easier for you to generate a healthy profit. 4. Is there a low startup investment? Too many business owners invest their entire life savings into a venture only to discover there is no market for their new products. Instead, keep your investments low, to $10,000.00 or even less. This way, even if you make a mistake, it won’t be financially devastating to you. Plus, it will allow you to start multiple businesses over time to generate more wealth as your skills improve. 5. Are there any professional licenses? Government-issued licenses are one way competitors control each other. Industry lobbyists conspire with politicians to “protect consumers” by passing new restrictions and threatening to take your license away. These laws do nothing for consumers. They are designed to protect your competitors. Stay away from professions that require a professional license, such as insurance, financial advising, law, or medicine. That license is used to control what you say in your marketing and to restrict your ability to generate wealth. There are six advantages of an information marketing business: 1. Replaces manual labor by “multiplying yourself” and leveraging what you know. 2. Buyers of your information products will buy more. 3. A small amount of interaction with buyers is possible. 4. Few staff members are necessary. 5. Little investment is needed to get started. 6. Large profit potential exists. People who buy your information products are much more likely to hire you to perform services than other customers you market to. Quite simply, having your own published information product makes you the obvious expert. You just need to leverage the information you already know. How? By 1) identifying a market of people who are excited about the information you have, 2) creating a product those people want, and 3) offering it to them in a persuasive way. That’s why you can get into the information marketing business with a relatively low startup budget. One word of caution: Many info-marketers do not invest enough in their marketing and end up with a very slow start. Investing money in marketing when you are launching your business increases revenue more quickly. You can take a “stair-step” approach by investing a small amount in your first campaign and reinvesting your sales revenues into the next campaign. You can increase your marketing investments as you continue to have success in selling your product. That way you can start with a very modest investment, but by continuing to reinvest profits into making new sales and getting new customers, you can build your business. This is a business with a lot of profitability, but you will not create a business that generates more than $1 million a year by investing nothing. You must be willing to test a marketing strategy to find new customers (known in the business as a front-end marketing funnel) and test it until it produces positive results. When you get positive results, you must invest in expanding that marketing campaign and growing your customer base. Many info-marketers are making million-dollar incomes through their information marketing businesses. Each one started out like you, with no products and no customers, and they gave it a shot. Information marketing is responsive to and fueled by the ever-increasing pressure on people’s time. For me, information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. When I create an information product, I spend a lot of time studying a market, examining the problems its members face, and designing my offering as the solution to that problem. Information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. ..... you have the free content you offer to attract new customers to you. Your free content could be articles you publish, videos you make available on your website, or an e-mail auto responder series that provides ongoing free content. You’ll have your largest number of users at this level. It’s free, so there is a low barrier to entry. Your next step of your Information marketing .......is an introductory product. For some info-marketing businesses, this is a $199.00 product consisting of six CDs and a binder of materials. For others, it could be a book that’s available in bookstores. This book provides customers with an easy first step to try out your products to see if your information is right for them. Here is also where e-books fit in. You’ve seen a lot of online marketers marketing e-books on their websites. To maximize the number of e-books you can sell, you must invest in marketing. When you build the rest of your pyramid, you increase the revenue you generate from each customer, allowing you to invest more in marketing to get a new customer than you could with an e-book as your only product. Once your customers experience your product, you offer them the opportunity to receive ongoing information through a monthly continuity program. These continuity programs are monthly subscription programs where you provide interviews, newsletters, and/or access to a membership site where your customers can get more of the information they loved in your introductory product. The pricing for these programs can be from $9.95 a month for a membership site to $199.00 a month for a program that includes newsletters, group coaching calls, and expert interviews on CD. The next step is high-priced specialty products shown in Figure 3-4. It’s impossible to build one product that provides all the information any of your customers could want or need about a particular topic. Instead, you provide a high-quality introductory product that outlines your strategies and provides useful examples to follow. Then for different areas of expertise, you provide additional products that provide additional details about that particular aspect. You will be able to sell these specialty products for much higher prices, from $495.00 to $1,995.00 or more. Large info-marketing business includes seminars. There’s nothing as powerful as being face to face with your members. The next area is seminars, shown in Figure 3-5. Many info-marketers choose not to offer seminars, and that’s fine. But for those who do offer them, it can be a lucrative part of their business. Info-Marketing seminars are usually priced between $750.00 and $1,995.00 per person or more. The next section is a coaching program. I talk a lot about moving your customers up your pyramid into group coaching and seminars in Chapter 10, but for now, recognize this is an important level of your pyramid. Group coaching gives your customers the opportunity to receive personal help implementing your teaching in their own lives. At the top you’ll find personal coaching. Some customers will invest in all your products and still want to sit down with you for one-on-one, personal assistance. And the best part for you is they will be willing to pay you for that privilege. So you need to keep these three factors in the forefront of your mind as you begin your business: Marketing Research Continuity Income Marketing Systems to Generate New Customers. The single most common reason information marketing businesses fail is inadequate market research. Many of us get caught up in creating just the right marketing strategy, writing the perfect sales letter, or building the perfect product, but in fact, very few of those things can have as much impact on your business as thorough market research. Researching your market and interviewing potential customers is the shortcut to launching a profitable business quickly. Continuity income is revenue you receive from your members on an ongoing basis Start every month of the year with customers already buying products from you with monthly continuity programs. Just think about this: If only 5 percent of your new customers participate in your continuity program, then every month your monthly continuity income continues to grow. The power of these programs is in providing monthly cash flow for your business. So when you have a big promotion or a seminar and make a large amount of money, you can pull it out in profit because your monthly continuity income is paying your monthly bills. You start each month billing customers’ credit cards so you can provide the newsletters, products, or services you’ve committed to those subscribers. It’s a great way to start in business every month—with revenue already in the bank. The real secret to the information marketing business is to build a marketing process, a funnel if you will, that generates new customers over and over again. This process generates leads, and those leads go into a sales system that helps potential customers learn about you and how you can solve their problems before inviting them to make a purchase. Once they’ve made a purchase, the sales system invites them to make other purchases based on their interests. That helps increase the value of every customer. And in addition to their purchases, you invite these new customers to participate in your monthly continuity programs so you can grow your monthly income as well. Every new business needs new customers to grow. Information marketers unlock the “business owner” lifestyle by creating an automated process to generate new customers every month from a variety of sources. New customer generation is one of the most difficult parts of any business and often can be the most expensive as well. This is why so many new info-marketers move on to other areas of their businesses once they get their businesses going. They become focused on product creation or putting on a new seminar, for example. However, as an information marketer, it’s crucial that you set up ongoing systems and processes to help you generate new customers. You need to have a marketing funnel that helps put new customers into your business on a continual basis Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months Even in a set-it-and-forget-it situation, you still are going to have to innovate; you still need to replace, update, correct, improve, monitor, and build new processes as you go. Internet marketing provides a lot of great tools information marketers can use to create, sell, and deliver products. However, internet marketing tools do not create a business. Instead, your focus has to be on creating a business first and then using internet marketing tools to allow you to grow more quickly. Membership websites can be an important part of an info-business. Plus, they can be a useful forum for members to exchange ideas. However, you may have seen marketers promoting how to create membership sites where everybody interacts and communicates, with members contributing all the content so you don’t have to do any of the work. Those membership sites are very rare, making up less than 1 percent of the sites that are created. Most membership sites are a great tool to help facilitate a membership program that also provides printed content and monthly teleseminars, and they also serve as forums for delivering content for coaching programs. The membership site that stands alone, generates new customers by itself, and generates content by itself because all the participants are communicating with each other on message boards and uploading samples? That site is a very rare beast. First of all, in the information marketing business, the customers who love you are going to want to invest in more products and services from you. If you have a business that is simply selling a particular product over a website, you’re not maximizing the marketing investment you made in generating new customers by selling them additional products and services. You need a way of providing those customers additional products, additional programs, and additional systems so they are able to solve additional problems in their lives and you are able to make more money from your business. Any business that doesn’t have that element is not generating as much profit as it should be. Well, the reason they’re doing it that way is because customers often prefer seminars to digital downloads. And the internet marketer can make a lot more money by having those seminars. For you, it’s better to go ahead and get into business with the expectation that you’re going to be interacting with your people because eventually you are—if you want to generate the real money you want and unlock the lifestyle you desire. Finally, there’s the issue of human interaction. I know one of the elements that really attracted me to the information marketing business was limited interaction. And it actually is a benefit, as mentioned in Chapter 1, but my picture of limited human interaction was that I never had to interact with customers at all. They would consult my frequently asked questions if they needed something; otherwise, they’d go to the site, buy, receive the product, and I would never have to interact with them. Well, the fact is many of the people who buy your products will want additional help and support from you or your team. While many customers go to the website to buy, many others browse the website and then pick up the phone to place their orders with live operators. If I didn’t have someone there ready to take their orders, I would lose those sales. It’s not important for you to become the foremost expert in all topics; instead, become an expert in one topic that’s useful to your target market. They’ll become your customers even though they may know more than you in other areas of expertise. You’ve got to find the market that is excitedly expecting what you have to offer, or you have to offer what your target market is already excitedly expecting. The most important factor in a successful info-business is finding a market with customers who eagerly desire information. “Everyone says to go find a target market and research it, but not too many people go into as much detail as I did. But it’s so beneficial.” As you plan your information marketing venture, be sure you start with the market first. Find out what the market desperately wants before you create a product and a marketing campaign to sell it. Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal
I loved this book, it was a book that I literally made myself slow down and read only one chapter a week. I would find myself thinking about it off and on all week. Definitely a book to make your self better. (I am now reading The Power of Habit and it is having the same impact.) TO SUCCEED AT SELF - CONTROL , YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU FAIL I believe that the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control. Knowing how you are likely to give in doesn’t, as many people fear, set yourself up for failure. It allows you to support yourself and avoid the traps that lead to willpower failures. Self-knowledge—especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble—is the foundation of self-control. One thing the science of willpower makes clear is that everyone struggles in some way with temptation, addiction, distraction, and procrastination. These are not individual weaknesses that reveal our personal inadequacies—they are universal experiences and part of the human condition. I’m a scientist by training, and one of the very first things I learned is that while theories are nice, data is better. This is so how I live my life. Before you can change something, you need to see it as it is. Although you could read this whole book in one weekend, I encourage you to pace yourself when it comes to implementing the strategies. Students in my class take an entire week to observe how each idea plays out in their own lives. They try one new strategy for self-control each week, and report on what worked best. I recommend that you take a similar approach, especially if you plan to use this book to tackle a specific goal such as losing weight or getting control over your finances. Give yourself time to try out the practical exercises and reflect. Pick one strategy from each chapter—whichever seems most relevant to your challenge—rather than trying out ten new strategies at once. First time I ever actually did this. When people say, “I have no willpower,” what they usually mean is, “I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or (fill in your anatomical part) wants to say yes.” Think of it as “I won’t” power. But saying no is just one part of what willpower is, and what it requires. “Just say no” are the three favorite words of procrastinators and coach potatoes worldwide. At times, it’s more important to say yes. All those things you put off for tomorrow (or forever)? Willpower helps you put them on today’s to-do list, even when anxiety, distractions, or a reality TV show marathon threaten to talk you out of it. Think of it as “I will” power—the ability to do what you need to do, even if part of you doesn’t want to. “I will” and “I won’t” power are the two sides of self-control, but they alone don’t constitute willpower. To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want. Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t, and I want to help you achieve your goals We may all have been born with the capacity for willpower, but some of us use it more than others. People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer. When pit against other virtues, willpower comes out on top. Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut). If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad place to start. For most of evolutionary history, the prefrontal cortex mainly controlled physical movement: walking, running, reaching, pushing—a kind of proto-self-control. As humans evolved, the prefrontal cortex got bigger and better connected to other areas of the brain. As the prefrontal cortex grew, it took on new control functions: controlling what you pay attention to, what you think about, even how you feel. Many temporary states—like being drunk, sleep-deprived, or even just distracted—inhibit the prefrontal cortex, (Makes me wonder if mine even works at all) Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind. There’s the version of us that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and the version of us that controls our impulses and delays gratification to protect our long-term goals. (I believe this is actually bigger than this, we are many people.) This is what defines a willpower challenge: Part of you wants one thing, and another part of you wants something else. Or your present self wants one thing, but your future self would be better off if you did something else. Every willpower challenge is a conflict between two parts of oneself. For your own willpower challenge, describe these competing minds. What does the impulsive version of you want? What does the wiser version of you want? Some people find it useful to give a name to the impulsive mind, like “the cookie monster” to the part of you that always wants instant gratification, “the critic” to the part of you that likes to complain about everyone and everything, or “the procrastinator” to the person who never wants to get started. Giving a name to this version of yourself can help you recognize when it is taking over, and also help you call in your wiser self for some willpower support Neuroeconomists—scientists who study what the brain does when we make decisions—have discovered that the self-control system and our survival instincts don’t always conflict. In some cases, they cooperate to help us make good decisions. To have more self-control, you first need to develop more self-awareness. A good first step is to notice when you are making choices related to your willpower challenge. For at least one day, track your choices. At the end of the day, look back and try to analyze when decisions were made that either supported or undermined your goals. Trying to keep track of your choices will also reduce the number of decisions you make while distracted—a guaranteed way to boost your willpower. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do. Some parts of the brain grow denser, packing in more and more gray matter like a muscle bulking up from exercise. For example, adults who learn how to juggle develop more gray matter in regions of the brain that track moving objects. Areas of the brain can also grow more connected to each other, so they can share information more quickly. For example, adults who play memory games for twenty-five minutes a day develop greater connectivity between brain regions important for attention and memory. I love this paragraph. I believe it really is the heart of what I do. Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control. After eleven hours, researchers could see those changes in the brain. The new meditators had increased neural connections between regions of the brain important for staying focused, ignoring distractions, and controlling impulses. Another study found that eight weeks of daily meditation practice led to increased self-awareness in everyday life, as well as increased gray matter in corresponding areas of the brain. It may seem incredible that our brains can reshape themselves so quickly, but meditation increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles. The brain appears to adapt to exercise in the same way that muscles do, getting both bigger and faster in order to get better at what you ask of it. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:A FIVE-MINUTE BRAIN-TRAINING MEDITATION Breath focus is a simple but powerful meditation technique for training your brain and increasing willpower. Here’s how to get started: 1. Sit still and stay put . Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground, or sit cross-legged on a cushion. Sit up straight and rest your hands in your lap. It’s important not to fidget when you meditate—that’s the physical foundation of self-control. If you notice the instinct to scratch an itch, adjust your arms, or cross and uncross your legs, see if you can feel the urge but not follow it. 2. Turn your attention to the breath. Close your eyes or, if you are worried about falling asleep, focus your gaze at a single spot (like a blank wall, not the Home Shopping Network). Begin to notice your breathing. Silently say in your mind “inhale” as you breathe in and “exhale” as you breathe out. When you notice your mind wandering (and it will), just bring it back to the breath. 3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders. After a few minutes, drop the labels “inhale/exhale.” Try focusing on just the feeling of breathing. You might notice the sensations of the breath flowing in and out of your nose and mouth. Start with five minutes a day. When this becomes a habit, try ten to fifteen minutes a day. If that starts to feel like a burden, bring it back down to five. A short practice that you do every day is better than a long practice you keep putting off to tomorrow. It may help you to pick a specific time that you will meditate every day, like right before your morning shower. If this is impossible, staying flexible will help you fit it in when you can. Even when he was focused on his breath, other thoughts sneaked in. He was ready to give up on the practice because he wasn’t getting better at it as quickly as he hoped, and figured he was wasting his time if he wasn’t able to focus perfectly on the breath. Most new meditators make this mistake, but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective. Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology. It’s a temporary state of both mind and body that gives you the strength and calm to override your impulses. you have inherited from your ancestors an instinct that helps you respond to any threat that requires fighting or running for your life. This instinct is appropriately called the fight-or-flight stress response. You know the feeling: heart pounding, jaw clenching, senses on high alert. the fight-or-flight stress response is an energy-management instinct. It decides how you are going to spend your limited physical and mental energy. For your willpower challenge, identify the inner impulse that needs to be restrained. What is the thought or feeling that makes you want to do whatever it is you don’t want to do? Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in. For example, recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability goes up when they see a drink are more likely to stay sober. These findings have led psychologists to call heart rate variability the body’s “reserve” of willpower—a physiological measure of your capacity for self-control. If you have high heart rate variability, you have more willpower available for whenever temptation strikes. Many factors influence your willpower reserve, from what you eat (plant-based, unprocessed foods help; junk food doesn’t) to where you live (poor air quality decreases heart rate variability—yes, L.A.’s smog may be contributing to the high percentage of movie stars in rehab). Anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can interfere with the physiology of self-control, and by extension, sabotage your willpower. Anxiety, anger, depression, and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control. Chronic pain and illness can also drain your body and brain’s willpower reserve. But there are just as many things you can do that shift the body and mind toward the physiology of self-control. The focus meditation you learned in the last chapter is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the biological basis of willpower. It not only trains the brain, but also increases heart rate variability. Anything else that you do to reduce stress and take care of your health—exercise, get a good night’s sleep, eat better, spend quality time with friends and family, participate in a religious or spiritual practice—will improve your body’s willpower reserve. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: BREATHE YOUR WAY TO SELF-CONTROL You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That’s ten to fifteen seconds per breath—slower than you normally breathe, but not difficult with a little bit of practice and patience. Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges. Research shows that regular practice of this technique can make you more resilient to stress and build your willpower reserve. One study found that a daily twenty-minute practice of slowed breathing increased heart rate variability and reduced cravings and depression among adults recovering from substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Heart rate variability training programs (using similar breathing exercises) have also been used to improve self-control and decrease the stress of cops, stock traders, and customer service operators—three of the most stressful jobs on the planet there are many things you can do to support the physiology of self-control, this week I’m going to ask you to consider the two strategies that have the biggest bang for their buck. Both are inexpensive and immediately effective, with benefits that only build with time Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect If you want a quick willpower fill-up, your best bet may be to head outdoors. Just five minutes of what scientists call “green exercise” decreases stress, improves mood, enhances focus, and boosts self-control. Green exercise is any physical activity that gets you outdoors and in the presence of Mama Nature. Here are some ideas for your own five-minute green exercise willpower fill-up: • Get out of the office and head for the closest greenery. • Cue up a favorite song on your iPod and walk or jog around the block. • Take your dog outside to play (and chase the toy yourself). • Do a bit of work in your yard or garden. • Step outside for some fresh air and do a few simple stretches. • Challenge your kids to a race or game in the backyard. If you tell yourself that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy and willpower.exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy GAIN WILLPOWER IN YOUR SLEEP! If you are surviving on less than six hours of sleep a night, there’s a good chance you don’t even remember what it’s like to have your full willpower. Being mildly but chronically sleep deprived makes you more susceptible to stress, cravings, and temptation. It also makes it more difficult to control your emotions, focus your attention, or find the energy to tackle the big “I will” power challenges Why does poor sleep sap willpower? For starters, sleep deprivation impairs how the body and brain use glucose, their main form of energy. When you’re tired, your cells have trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream. This leaves them underfueled, and you exhausted. With your body and brain desperate for energy, you’ll start to crave sweets or caffeine. But even if you try to refuel with sugar or coffee, your body and brain won’t get the energy they need because they won’t be able to use it efficiently. This is bad news for self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks your brain can spend its limited fuel on. The kind of relaxation that boosts willpower is true physical and mental rest that triggers what Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson calls the physiological relaxation response. Your heart rate and breathing slow down, your blood pressure drops, and your muscles release held tension. Your brain takes a break from planning the future or analyzing the past. To trigger this relaxation response, lie down on your back, and slightly elevate your legs with a pillow under the knees (or come into whatever is the most comfortable position for you to rest in). Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, allowing your belly to rise and fall. If you feel any tension in your body, you can intentionally squeeze or contract that muscle, then let go of the effort Science also points us to a critical insight: Stress is the enemy of willpower. one of the most robust, if troubling, findings from the science of self-control: People who use their willpower seem to run out of it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It This finding has important implications for your willpower challenges. Modern life is full of self-control demands that can drain your willpower. Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day. In study after study, no matter what task he used, people’s self-control deteriorated over time. A concentration task didn’t just lead to worse attention over time; it depleted physical strength. Controlling emotions didn’t just lead to emotional outbursts; it made people more willing to spend money on something they didn’t need. Resisting tempting sweets didn’t just trigger cravings for chocolate; it prompted procrastination. It was as if every act of willpower was drawing from the same source of strength, leaving people weaker with each successful act of self-control. These observations led Baumeister to an intriguing hypothesis: that self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely, like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion. other research teams have supported the idea that willpower is a limited resource. Trying to control your temper, stick to a budget, or refuse seconds all tap the same source of strength. And because every act of willpower depletes willpower, using self-control can lead to losing control. Many things you wouldn’t typically think of as requiring willpower also rely on—and exhaust—this limited well of strength. Trying to impress a date or fit into a corporate culture that doesn’t share your values. Navigating a stressful commute, or sitting through another boring meeting. Anytime you have to fight an impulse, filter out distractions, weigh competing goals, or make yourself do something difficult, you use a little more of your willpower strength. If your brain and body need to pause and plan, you’re flexing the metaphorical muscle of self-control Luckily there are things you can do to both overcome willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control strength. That’s because the muscle model doesn’t just help us see why we fail when we’re tired; it also shows us how to train self-control. If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength. Even though the brain is an organ, not a muscle, it does get tired from repeated acts of self-control. Neuroscientists have found that with each use of willpower, the self-control system of the brain becomes less active. boosting blood sugar restored willpower. Low blood sugar levels turn out to predict a wide range of willpower failures, from giving up on a difficult test to lashing out at others when you’re angry. It is as if running low on energy biases us to be the worst versions of ourselves. In contrast, giving participants a sugar boost turns them back into the best versions of themselves: more persistent and less impulsive; more thoughtful and less selfish. How much energy, exactly, was getting used up during acts of mental self-control? And did restoring that energy really require consuming a substantial amount of sugar? University of Pennsylvania psychologist Robert Kurzban has argued that the actual amount of energy your brain needs to exert self-control is less than half a Tic Tac per minute. This may be more than the brain uses for other mental tasks, but it is far less than your body uses when it exercises. So assuming you have the resources to walk around the block without collapsing, the absolute demands of self-control couldn’t possibly deplete your entire body’s store of energy. The human brain has, at any given time, a very small supply of energy. It can store some energy in its cells, but it is mostly dependent on a steady stream of glucose circulating in the body’s bloodstream. Special glucose-detecting brain cells are constantly monitoring the availability of energy. When the brain detects a drop in available energy, it gets a little nervous. What if it runs out of energy? Like the banks, it may decide to stop spending and save what resources it has. It will keep itself on a tight energy budget, unwilling to spend its full supply of energy. The first expense to be cut? Self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks the brain performs. To conserve energy, the brain may become reluctant to give you the full mental resources you need to resist temptation, focus your attention, or control your emotions. University of South Dakota researchers X. T. Wang, a behavioral economist, and Robert Dvorak, a psychologist, have proposed an “energy budget” model of self-control. They argue that the brain treats energy like money. It will spend energy when resources are high, but save energy when resources are dropping. Importantly, it wasn’t the absolute level of blood sugar that predicted a participant’s choices—it was the direction of change. The brain asked, “Is available energy increasing or decreasing?” It then made a strategic choice about whether to spend or save that energy The brain may have a second motivation behind its reluctance to exert self-control when the body’s energy levels are dropping. Our brains evolved in an environment very different from our own—one in which food supplies were unpredictable. (Remember our trip to the Serengeti, when you were scavenging for antelope carcasses?) Dvorak and Wang argue that the modern human brain may still be using blood sugar levels as a sign of scarcity or abundance in the environment. To an energy-monitoring brain, your blood sugar level was an indicator of how likely you were to starve in the near future if you didn’t find something to eat, quick. A brain that could bias your decisions toward immediate gratification when resources are scarce, but toward long-term investment when resources are plenty, would be a real asset in a world with an unpredictable food supply. He who takes the biggest risks—from exploring new land to trying new foods and new mates—is often the most likely to survive (or at least have his genes survive). What appears in our modern world as a loss of control may actually be a vestige of the brain’s instinct for strategic risk-taking. To prevent starvation, the brain shifts to a more risk-taking, impulsive state. Indeed, studies show that modern humans are more likely to take any kind of risk when they’re hungry. For example, people make riskier investments when they’re hungry, and are more willing to “diversify their mating strategies” (evolutionary psychologist–speak for cheating on their partner) after a fast. But when your blood sugar drops, your brain will still favor short-term thinking and impulsive behavior. Your brain’s priority is going to be getting more energy, not making sure you make good decisions that are in line with your long-term goals. better plan is to make sure that your body is well-fueled with food that gives you lasting energy. Most psychologists and nutritionists recommend a low-glycemic diet—that is, one that helps you keep your blood sugar steady. Low-glycemic foods include lean proteins, nuts and beans, high-fiber grains and cereals, and most fruits and vegetables—basically, food that looks like its natural state and doesn’t have a ton of added sugar, fat, and chemicals. It may take some self-control to shift in this direction, but whatever steps you take (say, eating a hearty and healthy breakfast during the workweek instead of skipping breakfast, or snacking on nuts instead of sugar) will more than pay you back for any willpower you spend making the change. Researchers have put this idea to the test with willpower-training regimes. We’re not talking military boot camp or Master Cleanses here. These interventions take a simpler approach: Challenge the self-control muscle by asking people to control one small thing that they aren’t used to controlling. For example, one willpower-training program asked participants to create and meet self-imposed deadlines. Other studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower. And while these small self-control exercises may seem inconsequential, they appear to improve the willpower challenges we care about most, including focusing at work, taking good care of our health, resisting temptation, and feeling more in control of our emotions. The important “muscle” action being trained in all these studies isn’t the specific willpower challenge of meeting deadlines, using your left hand to open doors, or keeping the F-word to yourself. It’s the habit of noticing what you are about to do, and choosing to do the more difficult thing instead of the easiest WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A WILLPOWER WORKOUT If you want to put yourself through your own willpower-training regime, test the muscle model of self-control with one of the following willpower workouts: • Strengthen “I Won’t” Power: Commit to not swearing (or refraining from any habit of speech), not crossing your legs when you sit, or using your nondominant hand for a daily task like eating or opening doors. • Strengthen “I Will” Power: Commit to doing something every day (not something you already do) just for the practice of building a habit and not making excuses. It could be calling your mother, meditating for five minutes, or finding one thing in your house that needs to be thrown out or recycled. • Strengthen Self-Monitoring: Formally keep track of something you don’t usually pay close attention to. This could be your spending, what you eat, or how much time you spend online or watching TV. You don’t need fancy technology—pencil and paper will do. But if you need some inspiration, the Quantified Self movement (www.quantifiedself.com) has turned self-tracking into an art and science. Timothy Noakes, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town, had a different idea. Noakes is known in the athletic world for challenging deeply held beliefs. (For example, he helped show that drinking too many fluids during endurance competitions could kill an athlete by diluting the essential salts in the body.) Noakes is an ultra-marathon competitor himself, and he became interested in a little-known theory put forth in 1924 by Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill. Hill had proposed that exercise fatigue might be caused not by muscle failure, but by an overprotective monitor in the brain that wanted to prevent exhaustion. This theory says it is just a feeling generated by the brain to motivate us to stop, in much the same way that the feeling of anxiety can stop us from doing something dangerous, and the feeling of disgust can stop us from eating something that will make us sick. But because fatigue is only an early warning system, extreme athletes can routinely push past what seems to the rest of us like the natural physical limits of the body. These athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit, and with sufficient motivation, they can transcend it. Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body—we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are. In part, we can thank a brain motivated to conserve energy. Just as the brain may tell the body’s muscles to slow down when it fears physical exhaustion, the brain may put the brakes on its own energy-expensive exercise of the prefrontal cortex. This doesn’t mean we’re out of willpower; we just need to muster up the motivation to use it. Based on these findings, the Stanford psychologists have proposed an idea as jarring to the field of self-control research as Noakes’s claims were to the field of exercise physiology: The widely observed scientific finding that self-control is limited may reflect people’s beliefs about willpower, not their true physical and mental limits. The research on this idea is just beginning, and no one is claiming that humans have an unlimited capacity for self-control. But it is appealing to think that we often have more willpower than we believe we do. It also raises the possibility that we can, like athletes, push past the feeling of willpower exhaustion to make it to the finish line of our own willpower challenges. When your willpower is running low, find renewed strength by tapping into your want power. For your biggest willpower challenge, consider the following motivations: 1. How will you benefit from succeeding at this challenge? What is the payoff for you personally? Greater health, happiness, freedom, financial security, or success? 2. Who else will benefit if you succeed at this challenge? Surely there are others who depend on you and are affected by your choices. How does your behavior influence your family, friends, coworkers, employees or employer, and community? How would your success help them? 3. Imagine that this challenge will get easier for you over time if you are willing to do what is difficult now. Can you imagine what your life will be like, and how you will feel about yourself, as you make progress on this challenge? Is some discomfort now worth it if you know it is only a temporary part of your progress? this left them vulnerable to what psychologists call moral licensing. When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad. Moral licensing doesn’t just give us permission to do something bad; it also lets us off the hook when we’re asked to do something good. For example, people who first remember a time when they acted generously give 60 percent less money to a charitable request than people who have not just recalled a past good deed. In a business simulation, managers of a manufacturing plant are less likely to take costly measures to reduce the plant’s pollution if they have recently recalled a time when they acted ethically. Simply put: Whenever we have conflicting desires, being good gives us permission to be a little bit bad. if the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself. The worst part of moral licensing is not just its questionable logic; the problem is how it tricks us into acting against our best interests. Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself. You aren’t off the hook just because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your actual goal is. Ayelet Fishbach, professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Ravi Dhar, professor at the Yale School of Management, have shown that making progress on a goal motivates people to engage in goal-sabotaging behavior. In one study, they reminded successful dieters of how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight. They then offered the dieters a thank-you gift of either an apple or a chocolate bar. Eighty-five percent of the self-congratulating dieters chose the chocolate bar over the apple, compared with only 58 percent of dieters who were not reminded of their progress. A second study found the same effect for academic goals: Students made to feel good about the amount of time they had spent studying for an exam were more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong with friends. But when they also asked the participants to remember why they had resisted, the licensing effect disappeared—69 percent resisted temptation. Like magic, the researchers had discovered a simple way to boost self-control and help the students make a choice consistent with their overall goals. Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good. Remembering the why will also help you recognize and act on other opportunities to accomplish your goal. The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and remember the why. The researchers were intrigued by reports that when McDonald’s added healthier items to its menu, sales of Big Macs skyrocketed. The researchers found the same effect for vending machine choices. When a reduced-calorie package of cookies was added to a set of standard junk-food options, participants were more likely to choose the least healthy snack (which, in this case, happened to be chocolate-covered Oreos). Sometimes the mind gets so excited about the opportunity to act on a goal, it mistakes that opportunity with the satisfaction of having actually accomplished the goal. And with the goal to make a healthy choice out of the way, the unmet goal—immediate pleasure—takes priority. This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today. I’ll smoke this one cigarette, but starting tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll skip the gym today, but I’m sure I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll splurge on holiday gifts, but then no more shopping for at least three months. Such optimism licenses us to indulge today—especially if we know we will have the opportunity to choose differently in the near future. We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Behavioral economist Howard Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. Apply Rachlin’s advice to your own willpower challenge this week: Aim to reduce the variability of your behavior day to day. View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?” Or if you’ve been putting something off that you know you should do, instead of asking “Would I rather do this today or tomorrow?” ask yourself, “Do I really want the consequences of always putting this off?” Rather than giving himself permission to be good on some days and bad on others (which, predictably, led to more bad days than good), he decided to take the challenge of reducing the variability in his behavior. He settled on the strategy of “vegetarian before dinner.” He would stick to vegetarian foods until six p.m., then eat whatever he wanted to for dinner. Using a daily rule also helps you see through the illusion that what you do tomorrow will be totally different from what you do today. Jeff knew that if he broke his rule one day, he would—according to the experiment’s instructions—have to break it every day for the rest of the week. When a halo effect is getting in the way of your willpower challenge, look for a the most concrete measure (e.g., calories, cost, time spent or wasted) of whether a choice is consistent with your goals. • Virtue and vice. Do you tell yourself you’ve been “good” when you succeed at a willpower challenge, then give yourself permission to do something “bad”? • Are you borrowing credit from tomorrow? Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behavior tomorrow—and if so, do you follow through? • Halo effects. Do you justify a vice because of one virtuous aspect (e.g., discount savings, fat-free, protects the environment)? • Who do you think you are? When you think about your willpower challenge, which part of you feels like the “real” you—the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled? As you will see, it’s not just electrodes in the brain that can trigger this system. Our whole world is full of stimuli—from restaurant menus and catalogs to lottery tickets and television ads—that can turn us into the human version of Olds and Milner’s rat chasing the promise of happiness. When that happens, our brains become obsessed with “I want,” and it gets harder to say, “I won’t.” When the brain recognizes an opportunity for reward, it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what to pay attention to and what to get our greedy little hands on. A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself—the feeling is more like arousal. We feel alert, awake, and captivated. We recognize the possibility of feeling good and are willing to work for that feeling. In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire. But one thing is clear: It is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure, or actual reward. The joy of winning was registered in different areas of the brain. Knutson had proven that dopamine is for action, not happiness. The promise of reward guaranteed that participants wouldn’t miss out on the reward by failing to act. What they were feeling when the reward system lit up was anticipation, not pleasure. The flood of dopamine marks this new object of desire as critical to your survival. When dopamine hijacks your attention, the mind becomes fixated on obtaining or repeating whatever triggered it. When we add the instant gratification of modern technology to this primitive motivation system, we end up with dopamine-delivery devices that are damn near impossible to put down. There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: We search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like—well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit,” looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough. Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward—combined with a growing sense of anxiety when we think about stopping—is enough to keep us hooked. If you’re a lab rat, you press a lever again and again until you collapse or starve to death. If you’re a human, this leaves you with a lighter wallet and a fuller stomach, at best. At worst, you may find yourself spiraling into obsession and compulsion. In one study, participants who sampled something sweet were more likely to purchase indulgent foods such as a steak or cake, as well as items that were on sale. The food and drink samples amplified the appeal of products that would typically activate the reward system. There was no effect, however, on utilitarian items like oatmeal and dishwasher liquid, demonstrating that even a hit of dopamine cannot make toilet paper irresistible to the average consumer (sorry, Charmin). The Stanford researchers who ran this study asked twenty-one food and nutrition experts to predict the results, and shockingly, 81 percent believed that the opposite would be true—that samples would decrease a shopper’s hunger and thirst, and satiate their reward seeking. This just goes to show how unaware most of us—experts included—are of the many environmental factors that influence our inner desires and behavior. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever outlaw the promise of reward, we might as well put it to good use. We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks. An unpleasant chore can be made more appealing by introducing a reward. And when the rewards of our actions are far off in the future, we can try to squeeze a little extra dopamine out of neurons by fantasizing about the eventual payoff (not unlike those lotto commercials). The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward. Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would from guaranteed payments. This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. This is why people would rather play the lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO. But dopamine does have a dark side, one that’s not hard to see if we pay close attention. If we pause and notice what’s really going on in our brains and bodies when we’re in that state of wanting, we will find that the promise of reward can be as stressful as it is delightful. Desire doesn’t always make us feel good—sometimes it makes us feel downright rotten. That’s because dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy. It doesn’t mind putting a little pressure on us—even if that means making us unhappy in the process. To motivate you to seek the object of your craving, the reward system actually has two weapons: a carrot and a stick. The first weapon is, of course, the promise of reward. Dopamine-releasing neurons create this feeling by talking to the areas of your brain that anticipate pleasure and plan action. When these areas are bathed in dopamine, the result is desire—the carrot that makes the horse run forward. But the reward system has a second weapon that functions more like the proverbial stick. When your reward center releases dopamine, it also sends a message to the brain’s stress center. In this area of the brain, dopamine triggers the release of stress hormones. The result: You feel anxious as you anticipate your object of desire. The need to get what you want starts to feel like a life-or-death emergency, a matter of survival. The promise of reward is so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy, and consume things that bring us more misery than satisfaction. Because the pursuit of reward is dopamine’s main goal, it is never going to give you a “stop” signal—even when the experience does not live up to the promise. Mindfully indulge, but don’t rush through the experience. Notice what the promise of reward feels like: the anticipation, the hope, the excitement, the anxiety, the salivation—whatever is going on in your brain and body. Then give yourself permission to give in. How does the experience compare with the expectation? Does the feeling of the promise of reward ever go away—or does it continue to drive you to eat more, spend more, or stay longer? When, if ever, do you become satisfied? Or do you simply reach the point of being unable to continue, because you’re stuffed, exhausted, frustrated, out of time, or out of the “reward”? People who try this exercise commonly have one of two results. Some people find that when they really pay attention to the experience of indulging, they need far less than they thought they would to feel satisfied. Others find that the experience is completely unsatisfying, revealing a huge gap between the promise of reward and the reality of their experience. Both observations can give you greater control over what has felt like an out-of-control behavior. When you’re feeling down, what do you do to feel better? If you’re like most people, you turn to the promise of reward. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the most commonly used strategies for dealing with stress are those that activate the brain’s reward system: eating, drinking, shopping, watching television, surfing the Web, and playing video games. The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Neuroscientists have shown that stress—including negative emotions like anger, sadness, self-doubt, and anxiety—shifts the brain into a reward-seeking state. You end up craving whatever substance or activity your brain associates with the promise of reward, and you become convinced that the “reward” is the only way to feel better. The stress hormones released during a fight-or-flight response also increase the excitability of your dopamine neurons. That means that when you’re under stress, any temptations you run into will be even more tempting. Stress points us in the wrong direction, away from our clear-headed wisdom and toward our least helpful instincts. That’s the power of the one-two punch of stress and dopamine: We are drawn back again and again to coping strategies that don’t work, but that our primitive brains persistently believe are the gateway to bliss. According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.) The main difference between the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t? Rather than releasing dopamine and relying on the promise of reward, the real stress relievers boost mood-enhancing brain chemicals like serotonin and GABA, as well as the feel-good hormone oxytocin. As part of our class experiment, Denise committed to doing yoga at least once. When she did, she felt even better than she had remembered and couldn’t believe she had talked herself out of it for almost three years. Knowing that she was likely to forget again and fall into her old routine, she made a voice memo on her phone after class one evening, describing how good she felt after doing yoga. When she was tempted to skip yoga, she listened to the memo to remind herself, knowing that she could not trust her impulses when she was stressed. We don’t just cling to guns and God when we’re scared; many of us also cling to credit cards, cupcakes, and cigarettes. Studies show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief. This, no doubt, is how we end up with half the purchases that clutter our homes and pad our credit card bills. We’re feeling a little down, we come across an opportunity to purchase something, and a little voice—OK, a few dopamine neurons—in our head tell us, “Buy this—it’s everything you never knew you wanted!” Terror management strategies may take our minds off our inevitable demise, but when we turn to temptation for comfort, we may inadvertently be quickening our race to the grave. Case in point: Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. Sometimes terror management leads us not into temptation, but procrastination. Many of the most put-off tasks have a whiff of mortality salience about them: making a doctor’s appointment, filling a prescription and taking it when we’re supposed to, taking care of legal documents such as wills, saving for retirement, even throwing out things we’re never going to use again, or clothes we’ll never fit into. If there’s something you’ve been putting off or keep “forgetting” to do, is it possible that you are trying to avoid facing your vulnerability? If so, just seeing the fear can help you make a rational choice—the motivations we understand are always easier to change than the influences we cannot see. people who drank too much the previous night felt worse in the morning—headaches, nausea, fatigue. But their misery wasn’t limited to hangovers. Many also felt guilty and ashamed. That’s where things get disturbing. The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong. Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control. Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience. Below is an exercise that psychologists use to help people find a more self-compassionate response to failure. Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge. 1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that? 2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you. Consider the truth of these statements. 3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback. What words of support would you offer? A WRITER CHALLENGES THE VOICE OF SELF-CRITICISM Ben, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school social studies teacher with literary aspirations, had set the goal to finish writing his novel by the end of summer vacation. This deadline required him to write ten pages a day, every day. In reality, he would write two to three pages one day, then feel so overwhelmed by how far behind he was that he skipped the next day completely. Realizing that he wasn’t going to finish the book by the start of the school year, he felt like a fraud. If he couldn’t make the effort now, when he had so much free time, how was he going to make any progress when he had homework to grade and lessons to plan? Ben started to doubt whether he should even bother with the goal, since he wasn’t making the progress he thought he should be. “A real writer would be able to churn those pages out,” he told himself. “A real writer would never play computer games instead of writing.” In this state of mind, he turned a critical eye to his writing and convinced himself it was garbage. Ben had actually abandoned his goal when he found himself in my class that fall. He had enrolled in the class to learn how to motivate his students, but he recognized himself in the discussion about self-criticism. When he did the self-forgiveness exercise for his abandoned novel, the first thing he noticed was the fear and self-doubt behind his giving up. Not meeting his small goal to write ten pages a day made him afraid that he did not have the talent or dedication to realize his big goal of becoming a novelist. He took comfort in the idea that his setbacks were just part of being human, and not proof that he would never succeed. He remembered stories he had read about other writers who had struggled early in their careers. To find a more compassionate response to himself, he imagined how he would mentor a student who wanted to give up on a goal. Ben realized he would encourage the student to keep going if the goal was important. He would say that any effort made now would take the student closer to the goal. He certainly would not say to the student, “Who are you kidding? Your work is garbage.” From this exercise, Ben found renewed energy for writing and returned to his work-in-progress. He made a commitment to write once a week, a more reasonable goal for the school year, and one he felt comfortable holding himself accountable to. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on. The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful fantasies (“I lost five pounds, and I still have a crappy job!”). As we face our first setbacks, the initial feel-good rush of deciding to change is replaced with disappointment and frustration. Failing to meet our expectations triggers the same old guilt, depression, and self-doubt, and the emotional payoff of vowing to change is gone. Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and these are not the same thing. If all you care about is the feeling of hope, this is not an irrational strategy. Resolving to change is, for most people, the best part of the change process. It’s all downhill after that: having to exert self-control, saying no when you want to say yes, saying yes when you want to say no. The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to the rush of imagining that you will change. And so it’s not only easier, but also much more fun, to milk the promise of change for all it’s worth, without the messy business of following through. That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good. The high we get from imagining our own extreme makeovers is a difficult drug to quit. There is a fine line between the motivation we need to make a change, and the kind of unrealistic optimism that can sabotage our goals. We need to believe that change is possible; without hope, we’d resign ourselves to the way things are. But we must avoid the common trap of using the promise of change to fix our feelings, not to fix our behaviors. Otherwise, we can turn what looks like willpower into just another version of a rat pressing a lever, hoping this is the time we get the reward. Optimism can make us motivated, but a dash of pessimism can help us succeed. Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution. For your own willpower challenge, ask yourself: When am I most likely to be tempted to give in? How am I most likely to let myself get distracted from my goal? What will I say to myself to give myself permission to procrastinate? When you have such a scenario in mind, imagine yourself in that situation, what it will feel like, and what you might be thinking. Let yourself see how a typical willpower failure unfolds. Then turn this imaginary failure into a willpower success. Consider what specific actions you could take to stick to your resolution. Do you need to remember your motivation? Get yourself away from the temptation? Call a friend for support? Use one of the other willpower strategies you’ve learned? When you have a specific strategy in mind, imagine yourself doing it. Visualize what it will feel like. See yourself succeed. Let this vision of yourself give you the confidence that you will do what it takes to reach your goal. Planning for failure in this way is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt. When that moment of possible willpower failure hits, you will be ready to put your plan into • Forgiveness when you fail. Take a more compassionate perspective on your setbacks to avoid the guilt that leads to giving in again. • Optimistic pessimism for successful resolutions. Predict how and when you might be tempted to break your vow, and imagine a specific plan of action for not giving in. Economists call this delay discounting—the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you. Even small delays can dramatically lower the perceived value. With a delay of just two minutes, six M&M’s became worth less than two immediate M&M’s. The value of each M&M shrank as it became more distant. For your willpower challenge, ask yourself what future rewards do you put on sale each time you give in to temptation or procrastination. What is the immediate payoff for giving in? What is the long-term cost? Is this a fair trade? If the rational you says, “No, it’s a lousy deal!” try to catch the moment you reverse your preferences. What are you thinking and feeling that lets you put the future on sale? We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming. This leads to bounded willpower—we have self-control until we need it. The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and—for maximum effect—you need to see it. As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the power of balance shifts back to the brain’s system of self-control. This time, the students were much more likely to choose the larger, delayed reward. Not being able to see the immediate reward made it more abstract and less exciting to the reward system. This helped the students make a rational choice based on mental calculations, not primal feelings. This is good news for those who want to delay gratification. Anything you can do to create that distance will make it easier to say no. For a cooler, wiser brain, institute a mandatory ten-minute wait for any temptation. If, in ten minutes, you still want it, you can have it—but before the ten minutes are up, bring to mind the competing long-term reward that will come with resisting temptation. If possible, create some physical (or visual) distance as well. If your willpower challenge requires “I will” power, you can still use the ten-minute rule to help you overcome the temptation to procrastinate. Flip the rule to “Do ten minutes, then you can quit.” When your ten minutes are up, give yourself permission to stop—although you may find that once you get started, you’ll want to keep going. When “never again” seems too overwhelming a willpower challenge to tackle, use the ten-minute delay rule to start strengthening your self-control. One reason is that most people are loss-averse—that is, we really don’t like to lose something we already have. Losing $50 makes people more unhappy than getting $50 makes them happy. When you think about a larger, future reward first and consider trading it in for a smaller, immediate reward, it registers as a loss. But when you start with the immediate reward (the $50 check in your hand) and consider the benefits of delaying gratification for a larger reward, it also feels like a loss. You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is. 2. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: Are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now? The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It The Flinch by Julien Smith
This book, free on Amazon for the kindle, is one of those books that even though it is short, makes you pause and stop reading as you go. It made me understand that you need to lean into things. It’s about an instinct—the flinch—and why mastering it is vital. This book is about how to stop flinching. It’s about facing pain. It is about using the fear and pain to improve. Behind the flinch is pain avoidance, and dealing with pain demands strength you may not think you have, but you do. We all do, inside, it just needs to be unleashed. Facing the flinch is hard. It means seeing the lies you tell yourself, facing the fear behind them, and handling the pain that your journey demands—all without hesitation. The flinch is there to support the status quo. You treat mistakes as final, but they almost never are. Pain and scars are a part of the path, but so is getting back up, and getting up is easier than ever. You don’t need adrenaline to get through those things—you just need to do them. Crossing these obstacles will put the flinch in its place. The lessons you learn best are those you get burned by. Without the scar, there’s no evidence or strong memory. Firsthand knowledge, however, is visceral, painful, and necessary. It uses the conscious and the unconscious to process the lesson, and it uses all your senses. When you fall down, your whole motor system is involved. You can’t learn this from books. It just doesn’t work, because you didn’t really fall. You need to feel it in your gut—and on your scraped hands and shins—for the lesson to take effect. You can’t settle for reaching other people’s limits. You have to reach yours. If you don’t test yourself, you don’t actually grow to your own limits. For you to map out this new world, you need to test it, and test what you’re capable of inside it. You need to make mistakes, resist the flinch, and feel the lessons that come with this process. The anxiety of the flinch is almost always worse than the pain itself. You’ve forgotten that. You need to learn it again. You need more scars. You need to live. Ask yourself this: would your childhood self be proud of you, or embarrassed? Love this line. Who ever wanted to grow up and be working in a cubicle? Start doing the opposite of your habits. It builds up your tolerance to the flinch and its power. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” The truth is that judgment and fear will never stop, but they don’t actually do anything. There are no negative consequences for breaking the habit of flinching. Nothing will actually happen if you stop being afraid. You’re free. The ability to withstand the flinch comes with the knowledge that the future will be better than the past. You believe that you can come through challenges and be just as good as you were before them. The more positive you are, the easier it is for you to believe this. You move forward and accept tough situations, so no matter the breakup, the job loss, or the injury, you believe you’ll recover and end up fine. If you believe this, you’re right. Krishnamurti, a great Indian sage, once said: “You can take a piece of wood that you brought back from your garden, and each day present it with a flower. At the end of a month you will adore it, and the idea of not giving it an offering will be a sin.” In other words, everything that you are used to, once done long enough, starts to seem natural, even though it might not be. In times of stress, whatever pattern you’re used to taking emerges. If you’re used to running, you run. If you’re used to getting defensive, the same thing happens. It’s how you act under pressure. So you need to start recognizing your fight-or-flight response. Every alternative you develop is highly valuable because it opens your options dramatically. You can train yourself into new patterns, and you’re not the first to do so. The first step is to stop seeing everything as a threat. You can’t will this to happen—it requires wider exposure. If you’ve been punched in the face, you won’t worry as much about a mugger, for example. If you face the flinch in meditation, you don’t worry about a long line at the bank. Build your base of confidence by having a vaster set of experiences to call upon, and you’ll realize you can handle more than you used to. Doing the uncomfortable is key. It widens your circle of comfort. Second, rework the pattern of threat response. Learn habits that move you out of a fight-or-flight choice and into another pattern that’s more effective. But the real trick is to do what the professionals do. They use the speed of the flinch—they use its intensity—to their advantage. Instead of flinching back, they flinch forward—toward their opponent, and toward the threat. When you flinch forward, you’re using the speed of your instincts, but you don’t back off. Instead, you move forward so fast—without thinking—that your opponent can’t react. You use your upraised hands as weapons instead of shields. You use your fear to gain an advantage. Train yourself to flinch forward, and your world changes radically. The Flinch You go on offense instead of defense. Any fight you want to win, a habit of pushing past the flinch can make it happen. Most people rarely get in the ring for what matters. Instead, the fight gets fought by other people, elsewhere. Everyone talks about it like they want to be involved, but it’s just talk. The truth is that they can’t handle the pressure. They’re not in the ring because they aren’t ready to do what’s necessary to win. Today, right now, eliminate all excuses from your vocabulary. Refuse to mince words or actions. Refuse a scar-free life. The ring is different for everyone, but it’s always made of places, people, and projects that are worth the flinch. Habits obscure it. Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. But wiping out the fear isn’t what’s important—facing it is. This pressure you feel—this flinch you encounter every day—there is no end to it. After you deal with one, another will come your way. The pressure increases as you go on. Whatever tension you can handle, the ring will provide just a little bit more than that. Adjust to it. You will never be entirely comfortable. This is the truth behind the champion—he is always fighting something. To do otherwise is to settle. THE FLINCH, A CHECKLIST 1. Challenge yourself by doing things that hurt, on purpose. Have a willpower practice, such as very hard exercise, meditation, endurance, or cold showers. Choose something that makes your brain scream with how hard it is, and try to tolerate it. The goal isn’t just to get used to it. It’s to understand that pain is something you can survive. 2. Remember things that are easy to forget. Upgrade your current relationships. Create un-birthdays for your friends and stick to them. Go through old text messages to rekindle dormant friendships. 3. Read more. Not just current blog posts and tweets and Facebook updates online, but other sources that take more consideration than blog posts or news. 4. Get some scars by working with your hands. Try to understand how things in your world work, like your car, your stereo system, or even your kitchen. 5. Turn your mobile phone off for a few hours each day. Having nothing to do while you’re waiting for a bus can be boring, but it’s only when you’re bored that the scary thoughts come to the surface. 6. Find new friends who make you feel uncomfortable, either because they have done more than you or because they have done nothing that you have. 7. Renegotiate your work. If you achieve X, then will your employer do Y? 8. Start dressing as if you had a very important job or meeting, or as if you were twenty years old again and thought you were the coolest person on Earth. 9. Imagine that you have to leave a legacy, and everyone in the world will see the work you’ve done. Volunteer. Create something that lasts and that can exist outside of you, something that makes people wonder and gasp. 10. Make something amazing, something that’s terrifying to you. Stay uncomfortable. Fight the flinch wherever you see it. Leave no stone unturned. The Flinch Be ruthless towards your business.
Pretend it isn't personal, pretend it belongs to someone else for a moment so you can look at your work objectively. If a fighter loses a fight, he starts training for the next one. That is what you need to do, shake it off, and start training for the next one. Just because you thought something was a good idea doesn't it mean it was a good idea. If a product isn't selling, tweak, test it, but in the end, if it is not working, stop selling it and find another. The important part is the model, how it works, not what product you are pushing through it. If the product doesn't work, it doesn't mean you failed, in fact you have done something great, you tried something most people just talk about, or wish for, but never actually get off their couches to go do. You did it, you got started, took the leap/ Selling a product that didn't work just means you need to try something different, you learned something from that product that you can use on the next product, and on the next, You learned what doesn't work, you learned new skills. The only way selling a product that doesn't sell hurts you is if you are too stubborn to learn from it and move on. If it doesn't sell, pick something else. D Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance - Notes on the Book by Jonathan Fields8/11/2012
Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields
I liked this book much better than his first one, and it also popped on my radar just as I needed it. I particularly like the idea of rituals. It’s hard to sell mastery of entrepreneurship, marketing, and lifestyle without being able to succeed at those very things in your own business and life. The interesting thing about these ratings is that they aren’t based so much on the difficulty of the entire climb as on a set of moves known as the crux. Crux moves are the most challenging moments of the entire route; they often require you to push physically, emotionally, and intellectually, to take big and often blind risks in a way no other part of the climb does. There may be multiple crux moves along a single route. The manner in which you handle the thousands of smaller moments of uncertainty and challenge along the way determines whether you get to the crux moves. But the way you handle the crux moves themselves so strongly determines whether you’ll actually reach the peak that the difficulty of the most challenging crux sequence is often used to rate the entire climb. The book begins with an in-depth exploration of the three psychic horsemen of creation: uncertainty, risk, and exposure to criticism. When you begin, nothing is certain save the drive to create something worth the effort. The more certain you are of the answer or the outcome in advance, the more likely it is to have been done already—to be derivative—and the less anyone will care, including you. Anything certain has already been done. Or you can stand up and make a conscious choice to wade back into uncertain waters, knowing you’ve now invested time, money, and energy in an endeavor that, without substantial alteration, is going to end up a dud. These are tough moments, and ones that no creator in any realm can avoid. Creators need data. They need judgment, feedback, and criticism. But the possibility of loss is also a signpost that what you’re doing really matters, that you’re vested in both the process and the outcome. Knowing that fuels a deeper commitment to action and to striving not just to create something, but to create something amazing. Risk of loss has to be there. You cannot create genius without having skin in the game. Kill the risk of loss and you destroy meaning and one of the core motivations for action. The more you’re able to tolerate ambiguity and lean into the unknown, the more likely you’ll be to dance with it long enough to come up with better solutions, ideas, and creations. The two banks, it turns out, deliberately built their core philosophies, modes of operations, and culture around radically different ideals. For her book Bullish on Uncertainty (2009), business professor Alexandra Michel conducted a three-year study of the two banks. This approach was designed to deliberately amplify uncertainty, to force bankers to constantly reexamine what they were doing and why, and to keep them from falling into a pattern in which their perception of knowledge, expertise, and prestige blinded them to seeing the needs of any given client at any given time. It wasn’t unusual for them to report feeling overwhelmed and anxious as they tried to navigate those waters with very little structure. They immediately had to abandon a sense that they could rely on their own abilities and knowledge to get any deal done. Instead, they learned to harness all the resources of the firm and respond with the freshest eyes possible to what was in front of them. The ability not only to endure but to invite, amplify, and exalt uncertainty, then reframe it as fuel is paramount to your ability to succeed as a creator. Genius always starts with a question, not an answer. Eliminate the question and you eliminate the possibility of genius. However, that’s where things get really sticky. For all but a rare few, “living in the question” hurts. It causes anxiety, fear, suffering, and pain. And people don’t like pain. Rather than lean into it, we do everything possible to snuff it out. Not because we have to, but because we can’t handle the discomfort that we assume “has to” go along with the quest. The aversion to uncertainty, it seems, is hardwired into most people. a part of the brain known as the amygdala, which is a core instigator of fear and anxiety, lights up, triggering a cascade of physiological and psychological events, sending impulses and chemicals rushing through our bodies that induce a state of hyperalertness and, for many, anywhere from mild to severe fear and anxiety. “Remarkably, eliminating the possibility of evaluation by others makes ambiguity aversion disappear entirely.... Introducing the possibility of evaluation . . . is sufficient to make ambiguity aversion reemerge as strongly as commonly found.” We’ll create with abandon, make bolder choices, lean into uncertainty, and take risks far more readily if we know that whatever comes out of that effort will never be revealed to others. The moment we introduce the element of exposure, judgment, criticism, and the potential for rejection, most people run for the certainty fences. And in doing so, they become less willing to push boundaries, take risks, and choose less-certain options that often yield the greatest opportunities. In reality, we may not be as hardwired to avoid uncertainty as we are hardwired to avoid wanting to be judged for taking the lessmainstream path and coming up empty. Fear of judgment stifles our ability to embrace uncertainty and as part of that process delivers a serious blow to our willingness to create anything that hasn’t already been done and validated. One of the biggest awakenings as you strive to build a project, a career, and a life worthy of a legacy is that, in the end, there is no there there. No resting point. No certainty. No place to hide from either the inner or outer critics. The book may be finished, the movie wrapped, the company launched, or the product revealed. But what will you do when you go to work tomorrow? You and what you create will remain, to varying degrees, in a state of constant evolution. For Winsor, it’s not about tempting fate, it’s about going to that place where magic happens. “When the risks are big,” Winsor shared with me, “it’s where I feel most alive. In a weird way, it’s almost a meditative thing. When a lot’s on the line, whether it’s a big business deal or surfing a scary wave, I get so focused. Things slow down. The tiniest of details become alive, the feeling of a pebble beneath your shoe on a rock wall or the real meaning of a sentence in a business deal.” That experience, to Winsor, is what it’s all about. Rather than deterring action, he’s figured out how to experience it as the place from which the greatest opportunities arise. Indeed, the very activities he engages in, especially outside of work, and the consistency with which he undertakes them may be at the root of his ability to experience scenarios that would paralyze others as opportunities to go deeper. Junger’s seeming ability to harness the fear that cripples so many other creators, especially writers, is something that’s been with him for as long as he can remember. In a later conversation with me, he revealed, “I just figured out how to disengage from my experience of the fear and I do that with a lot of different emotions. I can do it with anger, frustration, whatever. I start feeling it and then I could just unhook from it.... I was a climber for tree companies and I’m scared of heights, but I never got over my fear of heights. I just figured out how to not think about it. It was really simple.” FROM THE DAWN of religion, nearly every faith has been built around not just scripture, not just community, but ritual. But if you strip away the beliefs and leave only the underlying rituals, you may be surprised to discover that rituals alone still have immense power as tools to counter the anxieties of an uncertain life. A certainty anchor is a practice or process that adds something known and reliable to your life when you may otherwise feel you’re spinning off in a million different directions. For the creator, whose very existence depends on the ability to spend vast amounts of time living and operating in the ethereal sea of uncertainty and anxiety that is creation, rituals in every part of life serve as a source of psychic bedrock Joe Fig’s fascinating look at the daily routines of artists, Inside the Painter’s Studio (2009), reveals that many of them maintain a near-dogged attachment to daily routine Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance In her classic book The Creative Habit (2003), legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp shares how she would awaken at 5:30 a.m. every day, take a taxi to the gym, work out with the same trainer, shower, eat three hard-boiled egg whites and coffee, make calls for one hour, work in her studio for two hours, rehearse with her company, return home for dinner, read for a few hours, then go to bed. Every day, the same routine. “A dancer’s life,” she said, “is all about repetition.” Commenting on the role of certainty anchors in his life, Steven Pressfield, whose book The War of Art (2002) opens a window into the power of ritual in creative work, shared with me his belief that to be a writer is to live in total insecurity. You never know where your next job is coming from, you never know if the next thing you do is going to find a market. “So . . . let’s say managing my money,” he offered, “I’m the most conservative person in the world. I just give it to a friend who takes care of everything for me. The only place I take risks is in the work. And then that’s where I feel like your job is to take risks.” Creation unfolds in two fairly distinct phases: • Insight/Dot Connecting/Disruption • Refinement, Expansion, and Production. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From (2010), REP is all about building out, testing, expanding, refining, detailing, debugging, and improving big ideas and insights. For entrepreneurs, it’s where the visionary individual generally ends up butting heads with the operations and process people charged with turning the idea into something executable and profitable. This is where ritual and routine, done right, add immense power to the process. Ritual helps train you to sit down when you most want to stand, when you’re forced to work on the part of the process that leaves you anywhere from bored to riddled with anxiety. Over time, ritual has a funny side effect. It creates momentum. It becomes a habit that builds its own head of steam, one capable of overriding the call of Twitter, Facebook, Green & Black’s Dark 85% chocolate, and trying to learn whether the rumors about Apple’s next product are true. Over time, through sheer force of practice, you begin to get better at the side of the process that empties you out. Maybe never as good as someone whose creative orientation pulls them toward it, but good enough to be better than most others who don’t work as hard at it as you do. Better than you thought you’d ever be at it. And when that happens, you begin to experience that side of the dance with greater tolerance. The distaste and anxiety diminishes just enough to make you no longer hate it. Repeated exposure to it reduces your fear of it. When writing his most recent book, Be Excellent at Anything (2010), Schwartz structured his day into three ninety-minute writing bursts that allowed him to complete the book working only four and a half hours a day for three months. Our brains, Schwartz discovered, become easily fatigued. They need breaks in order to refuel, to be able to refocus, create, and produce. In his book How We Decide (2009), Jonah Lehrer points to the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as the seat of selfcontrol or willpower. The problem is, the PFC is easily fatigued. In a Wall Street Journal article, Lehrer recounts an experiment conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Baba Shiv that divided students into two groups. While walking down a hallway, the members of one group had to recall a two-digit number, the members of the other a seven-digit number. During these walks, each student was offered a slice of chocolate cake or a bowl of fruit. The students trying to remember the seven-digit number were twice as likely to choose cake. Remembering the extra five digits so increased what Shiv called the “cognitive load” on their PFCs that their brains literally lost their ability to resist the cake. Willpower, it turns out, is a depletable resource. Tasks that involve heavy thinking, working memory, concentration, and creativity tax the PFC in a major way, and as Shiv’s experiment shows, Why should you care? Two reasons. What we often experience as resistance, desire, distraction, burnout, fatigue, frustration, and anxiety in the process of creating something from nothing may, at least in part, be PFC depletion that reduces our willpower to zero and makes it near impossible to commit to the task at hand—especially if the task wars with our creative orientation. In addition, what so many creators experience as a withering ability to handle the anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty as a project nears completion may actually be self-induced rather than process-induced suffering. Certainty anchors, dropped both within the context of your broader life and the boundaries of a specific creative endeavor, can be highly effective tools to counter the pull of fear, anxiety, and resistance. Explore Your Lifestyle Ritual Look at your life outside of your primary creative endeavor and see if you can create routine around the mundane, day-to-day activities. Look at your life outside of your primary creative endeavor and see if you can create routine around the mundane, day-to-day activities. Identify Your Creative Orientation Figure out which creative orientation fills you up and which empties you out: insight and big-idea generation, or refinement, expansion, and production. You may be able to evolve your starting orientation over time, but with rare exceptions we all come to the process with certain strong preferences. Ritualize Your Creation Time and Work in Bursts and Therapeutic Pauses When building your creation rituals, limit your bursts to no more than forty-five to ninety minutes, at least in the beginning. You may be able to train yourself to stay focused longer over time. Refuel Your Brain Between Bursts Between those bursts, exercise, meditate, nap, walk, eat—do whatever helps you refuel. It’s a bit like Shambala Buddhism founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s famous quote: “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground.” All the founders make a presentation to the group on a weekly basis. There are no secrets. Nobody gets selective protection. Everyone is exposed. Transparency is the rule. This dynamic doesn’t remove judgment, nor should it. As we’ve already noted, judgment, done well, is feedback, and feedback is manna to the creation process. But what it does is change the psychology of feedback by leveling the field. It creates a group dynamic in which each creator becomes far more open to input because that input is clearly driven by the desire to help improve the creation. The all-in nature of the feedback loop also helps lessen the blow. It’s not just your ideas that are being put on the block; everyone’s ideas are. That’s the process. And that’s a good, necessary thing, as long as it’s done right. If you can’t do it live, do it online. We saw an example of that in Scott Belsky’s creation of Behance.net and The99Percent.com. These are both huge creative communities catering to the broader set of “creatives who like to get stuff done.” Now, with millions of monthly page views, they serve as tremendous showcases and sources of feedback for the participants’ work. For Belsky, the communities also serve as gateways to the suite of wonderful creative productivity tools under his Action Method brand. So far, we’ve explored how making certain changes in behavior (certainty anchors, ritual, routine, working in bursts), environment (hives), and access to individuals (like-minded colleagues, mentors, heroes, and champions) can have a significant impact on your ability to lean into the uncertainty, exposure to judgment, and risk that come with the process of creation. WELL-CRAFTED, CONSTRUCTIVE CREATION hives, buttressed by peer feedback and guidance from mentors, heroes, and champions, can be powerful supports in the quest to embrace the uncertainty of creation. They allow us to get the information we need to move the creative ball forward while minimizing the anxiety that often comes from haphazard exposure to less tactful or even maliciously inclined colleagues and leaders A huge part of the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that defines the typical quest to create comes from a lack of input during the process of creation from those we’d most like to appeal to with our creations. When we plan a business, book, painting, or product, we take our best guesses at what will work. Then we work to either find the sweet spot between what we are organically compelled to create and what we believe people will want or ignore those we hope will eventually love our creations in the name of staying true to our muse. The process, for many, is largely blind. And that often leads to extraordinary levels of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and suffering. “My philosophy,” Rowse told me, “has always been just to start it and then again just start testing to see whether it’s worth spending any money on it . . . I’ve always been very conservative on that front . . . I don’t like to start things that I don’t think will work, and I don’t like to start things that other people don’t think will work.” Over time, the repeated exposure to user feedback served to diminish Rowse’s potential fear of judgment and intolerance for uncertainty. The same can happen for you: The repeated exposure to criticism becomes the functional equivalent of exposure therapy, one of the core tools in the fear arsenal of cognitive behavioral therapists. The more you act in the face of it and survive, the less you feel its stranglehold. The tenets of lean manufacturing are generally agreed to include: 1. Eliminate waste. 2. Amplify learning. 3. Decide as late as possible. 4. Deliver as fast as possible. 5. Empower the team. 6. Build in integrity. 7. See the whole. In the lean start-up, everything is done in the name not of profits but of learning. Teams build what Ries calls a minimum viable product (MVP) that represents the “least amount of work necessary to start learning.” This product is then released to potential users as a series of experiments; feedback is solicited, then folded into the next MVP. The word “pivot,” which in start-up circles means the process of making serious changes to nearly every assumption your big business idea was based on and everything that’s grown out of that idea, As the legendary Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Randy Komisar revealed in his book Getting to Plan B (2009), the vast majority of companies, even vetted ones backed by venture capital, get serious elements of their business model, solution, and market demand completely wrong. A willingness and ability to own those mistakes as early and as often as possible has become exalted by a growing number of mentors, founders, and investors Creators of all types are tapping a very different online platform—Kickstarter.com—to fund their creations, solicit feedback, and even pre-sell their creations while they’re still in the idea stage, altering the fear and certainty dynamic in a profound way. According to the description on the company’s Web site, Kickstarter. com is “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.... This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work.” In the three years preceding the book’s publication, Rubin had taken to blogging and had built a substantial, engaged community. She tapped that community on a regular basis to ask questions, share ideas, and offer hints of what was coming in the book. The blog also became fertile ground to test content and see what people were responding to. Then she went a step further and created what she called her tribe of Happiness Project “superfans,” a gathering of readers who got more access to Rubin, along with the opportunity to learn more about the book and share insights and ideas. As we saw earlier, whether you’re tapping a full-blown lean creation process—with rapid prototyping, iteration, and co-creation—or focusing more on just the co-creation aspect, it’s important to preserve your role as the leader and primary visionary in the process. While there is no way to remove uncertainty from the process of creation, technology is now opening doors that allow us to reallocate how and when we experience that uncertainty. Shift Your Focus to Learning One of the big leaps Eric Ries suggested entrepreneurs take is to focus less on traffic, sales, or profits and more on learning as much as possible as quickly as possible Explore Your MVP Ask yourself whether you can create a minimum viable product that is finished enough to be able to release so you can gather feedback that you can incorporate in the next iteration. Be Open to Collaboration with Colleagues and End Users If you are creating simply because that is why you are here, without reference to whether your output will ever earn enough to let you live well in the world, it’s easier to create in a vacuum. However, the moment you seek money in exchange for your creation, the opinions of your eventual buyers matter. Bring Out Your Leader Bringing others into the process requires a set of skills that many creators either don’t normally exercise or haven’t fully developed, the most important involving leadership. Explore Your Value Exchange If you are asking something from others, explore what type of value you can offer in exchange. “When you step into ambiguity and uncertainty, when you surround yourself essentially with uncertainty without a life jacket,” Komisar told me, “you still have to have a foundation, a core, a center. You can’t be completely relative in that environment.... Even though you may not actually have a clear objective and you certainly don’t have a path to get there, you have to have a keel that keeps you centered. Spiritual practice allowed me to find that keel.” Meditation had formed the centerpiece of her creative life for decades. She considers it the most essential thing she does in her business, Practicing and mastering that one skill—touching, then dropping your current thought pattern—is hugely important for any creator. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance Addressing an audience of film students at Boston’s Majestic Theater, filmmaker David Lynch pointed to yet another form of AT—Transcendental Meditation—as the source of deep calm and tremendous leaps in creativity. “Anger and depression and sorrow, they’re beautiful things in a story,” he said with the audience, “but they’re like a poison to the filmmaker, they’re a poison to the painter, they’re a poison to creativity.” Through his practice, he added, “the enjoyment of life grows. Huge ideas flow more. Everybody has more fun on the set. Creativity flows.” Attentional training (AT) is a catch-all phrase for a wide variety of techniques that create certain psychological and physiological changes in your body and brain. Many of them are derived from centuries-old ideologies and philosophies; some have religious overlays, while others have always been more secular. Major approaches include: • Active AT • Guided Meditation • Transcendental Meditation • Insight meditation • Mindfulness • Zen meditation and zazen • Buddhist meditation • Mantra meditation • Chanting and prayer across many traditions • Biofeedback • Hypnosis and self-hypnosis Each approach is built around a set of relatively simple daily practices. The common element is the experience of focused awareness for a committed period of time, The point is, the right kind of physical activity can induce the AT state. And over time that psycho-physiological training filters past your physical health to your mind-set and creativity. Mindfulness is, most broadly, an approach to how you exist in the world. Sitting and walking meditation are common daily practices, but mindfulness is also about how you wash your dishes, do your work, talk to people, and engage with the world. It’s not about seeking to create change; it’s about being with what you have and where you are, in the moment, every moment. Rather than focusing and excluding, it’s about resting a smallish bit of attention on your breath, then progressively opening to anything and everything that’s happening around you Transcendental Meditation was introduced to the world by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi some fifty years ago. According to TM.org, “During the past 50 years, more than five million people have learned the Transcendental Meditation technique and . . . Maharishi has trained over 40,000 teachers, opened thousands of teaching centers, and founded hundreds of schools, colleges and universities.” It is the most widely practiced and probably the most standardized teaching and practice protocol around today. TM instruction is highly standardized into a seven-session training sequence. Everyone learns the same thing, and training is readily available in many places. Once you learn it, you practice twice a day for twenty minutes at a time. David Lynch has become a huge proponent of TM practice as a tool for creators, because it cultivates a shift in brain coherence, mood, and the ability to lean into fear and uncertainty, and allows you to tap what the TM community calls the Unified Field, a form of shared consciousness that can become a rich source of creative insight. AT drops you into a place that, as your practice deepens, increasingly inoculates you against much of the pain and suffering that accompanies scenarios that would normally bring on fear, uncertainty, and anxiety. It doesn’t change the scenario. It doesn’t alter your circumstance. It doesn’t make things more certain or less fearful or pull you out of the state you need to be in in order to create. It just changes the way you live in this place. It allows you the equanimity to lean into uncertainty, risk, and judgment with greater ease. by Professor Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology and Professor Michael Posner of the University of Oregon, reported that just five days of a meditation-based form of AT called Integrative Body Mind Technique (IBMT) led to “low levels of the stress hormone cortisol among Chinese students.” The experimental group also showed lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue than students in a group practicing a nonmeditative form of relaxation. In 1993, University of Hertfordshire professor and author of The Luck Factor (2004) Richard Wiseman conducted a fascinating experiment that demonstrated the potentially limiting impact of blind commitment to a goal and its connection to perceived good fortune and improved outcomes. Good fortune, it seems, smiles upon those who remain open to inviting possibilities and opportunities outside the rigid constructs of their immediate task, mission, or vision. The approach to visualization or mental simulation most often offered is something called outcome simulation. It asks you to create a vivid picture of a specific outcome as if it has already happened. There is, however, a different approach to visualization that has been shown in a number of published studies to be significantly more powerful than outcome visualization. It’s also an approach that is custom-built for the daily mind-set of the long-term, large-scale creator, because it bolsters your ability to better define a project and take action on it on a daily basis. It’s called process simulation, and true to its name, it focuses on visualizing not the outcome or goal but the steps and actions needed to get there. Over a one-week period, for five minutes each day, students in the processsimulation group visualized the actions and steps needed to complete a specified project The driving engine and greatest challenge in any long-term, creative endeavor is to act daily, especially in the face of great uncertainty, fear, risk, and anxiety. How do you make process simulation work for you? Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, MAPP, offers three powerful ways to put this tool to work: Define Your Daily Creation Ritual Use It to Self-regulate or Stick to Your Ritual Here’s where this practice really shines. Actions and rituals have power when you do them. If you’re a writer, visualize yourself putting your notebook or pad in your bag, walking to your favorite café, choosing your table, ordering your favorite beverage, spending a few minutes reviewing handwritten notes, then opening your current creation and writing X words or for X minutes or hours, then taking a break to do Y, then coming back for your second creation about thirty minutes later. Create a Tangible Manifestation of Your Commitment While many people are strongly visual in their thought and learning, others are not. Asking those nonvisual people to visualize even small steps can be an exercise in futility, because their brains don’t operate that way. Writing, however, can be a highly effective approach to process simulation. Rather than simply thinking and seeing the steps, rituals, and actions, take the extra step of writing them down. This changes the dynamic in a number of ways. To-do lists are perfect examples of this. Part of the reason they can be so effective (not always, for as we all know, they can be easily abused or used as crutches) is that they are effectively process simulation lists. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), she identifies what she calls the fixed and growth mind-sets. A person with a growth mind-set, on the other hand, assumes that work is the core driver of success and places less importance on genetics as a determining factor An excerpt from a 2004 interview with Murakami in The Paris Review brings home the connection between physical strength and creating extraordinary work: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 A.M. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit, and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 P.M. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity. As Dr. John Ratey noted in his seminal work Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (2008), exercise isn’t just about physical health and appearance. It also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). It affects not only your ability to think, create, and solve, but your mood and ability to lean into uncertainty, risk, judgment, and anxiety in a substantial, measurable way, even though until very recently it’s been consistently cast out as the therapeutic bastard child in lists of commonly accepted treatments for anxiety and depression. In a 2002 study, Rhode Island College professor Stephen Ramocki found a significant relationship between vigorous aerobic exercise and creativity, including an increase in creativity immediately following exercise. While higher-intensity exercise seems to be more effective in countering anxiety and elevating mood, Blanchette found that even moderate exercise yielded a significant increase in creativity that was still present two hours after the exercise was completed. And an October 2007 Newsweek article reporting on a series of studies by Professor Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, showed that daily aerobic exercise can actually grow new brain cells, especially in the hippocampus, the area that controls memory and learning, and in the frontal lobes, which are chiefly responsible for executive function—planning, abstract thinking, decision making and adaptation, processing sensory information, taking constructive action, not taking destructive action, and knowing the difference between the two. Exercise fostered improved performance on psychological tests of the subjects’ ability to answer questions more quickly and accurately. The research also seems to show there is a “use it or lose it” effect once you are well into adulthood. Stop exercising and the increases quickly fade Indeed, the demand for varied, community-driven exercise has begun to fuel an explosion in alternative forms of movement and exercise experiences and settings among adults. These activities—think martial arts, CrossFit, bootcamps, obstacle challenges, modified indoor cycling, P90X, power yoga, dancing, team sports, boxing, badminton, rock climbing—engage the mind, cultivate passion, and inspire joy. • For more information on easily accessible approaches to AT and to download complementary guided meditations in mp3 format, visit JonathanFields.com/mindset. Read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success for detailed information about how to undertake the change First, read Dr. John Ratey’s book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. When you are called to create, the psychology of the endeavor also changes. Experiencing a calling creates a sense of deeper conviction, of purpose that often you, even as the creator or vision leader, don’t fully understand. When you are driven by a calling or a deeply personal quest and you allow that calling to inspire action, you live in the world differently. You do a thousand little things you’ve never done before. You act and interact with more confidence and vitality. Your personal energy changes. As Guy Kawasaki explains in his book Enchantment (2011), purpose and passion enchant people. They want to be around you. They want to help you. In his book Getting to Plan B, Randy Komisar suggests setting up what he calls a dashboard. You create a grid that identifies all of your major data points, assumptions, and leaps of faith on day one, then revisit it at regular intervals to assess what remains valid. Belsky’s vision is not to create the current line of Action Method products, but rather to create tools and processes that make creatives more productive. What those look like will change over time. And that allegiance to a market, rather than a specific product, gives him a lot of leeway to continue to test, build, bomb, and evolve. All too often, that’s not how start-ups or even established productdevelopment teams operate. They are wedded more to their particular solution than to the notion of serving a market. When they start to have problems with that product, ones that aren’t fixable with easy tweaks, they have a very difficult time moving through these moments. I also had a chance to sit down with Robert McKee, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the structure of storytelling. Through his international Story seminars and a book of the same name, McKee has trained tens of thousands of screenwriters, television writers, and authors, including a laundry list of people who’ve won every award possible. Genius requires craft plus insight. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance Counterintuitive as it sounds, it’s the undoing that plants the seeds of the greatest doing. What I create in any one medium is made far richer by the fact that I spend considerable time outside that medium. It may mean my path to mastery takes longer. So be it. In the end, I create better businesses because I write. I write better books, essays, and posts because I relish my time as a dad, son, brother, husband, friend, yogi, student, and teacher. we also have an organic cap on our ability to focus. Ninety minutes is the outside window. And, honestly, that’s being quite generous. Business strategist and Be Unreasonable (2007) author Paul Lemberg shared with me that his extensive work with hundreds of C-level executives and thousands of employees yielded a number closer to twenty-five to forty-five minutes. Start by spending a few weeks really listening to and watching your rhythms to get a good sense for the parts of the day in which you’re able to (1) do great work (2) with the greatest ease. Try working at different times of the day, maybe even rising early or staying up later to test a variety of windows. Productive creation rituals let you check back into your nonwork life. They give you both the time and the mind space to drop into that life far more often, spend more time there, take better care of yourself, and remind yourself how wonderful that place and its inhabitants are. Rather than allow these things to derail her, she reframes these challenges as experiences and information that will help make next year’s event even better. In her mind, this isn’t so much a one-shot deal as it is a journey that will build and unfold for years. It’s all about learning and serving. That “reframe” doesn’t eliminate the emotions but rather gives it a different context, a different story line that allows her to lean into it and move through the uncertainty, exposure, and risk with more ease. That shift alone is pretty powerful. Reframing, in the world of psychology, is better known as an example of cognitive reappraisal, changing the story or message around fear-inducing stimuli to alter your emotional response. Reframing literally changes the way your brain processes the experience, tamping down the fear and anxiety that might come as an automatic response to uncertainty, risk, and exposure to judgment. One of the greatest fears of creators is the fear of failure. But that term is pretty fuzzy. It’s more of a catchall phrase that includes (1) fear of judgment (what happens when you crash and burn), (2) intolerance for uncertainty, and (3) fear of what most people would consider extreme loss. We’ll use “going to zero” as a shorthand phrase to describe that trilogy. What we’re really talking about here is the anxiety that sets in when you envision yourself losing a solid enough chunk of money, time, energy, prestige, respect, or reputation that the fall would, in your mind, spell disaster. For many entrepreneurs, artists, and organizational innovators, the experience of going to zero releases within them the freedom to rebuild in a way they’d never have given themselves the latitude to explore had they never been stripped of their prior success. There’s only up or down. The notion that you can just coast through life in neutral is a fallacy constructed to rationalize inaction. By no means is the “sideways is good enough” mentality limited to the fitness industry. In fact, the challenging economy is fueling a mass movement to this position. Concerned about job security, employees who built careers on the back of innovation across a wide spectrum of industries are increasingly unwilling to take bold, creative action. Nobody wants to guess wrong in a climate where money is short and jobs are shorter. The net effect—a stifling of the very risk taking, innovation, and action in the face of uncertainty that fueled earlier success—spells troubling times ahead for many companies that don’t reaffirm their commitment to a culture of innovation, and not just in words, but in actions. In art, business, and entrepreneurship, there is no coasting. There is no neutral. No sideways. It’s a myth, an illusion. There’s only up or down. Leading or trailing be sure to explore the three key questions as well: • What if fail, then recover? • What if I do nothing? • What if I succeed? When you run from uncertainty, you end up running from life. From evolution. From growth. From wisdom. From friendship. From love. From the creation of art, services, solutions, and experiences that move beyond what’s been done before to illuminate, serve, solve, and delight in a way that matters. I built certainty anchors more deliberately into my life and my work. I created more systematic routines around basic lifestyle activities, then rebuilt work-oriented creation efforts around a series of intense bursts interspersed with activities that would give both my brain and my body a chance to recover and refuel. I created and leaned on my own creation hive, an inner circle of like-minded writers, marketers, and entrepreneurs who I knew were insanely smart, compassionate, driven, and abundance oriented—meaning we each viewed the others’ successes as our own and rallied to support them. Leveraging technology, I created my own private creation tribe, which was in part a subset of my already rich online community but also included a number of new voices drawn to share in my process and journey. I shared ideas, insights, and experiences; Recommitting to a twice-a-day meditation practice has allowed me to find what Randy Komisar identified as a “keel” in the storm of life, as well as a place of stillness in which to cultivate ideas and insights and let them grow into actions and then endeavors. Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance Hustle matters. Grit matters.
I know, you love ideas, and you are great at them. You have several millionndollar ideas. You are a machine. Listen. Ideas are cheap pieces of head lint. Ideas do not make anyone rich. Ideas are merely daydreams when you do nothing to make them happen. They are nothing more tan wishes without action. You will have a million ideas, and the ideas that you will have will pop in your head constantly, and most of those ideas you won't notice or you will ignore. Some of your ideas will be so good that you will get excited, and you won't tell anyone that way no one will steal your idea. Do yourself a favor and tell someone. Get some new thoughts on your idea, some fresh eyes. More importantly, take action on your idea. get others to believe in your idea, and get hem to take action. Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to success. The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action. Do something. Anything. I do not listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What they say only tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, but what they do tells you who they are. As you start to take action on your thoughts and ideas, and things start to happen, what you will find is thst other opportunities will come up, and other possibilities will come your way. Action creates success. Ideas equal wishes and work just as well. On life, only grit and hustle matter. D |
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