10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace: First Secret
February 19, 2010 by dr. lam · 3 Comments
Wayne Dyer provides a never-ending source of inspiration and guidance for me. He has melded my professional and personal lives seamlessly because they are truly now one. My intention in life is to leave someone whom I encounter better off than before I met them. My goal in short is healing: healing for me, healing for my loved ones, my friends, my acquaintances, for the world, and for those whom I have not had the honor to meet yet. Dyer’s short and simply book, 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace provides a simple recipe to live one’s life, and I am happy to record some of his thoughts comingled with my own.
He disavows the “success” in this book not as one of how to get more money, get more respect in a job, how to get a person to love you but something much more substantive than any of these three. How to attain peace and happiness in our lifetime but through different channels. I hope you attain as much joy and happiness as I have done just reading his work and interpreting it.
First Secret: “Have a Mind That Is Open to Everything and That Is Attached To Nothing”
Aren’t we a product of our environment? If our parents were Republicans, we then to lean to the right. If our parents were Democrats, we may gain a favorable disposition to that party. If we were raised in a religious household, we may espouse certain beliefs. If we were raised in a Jewish household, we probably would not be devout Muslims. How often does our gender, race, age, country, etc. confine our beliefs and opinions so that when someone says something we are already offering a closed judgment. We do not sit to consider its merits because we are who we are.
Dyer espouses that we should all be open-minded individuals who can think and accept ideas that are presented to us without early closure, prejudice, dismissal, and bias. By opening your mind and listening instead of shutting off the other person, we may gain valuable insight despite our color, creed, age, religion, politics, gender, orientation, and a whole host of other biases and self-imposed limitations.
His second part of the first secret is not to be attached to anything. This can mean both in terms of physical objects but also preprogrammed thoughts. When the only way to think of a subject is as a Republican then we must shut out anyone and everything that collides with this belief. We simply cannot entertain another way. We are closed. When we are attached to physical pleasures and amenities we are slaves to them because we must have those creature comforts to be who we are. We are our car, our house, our clothes, etc. We cannot see that attachment to things, ideas, etc. makes us a closed off individual with barriers between us and our fellow humans. Today open yourself to new ideas, new thoughts, new adventures, new people, etc.
What the Dog Saw Part 4 of 4: Late Bloomers
February 18, 2010 by dr. lam · 7 Comments
The story of Ben Fountain, the celebrated author, is fascinating. He quit his day job as an attorney in Dallas at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, to write full time, leaving his wife to go on to become partner in the same firm. Fountain became famous for his collection of short stories entitled, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which the Time Book Review called “heartbreaking”. He was listed on almost every major bestseller list and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. All of this sounds like the typical story of a struggling writer whose precocity is recognized and takes the literary world by storm.
Not exactly. Fountain quit his day job in 1988. It was not until 2006, 18 years later that he got his breakthrough with Brief Encounters. A novel that he wrote and put into a drawer took him 4 years to write. Our idea of genius is inextricably linked to precocity. Someone who at a tender age creates his masterpiece like Orson Welle’s Citizen Kane at 25 years of age or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at 32 years of age. However, is this always the case?
The best example of understanding how this may not always be the case is looking at Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso was celebrated from the get go. He was given a generous stipend when arriving to Paris and won acclaim at the age of twenty and continued to marvel the world as he matured. Cézanne on the other hand tore up pieces on and off again until his maturity. His aborted painting of his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, is a typical example. He had the dealer show up at 8 in the morning and worked feverishly until 11:30, with 150 sittings during that time before abandoning the project. Picasso, on the other hand, said “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research.” Picasso knew what he wanted and painted it. In fact, paintings from Picasso in his midtwenties are valued at four times what his later work sells for; whereas for Cézanne the opposite is true: paintings in his sixties are valued at 15 times what his paintings from his early years are worth. He was a late bloomer.
David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago, wrote in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity” believes that younger artists who achieve fame start at a “conceptual” level. They have a concept and they execute on it. Other artists that slog toward a result are “experimental”: they constantly revise a work until they get it right. That might take years to achieve. They are the Cézannes and Fountains of this world.
In contrast to Ben Fountain, the writer Jonathan Safran Foer wrote his masterpiece, Everything is Illuminated in 2002 while he was an undergraduate student at Princeton. He took a class by famed author Joyce Carol Oates and tried his hand at creative writing, being encouraged for a second semester by Oates’ comment that she was a fan of his writing, which of course shocked him. She said he had the most essential element of a good writer, energy. He then took a summer retreat to Europe after his sophomore year to visit where his grandfather came from in Ukraine. He wrote 300 pages in 10 weeks of a book he was not even planning to write and it became his famous first outing, Everything is Illuminated.
Gladwell then recounts how Fountain was able to survive all of those years in obscurity without a real job so to speak. It was his wife Sharie who worked and continued to believe in his artistry. She was his muse and patron. Similarly Cézanne was encouraged by Emile Zola, taught by Camille Pisarro, and supported by Ambrose Vollard and his own disbelieving but wealthy banker father, Louis-Auguste. Without patrons, “experimental” artists may never see the light of day.
This chapter for me was fascinating since I love art, artists, and artistry. It is amazing to see this dichotomy between two types of artists and it makes sense. I fashion myself more of a conceptual artist, as I tend to have a strong vision that starts my quest toward a goal. I then execute on it. In fact, one of my favorite artists Sol Lewitt is the father of conceptual art, as the concept is king. I love to see how Gladwell wove this amazing story from start to finish. It reveals a lot about the rich tapestry of humanity and complexity that lies within each of us.
What the Dog Saw Part 3 of 4: Blowup
February 17, 2010 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
When the space shuttle Challenger blew up in the sky over southern Florida 45 minutes into its voyage on the fateful day of January 28, 1986, a search for blame began. The slipshod policies of NASA and its prime contractor, Morton Thiokol, were clearly to blame. Thirty-two months later, the shuttle Discovery was redesigned and launched as a testament to that correction. However, the sociologist Diane Vaughan, in her book, The Challenger Launch Decision, argued “No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil.” She further states, “Rather, a series of seemingly harmless decisions were made that incrementally moved the space agency toward a catastrophic outcome.” What? No one was to blame? Perhaps. Even if Vaughan’s arguments are only partly correct, it raises a fundamental concern of how we as humans need to wrap up our understanding of failure by laying blame.
In the near disaster of Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear-power plant in March of 1979, the president’s commission concluded that the result was of human error, particularly on the part of the plant’s operators. However, perhaps the story is not that simple. It all began with a blockage in the plant’s polisher, a giant water filter of sorts. Polisher problems are a relatively common occurrence and one that typically does not lead to any major problems. However, in this case, the blockage caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, which then tripped two valves that in turn shut down the flow of cold water into the plant’s steam generator. Typically, the backup cooling system handles such a problem. However, for a reason that is unclear, the valves for the backup system were closed. In addition, a repair tag hanging on a switch above the indicator just so happened to block the visibility of the off setting in the control room. That left the relief system to handle the problem. However, it just so happened that the relief system was not working that day. In addition, it just so happened the gauge to tell the operators in the control room that the relief system was not working was also not working. By the time that the operators figured out the 5 things that all went wrong at the same time, TMI was near hitting a melt down.
Charles Perrow of Yale University is a sociologist who has investigated these matters and has classified the accumulation of minor events that lead to catastrophe as a “normal accident.” In his classic 1984 treatise on accidents, Perrow uses examples of well-known plane crashes, oil spills, chemical-plant explosions, etc., to show that many of them can best be understood as “normal”. The most famous example of a normal and not a “real” accident is Apollo 13, as brilliantly depicted in the movie of the same name. The Apollo flight was hit with a combination of the failure of the spacecraft’s oxygen and hydrogen tanks and the failure of the astronauts to recognize the problem due to an indicator light that diverted their attention.
Was the Challenger accident then a normal accident? Not exactly. The Challenger failed because of one catastrophic problem, the O-ring. However, Vaughan looked at the culture of NASA that over decades had accepted what was deemed normal risk or deviance. This creep of behavior over time allowed the brass to accept the O-ring problem as within tolerable limits of normal. So it was not amoral or immoral individuals that ignored dangers, it was the longstanding culture of NASA to factor in this risk as part of conformed policy.
In fact, how we handle risk is something fascinating. When we become accustomed to risk, we start to behave a bit like NASA. Since the O-rings never caused problems in the past, then we can lower our standards a bit. This is known as risk homeostasis. The introduction of ABS brakes actually led to a higher incidence of accidents because people began to act erratically on the roads and took greater risks. The adoption of seat belts however was such a powerful factor toward safety that it overcame the limited increase in risk homeostasis. An example in Sweden is fascinating. In the late 1960s, Sweden switched from driving on the left hand side of the road to the right side. Instead of an increase of accidents, there was a decrease of 17% during the next year, followed by a steady return to previous accident levels. People were simply driving much more safely to avoid a possible accident.
What this chapter brought to my attention were several important ideas. First, we humans tend to ascribe blame to an accident because we want a reason for something and a story to tell it. However, sometimes accidents just occur no matter what we do to try to avoid them. Second, if we look less proximally at the accident but at the larger culture we may be able to create an environment that is less prone to having an accident. Finally, if we take even a deeper look at our own irrationality, we can see that our accustomed insouciance toward risk can be the ultimate cause for increasing our own risk, the so-called concept of risk homeostasis.
What the Dog Saw Part 2 of 4: JFK, Jr. and The Art of Failure
February 16, 2010 by dr. lam · 6 Comments
Gladwell investigates the difference between choking and panicking. In the 1993 Wimbledon finals, Jana Novotna led Steffi Graff by 4-1 and serving 40-30, was poised to win the tournament. But then the tide turned, and Novotna after a double fault began to lose control ultimately to her own demise and Graff’s victory. Did she choke or did she panic?
Gladwell says that choking occurs when we resort to our “explicit learning” system, the time when we were younger and just starting out to learn something and when our conscious minds dominated our every thought. Remembering Maxwell Maltz’s four stages of mastery, we go from unconscious incompetence (we don’t know we are doing it wrong), conscious incompetence (we know we are doing it wrong but don’t know how to fix it), conscious competence (we are doing it right but with a lot of conscious effort), to unconscious competence (it is effortless).
In a stage of choking, we return to conscious competence or worse a lower stage. We tend to become extremely deliberate with every movement because we are trying very very hard not to screw up. The effortlessness that we have acquired with experience is thrown out the window and we become in short, a junior player, once again. That is the essence of choking.
Panicking is altogether different. An example is of a diving accident in Monterey Bay, California. At nineteen years of age just two weeks into dive training, a young man recounts that during an exercise he had to remove his regulator and replace it with his secondary one after clearing the line of water. When doing so, his mouth was engulfed with salt water. Panicking, he couldn’t think and reached out to grab the regulator from the mouth of his buddy. Doing so could have imperiled both of them. Instead of reaching for his primary regulator or for his partner’s secondary regulator, panic set in. Perceptual narrowing caused him to forget all logic and move to instinct, “I need air now” causing him to react in the manner he did. With added experience, an individual has less chance of panicking because he can draw from his accumulated experience.
As evident, panic is the opposite of choking. Choking involves a return to a logical, explicit system of behavior. Panicking involves a return to a base instinctual response. Why does this matter? It doesn’t so much if you lost a tennis match due to a choke or panic. However, it can bring about an understanding in certain cases of failure. Take for example the aerial death of JFK, Jr.
On a Friday evening in July of 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and his sister-in-law took off for Martha’s Vineyard, a course that he was quite familiar with. However, that night the air was particularly hazy and visibility was poor. Kennedy accustomed to looking for Martha’s Vineyard’s lights at night looked out into a bleak oblivion, as there were no visual guides whatsoever. He started to frenetically bank his plane. However, a slight embankment can lead to a greater embankment, as the plane enters what is known as a “graveyard spiral”. The pilot may not even feel the G force since the spiral in a pressurized cabin feels like he is moving level with the absent horizon. The time between initial radio contact and the crash into the ocean was less than sixty seconds.
JFK, Jr. panicked. He was very used to using the lights of Martha’s Vineyard to guide him. Without them, he was lost. Rather than returning to his explicit learning of using his instruments, he continued to literally spiral into his instinctual flying habits but without a noticeable G force of the downward spiral and no lights to guide him, he most likely remained frozen and lost concentration. That loss of concentration for less than one minute cost 3 lives that night.
There are two important things to learn from this situation. First, experience counts for a lot. The more that we perform in our specialty, focus on it, and spend time with it, we can create alternative strategies in times of apparent failure. Second, we should possibly go back to our explicit learning system rather than our intuitive one when we reach a point when our intuition fails us. Profound.
Mindfulness Mondays 38: Letting Go of Judgment
February 15, 2010 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
Don’t we all have a little Simon Cowell in us? How good does it feel to be judged ourselves? Not great, right? We oftentimes judge others by their words, actions, and deeds. When they do not conform to our narrow worldview, we stand in judgment over that person owing to our superior position. We use religion, politics, education, age, gender, race, looks, etc. to get in our way, and simply put we judge.
We rely on labels to help reduce that other individual in our eyes to a stereotype: Black, Woman, Muslim, Child, Retarded, Nerdy, etc. We hide behind these stereotypes because they are easy and make us feel good about ourselves. But do they? We should feel bad if we start to label and judge another individual because we have no right to do so. Simon Cowell may be fun for American Idol, but he is no fun if you are one or if you are with one.
Remember in The 4 Agreements, “we judge others by their action, and we judge ourselves by our intention.” Oh, Bob did that because he was being hurtful (judging action). Oh, I never meant to cause harm because I am a good person (judging intention). We are so full of moral superiority that we have to exercise it daily just so that we can feel good about ourselves. ”I would not hang out with Susan because she just does not know when to shut up.”
When are we filled with judging? How do we judge? This week catch yourself judging someone else and begin the process of letting that go. When we let go of judging, we can connect with people that we thought we never could because of our preconceived judgments that got in our way.