The 50th Law (22 page)

Learning language sets the pattern for all human activities—purely intellectual or physical. To master a musical instrument or a game, we begin at the lowest level of competence. The game seems boring as we have to learn the rules and play on a simple level. As with learning language, we feel frustrated. We see others play well and we imagine how that could feel, but we are locked in this mode of tedious practice and repetition. At such a point we either give in to our frustration and give up the process, or we proceed, intuiting the power that lies just around the corner. Slowly our ability rises and the frustration lowers. We don’t need to think so much; we are surprised by our fluency and connections that come to us in a flash.

Once we reach a certain level of mastery, we see there are higher levels and challenges. If we are disciplined and patient, we proceed. At each higher level, new pleasures and insights await us—ones not even suspected when we started out. We can take this as far as we want—in any human activity there is always a higher level to which we can aspire.

For thousands of years this concept of learning was an elemental part of practical wisdom. It was embedded in the concept of mastering a craft. Human survival depended on the construction of instruments, buildings, ships, and more. To build them well, a person had to learn the craft, spending years as an apprentice, advancing step by step. With the advent of the printing press and books that could be distributed widely, this discipline and patience was then applied to education—to formally gaining knowledge. Those who posed as people who possessed learning, without the years of accumulating knowledge, were thought of as charlatans and quacks, to be despised.

Today, however, we have reached a dangerous point in which this elemental wisdom is being forgotten. Much of this is due to the destructive side of technology. We all understand its immense benefits and the power it has brought us. But with the intense speed and ease with which we can get what we want, a new pattern of thinking has evolved. We are by nature creatures of impatience. It has always been hard for us to want something and not have the capacity to get it. The increased speed from technology accentuates this childish aspect of our character. The slow accumulation of knowledge seems unnecessarily boring. Learning should be fun, fast, and easy. On the Internet we can make instant connections, skimming along the surface from one subject to the next. We come to value breadth of knowledge over depth, the power to move here or there rather than digging deeper to the source of a problem and finding out how things tick.

We lose a sense of process. In such an atmosphere, charlatans sprout like weeds. They offer the age-old myth of the quick transformation—the shortcut to power, beauty, and success—in the form of books, CDs, seminars, ancient “secrets” brought back to life. And they find many suckers on which to prey.

This new pattern of thinking and learning is not progress. It creates a phenomenon that we shall call the “short-circuit.” To reach the end of anything, to master a process, requires time, focus, and energy. When people are so distracted, their minds constantly moving from one thing to another, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain concentration on one thing for a few hours, let alone for months and years. Under this influence, the mind will tend to short-circuit; it will not be able to go all the way to the end of a task. It will want to move on to something else that seems more enticing. It becomes hard to make things well when the focus is broken—which is why we find a gradual increase in products that are shoddy, made with less and less attention to detail.

Understand: the real secret, the real formula for power in this world, lies in accepting the ugly reality that learning requires a process, and this in turn demands patience and the ability to endure drudge work. It is not sexy or seductive at first glance, but this truth is based on something real and substantial—an age-old wisdom that will never be overturned. The key is the level of your desire. If you are really after power and mastery, then you will absorb this idea deeply and engrave it in your mind: there are no shortcuts. You will distrust anything that is fast and easy. You will be able to endure the initial months of dull, repetitive labor, because you have an overall goal. This will prevent you from short-circuiting, knowing many things but mastering none of them. In the end, what you really will be doing is mastering yourself—your impatience, your fear of boredom and empty time, your need for constant fun and amusement.

The following are five principal strategies for developing the proper relationship to process.

PROGRESS THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR

Based on his street fighting as a teenager, Jack Johnson had the feeling that he could some day become a great boxer. But he was black and poor, too poor to afford a trainer. And so in 1896, at the age of eighteen, he began a rather remarkable process. He looked for any conceivable fight he could have in the ring, with any kind of opponent. In the beginning he suffered some terrible beatings from boxers who used him as sparring material. But since this was his only form of education, he quickly learned to become as evasive as possible, to prolong the fights so he could learn.

At the time, fights could go a full twenty rounds, and Johnson’s goal was always to drag them out to the maximum. In that time he would carefully study his opponents. He observed how some types would move in familiar patterns and how others would telegraph their punches. He could categorize them by the look in their eye and their body language. He learned to provoke some into a rage so he could study their reactions; others he lulled to sleep with a calm style, to see the effects of this as well.

Johnson’s method was quite painful—it meant fifteen to twenty bouts a year. He suffered innumerable hard blows. Even though he could knock out most of his opponents, he preferred to be evasive and learn on the job. This meant hearing endless taunts from the mostly white audiences that he was a coward. Slowly, however, it began to pay off. He faced such a variety of foes that he became adept at recognizing their particular style the instant the fight began. He could sense their weaknesses and when exactly he should move in for the kill. He accustomed himself—mentally and physically—to the pace of a long, grueling bout. He gained an intuitive feel for the space of the boxing ring itself, and how to maneuver and exhaust his opponents over the course of twenty rounds. Many of them later confessed that he seemed to have the ability to read their minds; he was always a step ahead. Following this path, within a few short years Johnson transformed himself into the heavyweight champion of the world and the greatest fighter of his era.

Too often our concept of learning is to absorb ideas from books, to do what others tell us to, and perhaps to do some controlled exercises. But this is an incomplete and fearful concept of learning—cut off from practical experience. We are creatures who make things; we don’t simply imagine them. To master any process you must learn through trial and error. You experiment, you take some hard blows, and you see what works and doesn’t work in real time. You expose yourself and your work to public scrutiny. Your failures are embedded in your nervous system; you do not want to repeat them. Your successes are tied to immediate experience and teach you more. You come to respect the process in a deep way because you see and feel the progress you can make through practice and steady labor. Taken far enough, you gain a fingertip feel for what needs to be done because your knowledge is tied to something physical and visceral. And having such intuition is the ultimate point of mastery.

MASTER SOMETHING SIMPLE

Often we have a general feeling of insecurity because we have never really mastered anything in life. Unconsciously we feel weak and never quite up to the task. Before we begin something, we sense we will fail. The best way to overcome this once and for all is to attack this weakness head-on and build for ourselves a pattern of confidence. And this must be done by first tackling something simple and basic, giving us a taste for the power we can have.

Demosthenes—one of the greatest political figures in ancient Athens—followed such a path, determined to overcome his intense fear of public speaking. As a child, he was frail and nervous. He talked with a stammer and always seemed out of breath. He was constantly ridiculed. His father had died when he was young, leaving him a nice sum of money, but his guardians quickly stole all of it. He decided to become a lawyer and eventually take the perpetrators to court on his own. But a lawyer needed to be an eloquent speaker, and he was an abysmal failure at that. He decided he would give up law—it seemed too difficult. With what little money he had, he would retire from the world and attempt somehow to master his speech impediment. At least then he could take on some kind of public career.

He built an underground study where he could practice alone. He shaved half his head so he would be too embarrassed to go out in public. To overcome his stammer, he walked along the beach with his mouth full of pebbles, forcing himself to speak without stopping, louder and more forcefully than the waves. He wrote speeches that he then recited while running up steep slopes, to develop better breathing techniques. He installed a looking glass in his study, allowing him to monitor closely the looks on his face as he declaimed. He would engage in conversations with visitors to his house and gauge how each word or intonation would affect them. Within a year of such dedicated practice, he had completely eliminated his stammer and had transformed himself into a more than adequate orator. He decided to return to law after all. With each new case that he won, his confidence rose to new heights.

Understanding the value of practice, he then worked on improving the delivery of his speeches. Slowly he transformed himself into the supreme orator of ancient Athens. This newfound confidence translated into everything he did. He became a leading political figure, renowned for his fearlessness in the face of any foe.

When you take the time to master a simple process and overcome a basic insecurity, you develop certain skills that can be applied to anything. You see instantly the reward that comes from patience, practice, and discipline. You have the sense that you can tackle almost any problem in the same way. You create for yourself a pattern of confidence that will continue to rise.

INTERNALIZ THE RULES OF THE GAME

As a law student at Howard University in the early 1930s, Thurgood Marshall could contemplate many injustices that blacks experienced in the United States, but the one that burned in him most deeply was the vast inequalities in education. He had toured the South on fact-finding missions for the NAACP and had seen firsthand the abysmal quality of schools set apart for blacks. And he had felt this injustice himself. He had wanted to go to the University of Maryland, near his home—it had an excellent law school. But black students were not admitted there, no matter their academic record. They were directed towards black universities such as Howard, which at the time were inferior. Marshall vowed that some day, in some way, he would help take this unjust system apart.

Upon graduation from Howard in 1933, he faced a crucial decision for his future. He had been offered a scholarship at Harvard University to study for an advanced law degree. This represented an incredible opportunity. He could carve out for himself a nice position within the academic world and promote his ideas in various journals. It was also the middle of the Depression, and jobs for black people were few and far between; a degree from Harvard would ensure him a prosperous future. But something impelled Marshall in the opposite direction; he decided instead to set up a private practice in Baltimore and learn from the ground up how the justice system worked. At first it seemed a foolish decision—he had little work and his debts were mounting. The few cases he had, he lost and he could not figure out why. The justice system seemed to have its own rules and codes to which he had no access.

Marshall decided to employ a unique strategy to overcome this. First, he made sure that his legal briefs were masterpieces of research and detail, without any errors or erasures. He made a point of always dressing in the most professional manner and acting with the utmost courtesy, without appearing to bow and scrape. In other words, he gave no one the slightest pretext for judging against him. In this way, he defused suspicion, began to win a few cases, and gained entrée to the world of white lawyers. Now he studied that world closely. He saw the importance of certain connections and friendships, power networks he had not known about before. He recognized that certain judges required certain treatment. He learned to talk the language and fit in socially as best he could. He found out that in most cases, it was best to argue on points of narrow procedure rather than on grand concepts.

Knowing how to maneuver within these rules and conventions, he began to win more and more cases. In 1935 he took on the University of Maryland on behalf of a black student who had been denied admission to its law school, and won. From then on, he used his knowledge to take on all forms of segregation in the education system, culminating in 1954 with his greatest triumph of all, arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court the case known as
Brown v. Board of Education.
The court’s decision in his favor effectively ended any basis for educational segregation in the United States. What Marshall (who would later become the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court) had learned by immersing himself in the white-controlled justice system of his time is that the social process is just as important as the legal or technical one. This was not something taught in law school and yet learning it was the key to his ability to function within the system and advance the cause for which he was fighting.

Understand: when you enter a group as part of a job or a career, there are all kinds of rules that govern behavior—values of good and bad, power networks that must be respected, patterns to be followed for successful action. If you do not patiently observe and learn them well, you will make all kinds of mistakes without knowing why or how. Think of social and political skills as a craft that you must master as well as any other. In the initial phase of your apprenticeship you must do as Marshall did and mute your colors. Your goal here is not to impress people with your brilliance but to learn these conventions from the inside. Watch for telling mistakes that others have made in the group and for which they have paid a price—that will reveal particular taboos within the culture. With a deepening knowledge of these rules you can begin to maneuver them for your purpose. If you find yourself confronting an unjust and corrupt system, it is much more effective to learn its codes from the inside and discover its vulnerabilities. Knowing how it works, you can take it apart—for good.