The Achievement Habit (10 page)

CHAPTER 5

For the things we have to learn before we can do them,
we learn by doing them.

—Aristotle

Whenever anyone makes an important change, it’s because a switch has flipped. Someone who has struggled her whole life with her weight finally decides to get fit. Someone who has put up with an abusive boss for years finally has enough and quits. Someone who has harbored a secret crush finally takes the plunge and asks her beloved out for coffee. A shift has happened that has made action favorable to inaction.

You can sit around in the dark waiting for the light to come on, or you can get up, walk across the room, and flip the switch yourself.

As we’ve established, there is a big difference between
trying
to do something and actually
doing
it. They’re two totally different actions. The difficulty arises when people conflate them.

If you
try
to do something, it may or may not happen. If
it does not happen, you might try using an altered strategy, and again it may not happen. Although this could go on indefinitely, usually it lasts until you luck out and succeed, get tired of trying, or get distracted by something else. Clearly this is a very unproductive way to go about your life.

If you are
doing
something, then no matter how many times you hit a barrier, or how frustrated your original strategy becomes, you intend to get the job done, and you bring to bear on it the inner resolve and attention necessary to fulfill your intention.

Doing takes
intention
and
attention
.

Remember the exercise I gave my students in which I asked one of them first to
try
to take an object from me, and then to actually
take
the object from me? Wrestling over the object when the volunteer is trying is often fun for both of us. Trying can often be fun and easy. Nevertheless it is
doing
that gets things done.

In 1974 I was having lunch with my friend Harold in the Russian Tea Room, a fashionable restaurant near Carnegie Hall in New York City. The waiters in this restaurant all wear Russian Cossack uniforms, which my friend admired because he was a big fan of the Soviet Union. The thought came to me, as he kept expressing this admiration, how wonderful it would be to get Harold one of these uniforms. Suddenly I just decided I would do it. I didn’t know how, yet whatever it took I
would
give him one of these uniforms as a present.

Taking advantage of Harold’s legendary frugality, I told him that I would pay for the lunch if he would go get the car. I sized up all the waiters as soon as he left, choosing the one who looked most amenable to a beneficial economic transaction. I called that waiter to my table, told him how much we
had enjoyed the lunch, and relayed Harold’s great admiration for the uniform. I told him that if he could get me a uniform, I would make it worth his while.

“How worthwhile?” he asked.

I took out my wallet, opened it to the billfold section, and said, “You decide.” He removed a $10 bill (which would be $50 in today’s money) and left without another word. A short time later I was waiting by the curb with a full uniform, including boots, wrapped in a day-old newspaper.

Harold died in 2011, and I often think of him when I’m doing the trying-versus-doing demonstration. I recall that moment of triumph and the resulting flash of insight that I gained long ago. I am still warmed by recalling how happy and astounded Harold was when I gave him the uniform.

Another time I was leading a workshop for a professional group in Seoul, Korea. A young woman volunteered to do the trying-versus-doing exercise, and when I asked her to take the object from my hands, she immediately seized my eyeglasses and threatened to break them unless I gave her the object. I paid the ransom, and retrieved my glasses unharmed. It was, perhaps, a bit scary, yet she certainly had a creative approach!

This incident brings up the question of ethics and morality. Here’s an extreme case: if I had to kill you to move from trying to doing, in normal circumstances I would change my mind and decide not to do it. The exercise is about the difference between trying and doing. It is not about ethics or morality. You need to decide for yourself if you are going to violate any boundaries. If doing requires trespassing, then perhaps it is time to change your intention from doing to not doing.

I do not know if the woman would have broken my glasses. Given her previous behavior, I think there is a good chance she
would have carried out her threat. If she had broken them, I could have had a new pair made. In any case, her intention was strong enough to get her the object, and in my view no strong ethical or moral boundaries were crossed.

Recently I had a family experience that beautifully illustrates the difference between trying and doing. My wife, Ruth, and I were in San Francisco for the evening. After dinner, driving past the Roxie—a neighborhood movie theater we occasionally frequent—I noticed a crowd and a program that sounded interesting to me. I suggested that Ruth should buy the tickets while I hunted for a parking place. She was lukewarm about the movie, yet agreed to the plan anyway.

When I returned to the Roxie ten minutes later, I was shocked to find that Ruth was not in line. She told me that she had tried to buy tickets but they were sold out. Because I really wanted to go, I sprang into action: I went to the box office and asked the seller if there were any cancellations; she agreed to take my name, and I agreed to wait close by. Then I started to ask people in the line if they had an extra ticket. I was able to purchase one ticket from someone approaching the box office for a refund and another one from someone in the line whose friend had phoned to say she was not coming. Suddenly we were
doing
.

This incident illustrates some basic points. My wife did not really want to go to the movie, and when they told her that the show was sold out, she had a
goooood
reason for not going. I was determined to go. So the fact that they were sold out was simply a lamppost I had to walk around. I knew the “sold out” reason was bullshit. The moral: If you don’t really want to do it, then the world might be nice enough to give you
goooood
reasons why it can’t be done. If you really want to do it, those reasons are not going to stop you.

Actually, in this case we would have been much better off trying rather than doing. The movie and live show were terrible. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

We can also apply the notion of trying and doing to a person, rather than her actions. Instead of trying, you would see yourself as a trier; instead of doing, you would see yourself as a doer. Unless you are an extreme type A personality, you will have a better life incorporating both trier and doer into your self-image and calling on each as appropriate. Come to think of it, maybe you should incorporate both
especially
if you are type A—a little more trying and a little less doing might extend your life span.

Maxwell Maltz was a cosmetic surgeon who found that his patients were often not satisfied with their surgery, even though it was technically successful. He believed this was in large measure due to the patients having unhealthy self-images. His solution was to develop a series of techniques with which he felt people could improve their self-images.

One of his methods was to have a person set a series of goals and then picture achieving them with the aid of mental visualization techniques. Maltz relied on the power of self-affirmation and mental visualizations as well as the connection between the mind and the body. In 1960 he published his ideas in
Psycho-Cybernetics
, a straightforward self-help book that ultimately sold more than thirty million copies. A large industry and volumes of literature subsequently developed around the use of affirmations as a tool to change self-image. Several of my students found Maltz’s affirmation exercises useful.

An affirmation is a carefully formatted statement that you
repeat frequently to yourself, and which can also be written down. People who perform affirmations contend that a positive mental attitude supported by affirmations will make almost anything possible. For an affirmation to be effective, they believe, it needs to be present-tense, positive, personal, and specific. You pick something you want to change or reinforce, and take time each day to tell yourself that it has happened. To use an affirmation to improve your self-image, for example, you might repeat to yourself, “I am a loving person when I’m interacting with my daughter.”

Certainly a positive mental attitude is a big plus in life. Affirmations work well for some people—however they’re not for everybody. I find it hard to convince myself that the positive stuff is really true. It reminds me of the part in the film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
where the wicked queen is daily asking the magic mirror, “Who is the fairest in the land?” Even though the queen gets the answer she wants, she does not seem to believe it. If she did, she wouldn’t need to keep going back to the mirror to check.

To me, the problem with the self-affirmation movement is that people often feel that positive affirmations seem false, yet they readily accept the negative self-images they carry around as true. It is a classic example of seeing a glass as half empty or half full. For many of us, the half empty seems real, and the half full seems false. Probably the glass is both half full and half empty, and we get to decide which way we see it. The idea is to get enough external verification of the half-full version that our self-image really changes, and we do not need to keep going back to the magic mirror in our heads to find out who and what we are.

One way to do this is to use affirmations in a slightly indirect way. Instead of dealing directly with a desired accomplishment,
we can use affirmations to modify a behavior such that the modified behavior leads indirectly to the desired accomplishment.

For example, in one study students with low academic self-esteem were not asked to think of themselves differently; instead they were simply asked to list and write about characteristics they felt were positive in regard to education and career preparation. These students ended staying in school at much higher rates than those in a peer group.

This is closely related to the advice parents and teachers are often given, to affirm their children’s efforts rather than their accomplishments. The idea is that if affirmations are given, they should reinforce the desired characteristic—namely, the effort, which then endures and transcends any transitory failure. When reinforcement is based solely on accomplishment, it doesn’t foster the resiliency that is needed to overcome life’s inevitable disappointments.

When I started teaching the course on which some of this book is based, I knew that I wanted students to choose projects having to do with their own lives. Moreover, I had met a lot of engineers in Silicon Valley who worked for big companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, and had dreams of starting their own companies. This was back in the 1960s, before the availability of serious angel and venture funds or the strong culture of start-ups.

People just talked about it, and nothing happened. The situation reminded me of the Eugene O’Neill play
The Iceman Cometh
. The characters spend the entire play in a saloon talking about leaving, yet no one leaves. (Nick, one of my acquaintances, actually left Hewlett-Packard and started his own company. I was so delighted that I bought him a case of champagne. Now, forty years later, he is probably still wondering why I did it.)

This gave me the idea that students need to learn not to wait until after they graduate. Many students develop the idea that they’re supposed to follow a prescribed path, in which they’re not allowed to achieve anything until after they get a diploma. And if they don’t develop the habit of doing things of their own volition, they will not change after they graduate. Many of the greatest entrepreneurs already had their businesses going during college—and many never graduated. Today’s clearest example is Mark Zuckerberg and four fellow students, who started Facebook from the dorms at Harvard University.

Based on this thought, I decided the class project directive would be: Do something you have really wanted to do and have never done, or solve a problem in your life.

The projects served to introduce the achievement habit. Students learned they did not need to wait for some future time to take command of their lives. Doing this ten-week project of their own choice gave them a sense of empowerment that in many cases carried over into the rest of their lives.

You too can stop waiting for Godot and learn to do things that you have always wanted to do. If you start doing, and also apply the ideas in this book toward ridding yourself of unwanted issues, the chances are good that you too will have a much more interesting and fulfilling life.

Hugh Laurie, the doctor in the TV show
House
, said in an interview with
Time Out New York
, “It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now. And you may as well do it now. I mean, I say that confidently as if I’m about to go bungee jumping or something—I’m not. I’m not a crazed
risk taker. But I do think that, generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”