The Achievement Habit (23 page)

The story was told to warn the guru’s followers about self-delusion and false prophets. It makes the point that if enough people do it, it stops being crazy and instead becomes the accepted norm. The famous tulip, stock market, dot-com, and housing bubbles are just the tip of the iceberg for this type of
me-too behavior. Unfortunately this tendency to relabel the crazy as normal doesn’t apply only to financial situations; it is also at the heart of some of the world’s greatest political and social conflicts.

In the many ongoing conflicts between people and nations, each side justifies itself by pointing out some wrong done to it by the other side. Each side’s story makes perfect sense, and justifies whatever they do in response. The interesting thing that often goes unnoticed is that the justification depends on where they start the story. I call this a question of punctuation, and although it goes unacknowledged by the belligerents, it is of utmost importance.

History is an ongoing flow. For all practical purposes—other than in our individual lives—there is no beginning or end. So all stories that are told with a beginning are distortions of what has happened. Where the story starts colors it so as to justify the storyteller’s position. The ongoing slaughter between Muslims and Hindus did not start with who threw the first stone after the Indian subcontinent’s partition. The trouble in your marriage did not start when your wife went out with her ex-boyfriend or when your husband did not clean the garage. By deciding where to start the story or where to put the period, you give the story its meaning. By changing the punctuation, you can make the hero into the villain, and vice versa.

The problem is that most of us are too busy seeing all the babbling sheets around us. If that is all we see, it becomes very difficult for us to see that we and our fellows are not acting like autonomous, reasonable, rational beings.

In many ways our self-image is intimately related to what we choose as our identity. We often hold a few items so strongly that we lose our autonomy and in effect become puppets. These items should certainly be on your list of “things that are too
obvious or too trivial to list.” If you are willing to cut the puppeteer’s strings while still holding on to your identity, you might free yourself to rewrite your conflict stories with different punctuation.

Somewhere along the way, all of us will screw up. Some of us will screw up more than others; it’s just plain going to happen.

You’ll fudge something on a résumé and get caught. You’ll say something insulting about your boss and find out he’s within earshot. You’ll accept credit for something that was really someone else’s idea. You’ll sneak into work late and pretend you were there all along.

Here’s the thing: Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both screwed up, yet what got them into real trouble wasn’t the original “sin,” it was the lies they told afterward. Had each of them fessed up, their troubles would most likely have blown over much faster. Instead we remember “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” as punch lines.

Lies can snowball. You tell one, and then you have to tell another to back it up. When you feel painted into a corner, there’s a good solution: tell the truth. It’s uncomfortable, and you may get into trouble, yet it will almost certainly be less trouble than if you compound the issue by lying again.

When you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar, don’t cover up—fess up.

S
OMETIMES WE CAN GET
so caught up in the minutiae of our lives that we forget to step back and see the bigger possibilities out there for us. If you’ve been following a conservative path,
why not take a chance and veer off it for a while? Change your surroundings, agree to a friend’s crazy plan, tag along on a cross-country trip. Learn about communities different from your own and figure out where you fit in. Remember that the real “big picture” is this: You don’t take anything with you when you die, so you might as well spend your time on Earth experiencing all that you can, rather than stagnating and accumulating.

CHAPTER 10

Hardening of the categories leads to art disease.

—Kenneth Snelson

I take the view that life is basically a problem-solving activity, and you can learn to make both the process and the result better. My goal with this book has been to give you tools and concepts that you can use to achieve a fuller, more fruitful, more satisfying life.

The word
problem
has negative connotations. It implies there is something wrong that needs fixing. However, if a problem is reframed as an opportunity to make things in our life better, then it becomes a positive, and problem solving can be recognized as one of our basic life forces.

Some enlightened individuals think of all problems as opportunities. Still, you do not have to wait for enlightenment to realize the positive influence problems can have in your life; you can just look at your own experience. When I’m working on a
problem, it can take over my life. I find it hard to go to sleep, and I wake up early, excited to deal with it.

In his classic nineteenth-century Russian novel, Ivan Goncharov creates the antihero Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov, the ultimate embodiment of a superfluous person. Oblomov is incapable of making a decision or undertaking any significant action. He has no real problems, so he rarely leaves his bed. In fact, he fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel. This is a fictitious story that, in its time, was meant to parody the life of idle aristocrats. It represents for me a portrait of what happens in a life without problems. It reaffirms my experience that problems, like satisfying work, are gifts that provide vehicles for the natural development of our life-giving forces.

So what are problems?

I use the word
problem
to describe any situation that we want to change. Usually problems are stated as questions (“How do I get a job?”) or statements (“I cannot afford college”). Generally we want to deal with problems in order to effect a positive change in some situation.

Life consists of solving a series of problems. We are nearly all very good at it. We learn by repetition, and to a great extent are not consciously aware of our abilities. Most people dress themselves suitably on a daily basis, make their way to their destinations, and accomplish basic tasks such as feeding themselves. Furthermore, they manage all this within their environmental, cultural, and economic constraints.

In addition to this daily onslaught of success, we also find frustrations and failures. We all have unsolved issues in our lives. There are situations and people that bug us, and there are vexing personal and professional problems. It is often easy to
resolve these issues by applying the simple techniques described in chapter 3. I’ve employed these techniques in my own life and shared them with many groups throughout the world.

If you reframe your problem, many possible options become apparent, and the path to a solution often becomes obvious. Once you have a clear view of what you want to accomplish, there are various ways to work out the details.

A
prototype
is a sample or model created to show or test a concept—something to be learned from. In solving problems, an excellent way to move forward is to incorporate prototyping into your process.

Early in the problem-solving process it is best to think of prototypes as simply trial balloons—ideas or statements sent out to gauge people’s reactions to your ideas. Prototypes do not necessarily have to resemble a physical object. They can take any form. They could be conversations, written drafts, short movies, skits, physical embodiments of social or personal problems, or actual physical models of objects. Prototypes can be in any form that gives information. They do not need to
look like
or
work like
the final solution, and they certainly do not need to do both.

In a culture of prototyping, things are always being tried out. The road to a final solution is strewn with ideas that have been prototyped as ways to get information, directions to take, ideas to modify, and ideas to abandon. Prototyping is a great way to show people what you have in mind, so you can elicit their feedback. When the result of prototyping is a physical object, it is usually best that it not be too precious. The term
mock-up
is sometimes used to denote an early-stage
nonprecious prototype. I think the term
crap-up
would be a better way to describe the ideal early prototype.

The next time you are asked to do something, don’t spend too much time thinking. Simply charge ahead. Do this by taking the first idea that comes into your head and make a quick prototype (of the “crap-up” variety). Then think about what you have learned from this. If you are brave enough, try it out on some people and get their thoughts.

In the d.school and our design programs at Stanford, prototyping is a way of life. The same is true for our neighbors, the design consultancy IDEO. Between Stanford and IDEO, I have seen thousands of prototyping examples. Most have been very useful, and some have become iconic. In my “Transformative Design” class, a three-student team was interested in improving the patient experience in Stanford Hospital’s emergency room. They were particularly interested in how patients in the waiting room were managed. They arranged to visit the emergency room to do patient observations and interviews. Unfortunately, a day before their visit, permission for their visit was revoked due to issues of patient privacy.

Undeterred, the students thought up a prototype that worked like the emergency-room system. They based their prototype on making the need to urinate analogous to the need for emergency medical treatment. They invited a group of friends and asked them to be sure not to have urinated for several hours. When their friends arrived, they offered them drinks and also denied them access to the bathroom. Eventually the bathroom was opened. However, people wanting to use it had to sit in a special waiting area until they were called.

The order of the call was not according to arrival time in the waiting area; it was according to how much a person had drunk. In the students’ analogy, the more people drank, the greater their need for priority medical treatment, and thus those who had drunk the most were given earlier access to the bathroom. This prototype yielded important insights as to how to better inform patients and gain their understanding when they see others taken out of turn while waiting for service in a hospital emergency room.

Prototyping like this gets you past the cerebral what-it-might-be-like stage and into the reality of problem solving.

In another case, designers made a film to show how a proposed children’s smartphone application would work. Using the app, kids would touch or flick the screen to animate creatures. The film demonstrated this by using a man in place of the creatures.

Was the film made by recording the actual app on a smartphone? No! The prototype was simply a piece of cardboard in the shape of a phone screen, and there was a real person on the other side. The person would move in response to the user’s hand as he pretended to touch the imitation phone screen.

In this way the designers could test and demonstrate various different ideas without the need to actually create the animated figure and the programs to control it. This led to Sesame Street’s
Elmo’s Monster Maker
, a very successful smartphone app for children.

What is being prototyped in these examples is the basic idea—that is, the concept behind the eventual solutions. They fall under the broad heading of
conceptual prototypes
—as opposed to
functional prototypes
, which are made to test the actual functioning of the solution. Because prototypes can be
physical objects, sketches, videos, conversations, or any trial balloon, the bottom line with prototyping is to choose the type that will let you learn the most in the fastest way.

Prototyping has different purposes, depending on where we are in the solution process. Let’s divide this process into three stages. In the first stage we use prototyping to
inspire
a good concept (this is often called a
concept prototype
). The second stage is to concretely
evolve
the solution (this is a
feasibility prototype
). The final stage is to
validate
that the solution is actually going to work as expected (this is a
functional prototype
). What I have been talking about is mainly the first stage.

As the solution process proceeds, the approximations to the final solution get more exact, and the prototypes tend to become more like dress rehearsals for the real thing.

Even though we rarely think in these formal terms when dealing with personal issues, these same concepts about prototyping apply to most problems. For every issue you deal with, you need to be inspired to find a solution idea, evolve the details of a solution, and validate that the solution works. In everyday life you may show a draft of a letter to someone or simply ask for advice about something you are thinking of doing. By doing this, you too are prototyping. It may be helpful to keep this in mind when you’re facing a project you keep putting off. If you’ve long had an idea for a screenplay at the back of your mind, or if you want to design a dress, don’t get caught up in how you’re going to get it just right. That’s what causes many people to shut down and never get started. Avoid the desire for perfection right out of the gate. Instead, tell yourself that you’re
prototyping
your screenplay or your dress. The final version can come later.

In problem solving, as in all facets of life, sometimes things go very wrong. When they do go wrong, we tend not to take responsibility for our part in the malfunction. One common way of avoiding responsibility is to label the missteps as
accidents
.

My main athletic activity is biking. I am extremely fortunate in being able to bike to work every day. I also have a group of friends that I ride with on Sundays, and several times a year we go on extended bike trips. This ritual has gone on for over thirty years, and in that time I have witnessed many bike accidents. Unfortunately I, too, have had my share of spills. Looking back over all the accidents I see that almost all of them have a single root cause: loss of focus. I (or someone) wasn’t paying attention.

My two worst bicycle accidents are classic examples. In the first, we had cycled over thirty miles from Stanford University to San Francisco. The plan was to take the train back home. When we got within sight of the train station, I felt the ride was over, and I started thinking about a presentation I was scheduled to make that evening. I was not paying attention to riding. Suddenly my tires got trapped in a trolley track groove, and I fell, sprawling into the middle of a busy intersection. Luckily I did not get hit by any vehicles, although I did get badly bruised and bloodied.

If I had been paying attention, I could easily have steered to cross the rail groove at an angle, as the rest of my group did. After this incident I resolved to always keep my focus on the road when I am biking.

Fast-forward a few years, to my usual Sunday ride. One of the other riders was talking to me about his upcoming trip to India, and we were falling behind the rest of the group. As we
ended the conversation, I wanted to recommend a change in his itinerary. Momentarily I was not able to recall the name of “that nice city south of Bangalore.” I started pedaling faster to catch up to the group, thinking of India and searching my brain for the name I was forgetting. Suddenly I hit what seemed like a three-foot-high wall. My bike flipped 180 degrees, and I landed on my head and shoulders in the middle of the road. The rider I had been talking to immediately stopped the traffic, and eventually I was taken to the side of the road with a trashed helmet, a dislocated shoulder, and a bleeding head and face. Oh, yes, the name of the city was Mysore—sort of poetic justice, don’t you think?

The three-foot wall I thought I’d crashed into was in reality a three-inch-high triangular island to split the traffic at a three-way intersection. I had cycled around that island without incident almost every Sunday for over thirty years. Yup, I had broken my vow to not lose focus.

Keeping focus is important in many parts of your life; even if you do not bicycle, it will keep you safe. I am not just talking about driving cars, skateboarding, Rollerblading, piloting an airplane, running, walking, or other forms of physical activity; this holds for all aspects of life. Just as you give life its meaning, you give all your activities their meaning. In addition to your physical activities, your emotional and intellectual activities also require your focus. If you don’t focus on these, you may also hit the three-foot-high wall, even if you have gone past it safely many times before. I cannot call such malfunctions “accidents.”

We tend to inflate our own importance in other people’s lives and actions, and this is another cause of things going wrong in
problem solving and other aspects of our lives. We need to realize that other people are not concerned about our hairstyle or what we are wearing; they are too busy worrying about themselves to take much notice of us. People are mainly preoccupied with their own careers and problems, not yours. In spite of this, many of us believe we are the principal cause of other people’s actions.