The Achievement Habit (24 page)

A more realistic model is implied by the phrase “It’s not about me.” I often found that when I thought I was the cause of another person’s behavior or mood, it turned out later that their actions had nothing to do with me. Even recently, I needed a reminder of this when I took an overseas trip.

I had signed up to give a series of lectures in Santiago, and then to colead a five-day workshop on a ship off the southern coast of Chile. My wife, Ruth, was not happy to be left alone for two weeks. Although I left feeling a bit uneasy, and our parting was strained, I was not overly concerned about her.

As soon as I got to Chile, I sent her a series of e-mails. After three days with no response, I figured she was probably mad at me. So I phoned, thinking that speaking directly would be the best way to clear things up. She did not answer the phone. I left a voice message asking her to phone me. I repeated this four times. She did not return my calls. I felt sure she was mad at me. I phoned our son Elliot and asked him to call her. She always picks up his calls. When he reported that he, too, could not reach her, I started to get very concerned.

I asked Elliot to contact Ruth’s friends. Those he could reach did not know where she was. From a neighbor, he found out that her car was still in the carport. The neighbor went into our house, and everything looked normal, however, there was no sign of Ruth.

It was now a few hours before I was scheduled to fly south
from Santiago to meet the ship. I had to decide whether to cancel the trip and fly home. Finally, at the last minute, Elliot found her. She was ill and had been taken to the hospital by a friend.

Ruth had been sending us e-mails the whole time and wondering why no one was responding. She found out later that she hadn’t been sending or receiving e-mails because she had not properly connected to the hospital’s Wi-Fi system with her new smartphone.

By the time I came back home, Ruth had returned to good health. She had not been mad at me. If I had remembered the mantra “It’s not about me,” I could have avoided misunderstandings.

The next few times something happens where you think people’s actions are related to what you did or did not do, tell yourself “It’s not about me.” Then note how you feel and, if possible, check how they feel.

Motivation is at the heart of problem solving. I once returned to Stanford after spending about a month lecturing in China. I was standing in front of a classroom on the first day of the term, looking at a group of graduate students who were there “shopping” for which classes to take. It was my job to motivate them to sit through ten weeks of lectures in my class. What went through my mind was an item on the questionnaire they would be asked to fill out at the end of the last class: “On a scale of 1 to 5, does the teacher motivate me to do my best work?”

In our system it is up to the teacher to motivate the students. If I do not motivate them, I am not doing a good job. For the
first time, it seemed absurd to me that I was supposed to motivate graduate students. During my trip to China, I had experienced people who were highly self-motivated to learn. There was a stark contrast between that experience and what I was seeing in my classroom.

My China trip occurred shortly after the normalization of diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States, and there was a great societal thrust in China to learn English. No matter what city I was in, every time I left my hotel there would be people waiting outside wanting to practice English. I was enthralled by their eagerness to learn, and at times ended up sitting in the street correcting pronunciation while several people read aloud to me.

Some years later, when I started participating in the Burning Man festival, I was again struck by the power of self-motivation. I witnessed thousands of people who put in endless hours of labor (and, in some cases, lots of money) to create things that had no commercial value. They were doing it for self-satisfaction and the entertainment of their friends; they thought what they were making was cool and they were proud to show it off. Again I thought about this in contrast to my experience as a teacher.

Education systems tend to use rewards as motivators. The most immediate reward is a grade. Once you get a certain number of those, you earn the system’s ultimate reward—a degree. The problem with this is that the rewards are basically extrinsic, not intrinsic. Getting a degree for many students is highly instrumental. It is, for them, the same as if they were working all week at an odious job just to earn enough money to have fun on the weekend. The system does not give them the tools to be self-motivated. It may provide heroic role models,
but, unfortunately, for most students these models represent an unattainable lifestyle that they can only worship from afar. No matter how high their grades, their education can leave them with a lack of focus, a lack of direction, and a lack of confidence. Many people who graduate are not sure they can do anything. The system is not geared toward fostering their growth to a point where they can develop intrinsic motivation. It often does not give them an opportunity to do something that matters to them and that they feel is actually important.

I have found that project-based learning greatly increases intrinsic motivation. My experience with student motivation comes mainly from my experience at an elite university. In the years when we used to do the two-week creativity workshops, we would often hear, “Well, you can do that at Stanford, but you don’t know how impossible that would be back at my school.” After the first year, we found a way to answer that concern. Toward the end of the first week we screened a movie called
Stand and Deliver
, based on the true story of a high school math teacher, Jaime Escalante. It shows how he succeeded in getting remarkable results by motivating underperforming, economically challenged students at Garfield High, a high school in the predominantly Hispanic ghetto of East Los Angeles.

Everything was against Escalante. Initially the school administration opposed him; the students had little family support. There were no positive role models, and the school had very limited resources. The main thing he had was his own motivation for his students’ success. Determined to change the status quo, Escalante had to persuade the first few students who would listen to him that they could control their futures with the right education, and he enrolled them in a newly created calculus class. Ultimately he was able to create a math program that, every
year, turned out classes in which almost all the students passed the challenging Advanced Placement Calculus Examination.

The film is a tearjerker and worth seeing. It served our purpose of inspiring and motivating the attendees in our workshop, and it will do the same for you. The message the workshop participants always came away with was: If Escalante could accomplish what he did in circumstances that were many times more difficult than anything I will ever face, then I cannot hide behind the excuse that my environment does not support what I want to accomplish.

The Escalante story is not only about education, just as my experiences in China and at Stanford are not only about teaching. All these stories are about the human experience; they are relevant to all human interactions and all walks of life. They are relevant to your and my family situations, to a mom-and-pop business, to a start-up, and to a large corporation. It does not matter what you do for a living or what your job title is or is not; we all face these same issues of how to get the job done and live a satisfying life.

Being the “cause in the matter” means taking full responsibility for whatever you’re dealing with and whatever happens in your life, even when it seems that things are not totally in your control. It’s a declaration of choice: instead of playing the role of passive protagonist in your life, choose to take charge of your future. Resolve to get things done, whatever it takes, and no matter how many valid “reasons” pop up.

On a long train ride in China, I noticed that the windows were dirty. I could have complained or sulked about it. Instead I got out during a stop, got a bucket of water, and washed the
windows. I decided to be the
cause in the matter
of my trip. If you’re missing opportunities because you’re waiting for someone else to act, consider how empowering it is to take responsibility for your own experiences.

Even if we have never met, this book has been about you. By telling you my stories, I hope I am motivating you to look at your life in an honest and open way. Underpinning everything is my assumption that you are willing to examine your own experiences and make desired corrections to your future story.

This book has offered many tools and concepts. They can only be of value to you if you are willing to give them a chance. Do not prejudge them. It does not matter if you think they are great or not. What matters is whether they prove to be valuable in your life. Adopt an attitude of willingness to give things a chance; allow yourself to test things out and see what happens without thinking you know the outcome. To test things, you need to give them your attention.

Attention begins with noticing your behaviors and interactions. Notice both yourself and the people you interact with. What works and what doesn’t? What could work better? Then test the various tools and exercises in this book by inserting them into your everyday interactions. You can do one of them to start; then add another.

For example, notice how you and your friends use reasons. Then cut back on your use of reasons. Just say what you have to say without justifying it. Modify your way of speaking until you are practically reason-free.

Next, notice how much of what you think and say is clearly a projection. Check yourself on projections. You do this by reversing subject and object in your thoughts or speech. Be aware of which version feels closer to the truth.

The projection exercise will not work if you are not honest with yourself. When one of my students told me that the projection exercises did not work for him, I asked him for an example. He told me that reversing the following sentence did not work: “I am listening to this boring speaker. He goes on and on and does not say anything.” I asked him to change subject and object. He came up with “He is listening to my boring talk. I go on and on and do not say anything.”

I asked the student if the reversal felt like it had some truth in it. He said no. There was an almost audible sound from the restrained smirks in the class; the other students could not have imagined he would say no. The projection seemed 100 percent accurate to all of us. This student regularly came to class ill-prepared, and to fake it he would ramble on and on, repeating the same inane comments until I found a way to finally interrupt him. Clearly he was not willing to tell himself the truth when he looked at the sentence reversal. It described his behavior perfectly. After I worked with him for a while, he smiled and admitted there might be something for him to think about in the projection exercise.

Unfortunately, I will not be with you to assist you in being honest with yourself. You will need to do it for yourself. Believe me, the projection exercise works. If it does not work for you, chances are you are not willing to look at your truth. Attempt various slight variations in the wording. If it still does not work, imagine me standing behind you, saying, “Tell yourself the truth.” If that still does not work, imagine me standing behind you shouting, “Bullshit!”

After you get the hang of noticing your use of reasons and projections, move on to reducing the number of times you say
but
and start using
and
instead. Then move to some of the other exercises in this book.

Informed by your insights and clear intentions, you can use the tools in this book to modify your behavior. Eventually you will think you are getting perfect. That’s when you need to start looking at the exercises all over again. Go back to square one and keep fixing yourself. It will keep you busy until you die. It is best to think of the material in this book as a tonic that you need to keep taking, or at least as a seasonal dose—much like an annual flu shot. One shot will not inoculate you for life.

I speak from personal experience.

I was on sabbatical leave in Sweden. During the day, I was leading workshops on creativity and problem solving, using many of the techniques described in this book. At night I was losing sleep, worrying about whether I should retire because I was about to reach what was then the normal retirement age. In the middle of one of the sessions I realized I had not applied what I was teaching to my own problem.

That evening, I asked myself, What would it do for me if I retired?

The answer was: I could stop worrying about whether I should retire. In a flash I realized I had spent six months thinking about the wrong problem. I now had the real question: How do I stop worrying about whether to retire? The answer was obvious: Stop thinking about it. Now, over fifteen years later, I can tell you that since that evening I have never once thought about retiring.

I feel really stupid that I wasted six months on something I did not really care about, and that I was doing it while I was teaching others how to deal with the right question.

Be smarter than I was. Realize that your mind is trickier than you think, and is always working with your ego to make you believe you are doing better than you really are. That’s the
human condition. What you have going for yourself is that, if you choose to, you can be mindful about controlling both your intentions and your attention to make your life better for yourself and for those around you. You can choose to be the
cause in the matter
of the circumstances of your life and you can instill in yourself the habit of achievement for a more functional and satisfying life.

I hope this book contributes to these worthy goals.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. The material has been a big part of my life for many years, however, only in the last few years have I felt the desire to share these ideas with a wider audience. This material has been generated over many years, and I am sure that all the sources and influences that led to this book will not be properly remembered or credited. At any rate, here is the way I remember the main threads that led to this book.

At Stanford University one of my first friends was my colleague Bob McKim. Bob had a connection to Mike Murphy, a Stanford graduate and a founder of the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Mike invited Bob to organize a group of Stanford faculty for a weekend of sampler workshops at Esalen, and I got included. This was my first hands-on introduction to the human potential movement. Out of that experience an Esalen at Stanford program was formed that consisted of weekend workshops on the Stanford campus led by people from Esalen.

At the Esalen weekend I had met Doug Wilde, a popular chemical engineering professor. He and his wife, Jane, were faculty residents at one of the Stanford dorms. Doug invited me to become a faculty affiliate at his dorm. Moreover, he suggested we coteach a class in the dorm under the title “People Dynamics Lab.” This would be an experiential one-unit “lab” class built around the Esalen at Stanford program. Students in the class would be required to attend a few of the weekend programs, and the class sessions would be follow-ups to those experiences.

Once we started to teach the class, I attended a large number of the weekend workshops. I had a natural affinity for the material and soon could lead classes without reliance on the Esalen at Stanford program, which ended after a few years. Bob McKim and Doug Wilde are the first people I want to thank; the chances are that without their friendship and initiative, this book would not exist. Although most of them are no longer alive, I do want to thank Fritz Perls, Will Schutz, and other Esalen workshop leaders from whom I learned the craft both at Esalen and during those Stanford weekends. I also want to thank John O. Stevens for writing the book that is a treasure trove of the exercises used in the Esalen workshops, which was of great assistance to me in the beginning of my workshop leadership journey.

After some years I created a graduate version of the “People Dynamics Lab” class. My memory is vague on the transition, and the story I tell is that my friend Jim Fadiman told me that I was schizophrenic and needed to choose among my commitments to engineering, human potential, and politics. Even though Jim is a psychologist, I told him he was wrong and that all three interests were simply alternate expressions of my personality; furthermore, I would show him he was wrong by
creating a course that combined all three. I called the course “The Individual and Technology.” Jim does not remember, and I am not sure this is the way it really happened; still, I want to thank Jim for many years of friendship and collegiality.

Several years later I renamed the course “The Designer in Society.” I thank all the students who participated in the course, regardless of its name. Some have become good friends; others I run into on rare occasions. To all, I am very grateful when you tell me that you remember some experience from the course that has over the years been a treasure in your life. Those meetings have touched me to my core and been a major inspiration to me while writing this book.

I am also thankful to Bob McKim for another important thread: he introduced me to the est workshops and to the est organization’s founder, Werner Erhard. I learned a lot from Werner and his work. For me it put an intellectual framework around all the fragments I had gotten from Esalen. I also benefited from coleading several workshops with Werner and his associates. Three years ago I participated in a leadership workshop colead by Werner, Michael Jensen, and Kari Granger. It had been twenty-two years since I last worked with Werner. This experience brought a renewed realization as to how deeply his style and content have influenced my teaching. I am very thankful for his teachings and friendship.

Lynn Johnston has been more than a literary agent, assisting to reshape a rambling manuscript into a work with a distinct point of view. Without her this book would have been published in a much less focused form. She brought professionalism and passion to this project, and I owe her a deep debt of gratitude for her commitment and expertise. She has been a joy to work with.

Jenna Glatzer, my developmental editor, has also been a joy to work with. I will always be thankful that I had access to her expert guidance and professional skills. In spite of a very busy schedule, she generously found the time to give me much-needed guidance. Her thoughtful contributions appear throughout the book.

I thank my faculty colleagues at the Stanford Design Group for many years of collegiality that have provided me with a supportive environment for my work. I want to especially thank Sheri Sheppard, for taking the time to read two early drafts of the first chapters of this manuscript. Special thanks to Dave Kelley for inviting me to take part in the creation of the d.school and for permission to use the iconic mind map he created at the beginning of our d.school journey.

In the d.school I have been blessed with colleagues who read my manuscript and provided structural suggestions that were extremely helpful (even when they were in complete contradiction to each other!). In this regard I thank Thomas Both, Scott Doorley, Perry Klebahn, Adam Royalty, and Jeremy Utley. Emi Kolawole went beyond the call of duty and provided extensive language edits that have made this a more readable book; I owe her much. Caitria O’Neill generously connected me with a publishing contact. I also want to thank Sarah Stein Greenberg for her strong support of my book writing project.

I want to again mention Thomas Both, and thank him for his extraordinary work in creating the illustrations and front cover concepts on very short notice. Although I had his support throughout the project, this new role put demands on his talents and time that went beyond what was reasonable. He has my profound thanks for having so willingly joined me in my hour of need.

Starting with a prototype from the publisher, Thomas Both created alternative front covers. In developing the cover designs he involved Scoot Doorley, Charlotte Burgess Auburn, and Stacey Gray as his principal consultants. In addition he received valuable advice from Justin Ferrell, Chris Flink, Ashish Goel, Mark Grundberg, Seamus Harte, Emi Kolawole, Danielle Kraus, and Erik Olesund. I am very thankful to everyone who assisted.

Bill Scott created drafts for illustrations and a cover and advised on aesthetic considerations for the first draft of the manuscript. He and his dog were the source of much pleasure to me and Ruth during our meetings. In spite of a busy schedule he generously took time to donate his talent and insights to this project, and for that I am grateful.

Haakon Faste went to considerable effort to produce a cleaned-up copy of Rolf Faste’s drawing. I thank him for his efforts and his permission to use his father’s drawing.

Ann Davidson, Elliot Roth, Marcia Ruotolo, and Donalda Speight were kind enough to read the entire manuscript and provide detailed structural and language edits. Also my wife, Ruth Roth, and her book club provided useful editorial suggestions.

I am also very thankful for the early encouragement and guidance I received from R. B. Brenner. I am grateful to Paddy Hirsh for introducing me to his agent, and to Barry Katz, Tina Seelig, and Doug Wilde for generously introducing me to their editors. I am eternally grateful to Raju Narisetti for introducing me to Lynn Johnston. Jim Adams, Tom Kosnick, Douglas Sery, Bob Sutton, and Kate Wahl shared their ideas about routes to publication.

At HarperCollins, I thank my editor, Colleen Lawrie, for
her support of this project and her expert editing and guidance. And I also thank Miranda Ottewell for her thoughtful and thorough line editing.

I especially want to thank my family and all the friends and colleagues mentioned in this book. To all of you, I am grateful for our interactions, which have provided me with the material for this book and been the bedrock of a rich and fulfilling life.