The Achievement Habit (3 page)

This incident was a vivid reminder that while I cannot control what the outside world does, I can determine my own experience. Once you accept that
you
give everything in your life its meaning, you feel like the master of your life, not a powerless victim of circumstance and chance.

When my friend Ann got breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, she wrote “Modified Radical,” a lengthy poem about her experience that was published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
and later incorporated into a booklet she titled
Modified Radical and Other Cancer Poems
. The American Cancer Society distributed the booklet as a patient education tool, and it became a source of comfort and inspiration for many people. Ann received letters from readers telling her how much her poem had helped them. One very moving letter came from a surgeon telling her that even though he had performed many mastectomies, and his wife had undergone one, he had not deeply grasped the psychological aspects of the experience until he read Ann’s poems. That was when I first noticed that Ann has the knack of turning personal adversity into positive experiences for herself and those around her.

A few years later Julian, Ann’s fifty-nine-year-old husband, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was able to care for Julian at home for the first few years. Eventually, though, his condition became too much for her to handle, so she moved him to a residential care facility about forty miles away. She visited him regularly, and I joined her once a month.

We would pick Julian up at the facility and drive him to a nearby lakeside park. There we would hold hands and walk slowly along the lake singing old folk songs like “Oh My Darling, Clementine” and, in honor of Julian’s Scottish origins, “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond.” Finally we would buy him an ice cream or something else for his still well-functioning sweet tooth. It was always a great time, full of warm feelings and fun, even on the days when it wasn’t clear whether Julian recognized me. On the drive back home I always felt glad to be alive. I left looking forward to my next visit.

Ann chronicled how she and Julian continued to celebrate life in two books—
Alzheimer’s, a Love Story
and
A Curious Kind of Widow
—that describe how after the initial shock of fear, anger, and dread, she decided they would go down the road together in a spirit of love. Her books were used by the Alzheimer’s Association to give hope and guidance to many families. They also led to invitations to lecture to lay caregivers and medical professionals at workshops and conferences.

While Julian was sick I also had another friend with advanced Alzheimer’s. He too had loving and concerned caregivers, but they were consumed by a sense of fear, tragedy, and loss, and he was ordered about like a child and kept under tight control.

When I visited my friend, I always felt very uncomfortable for him, and was glad to leave. There was no joy in that place. The contrast with Julian could not have been greater. Interestingly,
pre-Alzheimer’s, Julian and my other friend had been similar in almost every way, and their disease progression was essentially identical. Clearly, what made the difference was Ann’s attitude. For me it remains a strong reminder of how once we understand we give everything in our life its meaning, we can begin to control what happens to us and even convert our own adversity into a gift to ourselves and our loved ones.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I’ve won a lot of awards. I have drawers filled with them. They’re nice to receive and sometimes the dinners are fun. However, the next morning when I wake up and look at them—the glass paperweight, the certificate—they don’t really mean anything.

So it is with many of the hallmarks of “achievement,” as people usually use the word. Getting on the honor roll, graduating from college, getting a high-paying job, getting a higher-paying job, being salesman of the month, getting the corner office, getting a company car, getting interviewed by the media, winning awards: this is what most people think of when they think of achievement. To me all this misses the mark.

Each of those things can be a genuine achievement—something that means something to you for more than a day—or each could just be a badge of importance that you use to show people that you’re
somebody
. Do those things make you happy in and of themselves?

I know mega-millionaires who are miserable. They spend their money getting the fat sucked out of their love handles and hiring bodyguards because they’re paranoid (maybe rightfully so) that people are out to get them. They’re always concerned with outdoing themselves and making the next million and the
next—and for what? Conversely, I know artists who barely scrape by yet are happy and fulfilled. Neither is a sure path to happiness or enlightenment; you can surely be rich
and
happy, but one doesn’t necessarily follow the other.

Achievement for achievement’s sake, then, is pretty hollow. It’s the endless pursuit of a carrot on a stick as you race around a track. For me, real achievement is traveling to a foreign country, learning some of the language, and finding my way around on my own. Real achievement is learning to be self-sufficient. Real achievement is making lifelong friends.

In my mind and for the purposes of this book, I define
achievement
as having a good life; getting the job of living done in a satisfying way that nurtures the life force within us and within those we associate with. It entails developing some self-mastery to handle the difficult aspects of our lives and relationships. It involves finding something to do with our lives that engages us and gives us positive feedback. If we’re doing it right, life shouldn’t be a debilitating struggle, even if at times it takes considerable effort.

To forge a new attitude toward the events and relationships in your life, you must learn to look at them with a fresh perspective. It’s a common practice during creativity seminars to give participants a bag full of materials and tools and then a problem to solve. The materials and tools are usually everyday items. Their nominal use is obvious to all. You are then to use those materials in whatever ways you want to solve the problem; however, there isn’t usually an obvious connection between the items and your problem. For instance, maybe you have to figure out how to create a communication device using
a box of Cheerios, a hammer, tape, cotton balls, a hairbrush, and a bag of marbles.

Most people have a cognitive bias called functional fixedness that causes them to see objects only in their normal context. The use of the materials and tools in their ordinary way will generally lead to no workable solutions or, at the very most, mundane ones. The really exciting solutions come from overcoming functional fixedness and using these everyday items in new ways. To see the possibilities it is helpful to take the viewpoint that
nothing is what you think it is
. You need to make the familiar unfamiliar.

So, for example, a box of Cheerios is no longer only a breakfast cereal. It can be broken down into cardboard and wax paper. It is a source of biomass or a source of small chips and grains. It also can be made into a sludgy mixture. Similarly, a hammer is a weight, a source of metal and wood, and it can act as a mandrel, a seesaw, or a pendulum. Tape can be used to hold things together, and it also can be made into its own structural element in any desired shape. There are a number of creative ways you might use these items to fulfill the assignment.

The same dynamic can be applied to ourselves. Just as things in the material world can be transformed from their common use into something different, so too can behavior and relationships. It’s difficult at first to break through preconceived notions, however once you do it, you’ll find it opens the world up to you. Stop labeling things in their usual way. Mike is not a failure because his class project failed. You are not a loser because you lost your job. Make the familiar into the unfamiliar, and the result can be amazing and delightful, as opposed to dull, nonfunctional, and ordinary.

My first experience with the power of changing a fixed
perception came after a long day running an intensive creativity workshop. I was on break, and I was completely brain-dead. I was sitting by myself, relaxing in front of a large fountain. Suddenly, through my fog of fatigue, the fountain transformed from streams of water to countless particles bouncing off each other. It was an amazing experience. It was as if I was simply too tired to focus on the label
fountain
. I was simply there, experiencing its component parts.

If you stop labeling the world, your job, and your life, you may find that an amazing trajectory is there for the taking. Several of my favorite students never graduated. They were bright and capable, yet rather than “play the game,” they chose a different path. Their parents were probably not thrilled in the beginning. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, when I occasionally run into one of these dropouts, I almost always find that she has made good life choices that have made her happy, and often made the world better to boot.

You can remove labels entirely; you can also relabel to great effect. Recent studies reinforce the idea that relabeling can change behavior. Experimenters have found statistical evidence that, for instance, if you ask people to
be voters
, you get more voter turnout than if you simply ask people
to vote
.
¹
Similarly, if you ask people
not to be cheaters
there is less cheating than if you just ask people
not to cheat
. The inference is that people are more concerned with reinforcing their self-image than with their actions; thus, to change behavior, you first change self-image.

We all have ideas in our minds of what and who we are. We may have an accurate self-image, or it may be way off. Either way, it strongly colors how we respond to the world around us. In her book
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
, Carol Dweck writes, “For twenty years, my research has shown that
the view
you adopt for yourself
profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.”
²

Occasionally we have powerful, life-changing experiences; but most changes take place in small increments. Some unexpected positive or negative experience will change your self-image slightly. Through repeated incremental changes, the entire image is altered. Done the right way, this increases your sense of what you can accomplish; psychologists say your self-efficacy is increased.

This happened to Doug when he decided he could control his late-onset diabetes blood sugar problem by riding his bike three times a week from his home on the Stanford campus to the mountain community of Sky Londa. The round trip is roughly twenty miles, with a change of elevation of about fifteen hundred feet. All went well in the beginning. Then he started to notice how much trash there was on the road. At first he thought only, Somebody should clean that up. Soon it dawned on him that “somebody” could be him. So he started to carry a plastic shopping bag with him, stopping periodically to pick up some cans and other trash. Slowly this grew into a new persona for him. He eventually was hauling large amounts of trash on his bicycle, single-handedly keeping a good portion of the road trash-free.

As Doug’s activity became more known, he received increasing positive reinforcement from people living in the area. More and more drivers called out to him, some offering him money to reward his endeavor. He was guest of honor at a community party, stories were written in local newspapers, a movie was made about his road cleaning,
³
and he received environmental awards from San Mateo County. He became a local celebrity.
His self-image had altered considerably from the Doug who thought only, Somebody should clean that up. He was now “environmental Doug” or, as I lovingly dubbed him, Professor Poubelle (“dustbin,” in French).

The concept of self-efficacy has been used to deal with phobias and other limiting states and, of course, in most psychotherapy.
⁴
Similar ideas have also been used in education and in creating pathways to successful living. In an ideal world, self-image would form the basis for much of what we do and do not do. In the real world, things are more complicated.

We generally like to think we are in charge of our actions. Society has a stake in us believing that, or there would be no way to justify restraining and punishing people with antisocial behaviors. Nevertheless, we know that some of the things we do are not controlled consciously. These are known as reflexive or autonomous behaviors.

It is easy to see these autonomous behaviors in other species. Some of these can be quite complex and are part of animals’ DNA. For example, the South African weaverbird normally builds an intricate nest using specialized materials. Experimenters removed a pair of these birds from contact with building materials and from other members of their species for five generations.
⁵
The birds were not able to build, or even see, traditional nests. And yet when the sixth generation—still in isolation from its species—was given access to the traditional materials, it built a perfect nest. This may be an extreme example, yet it illustrates the point that even some complex behaviors may be reflexive and not quite under conscious control.

You see this at work when physical danger and emotional
threats trigger our fight-or-flight response. By the time the signals get to the parts of our brains that can reason about them, our emotional and reflexive brain centers have already armed our bodies, and we are in action.

Although this quick gut-level response could be lifesaving, it may not be the appropriate response to perceived emotional threats in a psychologically complex world. Not all issues can be satisfactorily resolved by following our first reactions. Like when that jerk cuts you off by swerving into your lane at ninety miles an hour.