The Achievement Habit (5 page)

I am sure we all have at one time or another said the opposite of what we mean—and let’s face it, as much as we like to
convince ourselves that our motives are pure, we are generally most concerned about ourselves. To keep this in check, do a reversal in your head. Anytime you or someone else gives a motive for behavior, just substitute in your head the opposite of that motive. So, for example, if you say, “I am telling Kathy what her coworker said about her for
her
benefit, not mine,” try out the reverse motivation in your head: “I am telling her for
my
benefit, not hers.” Often you will find that this is your true motive.

Projection is a common response. It happens when someone attributes a feeling or trait to another person, when it’s she herself who owns that particular trait or feeling. Although psychologists usually use the term
projection
to connote a negative behavior, projecting both the positive and the negative aspects of ourselves onto others is an important part of life that can be a major influence on our interactions with others. It is the experience of seeing traits in others that helps us to see them in ourselves. If you notice a flaw in another person, it probably means you’ve had that same flaw yourself.

Projection colors almost every aspect of interpersonal relations. A genuinely naive, truthful person will think all people he encounters are truthful. A person with a background of duplicity and dishonesty tends to be wary of others because he projects his own manipulative behavior onto them. Once we project a behavior onto others, it gives us a
goooood
reason to think we know what accounts for their behavior.

As you now know, I cannot stand to be late because lateness is an issue in my life. So I assume that others share the same concern. When people are late, I cannot understand how
they could be so irresponsible. However, only after I became obsessed with being on time did I even notice lateness in others.

One way to see how prevalent projections are is to make a list of things that bother you about other people in your life. Then take these same things and think about how they appear in your own life. For example, I’d say, “I hate how my son Elliot bickers with his friend Claudia” since, not surprisingly, “I hate how I bicker with my wife.”

There are countless things to like or dislike about people. That I chose to mention bickering first says something about me. It tells me that bickering is such an important issue to me that I project my feelings about it onto my son. Realizing this provides a great tool for self-awareness, and such insights make us more empathetic about others’ difficulties.

Self-hatred plays a large part in this aspect of our personalities. In chapter 4 of
The Adjusted American
, the book I mentioned earlier, Snell and Gail Putney explore this concept: “Men hate in others those things and only those things which they despise in themselves. It is possible to disapprove of other people in a rational and dispassionate manner, however, to hate them is an irrational and impassioned act. The passion betrays the underlying self-contempt. . . . The origin of hatred lies in the individual’s attempt to disown certain potentialities of the self.”

In other words, if we sense, even subconsciously, traits within ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge because they are alien to our self-image, we deny their existence and project them onto others. Thus our hatred of others is really the hatred of our own unwanted or feared capabilities projected onto them. To get beyond the self-destructive effects of hatred,
it is necessary to be able to accept a basic truth about ourselves:
we are all potentially capable of any human act
.

Projection also plays a large role in Putney and Putney’s provocative assertion that
marriage for love is a bad idea
(chapter 10). Put in our terms, they are saying that getting married for love is a
goooood
reason. For many of my students, this is a version of the aforementioned yellow-eyed cat story. They have all been brought up with the notion that marrying for love is not only desirable, it is also one of life’s highest possible attainments.

A friend once told me he was in love with falling in love. I knew what he meant. It can be a great feeling to fall in love—especially if your love is reciprocated. Incidentally, when he did eventually marry for love, it turned out to be a disaster. The problem is that people often confuse love with marriage. Falling in love is heavily reliant on projection, while a sound marriage is relatively free of projection.

Just as hatred is the result of projecting our own negative qualities onto another, love is the result of projecting our own positive qualities onto another. What we fall in love with are the qualities that we wish we had or qualities we have and wish to share with the other person. Usually these admired qualities are at variance with our self-image, so we avoid consciously possessing them ourselves and instead project them onto another. In time these idealized projections are worn away by life’s realities. Any marriage based mainly on projected qualities is bound to flounder.

A successful marriage results when both partners can just be happy being who they are and in so doing add to the enjoyment of each other. As the Putneys point out, “Each is seeking candor
and warmth, and the exploration of self-potential (sexual capacities and many others), all of which is facilitated by cooperation of someone else engaged in a similar development. Such persons are not preoccupied with being loved or with maintaining romantic illusions. They are trying to enjoy life—together.”

Love is the ultimate unreasonable activity. When asked why you love your significant other, you might say, “She’s smart and has a great smile and is kind to animals,” but clearly those reasons are only half true. You could find lots of women who are just as smart and who have great smiles and also love animals. Why don’t you love
all
of them? No one knows exactly why he falls in love. The Putneys call it projection; you can call it chemistry or fate or whatever you want; you’re drawn to whom you’re drawn to and attracted to whom you’re attracted to, and whatever reasons you give yourself are probably bullshit.

I used to look down on the institution of arranged marriage; surprisingly my attitude changed completely when I visited India and spent time in the homes of the people there. I saw just as much or more genuine affection between husbands and wives there than I did in America. I now feel that young Indians are quite lucky to have a culture where people who love them and know them well set about to assist them in finding suitable marriage partners.

The idea that marriage is a joining of entire families, not just two isolated people, is also very attractive. It is not a perfect system: there can be compulsion and ulterior motives on the part of the parents. In my experience, however, that is rare among educated families. If both parties are given veto power, then I believe the system is in many ways superior to online dating and the bar scenes that seem to be the major options these days for single people in America. The basic difference is
that in America, a man marries the woman he loves; in India, a man loves the woman he marries.

When you make a decision about something, you always need a
goooood
reason. It’s easy to agonize over even the smallest decisions. My wife and son are incredibly indecisive. My son always waits until the last minute. His mind-set is, Why commit before you absolutely have to? A better opportunity may come along. It may work for him, however, it is tough on the people around him. My wife sees the negatives in every option, so is reluctant to choose something that is not perfect.

My wife and son are victims of the Buridan’s ass paradox, named after the fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan and based on an old fable about a donkey that dies because it cannot make a rational choice between two equally appealing alternatives—eat hay or drink water. This fable has given rise to the Buridan’s ass method, in which the decision is based on eliminating the option that has the most negatives so that you don’t end up like the donkey. My wife has essentially reinvented this method, whereas my son is often in danger of starving to death by virtue of indecision.

I still chuckle over the time I was in France and came to a T intersection. The sign pointing to the left and the sign pointing to the right both had the name of the same village. I pulled over and spent many minutes, brow furrowed, wondering whether to go right or left. Of course, in the end it didn’t matter which way I went; both roads led to the same place! We would all do well to remember the old saying “If you don’t know where you are going, it doesn’t matter which road you choose.”

Making important decisions only after due consideration is a
good way to live one’s life. However, people often let the agony of deciding go on far too long. Like the fabled donkey, they have all the relevant information, yet they can’t decide.

In advising my students on making a big life decision, I find that after they’ve laid out the problem in question and we have discussed the pros and cons of each option, it’s best to introduce what I call the gun test. It’s very scientific, you see. I point my fingers, in the form of a gun, at the student’s forehead and say, “Okay, you have fifteen seconds to decide or I’ll pull the trigger. What’s your decision?”

They always know the answer! Even if they do not ultimately take that path, this exercise usually releases the pressure built up around the decision-making process and gets them closer to a resolution.

I’ve named another tool I use the life’s journey method. If a student presents a problem with two possible paths to a solution, I ask the student to take one of the choices and then imagine what life would look like as a result of that choice. It might go something like this:

       
STUDENT
: Okay, I decide to go for the PhD.

       
ME
: Then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I get the PhD.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I graduate and get a job as a professor.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I get married and buy a house.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I have children.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: My children grow up and get married.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I get older.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I die.

Then I ask the student to imagine her life if she took the other path. It might go like this:

       
STUDENT
: I would leave school after my master’s degree.

       
ME
: Then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I get a job in industry, or I start a company.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I make a lot of money.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I do the marriage, kids, house thing.

       
ME
: Great; then what happens?

       
STUDENT
: I get old and die.

       
ME
: So the end is the same. No matter what path you take, in the end you die.

The point of this is to get people to realize that there is no way to know where a decision will lead. The best way forward is embedded in the design thinking methodology: manifest a bias toward action, and don’t be afraid of failure. I believe it serves people best in life to accept that decisions are part of the process of moving forward, and that there are so many variables that it’s a waste of time to try to see the endgame. Once we realize that most decisions are not life-or-death, we can make them without undue stress.

Now, much of this flies in the face of decision analysis theory, which presents analytical methods to make good decisions even
in the face of imprecise information. Unfortunately, for decisions on personal matters quantitative tools can be inadequate to capture the subtleties, and thus yield misleading conclusions.

Many years ago I was living in India, in the guest house of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. Kumar, a young engineer who visited me every few days, told me that he was leaving and would be gone for three weeks. He’d be taking the train to his native village in the north to choose a bride. His family had located six eligible candidates, and he was going to meet with them, decide who was the most suitable, and marry her.

A month later Kumar reappeared, carrying a rolled-up window shade. When he unrolled it, I saw that he had crafted a large and complex weighted decision table, a standard tool used in decision analysis theory. On it were listed the names of the six prospective brides, each row representing one of the women. Each of seven columns was headed by an attribute he was most interested in. Each woman had been numerically rated for each attribute, from 1 to 10, and each of these numbers was multiplied by the weighting factor he’d given that attribute, according to what he deemed its relative importance. The seven weighting factors were chosen so that they added up to 10. If he had rated the attributes equally, all the weighting factors would have been 10/7 (which we can round off to be approximately 1.4).