Pursue Success Like a Successful Person

 

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash

Western culture embraces the notion that success is synonymous with having more money than you could ever spend or being nationally-recognized as the best at something. In sports, we find a measure of joy and satisfaction when our favorite sports squadron wins a national title. As fans, we find ourselves enjoying that success by proxy.

“My team won the [insert national title competition here],” we might say at the office water cooler.

Unless you’re Ryan Smith, they’re probably not your team.

Still, there’s an interesting thing that happens when you root for a particular team and they do well. Their success — even though your fandom contributes almost nothing to it — can have an immediate effect on the self-esteem and confidence of the fan. This is a phenomenon known as Basking in Reflected Glory or BIRGing. BIRGing hits the brain in some of the same way as personal achievement does.

We all know someone — maybe it’s ourselves — who seems to live by basking in their own former glory. The cliché version is the high school football star, now in his late 40s, who can’t seem to move beyond those glory days of being able to “throw a pig skin a quarter mile.” (Thank you Uncle Rico.)

Napoleon Dynamite and national pride aside, we don’t have to throw a football the way Tommy Frazier does in order to enjoy real success. Society tells us so measure success on a very large scale which can discourage us as we pursue “small” things in life. Using a national title scale to measure our success in losing those pesky fifteen pounds is a bit like measuring a high jumper’s record-breaking jump against the distance to the moon.

Where personal successes are concerned, there is only one metric that’s worthwhile: measuring where we are now against where we were.

Nir Eyal is an expert in the field of behavioral design and consumer psychology. I don’t know Nir personally, but it appears he’s one of the good guys in behavioral design, not one of those who is trying to keep you glued to your phone all day, every day.

In a recent article titled “Why Successful People Only Get More Successful,” Nir makes two powerful arguments to support the idea that our personal success should only be measured against ourselves. First, he says, “throughout our lives, we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves in specific ways; then, we tend to stick with those labels and their accompanying behaviors. Yet expectations form our reality, so we should take care not to label ourselves in ways that limit us.”

Using the moon-shot measuring stick again, we have to remove the success stifling stigma that because we’ve failed before, we will always continue to fail. It’s true that failure is part of success, but it’s not so binary as we either succeed or we fail. Incremental gains and incremental setbacks are the hallmarks of any journey toward achieving something — big or small.

Let’s use perhaps a silly example to illustrate. It’s Saturday morning and I haven’t done any laundry in six days for my six-person household. All the laundry baskets are overflowing.

After a brisk run, I start the laundry. Six loads later, my bed is covered with neatly-folded, clean clothes. However, there’s still a load in the dryer and one waiting to be washed. But, the day is gone, and it’s time to get kids to bed.

I can label myself a failure because there were two loads of laundry yet to be handled or I can view what I did with a sense of accomplishment. Three-fourths of the way there is great progress, and not much additional time will be required to wrap up the task.

Our attitude toward success and failure carries outsize importance in our progress toward future successes (or failures, though I wouldn’t label progress toward failure as progress).

This brings us to Nir’s second important point. In order to build new beliefs, we have to challenge our old ones.

Identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that undermine your confidence and expectations of success. Replace these beliefs with more realistic perspectives. Reflect on and celebrate your strengths, talents, and past successes. Remind yourself of your capabilities and resilience in overcoming challenges. — Nir Eyal

We can find growth and fulfillment in our own successes simply by reshaping how we view them. Instead of chasing arbitrary benchmarks that have little intrinsic meaning, we should focus on our own progress and incremental achievements.

In normal, everyday living, success has nothing to do with grand accolades or validation from others. Success is about becoming the best version of ourselves, one small victory at a time.

Are You Blinded By What's Broken?

 

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash

I have a lower tolerance for pain, so I’m grateful we live in such an age where I can open a cabinet, take a couple of pills, and resolve a headache in 30 minutes or less.

In 2017, I tore a small tendon in my left wrist. Being left-handed, I found the inability to use my arm crazy frustrating. For 6 weeks, I had to wear a brace that kept my arm locked in a specific position while the tendon healed.

Once immobilized, the pain of the damaged tendon was basically erased. However, the brace itself caused a lot of discomfort. I remember barely sleeping the first few nights as it felt like my skin was on fire.

Soon, the discomfort I felt was all I could think about. For perhaps two weeks, any idle time I had was occupied by thoughts of what had happened and how uncomfortable I was.

What added more to my discomfort was my inability to do my job. I had a job that required a lot of typing. If you’re a proficient typer, you know that one-handed typing is much more than twice as slow as two-handed typing. I resorted to a job-trade of sorts with my office manager who spent a lot of her time on the ten-key. I did her work (where I could) so she could sit at my desk and type as I dictated.

That was fun for about 15 minutes.

After a few weeks, I was at wit’s end. In frustration, I yelled at my boss one day which was uncharacteristic. Unfortunately, the expression of frustration didn’t end with him. I was impatient with almost everyone in my life. To be fair to myself, I wasn’t sleeping well which always shortens my fuse a little, but I tend to be a super patient person.

In short, I had allowed an injury to a small tendon to temporarily change who I was.

After about 3 weeks, an odd thing happened. I would sometimes take the brace off after I showered so I could dry my arm and clean the brace. I started noticing how much it hurt to take the brace off. Now, I still had the frustration of not being able to do my job, but the pain of not wearing the brace was greater than the discomfort of wearing it.

At the end of the six weeks, physical therapy was difficult, and I found relief by slipping my arm back into the brace I had hated so much. How was it that the object of my pain became the source of relief?

Why is it that the euphoria of victory seems to fade so much faster than impact of pain?

From the little I’ve read, psychologists seem to agree that we are wired to seek comfort. Perhaps that’s why the highs of victory fade, because they have the potential to contribute to our comfort whereas pain seems to be the opposite of how most of us define comfort.

We all know that at varying intervals we’re going to face difficult, painful situations. Knowing that, why are we so often blindsided when they come?

I subscribe to the idea that we’ll never know how we’ll respond to the big thing until it happens. I couldn’t have imagined how, at 14, I would respond to my mother dying. When the grief finally took hold, I hit the wall of my bedroom with my forearm and broke a forearm-length hole in the wall which I promptly covered with a Jurassic Park poster.

When I tore that tendon, I became a different person for a while, but when I injured my right hip flexor running on a golf course in Pennsylvania, I took being on crutches for two weeks in stride (pun). I even got to enjoy a couple of wheelchair rides in various airports.

Even though that particular injury kept me from running for more than two months while it healed, it had little impact on the rest of my capability to get things done, and it increased the number of times my kids were willing to get things for me so I didn’t have to. (Sympathy service.)

Can we be prepared, in some way, for when those emergent and difficult things arise?

While predicting our response is difficult, developing emotional resilience and having a strong support network are two crucial things that will make bouncing back and moving forward easier. Note that I didn’t say easy.

For a person who has had many surgeries in life, another routine operation may not be that big of a deal for them whereas even a minor procedure might be very difficult for someone who has never had any surgery.

The support network is often most important because emotional resilience is developed in the moments when it’s needed.

Our ability to avoid being blinded by the difficult things in life isn’t about avoiding difficult things. Sooner or later, they will come. All we can do is work on developing the capacity to face life’s challenges with grace for ourselves and leaning into being shaped by our challenges in ways we don’t and can’t expect.

These are the moments when we might surprise ourselves. It’s in our most difficult moments that we can grow, adapt, and face other difficulties in life with a little more poise.

Don't Think Other People's Thoughts

 

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I’m a professional ruminator. No, not the kind with a multi-chambered stomach. I’m one of those people who can latch onto a thought — usually one that elicits difficult-to-deal with emotions — and hold onto it with all the intensity of a toddler holding a dirt-covered lollipop.

I excel at both pre- and post-rumination, often holding conversations with people in my head about difficult subjects long before discussing it with them, if ever.

Years ago, I was involved in the sale of a durable goods distribution company. Part of the sale was an attempt to liquidate inventory that had not sold in a long time. During much of the workday, I was busy moving inventory from one warehouse to another and helping to organize it. Later in the day, I would man the old warehouse to meet potential buyers of whatever flotsam we had left. The idea was to sell the products for whatever I could get for them.

On a particularly hot afternoon in August, a long-time customer and friend came in to buy an item that had more dust on it than Tutankhamun’s tomb. I sold it for a song — happy to be rid of it and happy to be one step closer to completing the arduous task of moving the aged-out inventory.

As it happened, my boss came over while the customer was still perusing the remnant piles. He noticed the item I’d sold in the back of the customer’s truck and asked what I’d sold it for.

I told him.

“Why would you sell it for so little?” He asked with a tone that said, “you’re an idiot.”

“You told me to sell the inventory for whatever I could get for it.” Was my reply.

Without another word, my boss went and retrieved the item from the customer’s truck — without permission — and proceeded to try to refund him his money. The customer was upset and argued with my boss, yet my boss persisted. In the end, my boss won. The customer accepted the refund and left without purchasing anything else.

I was so embarrassed for him, myself, and our company that my embarrassment turned into unexpressed rage.

That was more than 7 years ago, and simply recalling that story causes my blood pressure to rise.

Like I said: a professional ruminator.

Have you ever watched a terrible TV show but you keep watching hoping that it’ll get better? Rumination is like that. Even worse, rumination is like watching the TV show on repeat in your brain.

Rumination, on the shallow end of the spectrum, is a waste of time and energy. Moving up the ladder, it increases anxiety and diminishes both focus and productivity. At the top of the scale — the professional ruminator step — rumination leads to long-term negative impacts on mental health, making rumination increasingly difficult to avoid.

Rumination sucks, and if you’re stuck in it, it can be very difficult to escape.

What hope is there?

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the practice of metacognition — thinking about thoughts — is an interesting one. On the surface, metacognition and rumination look very similar. The crucial difference, however, is that metacognition seeks to increase curiosity about why we think the way we do and stop the kind of thinking that defines rumination. In other words, rumination accomplishes the opposite of metacognition. Rumination keeps us stuck in a particular way of thinking and often leads to spirals of increased stress and anxiety.

Metacognition, on the other hand, seeks to build capability of watching as a thought crosses the mental stage, being curious about it in a judgment-free way, then allowing the thought to move on if it doesn’t serve a purpose.

As with most psychological things, making a change must begin with awareness. If you’re a pro ruminator, this awareness will require a lot of practice and just as much grace for yourself for falling back into old habits.

I’ve often referenced the “stop, challenge, choose” methodology which is applicable here. If you can stop the rumination long enough to challenge your way of thinking then you’ve opened up space to choose metacognition over rumination.

From there, you can apply any number of techniques to analyze thoughts: simple reflection, journaling, talking it out with someone (removing as much drama as possible), or maybe talking it through out loud with yourself (but probably not in the middle of a crowded shopping center). Whatever the approach, the goal is the same: to stop the cycle of replaying events without seeking any resolution.

Life’s a lot better when you can deal with those things that need to be resolved and moving past the rest.

R.I.P Instant Gratification. Hello Going Deep.

 There’s a joke in my family that the sloth is my spirit animal. My kids use it liberally, ironically because I’m almost never still. I wake up at the absurd hour of 4:00 am almost every day (even on weekends) and often don’t go to bed until after 10:00 pm.

Perhaps I’m one of those people who doesn’t need a lot of sleep, but my inability to remember things from one day to the next makes me think that it’s time to get serious about fixing my sleep.

I have a voluminous library (pun) of business books. Collecting business books that I’ll read someday is a hobby I’ve had for more than 2 decades. That’s resulted in a library numbering in the hundreds of books, many of which I have not yet read.

“Slow Productivity” is the first Cal Newport book I’ve read, and I’ve developed a serious literary crush. He has an incredible ability to take what many would consider a dull subject — business — and turn it into something fascinating.

What’s amazing about “Slow Productivity,” however, is the applicability to everyday life. There’s a phrase toward the beginning of the book that should resonate with all of us:

Haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience. — Cal Newport

Anthropologists do their very best at guessing what life was like before written history. If we were, indeed, a hunter/gatherer species for tens of thousands of years before more complex societies started forming around an agrarian lifestyle, then our modern age practice of “being on” all the time flies in the face of our genetic heritage.

I agree with the argument that Mr. Newport makes that we’ve “confuse[d] efficiency with frenzy” in most aspects of modern living. The highways packed with cars and highways packed with data bits have overrun what used to be common sense: slowing down is what we do. Periods of intense activity didn’t come close to outnumbering periods of leisure and rest.

Even worse, Western thinking has introduced an element of guilt, as in, we should feel guilty if we’re not making the most of every minute of every day.

Let me be clear: there are things that are a waste of time. Scrolling through social media for hours on end is a waste of time. Excessive sleep is also a waste of time. It’s impossible to accurately quantify where the line is between leisure and wasted time. A good rule of thumb is that leisure activities should refresh us, not serve as a mechanism to avoid dealing with something that needs to be done.

In my frenetic schedule, there are very few times when I allow myself to slow down. Somewhat paradoxically, it’s when I run that I give myself time to slow down, in a manner of speaking. It’s not that I run slow (though I am slowing down as I age), but when I run I choose not to plug in. I don’t listen to music or podcasts. When I run with others, we engage in conversation, running at a speed where we can (mostly) talk and run at the same time. When I’m alone, I let myself get lost in my thoughts or just admire the beauty of the world around me.

When we slow down, we have the opportunity to go deep on things. Those things might be relationship building, learning a new craft, or being present.

Of course, grace for ourselves and others is essential in the quest to slow down. There are seasons of life when it’s incredibly difficult to do. If you are raising a family and working to make ends meet, you may feel like there’s no room for slowing down.

Slowing down might look like taking 15 minutes to to disconnect, breathe, and be still. It might also look like spending 15 minutes tinkering with a hobby. It could mean taking a few minutes to call someone you haven’t talked to in a while or visiting with someone on their doorstep for a moment.

It’s important to remember that slowing down doesn’t have to look like living a monastic lifestyle where you spend hours a day in meditation. Slowing down means taking some time to be really intentional about something, rather than running around like the headless chicken of proverbial fame.