Something useful I’ve learned in the last few months is that you should learn to be strategically irrational. This has benefited me in two particularly helpful ways and I’ve incorporated these into absolutes in my life:

1) You should never have a reason to be happy.

2) You should never have a reason to be confident.

It’s useful for a person to be happy, right? People should be happy. They shouldn’t have to live in misery or be unhappy, ever. People function better when they’re happy and they get more done.

Likewise, it’s beneficial to be confident in yourself. If you doubt yourself, you don’t try as hard and you can’t get nearly as much done. It’s also harder to be a leader if you’re not confident in yourself, because people can’t see the ideal in you that makes them want to follow you. Who would follow someone that doesn’t know where they’re going?

You don’t need a reason to breathe to keep doing it, do you? So why do you need a reason to be happy or confident? If they’re critical to your survival, why do you need a reason to do them?

If you can accept those two ideas, then you’ll agree that being happy and being confident are pretty instrumental to success. So it’s pretty simple when you get down to it and accept the possiblity of suspending logic and reason. 🙂
Now that leads to the question: What can you do to safeguard those ideas and ensure that you’ll always be happy and confident?

Don’t have a reason for being that way.

Sure, it’d be nice if you could know objectively that you are a big freakin’ badass, that you have 1.5 billion compelling reasons to be happy and every reason in the universe to be confident in your abilities. But that makes them fallible.

The root of it is the fact that for every REASON for being that you can comprehend, there is an objection that can arise that will counter it.

It’s easier not being happy and not being confident, and your mind will conjure up whatever reason it can to subvert you and make you doubt yourself. For every reason you have, you will find one more objection to squash it.

If you can accept the freaky ideal of not having a reason for being happy, you can stop those objections dead in their tracks.

Think about it — if you’re happy and confident, and you have absolutely no reason for it, and it’s not based in reality at all, but you cling to it nevertheless — what on earth could possibly dislodge that belief? What could make you stop being happy? What outer or inner force could convince you to stop being confident? You can be impervious to reasoning yourself out of good habits.

It’s a vitally useful stronghold of the mind to

1) Define what qualities are important to you in order to succeed, and

2) Adopt what measures are necessary to safeguard those against any potential adversary, including yourself.

I’m the biggest fan of logic and reason that you could possibly imagine, and coming to understand this entire message that I’ve given involved turning my entire world upside down and doubting everything I’d come to know in my whole life… but it was one of the most important things I’ve ever done, and it’s so goddamned important that I needed to tell other people about it.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

If you need a reason to be happy or confident, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

I’ve found an absolutely amazing book that I’ve been rolling around and splashing in for the last few weeks. It’s a book that presents a very compelling argument that goal setting, relaxation, visualization, stress management, and flow are all total bullshit that will hurt you. 🙂

It’s called Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance.It’s basically a book that takes a look at the superstars of the world in sports, business, and politics and finds out how they think. It’s written by a psychologist that studies these people for a living and draws conclusions from that. It craps all over conventional wisdom and presents a lot of damned convincing reasons for it.

It’s one my top three best books ever. It totally grooved along with things I’d already thought but hadn’t put into words, and taught me a lot more besides. Ever since reading it, my attitude toward work and life has completely taken a 180 for the better. I’ve been happier and more productive ever since, and I’m still not even completely finished with it. 🙂

Basically, if you want to kick ass and be truly great, follow this book’s advice to the letter. I’ve NEVER found a book with so much incredibly potent and useful information.

Here’s an excerpt from it that totally blew me away. It explains how some of the traditional “tells” of stress and anxiety that people think are bad are actually your body stepping up to help you focus on kicking ass, on a physiological level!

—- EXCERPT BEGIN —-

Being a clutch player means thriving under pressure–welcoming it, enjoying it, making it work to your advantage. I can teach you how to do this, but first you will have to retrain some instincts, and that will require understanding two things:

1) Everything that your body does to you when the pressure is on is good for performance.

2) Pressure is different from anxiety; nervousness is different from worry.

Butterflies Are Normal

What is really happening to the body? Like almost every animal, humans have bimodal sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems that have evolved over thousands of years. One stimulates the heart, lungs, eyes, and muscles; the other suppresses them. One prompts basic bodily functions such as digestion and processing water and waste; the other shuts these systems off. They work in tandem. The sympathetic system is crucial for finding food, being on the lookout for dangerous predators, and defending against enemies, while the parasympathetic system keeps the body fueled, warm, working efficiently, and prepared for reproduction. When one turns up, the other turns down, and vice versa.

Under pressure, the brain switches the body to red alert. This activates the sympathetic nervous system, and energy is redistributed from parasympathetic tasks to maximize sympathetic tasks:

– The mouth goes dry. This is sometimes called “cotton mouth” because the body is channeling effort into tasks more important than producing saliva. We don’t need extra spit to sink a free throw at the buzzer.

– Butterflies in your stomach. The sensation of “butterflies” occurs from excess stomach acid because the digestive system is shutting down. During a major presentation to the board, who’s eating lunch?

– Stomach cramps. This is because the stomach lining is shrinking. THe body has stopped producing bile and is trying to get rid of any remaining food.

– Sweat flows. This is a safety mechanism to prevent the body from overheating. Even an audition for the New York Philharmonic is not worth boiling vital organs.

– Hands, feet, or knees begin shaking. That’s the body sending faster motor signals from the cortex through the motor neurons out to the extremeties, which will be running, throwing, illustrating, acting, keyboarding.

– Faster heartbeat. The heart beats faster to get more blood through the arteries, carrying nutrients and oxygen to the working muscles and brain cells so they can perform at a higher level.

– The eyes dilate. And doing so makes vision more acute.

– The mind races. this enables you to process a greater amount of information in a shorter amount of time.

All of these adaptations are the body’s way of making us perform more efficiently when we’re under the gun. When humans face stress, we are hardwired to respond favorably. Our bodies know just waht to do. Quicker hands and feet, more oxygen and fuel to our muscles, greater visual acuity, increased mental capacity–sounds like a pretty good formula for coming out on top, doesn’t it? So whether you are running the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics, trying to get one hudndred stitches into a patient’s heart within a minute, getting your fingers to play the allegro in a Mozart violin concerto, or pulling off the biggest sale of your career, why would you want to be more relaxed?

Relaxation teaches your muscles to lose tone, your brain to be passive. You cannot win gold medals without muscle tone, nor can you perform at your utmost with other parts of your sympathetic nervous system switched to “slow.” Most people experience fight-or-flight symptoms and BAM!–their performance is overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety. But arousal and anxiety are not the same thing. You simply have been conditioned or taught to treat them as equals. They’re not.

– The physical symptoms of fight-or-flight are what the human body has learned over thousands of years to operate more efficiently and at the highest level.
– Anxiety is a cognitive INTERPRETATION of that physical response.

Most people have come to believe that anxiety and stress go hand in hand. That assumption, however, is dead wrong. Stress need not produce anxiety. Once Bill Russell, a famous athlete, figured out the connection between his body’s physiological preparation and his performance, he actually was relieved to be throwing up before the big game because he recognized it as evidence that he was ready to play his best. Butterflies, cotton mouth, and a pounding heart make the finest performers smile–the smile of a person with an ace up their sleeve. Fight-or-flight symptoms comprise the extra juice they’ll need to go up against the best, so they welcome it. Many CEOs have confided to me that what they love most about their jobs are the aspects that make them the most nervous. They definitely would agree with Tiger Woods, who has often said, “The day I’m not nervous stepping onto the first tee–that’s the day I quit.”

All the great athletes, musicians, actors, doctors and business executives I’ve talked to seem to think the same way. So why does everyone else identify the body’s sympathetic response to high-stakes situations with fear of failure? The confusion tends to stem from childhood, almost as an accident. Here’s what happens: It is the first time you have to deliver in public. You are eight years old, playing in your first Little League game, giving your first recital, appearing in your first play, or delivering that debut book report from memory right before hte class. Your body goes nuts, registering all the classic fight-or-flight symptoms. On some level (and it’s usually not a higher cerebral level because, hey, you’re eight and you don’t process things that way yet) you are wondering, “What is happening ot me?”

Then you proceed to perform poorly.

You strike out three times and let the ball roll right between your legs, you blow your lines, you forget the next note, you blank on what the book was about. The next time you are called upon to perform in public, your body still reacts to the pressure, but you think, “The last time I felt this way, I was so awful that the other kids laughed at me.” Before you know it, you have attributed poor performacne to the body’s natural response under pressure. You essentially instructed yourself that the root of your problem was your body’s effort to help you perform to your utmost.

Trouble was, you didn’t really have any “utmost.” You performed badly because you simply were not yet very skilled. You were only eight years old! Your teacher probably didn’t teach you how to prepare your speech; you hadn’t practiced enough with your instrument. Some of the greatest athletes in history were lousy at age eight–or much older. (Remember: Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team sophomore year.)

Thus begins a vicious cycle between physical reactions to pressure and high anxiety. For the rest of your school days and then on the job, whenever you are asked to perform in public and the symptoms of arousal appear, you fill your head with negative thoughts. That is why amateur golfers with decades of experience still dread standing on the first ete, or why fifty-year-old executives live in terror of every presentation or big meeting with the board. Performing poorly becomes identified with the body’s natural invigoration mechanisms. The anxiety gets worse until you finally tell yourse,f, “I have to learn how to relax.”

The mistaken identity between stress and anxiety is so ingrained that when I ask new clients to tell me about their experiences performing under pressure, they often respond with a soliloquy on fear. I want to hear about breakthrough moments, the good stuff, but they tell me about choking, doubt, and ducking every opportunity that might activate such awful feelings. No wonder in our culture few words carry a more negative connotation than “pressure” and “stress.” Stress gets blamed for everything that doesn’t have an otherwise clear diagnosis. Going gray or losing your hair? Must be stress. Unidentified pains or headaches? You guessed it. But stress is not the cause; it’s how you interpret stress that causes psychosomatic illness.

In performance arenas, psychologists call this “self-intimidation.” You feed your mind with thoughts and instructions that your body is doing something wrong. You tell yourself that you’re not going to perform well because of your own natural instincts. You use emotionally exaggerated language such as “my heart is jumping clear out of my chest; my stomach’s so twisted upside down, the knots will never come out.” Often you say, “If only I could just relax, I’d do so much better.” You undermine your confidence by creating an irrational fear of yourself. Athletes like Dennis Rodman and John Rocker make a multimillion dollar living out of intimidating opponents. Most people are already intimidating themselves–for free.

—- EXCERPT END —-

The whole book is that awesome. Buy it. 🙂

“You can’t learn art.”

Have you ever heard that?

“You’re just born with it.”

Or that?

“Oh, that looks just awesome, don’t change a thing! It’s perfect.”

How about that?

People that say that are poison. I call them the Anti-Learning Brigade. The snobby intellectual artsy elite. They’ll play both angles… tell you that it’s impossible to learn to do what you’re trying to do, or that you can’t or shouldn’t try to get better at it.

Why? To grant themselves a false and unearned sense of superiority, and to cut off your legs so you can’t compete. They may not realize they’re doing it — I’ve seen plenty of examples of that — but the result is the same.

The reason I dismiss them is because of this simple question:

What does “You can’t learn it” offer to help people that want to learn it?

That’s not knowledge. That’s not wisdom. That’s not any kind of help. That’s ANTI-KNOWLEDGE. That’s the most destructive, least constructive, most useless piece of advice that can be imparted to another that’s trying to learn.

“Stop trying. Stop putting forth the effort. You’ll never do it. No one can do it… except me, I was born with it. Some people have just been born with the skill and have done it all their life. How could you possibly compete with that? It’s inborn, a gift, not something that can be trained. Just give up. Don’t try. You’re wasting your time.”

I’ve made my life and career out of ignoring people like that, to my great benefit. I’m past the point of thinking anything they say holds weight, but when I see them telling eager young kids that are just starting out that they’ll never be good and can’t learn, I get angry.

Very angry.

Because if I’d listened to them when I was at that stage, I’d be nowhere. I think about where I was then, and where I am now, and I imagine everything I learned and everything I became in that time DYING. All that existence unravelling, just because someone was insecure and trying to hold me down.

By what right can one human tell another that his efforts will never matter? That his hard work will amount to nothing? That he’d be BETTER if he GAVE UP and STOPPED TRYING?

Never listen to these people. Ignore them. Cut them out of your life. Treat what they say as a challenge to try harder, get better and improve. “Can’t learn it, eh? Watch me crush you.” It does happen. People can make themselves out of nothing. You can learn anything. You can get better at anything.

You don’t even need to start out being smart! You just need to be willing to learn and have the determination to BECOME smart. If you’re persistent enough, never give up, keep trying and constantly adapt to new ideas and throw out your favorite old ones, you can do absolutely ANYTHING.

If no one could learn anything, no one could DO anything. And look around you. See how the world works. Cars move, airplanes fly, skyscrapers are erected, electricity flows, computer systems whirr happily, and the gears of the world go on grinding. If no one can learn anything, how does any of that work? I haven’t seen many infants assembling airplanes lately.

Explain that, Anti-Learning Brigade.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal inertia and change, and how no matter how hard you try, some things about yourself you can never change. And what to do about it.

This past week or two I’ve been wrestling with myself over how best to spend my time, and how I naturally lean toward goofing off and wasting it. I know I’m going to do it, and I know beating myself up over it isn’t going to make me WANT to get better at it. In fact, that’s the worst way possible.

So I’m trying to get down and nitty-gritty and understand myself better, warts and all. Based on my past behavior and my natural inclinations, I have learned the following:

1) If I have the choice between doing something challenging and productive and doing something easy and fruitless, I will probably do the easy thing.

All the self-discipline I’ve used on myself to try to get better at it can only go so far. So my solution? Forcibly remove all the easy and fruitless activities. Bye bye internet. Bye bye cable TV. Bye bye DVDs. Bye bye beer. Problem solved.

Basically, I’m looking at myself as a rat in a maze, and I’m just removing obstacles and changing the maze myself to achieve the result I want. 🙂 I know I’m going to act like this. I know I will probably goof off, despite my best intentions. So the only logical answer is that I should completely remove the choice to do something easy and fruitless.

That ties into something else I learned about myself:

2) I have a highly addictive personality.

When I find something new and interesting that I love, I will absolutely exhaust it.

• If I get something awesome and fun to do at work, I will work myself to death with insane hours until I’m done with it.

• If I find a new exercise routine that I enjoy, I will repeat it until I can’t move.

• If I find a new book I like, I will sit down and read the entire thing in one sitting, then buy three more books by that author on Amazon.

• If I find a new kind of beer I enjoy, I will buy and drink cases of it.

• If I find a new restaurant I like, I will go there every day for a week.

• If I meet a new girl that I’m interested in, I can’t get her out of my head and I have to fight the urge to spend all my waking time talking to her.

And so on. I keep going until I hit some sort of wall and HAVE to stop. The incredible thing is that I never notice that I’m this obsessed, because I’m having so much fun.

And I never realized how intense I was in that regard until recently. And it’s funny (and scary) how totally involuntary it is. So this ties into the personal inertia concept… what can I do about that if I’m such a slave to my own whimsy? Surround myself with the kind of things I SHOULD become obsessed with and hack away at for a year until I get tired. 🙂 That’s why my apartment is becoming spotless. That’s why I’ve been eating healthier and exercising and why I’ve lost another four pounds just this week. And that would be why I am at work on a perfectly nice Sunday afternoon.

So the whole point of this is… know yourself. Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Find ways to turn your weaknesses into your strengths. People all fall into specific patterns of behavior that are VERY easy to recognize and take advantage of. Learn to understand your own, predict how you’re going to act and react to the things around you, and learn how to play yourself just like a game to get better performance and BE better.

Ultimately, we’re all just machines. Thousands of little systems that act together in very precise, predictable patterns. You don’t even have to think about them, because they simply work the way they do automatically without you ever realizing it. Hitch a ride on that! At that point it’s not even effort, it’s like totally free bonus time in which to kick ass.

Come on, just IMAGINE how much better you can be if you can just add or remove one little factor to turn your inborn unconscious quirks and weaknesses into happy, puttering little engines of success! 🙂

So, loyal readers, I’m curious! Have you ever turned a weakness into a strength? What was it and how?