3
Inspiration vs. Perspiration
In a nutshell: You need effort to get where you’re going, but it doesn’t have to be a slog. Effort trumps skill, but targeted effort combined with skill trumps everything. Slogging slows you down. Perfection will grind you into the ground. Be more creative and productive by giving your brain space to operate at its peak and taking care of the body in which it lies.
Our Brain as a Resource
Renowned psychotherapist Maryetta Andrews Sachs was musing to one of her patients about how much her field had changed in the 48 years since she had started practicing. Now in her 70s, Maryetta has worked in a community mental health clinic, private practice, and academia. One of the greatest shifts she noticed was the increased knowledge of how our brain works and its connection with the rest of our system.
“It used to be that we ignored the body, thinking it had no impact on the brain,” said Maryetta. “But after practicing for decades, I am far more aware that most people seeking therapy have some type of trauma associated with their presenting problems and that attention to the mind–body link has to be made in order for treatment to be successful.”
Our own brain is a resource in figuring out how we function and how to change behaviors that are unhelpful to us. If we can get better at understanding how we work, we can get better at changing the things we don’t like.
There’s plenty of research available, much of it in easily digestible forms, that helps us better understand the functioning of our own brains.
Check out TED Talks by people like Dan Gilbert, Martin Seligman, and others who are leaders in their fields in understanding what makes us tick and why we do the things we do. Most importantly, they offer us tools to help reprogram our brains a little to steer ourselves toward the outcomes we want and warn us against less helpful natural tendencies.
Daniel Kahneman offers some fascinating lessons in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.1 Essentially his thesis is that there are some things we learn to do so well that they become intuitive and we do them with ease, using little effort or awareness. Other things are much harder for us and take great effort and energy. He creates two characters: “System 1” and “System 2” to represent fast and slow thinking, illustrating his point and making his book highly readable.
With practice, we can move some of our activities from slow thinking (System 2) to fast thinking (System 1). For example, when we first learn to drive a car, slow thinking is at work. We struggle to juggle all the things we must do at the same time: use foot pedals, check our rearview mirrors, turn the wheel, and so on. Initially, it seems inconceivable that we could do all of this and also hold a conversation with someone or enjoy music on the radio. And yet, eventually the day comes when we are so proficient at driving that we have plenty of capacity left over to ponder what we should do on the weekend as we drive to work. That’s fast thinking at work.
The same thing goes for many other tasks that initially daunt us, whether it’s playing the piano or making a sales call. The more frequently we do it, the better we get at it and the less effort it takes.
Kahneman also has warnings for what happens when we over-rely on fast thinking and aren’t even aware that we are making decisions or that we are doing them based on very little information. We translate anecdotes as data and make assumptions we don’t test. This trips us up when we think we know more than we do.
Here’s why Kahneman’s work matters for us. If you are trying something new, you will generally find it is harder to do and takes more out of you than doing something at which you are proficient.
Take the case of Melanie, a coaching client of mine at a global consumer products company. Melanie took up a new role at headquarters, joining from a subsidiary of the parent company. She was recognized as a high-flyer and considered an internal hire. She knew a number of people at headquarters already and was inheriting a team that needed to be restructured and turned around. The move also involved a change of city and leaving her social network in Chicago.
When we first spoke, she said she was finding it very difficult not to be as confident in what she was doing as she had been in her old job and that people were expecting her to immediately perform with the same productivity as before. She was also feeling exhausted after days of getting less done than she was used to.
When we applied Kahneman’s thinking to her case, the cause was apparent. She was using System 2, slow thinking, by necessity because so much of what she was doing was new and unfamiliar. It was going to take some time to get to the level of efficiency of brain function that she had been used to in her old job where System 1, fast thinking, was in charge. That was also why she was so tired. Slow thinking uses more fuel than fast thinking.
Melanie realized she needed to give herself a break for not being instantly as productive and efficient as she had been before and also to push back on people expecting the same immediate performance from her.
Understanding what was happening in her brain made that much easier to do.
Effort Trumps Skill
In his book Outliers,2 Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that practicing 10,000 hours was the secret of success in a diverse range of fields from music to software to the law. However, to most of us mere mortals, reading tales of what Bill Gates, The Beatles, and Mozart had in common, although interesting, is not that helpful. Most of us are not phenoms, whom if given the right circumstances of birth and hours of undisturbed practice from an early age will go on to achieve greatness.
However, what Gladwell did get right for the rest of us was the importance of practice. It does not need to be 10,000 hours, which seems so extraordinarily unrealistic, but practice is in fact the secret to success in most fields. Luck and timing also help, but here we are focused on the things over which we have some control.
Angela Duckworth, a student of Martin Seligman, who was mentioned earlier in the book, is a pioneer in the field of “grit.” She has studied the role perseverance plays in acquiring skill and being successful at a given endeavor. Her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance3 is a useful read for anyone convinced that fate and family determine the path of one’s life.
Duckworth posits that grit, the ability to persevere despite setbacks and obstacles, is the true predictor of success in life. She has a grit test that one can take to check one’s own level of grit. I scored poorly the first time I took it, but I intend to persevere and raise my score!
Her conclusion after reviewing masses of data and conducting hundreds of interviews with athletes, musicians, teachers, and others is that there is a formula to success and it looks like this: talent x effort = skill; skill x effort = achievement.
Duckworth found that the swimmers who were most successful had consistently trained harder and the students who did better had worked harder, even when they initially started as less talented or gifted than their peers. In other words, effort was a more important predictor of outcome than apparent talent.
Duckworth’s work builds on that of Carol Dweck, who talks about “growth mindset,” which is the belief that effort and application result in improvement, or “I can’t do that yet.”4She compares that to a “fixed mindset,” which is the belief that if it doesn’t come naturally, it doesn’t come at all, or “I am someone who can’t do that.”
The wonderful news from our point of view of all this research is that effort is far more important than natural ability. If you simply make more of an effort, you stand to improve.
Here’s the important caveat: The effort must be focused.
I was wondering why I never get faster at running. I have been running for about eight years. I run a steady 10-minute mile pace, occasionally nine minutes, and I can generally do four to eight miles at a time, but not further.
Then I compare myself with my son, whom I used to easily outrun when he was 11 or 12 years old. He is now 15 years old and runs a five and half minute mile pace in cross-country races.
The answer isn’t simply that he’s younger and has gotten stronger. He practices with his school team six days a week. There is a plan for their practice and it varies. The runners are timed and have goals for each session in terms of speed and distance. Then they compete against others and see how they have improved.
Meanwhile, I do the exact same four- or eight-mile loop in my local park two or three times a week at the exact same pace. Of course I am not improving! Duckworth had the same realization in her book.
It takes focused effort to improve, but it can be done. So if you think you can’t get to the next level professionally or achieve a dream in a personal hobby, reflect on how much real effort you are putting into that goal. How much are you blaming circumstances and others for your inability to achieve what you want?
If it’s mostly about the effort, that’s really good news and life should look a whole lot better right now.
The Curse of Perfection
Seeking perfection can be very debilitating for the following reasons:
- Your focus on detail can leave you missing the big picture. As you format and reformat a document, you fail to notice new information that will impact the overall argument you’re making.
- You fear failure and are often hesitant to act in case you won’t be right. This can be as simple as not wanting to ask a “stupid” question in a meeting or failing to seize a professional opportunity for fear you won’t do it well enough.
- It’s exhausting. The problem with perfection is that it’s in the eye of the beholder. You can work and re-work something forever. There is usually little meaningful benefit from doing so. At best, it’s incremental improvement. Sometimes you have even made matters worse.
- It’s really hard on the people around you. If only you can do things “the right way,” you create disincentives for others to try or leave them believing they will never be able to do it for themselves. This happens as often at home as it does at work.
Ask yourself the following questions and answer “yes,” “no,” or “sometimes”:
- Do you have high expectations of yourself?
- Do you often criticize yourself for not achieving what you set out to do?
- Does it matter very much to be right?
- Do you get very irritated at things not being as they should?
- Do you like to explain things in detail?
Now tally your scores; yes = 1, no = 0, and sometimes equals 0.5.
If you scored between 2.5 and 5.0, you may suffer from the curse of perfection.
If you scored lower, keep reading, because someone you know almost certainly has this affliction and learning how it impacts them could be helpful to them and to you.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good” is a phrase that exists in multiple languages and has its origins from the 1600s. Voltaire quotes it in his Philosophical Dictionary5 in 1764, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”—more accurately translated as “The better is the enemy of the good.” Winston Churchill had a related saying: “Perfect is the enemy of progress.”6
Robert Watson Watt, who developed radar in Britain during the World War II, had an entire philosophy on this concept. He termed it “the cult of the imperfect,” and described it as, “Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes.”7
Ultimately, that is the problem with perfection for us; the timing is never perfect, we never have enough information, and things will almost certainly change. The challenge is to press on and take some risk in allowing things not to be perfect.
Many couples wrestle with whether the time is right to have their first child. The changes to their lifestyles, income, and own bodies seem immense and daunting. You would suppose that should be doubled when it comes to contemplating a second child, but it rarely is. Having done something once, doing it again feels much less daunting.
The same is true for changes you want to make in your own life. If you can press on, initially making minor changes and moving your way forward toward your goal, you will find your fear of not being perfect, and things not being perfect around you, will diminish.
Exercise: What are the things you hesitate to do because you don’t think you would do them well? Perhaps you duck away from public speaking, never raise your hand to volunteer, or do not entertain friends as often as you’d like.
List the things you steer clear of, things that have the ability to benefit you or bring you pleasure. Now pick one from the list and plan to do it within the next seven days. Start small. Maybe its presenting to your own team, asking someone to mentor you, or speaking up at a town hall. Make yourself do it and see what happens. Then pick the next thing on the list. It will get easier as you work your way down the list.
Friluftsliv
If it is true that psychotherapy never really paid much attention to the brain as a physical organ, it paid even less attention to the rest of the body and the importance it plays in our well-being and happiness.
Ever more research is uncovering the benefits of exercise to our mental state, moods, brain functioning, and ability to fight disease. It’s now said that if exercise were a pill, it would be prescribed more widely than aspirin.
In April 2015, the Academy of Medical Colleges released a report citing the benefits of exercise as a “miracle cure”8 and huge meta-analysis of numerous longitudinal studies have demonstrated the long-term benefits of exercise.
In the ancient world, the Roman poet Juvenal coined the term “Mens sana in corpore sano,” which has been translated as “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” 9 The Romans believed that the foundation for the good life involved both the physical and mental.
Most of us might acknowledge the benefits of exercise, but we find it hard to actually apply and make time for it. Our lives are already busy and adding another “should do” seems unrealistic. We are often good at intellectualizing and resolving to do better—just witness the flood of health club applications in January each year. By March, the flood of new people has receded and the regulars have the place to themselves again.
If you really want to reap the benefits of exercise you have to build it into your life and make it a routine, not something you have to think about. If you are making a decision each time about whether to go for a run or get to the gym, you are relying on will power, which is notoriously overrated.
Building exercise into your day offers you the best chance of success. Keeping your expectations low also helps. So, for example, don’t sign up right away for a triathlon; just make sure you have a routine that has you running three times a week, or getting to the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the same time. If you have friends who are also interested, coopt them. That improves your chances of going as you now have a commitment to keep.
My friend Caroline walks briskly for an hour every morning with some of her neighbors. She says she would never dream of rolling out of bed on a winter morning to do that by herself, but the fact that it’s already planned and they are expecting her takes away the desire to find excuses or cancel. They chat as they walk and the time goes quickly.
Another friend, Mark, hates the gym, but he loves food and fine wine. He knows he can’t enjoy eating and drinking at the rate he does and feel well if he doesn’t exercise. He schedules his personal trainer in the mornings and gets it out of the way so he can get on with the things he really enjoys.
Being outdoors and in nature when you exercise offers additional benefits. The Nordics call it friluftsliv, literally translated as “open air living.” It means enjoying life out of doors and spending time in nature.
A walk in the woods or countryside beats a walk on a treadmill (although the treadmill beats no walk at all, so I won’t knock it too much). Getting outdoors to exercise has a restorative effect on the mind in addition to getting you those endorphins.
Easier in summer but especially important in winter, a shot of friluftsliv can inoculate us from the winter blues.
The most important aspect of exercise is that it should be part of our routine and that it be vigorous. Strolls don’t count. You don’t get the benefit of endorphins with a stroll.
Endorphins are the chemicals released when you exercise. They interact with receptors in your brain that reduce your perception of pain. They also trigger a positive feeling in the body similar to morphine. They can create a feeling of euphoria, sometimes described as a “runner’s high”—that high also impacts your outlook on life.
In short, exercise benefits your mind as much as your body. It reduces stress and anxiety, can boost your self-esteem, and wards off depression. It allows you to sleep better, which sets you up for a better day and ultimately a better life. Treat it with the importance it deserves and you’ll start to reap the rewards.
Meditate Away
If we think of the mind as a physical organ that needs tending, one of the most effective ways of doing that is through meditation. Meditation or mindfulness is essentially the art of training the mind in awareness. It’s a skill that allows us to separate a little from the emotions and distraction we experience. If we can observe the emotions and identify them, we are already slightly apart from them. The act of noticing what we are feeling is only possible if we have stepped back a little and are looking at the emotion.
That simple step of observing what we are feeling creates some space in the mind and reduces the strength of the emotion. If we are not wrapped up in the emotion but are watching it instead, we have a little distance and that changes how we relate to the emotion.
Easier said than done, you say. What about when we are roiled by really strong emotions and are losing our cool? It’s rather difficult to step back and think “Oh, there I go, I’m furious because that person has cut me off in traffic and I’m already late.”
That’s where training the mind comes in. Meditation or mindfulness is simply the skill of training the mind to be aware of what’s happening. Being able to notice the ebb and flow of emotions and label them is enormously helpful in creating stability in the mind. That stability in turn contributes to feelings of calm and gives us the confidence to tolerate changing situations and our own emotions.
We soon discover that the mind is a little like Irish weather. If you don’t like what’s happening right now, wait a while and it will change.
It helps to know that good and bad feelings come and go, and that holding tightly on to them or chasing them away won’t help. The act of noticing them gives us confidence that they will change, whether we want them to or not.
Research on the benefits of meditation has increased dramatically as our understanding of how the brain works has increased.
Srinivasan Pillay, whom I met several years ago on a course for high-potential staff at the World Bank, has done intriguing research at Harvard Medical School on the brain and impact of meditation. A physician who combines scientific research with the study of human potential, he has demonstrated the benefits from the perspective of neuroscience.10
In the past, research into the benefits of meditation was usually focused on small groups, including communities of Buddhist monks living lives of quiet contemplation. Demonstrating that their stress levels were lower than the rest of us was hardly compelling evidence of the benefits of meditation. It was also not a useful solution to people seeking more calm in their lives. Taking off to a Tibetan retreat or spending several hours a day meditating is not a practical option for most of us.
Then larger-scale and longitudinal studies became more common, such as the one undertaken by the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, recently published in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry.11
These studies demonstrate that the benefits of meditation include reduced stress and reduced risk for various diseases and better sleep quality. Brain scans of participants showed differences in those who underwent mindfulness meditation. There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm. Four months later, those who had practiced mindfulness showed much lower levels in their blood of a marker of unhealthy inflammation than the relaxation group, even though few were still meditating.12
When I spent a few days at Kripalu, a yoga retreat in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, I joined a meditation class during which someone asked what kind of meditation is the best. The answer was, “The kind you do.”
The secret to unlocking the benefits of meditation is a regular daily practice. It doesn’t really matter which guru or app or school of mindfulness. What matters is that it is habitual and that you are building stability of awareness that you can use through the day.
My personal favorite is Andy Puddicombe, the creator of Headspace.13 He has a website, an app for your smartphone, and a selection of guided and unguided meditation programs to choose from. There are some great cartoons to help you understand some of the principles. And he’s not trying to sell you anything. There is no merchandise to buy. He is simply trying to help you train your mind and achieve greater calm and contentment in your life.
Combine this with exercise and you’ll be on your way to a healthy mind in a healthy body, and you will be well prepared to enjoy the things most important to you.