Step

14

Don’t adjust

Here is a key thought. In fact, it’s so important in this guide to be a fuck-up that I’m going to underline it. So you never, ever forget it. And it’s this: Don’t become a kid again. Do you remember how curious you were as a kid? How experimental? How open to new ideas? How creative? As Freud put it: “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and thefeeble mentality of the average adult.”Now he may have been a smart Alec, but he was right. Childlike behaviour can generate a massive number of successful results (in fact, you can best describe geniuses as big babies). Resist it at all costs.

For example, here is how kids learn to walk. They get a role model (by the way, another very dangerous thing for a student of failure to do – see step 31) and watch the role model, that is, an adult, getting around on just two legs. Then they copy them. And what happens the first time they try to walk? That’s right, they fall over. Now instead of being sensible and packing the whole idea in, being kids, and I guess being incredibly naïve about the ways of the world, they dust themselves down and have another go. And what happens? Right again. They fall over. And so on. The thing is, they keep adjusting and trying things out, like holding on to the furniture, until they succeed. Imagine if we treated our children in the way that most managers treat their staff. We’d be saying: “I’m sorry Tom, you’ve had three goes at this learning to walk malarkey and you’ve still not cracked it, so you are going to have to stop now and crawl around on your bottom for the rest of your life.” Which is why many adults you meet are still bottom crawlers, metaphorically speaking.

The ‘law of requisite variety’ originally comes from the world of quantum mechanics, so a fat lot of good it is to us. However, it states that the part of the system with the most flexibility ends up controlling the system. This law explains why kids always get what they want, eventually – “please Mum, can we have a dog . . . ” (now repeat 10,000 times). It also means if you can manage to lock yourself into your staid and fixed adult behaviour, and just do the same old things, over and over again, you will never get what you want. And that shouldn’t be too hard, for as Samuel Johnson said: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

So the chances of you developing more behavioural flexibility, at your age, are remote. Maybe Albert Einstein, the big baby, was right when he said: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” In fact, to develop a new way of doing something until it becomes a habit, experts claim you’d have to persist at it for 21 consecutive days or even longer. I’m suggesting you don’t, even for a moment, think about changing how you behave in order to achieve something. What’s the point?

It’s also hard to adjust if you don’t know where you’ve got to in the first place. My wife Candy was queuing at the post office a little while ago. While waiting, she began talking to the lady next to her. She had a strong feeling that they’d met before but couldn’t quite place where. Like lots of us in that situation, she was too embarrassed to ask directly the woman’s name and where they knew each other from. Eventually, just to make conversation, Candy said: “So, are you still living in the same place?” To which her companion replied: “Yes, I’m still living next door to you.”

“I’m suggesting you don’t, even for a moment, think about changing how you behave in order to achieve something.”

You don’t want to be any more aware of what’s going on around you than that. Don’t turn up your senses to number 11 and notice the things others miss. Successful people are aware of the signals, both conscious and unconscious, that are being sent out by ­others. They are keen to notice if what they are doing is working. On the other hand, failures are like fish, or as Einstein, or was it Mark Twain, said: “Fish will be the last to discover water.”