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THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE

God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

—REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Once you have decided what to place at the center of your life, your next step is to focus on the areas that you can effectively influence. Some of the things that are important to you may be beyond your area of influence. Music may be an important part of your life, and you may dream of singing on Broadway. But if you sing like a bullfrog with laryngitis, it’s unlikely that you will be able to will your way into a Broadway role. But that doesn’t put music appreciation beyond your area of influence. You can enjoy going to performances, and you can learn the lyrics and sing along in the privacy of your home or automobile. You can also learn to play an instrument.

You may find that the adorable person you married has a chemical-dependency problem or has a violent temper or is a poor money manager. You may offer your spouse your support and encouragement in overcoming these problems, but they actually lie outside your area of effective influence. The only person who can overcome an addiction is the addict; the only person who can control a violent temper is the individual with the violent temper; the only one who can change sloppy money-management habits for the better is the individual who has the sloppy habits.

You may face many limitations that you can do nothing about. If you have poor eyesight and poor reflexes, you won’t make it on the professional tennis circuit. If you’re six-feet-seven and weigh 270 pounds, forget about being a jockey. If your logical-mathematical intelligence is average but no higher, you probably won’t make it as a nuclear physicist, no matter how hard you study. If your bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is such that you have trouble threading a needle and tying a knot, do us all a favor and avoid a career as a brain surgeon.

PICK YOUR BATTLES

Good generals know that the secret to winning wars is to pick your battles. Try not to wage a campaign on unfavorable terrain. Avoid head-on confrontations when the enemy has superior numbers and fire power.

That doesn’t mean giving up. It means directing your efforts toward the situations you can influence and not wasting your energy on things beyond your control or things that don’t really matter.

The Battle of Midway, the turning point in the Pacific during World War II, illustrates the point. American air power at that point was no match for the Japanese, who had numerical superiority and better fighter aircraft. American airmen had repeatedly sacrificed themselves going head to head with superior Japanese forces. But American intelligence cracked the Japanese radio codes and helped U.S. naval forces locate the Japanese fleet attempting to capture the strategic island of Midway. American dive-bombers caught the Japanese carriers when their defending aircraft were off in pursuit of an earlier wave of torpedo bombers, and they were able to drop their bombs on the carrier decks. Once the Americans sank the carriers, it was unnecessary to engage the fighters in combat. With no place to land, they simply ran out of fuel and splashed down in the Pacific. The American forces found their area of effective influence and exploited it.

On the home front, too, the United States exploited its area of effective influence. American know-how was soon producing aircraft that could match the prowess of the Japanese planes, and U.S. industrial capacity was producing them at a rate neither the Japanese nor their German and Italian allies could match.

Helen Keller found her area of effective influence in a quite different arena. She couldn’t change the fact that she was unable to see or hear. So she directed her energies toward developing other methods of communication, and she achieved sterling success.

Thomas Edison learned the telegrapher’s trade while working for the Michigan Central Railroad. At first the signals were transmitted in the form of dots and dashes scratched on a piece of paper. Later the signals were transmitted in the form of audible clicks. Edison was hearing-impaired and couldn’t hear the clicks.

He didn’t waste time trying to improve his hearing, and he didn’t strain his ears trying to hear the clicks. Instead, he invented a telegraph that could convert the electric impulses into letters of the alphabet.

SITUATIONAL TRIAGE

The situations you encounter in life generally fall into three categories:

1. those you want to influence and can
2. those you’d like to influence but can’t
3. those that are not worth influencing

Choosing the areas on which to focus your energies thus becomes an exercise in situational triage. Triage is a system developed during warfare for classifying the wounded. In one group are placed the people who are likely to die regardless of the treatment they receive. In another group are the people who are likely to survive regardless of whether they receive immediate treatment. In a third are those likely to die without treatment but who might be saved through immediate treatment. Those in the latter category are the ones who get priority at the field hospitals.

You can maximize your chances of success by applying the principles of triage to your challenges. Ignore the challenges that are unlikely to affect your success and happiness either way. Look for ways to adjust to those situations that you can do nothing about. Focus your efforts on the things you can change.

Suppose you’re offered an attractive job in a compatible career. You’re told: “The job requires a familiarity with Lotus software, and you’ll need to work an occasional weekend. By the way, you’ll be based in Seattle.”

You’ve never worked with Lotus software. You’d prefer to have your Saturdays and Sundays free. And your spouse has a well-paying and secure job in Atlanta.

You think it over and perform situational triage: You’ve learned other software programs and you’re certain you can master Lotus in a short time. This is a situation well within your area of effective influence. You like to have Saturdays and Sundays off, but an occasional working weekend wouldn’t seriously disrupt your life. This is a situation not worth making an issue over.

The job, though, is in Seattle. You can’t change that circumstance, so you must adjust to the reality. You can adjust in a number of ways. You might:

1. turn down the job and look for a comparable position in the Atlanta area
2. try to persuade your spouse to pull up stakes and move with you to Seattle
3. agree to a transcontinental marriage, with you on the West Coast and your spouse in the Southeast, spending occasional weekends together
4. divorce your spouse and start a new life in Seattle

Note that while the situation itself is beyond your control, your response to it definitely lies within your area of effective action.

Consult Your Values and Principles

Your decision would have to be made after consulting your values and principles. If family togetherness and love of spouse are among your core values, and you are committed to the principle of marital stability, then the third and fourth options would be unthinkable. You could dismiss them decisively without a second thought. The second option would be viable only if your spouse were willing to make the sacrifice; so it would not lie entirely within your area of effective influence. You probably would exercise the first option. But the choice would be yours.

Many people allow the things they can’t control to govern their decision making. That’s the reactive approach. Others look for ways to get maximum leverage from the things they can control. That’s the proactive approach.

For instance, even if you decided to turn down the job in Seattle, you could still upgrade your skills so that when a comparable position arose in the Atlanta area you would be ready to claim it. You could compile a list of similar businesses in Atlanta and inquire about their needs in your field of expertise. You might even expand your job search to Birmingham and Chattanooga, assuming your spouse would be willing to live somewhere in between and accept a long commute for the sake of your career.

Don’t Surrender to Circumstances

Accepting the things you can’t change doesn’t mean that you surrender to circumstances. Proactive people look for ways to succeed in spite of the circumstances.

Reactive people are likely to go through life complaining about their circumstances. They focus on things they can do nothing about and ignore the things that are within their circle of influence.

If you live in a northern state, you can stay inside during the winter and complain about the snow and the cold. Or you can take up snow sledding and skiing.

If you live in a large city, you can complain about traffic congestion and the cost of parking, or you can carpool or use public transportation.

If you’re a high-school graduate, you can complain about the scarcity of jobs for people without college or technical training, or you can go out and get an education.

If you live in a sparsely settled area that offers limited opportunities in your area of expertise, you can lament the lack of opportunity there or you can take effective action. The action could mean moving to a more populous area that offers the economic opportunities you seek, or it could involve finding ways to use your talents profitably in a sparsely populated area.

If you’re an apartment dweller and dream of a home in the suburbs, you can complain about the high cost of real estate, or you can open a savings account and save toward a down payment.

DON’T MISTAKE THE DIFFICULT FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE

A word of caution: Don’t be too quick to assign a situation to the second category in your situational triage; that is, things you’d like to influence but can’t. Conventional wisdom holds that if you’re shorter than the average man you should forget about a professional basketball career, but Muggsy Bogues, who stands five-feet-three, not only made the team but also became a star with the National Basketball Association’s Charlotte Hornets.

It’s easy to mistake the difficult for the impossible. And sometimes, things that appear to be impossible are easy enough, if you take the proactive approach.

The situations that lie outside your area of effective influence generally fall into one of these two categories:

• Situations resulting from the behavior of others. You can’t change other people; they have to change themselves. The only situations you can change are those relating to your own behavior.
        If your business partner has a drinking problem and tends to become obnoxious and alienate clients and customers, you can’t force the partner to stop drinking or to stop seeing clients and customers. But that doesn’t mean you have to put up with the consequences of your partner’s behavior.
        You can try to arrange business encounters in nonalcoholic settings. You can establish your own personal relationships with clients and customers. And you can give your partner an ultimatum: Discontinue the objectionable behavior and get help for the problem or discontinue the partnership. Just be sure that you’re able and willing to stand behind the ultimatum. When you take these steps, you’re directing your own behavior in a proactive way, and you’re not assuming responsibility for your partner’s behavior.
• Situations resulting from circumstances over which you have no control. Things that happened in the past are beyond your control. Forget about them and focus your efforts on the future. If you introduced a product or service that bombed, you can’t go back and de-introduce it. Start thinking about what you can do in the future to make up for the failure. If you followed a hot tip on the stock market and got badly burned, you can’t breathe life back into the worthless stock. Learn from the experience and move forward.
        Accidents of birth are beyond your control. If you were born into a poor family without the means to send you to Harvard Business School or to MIT, you can’t go back and trade your parents in on a set of millionaires. If you were born with a physical disability, you can’t trade your body in on a better model.

But remember that the cards you’re dealt are less important than the way you play your hand. Circumstances may be beyond your control, but you have full control of your responses to circumstances. The history books are full of success stories about people who focused their energies on the things they could do rather than the things they couldn’t do.

Abraham Lincoln was reared in poverty in the backwoods of Kentucky and Southern Illinois. He received very little formal education. Harvard or MIT? He didn’t even get through grade school. Yet he became a successful lawyer and perhaps our most eloquent president.

Winston Churchill, while heading Britain’s admiralty during World War I, suffered severe criticism after British forces were defeated in their efforts to open up the straits at the Dardanelles and take the Turkish port of Gallipoli. But he didn’t let that circumstance of the past dampen confidence in his ability to lead the British to victory in World War II.

Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio and couldn’t stand without braces; yet he was the twentieth century’s most powerful president.

Stephen Hawking was stricken with a debilitating disease that left him practically a prisoner in his own body. Yet he became one of the century’s outstanding scientists, giving the scientific community dazzling insights into the nature of black holes.

Without a Leg to Stand On

There are some less visible but hardly less dramatic examples of people who achieved success by focusing on the possible. I came across two such examples while browsing through a single issue of Reader’s Digest.

At West Point, Frederick Franks was captain of the baseball team and planned to follow his congenial competency into a successful military career. His career took him to Southeast Asia. There, Major Franks encountered an exploding grenade in Cambodia. Flying shrapnel shredded his leg, and it had to be amputated. Franks couldn’t alter the fact that he was an amputee. That circumstance had to go into the second category of triage: something beyond his ability to influence.

But he refused to place his military career and his love for baseball in the same category. He stayed in the army. He also continued to play baseball. He would go to bat, hit the ball, and let a teammate run for him.

Then one day he saw a teammate slide into third, and he thought: “What’s the worst that could happen if I tried the same thing?”

On his next trip to the plate, he hit the ball into deep center field. This time, he decided to do his own running. He ran to first as fast as his one good leg and his artificial limb would carry him. He rounded first and jogged toward second. He saw the outfielder throw the ball toward second. Franks slid head-first into the bag and heard the umpire call “Safe!” He was on with a double!

He was just as determined in his military career. Once he led his squadron through field exercises over rough and swampy terrain. When his prosthesis became stuck in the mud, he would tell his men, “That’s what happens when you don’t have a leg to stand on.”

Frederick Franks rose to the rank of four-star general, and became living proof of the effectiveness of focusing on the possible.

“Losing a leg has taught me that a limitation is as big or small as you make it,” he said. “The key is to concentrate on what you have, not what you don’t have.”¹

A Young Golfer Gets a Hand

Larry Alford was a high-school student in a suburb of Houston. He had high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and a love of golf. He won a spot in a golf tournament for the country’s top young golfers at Rancho Mirage, California, and he tied for second place. Larry wanted to be a golf pro, and for him that calling represented a congenial role in a compatible career. He won an athletic scholarship to the University of Houston, and his dreams seemed to be on their way to fulfillment. Then he was involved in an automobile accident and lost a hand.

Many people would have placed golfing in category two of their situational triage: a circumstance beyond their control. The PGA doesn’t have a category for one-handed golfers.

But Larry Alford kept golfing within his area of effective influence. He was placed in a rehabilitation institute, and while there he practiced his putts on the floor of his hospital room. Then he went out to the lawn behind the rehab center and tried a one-handed swing. The ball went fifty yards.

“I’ m on the comeback trail,” Larry said.

Then Jay Hall, a psychologist who was dating Larry’s divorced mother, gave him a hand-literally. Hall decided to design a prosthetic hand for Larry. If the hand was to control a golf club during the swing, it had to be able to grip the club firmly. Hall decided to line the hand with inflatable air cells similar to those in pump sneakers. It also had to have a wrist that would cock when Larry went into his back swing.

Hall took his design to the owner of a Houston prosthetic company. The company was able to make the air cells all right, but the artificial wrist presented a problem. Then the owner discovered a prosthetic knee device made for a small child. The aluminum joint made a perfect wrist.

Larry got his new hand at Christmastime. He spent two months adjusting the prosthesis, then went out to practice his golf swing. His first drive went two hundred yards. A month after his high-school graduation, Larry again entered the Rancho Mirage tournament and finished two strokes under his score for the previous year. He went on to become a member of the golf team at Sam Houston State University.²

You Have Flexibility

Be sure that a situation is truly beyond your control before moving it out of your area of effective influence. And remember that while circumstances may be unchangeable, you have a great deal of flexibility in responding to circumstances. Major Franks never got his leg back and Larry Alford didn’t get his hand back. But each responded proactively to the circumstances and found ways to deal with them effectively.

As you perform your situational triage, you’ll make an interesting discovery: The more you operate within your area of effective influence, the larger the area becomes. The principle that success begets success is a valid one. Each challenge that you meet and surmount opens new challenges for you and strengthens you to meet those challenges. Successful people have learned to establish a pattern of successful action. Succeeding in small things builds confidence and creates an expectation of success that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So look for small ways to exert positive influence. Pick the challenges you know you can win.

Think of your life as a baseball season. Each time you come to the plate is an opportunity to get on base. Getting on base opens the opportunity to score a run. Each run scored takes you closer to victory in the ball game. Each victory enhances your opportunity to win the pennant. Winning the pennant opens the opportunity of getting into the World Series. And if you don’t make it this year, there’s always next year.

So find yourself a core motivation, built around a set of positive principles that are important to you. Identify your area of effective influence and let those principles motivate you and guide your actions. Identify the things you can change and go about changing them. Identify the things you can’t change and develop positive strategies for dealing with them. Ignore the trivial. As H. Jackson Brown put it in Life’s Little Instruction Book, “Don’t stop the parade to pick up a dime.”