Loserthink, page 10
If your intention is to win at all costs, this sort of unethical branding of the other side can work wonders. If you do it right, you can convince your team to hate those outsiders with a passion that borders on violence. Don’t do that, please.
If you find yourself believing that several million people in your own country share a common set of despicable traits, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you might be engaging in loserthink that will make you less happy and less effective.
If you are genuinely trying to understand the world, please avoid judging entire groups by their worst members. It’s bad enough that people on your own team encourage you, by example, to think that way. But if you copy that kind of loserthink, I don’t recommend feeling proud of it.
The business model of the free press depends on reinforcing the ideas that each side of the political divide in the United States is as bad as the worst 5 percent. That creates endless news stories in which minor events get reframed as the entire group’s bad behavior. Keep that in mind when reading stories about how one group or the other is “always doing X.”
Don’t believe that every member of a group is as bad as its worst 5 percent. If you do, you’re probably among the worst 5 percent of whatever groups you are in.
PROVING A NEGATIVE
If any part of your argument depends on asking critics to “prove it isn’t true,” you are thinking like a cult member. Generally speaking, it isn’t possible to prove things don’t exist. The best you can do is show that you can’t detect the existence of something. But that is very different from proving something can’t be done or doesn’t exist. Here’s an example of my California representative, Eric Swalwell, challenging the public to prove a negative, which of course is impossible.
Can I prove my decisions are not being directed by an advanced species of space aliens who are using a brain-gun to influence me without my knowledge? No, I can’t prove it isn’t happening. But that doesn’t mean it is happening.
I mentioned the Q conspiracy theory earlier. Believers in Q swarmed my Twitter feed after I said Q wasn’t real and challenged me to “prove Q isn’t really a Deep State insider like he claims.” I don’t think it is an accident that members of the Q cult do not understand that one cannot prove a negative. I can, and did, point them to links showing Q does not accurately predict the future. At that point, the Q followers retreated to some nonsense about Q teaching people to research for themselves, as some sort of excuse for why the predictions are more wrong than right. It seems to me that Q followers, or at least most of them, have not studied any of the disciplines that teach one how to think. And I say that with love, as I think the followers of Q have good intentions. But if they have never been exposed to the disciplines that teach one how to think effectively, they might be at a disadvantage in deducing the truth of Q.
People who are trained in decision-making know it is not rational to ask someone to prove a negative. So if you find yourself demanding that others do so, you are practicing loserthink.
Rarely is it possible to prove something isn’t true. But sometimes we can prove things are true.
CHAPTER 9
Thinking Like an Entrepreneur
COUCH LOCK
I’m a trained hypnotist, and that experience has completely changed how I see the world. As a hypnotist, you rewire people’s minds in real time, as if they are what I call “moist robots.” If you haven’t personally witnessed a mind being rewired, it would be hard for you to release any romantic notions you might have about humans as independent souls with free will. For our purposes here, I won’t get into the philosophy of it all; I will simply suggest that understanding how hypnotists think about the programmability of human brains can be useful in a variety of settings. You don’t need to “believe hypnosis is real” in order to take advantage of the thinking style that emerges from that practice. Just try the method I describe below and see for yourself if it gives you a good result.
Lazy people and stoners have a term that describes how it feels when they can’t motivate themselves to get off the couch. It’s called couch lock. Your body is presumably able to get off the couch, and perhaps you want to get up, but you lack the specific motivation. It feels as if you are trapped in your own lazy body.
You don’t have to smoke marijuana to experience couch lock. We’ve all experienced times when we wanted to get up and do something useful but we couldn’t talk ourselves into it. It can happen when you are tired, unmotivated, shy, anxious, or even depressed. Your body sits there like a bag of potatoes while your helpless brain thinks that getting up and doing something would be a good idea. For some mysterious reason, your brain can’t give the order to your body to make it get off the couch. You might know you need to make a phone call or take a class to further your life ambitions, but for some reason you don’t do it. Maybe you think you know why, and maybe you don’t. But the net result is that your brain can’t force your body to do the simple things you know you need to do to improve your situation. For all practical purposes, you’re locked in a mental prison of your own making.
Even if you don’t have a couch-related problem, you might feel paralyzed in major areas of your life. Are you thinking about changing jobs, applying to graduate school, moving someplace better, learning a new skill, or upgrading your love life? Your first step is figuring out how to cure your own impulse for inaction.
The secret to thwarting couch lock of any sort is to stop imagining everything you need to do, and start imagining the smallest step that you can do without much real effort. If you feel you can’t talk yourself into standing up and doing something that needs to get done, talk yourself into moving your pinky finger. Then move it.
As you move your pinky, you will immediately regain the sense of agency over your body that had been temporarily missing. Moving your pinky finger is easy no matter how stoned, tired, depressed, or unmotivated you are. Do what you can do, not what you can’t. Then build on the momentum.
What you will quickly learn is that moving your pinky finger makes it easy to wiggle the other fingers. Then you can easily move your hand, your arm, and the rest of your body. You’ll be off the couch in about ten seconds.
A similar approach works for those big things you need to do in life that you can’t talk yourself into doing. Figure out the smallest step you can take and then do it. Then take the next microstep. Stop thinking about the whole project you have in mind, as that will overwhelm you and stun you into couch lock. Just do what you can easily do, and watch how quickly that action makes it easier to do the next action.
Sometimes I experience “phone lock.” That happens when I know I need to call someone but I can’t force myself to pick up the phone and do it. I give myself one excuse after another about why it’s okay not to act right now. The solution is to do what you can do, which might include writing a to-do list with that item at the top. Or maybe you need to find the phone number first, so do that part and allow yourself the permission to stop there. When your brain is experiencing any kind of couch-lock situation, figure out the first microstep in your desired pathway that is simple enough that you are willing to do it. Even if that microstep is nothing more than wiggling a pinky finger.
In 1988, I decided to pivot from my stalled corporate career to become a cartoonist. But how does one become a cartoonist? Where do you start? What do you do first? I had no idea. The enormity of the challenge was a huge mental obstacle. So I did the smallest task I could talk myself into doing. I drove to the local art supply store and bought some high-quality pens and paper for drawing. That was all I did that day to begin working on my long-term career objective.
Later that week, I sat down with my pens and paper and started doodling, mostly to test the quality of the materials and to see how much I liked them. And that was all I did that day.
I decided to set my alarm clock half an hour earlier than normal from that day on so I would have time to draw some comics, for practice, and drink coffee before work. That became my morning ritual. Each step was tiny, but they added up. By 1989, I had assembled enough microsteps to get exactly where I wanted to be. That year, Dilbert started running in newspapers across the country.
Looking back, I see the amount of effort I put into becoming a cartoonist was enormous. But on any particular day, the effort was quite manageable. And that’s how life works in lots of realms. We take continuous microsteps that sum up to big things over time.
I just freed you from couch lock. But you won’t know it until the first time you remember this chapter and find yourself wiggling your pinky to start something you need to do.
Loserthink involves imagining the entire task ahead and letting it stun you into inaction. The opposite of loserthink is breaking down a big task into the tiniest step you are willing to do right now. Then build from there, one tiny task at a time.
Learn to think in microsteps. If you are experiencing couch lock, try wiggling one finger. Then build from there.
Hypnotists and entrepreneurs have overlapping thinking styles when it comes to motivating themselves to take action. When entrepreneurs don’t know how to get from A to B, they take the smallest step in that direction that is available to them and then see if they can figure out the next one from that new starting point. Hypnotists who see humans as programmable entities understand that they have to start with small suggestions, such as “Your eyelids feel heavier,” in order to work up to larger actions, such as “Your arm is so light it will start to float.” When the hypnotist succeeds at the smaller suggestions, it primes the subject to be receptive to larger suggestions, such as lifestyle changes or getting past a phobia. When you wiggle your pinky to escape couch lock, you are acting like both the hypnotist and the subject, and you quickly realize the small suggestions to yourself prime you to take bigger actions, and it happens almost immediately.
STAYING IN YOUR LANE
At the time of this writing, the two most influential politicians in the United States are a real estate developer who became president and a bartender who got elected to Congress. For those of you reading this book a few decades from now, I’m talking about President Trump and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The most striking thing they have in common is that they did not “stay in their lanes,” and it worked out great for them.
Likewise, you would not be reading this book, and the Dilbert comic strip would not exist, if I had “stayed in my lane,” which at the time meant working in a cubicle.
My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization. The world as we know it was engineered, designed, and built by people who left their lane and tried something outside their temporary skill stack. They figured it out as they went.
I’ll agree that one size doesn’t fit all, and some people probably should stick to what they do best. But I wouldn’t want society to decide that staying in one lane is some sort of obvious wisdom. In my experience, the smartest plan for life is to leave your lane as often as you can (without inviting major risk) to pick up skills that will complement your talent stack. The more skills you have, the more valuable you will be, although you won’t necessarily know in advance where it will take you.
If you happen to be one of the best in the world at some specific skill, such as sports, music, or science—and you like what you do—it might make perfect sense to “stay in your lane” and milk that situation for all it is worth. But most of us are not the best in the world, or anywhere near it, at any particular skill. If that describes you, I recommend leaving your lane often—even at the risk of embarrassment—to pick up new skills and new ways to see the world. Here’s a list of skills I have sampled, as opposed to mastered, over my lifetime:
Economics
Business
Management
Sales
Psychology
Hypnosis
Programming
Commercial lending
Project management
Public speaking
Design
Art
Writing
Television production
Negotiating
Budgeting and finance
Persuasion
Entrepreneurship
Marketing
Publishing
Social media
Video editing
Photoshop
Engineering
Drumming
Cartooning
Political punditry
Livestreaming
The best way to widen your lane is to leave it often, so you can learn something new. I prefer picking projects in which I will come out ahead no matter what kind of luck I have. If I learn some useful new skills, and I make some valuable contacts, and I learn to see the world through the filter of the new skill, I know I have become more valuable and my lane has widened.
Leaving your lane and learning a new skill can be deeply rewarding. The experience of struggling to learn a new skill and then mastering it over time can be a big boost to your confidence. And it is the best way to remind yourself you can prevail in hard situations. Two of my favorite sentences are . . .
I don’t know how to do that.
But I can figure it out.
Learning to take sensible chances outside your lane is one of the best life skills you will ever acquire. And it is available to all of us.
Sticking with what you know ensures you stay where you are. Take some chances. Leave your lane and build some skills.
PERSONAL CONTROL
One of the fringe benefits of being mildly famous is that I meet a lot of successful entrepreneurs. I also know lots of people who have failed so often it seems intentional. If I had to pick one defining characteristic that separates the successful from the unsuccessful, it would be luck.
But if I had to pick two defining characteristics, the other one would be a sense of control. Successful people, and people who will someday be successful, seem to believe they can steer their fate by their actions. Whether they are right about that or not, it’s a winning mindset. People who think they control their situations will put more effort into doing so.
In 2013, my book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big came out. By 2014, I was getting messages from readers telling me how they had used the tips in the book to radically improve their careers, health, and personal lives. The book teaches readers how to create easy systems that improve their odds of success. Evidently, it had a big impact on people who tried it out. Perhaps the most important thing the book does is move people’s minds from wondering how to succeed in a world that seems mostly driven by luck, to habit-driven systems in which you are evolving from a situation with low odds of finding luck to situations with better odds. When you spend time every day doing something productive, whether that involves learning something useful or exercising, for example, you gain a sense of control over your reality. And that sense of control can be both motivating and satisfying, which helps you do more of what works.
At the other extreme, people who are consistently unsuccessful often believe they are victims of life, although the details of that victimhood can differ. Think of the people you know who are consistently late for everything. Do they blame themselves? Sometimes, yes. But usually they tell you traffic was bad or something came up that was out of their control.
Now talk to the people who are always five minutes early no matter what. That group believes timeliness is about 90 percent under their control. And that kind of belief is a strong predictor of success.
You can figure out which group you are in by asking yourself what is keeping you from achieving your objectives in life. Is the first answer that comes to mind something about your own efforts? Or did you immediately think about an obstacle that life has put in your way? If you take full responsibility for your outcomes, even while knowing much of it depends on luck, that’s how rich people think. If you blame something beyond your direct control, you’re probably engaged in loserthink, and your outcomes will reflect it.
Now let me talk directly to the people who would like to be successful in life but are “thinking like poor people.” And by that I mean you believe you are not the primary authors of your own life experience. The place to start is by changing that mindset. If you don’t fix that first, don’t expect anything else to work out for you. I think nearly every successful person would agree with me on this point: get your mind right first. Everything else depends on that.
The simple way to learn how to think like a rich person is to start reading books on the topic. And your first microstep on that path is to buy one or more of those books and have them in your home or on your digital device for when you are ready to consume them. Don’t think about reading a book (which might seem hard). Think about buying a book, which can be as simple as one-click online ordering. Once you have the book, think in terms of reading one page or one chapter at a time. Put it in your bathroom if that helps. Put it on your phone if it is an ebook, and make it a habit to read a chapter anytime you are waiting in line. Take microsteps. And if you like what you got out of the first book, repeat. There are plenty of super-helpful books on how to get your mind right for success.
I recommend one of my own books as a starter: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. If I may ignore modesty here in the interest of being useful, people who read that book consistently report that it improved their lives by improving their mental game. But you don’t need to trust the author of the book. Just read the customer reviews and ignore the ones from people who seem to be mad at me for unrelated stuff. The main theme of the book is about how to think of your path to success as a series of systems instead of goals.
