Loserthink, page 17
As I write this chapter, I am on a working vacation at a site 8,300 feet above sea level. I am told by one of the staff at the hotel that about half of the people who come here will experience flu-like symptoms from the altitude, for a day or two. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what makes some people experience those symptoms and some people not? Do we differ in DNA, or in lifestyle, or weight? If I knew I was in the half of the population likely to have bad symptoms (which I did), I could have spent a day in the town halfway down the mountain to acclimate before going higher, which I learned is a common practice here.
My examples might be unimpressive, but the larger point is that with enough data on people’s health and actions, we can unlock enormous healthcare value. The potential for saving money by having better patient data is enormous.
Medical Breakthroughs
Medical science has moved forward for centuries, but in recent years the pace of that change is accelerating. We’re seeing breakthroughs in gene therapy, stem cell therapy, cancer treatments of all kinds, and vaccine delivery systems, to name a few. Some of our most horrible and expensive medical problems will soon have routine fixes.
If your body were an automobile, we are leaving behind a time in which all you could do for upkeep was to add gas and rotate the tires, and we are entering an age in which we can rebuild every part from scratch. The changes we already know are coming are not incremental in nature. They are game-changers.
The trends I’ve mentioned above have the collective effect of lowering future healthcare costs dramatically. New healthcare solutions for things we previously couldn’t treat will add to healthcare costs, but that trade-off is acceptable for solving previously unsolvable problems.
RACE RELATIONS
If you make the mistake of paying attention to the news, you might think race relations in the United States have deteriorated to an alarming degree. I believe that is mostly an illusion caused by the business model of the press. Bad news sells, and bad news about the Trump administration sells better than anything, according to CNN boss Jeff Zucker. The fire hose of biased news coverage blinds us to any positivity we might otherwise notice.
My favorite example of that was when the press hammered President Trump for what they claimed was his habit of criticizing African-American women. This, they said, was clear evidence of his alleged racism and disrespect for women. The president did criticize several high-profile African-American women within a few weeks, and that was enough to create a pattern in the mind of the president’s critics. What they left out of their analysis was that President Trump insults 100 percent of his critics, no matter what demographic group they are in. The very next week he was tweet-slamming several white males, and anyone else who needed it.
My interpretation of this situation was that the reason so many black women were being targeted by the president was because those women were extraordinarily successful in their careers—so much so that the president of the United States had to address their criticisms. The women Trump criticized were playing the blood sport of politics at the very highest level. One of the greatest success stories in race equality you will ever see was widely reported as the opposite. If the president of the United States is attacking you for your criticisms, you’re doing a lot right in your career.
The week I was writing this chapter, President Trump tweeted that his fired secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon, was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.” Old, rich white guys are not safe from the president’s counterattacks. The proper context here is that Trump attacks anyone who attacks him first.
Personally, I found it inspiring (and I mean this literally) that so many African-American women had achieved the same target value as Rex Tillerson. A lot of black women in America are experiencing sensationally successful careers, and that is a deeply positive sign.
I live in California, and I won’t pretend my experience is typical of the rest of the country. But from my perspective, race relations on a person-to-person level are better than ever. There is more interracial marriage, historically high employment rates for all minority groups, and a generally improved comfort with each other as friends, mates, and neighbors.
If it seems to you there are more racist groups in the country lately, keep in mind that the people who track those things, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, are paid to find it. If you pay me to track the number of racist groups in the country, I’m not going to skip the three guys in South Dakota with a website they made all by themselves. If you pay someone to find ghosts and eradicate them from your home, the service you hire will probably tell you they found those ghosts. Don’t trust data from people who have a financial incentive to find lots of whatever it is you are tracking. And never, ever believe the bad news you hear in the press is as bad as they say when there is a political dimension to the story, because in those cases the press is generally just taking sides.
If you see an increase in racism in your daily experience, that is a big red flag and you should not ignore it. But if the only place you see an uptick in racism is on the news or as reported by groups paid to find a lot of it, maintain some skepticism. In my opinion, based on living for several decades, racism in America has declined every year of my life. And next year looks good too.
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IN SUMMARY . . .
In this chapter, I’ve tried to frame several global challenges as being not as scary as you originally thought. You can disagree with my optimistic opinion in a number of places, and I’m sure you will, but that would still leave enough of my examples to make you wonder why you were worrying as much as you were.
The business model of the press guarantees you will see more negativity than the facts support. Things are often better than they seem, especially in the long run.
As I mentioned earlier, fear is a great motivator, and when humans fear something, they get to work trying to solve the problem. In my optimistic opinion, our current biggest problems are likely to go the same way as our past biggest problems—meaning we’ll figure out how to deal with them.
CHAPTER 13
How to Break Out of Your Mental Prison
It would be unkind of me to show you the walls of your mental prison without also showing you how to break out. I’m about to share with you the tools and techniques for doing just that. Once you are free of your mental prison, almost every part of your life will get easier, and you will understand the world at a level most people never get to appreciate. You will also be a more effective thinker and more able to contribute to the coming Golden Age.
MY MENTAL PRISON BREAKS
It might help you to know about my own mental prison breaks, so you can get a better feel for what is possible when you free your mind. My mother raised me to believe I “could do anything” so long as I set my mind to it. That was hyperbole, of course, because I can’t play the center position for an NBA team. But the mindset of you can do anything was a tremendous advantage for me in how I’ve approached life. I believe no mental prison could hold me, and I’ve lived my life that way.
I became one of the top cartoonists on the planet without any formal training.
I became one of the highest-paid and most sought-after professional speakers in the country by starting out incompetent and figuring out how to improve.
I became a number-one bestselling author with my first book, The Dilbert Principle. This book will be my eleventh, not counting dozens of Dilbert books. I have never taken a writing class, unless you count a two-day workshop on business writing.
A few years into my cartooning career, I acquired an incurable muscle spasm with my drawing hand called focal dystonia. The top expert in the country explained to me that it was incurable. It is my understanding that I’m the first known person to find a cure for it. I did that through trial and error plus finding some work-arounds to prevent reinjuring my hand.
As I mentioned earlier in the book, I was born with an “incurable” condition called paruresis, better known as shy bladder. Paruresis is almost impossible to beat, but I’m largely free from it now, having found a way out that works for me.
In 2004, I lost my ability to speak for over three years, thanks to an incurable problem called spasmodic dysphonia. My vocal cords would spasm when I tried to talk. After several years of hunting for a solution, I became one of a few dozen people on the planet to find a cure through what was a new surgical method.
In 2015, I made an unexpected pivot to political commentary, becoming one of the most followed and quoted opinion-makers in the country.
Those are the stories I can tell you. The stuff I can’t talk about, for a variety of different reasons, is far more mind-boggling.
You can see from my odd life arc that I don’t recognize artificial limits on what I can do or what I can accomplish. I have to wonder what it would have been like if I had been raised to believe there were limits on what I could do. Would I have walked through so many imaginary prison walls in my life, or would I have believed in the existence of those walls and stayed in my mental prison? I don’t know. But I do know I have seen plenty of older adults break out of their mental prisons and do great things. So apparently it doesn’t matter at what age you plot your escape. You don’t need to be raised to ignore your prison walls, as I was. You can start today. And if you are reading this sentence, you are already halfway free.
Let’s finish the job.
CULTURAL GRAVITY
Every culture has its own feelings about success. I call that cultural gravity. If your culture celebrates success, you have low cultural gravity, and you can rise according to your talents and efforts. But if your culture disapproves of success, you’ll feel it dragging you back to earth every time you try to succeed.
When I was in school, I got the highest grades in my class among the boys. Don’t be too impressed. It was a small town with only forty people in my entire graduating class, and two of my female classmates had better grades than I did for most of my school life. As you might imagine, the other boys in the class sometimes teased me about being a nerd. That teasing, especially at a young age, created a cultural gravity. The message was clear: if I wanted to be cool, I couldn’t also be a good student.
But I was largely immune to the teasing. For every person who tried to put a bad spin on my good grades, ten people were clearly rooting for me to succeed. My small town had low cultural gravity. It was a mostly Republican town, and if you worked hard and followed the rules, you could feel the culture supporting you. The wind was at my back from day one. In the interest of completeness, I have to say it helped a lot to be male. The girls in my school were getting no such support in those backward days. They experienced strong cultural gravity and an unfair expectation that marriage was their career path. The acceptable alternatives were becoming a teacher or a nurse.
We observe what seems to be consistent cultural support for success among the Asian-American communities. In that culture, getting good grades is a cause for celebration and respect. In other words, they have low cultural gravity.
The African-American culture in urban areas apparently has a different situation. That’s what I hear from members of that community. Here I do not rely on my own observations. I listen to the people who experienced their own cultural gravity and report on it. I’m told that a young black student in an inner-city area will have a lot of pressure to underperform and to break the rules in order to fit in. I don’t have any visibility on why that is the case, but I accept that it is.
As I write this chapter, Kanye West (you might call him Ye) is experiencing some of the most intense cultural gravity you will ever see. He is stepping outside his comfort zone, his brand, and even his experience level to try to improve the country. Anyone with a bit of knowledge about Ye’s history knows he has succeeded at the highest levels in both music and fashion, and in both cases he waded into the fields without already being an expert. Evidently, Ye doesn’t do loserthink. He is also unusually free of cultural gravity. And for that reason alone, one could argue he is one of the most important public figures on the planet. He isn’t just succeeding across multiple fields—he’s destroying loserthink and modeling how to escape cultural gravity. Forget about his success in music, his success in fashion, and whatever success he obtains in improving society or politics; Ye is showing the world how to think more productively. That’s Gandhi-level stuff, but it might be invisible to those who have feelings about him personally or musically.
If you allow the opinions of unsuccessful people in your culture to hold you back, you’re engaged in loserthink. If you can learn to think of yourself as free from the cultural gravity of your peers, it will pay off in the long run.
KNOWING WHERE TO START
If you don’t know the right way to do something, try doing it wrong, so long as it is not dangerous to do so. Doing things wrong is an excellent way to figure out how to do things right. I became one of the most successful cartoonists in the world by doing just about everything wrong until I figured out how to do it right. I became one of the highest-paid speakers at major events by being terrible at it until I understood what worked and what didn’t.
When you do something the wrong way, the people who know how to do things the right way will generally jump in to tell you what you are doing wrong. Take advantage of all that free advice.
If you don’t know how to do something the right way, and Googling doesn’t help, the only alternative to doing things the wrong way is to do nothing at all. That’s loserthink. Waiting until you know how to do something exactly right is a poor strategy. You could be waiting forever. Better to jump in, make your mistakes, and see what kind of free assistance that attracts.
In 2016, I started doing livestreaming programs every day on the Periscope app, talking mostly about persuasion and politics. My content had sketchy audio quality, bad lighting, unfocused topics, and generally the lowest production values you have ever seen. My small audience made continuous suggestions on how to improve all dimensions of my video streams, and I experimented with my own ideas as well. Today, my branded “Coffee with Scott Adams” Periscopes are followed by most of the major news media and have led to book deals and nonstop media requests for interviews. When I’m in public these days, I’m more often recognized for my political commentary than for being the Dilbert cartoonist. And I got to this place by being bad at nearly everything until I attracted enough free advice to make progress.
Loserthink involves waiting until you know how to do something right before you do anything at all. That strategy makes sense only when it is physically or financially dangerous to make a mistake. For most ambitions in life, we can jump in, make some mistakes, and figure it out from there. If you get embarrassed in the process, good for you! It means you just learned that embarrassment doesn’t kill you. And that, my friends, is like a superpower.
If you can’t figure out how to do a task the right way, do it the wrong way and watch how quickly you get free advice.
UNFOCUSED PRIORITIES
One way you can lock yourself in a mental prison is to get your priorities wrong. But getting your priorities right is not as easy as it sounds.
For example, years ago I took the GMAT—the test you take to qualify for U.S. graduate schools in business. The test asked students to read a brief story about a business situation and identify the “most important” variables. I completed several practice tests before taking the real GMAT, and while I got the answers on my practice tests right every time, I noticed that the people who designed the answer sheet did not. In other words, their opinions of what was “most important” differed from mine. I’m still fairly confident my answers were right and the official answers were wrong. In later years, they removed those question types, probably because people like me complained. My point is that it is often deceptively difficult to know what is “most important” in any complicated situation, and even harder to get two people to agree.
Sometimes priorities are clear, such as when there is a risk of physical harm or some immediate emergency. But in our everyday lives, we often can’t tell what is most important at any given moment. It’s a judgment call, and as I am sure you have noticed, people have bad judgment.
In my book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I talked about making yourself your top priority, because you can’t do much for others if you don’t first learn how to take care of yourself. That means making your health and your finances your top priorities until those things are in good shape. Then you are in a position to expand your generosity outward, in roughly this order of priority.
PRIORITIES RANKED
You
Family
Friends
Employer
Town/city
Country
World
Obviously there are exceptions to this ranking, but you will recognize them when you see them. For example, if you can solve a major problem for the world, please do. We’ll all thank you for it, and even your family and friends will appreciate your sacrifice. But that’s a rare situation. The more typical situation might be, for example, wondering whether you should work late versus going to the gym. The correct answer is usually the gym. I’ll trust you to know when to make an obvious exception.
I recommend being selfish when it comes to your health, fitness, diet, and education. Your job is a high priority too, and you will need to sometimes put your employer first, as that is why they pay you. But if your boss consistently makes you choose work over health, look for a new job.
