Loserthink, page 5
You might be wondering how I can be smart enough to write books and generally navigate life’s complexities and yet be thwarted by a car wash that people of all types seem to master without any special effort. My problem is that I’m too literal to understand directions that are apparently obvious to others. If a sign says Wait Here and the cashier waves me up for service, I’m momentarily frozen by the ambiguity of the situation. I might be able to work my way out of that dilemma, but not until I first ask for clarification: “Excuse me. Do you have the authority to override this sign?”
If you think I am underestimating my ability to figure out the car wash system, consider this recent story. My gym, at which I have been a member for about thirty years, recently changed how its lockers work. This upgrade did not go well for me. The old system required members to insert their membership cards inside a slot behind the open door and leave it there in order to remove the key. As you might imagine, lots of members would forget to remove their cards after their workouts, and that was a hassle for the gym and the members. Recently, after having this bad system for decades, they realized there was no reason to require members to put their membership cards in the locker. The gym placed blank cards in all the locker slots so we didn’t need to use our membership cards at all. The new system had the same functionality as before, but no risk of people leaving their membership cards in the slots. The gym management even wrote Do Not Remove on the blank cards so you knew you didn’t need to use your membership card. Good upgrade, right?
Not for this member. I had used the old locker system approximately seven thousand times, I calculated (literally). I stood and stared at that blank card that said Do Not Remove and I was stumped. “If I don’t remove the card, how will I insert my membership card?” I wondered. So first I tried wedging my card in the same slot with the blank card already in it. It didn’t fit. I was so stumped that I left the locker room and asked an employee how the new system works. She explained that all I needed to do was remove the key because the blank card was doing the work my membership card used to do. But she was not succinct, and I lost interest about halfway through her explanation. I gave up on asking for help and returned to see if I could conquer this new system on my own with a little more effort.
In the end—and I don’t like to admit this degree of rule breaking—I realized that if no one was looking, I could remove that blank card, insert my member card in its place, and no one would be the wiser. That’s what I did. Worked like a charm, but I felt like a criminal all afternoon.
This method continued to work on other visits until I noticed the gym started cutting the blank cards in half so there was not enough showing above its slot to grab and remove it. Then, and only then, did I realize the point of the new system: I didn’t need to use my membership card at all. I was so programmed after decades of the old system that I was cognitively blind to the obvious benefits of the improved system. And based on the half-size cards they now use, apparently I was not alone. We gym members had been programmed by years of habit and we were stuck in our mental prisons.
I also have a bad history with the self-checkout stations at my local Safeway grocery store. In my defense, the instructions for those things were obviously written by Russian spies as part of their plan to rip apart the fabric of our society. Based on my history of bad experiences, I have good reason to believe public instructions in any context are a surefire way for me to invite embarrassment and public loathing for being “that guy” who holds up the line. This is clearly an area I needed to work on to reduce my own loserthink.
If you think ego is who you are, as opposed to a tool you can dial up and down as needed, you might be experiencing loserthink.
Our egos control us through fear, and often that fear is an illusion. Consider public speaking, for example. If you are like most people, you are afraid of making a fool of yourself by talking in public. But that is a false fear. If I asked you to make a list of all the people who looked like fools while doing public speaking, your list would probably be empty. Part of the reason is that most people are not great at public speaking and you wouldn’t necessarily notice if someone was extra bad at it. More importantly, five minutes after you finish listening to a public presentation, you’ve already forgotten it. Strangers are not that interested in people they don’t know. Here are the two key exercises you can use over your lifetime to keep your ego from being your jailer.
Put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations on a regular basis for practice. If you get embarrassed as planned, watch how one year later you are still alive. Maybe you even have a funny story because of it.
And . . .
Note how other people’s embarrassments mean little to you when you are an observer. That’s how much your embarrassments mean to them: nothing.
Using those two techniques, I have evolved from being embarrassed about just about everything to having almost no sense of shame whatsoever. Like most things in life, practice matters. If you practice controlling your ego, you can learn to do it effectively over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you work at it, you’ll see big gains in a year. And the gains will accumulate.
FOCUSING ON WHAT IS WRONG
Human nature forces us to focus most of our energy and attention on whatever is going wrong in our world. You wouldn’t want to change that human trait because it is a big part of what allows us to survive and improve. When I pick up my mobile phone, I no longer see a modern miracle of technology and human ingenuity. I see a device that keeps interrupting me. Sometimes I wish it had a longer battery life so there would be one less thing to interrupt its job of interrupting me. That sort of flaw-first way of looking at the world is what leads to change. We humans see problems and we automatically wonder how we can fix them. Then we try.
As I write this chapter, I find myself looking past my computer screen, on which everything is going great, as you can plainly see, to notice the tablecloth doesn’t reach the edge of the table. That imperfection bothers me even though it is one of the least important variables in my environment. But I can’t help obsessing over it, because my brain is a flaw-finder by nature.
On the plus side, my view of the city is terrific, I’m in a great mood, and I’m enjoying some delicious coffee. My experience right now is better than that of 99 percent of humanity. I should be focusing on that.
And I would. But that darned tablecloth.
Give me a minute to fix that.
Okay, I’m back.
Our semi-evolved brains can’t handle all the things that are going right in our world because that would involve consciously processing far more information than we can handle. It makes sense that we evolved this way. If your cave-dwelling ancestors were enamored with the beauty of the scenery instead of, let’s say, the herd of carnivorous dinosaurs stampeding their way, they would not have survived to create the miracle that is you.
Are you wondering why the author of this book is so dumb he thinks humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time? I’ll bet many of you noticed that flaw and it captured your attention for a moment. See what I mean? Flaws are sticky. We can’t look away.
The obvious downside of our obsession with life’s imperfections is that we can too easily make ourselves crazy. Perhaps that wasn’t such a big problem before the age of smartphones and click-bait media. In olden times, the problems that intruded on people’s thoughts were hyperlocal. Today, we see problems everywhere in the world. Many of them aren’t even real.
As a demonstration, I will pick up my smartphone right now and tell you what problems I see.
My home screen has an emergency warning of dust storms approaching. (I’m in Las Vegas at the moment.) I didn’t even know that was a risk in Las Vegas until this minute.
I just learned via text message that my driver’s license is expired, which matters because I don’t know how I’m going to get onto a flight home without identification.
My Top Stories app informs me of various political crises, a deadly disaster in another state, a huge demographic problem approaching, and a dozen other tales of woe.
That’s just a sample. I haven’t even opened my email or Twitter, and you can imagine what horrors they hold for me. Thanks to the miracle of technology, I can feel angst about every problem in the known universe, so long as those problems can be described in words or pictures. The negativity can be overwhelming. I’m sure you’ve noticed.
On top of our instinct to notice problems, the business model of the press involves making you think about everything that is going wrong in the world. It isn’t news if someone does a good job and gets a good outcome. Or at least it isn’t the exciting kind of news that gets clicks.
When you combine a human brain that is wired to notice problems with a press that is incentivized to present stories involving huge problems, you can easily start imagining that the world is falling apart in a variety of fatal ways. And that worldview might limit your ability to appreciate all the things going right.
We live in a world in which lots of things do go wrong. But if all you see are the flaws in a given situation, you might be cognitively blind to the bigger picture. You have probably seen people who are locked into a belief that everything is going wrong and the future looks bleak. In reality, rarely does everything go wrong, and humans are quite handy at avoiding the worst-case scenarios when they see them developing. Persistent negativity is a harsh mental prison. Humans need optimism and hope to fuel progress. If all you see is the negative, while those around you seem to be experiencing optimism, that’s a signal you might be in a mental prison.
If you can’t think of anything good about a situation, and yet you observe that others can, you might be experiencing loserthink.
Your best defense against the negativity served up by your own filters on the world is to intentionally seek out positive thoughts and stories, which I sometimes call managing your mental shelf space. For instance, I toggle back and forth between CNN and Fox News to get a more balanced approach to the news, and my trigger to switch is any pharmaceutical commercial I see. This system has the advantage of preventing me from hearing a laundry list of the side effects associated with each drug. If you allow yourself to listen to unnecessary lists of horrible health issues, the experience will depress your mood, create unnecessary stress, wreck your energy and optimism, and probably weaken your immune system. If that seems like an exaggeration, it is not meant to be one. Viewing one commercial isn’t much of a danger, but if you watch an hour of cable news, you will hear so many scary references to debilitating health problems in the advertisements that over time it will start to gnaw away at your mind and your body.
It is helpful to think of your mind as having limited shelf space. If you fill that space with negative thoughts, it will set your mental filters to negativity and poor health, and there will be no space left for healthy, productive, and uplifting thoughts. You can control your mental shelf space—to a degree—by manipulating your physical surroundings. In the case of pharmaceutical commercials, it means changing the channel so you are not bombarded with unhealthy thoughts that can wreck your mind and body over time.
I will pause here to note that science is solidly on my side.4 So is nearly every self-help guru. The thoughts you allow into your head are the code that programs your mind and body. If you watch sad movies, you can become sad. If you hear inspirational stories, you can feel inspired. And your mental state has a huge impact on your health. Exposure to horrible and frightening thoughts can elevate your stress, which releases cortisol. The Mayo Clinic website explains that cortisol “curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation. It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with regions of your brain that control mood, motivation and fear.”5
That’s what you do to yourself when you expose your mind to unnecessary negativity, such as pharmaceutical commercials, sad movies, sad music, and sad news. It is nearly impossible to avoid all of those sources of negativity, but you can limit their impact by filling your mental shelf space with healthier and more productive thoughts. Every minute you spend with a positive thought is a minute that you keep negative thoughts at bay.
If you are having trouble keeping negative thoughts from your mind, don’t try to “not think” about them. That just makes you think about them more. Instead, find the most positive and “sticky” thoughts you can imagine, and focus on them until your mental shelf space is filled.
If you allow your mental shelf space to fill up with negative thoughts, you are punishing yourself with an unhealthy form of loserthink.
Later in this book, I present my case for why we are entering a Golden Age. You might quibble with the details of my optimism, but note how it makes you feel, and let that feeling be your reward as you train yourself to seek good news and positive interpretations of reality. Your natural instinct is to notice problems, but you can train yourself to think more positively and to notice the good in things. All it takes is intention and practice. Try it for a week and you will notice a difference in yourself. You’ll probably feel happier and less anxious, but—equally important—you will discover a more accurate filter on reality.
CHAPTER 4
Thinking Like an Artist
FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
A defining characteristic of artists is that they tend to have strong powers of imagination. And that imagination can be helpful in keeping you out of mental prison. But you don’t need to have an artist-level imagination in order to see the world more clearly. To keep yourself out of mental jail, continually remind yourself that the most likely explanation for many—if not most—situations in life is something you didn’t imagine.
Have you ever been angered by someone’s apparent selfishness, sloth, lying, incompetence, rudeness, or criminality and later realized there was a perfectly good reason for whatever they did, and it wasn’t for any of those reasons? That situation describes about half of most people’s experience of life. We’re continually making bad assumptions about why things happened. We humans are a skeptical bunch, and we often think someone or some entity is running a scam on us. Unfortunately, we are often right. But at least half the time, based on my observation, we think a conspiracy exists when there are perfectly normal explanations for events.
I think my dog Snickers believes I’m an idiot because I don’t take her outside to play when she is quite clearly communicating to me that it’s time to do so. Snickers knows she is sending me the “Let’s go outside” signal, she knows I see it, and she knows I am physically able to go outside. So if I don’t stop what I am doing and take her out, does she think I’m stupid?
As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand. That’s an important thing to keep in mind. If your opinion is that another person’s idea is terrible, you can only be sure that at least one of you is stupid. You can’t really know which one of you it is except in rare cases in which things can be objectively measured.
I find it useful to remember I can’t always tell the difference between genius and stupidity. Neither can anyone else, at least not every time. So when a person who is otherwise smart says something that sounds dumb to me, I remind myself that, in this situation, I might be the dog.
When you have multiple possible explanations for an outcome, such as you might hear from competing sides in a murder trial, you can usually sniff out the truth so long as you have a sincere dedication to facts and reason. Or at least we all hope you can, because otherwise the justice system is nothing but a cruel and expensive placebo. But keep in mind that jury trials are a special situation in which the facts are meticulously explained and a judge helps you decide how to wrestle with those facts. Your normal life is nothing like that. In our daily lives, we’re often guessing about the facts based on hints, hunches, bias, misinformation, and the like. It is no wonder so many people are walking around in what looks to you a state of delusional thinking.
The more ordinary way people make bad assumptions is by a failure of imagination. Take, for example, my story about fearing instructions at the self-service car wash. If you had not heard my story, and you saw how dirty my car is, you might think the only explanation that makes sense is that it recently got dirty and I’ll be getting it cleaned soon.
You would correctly assume I can afford to get my car washed, and over the course of a month, for example, I would have enough time to get it done. And every semi-normal person prefers a clean car to a dirty one. So when you saw my perpetually dirty car, you might think I didn’t wash it because I am too busy, or because I want to preserve water, or because I’m not interested in how my car looks so long as it works. You might come up with a few more reasonable explanations too. The explanation you are unlikely to even imagine is the one that is true: I have an irrational fear of public instructions.
I’ll give you two more examples of how a failure of imagination is confused with rational thinking. In the interest of balance, one example comes from the political left and one from the right. Loserthink isn’t confined to one group, unfortunately.
