Book Review-The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get Here from There

It was working my way back through Brené Brown’s work that led me here ( See Rising Strong (Part 1 & Part 2), Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection). In The Gifts of Imperfection, she referenced Snyder’s work in The Psychology of Hope to explain how hope is not an emotion, but is instead a thought process. This was a different perspective and ultimately led me to wanting to know more. I’m glad that I dug in deeper.

Hope is woven as a binding thread through numerous thoughts. The thread obviously holds a prominent place in happiness. (See Stumbling on Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis, and Hardwiring Happiness for more on happiness.) However, hope is more than happiness. Hope is a critical component of living. It shows up as the placebo effect in medicine. (See The Heart and Soul of Change for the relationship between the placebo effect and hope.) In my post Faith, Hope, and Love I mentioned that, when I’ve experienced the greatest losses of hope, my body reacts by shutting down my digestive system.

It impacts people’s belief in their ability to change, as Dweck explains in her book Mindset. Hope is all around us, but who takes the time to consider it in detail? As it turns out, a professor at the University of Kansas does.

Two Parts

In his study, Snyder discovered that hope is made up of two primary components. There’s willpower and “waypower”. Willpower is the driving force. It’s the internal fuel that moves people forward. (I read and reviewed a whole book on the topic called, aptly, Willpower.) Waypower is “a mental capacity we can call on to find one or more effective ways to reach our goals.” Said differently, it’s our ability to create a path between our current situation and where we want to be.

Control and Self-Direction

Control has gotten a bad reputation. Everyone wants to control – and no one wants to be controlled. As we learned from Compelled to Control, some control is appropriate. So when I say that hopeful people tend to believe they have more control of their world, I can say that this is a healthy belief in control – or perhaps more appropriately influence – over their world. It’s not that they don’t understand that their circumstances are real. Hopeful people are realistic in understanding where they are. They just happen to believe that they’re not stuck where they are now.

In truth, high-hope people tend to know they’re not stuck where they are. High-hope people know that they have improved (or at least changed) things in the past, so it’s not unreasonable that they’ll be able to change their world again.

Fundamentally, hopeful people have a growth mindset. (See Mindset for more on growth mindset.) They know that they’re able to grow personally and to use their influence to change the world around them.

Rose-Colored Glasses

Incognito discussed at length how we don’t really experience reality perfectly well. We’ve got literal blind spots in our vision (where the optic nerve connects) and a host of other biases that our brains quietly ignore as they build up the belief systems that we live by. So we all have biases. Sometimes we win the cortical lottery and get rose-colored glasses. (The Happiness Hypothesis is where the idea of the cortical lottery comes from.) The idea is that we have a predisposition – a bias – towards seeing the world positively.

As it turns out, this is one of the characteristics of high-hope people. They tend to see the world with rose-colored glasses. They accept and acknowledge the distortion of things in a positive direction because they want to live with the expectation that the world is such a place.

Stockdale Paradox

It was Jim Collins in Good to Great that introduced me to the idea of the Stockdale Paradox. That is, the need to have unwavering faith in what you’re doing, and simultaneous acceptance of what others are saying, so that you can adapt and modify what you’re doing. In essence, a self-confidence about the approach you’re taking, and a vulnerability about the fact that you may be wrong.

In the language of The Psychology of Hope, this is the willpower to make your dreams happen and the waypower to adapt to the problems that get in your way. As an entrepreneur, I know that both are necessary – and that they’re related in a confusing way. If there’s not much willpower in what I’m doing (some would say purpose or motivation) then I’ll expend relatively little energy finding my way around the barriers that get in my way. I need both to hold on when the going gets rough and to find a way around the problems.

Multiplicity

There are books that advocate having a single goal. Being focused on one thing and one thing only. (The most notable is The ONE Thing.) However, Snyder points out that most high-hope people have multiple goals. They appear to have multiple goals to help them cope with the inevitable failure to reach every goal that they set. Their flexibility in their goals helps them maintain their positive outlook and their desire to move forward. To Snyder, it appears flexibility in goals is a form of waypower. If one goal becomes unobtainable for some reason, it’s easy to pour more effort into other goals.

I voiced my concerns with The ONE Thing book when I reviewed it. One of those concerns was that it ultimately advocated for one thing in each area of your life. The beauty of this approach is that it gave you the ability to have multiple areas of focus. The danger is that the categories were drawn so widely that you could have one goal for your marriage and one for your business; if your marriage wasn’t going well you could pour yourself into your business goal. Launch! made the important observation that in life we’re always juggling. Some of the balls that we’re juggling are rubber (or super) balls. If we drop them they’ll bounce back. Other balls, like our relationships and health, are glass balls. Once we’ve dropped them, they’re difficult if not impossible to get back.

Gaming the System

My entire life, I’ve somehow managed to figure out how to “game the system”. That is, I’d figure out what the rules, limits, guidelines, and procedures would allow me to do without getting in trouble – or to get a reward. In high school, there was a little more than a year of an open attendance policy. I took advantage of it and didn’t go to many of my classes. I studied on my own. Sometimes I’d be in the school library. Other times, due to the open campus policy which meant I could leave school grounds, I’d do my work at home. As long as my grades were good, no one really bothered me that much. The principal and I spoke reasonably often – I remember her telling me which days counted for state funding, and she’d ask that I attend all of my classes, which I did. The net effect? One semester, I missed 156 half-days of school.

For technical certifications, I learned how the questions were written. I learned what was allowed and what wasn’t allowed. This allowed me to evaluate the questions and the answers to see which ones fit inside the rules and this information allowed me to pass exams that I barely studied for.

The point isn’t so much the results that I was able to obtain from gaming the system. The point is that I was having fun with it. I was having fun with figuring out what I could get away with and still stay inside the lines.

One of my favorite movies is Real Genius. In it, a super genius named Lazlo Hollyfeld submits an untold number of sweepstakes entries. When asked if he feels like that’s cheating, Lazlo responds that “they made the rules.” After all, he figured out he has certain material needs. The character had a certain levity to adhering to the rules.

This is what hopeful people do. They bring levity to life. They’ll enjoy life as a game. It’s fun to see what they can do and accomplish.

Philanthropy and the Psychological Roots

Philanthropy is a good thing: taking what you have and reaching a hand out to others to help them be successful and accomplish things. However, where is the root of this behavior? If you believe the social research, this is something that increases our likelihood of survival as a species. (See Spiritual Evolution for research on Baboons and higher social networks predicting higher survival.) However, from a more personal psychological perspective, higher-hope people are more philanthropic.

One might wonder why this is the case, and I speculate that this because the higher-hope people believe in the random kindness of strangers. Perhaps they were a recipient of it, or perhaps it’s just the way they chose to see the world. In my estimation, high-hope people are philanthropic people because they have to be. They have to live out their belief that the universe and other people are ultimately good and are out there to help people, not to punish or hold them back.

Hope for a Lifetime

We’ve all met people whose fire of hope has all but been extinguished. They’ve developed a kind of learned helplessness that perpetually holds back their ability to be hopeful. (See Mindset and The Paradox of Choice
for more on learned helplessness.) At the same time, we find people living in their 80s and 90s who are spry and full of hope. It seems that hope, once established, seems to be relatively stable over a lifetime. It seems that, despite the normal fluctuations of good and bad fortunes, hope itself seems to remain relatively stable across time.

It turns out that hope is like a tetherball. It can move around some sort of invisible post. It seems, according to Snyder’s research, that the concrete that this is poured into is set around 20. That is that past the age of about 20, folks’ general belief about the hopefulness of life doesn’t change much. Admittedly, I’d love to see research on how people are able to infuse hope into those who are older than 20.

The Nitty Gritty of Hope

How Children Succeed spoke of grit. Others use the word “persistence” or “resilience” to speak about the ability of children to develop a capacity to continue to work for goals in the presence of barriers. This grit is the waypower to develop hope later in life.

Snyder recommends that toddlers who have barriers between them and what they want should be joined in their problem rather than having it solved for them. He’s suggesting what “G” is for Growing calls “down on the floor” moms and dads. They’re the parents who aren’t afraid to lower themselves to the level of their children.

These are the same parents who are willing to nudge and hint the direction that will allow the child to solve their own problem – rather than solving it for them.

Hope Is the Rope from the Past to the Future

It’s no secret to me or those who know me that I’m a future-oriented person. (See The Time Paradox for more about perspectives on time.) I replaced large mulch beds on my property with rock because the rock won’t need replaced or refreshed as often. The lap siding on the house is made of concrete board because it won’t need replaced, or even painted, for a long, long time. I’m always preparing for the future.

This propensity for long-term doesn’t limit itself just to the maintenance of our home. Instead, it’s a general philosophy. How can I make investments today that will yield payoffs in the future which will get me to my goals? There are the obvious examples of saving for retirement; but more than that, how do I make investments in myself, in other people, and in life that will – or at least may – yield the results I’m looking for?

For my self-investment, I read and write these blog posts each week to expand my understanding of the world and to build perspective for me. I connect things between different books to form a web that will capture my future thoughts, and keep them from falling fallow to the ground. For others, we (my wife and I) pour love into our children so that they will develop the kind of secure attachment that seems to be beneficial in life.

What does this have to do with hope? As it turns out, quite a lot. I don’t know that the investments I make today will definitely produce results in the future. I don’t know that what I’m doing will help me reach my goals. What I do know is that I hope that my investments today will lead to the future results that I want.

My hope is the rope that guides me from my distant past through the present and on to the future.

Confidants and Connections

The more I read, the more I find evidence that we all need connections and confidants. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown describes connections as the reason why we’re here. In my post High Orbit – Respecting Grieving, I shared Robin Dunbar’s research on stable social connections. In Change or Die, Alan Deutschman shared that most of our health care costs are driven by behavioral issues; more importantly, he shared that the successes in getting folks to actually change is often the formation of a tight-knit community. In Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers explained that innovations diffuse along a “knowledge-attitudes-practices” path, where mass media can change knowledge, community or group members can shift attitudes, and it takes a personal decision to change practices.

The need for connection is punctuated by Emotional Intelligence’s quoting of a Science article, indicating that isolation “is as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and lack of physical exercise.” We need others to be alive. More importantly, we need people with whom we can share our deepest and innermost thoughts.

Snyder echoes these sentiments indicating that those who’ve gone through a divorce score lower on hope scales. One percent increases in unemployment rates increases first-time mental health services use by four percent. (Think about how much of your social interaction is driven through your work.) Of those with low hope scores, frequently their families don’t communicate their support. In effect, they’re not forming the supportive network that people need to grow.

Living by Labels

Another common thread which exists in the literature is the importance – both positive and negative – of labels. Labels are meant to define us, albeit in a narrow way. They can define our struggle, or they can define our strength. I’ve advocated before for an integrated self-image which includes all of the aspects or facets of who we are. (See Beyond Boundaries, Compelled to Control, and Schools without Failure for more on an integrated self-image.) Each of these facets needs a name so that the perspective can be clear.

The danger of labels is that we’ll use them to limit us and what we believe we’re capable of. We use the labels to take on the stance of a victim. (See Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries for more thoughts on victimhood.) Snyder was similarly concerned that, while labeling behavior helped to release the natural ego tendencies towards denial, they sometimes formed the basis for an excuse for poor performance. To the point that one of his colleagues noted an increase in social drinkers’ consumption of alcohol prior to performing an action where alcohol may be a good excuse for poor performance.

So, on the one hand, we need to be able to combat our ego’s defenses by labeling behavior and calling it out for what it is – and on the other hand, we need to exercise care to prevent the unintentional creation of a fixed mindset of victimhood. (See Mindset for more on a fixed mindset.)

Pandora’s Box

As I dig to find answers I keep coming back to the one thing which survived in Pandora’s Box. Against all of the evils of the world, hope was able to stand its ground and survive – though admittedly not without being battered. The more I look at happiness and joy in our lives the more I realize that we rely on The Psychology of Hope.

Book Review-The Wisdom of Walt: Leadership Lessons from the Happiest Place on Earth

My first visit to Walt Disney World was when I was about eight or nine. I can’t remember my exact age but from the pictures and my memories I know that I wasn’t too much older than that. I can remember arriving when the park opened and leaving when the park closed (with my sister doing cartwheels in the parking lot on the way out.) Since then I’ve been blessed to visit Walt Disney World several more times and I’ve even been able to visit Disneyland.

While those visits are magical experiences and something that I recommend to everyone whether they are young or old, with children or without – there’s another part of the story that remains hidden to most people. There’s the man that was Walt Disney and his legacy in leadership and how he left the world better than he found it despite the struggles. That’s what The Wisdom of Walt is all about – how he shared his wisdom with the world.

Love Letters

In my review of Primal Leadership I mentioned that a friend of mine described the Walt Disney Family Museum as a love letter from a daughter to her father. In reading The Wisdom of Walt I felt a similar thing, which is a deep admiration for a man who struggled and fought and ultimately won – the hearts and minds of the nation and the world. I won’t claim to be any sort of an aficionado on Walt or his life. Like most folks I’ve picked up snippets along the way and I’ve been curious about a man who made the animated film industry and remade the amusement park industry.

What I sensed in Jeffrey Barnes’s writings was that deep sense of awe when you get to meet your hero. While not having literally met Walt Disney, I think by studying so deeply and having such a keen interest in the things that drove Walt, he got to touch a bit of that greatness.

Into Every Life a Little Rain Must Fall

Most folks when they think of Walt, think of the movies and the theme parks. They don’t know that everyone thought Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would fail (it was the first full length animated movie.) No one remembers that everyone thought Disneyland was never going to make it. Most don’t know about the bankruptcy of Laugh-O-Gram Studios. They haven’t heard of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit or how the character came to be stolen from Walt.

Brene Brown calls it gold plating grit when we fail to acknowledge the struggles that we have and instead rush to the happy ending. While Walt seemed ever the optimist, he wasn’t without his struggles and his mistakes. Walt’s own mother died because of a faulty furnace in a house he bought for his parents. It wasn’t that Walt didn’t struggle to sell his dreams, it was really that he never quit. While speaking about working with the banks on the financing of Disneyland he mentioned that “dreams offer too little collateral.”

It seems fitting to share that Walt – like all of us – struggled. He wasn’t immune to the human condition but perhaps he was conditioned to the desire to make the human condition better. He wasn’t trying to entertain the critics – he was trying to entertain the public and make their lives a little brighter in the process.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a powerful force. Whether you’re a past-positive or past-negative time focused person – or neither – nostalgia holds a powerful draw. (See The Time Paradox for more on time perspectives.) I’ve also mentioned before that time has the tendency to wash away the negatives and leave behind positive memories of colleagues that you’ve worked with in the past. Somehow even though you might have fought with them before the fact that they were in the same situation as you bonds you to them.

Main Street USA, the entryway to the parks, is designed to elicit and leverage nostalgia. The street is roughly reminiscent of the downtown streets that our parents grew up with. Little shops where people sold things and where community was formed — one soda and one haircut at a time.

Park Before the Park

Walt knew about creating experiences. To him the pre-show was as important as the show. That’s why the parking lot was like an “outer lobby” to him. He knew that the guest experience starts the moment they arrive. He wanted to set the stage for wonder and amazement much like having comedians before the main act warms up the crowds. (See I am a Comedian for more.)

People don’t want an amusement park. They want a way to step into a fantasy world where they can’t see, hear, or feel the problems that plague them in the real world. The process of stepping into that fantasy starts not at the moment of the front gate where their ticket is taken or money is exchanged. Instead, the fantasy starts at the first moment that it can. In the case of Disneyland it was the parking lot.

At Disney World the step into the fantasy starts while still miles away. Grand signs welcome visitors to Disney World while they’re driving in. These signs move the guests one step closer to the fantasy that they want as an escape from reality.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of These

There’s no doubt that Walt was a dreamer. He brought his dreams to life. He was constantly creating. His dreams formed in his head but they came to life through perseverance. (See How Children Succeed for more on grit and perseverance.)

When setting goals, it’s easy to become fixated on incremental improvements. We’ll increase our revenue by 10%. We’ll reduce waste by 6%. It’s dreams, however, that provide the destination for a goal which isn’t incremental. Dreams serve as a malleable end point where people want to go. Dreams by their nature are ephemeral and therefore subject to revision as they are cast out into the light of day.

The power of dreams is less that they’re a fixed anchor with perfect vision, but instead that they have the ability to be a distant signpost that’s almost unrecognizable amidst the fires of daily life.

Passion and Persistence

If dreams are the endpoint goals – the place of our desires – then it’s passion that’s the fuel to get us there. There are plenty of improvements that we could seek in our life from the proverbial “make a better mouse trap” to more complex endeavors like reducing our energy costs. These potential goals are – for most people – just minor annoyances. We suffer with existing mousetraps and we sign the checks for our energy bills and move on. However, there are some desires that arouse in us a deep and burning desire to conquer.

When we find an annoyance, a vision, or a dream that captures our attention we’ve found a passion. Passions are the things that we’re interested in just because we are interested in them. Our elephants are intrigued. (See The Happiness Hypothesis for more on the Rider-Elephant-Path model of our psyche.)

If you’ve ever seen a movie explosion you’ve seen what happens when a fuel (typically gasoline) isn’t put to use in an engine. Passion though filled with energy doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll accomplish our goals. The truly impressive goals are a long way away. Whether they are perceived to be right next door or very distant – they are typically within reach but further away than you expect. While mirrors may be printed with “Images are closer than they appear” goals should be printed with “Further away than they appear, but reachable.”

So while it’s passion that’s the fuel for meeting our goals, it’s persistence that is the engine that the passion goes into. If you look at any book on success you’ll find a component of persistence. In The Success Principles it’s “Practice Persistence.” In The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, it’s The Law of the Big Mo (Momentum).

The problem with persistence is that you never know when it’s the right thing to do and when it isn’t. No matter how much persistence you have working to develop a system of canals to transport goods it isn’t likely to be successful. Since the railroads, it’s not been the most efficient way to transport goods. So despite all the hype just being persistent isn’t enough. You have to be persistent at the right things.

For me, the thing that I shouldn’t be persistent with is the development of DVD based video content. I started this idea on the tail end of DVDs being popular and while we still sell them, we don’t market them because these days everyone expects that video will be available via the Internet. The idea that you would ship a DVD seems as foreign as having to be home at a specific time to see a network television program. The time for this has past.

However, at the same time, I have a passion for delivering compelling video education. I want people to be able to learn at any time without having to travel to training. That has meant constant work on my video studio. (See My Video Studio 2.1 for more on the studio.) I’ve been persistent in my desire to improve the quality of the video content that I’m creating on both the technical production front as well as the content delivery front. This includes learning new techniques. (See I am a Comedian
for how I took comedy classes to improve my speaking.) It also includes research on how adults learn. (See The Adult Learner, Efficiency in Learning, Job Aids and Performance Support, The Art of Learning, and The Art of Explanation
for a few of the resources I’ve used to learn more.)

The results of all of this work are still forthcoming. While I’m seeing some value from the investments I’ve been making they’re still not returning the value that I’m putting into them but I’m not giving up. I’m continuing to make investments on every front to be able to deliver the best experiences technically, with the best content, and with the best delivery. I won’t get the chance to bring joy to people’s lives like Walt did, I do hope that I can help them learn quicker. For that I’ll be persistent at perfecting my craft.

Things are Not as They Appear

When we’re talking about authenticity, trust, vulnerability, and being real (See Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy) the creation of an image that isn’t real is a bad thing. On the other hand, when discussing marketing topics and the desire to create a brand that people want you absolutely must create an image. (See Guerrilla Marketing and Duct Tape Marketing) In Walt’s world where story is king, there is a need to ensure that everything is consistent with the story. He even had berms built around Disneyland to prevent the outside images from entering the park. He wanted to control the experience and that meant controlling the appearances.

Whether it’s main street’s narrowing as it gets closer to the castle, the castle and the stores on main street’s progressively smaller floors, Walt was creating a perspective – a forced perspective – of his world.

Small Cathedrals

I don’t believe that Walt would have envisioned Mythbusters. Somehow a man who built a world of story and imagination doesn’t seem like a fit with a show designed to bring forth the truth about the world in which we live and debunk the myths that people have about their daily life. However, despite this there’s a similarity in the approach between what Walt did and what Mythbusters did. Most compelling similarity is the path of testing in small scale before testing in large scale.

Walt did this with short movies before feature length. He did this by creating and testing technologies before he needed to rely on them. He was always tinkering with things until he had them good enough to move them into a larger scale. Mythbusters did this through small scale experiments which became the genesis for the larger and much more spectacular tests.

One of the discussions I remember from Mythbusters is an on-camera discussion about how big to make the small scale model. It’s an interesting conversation because it’s the kind of question that leaders struggle with. How big a bet do you put down on the table to test a belief? How “all in” do you go? The best wisdom about serial entrepreneurs is that you shouldn’t “bet the farm” on your first try but the unanswered question is when do you bet the farm? There were things like Disneyland and Snow White where Walt “bet the farm” but many, many other things where he simply made investments and tested things. Like Thomas Edison he was seeking to learn more so that he could take those bold steps forward.

Humility

It was all built on the back of a mouse. That – or some variant there of – is something Walt is frequently quoted as saying. He was grand in his visions and dreams but yet rooted, grounded, and humble to remember that the entire organization was built on the back of the mouse he drew coming back from New York. Despite his great reach and his ability to entertain people everywhere, he never lost sight of the fact that he came from humble beginnings. That he had his share both of bad luck and good.

My favorite definition of humility is the one from Humilitas – “Power held in service to others.” Walt used his power of storytelling to create for us a better world and to teach us how to grow our own leadership. Perhaps that is the true Wisdom of Walt.

Book Review-On Dialogue

What does a physicist have to say about dialogue? It turns out, if that physicist is David Bohm, a lot. Bohm’s work has been referenced from six of the books that I’ve already reviewed (Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology,  Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together, My Spiritual Journey, Theory U, Sharing Hidden Know-How, and The Fifth Discipline). So despite the relative difficulty to unfold what Bohm has said, On Dialogue has a lot to say.

Coherence

When it comes to being aligned – or coherent – there is a lot of room for improvement. I often use the illustration of what happens when you start with a lantern that can generate light for maybe 30 yards. From there, we as a human race created lighthouses with their Fresnel lenses which focused light along the horizon. Lighthouses could push light out 26 nautical miles. Admittedly there was more power in the light –not proportionally more power, but some more power. Today we have lasers that we can use to bounce light off the moon – substantially further than 26 nautical miles – but with less power than in a typical lighthouse light. It’s all a matter of coherence, the degree to which things are aligned. The more aligned things are; the less power is needed to do the same thing.

The problem is that incoherence is the default of the universe. Chaos is the cosmic currency. Coherence happens but it’s not easy. This is where dialogue comes in. Dialogue is the mechanism by which we seek to introduce coherence in our relationships with others. By neither wielding power nor cowering behind our need for safety, we can find a balance where we’re able to more clearly understand perspectives and values that are not our own.

Thought Illusions

A mirage is just a shimmering image of falsehood but it’s one that we believe. Incognito went to great lengths to explain the ways which our own brain deceives us. All the way down to the very root of perception, what we believe is a fiction created in our minds. While we’ve got the most complex and sophisticated set of neurological pathways that Mother Nature has ever created, it’s all built on a fundamental set of lies that we are seeing reality correctly. Even properly formed expectations from those perceptions can be – and often are – wrong.

Gary Klein spoke of “recognition primed decisions” in Sources of Power in the context of fire commanders making decisions about how to fight a fire, but we use the same mechanisms when we’re interacting with other people. We build models of the people that we’re interacting with (like one based on Reiss’ work in Who Am I?). These models lead us to assumptions about what other peoples’ concerns are and how they’ll behave based on those concerns.

Assessing Assumptions

The challenge is that the models that we use are never complete enough to perfectly predict the behavior of another person. We may not know that they have a “soft spot” for baseball and will choose to support a baseball related suggestion even if it doesn’t make any sense objectively. Similarly, we may not understand their values and beliefs well enough to know how they’ll respond when multiple values or belief systems are in conflict. (See Who am I? for more on multiple values.)

The key is to assess your assumptions. The trick with assessing assumptions is that you don’t know that you have them. They’re transparent like panes of glass that we bump into from time to time. Instead of looking for these assumptions we need to develop a habit of assessing our assumptions indirectly. It might mean spraying water ahead of us and seeing if it gathers on something unseen to us.

If you’re concerned about running into something in the dark, you’ll reach out and tentatively test the environment with your arm before proceeding. This delicate dance is what we must do in our relationship with other people. We must gingerly reach out to see if our assumptions and reality align. We do this by reflecting back what we believe the other person is saying – and its meaning to us. Sometimes we’ll be right – or more accurately close enough – and other times we’ll be rather far off the mark.

Multiple Meanings

One of the challenges with our language – not just English but all languages – is that it’s imprecise. That is words don’t mean exactly the same thing to every person. Words are not “meaning” no matter how much we might wish them to be. This is at the root of the problem with search engines. They have no idea what meaning you’re searching for when you search with a word that has multiple meanings.

Consider the word staff. Am I speaking of a wooden rod that’s carried by a person? Am I speaking of the employees of an organization? Or am I speaking of a particular type of infection?

As we interact, we infer the meaning of the word being used from the context clues. Sometimes those meanings are correctly assessed – and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes the best we can do is just guess and hope that we’re right.

Painful Precision

There are times in any dialogue when there is a need for precision. We need to get to exactly the same understanding between all of the parties. This is like the handoff procedure for an aircraft or a three-phase commit cycle used to commit changes to a database. While in general a single source of understanding is a good thing, the effort necessary to get there may not be worth the return.

Sometimes it’s important that we accept the fact that we won’t necessarily know exactly what someone else is thinking. Instead, we have to accept that we understand their general perspective and direction, and elect to go back and learn more about an aspect of their perspective later. Neurologically we do this – when we leverage this in our interactions with others, we balance understanding and effort.

Helpful Heuristics

Our brains are not up to the job. While evolution has served us reasonably well, it moves far too slowly to allow us to match the explosion of information, data, and people on the planet today. As a result, tricks were developed to allow us to function in a world that is more complex than our minds can reasonably process. Positively they’re known as heuristics. They’re ways of simplifying problems enough so that we have the capacity to follow them. They’re rules of thumb and guidelines which we use rather blindly to allow us to function. We see one thing and we assume a bunch of unseen things.

Heuristics are the underlying mechanisms which drive stereotypes. Stereotypes are a heuristic applied to a group of people – usually not our own. While heuristics can be valuable in allowing us to function, stereotypes reveal the hidden problem. When we fail to be willing to dig into heuristics in a deeper way, we’re subject to the errors that we make because of them.

Mirror of the Mind

Most of the time the thoughts in our head flow by at a blinding pace. It’s like trying to single out people streaming out of a rock concert. There are so many people going by you at any one time it’s difficult to identify individuals, and harder still to find the one friend that you got separated from. In this melee of thoughts, it’s no wonder that we can’t identify what we’re really thinking or the root from which our thoughts come from. It’s only by apprehending our thoughts and suspending them in time that we can seek our true motives and find what hidden sources are driving them.

It’s a great gift to be able to do what Freud didn’t think was possible – that is objective introspection. Perhaps perfect objective introspection isn’t possible; but we can, if we learn to hold on to a thought and examine where it came from and what influenced it, set up a mirror in our mind to reveal those hidden motivations that we didn’t even know were there ourselves.

By apprehending and suspending our thoughts we can test what factors might have led to that thought and work backwards to the positive and negative memories that led to it. It’s more than chasing rainbows.

Runaway Rainbows

If you ask a child what a rainbow is you’re likely to get an answer that involves multiple colors arcing in the sky. If you ask an adult, you might get a more technical answer about light refracting at different rates through raindrops and causing the arc of multiple colors the children were speaking about. However, what happens if you ask a physicist? The answer is nothing. The physicist doesn’t believe in rainbows. Rainbows don’t, in fact, exist. You can look for the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow and you’ll never find him – not just because he doesn’t exist but also because rainbows don’t exist.

In the strictest literal sense, rainbows don’t exist. They have no mass. They emit no light. They really aren’t anything themselves. They’re an optical effect (or illusion, if you prefer). So when you’re chasing rainbows you’re chasing nothing.

As we’re looking into the mirror of our mind, as we’re apprehending thoughts, we have to realize the dichotomy that thoughts exist in one sense and don’t in another. Thoughts can say that they did nothing to shape us or our opinions, but equally they did – each thought layers on top of the other until we’ve developed a patchwork quilt of our lives.

One Wholeness

I’ve spoken repeatedly of the idea of an integrated self-image and the need to see things as wholes rather than as pieces. (See my review Rising Strong Part 2 for a starting point on having or developing an integrated self-image). While breaking things down into their component parts allows us to see individual things clearly and to understand how they work, it hits a limit as there are emergent properties of wholeness that aren’t present in the individual parts.

Often times we attempt to break down and isolate things to a degree that prevents us from seeing the whole. If you were to dissect a cow and evaluate the individual kinds of meat that are available from the cow, you might have a smorgasbord of options for dinner, but none of those options will reveal to you what the cow is or how a cow works. The pieces are not the whole. In conversations, we have the capacity to evaluate the individual words, the perspectives, and the positions of the parties, but it takes work to step back and see the whole symphony unfolding before us.

Hold On Rightly

Jim Collins in Good to Great speaks of the Stockdale paradox of being unwavering in your beliefs and simultaneously adjusting to input. This is the heart of dialogue. It’s holding on tightly enough to your beliefs so that they’re not lost, and at the same time loosely enough that you’re willing to test them. It’s the blind man who holds onto his walking stick loose enough to feel the objects it touches but not so loose that he drops it.

Learning the balance of detachment – not considering the stick to be a part of you by holding on too tightly and simultaneously not holding on so loosely as to drop it – is learning how to be in dialogue best.

Converting Conversations to Dialogue

While I’d recommend reading On Dialogue
to provide context and wisdom around the process of creating dialogue, in the end Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together is a better roadmap to getting towards dialogue and understanding how it can become misrouted. On Dialogue is more helpful when you’re confronted with a situation that isn’t neatly explained and you need a deeper understanding of the philosophy which supports dialogue.

Book Review-The Normal Personality

It was back in 2013 when I read Steven Reiss’ book Who Am I?. Reiss, a professor emeritus of Ohio State, proposed that there were 16 motivations that can be used to describe a person and how they’ll react. Shortly after reading Who Am I?, I picked up The Normal Personality – another of his books. However, it sat in my virtual bookshelf as my curiosity (one of his characteristics) led me in other directions. However, after finishing The Cult of Personality Testing and Science and Pseudo Science in Clinical Psychology, I felt like I needed to get back to Reiss’ work on personality testing and more importantly motivations.

Compared to the other models that I’ve looked at, there are numerous aspects of the Reiss model which seem to be able to more accurately predict how people will behave and the normal predispositions that they’ll have. While the model is still a difficult model to internalize for daily use, it is a good framework for understanding others.

Defining Abnormal

Much was made in The Cult of Personality Testing about the tendency for some tests, particularly Rorschach, to over pathologize people. In other words, there is a bias towards saying that there is something wrong with people. Given the context of that test—and others – for use of screening for mental defects, I suppose that this is a reasonable conclusion. However, it makes the tests far less useful when you’re trying to define what normal people look like, what motivates them, and how to engage them fully.

It seems that most personality tests – perhaps with the exception of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – are designed to tell you what’s wrong with someone, not how they function well under normal circumstances. I’ve mentioned that I tend to build a MBTI in my head unconsciously for the folks I’m interacting with. I’m trying to understand how to interact with them in the best possible way. Reiss believes the MBTI to be a useful – but narrow – instrument. This makes sense. Where the MBTI uses four dimensions, Reiss model is based on 16 factors. The level of precision capable when you have more dimensions is noticeably broader. Additionally, MBTI tends to define people as either-or and makes no attempt to identify which factors are more important to the person’s personality.

The tricky part with defining normal is that it’s not one thing. You can define a mental disease or defect with relatively specific precision about what constitutes the disorder, however, normal is the mass of possibilities in the middle and is therefore difficult to pin down.

Reiss even states at one point that it’s unlikely that someone has a mental health problem because most (but not all) people with mental health problems are unhappy. So even the rules that you could possibly use to define normal have boundary conditions.

Prioritizing Motivations

When you fail to predict the behaviors of another person whom you believe you know well, the normal reaction is to be surprised and stunned. Most of the time the reason for the failed prediction is that the person has a competing value system that was in play – and was more important at that moment. When values are in conflict it’s difficult to know which value will be the most important. Consider a scenario where a person who is highly motivated by Family but also intensely motivated in Power or Status. When the question comes up about whether to stay at work late – the answer might be that family wins out and they come home – getting online later instead of going to bed. However, when a prestigious opportunity comes up which requires substantially more travel, it may be that the family loses their parent to work and to the road. (See Our Kids for an interesting note about how parents are denying themselves for their children.)

When multiple value systems align into a single behavior they can sometimes – and do sometimes – overpower a single stronger motivation. In Reiss’ model the motivations aren’t viewed in a vacuum. They don’t exist without any outside circumstances. Kurt Lewin says that behavior is a function of both person and environment. It’s wrong to say that a person isn’t influenced by their environment both in micro and macro ways. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Johnathan Haidt speaks to the power that the path has in his rider-elephant-path model. We cannot exclude the environment in terms of culture or pressing needs when evaluating how others will behave.

Motivations exist in a world of competing forces. Each motivation seeking to reach its point of equilibrium.

Personality Equilibrium

No one wants chaos – or the complete loss of control. However, a motivation for order will tell just how far we’re willing to get out on the limb of lack of control. Some folks need everything in neat little boxes. Some folks need to have a large degree of order in their lives. They need neat and tidy to feel OK with who they are and where they are. Others are willing to live seemingly without any order. They don’t bother to book hotel rooms in advance. They tend to play the worst case scenario game – and win. They decide that the worst case scenario is they’ll sleep in their car.

It’s not that either of these perspectives – orderly and planned or spontaneous – is right or wrong. It’s just different. However, there is a normal range. That is a range where people can sometimes be orderly – or sometimes accept uncertainty. Those who struggle with uncertainty are closer to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) which I often tease that they call CDO – so the letters are in their “correct” alphabetical order. On the other end of the spectrum might be a homeless by choice person who likes not knowing where their next meal will come from or where they’ll spend the night.

The reality is that people will seek to obtain their natural equilibrium where their level for a motivating factor has been achieved. When placed in a chaotic situation we’ll almost all try to impose some order. When placed in highly rule bound and defined places we’ll seek to create levity and deflect the perception of too much order.

Recipe for Underachievement

Some kids get along just fine in school and some do not. When viewed from the lens of motivational psychology there are some patterns that emerge for those who don’t do well in school:

1. Low Curiosity – The kids just literally aren’t that interested in things.
2. Low Ambition – They have no need to become anything. They’re happy with the status quo.
3. High Vengeance – Folks with high vengeance are looking for opportunities for their vengeance to be satisfied. That is, they’re looking for trouble.
4. High Acceptance – If you want others to like you too much (high acceptance) then failure becomes an untenable option. You avoid doing something because then people can’t demonstrate that you failed at it.
5. Low Honor – Those with low honor are expedient. They’ll do whatever just to get to an answer and if being honorable takes too much effort, they’ll take the shortcut.
6. Low Order – Spontaneous people can be the life of the party but when it comes to planning the party spontaneity isn’t the best strategy. Kids with low order didn’t seem to do as well as their high (or moderate) order colleagues

Some of my best friends weren’t overachievers in high school. They made their way through but not without their challenges. In life they drifted until they found a home that for them is what they needed. Just because someone isn’t doing well in school doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. It can mean that their skills and talents aren’t matched to academic learning.

Normal Range

The trick as we seek to maximize our happiness and the happiness of others we love isn’t to create copycat clones of ourselves. (See Multipliers for more on the negative consequences of creating clones.) The trick is to help build skills that allow us to operate in the “normal” range. You don’t have to take your artist and turn them into an accountant (or vice versa.) However, everyone needs a way to function in this world. They may not need to know how to balance a checkbook any longer. However, everyone needs enough awareness to be able to be aware of their financial health. Similarly, everyone should be able to appreciate aesthetic beauty. Whether you’re an accountant or a coal miner, your happiness is influenced by your ability to appreciate beauty in the world.

As we’re coaching underachieving adolescents we need to remember that they don’t have to become the best at things they’re not currently good at. They need only get sufficient levels of skills to ensure that they’re not being held back by those lack of skills. They don’t have to be motivated by curiosity. However, they need to create enough curiosity inside of themselves to ensure their long-term success, survival, and thrival. (Thrival is the ability to thrive.)

Recipe for a Cheater

I was sitting at a church meeting. This was a special meeting in that it was designed to help struggling people get more peace with their life and align it more with their purpose. I was sitting across from a guy I’ll call Bill who was describing how he was currently having sexual relationships with 12 other women – besides his wife. After setting aside the moral concerns and letting go of any judgement, which is a part of this group that functions more like a 12 step program than a traditional church function, I was confused.

I was confused like I am with the idea of polygamy. I love my wife – but I can’t imagine having the emotional energy of managing that sort of an intimate relationship with multiple wives. Bill explained to me that they weren’t relationships that they were just sex. I still don’t understand it really but at least I understood that to him the women were a way of satisfying his desire for romance. His motivation for honor and family were very low. I don’t know how things worked out with Bill, I never really saw him after a few meetings, however, I know that when you mix a person with high romance and low honor, you have a recipe for a cheater.

Someone with low honor is often described as expedient. That is, they’ll do the honorable thing if it’s easy but they won’t go much (if any) out of their way to do the honorable thing.

Morals and Values

One of the topics delicately avoided in the normal personality was whether particular motivations are moral. That is whether motivations are good or bad. It’s more accurate to say that the motivations themselves aren’t good or bad – it’s what we do with them that makes them good or bad. A high desire for power isn’t bad. However, when it creates Nazi Germany which seeks to exterminate an entire race of people, most folks would call that bad. The relative ease with which people can be motivated to behave outside of what they would say their standards are, is frightening. (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me))

Buddhists describe emotions as afflictive (causing harm) or non-afflictive. (See Destructive Emotions and Emotional Awareness for more about Buddhist beliefs about emotions.) The relatively quirky point of view here is that the emotion may or may not be afflictive. It’s appropriate, for instance, to be angry at times. Anger is disappointment directed. There are times when disappointment is the right feeling. The key is whether this causes harm to yourself or others.

Spiritual Evolution walked through the connection between what we value and evolution. There are certain evolutionary advantages of caring and socialization. There are some advantages of high trust societies (See Building Trust in Politics, Relationships and Life for more on the economic impact of trust.) Morals are beneficial to society. They become the framework on which laws and positions can be based.

In general, morals and values and the laws that are passed to provide structure to them are designed to protect society. They delineate between the acceptable and unacceptable expressions of motivations as measured by societal norms or legal consequences.

For instance, in the United States, alcohol is relatively universally available to adults at 21 years of age. The age for voting and other “adult-ness” is typically 18. Whether someone is an adult at 18 or 21 is relatively arbitrary, however, it’s this standard that has worked its way into law – in an inconsistent way. Is it “right” for someone who is driven by eating to have a glass of wine with dinner? Morally and legally the question is ambiguous. In the United States, if the person is under 21, the answer is no. If we cross the border to the north if the person is 18, 19, or 20 they’re OK. In Europe where there’s no established minimum alcohol consumption age, the person of any age will be legally OK but perhaps not morally. (I’m not recommending including wine in a baby’s bottle.)

Largely morals and values operate outside of motivations. It’s only when strong motivations drive a person to behave in a way outside of the established norms and laws that problems arise.

Sex in the City

While viewed from a short term perspective it may seem like morals are fixed. However, when you start to look at the way that morals have changed over time you begin to realize that they’re really a shared experience more than they are fixed and unchanging. For instance, in the early days of television, married co-stars (both in real life and on screen) were shown sleeping in separate twin beds. Words like sex and pregnant were considered too sensitive to appear on air. When you evaluate TV of the 50s and TV of today – even broadcast TV to say nothing of cable – it becomes clear that the moral standards at least as they are expressed through public eyes is very different.

The Marketing of Evil seemed intent on describing a sinister plot to these changes, however, observationally, these changes seem to reflect naturally occurring responses to changes in society. There were movements that made birth control more acceptable to speak of in the 1920s and beyond but it was the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1950s that changed the consequences of sex.

With condoms (which have been available for substantially longer) combined with an oral contraceptive the effective pregnancy rate is very, very low. Add to this the controversial – even today — Roe v. Wade decision making abortions legal and the result is an even lower unwanted birth rate. (See Freakonomics for more on how abortions changed crime rates.) Thus the social consequences for sex – an unplanned child which would need to be supported – were reduced to such a small rate that they no longer represented a societal problem. Even the teen pregnancy rates which skyrocketed in the late 1980s to four times that of most western countries fell 52% from 1991 to 2012 as a response to aggressive campaigns to reduce this societal concern. (See Defensive Routines for more on the causes.)

Ultimately our views of unwed sex have changed. Gallup in their post titled “Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues” demonstrates how over time the values of the people they’re polling continue to move towards the direction of what some might call moral decline. I’m more inclined to call it moral shift. For instance, in 2001 only 53% thought it was morally acceptable for an unmarried man and woman to have sex. In 2015 that number is 68%. In the space of the relatively short 14 years our attitudes shifted 15%. While not every metric moves that fast, it’s an indication that our moral fiber isn’t as rigid as we’d like to believe.

Made in Marriage

John Gray in his book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus asserts that men and women are different. Reiss is able to support this assertion from his data but cannot say whether these are nature or nurture – whether they are programmed into our biology or are a result of our culture.

These differences it seems can be persistent thorns in our sides. That’s why sites like eharmony.com and other profile matching sites can be helpful. Reiss says that many divorces are the results of bad matches and not necessarily character defects in either party. Gottman says that 69 percent of marital conflicts are persistent – without a solution. (See The Science of Trust for more of Gottman’s work.) Reiss asserts that it’s better to find the right person than pay for therapy to try to make a bad match work.

Low Curiosity and Intimacy Anorexia

One of the stories Reiss relates in The Normal Personality is of a wife who isn’t interested in talking with her husband. This is assigned to a low curiosity. I wonder, however, if this particular example may cross over from the normal needing to regulate how deep and how frequent conversations should be to reach a satisfying state or whether this example represents Intimacy Anorexia. It’s hard to know where the line is sometimes between healthy – but on the edge – behavior and abnormal or errant behavior.

In Emotional Intelligence, Goleman quotes a report in Science which describes isolation as “as significant to mortality rates as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and lack of physical exercise.” In short, isolation or separation from others is a serious health risk. Reiss makes the point that his perspective of motivational psychology and a desire to avoid over diagnosing people isn’t without the awareness that mental illnesses are real and do exist.

Perhaps the wife is perfectly fine being emotionally intimate with her girlfriends, family, and others just not her husband. While this is a marker for more serious problems in the relationship it may not be a clinical condition. (See Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy for more on intimacy and the path to it.)

Biology and Psychology

Virtually everyone knows about Darwin’s survival of the fittest perspective on evolution and genetics. We’ve advanced in our understanding to be able to educate parents on the probabilities of having a baby with a genetic defect. The counseling provides an awareness of what might happen so that folks can be prepared but ultimately have no control on what genes are passed on.

However, with our frontal lobes we have another factor where survival of the fittest comes into play. That is the idea of memes. Memes are like viruses imprinting on others the same idea through communication, conversation, and thought.

Ways of thinking – memes – necessarily lead us towards some approaches and away from others. Consider that in English we put the modifier (adjectives) before the noun which they modify. In French and other languages, the modifiers come after the noun which they modify. It’s not that one is right or wrong. What’s important is that we necessarily think differently based on this change in language.

Our success in getting close to another person – in order to do reproduction – is now based at least in part by the ideas that we hold. We tend to connect better with those people who hold similar ways of thinking and processing as us.

Like More Alike

Reiss shares that sociology has definitively settled on the idea that we are attracted to those who are more like us and repelled by those who are different. It’s on this basis that you’re likely to have friends who are similar to you. You’re likely to have a spouse that is similar to you.

The quick rebuttal is often that your wife is very different than you. Competitors in a market tend to focus on the differences between their products and the competition where customers tend to focus on the similarities. (See The Challenger Sale for more.) My point isn’t to say that you and your wife are competitors – rather my point is to say that because of your extremely close proximity you’re more apt to see the relatively minor differences that people at a distance wouldn’t see.

As mentioned earlier, finding a mate that is more similar to you makes the maintenance of a marriage easier.

Know Thyself

The best platitude advice ever given is Socrates “Know thyself.” It’s impossibly hard to do and deceptively simple. We all believe we know ourselves but the more we look the more we realize that we don’t know ourselves very well. There are so many dimensions and depths to our psyche that we can spend a lifetime attempting to discover them and still not have scratched the surface. However, perhaps that’s what it’s like to have a The Normal Personality – a continual striving to know ourselves better.

Book Review-The Fred Factor: How Passion in Your Work and Life Can Turn the Ordinary into the Extraordinary

It’s pretty common for professional speakers to have some sort of a book to promote themselves and their talks. That’s not at all different. However, the difference here, for me is that Mark Sanborn’s name just keeps coming up. I can’t explain that other than to say that in different circles and at different times I hear Mark’s name – and I have heard about The Fred Factor. Fred is a postman – or rather he was a postman. His customer service and care for his customers – particularly Mark Sanborn – made him the inspiration for Mark’s book about making the ordinary extraordinary.

Ordinary Extraordinarily

The heart of the Fred Factor is understanding that when you can turn the ordinary experience into the extraordinary experience you enrich and enhance others’ lives. When you’re enriching others’ lives, when you’re making them better, you’re going to create an impression. Whether it’s offering to make sure that mail is delivered when you’re home – and not when you’re not – or something equally mundane you have the power to make a difference in other people’s lives.

Recognizing Retail

Many workers in retail wear badges with their names on them. How many people do you know address the other person by their name? If you say “Thank You” – and not everyone does – do you say it with the person’s name you see or just the generic and half-mumbled thank you?

My wife, Terri, is great at this. We’ll be walking along and she’ll say “Hi Bob” or “Thanks Jane” – and even to this day, I’ll occasionally turn and ask her “Did you know that person?” The answer is frequently – but not always – no. However, she’ll find a way to see their name on their nametag when I didn’t even notice it was there.

This is a sort of personal connection. It’s customer service in reverse. It’s being a human who is so concerned with others that you want to greet them by name when you can.

Excellence

My good friend Scott loves to say about me that I always do everything with excellence. (He’s wrong by the way, I don’t do everything with excellence, I just do what I can manage with excellence.) He’s explained to me several times what he means and at some level I still don’t get it. You see for me, doing things as good as possible all the time, is the way I do things. However, I’ve come to realize that this isn’t the norm for most people. People naturally only put themselves out there to do their best occasionally. There’s safety in being able to say that you didn’t do your best. If someone doesn’t like what you’ve done, they don’t know what you’re really capable of. (See Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy and Find Your Courage for more about being fully out there.)

My friend Joel describes excellence as doing the best you can with what you have all the time. This description is to try to differentiate it from perfection. He knows that we all make mistakes but simultaneously that we can set ourselves up for success by preparation and hard work.

Most people seem content with putting in only the effort necessary to meet the standard. The standard is the measuring stick. However, with excellence the measuring stick isn’t what the standard is but is instead what you’re capable of. With the concept of Flow (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman) we know that this optimal state is achieved when the gap between the skills and the challenge is 4%. People who do things with excellence are always asking how they can get to the optimal state of flow instead of resting on their laurels and accepting the standard.

What does excellence look like? It looks like something that is outstanding – something that is set apart from the norm. Sometimes just deciding to do everything can change the ordinary into the extraordinary.

I was recently at Graceland and I was struck by a fact that Elvis only ever personally received one award in his life. That was an award from the Jaycees. It wasn’t about music. It was an award for being one of ten outstanding young men. Of all of the awards he received the one that wasn’t about his music but was about who he was – that was the award he honored by accepting personally. In the supporting audio at Graceland it was explained that he didn’t feel worthy of the honor. He felt like he was “just” entertaining people. If Elvis – the king of Rock and Roll – believed that he was “just” entertaining what is it that you’re “just” doing?

Creative Problem Solving

Most of the resources you have are between your ears. They exist in the world of possibilities in your mind. The times when I’ve been told I’m the most creative, the most innovative, and operating at the highest levels of excellence are those times when I’m solving problems. Whether it’s the custom made lighting for the video studio which utilizes strip LED lighting so I can get over eight linear feet of even lighting, or the lighting truss that is standing on end to be my camera tower for the studio – or any of the other dozens of things that exist in the world here but almost nowhere else, creative problem solving is excellence in action. (You can learn more about my video studio in my post My Video Studio 2.1.)

Sometimes what people are missing is creative confidence (See my review of Creative Confidence.) Sometime the missing components are the mental models at the heart of recognition primed decisions (RPD) (See Sources of Power and The Art of Explanation for more on mental models.) Problem solving comes from an awareness of how things work. This essential understanding of the components allows you to change the way things work – or create new working systems. (See The Fifth Discipline and Thinking in Systems for more on systems thinking.) Sometimes the way things work are the mental processes that operate inside someone’s head.

By combining a willingness to try (Creative Confidence), an understanding of how things work (mental model), and an awareness of systems (thinking in systems) truly interesting and innovative solutions can be created for problems. Those solutions don’t have to require money. When confronted with a problem we tend to try to find a solution to match the size of the problem. However, when you understand systems you can put a small change in place that makes a big impact.

In flying, we have trim. That is, there is a function to help keep the controls in the place where we want them. It allows pilots to reduce their work and focus on other things. Elevator trim sets the relative position of the elevator and thus that attitude of the plane which ultimately controls the altitude of the airplane. (Attitude is how far up the nose is pointing.) The trim is controlled by the pilot by a wheel. The actual implementation is a small door that is actuated up or down to control the overall position on the larger surface – in this case the elevator. A little bit of the surface makes a big impact on the overall surface – and on to the pilot’s workload.

When you’re solving problems with customer service or in life, you don’t have to find big solutions to big problems. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. Sometimes they’re treating others like honored guests.

Excellence Without [Much] Money

Frequently we think of excellence as experiences that cost money – and lots of it. While having money to spend certainly makes excellent experiences easier to accomplish, it isn’t a requirement. It’s certainly not a requirement to spend more money to create excellence.

Last year, I was speaking in Boston and my son and his girlfriend got to come up and visit. My wife and I love lighthouses. We took a tour around the lower peninsula of Michigan to see every lighthouse. We wanted to see the lighthouses in Boston. One of the tours would allow us to see a few of the lighthouses. It was something like $50 per person. So around $200 for the four of us. Rather than taking this path we were able to find a company that would rent us a boat for two hours for about $200. We got a chance to go out on the water and enjoy ourselves without having to fight other people – and we got to go see all of the lighthouses rather than just seeing one or two. It’s true that we spent $200 on the experience – but the cost difference between getting an excellent experience with the four of us and the cost of “doing the tourist thing” was roughly equivalent.

Excellence isn’t about how much money you can spend to solve a problem or to create an experience. Many of the times when folks have spoken loudly about excellence, it has been about small things. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote in In Search of Excellence about the thousandths of a percent improvement that come from the trivial and mundane.

Four Principles of Fred

With this as a backdrop, The Fred Factor presents us with four principles:

1. Everyone makes a difference
2. Success is built on relationships
3. You must continuously create value for others, and it doesn’t have to cost a penny
4. You can reinvent yourself regularly

Here, excellence isn’t measured in having the most optimized system for delivery of widgets. It’s not about one master architect at the top of the pyramid who makes all the right decisions. (In fact, Innovation is about pushing innovation down to everyone. See Unleashing Innovation and The Innovator’s DNA.)

I had done something small in my opinion for someone. It was so small from my point of view that I don’t even remember what it was. I was commenting upon how it wasn’t a big deal and my friend stopped me short and reminded me that the value of the gesture wasn’t in the effort it took me to do it. The value was on the receiving end because the person couldn’t do it for themselves. What I could do in a few minutes they wouldn’t be able to do at all.

It’s these simple things that can make the difference. The value isn’t in the cost to do something – it’s in how the recipient of your gesture values it. If you’re able to care enough to pay attention to when people are home or not, you can help keep watch over their home – from your mail truck.

Finally, whatever you are today doesn’t mean that it is what you must be tomorrow. You have the capability to improve and grow. (See Mindset for more on changing your mindset.)

Whatever you’re doing, go out and do it the best you can and maybe you can become The Fred Factor.

Book Review-The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

It’s the Medici family that is responsible – in part – for kicking off the Renaissance. By bringing together masters in multiple disciplines they allowed knowledge to flow across the boundaries of discipline and thereby they created the opportunities for intersection. The Medici Effect is a book about the ideas at the intersection of different disciplines.

Renaissance

Thinking of the Renaissance is a recurring theme for me. It last surfaced in Beyond Genius. There I referred to my 2004 article on Developer.com – “Renaissance man.” For me the Renaissance is a time of great advancement of our humanity. My wish for the world is that we’re able to maintain a rapid advancement of enlightenment. It’s to that end that I want to understand the factors that lined up to kick the advancement off.

Creativity

Any idiot can have ideas. Having an idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s a good idea when others find it relevant, important, and valuable. While we’re all inherently creativity as Creative Confidence, Creativity, Inc., Group Genius, and Play
have discussed. We’re creative until our inner critic – fed by the voices of external critics – squashes our drive to be creative. We begin to believe the lie that we aren’t creative and never will be. (See Mindset for a fixed mindset.)

Creativity is a notably messy process. Whether you’re giving kindergartners finger paints or you’re trying new business solutions there are bound to be messes and failures. As adults we don’t like failures because too many of us were raised with performance based love and we believe that if we fail then we are failures. (See The Road Less Traveled for more on performance-based love.) The true failure however, is to not try. Everyone who seeks creative success has had failure. The trick is that they didn’t let the failure stop them from moving forward.

Innovation

It’s not enough to have an idea. Nor is it good enough to have a creative idea. For an idea to be innovative it has to be implemented and adopted. (See Diffusion of Innovations and Unleashing Innovation for more.) The impact of the Renaissance was innovation. The ideas were creative – but more importantly they were adopted.

Brackish Water

My sister wanted to be a marine biologist as a child and as such she had an interest in marine biology that she carries with her. At some point while visiting her I was asking whether the water we were passing over – the intercoastal – was salt water she responded that the water was brackish water. That is the water was neither salt water like the ocean nor freshwater like a stream or spring.

Medici like innovation is like this. It occurs at the intersection of two seemingly incompatible disciplines. Brackish water occurs when freshwater and salt water mix as often happens at the deltas of rivers as they empty into the sea. It also happens along areas where the tide can come up over freshwater supplies. It lives at the intersection between salt and non-salt water.

It’s in these places that there are special species of plants and fish that are especially adapted to the conditions. Because most plants and fish struggle in these in between conditions the plants and fish that live in brackish water often thrive in their environment. They live in the space between salt and fresh.

Innovators are like this. Because there aren’t many innovators – because most people live in one world or another, those who can live in multiple worlds – or worlds at the intersection of others – can make their own worlds. (See Extraordinary Minds for the maker type of genius – who is the innovator.)

Wrong Ideas

Memes are mental viruses. They replicate through the use of imitation and copying. They leap from brain-to-brain. They travel. Sometimes they’re hard to eradicate when they’re wrongheaded or bad. Consider for a moment how autism has been incorrectly linked to vaccines. A single article published in the Lancet – and since retracted due to ethical issues that cost the lead author his medical license has created a paranoia about vaccines that has yet to be effectively quashed.

It makes sense though. Autism is typically discovered right around the time of vaccinations so vaccinations must be the cause, right? Just because two things are coincident doesn’t mean that one is causal for the other. No one would say that autism causes vaccinations – so why do we so readily accept that the opposite is true even though the evidence is overwhelming at this point that there is no causal relationship between vaccines and autism. (As a sidebar, it appears to be a poorly timed histamine response in the mother during pregnancy may be a contributing factor but more research is needed here.)

Sometimes we become so ingrained in an industry that we can’t see the frameworks of the industry that are holding us back. Once you’ve become a part of the establishment it’s very hard to slay the sacred cows or say that the emperor has no clothes.

Education

You need raw material in order to be innovative. Without any training you don’t have any structure or foundation to think about things. (See Sources of Power for more on mental models.) As a result, the possibility of being innovative climbs as you know more about a subject – up to a point. Once you reach a certain point the probability of innovation plateaus before falling off. Once you become too established in an area of knowledge you stop questioning it. You follow chains of association until they enslave you.

The recipe for becoming an innovator then isn’t to be a learned person in the traditional go to college and study a single topic type of way. Instead, innovators tend to be self-learners. They have a voracious appetite for the things that interest them. Innovators may have little or no schooling but are instead intensely curious and motivated towards the hard work of learning the things that interest them. (See The Adult Learner for more on what motivates people to learn.)

Randomness

If creativity comes from two components – combination of different concepts and randomness – the ingredient that will bother most folks is the randomness component. However, randomness is at the heart of the world we live in even if we don’t want to admit it.

With the notable exception of Ansel Adams, every great photographer I’ve ever heard about took a lot of photos to get good. They didn’t know how to compose a scene or to execute the technical mechanics of their cameras until they learned. They learned randomly through trial and error. Life is like this. Despite our propensity for trying to find order in the data, there is randomness.

For innovation to stick we have to have enough random events to align in a way that works out for the innovation. If enough random events don’t happen then there will be a creative idea but no innovation. We get a good idea that never survives crossing the chasm to an innovation.

Acceptable Risks

Everyone has a level of risk that they’re comfortable with. We’re willing to drive at a certain speed because we trust our ability to drive a car and the features of the car that support that being an acceptable level of risk. In my sports car I’d drive faster than I will in any other vehicle because I knew the capabilities of the car. In fact, advances like ABS haven’t changed the accident rate of cars. Our relative number of accidents has stayed relatively constant.

Living at the intersection of disciplines means living with risk. Risk of the bad idea and risk of rejection or scorn by your peers. Living at the intersection of ideas is a scary place and it takes a special level of risk tolerance to have the courage to stay there. (See Finding Your Courage for more on courage.)

The Risk of Inaction

In the end, the worst risk is the risk of doing nothing. The moment you stop trying, you start dying. I mean this from both the figurative point of view and the literal point of view, if you’re not moving forward and everything else including time is – you’re relatively speaking moving backward. On the more practical side as people retire without anything to do, they end up living shorter lives. Those folks who live the longest lives and without the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s and dementia are those who are the most active. It’s not that being engaged and taking risks immunizes you to the effects of aging or mental disease, but it does increase your resistance to the conditions.

In your heart and in your organizations it’s important to ensure that you are making the process of taking risks easier and the process of inaction gets harder – and that’s hard to do. However, the impact of supporting risk is you make them easier and people take them more often. The impact of more risks is more failures – and more successes. Ultimately more successes means that you may have been able to kick off your own renaissance period in your organization all thanks to your own [The] Medici Effect.