Effortful Fullfillment

UCLA psychologist Jim Stigler gave American and Japanese elementary school students the same convoluted math problems to solve. The American kids struggled briefly with the problems and then gave up. In contrast, the Japanese kids kept trying so long that Stigler remembered thinking, “This is inhumane. I have to stop them. They’ll go on forever.”

This experiment illustrates a difference between the two cultures: 

• In general, with a few exceptions, Japanese students believe that if they keep working, they will eventually solve the problem.
• Most Americans think that solving problems has more to do with talent than with tenacity.
• To a Japanese student, the inability to find a solution to a problem results from failing to work hard enough.
• To an American student, failure results from lack of talent.
• Americans typically think that inborn ability is more important than effort and persistence.
• The majority of American students believe that the more effort that is required to succeed, the less talented they must be.

The Self-esteem myth

The American self-esteem myth has produced a narcissistic society that values talent, luck, and social status over effort. Advertisers have told us that a particular possession can provide self-esteem that will fill our lives with friends and fun. Many parents wanting their child to avoid the "agony of defeat" support the declaration proclaimed by Alice in her wonderland: “All have won, and all will receive prizes.”

Parents have been taught that compliments for effortless achievement will encourage children to try tasks that are more difficult. Just the opposite occurs. After all, why work harder when the humdrum brings praise?

THE MAKING OF GENIUS

Are geniuses born or made? Certainly successful people have innate gifts, but peak performance has more to do with hard work than with genetic endowments. Commitment and motivation precede outstanding performance. Dedication, drive, and determination appear to be more important factors than innate ability in developing expertise. Here are some examples:

MICHAEL JORDAN. Michael Jordan, perhaps the best basketball player of all time, was no child prodigy. He failed to make his high school basketball team when he was a high school sophomore. Jordan certainly wouldn’t have been a basketball player if he didn’t have height, leaping ability, quickness, and agility, but his phenomenal success probably had more to do with practice than inborn talent. In the well-recognized Nike ad Michael Jordan said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

MOZART. Early musical exposure and training had as much to do with his success as innate ability. Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, six years his senior, was considered a musical wonder-child. Mozart’s father, Leopold, a gifted violinist, and keyboardist was a music pedagogue who devoted his life to developing the musical skills of his children. He taught them “to wear the iron shirt" of discipline. Leopold believed musical skill came from grueling work.

PROFESSIONAL SOCCER PLAYERS. A study of professional soccer players suggests that they owe their success more to training than to talent.

CHESS GRANDMASTERS. Chess grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of game positions. Through years of practice, skilled players learn to recognize chessboard information that can be retrieved from long-term memory and they use this information to determine the best move for each situation. To develop their phenomenal memory for different outcomes based on the board position of each chess piece, grandmasters engage in years of exhausting study.

ORDINARY PEOPLE. Even the average performer engages in strenuous effort initially. Once ordinary people reach an acceptable level of performance, they relax and stop developing their talents. Average students tend to develop friendships with other average students. Golfers congregate with golfers who perform at their level. Ditto for artists, mathematicians, writers, and business professionals. For the masses, ease trumps expertise.

THE MOTIVATED FEW. In contrast to ordinary people, prodigies continue to undertake challenges that lie just beyond their competence. Top performers relish challenges. They consider mistakes a natural part of learning, and bounce back from failure with new strategies. Success builds on success because each accomplishment strengthens motivation.

THE VALUE OF FAILURE

Thomas Edison identified 10,000 filaments that wouldn’t work until he used the carbonized cotton thread for the light bulb. Edison wrote, “Our greatest weakness is giving up. The most certain way to success is to try one more time.”

• Henry Ford declared bankruptcy five times before he became an automotive industry leader.
• Walt Disney’s first cartoon production company went bankrupt. 
• Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a television reporter because she was “unfit for TV.”

Because challenge may initially lead to failure, all successful people have failed, many of them repeatedly. Failure is never fatal or final. Failure, instead of dooming us, helps develop new strategies, different approaches, and creative adjustments that produce success. Think of failure as the successful identification of what doesn’t work.

BALANCING POSITIVE REGARD WITH CHALLENGE

Children do best when parents establish a balance between positive regard and challenge. Here are some suggestions for helping children develop their talents:

• Praise accomplishments that require considerable effort. Praise for low expectations produces laziness.
• Praise persistence. Persistence produces peak performance.
• Praise trying different strategies.
• Praise personal progress.
• Teach the value of failure by talking about the struggles of famous people.
• Pay more attention to hard work and diligence than to grades, SAT scores, and class position.
• Avoid manipulative praise that is given to build confidence. Confidence comes from effort. Manipulative praise discourages hard work.
• Be specific with praise. Instead of “good job,” say something like this, “Your story was so vivid that I could hear the rain falling.”
• Be specific with criticism. A flat, “I’m disappointed in you” is a hollow statement. A specific reason for your disappointment gives the child direction and encourages positive change.

A society that values wealth, power, and beauty over effort breeds a narcissistic culture. Acknowledging the usefulness of failure, the fun of challenge, the value of persistence, and the benefit from hard work produces a healthy society.

Smarter Than Smart

Here are some ideas for becoming smarter than our IQ:

Know Thyself

Knowing our internal states—our emotional strengths and weaknesses—can help us develop our talents while minimizing our defects. For example, if we understand that we have a weakness for impulsive decision-making, we can train ourselves to sleep on a decision or wait through a weekend before making a determination. On the other hand, waiting until we have enough facts to be confident that we have covered all the bases causes deal-defeating delay. Taking action when we have 50-60% of the information prevents “analysis paralysis.”

Cool Under Pressure

Those with high emotional intelligence know that they have control over one factor—their internal state. While we are unable to control other people or events, we can control our feelings by changing our beliefs about people and events. We can also learn to manage our disruptive emotions—to control our temper, our pessimism, and our cynicism.

Moved By Action

Many talented people waste their abilities because they remain inactive. Productive action comes from the desire for pleasure, the urge to avoid pain, and the belief that goals can be accomplished. Motivation comes from craving success multiplied by the belief that we can accomplish our desires. Belief in ourselves is enhanced when we see others accomplishing their goals.

Winning with People

The art of getting along with people is more important than raw intelligence. Studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology proved that even in the technical areas of science and engineering, 85 percent of success depends on skill with managing people and 15 percent of financial success is due to technical knowledge. John D. Rockefeller said, “The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun.”

Persistence

The self-esteem myth has produced a narcissistic society that values innate talent, luck, and social status over effort. Advertisers have told us that a particular possession can provide self-esteem that will fill our lives with friends and fun. In our Wonderland World, we acknowledge the declaration proclaimed by Alice: “All have won, and all will receive prizes.”   

Parents have been taught that compliments for effortless achievement will encourage children to try tasks that are more difficult. Just the opposite occurs. After all, why work harder when the humdrum brings praise?

Encouragement, optimism, positive feedback, and confidence have tremendous value. The usefulness of failure, the fun of challenge, the values of persistence, and the lessons learned from hard work have even more value.

Spiritual Wisdom

 My good friend, Bill Hendricks, MD, and I were discussing the blog on emotional intelligence. Bill said, “That was good stuff when it came out twenty years ago, but have you thought about spiritual intelligence? What characterizes spiritual intelligence?”

I immediately suggested the key to spiritual wisdom began with humility. One has to humble oneself to God. Bill suggested that before humility came surrendering oneself to God. I suggested that in this case humility and surrender were synonyms. He didn’t agree.

I proposed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as essential. Bill agreed.

Bill then suggested listening to God was the third criteria for spiritual wisdom.

He then provocatively suggested three types of grace. Classical grace is the unmerited favor of God. According to Bill another grace that God grants is awareness that we have made a spiritual error. He gave this example:

This morning when I was shaving I began thinking about my retirement party in eighteen months. Everybody would come and patients would discuss their experiences and I would discuss my thoughts about them. Suddenly God’s grace intervened and told me I was selfishly patting myself on the back. Instead I should be focusing on being in the present, my tasks for the day, and how I could grow closer to God today. This experience could be called a revealing grace.

According to Bill spiritual grace occurs after God exposes our selfishness and invites us to have a closer relationship with Him.

I felt that Bill’s evocative words were well worth sharing. Now, of course, Bill and I are no more theologians than the Pope is a hall of fame baseball player, but perhaps these ideas will stimulate your thoughts about spiritual wisdom.

Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, a former brain sciences editor of The New York Times, has written a follow-up book to his enormously popular, Emotional Intelligence. The sequel, Working with Emotional Intelligence, is based on studies done by dozens of experts in 500 corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. An examination of these studies asserts that they can be cultivated:

SELF-AWARENESS

Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand our moods, emotions, and motivations and their effect on others.

Knowing our emotional strengths and weaknesses can help us develop our talents while minimizing our defects. We can fully use our talents while working on improving our weakness. 

Here are some suggestions: 

• Make a list of five strengths and develop them; make a list of five weaknesses and change them. Don't use the excuse, "Well, that's just the way I am."
• Because we don't know what we don't know, we would do well to ask our best and most trusted friend to analyze our strengths and weaknesses.

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Those with high emotional intelligence have the ability to control or redirect disturbing impulses and unproductive moods and to suspend judgment by thinking before acting. Self-regulation is marked by the following characteristics:

• Trustworthiness and integrity. Trustworthy individuals follow the Golden Rule---they do unto others as they would have others do unto them.
• Doing the right thing the right way.
• Emotional flexibility and open mindedness.
• Being comfortable with ambiguity. We must be able to make decisions based on the best evidence and understand that the only constant if life is change. 
• Life-long learning.
• The ability to manage disruptive emotions. We can  improve our frustration tolerance and control our impulses.

We have control over one factor—our minds. We are unable to control other people or events, but we can change our belief about people and events.

Events in our lives are not as important as our beliefs about events.

When storms flood our homes we can believe that we will never recover or we can choose to believe that we can overcome. 

Motivation

Motivation is a passion to work and to pursue goals with energy and persistence for reasons that go beyond money or status. Motivation comes from the following traits:

• A strong drive to achieve that comes from the desire to do our best with the talents and skills we have been given.
• Optimism comes from the ability to view failure as a learning experience. Viewing failure as an opportunity to learn what doesn't work enables optimists to persist despite adversity.
• The most successful individuals are able to subordinate their ego to the overall good of the entire team.

Many talented people waste their abilities because they remain inactive. If we keep the bat on our shoulders we will never hit a home run. 

EMPATHY

Empathy is the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people and skill in treating people according to their emotional reactions. Those with empathy possess the following skills:

• The ability to help others feel important by listening carefully to what they say and by praising desired behavior. 
• The ability to relate to all races and nationalities and to understand cultural differences.
• Giving respect and affection to others.  

WINNING WITH PEOPLE

Rapport comes from proficiency in building relationships by finding common ground marked by the following:

• Inspiring others to do what they don't want to do so they will become what they always wanted to be.
• Encouraging others by catching people doing something right.
• Finding what others want and then helping them achieve their goals.
• Believing that just about everyone has something to teach each of us.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie first published in 1936 remains the absolute best book for developing social skills. 

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Some people can jump higher and run faster than others. Some have better minds than others. Some have more musical talent than others. Not everyone will win. We will not receive equal prizes. Doing our best with our emotional intelligence is the best we can expect of ourselves. 

Living Smart

We all know someone who scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT and flunked out of college by the second semester. That’s because success in college, and in life, has little to do with raw intelligence. 

IQ predicts success about 20% of the time. Behavioral scientists have discovered that 80% of success depends on emotional factors.

Harvard students from the 1940s—a time when there was a wider range of IQ at that school—were tracked into middle age. The high IQ men were not anymore successful than the lower in intelligence. 

Similarly, 450 boys from Boston slums were followed into middle age. Success in this social group was not dependent on intelligence. Ten years after 81 valedictorians and salutatorians graduated from their high school, only four were at the highest level of young people of comparable age in their chosen profession. 

Academic intelligence fails to predict how one will react to the vicissitudes of life. Psychologists gave col­lege freshmen tests to measure optimism. Four years later, the psychologists found that optimism predicted grades better than SAT scores or high-school grades.

In a Met-Life Insurance Company study, insurance executives hired a special group of applicants who failed the normal screening tests, but scored high on optimism. The first year on the job, the "dumb" optimists sold 21% more insurance than the "smart" pessimists. The second year, the optimists sold 57% more insurance than the pessimists. " Dumb" opti­mists sell more insurance than "smart" pessimists.

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