God knows I’m no great fan of the
self-help genre. Actually, that would be some understatement, as not only have
I never bought a book under that label, but I tend to actively despise both
them and their readers (I’m arrogant and unsympathetic to my distressed fellow
human beings’ plight like that), an ugly tendency that leads me to hector
anybody I see reading them about the likely evils and shortcomings of their
content. Take a look at the almost 200 posts I’ve published in the last years
and, although being mainly concerned with moral philosophy and ethics (well,
and weightlifting, which ends up being the most practical part of it) you won’t
find much applicable advice on how you, anonymous reader, should conduct your
life.
Which makes some sense. I don’t know
you and your specific circumstances, so how could I dare to suggest you to do
this instead of that? (whatever “this” and “that” may be). However, a few weeks
ago I had a conversation with my elder son that looked like a semi-decent,
reasonably generalizable, piece of advice, and it seemed kinda selfish to keep
it to myself. So, breaking a lifelong tradition of being circumspect about
those issues, I’m gonna share in this post some thoughts that can be
immediately put in practice, and that can turn your actual, real, lived life
for the better (as opposed to my usual pabulum of a highly abstract nature,
which tends to be as practically useful as an Inuit sealskin jacket in the Sahara).
To begin with, we all want to get
better. By definition, we all want what is good, and we intuitively understand
what being good in certain areas consists in, although we may differ on the
details. I’m going to focus in four areas of goodness in which I think there is
wide agreement, both about their overall desirability (that is, almost
everybody, in any age and culture, agrees that they constitute a “good”, that
having a greater mastery in that area is a net positive for living a worthy
life) and about the most salient features being desired (what mastering such
area looks like). The four areas are:
·
Relationships
·
Intellectual
ability
·
Physical
ability
·
Transcendence
You may miss some areas that are important for
you, and you may find some in there that you don’t think are that salient right
now. Just bear with me, as I’ll be briefly justifying each one in turn. But there
is one area, in particular, that is conspicuously absent and that may cause
some puzzlement: work. So its absence requires some previous justification. Isn’t work, like, super-important? Specially,
in our materialistic, anomic, secularized societies, much more important than
some other areas in the list (I’m looking at you right now, transcendence)?
Don’t people show, in their day to day actions, that they value their work more
than relationships (all those broken or deprioritized friends and family ties),
more than intellectual ability (all those courses not taken, books not read),
more than physical ability (all those workouts missed and gym memberships left
to expire unused) and, surely, more than transcendence (what was that about,
again)?
In a sense, I’m not going to write about work
because sure as hell you don’t need another voice telling you how essential it
is for a fulfilling life and in order to develop your full potential. You are
already drowned by messages along those lines, and, you know what? They are
mostly hokum. I’ve been attending to a number of retirement parties lately,
some of them to say goodbye to lowly assistants (although much loved) and some
to CEOs and Chairmen (a more mixed bag, although I’ve been incredibly lucky to
work with very widely respected professionals at all levels) and the impression
I take is that, at the end of the day, even for those at the very top of the corporate
hierarchy, almost in every case your job is not all that it was hyped up to be.
Even for the captains of industry, the sacred entrepreneurs, the titans that
created companies from scratch and turned them in multi-billion dollar
concerns, what remains, what they are remembered for, is their gentleness (or
lack thereof), their intelligence (ditto) or, in one surprising case, how
insanely in shape he was. And that seems to be the norm: what do people
remember of Steve Jobs? That he was a) a tremendous jerk, b) pretty clever and
c) lucky (you don’t hear that last one much, but the undercurrent of his
biography underlines how he had the right ideas at the right place and time for
them to payback beyond anybody’s wildest dreams). Something similar could be
said of Bill Gates, Jack Welch or Lee Iacocca.
Which points to a second aspect of
how we perform our (paid) jobs that is also worth noting. Was Jobs (or Welch,
or Gates) a good worker (in their case, a good CEO)? Depends on who you ask,
and, more pointedly, depends on what moment in time you focus on. Jobs was
terrible in his first tenure (almost run Apple to the ground) and then stellar
in his second (but then again, was it an increased learned ability, or did he
just get lucky)? People close to Gates say he was at best mediocre, but
consistently lucky, and consistently good at finding great helpers to
compensate for his deficiencies (or lack of interest). Then again others say
the opposite, and maintain he was a second to none manager and visionary (a most
rare combination). Same with Welch, who oversaw wild fluctuations in the total
share value of GE (the metric on which he, and the rest of his sycophants, were
fixated). Work performance, simply, is notoriously hard to measure, and there
is nothing like a consensus on what excellence as a worker means. A lack of
consensus, by the way, that is played yearly in performance reviews all over
the world when, regardless of what “objective” goals and metrics have been set,
managers the world over end up rewarding those workers with personalities more
like themselves, and then try to rationalize such self-preference the best they
can.
Furthermore, even if there were a
consensus of what a good worker looks like, beyond someone healthy, good at
relationships (so it is easy to get along and work with him) and clever (three
areas we have already covered), I’m not sure such set of qualities would be
“trainable”, which will allow me to finish this justificatory detour with a
clarification about the purpose of this post. To that end, I need to explain
the difference between “trainable” and “non-trainable” abilities. The paradigm
of the first group would be physical strength, and the defining feature of the
group is that we have a pretty good understanding of how to increase the
abilities within it (applying consistently the principle of progressive
overload, as I expounded in this old post: Progressive Overload in a nutshell). A possible paradigm of the second
group could be playing rugby (or being a CEO), as their defining feature is
that we don’t have a clear grasp on how to improve at them, other than
practicing something as close to the real thing as possible. We could try to
break it down in its components (in the case of Rugby, say, decide that playing
well consists in having good positional awareness, “reading” where the ball
should go, running fast, passing both far and precisely, tackling bigger guys
unerringly without being injured, dribbling opponents, etc.) and try to develop
protocols to improve in each of them separately, but as that would seem
insanely time-consuming, and there would always be doubts about how effectively
each of those “component” abilities transferred to the actual play, that is not
the most common approach. What most people do is just devote a ton of time to
play, in actual games or in training, and hope that such devotion will pay off
in enhancing (more or less) in unison all the components, and thus in making
them better players overall. Which is what usually happens. The application of
such strategy to work would be “do as much of it as you think you need to get
to the level of competence you desire to achieve”… which is essentially something
you already knew. But I can not add much more, and neither can any
self-professed self-help guru, as what that level of competence consists in is
subject to debate, probably quite different from one job to the next and has an
uncertain influence, compared with other factors outside your control (like
global market conditions, personality of boss or fit with corporate culture,
all of which are proxies for “sheer luck”, as much as we would like to think
life is fair, meritocracy works and everybody really gets what they deserve).
What we do know in Rugby is that,
everything else being equal (ability reading the field, precision in passing,
ability tackling), the stronger player will win over the weaker one, so
strength being highly trainable it always pays to devote time to develop it.
Similarly, in your job I can safely bet that being better at forming meaningful
relationships, having more mental acuity and sharpness and having more
endurance and stamina (being physically more fit) are going to be beneficial.
Regarding transcendence… you’ll have to wait ‘til we get there to judge to what
extent it is similarly positive and worthy of your attention and time. Without
more ado, then, let’s talk about how best to train those qualities:
Relationships
This one should be a cinch. Probably
the single factor with more influence in how satisfied we are with our own life
is the density of our social network, the amount of high-quality relationships
we have managed during our life to weave with lovers, family members, friends, and
even colleagues and professional partners (doubt it? Have the most cursory look
at the Harvard longitudinal study: The Harvard Study which has been following the
original participants for seven decades now, and has been expanded to include
people from different socioeconomic status, their wives and children). Having many people
who care for you, and whom you care for, not only makes you happier, but
strongly protects your health, both mental and physical. So investing in
maintaining such a robust network should be a doozy.
Sadly, a surprising majority of
people in the West doesn’t seem to have got the message, and get to the end of
their working life estranged from their families (all those years too busy
working to devote much time to them, you know?) and knowing very few people
outside of their professional circle. And those inside, after retirement, don’t
seem all that interested in maintaining much in the form of a relationship with
them, once they can not advance or promote their own interests (yep,
professional relationships based on self-interest are mostly selfish like that,
sorry to break the bad news to you).
Given, then, that we accept such
state of affairs is bad, and thus that it makes sense to invest time in improving
our ability to form that kind of meaningful, stable, long-term, rewarding
relationships, how can you go about to get better at it? Simple: family
reunions. Yeah, I know, you already visit your parents in Thanksgiving, and in
Christmas every other year. Too tough already, given you don’t get along all
that well with that know-it-all of your brother-in-law. And you went some years
ago to the wake of that second uncle, and saw again those cousins you hadn’t
seen since you were a freckled and carefree kid. Starting to see the problem? Meeting
people once a year or less is no way to sustain, even less nurture and grow, a
relationship! My suggestion is going full Mediterranean here: lunch at your
parents (or your spouses parents’) house every friggin’ weekend, unless
something really big impedes it (“really big” means second coming of Christ is
probably an acceptable excuse, hangover from poker night with friends is
probably not). And the more the merrier, prod your old ones to invite aunts,
uncles, cousins, old family friends, whomever has the thinnest relationship
that is still breathing.
I know sometimes having lunch (or dinner) w extended family may seem a chore. You don’t necessarily agree with the political views of your siblings, although, being same blood, you are willing to give ‘em a pass. But the in-laws? Well, they are putting up with your kin much more than you, so shut up, man up and be nice to them also! Because that’s the trick, that’s what makes the weekly family lunch invaluable to develop your relationship-forming abilities. You are constantly reminded that your own view is not that important. Doesn’t matter how much or how little you have accomplished in life, for your parents you will always be that little lovely critter that run around the house screaming every Christmas morning, the one that was run over by a bus and got out smiling as if nothing had happened, or that gulped a bottle of rat poison and had to be rushed to the hospital to had an orogastric lavage or whatever foolish and mildly embarrassing thing you did when very young that still is regularly brought up in any reunion (not to mention how huge your big toe was when you were born…). And for your siblings you will always be that mildly annoying, arrogant, self-important dick that competed with them for mom and dad’s attention, told them incessantly they were really (really!) adopted and paid them so little attention that didn’t remember at all their life transforming summer trip to Italy and keep on insisting they must have imagined it all. And that’s OK! Even if it is a pain to relive (again and again!) those little things, because by anchoring ourselves in a shared narrative they help to put us in our place and remind us of our (relative) insignificance in the grand scheme of things, and that’s really what a relationship, and love, are about: being a part of a whole bigger than you, a whole that will go on after you are not here anymore, a part that you didn’t entirely chose (you were born into it without anybody asking your opinion beforehand) but you didn’t entirely renounce, so it’s not as if you can’t be fiercely proud of it anyway.
And even more important, those
reunions remind you that for a meaningful relationship to flourish it has to be
disinterested, unselfish. It has to be “not about you”, or not too much anyway
(and certainly, not only about you, as our hyper-individualistic, self-centered
age is wont to forget). It’s great if you have a serious illness to have
friends and family really concerned, and visiting you in the hospital and all,
but for most of your life you keep on seeing them, and putting up with their
put downs, just because they are your friends and family, not because you
expect to receive something in return.
Which takes us to the thorny issue
of relationships within your work environment. Why not train to be better at
them by practicing them more directly? Wouldn’t it be more advisable to
recommend to go out to lunch every week with a group of co-workers? To organize
social outings with the colleagues? Absolutely not. That is akin to putting the
carriage in front of the horses. Remember: you don’t push yourself to see your
family more often to be able to form more bonds at work. Forming meaningful
relationships is not a means to a higher end (like professional progress or
making more money, or closing more sales). Forming meaningful relationships is
an end in itself, the highest end, indeed, if you want to be happier (brief
aside: if you really want to be
happier there is absolutely one end you should
not pursue, and that is happiness itself; It is an ironic feature of human nature that
the more obsessively you pursue happiness the less likely you are to achieve
it). And, ahem, and sorry again if this is news to you, professional
relationships are rarely deep enough to qualify as “meaningful” or “happiness
enhancing”. Remember the last chapter of 30 Rock, and the frustration of “Tracy
Jordan” as the character played by Tina Fey explains to him that after all
those years working together they would probably never see each other again? I
found that pretty insightful, as after a number of job changes I can attest that
more often than not job relationships are quite volatile, and being supported
by each party pursuing its own personal interest, they dissolve quickly and without
a trace.
I grant that there is a special
category of job relationship that can endure for the long term: the ones made
in the first years of professional career (5 to 10, tops), when you are fresh
out from college and are suddenly surrounded by similarly minded colleagues, as
clueless as yourself, and probably as willing to give it all and carve a name
for themselves in the corporate world. You can make real friends with your
equals then, but after those 5-10 initial years you have too many responsibilities, the
environment typically becomes too political, you can make favors, and ask for
favors that may enhance or hinder other people careers, so they just stop
approaching you for your charm and sympathy, and start doing it to see what
they can gain by associating with you.
So yes, by all accounts, participate in your company’s social life (respectfully and graciously… the young intern that you think is making a pass at you is probably a) not making it and b) even if she is, it is not because you are so goddamn attractive and irresistible, but because your position and authority make you appear so… just say no), but don’t think that somehow compensates for not having anybody that gives a rat’s ass about you outside of your professional circle. It doesn’t, and if that is the case, you better do something to fix that!
Intellectual
Ability
If the previous one was easy, this
one is darn complex. I’m sure you are already familiar with a thousand
miraculous solutions to make you sharper, more clever, a faster reasoner, and
thus better at a number of mental fields (mathematics, learning foreign
languages, passing IQ tests, improving your SAT score and whatnot): from mobile
apps that supposedly train your brain to listening audiotapes while sleeping to
solving sudokus to consuming nootropic drugs, the market is awash with products
that promise to increase your intelligence for a pittance. Which is all right,
as all those solutions have one thing in common: they don’t work. There is only
one thing that consistently seems to work: having chosen the right parents, as
general intelligence (which is the foundation on which all the other abilities
are constructed) is both highly heritable and not very amenable to training.
What a bummer! Does that mean that
you are stuck with the same mediocre mental capability you were born with, and
that you are condemned to never get past first degree French, unable to go
beyond “Bon Jour, mon nom est Choderlos,
comment est que vous vous appellez?” (or something similarly lame)? Well,
kinda yes, but the mileage you can extract from that predefined set of
capabilities may vary, and I’m going to propose a proven method to get the
maximum from what you have got. I’ll promptly recognize that the sample size on
which the proof has been made is somewhat modest (one person, I’ll let my
astute readers guess his identity).
The method is pretty simple,
actually, and darn cheap. Its only drawback is that to bear fruits it requires
a ton of willpower and grit, as it demands a lot of consistency during a very
long period of time. Here it goes: Read. Lots. Of. Boring. Books.
That’s it. That’s the optimal method
to increase your mental acuity, your cerebral suppleness, your reasoning
capabilities, your working memory and your symbolic manipulation capacity, all
at once. You may understandably have some doubts, so let me clarify a bit:
·
Read:
that part should be uncontroversial, reading is the fastest way to absorb new
information, and the more information you have at your command, the better you
can think. Marshall McLuhan identified reading from an alphabetic writing as
the key to Western dominance (the basic tool that taught us how to solve
problems in the most generic way imaginable: break them down as we break the
words in syllables, tackle each one separately, and then put the solution back together
as we do with the meaning of the word) and I recently read in Emmanuel Todd
(absolutely atrocious and unwarranted conclusions, but that would be the matter
for another post) that learning to read between 5 and 10 years irreversibly
alters the kids’ brains making them more plastic and more intelligent. So no
audiobooks, and no videos. Just read.
·
Lots:
that means really a big number. Twenty, maybe (gasp) even fifty? Nah. Think in
thousands, not in hundreds (well, I already warned you that it required time,
didn’t I?) At least half an hour every single day, no matter how exhausted you
arrive from work; how badly you want to watch TV, or play videogames, or hang
out with friends; how hung over you feel from yesterday’s party or how
seductively your wife is trying to woo you to the conjugal bed. Aws, OK, in
that last case you can go and leave reading for another day. We are talking of
week days, of course. Everything under three hours in the weekend is considered
cheating. Please note that I’m talking about the bare minimum. For the method
to work, that half hour during the week and three hours in the weekend
constitute the non-negotiable floor, but regarding a possible ceiling, the sky
is the limit. If you can leave work earlier and clock 2-3 hours on a weekday,
so much better! If on a blessed Sunday you can read for 14-16 hours go gladly
for it! Few pleasures compare to finishing a couple of numbingly, maddeningly,
apocalyptically boring books in a single day! You really go to bed being a so
much better man, and feeling so contented with yourself that it truly defies
words.
·
Boring:
I know what you are thinking now: “boring? Why do they have to be boring? If I’m
going to read thousands of books surely I can at least make it as enjoyable an
effort as possible! If I read 2,000-3,000 books I’m gonna turn into an
insufferable egghead, doesn’t matter if they are all about Jewish jokes and
Sci-Fi and erotica”. Nope, sonny, it doesn’t work like that. You read 3,000
books of good science fiction, or heroic fantasy, or YAF (is that even a
thing?) and you end up being definitely nerdier, but not a iota more clever.
What really makes your “cleverness muscle” (aka brain) pump is forcing yourself
to go through concepts and ideas you don’t care a patootie about. Having to
fight to stay awake as your vision crawls across the page mercilessly scribbled
with combinations of words that make barely any sense. And once you reach the
end of the page, having to start again because you realize you haven’t
registered a single concept, and if you were asked about the meaning of what
you just read you would have to stare blankly and confess you didn’t have a
clue. I recognize that the prospect of slaving through those many boring books
may seem like an insufferable drudgery to many, so soul-crushing and
willpower-depleting as to seem an insurmountable obstacle in your way to cleverness.
All I can recommend is the “weightwatchers” strategy: join a group of similarly
minded people to which you declare your intentions and where you report
periodically about your progress so they keep you accountable. Human teenagers
have been doing it for centuries, it is called “university career” and its main
tenet has always been to subject the students to a syllabus of works as boring
and unrelated with anything actually done in a real job as the teachers could
get away with. Indeed, I find it so inspiring that I have been studying one or
another, almost without interruption, since I was 17 years old…
·
Books:
it almost goes without saying, but only books will do the trick. Reading
millions of fortune cookies, advertising placards, movie posters or T-shirt
messages won’t do the trick. It has to be long and convoluted and with many
pages so you have to keep your working memory fully engaged to try to remember
as much as possible of what came before. I hear some TV shows now (“lost”, “breaking
bad”, “the sopranos”, “game of thrones”) demand almost as much from their
viewers as your average Russian novel from the XIXth century… maybe, maybe not,
but there are simply not so many shows of that kind around, and they don’t
exercise our ability to break problems down in tiny components and then
reassemble the solution from the ground up, so I’ll stick with books, and I
recommend you do too.
So there you are, the optimal
training strategy for becoming more clever, more disciplined, more acute, is to
read lots and lots of boring books. Of matters you are not familiar with. Of
course, at a certain point you run out of matters, and you start to actually
enjoy reading XIVth century metaphysics, or tracts on the philosophy of right
of the Carolingian codex, or treatises on the sociology of Andaman Islands
tribesmen, as you recognize events, ideas, theories, and you see how they “fit”
in the vast and wonderful network of human knowledge. Does that mean that you
can not keep on pushing the envelope, and have to admit you have reached a
definitive plateau and can only stagnate in your mental development? Far from
it! At that point you introduce reading in foreign languages you have not yet
mastered. But that is a very advanced technique which we will leave for another
day.
Another thing we will leave for
another day is discussing the optimal strategies for training the two remaining
skills (physical ability and transcendence), as this post is already
inordinately long, and I’ve surely taxed the patience of my readers more than
enough…
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