The Art of Self-Motivation
The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.
—Saint Augustine
For this chapter to work, we need to enlist a motivation expert. Fortunately, we found that person, and that person is you. You are the world’s top expert at figuring out what motivates you. You already know your deepest values and motivations. In this chapter, all we are doing is helping you discover them.
Pleasure, Passion, and Higher Purpose
Tony Hsieh is an inspiration to me. At the young age of twenty-four, Tony sold LinkExchange, the company he cofounded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He later became the CEO of Zappos and grew it from almost nothing to a company with a billion dollars in annual sales. But his entrepreneurial success is not what inspires me. What really inspires me is his wise, skillful, and courageous use of happiness in a corporate setting. Tony figured out that the secret to Zappos’ success is “Delivering Happiness”, which is also the title of his book. He created a corporate culture that is conducive to employee happiness; happy employees then provide customers the best customer service in the industry, and happy customers spend more money at Zappos. In other words, happiness is not just something nice to have; it is also the centerpiece of Zappos’ business strategy and the foundation of its business success. That is really inspiring.
Tony has great insights in the process of happiness in the context of work. He describes three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose.1
1. Pleasure: This type of happiness is about always chasing the next high. It is the rock-star type of happiness because it is very hard to maintain unless you are living the lifestyle of a rock star.
2. Passion: Also known as “flow,” where peak performance meets peak engagement, and time flies by.
3. Higher Purpose: This is about being part of something bigger than yourself that has meaning to you.
One interesting feature about these three is their varying sustainability. The happiness that arises from pleasure is highly unsustainable. Once the pleasurable stimulus ceases, or if you habituate to it, then your happiness returns to your default set point. Happiness that arises from flow is much more sustainable and you are far less likely to habituate to it. Happiness arising from higher purpose, in contrast, is highly sustainable. In Tony’s and also my own experience, this form of happiness is very resilient and can last for a very long time, especially if that higher purpose has an altruistic origin.
Interestingly, we instinctively chase after pleasure believing it to be the source of sustainable happiness. Many of us spend most of our time and energy chasing pleasure, sometimes enjoying flow, and once in a while, we think about higher purpose. Tony’s insight suggests we should be doing precisely the reverse. We should be spending most of our time and energy working on higher purpose, sometimes enjoying flow, and every now and then, savoring rock-star pleasure. This is the most logical path toward sustainable happiness, at least in relation to our work.
This insight also suggests the best way to find motivation at work is to find our own higher purpose. If we know what we value most and what is most meaningful to us, then we know what we can work on that serves our higher purpose. When that happens, our work can become a source of sustainable happiness for us. We can then become very good at our work because we are happy doing it, which in turn allows us to enjoy the happiness of flow with increasing frequency. Finally, when we become really good at our work, we may gain recognition. Occasionally, we may even get it in a massive dose, such as a big bonus, a special mention by a company vice president, a story on the New York Times, or an expression of gratitude from the Dalai Lama. This is the occasional rock-star pleasure experience that serves as icing on our motivational cake. Once we are working toward fulfilling our higher purpose, the work itself is the reward (but still, the occasional, fat bonus check is very nice, in case you are wondering, boss).
Motivation in Three Easy Steps
In this chapter, we will introduce three practices for motivation:
1. Alignment: Aligning our work with our values and higher purpose
2. Envisioning: Seeing the desired future for ourselves
3. Resilience: The ability to overcome obstacles in our path
Combined, we hope these practices constitute a complete package of tools to help you find out how you want your life to unfold and to navigate the path to get there.
Alignment
Having Fun for a Living
Alignment means aligning our work with our values and higher purpose.
Half jokingly, I think of alignment as finding a way to never have to work again for the rest of your life and still get paid. The secret is to create a situation in which your work is something you do for fun, so you are doing it for your own entertainment anyway and somebody just happens to pay you for it (and since you are nice to them, you do not want to say no to their money). I know of many successful and highly productive people in this situation. Warren Buffett is a famous example, still working … er … having fun at work in his eighties. Norman Fischer once told me he has never worked a single day in his life, even though he is one of the most sought-after Zen teachers in the country and is busier than most Silicon Valley professionals I know. Closer to home, most of the best engineers I have worked with write code as a hobby, so they really just come to the office to hobby away and get paid.
Work of this nature has at least one of these two qualities, very often both:
1. The work is deeply meaningful to you
2. It generates a state of flow in you
This is, of course, in perfect alignment with Tony Hsieh’s pleasure, passion, and higher purpose framework.
Flow
Flow is so important, it is worth mentioning in some detail. Daniel Goleman calls it “the ultimate motivator.” Flow is a state of peak performance discovered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who spent more than two decades studying it in individuals. Csikszentmihalyi describes it as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”2 Athletes know this state as being in the zone. Flow has been reported widely in a very diverse number of fields, such as climbing rocks, performing brain surgery, filing papers, and even in sitting meditation (in fact, one way to think of flow is as Zen in action).
Flow occurs when the task at hand matches the skill level of the practitioner, such that it is difficult enough to provide a challenge but not so difficult that it overwhelms the practitioner. If the task is too easy relative to skill level, the practitioner will be bored or apathetic. In contrast, if it is too difficult, the practitioner becomes anxious or worried. Flow occurs when difficulty is just right.
Flow is a state of focused attention, so people skillful in focusing their attention, such as meditators or martial arts experts, are more likely to find themselves in flow. If you have been doing the mindfulness exercises in the early chapters of this book, you are already halfway there, Grasshopper.
“But this is how I usually improve flow.”
Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
Bestselling author Daniel Pink proposes a framework that is nicely complementary to what we have already discussed. Pink uses fifty years of research in behavioral science to argue that external rewards like money are not the best motivator of high performance; instead, the best motivators are what he calls “intrinsic motivators”—motivation we find within ourselves. The three elements of true motivation are:
1. Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives
2. Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters
3. Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves3
In his TED talk, Pink tells the fascinating story of research based on the candle problem.4 The candle problem works like this: participants are given a box of tacks, a candle, and matches. They are asked to find a way to attach the candle to the wall.
It takes a while to figure out the problem, but the solution is fairly simple: empty the box of tacks, attach the candle to the inside of the box, and then attach the box to the wall with a tack. The key creative “aha” moment needed to solve this problem is figuring out that the box is part of the solution. This is not immediately obvious; you usually begin by thinking of the box merely as something to contain the tacks. So the creative leap here is recognizing the nonobvious use of the box—sort of like thinking outside the box, about the box.
“I’m having real problems thinking outside the box.”
Here’s the interesting thing: you have two randomly assigned groups. For individuals in one group, the incentivized group, you tell them the faster they can solve this problem, the more money they’ll get paid. For individuals in the other group, the control group, you tell them they will get paid the same amount of money regardless of how long they take. Here’s the really interesting find: the incentivized group did worse! That’s right, boys and girls, external incentives not only did not work but were counterproductive.
But wait, the story gets better. In another set of experiments, researchers gave the above items (a box of tacks, a candle, and matches) to participants with the box separate from the tacks. In this case, it is immediately obvious that the box is part of the solution, therefore there is no creative “aha” moment needed. In this case, the incentivized group does better than the control group.
What this and many other similar experiments suggest is traditional monetary incentives work well for routine, rule-based work: jobs that do not require a lot of creativity. For the type of work that requires creativity or other cognitive skills, monetary incentives do not work well; they can even be counterproductive.
For those types of work, the only motivators that work really well are the intrinsic ones: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In fact, they work so well, they can even turn supposedly soul-deadening jobs into jobs people become proud of. A great example is the customer service team at Zappos. They call themselves the Zappos Customer Loyalty Team (ZCLT). Team members are given very simple instructions: serve the customer, solve the customer’s problem, do it the way you want. This, plus attention to employees’ professional growth, plus their corporate motto of “delivering happiness,” infuses autonomy, mastery, and purpose to the jobs of the ZCLT folks. The result is happy folks delivering customer service that is sometimes rated even more highly than Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.5
Know and Align Thyself
Alignment is built upon self-awareness. When you know yourself at a deep level, you begin to understand your core values, purposes, and priorities. You know what is really important to you and what gives you meaning. With this clarity, you know what makes you happy at work and how best to contribute to the world. You will then know what work situation you want to create for yourself. When the right opportunity presents itself, you will be able to work in ways that offer you autonomy, mastery, and purpose. With that, your work will become a source of your happiness.
The cornerstone of knowing and aligning thyself is mindfulness. Even if you have no other practice than mindfulness alone, you will, over time, create the level of self-awareness you need to find alignment. Mindfulness alone is sufficient—that is the good news.
The better news is there are also other ways to help you clarify your values and higher purpose to yourself. One way is to tell them to other people. Things like values and higher purposes are fairly abstract topics, and the act of verbalizing them forces us to make them clearer and more tangible to ourselves. Another way is to journal. Once again, a similar mechanism is at work—the act of verbalizing abstract thoughts makes them clear and tangible. We find that doing these exercises in a structured way can be very effective. In our class, for example, many participants told us they gained a useful amount of clarity with just a few minutes of speaking to each other.
DISCOVERING VALUES AND HIGHER PURPOSE
If you are doing this alone at home, do a Journaling exercise (see Chapter 4) for a few minutes with one or both of these suggested prompts:
• My core values are…
• I stand for…
Alternatively, if you have friends or family members to work with (lucky you), do a Mindful Listening exercise (see Chapter 3) in a group of two or three. Take turns to speak. The speaker starts with a monologue, which can be any length, and after that, the group engages in a free conversation when the listeners can ask clarifying questions or make short comments. The only rule during the conversation is the (original) speaker has preemptive priority, which means he or she has priority in speaking and when he or she speaks, nobody can interrupt.
Possible topics of the monologue are:
• What are your core values?
• What do you stand for?
After everybody has a chance to speak, have a meta-conversation to talk about what this experience was like for each of you.
“Core values, core values… Hmm…”
Envisioning
Envisioning is based on a very simple idea: it’s much easier to achieve something if you can visualize yourself already achieving it. Psychiatrist Regina Pally describes it this way:
According to neuroscience, even before events happen the brain has already made a prediction about what is most likely to happen, and sets in motion the perception, behaviors, emotions, physiologic responses and interpersonal ways of relating that best fit with what is predicted. In a sense, we learn from the past what to predict for the future and then live the future we expect.6
Or as Michael Jordan says, “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
In 2005, my friend Roz Savage became the first woman to complete the Atlantic Rowing Race solo. That’s right—one woman, one boat, 103 days of rowing across three thousand miles of open ocean. Her cooking stove failed after twenty days and all four of her oars broke, but she made it. But that’s just for starters. Roz later became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. She did it in three stages. In 2008, she rowed solo from San Francisco to Oahu in Hawaii; in 2009, from Hawaii to Tarawa in Kiribati; and in 2010 to Madang in Papua New Guinea.
Roz wasn’t always an adventurer. She insists that before her rowing adventures, she led a normal, comfortable, mostly sedentary, middle-class lifestyle like many of us. She was a management consultant and project manager at an investment bank in London, with a steady income and a house in the suburbs.
Sometime in her midthirties, she did an exercise writing her own obituary. What would people say about her after she died, she wondered. She wrote two versions of her obituary. The first version reflected how things would turn out given her then-current life trajectory. The second version reflected the life she aspired to live. She made a very important discovery during that process. She realized that writing the first version drained so much of her energy, she could not finish it, while she was so energized while writing the second version, she did not want to stop. That was her life-changing insight. She eventually gave up her old life, her job, her steady income, her house, and her marriage to pursue her dream of rowing across oceans.
Some people think Roz must have been wealthy to be able to let go of everything to pursue her dreams. Actually, she wasn’t. She told me that when she started rowing across the Atlantic, her entire net worth was her boat and everything inside it (including the cooking stove that eventually broke).
What led Roz to her life-changing insight was an envisioning exercise. It helped her to discover her deepest values and motivations and, at the same time, allowed her to envision her desired future and to consolidate that future in her mind.
“Man, writing my obituary’s tougher than I thought.”
Discover Your Ideal Future
In Search Inside Yourself, we teach an envisioning practice similar to what Roz did for herself. The basic idea is to envision, discover, and consolidate our ideal future in the mind by writing about it as if it were already true. This is a very powerful practice I learned from my friend Barbara Fittipaldi, president and CEO of the Center for New Futures.
Here are the instructions. Kids, do try this at home; you are experts.
DISCOVERING MY IDEAL FUTURE
This is a writing exercise. We will do this over 7 minutes, which is longer than our usual writing exercises, and there is only one prompt. This exercise can be very fun and fulfilling.
The prompt is:
If everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years?
The more detailed the imagery in your mind, the better this exercise will work. Hence, consider these questions before writing. In this future:
• Who are you and what are you doing?
• How do you feel?
• What do people say about you?
Let’s spend a minute in silent contemplation before writing.
(1-minute pause)
Start writing.
There are variants to this exercise. You can spend more time on it, such as an hour or two instead of seven minutes. Or you can change the destination date; if five years in the future does not work for you, try ten or twenty years. Yet another variation is to pretend you are already living in your ideal future five years from now and to write diary entries from the future. This is the variation we used in Barbara’s class.
There are at least two other major variations. One is to write your own obituary, as Roz did, and if you like, write two versions like Roz did. Another is to visualize this scene:
You are attending a talk as part of a large audience. Everybody in the audience, including you, is deeply touched and inspired by what the speaker is saying. That speaker is your future self twenty years from now.
Questions to consider:
• What is the speaker saying and how is it touching and inspiring you?
• What about the speaker makes you look up to him/her?
Talk About Your Ideal Future a Lot
If you find yourself inspired by your ideal future, I highly recommend talking about it a lot to other people. There are two important benefits. First, the more you talk about it, the more real it becomes to you. This works even if your dream is highly improbable or impossible. My own dream, for example, is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime. I envision a world that is peaceful because inner peace, inner joy, and compassion are widespread, and those qualities are widespread as a consequence of ancient wisdom practices being made accessible to the modern world. I envision myself as a person who makes wisdom practices accessible by making them understandable, practical, and useful in the corporate world and beyond. When I started thinking about this, I knew my goal was impossible, but I talked about it to a lot of people anyway. The more I talked about it, the more it went from being impossible to implausible, and then from implausible to possible, and more importantly, it went from possible to actionable. I reached a state in my mind in which I felt there were actually things I could do to move it forward.
The second important benefit is the more you talk to people about your ideal future, the more likely you can find people to help you. This is especially true if your aspiration for the future is altruistic in nature because people will rush to help you. If your wish is to drive a nice Lexus, nobody will care. However, if your wish is something altruistic—for example, you want to feed every hungry person in the world, or you want to make sure no homeless person in San Francisco ever dies from the cold, or you aspire to help disadvantaged kids in your community learn better—and you are sincere about your wish to serve others, I guarantee the most common response will be, “How can I help?” When you are genuinely moved to help others, you inspire people with your altruism, and when you inspire them, they want to help you.
Truth be told, I was actually surprised by how well it worked. When I first started talking to others about my aspirations for world peace, I was pleasantly surprised how few people thought I was crazy (only two, so far). As it became more real to me, I began speaking about it with increasing confidence and, after a while, I noticed that people wanted to help me or introduce other people to me who could help me.
Soon, I was building a network of allies (whom I jokingly call the “grand conspiracy for world peace”). I found myself befriending many luminaries of the contemplative world such as Matthieu Ricard, and luminaries in the peace-making world like Scilla Elworthy. Richard Gere and the Dalai Lama gave me hugs. Owen Wilson and will.i.am said they wanted to help me. I was invited to deliver a TED talk on compassion at the United Nations. Many hundreds of strangers tell me that I have inspired them. I am amazed by how much my simple aspiration for world peace has resonated with so many people, and I am humbled by all the friendship and kindness I have experienced.
I learned that people want to be inspired. Every aspiration of service we have and every act of charity we perform inspires others. Hence, if you have altruistic aspirations, especially if you are already acting on them, I very much encourage you to share them with others so you can inspire more goodness in the world.
Resilience
Resilience is the ability to overcome obstacles along the way. Alignment and envisioning help you find out where you want to go, and resilience helps you get there.
We can train resilience on three levels:
1. Inner calm: Once we can consistently access the inner calm in the mind, it becomes the foundation of all optimism and resilience.
2. Emotional resilience: Success and failure are emotional experiences. By working at this level, we can increase our capacity for them.
3. Cognitive resilience: Understanding how we explain our setbacks to ourselves and creating useful mental habits help us develop optimism.
Inner Calm
I once asked Matthieu Ricard the most obvious question one can ever ask of the happiest man in the world. The question was: are there ever days when you are not happy?
Like most wise masters you see in Chinese kung fu movies, Matthieu answered with a metaphor: “Think of happiness as a deep ocean. The surface may be choppy, but the bottom is always calm. Similarly, there are days when a deeply happy person may feel sad—for example, he sees people suffering—but underneath that sadness, there is a large depth of unwavering happiness.”
This lovely metaphor also works for calmness and resilience. If you have access to a deep inner calm in your mind, then no matter the ups and downs of day-to-day life, you can always be resilient. Nothing can get you down for a prolonged period of time because every time something beats you down, you can always rest and recover in that inner calm and, depending on how deep your practice is, bounce back quickly.
Fortunately, this inner calm is accessible to everyone. As we mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3, by training in mindfulness, the mind can become calm, clear, and happy, and the more we practice mindfulness, the more the mind becomes so.
Just do a lot of mindfulness meditation, and this aspect will be “automagically” taken care of.
Emotional Resilience
Success and failure are emotional experiences. These emotions can give rise to grasping and aversion, which can hold us back and hamper our ability to achieve our goals. We can build upon the foundations of inner calm with practices that help us deal with the emotions involved in success and failure.
Like all emotional experiences, success and failure manifest most strongly in our bodies. Therefore, the place to start working on those emotions is in the body. The idea is to become comfortable with experiencing these emotions in our bodies, or in the words of Mingyur Rinpoche, making them our friends. We also let go of any grasping or aversion that arises. When we become capable of containing the emotions and able to let go of grasping and aversion, we can become emotionally resilient to success and failure.
In formal practice in Search Inside Yourself, we begin by calming the mind and doing a quick body scan, and then bringing up memories of failure and success. In each case, we experience them in our bodies, letting go of grasping and aversion. Here are the instructions:
MEDITATION ON RESILIENCE
Calming the Mind
Start with 3 deep breaths.
Bring gentle awareness to the breath, becoming aware of the in and out breaths, and the spaces in between.
Let’s bring attention to our bodies, beginning by focusing on sensations in the feet, legs, knees, pelvis, chest, arms, shoulders, back, neck, back of head, and face.
(Long pause) Failure
Let’s now shift gears into an experience of failure for 4 minutes.
Bring to mind a memory of an event when you experienced a sense of significant failure—not having met your goal, having let yourself and others down. See, hear, and feel it.
Observe all the associated emotions and see how they manifest in the body.
(2-minute pause)
Let us see if we can create the ability to experience all those emotions without aversion.
Consider these emotions you are experiencing as simply physiological sensations. That is all. They may be unpleasant, but they are simply experiences. Let’s simply allow these experiences to be present, to come as they wish, and to go as they wish. Just let them be, in a kind, gentle, generous way.
(Long pause) Success
Let’s now have more fun and shift gears into an experience of success for 4 minutes.
Bring to mind a memory of an event when you experienced a sense of significant success—having exceeded your goal, being admired by all, feeling great about yourself. See, hear, and feel it.
Observe all the associated emotions and see how they manifest in the body.
(2-minute pause)
Let us see if we can create the ability to experience all those emotions without grasping.
Consider these emotions you are experiencing as simply physiological sensations. That is all. They may be very pleasant, but they are simply experiences. Let’s simply allow these experiences to be present, to come as they wish, and to go as they wish. Just let them be, in a kind, gentle, generous way.
(Long pause) Returning to Calm
Let us now return to the present for 3 minutes. Check in with your body and how it feels now.
(Pause)
Take a deep breath and let go. Continue a relaxed attention on breathing and, if you feel so inclined, bring a hand up to rest on the chest.
(Pause)
Continue noticing what happens in your body, and slowly open your eyes.
Thank you for your attention.
Cognitive Resilience
We can further build upon emotional resilience with cognitive training that develops optimism. Let’s start with a story of failure.
Once upon a time, there was an athlete who was brave enough to tell the world how much of a failure he was:
“I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life....”
And he continued,
“… and that is why I succeed.”7
The athlete’s name is Michael Jordan, and for those of you who don’t know of him, well, he is only the greatest basketball player of all time.
Failure is the building block of success. Soichiro Honda famously said, “Success is 99 percent failure.” Thomas Watson said, “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” There is even a popular Chinese proverb that says, “Failure is the mother of success.” (I would hate to be the mom in that family, though).
If you dislike failure, the story gets worse. If you want to do something new and innovative, you often need to feel stupid as well. This point was made by Nathan Myhrvold (talking about his friend Bill Gates but also making a general point about going outside the box):
Lewis and Clark were lost most of the time. If your idea of exploration is to always know where you are and to be inside your zone of competence, you don’t do wild new shit. You have to be confused, upset, think you’re stupid. If you’re not willing to do that, you can’t go outside the box.8
Nathan Myhrvold completed his Ph.D. at the age of twenty-three. He was the chief technology officer at Microsoft and the founder of Microsoft Research. He was a prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer and master French chef, and he co-authored a bestselling book. He must be one of the most intelligent human beings on this earth. Even Bill Gates said, “I don’t know anyone I would say is smarter than Nathan.” Yet, even for Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, innovating involves being “confused, upset, think[ing] you’re stupid.” Reading that quote made me feel better about myself because if even Nathan Myhrvold is capable of feeling stupid, I can excuse myself for doing so.
The evidence above confirms something a lot of us have already learned from our own lives: that failure is a common experience. Everybody fails in some major way at some point in their lives, even the greatest and most successful among us, like Michael Jordan. What distinguishes successful people is their attitude toward failure, and specifically, how they explain their own failures to themselves.
Martin Seligman, the highly esteemed father of learned optimism, calls it the “explanatory style”—how we talk to ourselves when we experience a setback. People who are optimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal power. They feel that setbacks are temporary, are isolated to particular circumstances, and can eventually be overcome by effort and abilities. In contrast, people who are pessimistic react to setbacks from a presumption of personal helplessness. They feel that setbacks are long lasting, generalized across their lives, and are due to their own inadequacies, and therefore cannot be overcome. This difference in how we explain occurrences to ourselves has a profound impact on our lives. When an optimist suffers a major disappointment, he responds by figuring out how he can do it better the next time. In contrast, a pessimist assumes there is nothing he can do about the problem and gives up.
In a series of famous experiments done in collaboration with MetLife, Seligman discovered that optimistic insurance agents significantly outsell their pessimistic counterparts.9 What’s more, MetLife had a chronic shortage of agents, so Seligman convinced MetLife to hire a special group of applicants who scored just below the cutoff point on the normal screening test but scored high on optimism. This group outsold the pessimists in the group of regular hires by 21 percent in their first year and 57 percent in their second year!
Learning Optimism, Unlearning Pessimism
Happily, optimism is something that can be learned. Ironically enough, optimism starts with being realistic and objective. We naturally pay much more attention to negative than positive occurrences in our lives. For example, if you’re a writer and out of ten reviews of your work, nine are glowing and one is nasty, chances are you will remember that one nasty review more than the glowing ones. This is also true for other aspects of our lives. Barbara Fredrickson, a noted pioneer in positive psychology, found that it takes three positive experiences to overcome a negative one, a 3:1 ratio.10 In general, each negative feeling is three times as powerful as a positive one. If you put that in perspective for a moment, let’s assume you live a life in which you have twice as many happy moments as unhappy ones, a 2:1 ratio. It is like some rich uncle gives you two dollars for every dollar somebody else takes from you. Dude, you win! Objectively, it would look as if you are very lucky and have a very good life. Subjectively, however, since your 2:1 ratio is still well below Fredrickson’s 3:1 ratio, you would think, “My life sucks.” This insight hit me like three Zen sticks hitting my head (yes, a 3:1 stick-to-head ratio).
The first step to learning optimism is becoming aware of our own strong negative experiential bias. It is entirely possible, even likely, that we have much more success than failure in our lives, yet it does not seem that way because we pay too much attention to our failures and too little attention to our successes. Just understanding this can change how you see yourself.
The second step is mindfulness. Learning optimism requires us to create objectivity toward our own experiences and, as mentioned in Chapter 4, mindfulness is the best way to create that objectivity. Specifically, whenever you experience success or failure, first bring mindfulness to your body. Next, bring mindfulness to the emotional experience, remembering that the body is where emotions manifest most vividly. Finally, bring mindfulness to your thoughts. How are you explaining the event to yourself? Do you feel powerful or helpless? How are your thoughts related to your emotions? If this event is an experience of success, bring mindfulness to the tendency to downplay it, or if the event is an experience of failure, bring mindfulness to its disproportionally strong effect on you.
The final step is transformation. When experiencing success, take conscious note of it and accept credit for it. This creates a mental habit of paying due attention to your successes. When experiencing failure, focus on realistic evidence suggesting that this setback may be temporary. If you have thoughts of inadequacy, recall past successes of which you took conscious note and for which you accepted credit. If you find any evidence suggesting reasons for realistic hope, bring attention to it. This sounds a bit like denial, but what it actually does is to increase objectivity by balancing out your natural, strong negative bias. Doing this often creates new mental habits so the next time you experience failure, your mind will quickly find realistic reasons for hope and you can recover more quickly from your setback. And thus, optimism is created.
Great Waves
We end this chapter with a story of a Japanese man who overcame his fear and failure by discovering his inner resilience.
In the early days of the Meiji era there lived a well-known wrestler called O-nami, Great Waves.
O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public, he was so bashful that his own pupils beat him.
O-nami felt he should go to a Zen master for help. Hakuju, a wandering teacher, was stopping in a little temple nearby, so O-nami went to see him and told him of his great trouble.
“Great Waves is your name,” the teacher advised, “so stay in this temple tonight. Imagine that you are those billows. You are no longer a wrestler who is afraid. You are those huge waves sweeping everything before them, swallowing all in their path. Do this and you will be the greatest wrestler in the land.”
The teacher retired. O-nami sat in meditation trying to imagine himself as waves. He thought of many different things. Then gradually he turned more and more to the feeling of waves. As the night advanced the waves became larger and larger. They swept away the flowers in their vases. Even the Buddha in the shrine was inundated. Before dawn, the temple was nothing but the ebb and flow of an immense sea.
In the morning, the teacher found O-nami meditating, a faint smile on his face. He patted the wrestler’s shoulder. “Now nothing can disturb you,” he said. “You are those waves. You will sweep everything before you.”
The same day O-nami entered the wrestling contests and won. After that, no one in Japan was able to defeat him.11
“Watch it, boys, here comes the new coach, and he looks like a mean sonofagun!”