A friend recently sent me one of his favorite books, Chaos, by James Gleick. To say it’s a difficult read is a bit of an understatement. I’m about a third of the way through it, and I think I’ve understood about three sentences. I exaggerate … make that two.
Nevertheless, the book has my gray matter acting up again. Oversimplified, chaos theory is about the underlying chaos that exists in seemingly orderly systems. The so-called butterfly effect comes into play here, because a small change in initial conditions can dramatically change the long-term behavior of a “system.” A system, of course, can be just about anything — the weather, a mathematical formula, a sporting event, even a student’s school career.
Of course, the ultimate chaos-versus-order showcase is the universe itself. A majority of scientists believe that the universe began about 14 billion years ago with the unleashing of the so-called Big Bang. That’s serious chaos. But what’s puzzling to many of them is that the formation of the substantive universe may not be as random as once thought. For example, there appear to be precise patterns (i.e., order) to the galaxies.
Perhaps the rings of Saturn are the best cosmic example for us Earthlings to study when it comes to chaos versus order. When you look at a photo of Saturn, its rings are so smooth that they appear to have been painted by an artist.
Yet, at the local level, randomness and disorder prevail in the rings, with billions of small particles of ice, mixed with dust and other chemicals, circling the planet in their own orbits. They range in size from microns to meters. In fact, on closer inspection, gaps can be found in the rings, and there are even two moons embedded in them.
So, in the case of the rings of Saturn, what appears to be perfect order from a distance is actually quite chaotic. What we see at a distance are patterns in the form of smooth, concentric rings, but this is a deception caused by distance.
The same is true here on Earth. No matter how orderly something may appear to be, there is always chaos at the local level. For example, a brick wall looks calm and steady, but on a micro level, there is disorder. Neutrons and protons are circling the nucleus of every atom in every brick, and the atoms themselves are vibrating wildly.
On a macro level, man has harnessed the energy of those atoms by rearranging them first into bricks and then into a brick wall. And now that I think about it, that’s pretty much what man does for a living; i.e., he brings order from chaos by rearranging atoms. Will Durant defined human progress as “increasing control of the environment by life … the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form or will.”
So, it appears that man’s purpose — at least his nonspiritual purpose — is to bring order from chaos. We’ve done a pretty good job of this over the past 8,000 years or so, but we should never forget that underlying our best-laid plans is utter chaos.
Seismic turmoil abounds below our orderly skyscrapers. The next Katrina lies quietly in wait to wreak havoc on some unsuspecting city. Transmutating killer viruses, invisible to the naked eye, are ready to thrust the next HIV into our lives.
We organize governments to bring order to society, but, underneath it all, what we really want is to be free of government. Human beings are anarchists at heart. They don’t like to be told what to do and when to do it. Chaos is always roiling beneath society’s surface.
In reality, what seems to be chaos is also order … and vice versa. As chaos theory tries to explain, what we think of as order … as perfection … as absolute … is really just patterns. We look for patterns in sports, in the stock market, in business cycles.
Where we invite problems into our lives is by believing that patterns are the permanent order of things. While striving to bring order to your environment, you should be careful not to deceive yourself. Murphy’s Law guarantees that chaos is always just around the next bend. The wise person lives his life accordingly.
Dr. Andrew Weil is back with another bestseller, Healthy Aging. Weil has probably done more than anyone else to bring so-called conventional medicine and holistic medicine together. Before him, most doctors and the American Medical Association pretty much looked down on the notion of “alternative” approaches to medicine.
Time magazine recently did an excerpt from Dr. Weil’s latest book, which was interesting enough to make me want to buy it. Weil sees aging as “a continuous and necessary process of change that begins at conception.” He further explains the importance of aging gracefully — learning “how to live in appropriate ways in order to maximize health and happiness.”
Weil goes on to say that what is appropriate in your twenties is not likely to be appropriate in your fifties. He uses the example of men in their thirties and forties who injure themselves playing contact sports or exercising improperly. He further points out that one of the secrets of healthy aging is “being willing to let go of behaviors more suited to younger bodies.”
I can relate to this mistake, because when I was in my late thirties and early forties, I became an exercise addict. I religiously lifted weights to the limits of my capacity and played racquetball five days a week. Plus, I jogged at least five mornings a week, always sprinting the last quarter mile.
Without mentioning a plethora of less-serious injuries, I broke my right foot, broke my left big toe, had to have arthroscopic surgery on both knees, severely injured my back, and endured an excruciatingly painful tendon operation on my right shoulder. Being the bright young man that I was, I eventually recognized that perhaps I was overdoing it a bit. My sixteen-year-old mind simply couldn’t keep up with my forty-year-old body.
I agree with most of what Dr. Weil says about aging gracefully, but there’s another important point to be made about exercise in particular: The more you overdo it, the less likely you are to stick with it throughout life.
So, when it comes to exercise, one of my favorite maxims applies: Moderation is the best policy. If you want to (1) increase your chances of living a longer and healthier life, and (2) continue to exercise throughout life, you’d be wise to take a moderate approach to exercise.
One day, when the then-unknown snipers (John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo) were terrorizing residents in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia, my son said to me, “I just found out today that the sniper is in our area.” I responded, “I doubt that. I don’t think anyone has a clue as to where he is from day to day.”
To which my adolescent son vigorously retorted, “I know for a fact that he’s in our area.” Of course, he was making an assumption based on absolutely no evidence – but, masochistically, I took the bait and asked him how so. “Because all the kids in school were talking about it,” he replied with a certainty in his voice.
A classic father-adolescent discussion then ensued. My son’s position was that if all the kids in school were saying it was true, that proved it was true. Which meant that I was confronted with the frustrating task of trying to make him understand that adolescent chatter has no relationship whatsoever to the subject of proof.
If you have, or have had, teenagers in your household, you’re probably smiling right now and shaking your head up and down. But it’s not all that funny when you stop to think about how many unsubstantiated things even we, as adults, believe. We
When I was in my early twenties, a doctor diagnosed a malignant tumor in my left sinus. Without taking the trouble to get a second opinion, I quickly found myself on an operating table. Fortunately for me, the story had a happy ending: The doctor’s diagnosis was wrong. How wrong? Well, not only was the “tumor” not malignant, it wasn’t even a tumor. Rather, it was nothing more than a harmless clump of polyp that could have remained in my sinus forever without causing a problem.
Sometime after the operation, I went to another doctor for a checkup. After looking at my x-rays, he told me that he never would have operated on me. He said it was obvious to him from the x-rays that the mass in question was nothing more than polyp. (What a great time to get a second opinion!)
It took at least six months for me to fully recover from the operation, and the pain in the early going was excruciating. Then there was the loss of valuable work time and quality time with my family. The stress and fear I endured were free of charge, of course.
It was a pretty big price to pay for assuming that a doctor’s diagnosis was correct. As a result, I now ask a torrent of questions whenever I visit a doctor’s office, which usually results in his/her harboring an intense dislike for me. And that, in turn, often results in my saying my goodbyes early and finding another doctor who is more willing to answer my questions.
Now, here’s the sticky part. The reality is that most of the actions you take are based on information and assumptions you have never verified. If you’re a control freak, you may find that hard to accept. But just think about it. When you get on an airplane, how do you know one of the pilots isn’t inebriated? The fact is, they sometimes are. As you may recall, one pilot — I believe he worked for Northwest Airlines — was arrested by the FBI some years ago when he landed in Minneapolis. The FBI had gotten a tip from someone that he had been drinking heavily the night before.
I’m much more rigid than most people when it comes to taking everything with a proverbial grain of salt. My motto is: Assume nothing. If your mother says she loves you, check it out! Nevertheless, on occasion I still find myself making assumptions when I have no sound reason for doing so.
For example, I occasionally take my wife and son to a Washington Nationals game at (ugh) RFK Stadium. We’re talking old here. RFK Stadium makes the Colosseum in Rome look like a state-of-the-art structure. If you’ve never had the pleasure of watching a game in this ancient relic, the best way to describe it is that you don’t need to ask anyone where the nearest toilet is. RFK Stadium is the toilet!
But, other than the filth and the irritating fact that people insist on calling the Senators the Nationals, going to a game at RFK can be an enjoyable experience … sort of.
For one particular game, we arrived early, because we didn’t have tickets. When we got to the ticket windows, we were surprised to find that there were about a dozen lines, each about fifty people deep. Suddenly, a man in a uniform (always a bad sign) said to the people at the back end of the lines, “If you go right around the corner to Gate F, there are more ticket windows and no waiting.” Totally disregarding Ringer Rule No. 228 about never believing anyone in a uniform, I quickly hurried off toward Gate F with my wife and son tagging behind.
I felt like Lawrence of Arabia making his way through the Sahara Desert — humid, 95-degree heat and desperate for something to drink. But, hey, what’s the big deal about a few hundred feet or so? I’ll tell you what the big deal was: The few hundred feet turned out to be all the way around on the other side of the stadium — which, in the heat and humidity, made it feel like we were walking to Baltimore! And all because I assumed that the guy in the uniform knew what he was talking about.
I’m sure by now you’ve guessed the Homer Simpson ending to this tale. The lines at Gate F were longer than they were at the main ticket windows. At this point, I was ready to start digging a water well with my bare hands. My stint as Lawrence of Arabia stumbling around outside RFK Stadium got me to thinking about just how many things even the most anti-assumptive among us take on faith.
Which brings me back to my son, who, two years after his “the sniper is in our area” statement, had came full circle and asked me (in response to someone whom I had quoted to him), “How can you be sure that he’s right about that?” I’m glad he asked the question, because it reminded me that whenever I read or hear something, the weight I give it is a personal judgment based on my confidence in the person who is conveying the information.
No one has the time to do so-called original research on every piece of information he requires before taking action. The skill is in picking the right sources for your information. But when you’re young and inexperienced, you are more inclined to believe people who tell you what you want to hear.
In my twenties, I probably would have bought a used car from Bill Clinton. I can just hear him saying to me, “I can guarantee you that I did not have sexual relations with that car.” And, just like that, I probably would have driven off the lot with a pregnant Chevy.
But when you have a little experience under your belt, you become pretty good at knowing whom you can believe and whom to distrust. Experience is important, because most of the information you act on is based on your faith in the provider of that information.
Authors, in particular, are in the business of offering information and opinions. After enough experience with a writer, you come to have either more or less faith in what he has to say. It’s the same with everyone you deal with.
And, remember, you don’t have to agree with everything an author or anyone else says in order to learn something valuable from him or her. Take what you feel sounds right and leave the rest. You might liken the millions of words that appear every day in newspapers, magazines, books, and on the Internet to a giant information buffet from which you can pick and choose as you please. The trick, of course, is to choose wisely.
Throughout your life, you are going to be criticized — and sometimes slandered and lied about — so best you learn not to allow it to throw you into a state of emotional turmoil when it occurs. Take heart by reminding yourself that we are all fair game, and that it happens to high-profile people all the time. To illustrate my point, I extracted the following miscellaneous excerpts from mostly one-star reviews (the worst rating possible) on Amazon.com.
The worldwide medical establishment has long been known for its vigilance in defending the status quo against maverick truth messengers. One of the earliest truth messengers to feel the sting of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) attacks was Dr. Max Gerson. Gerson attended the Universities of Breslau, Wurzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg from 1901 to 1906. He then served as an intern at a number of hospitals and clinics throughout Germany.
In 1910, Dr. Gerson, who had suffered from severe migraine headaches for years, came across a book written by an Italian doctor who claimed that some migraine headaches could be relieved by a milk diet, while others could be relieved by a fresh-fruit-and-vegetable diet. Gerson first tried the milk diet, but without success.
He then put himself on the fruit-and-vegetable diet, with an emphasis on apples, both raw and cooked. In a short period of time, his migraines disappeared. He further experimented by adding salt and a variety of other substances to the fruits and vegetables, only to find that his migraines returned very quickly, sometimes within a half-hour.
After serving in World War I, Dr. Gerson set up practice in Bielefeld, Germany as an internist and specialist in nervous diseases. Expanding his experimentation with diet, he claimed to be successful in curing 446 out of 450 supposedly incurable cases of lupus (an autoimmune disorder characterized by skin lesions).
For his work in this area, Dr. Gerson was hopeful that he might earn the Nobel Prize for Medicine. To his disbelief, instead he was challenged by the German medical establishment and hauled into court. The charge was that he was not a specialist in skin disorders, and therefore his work in this area was in violation of the German medical code. In reality, the medical establishment was protecting the status quo.
After having similar success with “incurable” tuberculosis, he again was challenged by the establishment medical community. Unfortunately, before he was able to prove that his natural diet therapy did, in fact, cure tuberculosis, Dr. Gerson, who was Jewish, had to flee his homeland because of the increasingly dangerous political situation.
After his escape from Germany, Dr. Gerson lived in Vienna and then moved to Ville d’Avray near Paris to become chief of staff of a sanatorium. Finally, after a short stay in England, he emigrated to the United States. In New York, at age fifty-five, Dr. Gerson had to go to school with first and second graders to learn how to speak English, a prerequisite for his earning a medical license.
He finally received his license to practice medicine in January 1936 after passing the New York State Board examination. After setting up practice in New York City, he continued his diet experiments with incurable arthritis and cancer patients. His success rate was astonishing even to him, but it made the medical establishment very uneasy.
On July 3, 1946, Dr. Gerson demonstrated his healing techniques before a U.S. Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Claude Pepper, bringing with him five cancer patients whom he had cured with his organic fruit-and-vegetable therapy. Faced by yet another threat to the status quo by Dr. Gerson, the AMA went berserk … to put it mildly.
In its November 16, 1946 edition, the Journal of the American Medical Association stated, “Fortunately for the American people, this presentation received little, if any, newspaper publicity.” Later, in its January 8, 1949 edition, the same publication declared, “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to indicate that modifications in the dietary intake of food or other nutritional essentials are of any specific value in the control of cancer.”
The AMA pressured hospitals, laboratories, and other doctors not to do business with Dr. Gerson. This made it difficult for him to document his work, because he was prevented from bringing his patients to established medical facilities for testing.
The final blow, however, was when Dr. Gerson was invited to be a guest on a radio talk show hosted by the popular Long John Nebel. The show lasted for several hours, and the public’s response was overwhelming. The result? The radio network was threatened by the AMA, and Nebel was fired the next day.
Finally, on March 8, 1959, after years of harassment from the AMA and other segments of the establishment medical community, Dr. Max Gerson, the ultimate medical messenger, died of pneumonia. In reflecting on Dr. Gerson’s work, Albert Schweitzer, the renowned doctor and humanitarian who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 (and whose wife Gerson had cured of tuberculosis) said:
“I see in him one of the most eminent medical geniuses in the history of medicine. … Unfortunately, he could not engage in scientific research or teach; and he was greatly impeded by adverse political conditions.
“In ordinary times he would have been able to expound his ideas for many years as a professor at one of the important German universities; would have taught pupils who could carry on his research and teachings; would have found recognition and encouragement. … All this was denied him.
“His was the hard lot of searching and working as an uprooted immigrant, to be challenged and stand as a fighter. We who knew and understood him admired him for working his way out of discouragement again and again, and for undertaking to conquer the obstacles.”
Dr. Gerson was the most hated kind of messenger, because the message he delivered threatened not only the incomes of doctors, but also of hospitals, clinics, and those involved in the manufacture and sale of pharmaceuticals and surgical equipment. After all, if people could stay healthy by eating the right foods, where would the medical community get its patients?
Which is why, long after the silencing of Dr. Gerson, corporate giants in the dairy, beef, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries, along with the American Medical Association, continued to shoot down one medical messenger after another in an effort to repress the hated, profit-killing truth and protect the status quo.
Today, of course, every halfway intelligent, rational person recognizes that alcohol, drugs, and foods loaded with saturated fat, cholesterol, salt, and sugar are the very things that lead to diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The importance of a natural diet for the prevention, and even cure, of most diseases is now pretty well accepted, thanks to modern medical messengers such as Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Roy Walford, who have the luxury of being able to stand on the shoulders of giants like Dr. Gerson.
Thus, the problem is no longer a lack of knowledge. The relationship between what a person eats and his health and longevity is well known to all. The real problem, particularly in America, is the renunciation of self-discipline and the addiction to instant gratification on the part of the general public.
This is graphically demonstrated every time another obese woman appears on television, sobbing and telling the world that it’s not her fault that she vacuums down two Big Macs, a large order of fries, and a milkshake every morning at 10:00 a.m. It’s because “McDonald’s makes it look so good in its ads.” In other words, the devil (or the clown?) made her do it.
The reality, of course, is that the only thing the devil made her do was file a frivolous lawsuit, and the devil I’m referring to is usually sitting right next to her on the talk show where she’s venting and lamenting. And that devil isn’t Ronald McDonald. He’s a money-grubbing humanoid we have all come to lovingly refer to as “personal injury attorney.”
Of course, all these frivolous lawsuits will ultimately be lost, because lethal food doesn’t kill people any more than guns do. Sorry, gun-control advocates, but the reality is that it’s people who kill people (and sometimes themselves). And they sometimes do it with ropes, knives, lead pipes, and even their own hands.
And it’s the same with food. Fast-food can’t kill you unless you choose to eat it. If the object is to kill as many Americans as possible, Al Qaeda is not the enemy we need to worry about. Nor is it the fast-food killing machines that try to make deep-fried food look so delectable.
The real enemy is our own lack of self-discipline, which, along with self-delusion, is the number-one killer on earth. These two culprits are not only killers in the absolute sense, they can also kill a person, figuratively speaking, in many other ways — including financially, spiritually, and emotionally.
To end on a high note, the good news is that, as a human being, you have the capacity to choose to employ self-discipline and think and act in a rational manner. And you can be certain that the results of self-discipline and rational action are a lot more fun than crying, playing the role of victim, and disrobing yourself in front of millions of people on Oprah.
What got me thinking about my interview with Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline many years ago was watching how Sarah Palin was sandbagged by the media throughout the presidential campaign — particularly when her cerebrally deficient handlers threw her to the media wolves: Charlie and Katie.
Charlie Gibson’s now-famous question — “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?” — tongue-tied Sarah Palin for a second. And well it should have, because it was based on a false premise! Alert the media: There is no such a thing as the “Bush Doctrine.” The so-called Bush Doctrine can be just about anything you want it to be. There was no reason for the question other than to make Palin look bad. Why play games?
To her credit, she recovered quickly and fired back at Gibson, “In what respect, Charlie?” That caught him off guard, and he staggered against the ropes for several seconds. Then, instead of answering her question, he came back with, “What do you interpret it to be?” He sounded (and looked) like a stern college professor asking a student a trick question.
Up to that point, my scorecard had Sarah Barracuda ahead on points, with Gibson reeling and trying to stay on his feet. But when she blurted out “His world view,” she opened the door for him to press on with this nonsensical subject that was completely irrelevant to the presidential campaign.
Having been through this kind of Gotcha Garbage many times myself — and having the advantage of watching the Gibson-Palin interview in the comfort of my living room — I found myself wishing I could slip her a note. The answer I thought she should have given Gibson was something like, “First of all, there is no such thing as the Bush Doctrine. The term means different things to different people. Second, I’m not here to take a test on George Bush. I’m here to talk about what John McMush and I plan to do for this country.”
The point is that the premise of Charlie Gibson’s question — that there is such a thing as a “Bush Doctrine” — was false. But Gibson decided that Palin had flunked his little quiz, and he proclaimed that the Bush Doctrine is that America has the right to “anticipatory self-defense.” So, why play games? Why not just ask the woman, straight out, if she believes the U.S. has the right to anticipatory self-defense?
The lesson we should all draw from this is that as we make our way through the coming years of endless, deadly doublespeak, we must keep reminding ourselves to carefully check a person’s premise before answering his question. I find that when it comes to questions regarding politics, most of them are based on premises that are false. And it’s simply not possible to give the right answer to a question based on a false premise. For example, suppose someone responds to your stated belief that wealth redistribution is wrong by asking, “So, you don’t care what happens to the poor, the sick, and the homeless, right?”
First of all, the premise that wealth redistribution does, in fact, help the poor, the sick, and the homeless is false. In fact, I would argue that it makes them worse off — especially over the long term. Second, the premise that there is a correlation between a belief in redistribution of wealth and compassion for the poor, the sick, and the homeless is also false.
Politicians are notoriously prolific truth twisters. While they work hard at trying to make the world believe they are acting in the best interests of their constituents, their real purpose is obfuscate the truth to achieve their own ends.
They accomplish this by conditioning our minds to accept false premises, which are cemented into place by the government-controlled education system. A classic example of this is the widely accepted notion that the president and Congress not only have the power, but the ability, to perform such miraculous tasks as “getting the economy moving” and “creating jobs.”
The premise that a president can affect the economy in a positive way is ludicrous on its face, yet the vast majority of voters accept it as a premise. The reason for this can be found in French philosopher Michel Montaigne’s observation that “Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.” The vast majority of the population knows nothing about macroeconomics (and some would argue that the same is true of most professional economists), so they are ripe to believe almost anything — especially if it sounds like it’s going to put dollars in their pockets.
But this is not just true for politics and ideology. You have be alert to being asked questions based on false premises in your business and personal life as well. One of the games people love to play is to use their personal opinions as premises. Oftentimes, what this really means is that they use their conclusions as premises! The latter is known as an a priori argument.
I find that the best defense against being taken in by false premises is knowledge. Whenever my knowledge comes to my aid in refusing to acknowledge a false premise, it reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s words: “The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
Above all, be vigilant about checking your own premises. The path to success is paved with correct premises, because they, and they alone, lead to correct conclusions. Thus, you have to constantly defend yourself against false premises on two fronts: (1) Those that others would use against you and (2) those you might be tempted to use yourself.
To the extent you succeed at these two objectives, you, too, will experience the noblest pleasure — the joy of understanding.
My, how time does fly. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly twenty-five years since my first and only appearance on ABC News Nightline. I must confess that my memories of that show do not bring tears of joy to my eyes. Tears, maybe … but joy? Not so much.
The producer of ABC News Nightline called me one day out of the blue and said he would like to do a show on “fear in the workplace.” He had already lined up Harold Geneen, former chairman of IT&T, and a psychiatrist from Wharton to be two of the guests. He said that because my name was “synonymous with intimidation,” he felt I would be the ideal person to round out the program.
I told him that although I admired Ted Koppel and thought it might be fun, it probably would be unfair for me to do the show. I explained that my book, Winning Through Intimidation, had been incorrectly positioned by the media as a book about how to get ahead by intimidating others, and that if he was counting on me to play along with that misrepresentation, he would be sorely disappointed.
The producer said that he understood what I was saying and assured me that I needn’t worry about being cast as “the bad guy.” I warned him one last time that I had resigned from playing the role of master intimidator for TV producers years ago, and that Koppel might be less than thrilled with my answers if he took that approach with me.
He again assured me that he fully understood and that there would be no problem. So, based on those assurances, I agreed to do the show. In my haste, however, I had forgotten one well-established fact about producers and interviewers: Most of them have no qualms about lying in order to suck you into their game plan!
The first half of ABC News Nightline that evening consisted of film clips of scenes from Psycho, The Exorcist, and Poltergeist. From this rather odd beginning, Ted Koppel segued into the evening’s discussion topic: “Fear and the marketplace: How executives use it to get more out of their subordinates.” It was a stretch that proved to be too difficult even for a professional like him.
Koppel started by asking Harold Geneen if he attributed his remarkable success at IT&T to his ability to motivate his executives though fear. Geneen replied that he had never advocated motivation through fear, and that he saw himself only as a demanding board chairman who set challenging goals for his people.
Looking disappointed by Geneen’s answer, Koppel then addressed me by saying, “Mr. Ringer, you’ve been called ‘the Apostle of Intimidation.’ How do you feel about motivating workers through fear?”
I politely but firmly told him that I objected to his introduction, and proceeded to explain that my book, Winning Through Intimidation, was not about intimidating others, but about how to defend yourself against intimidating people. He twitched so noticeably that I feared his hair mousse would crack, and the interview went downhill from there.
It was a long, uncomfortable hour for everyone involved. The producer’s good-guy/bad-guy scenario had failed to materialize. As you might have guessed, he neither thanked me nor said goodbye when I left. Standing on principle can be very lonely endeavor.
As annoying as that ABC News Nightline experience was for me, I was proud of the fact that I had held fast to my beliefs and refused to play the producer’s deceitful game of “pin the tail on the villain.” Years earlier, when I was a naïve young man, I had fallen into the trap of playing the bad guy in a number of interviews. The low point for me was when I play-acted the role of an intimidator on The Tonight Show, making an utter fool of myself – to the delight of producer Freddie de Cordova, who held me over for a second segment.
I shall not go into that story in detail here, as I have discussed it at length in my book Action! Nothing Happens Until Something Moves. But I will say that it was a turning point in my life in that it made me think a great deal about the danger of accepting false premises — and the efficacy of learning to challenge them.
In Part II of this article, I’ll tell you what it was that prompted me to think about the details of my ABC News Nightline experience in the first place.
“Leo,” our centimillionaire guest for a recent Mastermind Discussion Group call, shared with members his strategy for handling big paydays. He said that throughout his career, whenever he received a big chunk of income, the first thing he did was carve out an amount sufficient to cover the income taxes he would have to pay on it and put the money in a special bank account. The result, of course, was invisible, because the potential problem (having to cough up an unexpected number of dollars at tax time) never became an actual problem.
Leo explained that he would then set aside 90 percent of the remaining money to expand his ever-increasing financial cushion. And with the remaining 10 percent, he indulged himself and his family with whatever luxuries their hearts desired. Leo had very specific ways to invest money.
I don’t believe I’ve ever known anyone who planned his financial life so carefully and followed through in such a disciplined manner. Leo did, in fact, hit a string of crises in the mid-eighties that might have put most wealthy people under. But thanks to his taxes-first, cushion-second, luxuries-third approach to allocating income, he was able to weather each and every adversity.
Today, Leo lives in a $35 million oceanfront mansion in Bermuda. Prior to moving to Bermuda full-time, he sold his home in Aspen for a cool $19.75 million, which The Wall Street Journal reported to be the biggest residential real estate sale in the history of Colorado.
Oh, and by the way, when a European buyer offered him $13 million in cash plus a $6.75 million second mortgage for his Colorado home, Leo turned him down. He told the fellow that he always paid cash for his homes, and that he expected anyone else to do the same when buying from him. The guy quickly agreed to an all-cash deal, and Leo had another huge payday.
I guess you’d say that because of his approach to finances (including his ways to invest money), Leo is the consummate financial winner. Which brings me to another friend whom I had always placed in the same category as Leo.
Jack was a go-go entrepreneur, always on the move, always making deals, always enthusiastic and positive. He once told me he had never invested in a deal that didn’t make money. I can’t confirm the validity of his claim, but if he was exaggerating, I’d be willing to wager it wasn’t by much.
Jack was the epitome of success. Like Leo, he owned two magnificent homes, not to mention a fishing lodge in Panama. Just as important, Jack was a superb human being – kind, honest, and gracious to a fault. He was one of those lucky people who possess a natural quality that makes everyone instantly like and trust them.
Back in the early eighties, Jack and I were involved in a cellular-telephone deal together, and, as one of the financial requirements for filing cellular-licensing applications, he was required to submit his personal financial statement. It was an impressive $32 million – a very liquid $32 million.
As the years passed, I moved abroad and got caught up in other matters. As a result, I lost contact with Jack. I did think about him from time to time and wondered how his life was going, but those “I’ll have to give him a call sometime” thoughts never manifested themselves into reality.
I vividly recall saying to my wife on one occasion, when Jack’s name happened to come up in conversation, “Knowing what a magic touch Jack has, I wouldn’t be surprised if his $32 million net worth has grown to more than a hundred million by now.” Just the thought made me feel happy for him, because it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Fast-forward to late 2006 …
Recently, I received an e-mail from Jack’s youngest son, Jay, saying that his father had recently passed away. Jay and I subsequently spoke by phone, and what he told me nearly took my breath away.
Jack, the epitome of vitality, affluence, and well-being, had died penniless in a nursing home. About seven years after my last contact with him, the IRS presented him with a huge tax bill that forced him to sell most of what he owned at the time, including two palatial homes in Florida and Wisconsin. Dementia had begun to set in, followed by a stroke, then confinement to a wheelchair. The last several years of his life, Jack couldn’t speak at all and had to be fed and cared for by a nurse.
I was touched beyond words when Jay told me about the last time he saw his father alive. Family members had warned him that Jack was so far gone that he wouldn’t even recognize his own son. But they were wrong. Though he couldn’t speak, tears rolled down Jack’s cheeks when Jay entered the room.
It is impossible for me to focus on a mental picture of Jack confined to a wheelchair, unable to speak, his brain deadened by dementia – and penniless, to boot. For me, he will always be vibrant, confident, and the picture of prosperity.
I don’t know the details of Jack’s IRS problems, so it would be presumptuous of me to speculate. Perhaps his personal ways to invest money could have been better diversified. Nor could I suggest that he did anything particularly wrong in handling his financial affairs. Sometimes, the unforeseen circumstances Fate places in our path are just too much to handle.
In this regard, Jack’s sad end reminds me of the words of Baltasar Gracian, the 17th century Jesuit priest who cautioned, “Place your winnings under cover when they are sufficient or large. … Fortune soon tires of carrying anyone long on her shoulders.”
The words on Forrest Gump’s T-shirt put it more bluntly: “S___ happens.” And it happens so frequently that a rational person has no choice but to recognize it as an integral part of life. What’s especially irritating about it is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you may be, and no matter how carefully you plan your financial affairs, there will likely be unforeseen circumstances that will register 8.4 at your epicenter.
All anyone can do to prepare for a seismic life shock of that magnitude is to never forget that Fate sits on the other side of the Table of Life, plotting her next move. Make your financial moves very carefully, and never underestimate the unforeseen circumstances that she surely has in store for you.
Overconfidence (which, like many of us, Jack was probably guilty of) is a dangerous card to play. And arrogance (which definitely was not one of Jack’s traits) is as close as one can come to playing a fatal card.
It’s a good idea to operate your life on the assumption that unforeseen circumstances are lurking in the shadows, just around the next bend. Which is why it’s wise to handle your finances with the understanding that Fortune does not carry anyone on her shoulders indefinitely.
To do so is not in conflict with envisioning positive outcomes. Without question, you should always try to hold a clear picture in your mind of the end result you’re after. And to the degree you become adept at this skill, you’re likely to end up with a very good batting average – payable in dollars.
Having said that, it’s still all for naught if you fail to make allowances for the roadblocks that are sure to be placed in your path by that fickle trickster known to humankind as Fate.
In our most recent Mastermind Discussion Group session, Joe Vitale was my special guest. Joe, the author of numerous books, including his excellent bestseller The Attractor Factor, has an in-depth understanding of, and unwavering belief in, the ability of the mind to deliver results. His inspirational thoughts are worthy of exploration.
I think most rational adults realize that your life is pretty much the sum of your thoughts. Negative thoughts tend to attract negative results; positive thoughts tend to attract positive results. Simple … but not quite that simple.
The subject of the law of attraction is far too complex to discuss in detail here, but there is one important aspect of this powerful principle that I would like to share with you. It’s the concept of “letting go.” On our Mastermind call, I referred to this concept as “graduate-school stuff,” because the way it connects with your ability to achieve a goal is subtle and can be difficult to grasp.
In The Attractor Factor, Joe puts it this way: “You must let go of your attachment to success to attract success.” He says that you have to be careful not to become addicted to your desire; i.e., don’t think to yourself, “I must have this.”
When I read Joe’s explanation, it reminded me of something Viktor Frankl wrote in his book The Unheard Cry for Meaning about “paradoxical intention” – a technique used in psychotherapy that involves doing the exact opposite of what you’re hoping to achieve. In laymen’s terms, it’s based on the idea that the more we make something a target, the more likely we are to miss it.
The quickest and most certain way to achieve a goal is to mentally focus on what you want, and attach very strong feeling to wanting it. If you picture a result without attaching strong feelings to it, it’s no more than a thought.
And that’s where the subtle connection between desire and letting go comes in. If your objective becomes an obsession – if you believe that you can’t be happy without achieving it – your feelings pass the point of diminishing returns and your focus becomes counterproductive. Sort of like what happens when you press too hard to close a deal. In other words, if you want something very badly, but you don’t have to have it in order to be happy, you are more likely to get it.
Again, the subtlety: Having strong feelings or inspirational thoughts about wanting to attract something into your life is a good thing – the stronger your feelings, the better. But, at the same time, you have to let go and allow the universe to deliver it to you. Not an easy thing to master, but well worth the effort. I have seen it work in my own life repeatedly.
To the extent you are able to achieve this fine balance, you are likely to have an abundance of both peace of mind and success.
In Part I of this article, I discussed the major role abstractions play in our day-to-day lives. I pointed out that even though we cannot see, hear, or grab hold of an abstraction, firsthand experience assures us that certain abstractions definitely do exist.
Now, I’m going to focus on an abstraction – mind power – that makes it possible for you to alter the events that shape your life. It is self-evident that human beings, unlike animals, are “conscious of consciousness.” Or, put another way, an animal may be aware, but a human being is aware that he’s aware.
If we do not have the power to manifest our destiny, we are the victims of a bad cosmic joke. It would mean that our awareness is a Catch-22. We would be conscious, yes, but conscious of the fact that we are on autopilot and have no say-so in the way our lives play out. It would be the ultimate nightmare – being conscious of our impotence.
But to me – and, I hope, you – it is obvious that we do have that power. Which brings us to the concept of “metaphysical world.” Technically speaking, all the examples I pointed to in Part I of this article – e.g., time, negative numbers, ideas, love, fairness, and axioms – are part of the metaphysical world in that they do not have form or substance.
When people use the term metaphysical world, they generally are referring to more weighty phenomena, such as the soul, afterlife, and – the ultimate abstraction – God. The problem many have with abstractions such as these is that their existence cannot be proven.
Which is why, from the viewpoint of secular reasoning, none of these things make any sense. But after you’ve lived on this earth for awhile, experience teaches you that there are “reasons beyond reason” for things that have no secular explanation.
As the ultimate abstraction, God certainly falls into this category, which is why it is not surprising that He is the abstraction most often denied. After all, you cannot see God. You cannot hear God. And you certainly have no tangible way of knowing whether God considers an action to be righteous or sinful.
Thus, the atheist’s primary case against God is: That which can neither be seen nor scientifically proven does not exist. While I have intellectual respect for many atheist arguments, this one does not stand the test of logic.
The Dalai Lama sums it up well in The Universe in a Single Atom when he says, “There is a fundamental difference between that which is ‘not found’ and that which is ‘found not to exist.’ If I look for something and fail to find it, this does not mean that the thing I am seeking does not exist. Not seeing a thing is not the same as seeing its non-existence.”
In other words, there’s a lot more to reality than the material world we are able to see. Clearly, we ignore intangible realities at our peril. We cannot see gravity, but firsthand experience teaches us not to attempt to defy it.
Results of the Hubble Telescope project have scientifically underscored the Dalai Lama’s position. Hubble scientists long ago discovered that not only is all matter moving away from all other matter at unfathomable speeds, but that those speeds are accelerating. This indisputable scientific evidence forced them to conclude that there is an invisible power in the universe – which they refer to as “Dark Energy” – that is greater than the gravitational pull of all matter in the universe combined.
It therefore stands to reason that if you are able to tap into this infinite power source, your own power is theoretically unlimited. And if your power is unlimited, it logically follows that you should be able to have a great deal of control over your destiny. I refer not only to the power of the mind here, but also to a deeper power within us.
The question then becomes: What is the best way to access the Universal Power Source? We have been led to believe that the great teachers and prophets throughout history were able to maintain an extraordinarily high level of awareness. But rank-and-file human beings like you and me do not have the capacity to live in a perpetual state of high awareness, chiefly because we are distracted by the background chatter that constantly bombards our minds. As a result, our mind power is underutilized.
Which is why you have to make a conscious effort to connect with the Universal Power Source on a regular basis. This is not a learn-it-once-and-you’ve-got-it-for-life proposition. It’s a lifetime project, but one that not only can pay big dividends, but becomes easier with age.
There has been a great deal of publicity lately about autism and autism-related disorders. Many researchers are convinced that early intervention can dramatically reduce autism’s crippling effects. The autism “umbrella” includes such conditions as Asperger’s Syndrome, high-functioning autism (a condition that many experts believe Bill Gates has), and Rett Syndrome.
Given the increase in the incidence of autism-spectrum disorders in recent years, it’s a good idea for all parents to have at least a cursory understanding of the symptoms. Often, it is not apparent that something is wrong until a child is in his teens.
Autism-spectrum disorders are a result of damage to certain cells in the right hemisphere of the brain. Among other things, such damage can cause difficulties in the processing of abstract thoughts and ideas. Which, in turn, can make life very frustrating for the afflicted individual.
Abstractions play such a major role in day-to-day life that this got me thinking about just how important they are for all of us when it comes to functioning in our modern world. Abstractions demonstrate the power of the mind. An abstract is theoretical in nature – i.e., it is not a tangible reality. It has no form or substance. Examples of abstractions include such concepts as time, infinity, negative numbers, zero, gravity, motivation, ideas, resourcefulness, determination, momentum, love, justice, fairness, dreams, intuition, common sense, conceptualization, and axioms.
Among the most interesting abstractions are axioms, because even though we rely heavily on them, an axiom cannot be proven. That’s right – an axiom is an unprovable, though self-evident, truth.
Negative numbers are also fascinating. A negative number is nothing more than a theoretical supposition – a presumption that it exists, but not in concrete form. (How can you have minus six oranges?)
One of the most difficult abstract notions to grasp is infinity. The way we throw the word around, you’d think we have a clear understanding of what it is. But can we really comprehend what infinity means? We know that space, time, and numbering are infinite … yet, at the same time, they are incomprehensible.
Entire phrases can also be abstract – “in the best interest of society,” “social consciousness,” and “the will of the people.” What in the world do these things mean? They are concepts that can only be defined subjectively, yet politicians and crusaders use them as though they were absolutes.
Finally, if you stop to think about it, life itself is abstract. This was driven home by the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu when he described the following experience:
Once upon a time, I … dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.
Or, as Woody Allen put it, “What if nothing exists and we’re all in somebody’s dream?”
What I’m driving at here is that we live in an abstract world, a world filled with abstract thought, existence, and causality. A world where time, being, and substance are not provable. Yet, through firsthand experience, we can be pretty certain that all of the phenomena mentioned in this article exist.
Which brings me to the phenomenon of the power that flows from thought. If, through our thoughts, we possess the power to influence the course of our lives, there are two questions that should be of utmost importance to us: (1) How much potential power do we have for altering events through our thoughts? and (2) How can we best tap into this reservoir of power?
In Part II of this article, in an effort to answer these two questions, I’m going to discuss the power of the mind, an abstraction that most people believe in, but few seem to utilize to any meaningful extent.
When I was a teenager, one of my good friends was Gary “Nathan.” Gary was one of those kids who was the target of the taunters and teasers. Even nice guys threw barbs at him, and he took it all in a good-natured way.
I probably teased Gary myself on occasion … I honestly can’t remember … but I know that I went out of my way to be kind to him most of the time. I liked Gary, because he was a genuinely decent person.
What caused Gary to be teased so much was the way he spoke (a little odd) and ran (very odd). Funny, but no one – including me – ever stopped to think about what might be wrong with someone who had what we would now clearly consider to be a disability. In those days, if someone walked, talked, or acted differently than everyone else, he was simply thought of as a “donkey,” “do-do,” “dork,” “weirdo,” etc. Compassion and understanding were scarce commodities.
Things like “learning disorders” and conditions such as autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, or cerebral palsy were never discussed. Nor did teachers or school staff members ever dream of giving kids with such problems special accommodations. It was a pretty cold world for those youngsters. You either cut it or you didn’t.
By the standards of yesteryear, Gary’s dad was perceived to be rich by everyone who lived in our little version of Peyton Place. By today’s standards, of course, he really wasn’t. But I loved going over to Gary’s house, because he had everything – including a great recreation room in the basement with a jukebox, ping pong table, pinball machine, and more.
What was really interesting about Gary was that even though the bullies in our class tried to make him out to be a dummy, he was actually very smart. I remember playing a game with him one afternoon with two dictionaries. One of us would throw out a word, and then we would race to see who could find it in his dictionary first.
As best as I can recall, Gary found every word faster than I did. It just about drove me nuts. It was the first time I consciously thought about how smart he was.
I also recall dragging Gary into touch-football games in the street with two of my neighbors who were roughly our age. He could catch the ball pretty well, but he ran stiff-legged like a duck. One of my neighbors (“Larry”), who was in the grade below us, would mock him unmercifully for this. Interesting, now that I think about it, because Larry was one of the dumbest kids in his class, having flunked at least one full year that I knew of.
As is so often the case, we all went our separate ways after high school. After a number of years had passed, I heard from “Ben,” my best friend in high school, that Gary had moved to Washington, D.C. Every time I came to Washington, I thought about trying to get in touch with him. But it never happened … too busy with business matters.
Years later, when I moved to the D.C. area, I finally tracked down Gary’s telephone number. I thought it would be a kick to get together with my old high school pal and see how his life had turned out. I’d heard he was an attorney, but didn’t know if he ever got married or had children. Plus, as an adult in a much more open, knowledgeable, and medically aware world, I was curious as to what Gary’s condition was and how successful he had been in rising above it.
Gary kept creeping up on my To Do List, until he eventually made it to the top ten. I felt sure I would be able to get in touch with him and manage to have a little reunion within the next few weeks. I was looking forward to it.
But before I got around to making the effort, I took a short trip back to Peyton Place to visit my elderly mother in her nursing home. Ben picked me up at the airport. As soon as I got in the car and closed the door, he said, “Before I even pull away from the curb, I want to tell you something. Gary Nathan died a few days ago – on the operating table while having open-heart surgery.” I was stunned.
I’m angry with myself that I didn’t see Gary again. I’ll never know the answers to all the questions I had about him and his life. I especially wanted to talk to him about his condition, as I have two children with disabilities. But I was too late.
Which leaves me thinking about all those things on my To Do List that were always ahead of getting in touch with Gary. In retrospect, I wonder: Was each and every one of them more important than seeing him? I guess I’ll just have to keep wondering … and wonder what our reunion might have been like.
Who’s on your To Do List, and how many tasks are ahead of that person? You might want to start wondering about your priorities. Wondering about it today – not tomorrow – can lead to action instead of regrets. When you wait until tomorrow to wonder, action is sometimes not an option.
We often go to great lengths to convince ourselves of our innocence. But the truth of the matter is that, in the vast majority of cases, our bad outcomes can be traced to our own actions – or lack of action. Those who don’t get this become unconscious participants in the Blame Game, in which they blame events, conditions, or other individuals for their bad results. It’s a dangerous game to play, because it can become an excuse for failure.
What I’m talking about here is a psychological delusion known as transference – the act of looking to others, or to “uncontrollable” circumstances, for the source of one’s problems. When you insist that something is not your fault, what you are unwittingly saying is that you cannot change your situation because you have no control over it.
The most common targets of transference are the droves of dreadful people who continually cross our paths – the liars, the self-righteous, the rude, the petty, and, worst of all, the hypocrites. After all, aren’t they at fault for any friction that interferes with the way our Human Machines perform? (In Part I of this article, you will recall that the term “Human Machine” is the way Arnold Bennett referred to the part of us that consists solely of brain and muscle.)
The answer is no! We would like those people to be at fault, but they are not. They merely provide us with an excuse for the bad results of our own faulty judgment. Even when you suffer as a result of someone else’s bad behavior, you do yourself no favor by blaming your pain on that person. There is a difference between engaging in transference (blame) and trying to analyze the reason you incurred the problem.
There is always a reason for a bad consequence, but a reason is far different from an excuse. An excuse is nothing but a clever way to escape accountability. The fact that someone was dishonest with you could be a legitimate reason why you were harmed, but it is not a valid excuse for abusing your own Machine.
What I mean by this is that if you allow someone else’s malfunctioning Machine to “bug” you, if you focus on retribution against the owner of that malfunctioning Machine, you – not he – create an enormous amount of friction in your Machine. Why? Because you are the master of your thoughts, and it is your thoughts that either abuse your Machine or keep it operating smoothly.
The reason you are the master of your thoughts is because they are formulated in your mind, and no one can enter your mind and wreak havoc without your permission. Which means that no human being can force you to be upset … to complain … to be angry. Anger is a debilitating mind-set, because it separates a person from his common sense and dignity. When anger is out of control, anarchy reigns in your head.
But even when we’re not angry at someone else, we often cause friction in our own Machines by making the mistake of trying to control others. Bennett gave excellent advice regarding this mistake when he pointed out that we are not in charge of the universe; we are in charge of ourselves.
Remember this the next time you think about meddling in someone else’s Machine. Learn to leave things alone that are none of your business. As Bennett put it, the art of peaceful living lies in “keeping the peace, the whole peace, and nothing but the peace with those in your life.”
A good motto to live by is that when there is friction in your Human Machine, the fault always lies within. When all is said and done, the only thing you can really control is your own mind. Which is no small task. Work at becoming adept at it, and you will be amazed by how smoothly your Machine functions.
I often remind readers that abstract concepts such as universal principles, human nature, and philosophical insights are constants. Those of us who make a living by delving into these topics recognize (or should recognize) that we don’t invent anything. Our job is to try to make sense out of life and communicate our conclusions to others in the simplest possible manner. To accomplish this, I attempt to offer fresh slants on timeless subjects in the hopes of helping others see things they might otherwise miss.
From Plato to Will Durant … from Epictetus to the Dalai Lama … from Montaigne to Eric Hoffer … the rules of life never change. In a world of chaos and madness, it’s nice to know there are certitudes that not even the ACLU can eradicate.
All of this came to mind yet again when I recently read a book written nearly a hundred years ago by Arnold Bennett. The book, The Human Machine, admittedly is not written in a reader-friendly style — but Bennett’s approach to an age-old idea is quite clever.
By the “Human Machine,” Bennett was referring to that part of a person that consists of brain and muscle. The brain intellectualizes, conceptualizes, and gives orders to the muscles. It has the power to override instincts. But the brain and the ego are not the same thing. Bennett believed that “your brain is the servant of the ego.”
In an ongoing effort to strip mankind of any last vestiges of a connection to a Universal Power Source, researchers of late have been frantically trying to show that abstracts such as the ego and the soul are nothing more than physical aspects of the brain. Their objective is to move the ego and soul out from under the umbrella of metaphysics and fit them neatly into the Human Machine.
It was of great interest to me, then, that a hundred years ago Arnold Bennett was addressing many of the same issues I have been writing about over the past three decades. Which is not all that surprising, given that the foundational principles of life never change. For example, Bennett cautioned readers not to base their actions “on the workings of an ideal universe,” and instead to “base them on this universe.”
In my book Looking Out for #1, I discussed this point at length under the moniker of the Is’s versus Ought-to’s Theory, which states: The degree of complications in a person’s life corresponds to the degree to which he dwells on the way he thinks the world ought to be rather than the way it really is.
In other words, reality is what it is, and it’s up to us to discover it. Our perception of reality may or may not have any connection to reality itself. While all this may sound obvious, each and every one of us is guilty, at one time or another, of confusing reality with the perception of reality.
In Part II of this article, we’ll examine how an inaccurate perception of reality can cause massive friction in our Human Machines, and we’ll take a look at how best to prevent this attrition catalyst from gaining a foothold.
Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1996 and 2000, passed away on March 1, 2006. Harry may have possessed the most remarkable intellect of our time. He had an uncanny knack for making profound points in ways that anyone could understand.
I recall Harry appearing on talk shows a couple of times with other presidential candidates. In such situations, he was so far above his counterparts intellectually that I was almost embarrassed for them. Which is why it’s sad that he will be but a footnote in U.S. history, while scoundrels such as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton have presidential libraries to remind people of the well-edited highlights of their accomplishments.
If you’re up to some very deep, often difficult to understand, reading, try tackling Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey. Eiseley, born in Nebraska, wrote many brilliant essays and books during his lifetime that deal with the history of civilization and our relationship with the natural world. Published in 1946, The Immense Journey was his first and perhaps best work, bringing him national prominence along with it.
Eiseley’s writing style is deep, poetic, and unique. There is a hidden wisdom in his work that is rare. My favorite line from The Immense Journey is: “The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only.”
There are many ways to interpret these profound words, but, for my purposes, I use them (perhaps out of context) to remind myself that you can’t go backward in life. The past is the past, and you have only two choices: Move forward or perish.
On rare occasions when I’ve made the mistake of trying to get the door to the past to swing in the other direction, it didn’t work out. No hidden wisdom in that, to be sure. The reason is obvious: The world, like the universe, is in a constant state of change.
The only rational way to live one’s life is to forget about the past and keep opening new doors to the future. Intelligent action is the human tool that gives you the capacity to continually do this. Unlike the door to the past, the door to the future swings open quite easily. And, for the most part, you are always free to walk through it.
I’ve always thought I’d be a much smarter tyrant than Saddam Hussein. Now I’m sure of it. When I watched him sitting in court, waiting to be sentenced to death, I have to admit I was thinking, “I told you so.”
Ever since the U.S. invaded Iraq to save the Kuwaitis, pundits have labeled Saddam “the master of miscalculation.” Watching him in his present circumstances, however, I feel it would be more appropriate to refer to him as the master of The Big Mistake.
Never being one to miss an opportunity to quote myself: “Some Big Mistakes are made impulsively, on the spur of the moment, while others are made after considerable reflection. In the latter case, the problem usually is that the person allows his intellect to get trampled by his emotions.”
In reflecting on Saddam’s error in judgment, I realize now that I should have said “… the problem usually is that the person allows his intellect to get trampled by his emotions and/or ego.” In thinking about Saddam’s free-fall from a large collection of sumptuous palaces to a small prison cell and a death sentence, I’m still dumbfounded by the magnitude of his mistake.
Just as he had done in 1990, Saddam gambled that the U.S. wouldn’t cross the Atlantic and kick butt. He probably assumed Cowboy George was as weak-kneed as George Sr., who let Saddam off the hook at a time when the U.S. military easily could have finished the job.
Saddam’s is the ultimate Big Mistake. All he needed to do was let the U.N. inspectors flit around Iraq and pretend they were looking for WMDs, and the civilized world would have allowed him to continue to torture and plunder his people at will. Even if he had WMDs at the time, he could have simply let the powers that be destroy them – or ship them to Syria, which is quite possibly what he ended up doing anyway.
By contrast, Muammar Qaddafi apparently remembered the lessons of history (a Reagan missile zooming over his dining room table in 1986) and factored those lessons into his decision-making process. Qaddafi is purported to have asked a high-ranking State Department official if he would meet the same fate as Saddam if Libya terminated its nuclear program.
The official assured him that if Libya went the no-nuke route, the U.S. wouldn’t bother him. Apparently pleased to hear this, he rationally opted for the life of a Boy Scout. In other words, at the moment of truth, Qaddafi’s intellect overrode his emotions and ego. Which, in turn, led to his not making The Big Mistake.
Unfortunately, there’s no foolproof way to avoid making The Big Mistake, but a method that I find works quite well is what I refer to as “looking backward from the future.” Here’s how it works:
Project yourself into the future before you act.
Picture the worst possible consequences of your actions.
Pretend to look over your shoulder from the future – at where you are today.
If No. 2 is much worse than what you see in No. 3, you would be wise to rethink your plans. Put another way, if you’re not prepared to live with the worst-possible consequences of your contemplated action, take a pass.
I don’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t take risks. Risk is an integral part of success. But so is moderation, which is why you should always add it to the risk equation. Reasonable risk is a necessity for getting ahead in life; unreasonable risk is foolish.
By employing the looking-backward-from-the-future method, I’ve been able to avoid the “excitement” of engaging in dubious activities like jumping out of airplanes – with or without a parachute. Given that I don’t have wings, I don’t like the downside of that particular activity.
When the worst possible consequence is death, you’re probably about to make The Big Mistake. And that, of course, includes financial death.
We witness misery every day on our television screens, but when John Travolta’s son died, it pained me in a special way. I could relate to that great photograph of the two of them, nose to nose. You could see how much he loved that boy.
It was just another reminder of one of life’s harshest realities: No one, no matter how rich or famous, escapes the tragedies inherent in human existence. The only thing different about tragedy in the life of a high-profile person is that it feels close to home to the rest of us. That’s because, in a vicarious way, we feel like we know that individual on a personal level.
An even bigger reality that the Travolta tragedy brought home to me is how we go along so merrily in life – especially when we are prosperous and healthy – not really thinking about the inevitable bad stuff just over the horizon. And to a great extent, it’s a good thing that we have the capacity to ignore the inevitable sadness that looms ahead, lest we be perpetually depressed.
In his book Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton, says:
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast – from a stubbed toe to an untimely death – at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
The collisions begin in earliest infancy, with the discovery that the sources of our satisfaction lie beyond our control and that the world does not reliably conform to our desires.
An understatement, to be sure. Even if you are the embodiment of a positive mental attitude, from time to time a harsh reality will, without warning, collide with your desires and best-laid plans. Where a positive attitude comes in is not so much in believing that nothing bad will ever happen, but in helping us handle the bad things when they occur.
Later in the book, Botton quotes Seneca as saying:
We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive … So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army, and succeed to their father’s property.
When I was in the seventh grade, I remember coming to school one day and noticing that the chair behind me, where Walter Graves sat, was empty. When class began, our teacher said to us, “I’m sorry to tell you that Walter Graves passed away yesterday.”
I knew Walter only well enough to say hello. He seemed like a nice enough kid – quiet and, as I recall, a bit shy. Then, one day – just like that – he was gone. It was my first introduction to mortality. The boy who sat right behind me died! No further explanation was given to the class.
Finally, Botton says:
There is a dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability. Any accident to which a human has been subject, however rare, however distant in time, is a possibility we must ready ourselves for.
Those of us who are members of that most solemn of all clubs – the one that reverses the natural chronological order of things – can relate all too well to this. Losing a child is something that cannot be fully understood by an outsider. Members of the Reversal of Nature Club are painfully familiar with the “dangerous innocence in having an expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability.”
Now, my youngest son has reached the age of immortality – twenty. Do you remember when you were twenty? I do. I never for a moment allowed reality to interfere with the way I lived my life. Walter Graves was but a distant memory when I was twenty. I threw caution to the winds and enjoyed my immortality. The people in the funeral processions that passed my door were just actors on my personal stage of life.
Last week, my twenty-year-old son’s immortality had a brush with reality. He nearly totaled his car, but, luckily, no one was seriously injured. The fallout, however – an upcoming court date to face a reckless driving charge, a $500 deductible to pay on a $10,000 repair job, a probable monthly increase of $100 or more on his car insurance – has been enormous.
And those things pale in comparison to the stress all this has caused him and his fearful thoughts about how, but for the grace of God, someone easily could have been killed. Not to mention two months of being without a car (longer if his license is suspended).
Funny how life works. One of the most beneficial experiences a young person can have is to be in a serious automobile accident in which all parties escape uninjured. I thought about that when my son kept telling me how much he had learned as a result of his accident. We shall see.
As for the Travoltas and the rest of us who have become unwitting members of the Reversal of Nature Club, we are humbled by the reality that no one escapes the tragedies of life, that there is such a thing as the inevitable, and that, no matter how positive we may be, we are powerless to alter certain events.
Having said this, we are free to choose how we prepare for, and react to, such events. And when all is said and done, no one can teach us how to excel at that. It is one of life’s great challenges in a world filled with more tragedy and uncertainty than ever before in human history – a challenge worthy of considerable time and effort on our part.
On reflection, perhaps the best way to deal with the inevitability of tragedy and sadness is to think of life as a game – and, as Robert DeRopp put it in his book The Master Game, to seek a game worth playing. Having found the game, play it with intensity. Play as if your life and sanity depend upon it … because they do.
On a personal level — i.e., government and politics aside — the Valkyrie story is yet another reminder that it’s much more important to be loyal to your principles than to be popular. Truth and popularity, in fact, are all too often at odds with one another.
In comparing his own life to that of Socrates, in his book The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton writes:
In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel — salival enthusiasm born of a morbid, indiscriminate desire for affection. I did not publicly doubt ideas to which the majority was committed. I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.
Sound familiar? It should, because, to some extent, every one of us is guilty of not having the courage to reveal our true thoughts. In fact, none of us will ever totally rid ourselves of the sometimes overpowering need to be accepted. It is a psychic disability that is part of being human.
This is so even though we know, in our heart of hearts, that some of the biggest fools on the planet are popular. If we need reinforcement on this point, we need only turn on our television sets and listen to the babble of the many high-profile fools who grace our screens.
But what about compromise? Doesn’t a civilized society require compromise? I like the way former House Majority Leader Dick Armey answers that question: “You can compromise on details, you can compromise on strategies, but you must never compromise on principles.”
For the most part, compromising on “details and strategy” can be beneficial if it helps equals to get past trivial issues. But when it comes to principles, Ayn Rand had it right: How do you compromise between good and evil? Between moral and immoral? Between freedom and slavery?
Also, remember another important lesson from the Valkyrie episode: Circumstances change. And when circumstances change, perceptions can change. If you don’t believe it, just think about the way the public perception of Cassius Clay changed when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. Then, worse, when he refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army on the grounds that he was a conscientious objector.
Ali may not have been well versed on Socrates, but he certainly spoke with clarity when he said, in 1966, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” Whether you loved him or hated him for it, you have to admire the fact that he didn’t back down when Uncle Sam threatened him with five years in prison — at the height of his career!
What I still find amazing is that boxing commissions throughout the country suspended his licenses to fight and he was stripped of his heavyweight title. He was convicted after the jury deliberated for only twenty-one minutes, but he appealed that decision, and his case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The clock ticked away for four years before the Supreme Court overturned his conviction. And guess what happened during that time? Circumstances changed! As with the Iraq War, the majority of Americans came to oppose the Vietnam War with a passion. And a side effect to that was that Ali became wildly popular.
Ali’s Valkyrie-like stance didn’t cost him his life, but it did cost him the best earning years of his career. In the meantime, however, he became an American icon of inner strength. Without question, had he not stuck to his convictions, he would not be the popular, courageous figure he is today.
Which brings me back, once again, to the Valkyrie story. It reminded me just how important it is not to compromise one’s principles. Like everyone, I’ve had my share of people getting mad at me for something I’ve said (You should read some of my subscriber e-mails!), something I’ve done, or for refusing to do something they wanted me to do.
If this, too, sounds familiar, I’d like to pass along some advice from one of the wisest men I’ve ever known. About a year before he passed away, “The Red Barron” told me that when people become angry with you for your words or actions, and you know that you’ve done nothing wrong, the solution is to look in the mirror and say to yourself:
“If my hands are clean and my cause is just and my demands are reasonable, I have nothing to worry about.” Then simply go about your business.
Finally, I would remind you to keep things in perspective: Unless it involves the government, sticking to your principles with Socratic stubbornness is unlikely to result in your execution. Of course, in certain instances, it could cost you financially. But, even then, the trade-off is that your self-respect and self-esteem will skyrocket.
And those are things you can’t put a price tag on.
If you haven’t yet seen Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise film about the best-known of the fifteen or so plots to kill Adolf Hitler, it’s worth the general discomfort of a trip to your nearby overpriced popcorn and candy store (a.k.a. “theater”). Better yet, you can wait a few weeks, get it on DVD, and make your own popcorn.
Hollywood often comes up short when making films based on novels or true stories. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities was a classic example of this. If you read the novel, then saw the film, you had to be disappointed.
One of the reasons that filmmakers fail when attempting to recreate novels and true stories on celluloid is that they almost always add a little schmaltz to the mix. The other is that they seem to believe subtlety is a virtue, which can make it difficult to follow the plot.
I had no problem on that score with Valkyrie, but only because I had seen The History Channel’s recent documentary Valkyrie: The Plot to Kill Hitler. In the event you saw this splendid presentation, I can tell you, in advance, that the movie doesn’t live up to it.
What I especially liked about the documentary was the part that began where the film left off. After Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) and his co-conspirators were captured and executed, The History Channel went on to discuss their posthumous evolution from traitors to heroes in thought-provoking detail.
Hitler, in his best propagandist mode, referred to the Valkyrie plotters as “a tiny clique of criminally stupid officers.” His denunciations were heard loud and clear throughout Germany, and if there’s one thing we know about human beings, most of them, sadly, tend to believe whatever those in power tell them.
Thus, for many years after their executions, the conspirators were viewed by the general public as traitors. However, as Germany settled into becoming a civilized society, it slowly came to grips with the monstrous crimes Hitler and the Nazis had committed. As a result, public sentiments about the plot shifted dramatically and the men involved in it were increasingly viewed as heroes.
Ultimately, the Bendlerblock building in Berlin, where Hitler had the conspirators executed, became a national memorial site. Today, the inscription on the symbolic statue in the courtyard of the building reads: “Here in the former Army High Command, Germans organized the attempt to overthrow the lawless National Socialist regime on July 20, 1944. For this they sacrificed their lives.”
It’s too bad the movie left all this out, because there are several major messages here. First and foremost, whether one is a traitor (or “terrorist”) or a patriot (or hero) is very much determined by time and circumstances. Hitler had nearly a year to ingrain in the minds of his subjects the belief that von Stauffenberg and his cohorts were traitors of the worst kind.
So, to me, the most inspiring part of the Valkyrie story is that, in the end, truth prevailed: Hitler was reviled by the masses, and those who tried to overthrow him were (and are) looked upon as patriots and heroes.
Perhaps the Valkyrie conspirators were well versed in the life of Socrates. To the bitter end, Socrates never retracted his unpopular statements. And to the bitter end, the Valkyrie heroes never wavered in their determination to put an end to Hitler’s madness.
But history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Today, Germans, like their counterparts in the U.S., have once again become “sheeple.” Instead of Patrick Henry’s rallying cry of “Give me liberty or give me death,” the only thing on their minds is “Give me!”
And when the tax-producing productivity and the borrowing capacity of a nation can no longer meet all of the sheeple’s demands, the gate swings open for the next Il Duce or Fuhrer to enter. Why? Because then there is only one “solution”: Running the fiat-currency printing presses overtime.
As suicidal government practices continue to destroy what’s left of the U.S. economy, intrude on our liberties, and forever change our cultural landscape, look for words like traitor and unpatriotic to become more and more popular. Our benevolent new vice president has already made it clear that paying taxes is patriotic. From which one is forced to conclude that anyone who believes taxes should be lower is unpatriotic.
Which makes just about everything a target in the traitor game:
Will you be considered a traitor if you’re against handing over a portion of your earnings to autoworkers so they can remain employed for a while longer?
Will you be considered a traitor if you’re against the government’s launching another unprovoked war?
Will you be considered a traitor if you speak out against the possibility of Congress implementing another “Fairness Doctrine”?
Answer: Most probably. But the Valkyrie segment of your brain should never forget that one man’s traitor is another man’s patriot. All liberty lovers should keep this in mind as the rhetoric and name calling heat up in the months and years ahead.
In Part II of this article, I’m going to change gears and discuss how the valor of the Valkyrie heroes can be applied on a much more personal level.
Right up there with the Abu Ghraib prison and Gitmo, a shopping mall is one of my most unfavorite places. My annual Christmas trip to the mall this year was especially bad … rather depressing, in fact.
The place was mobbed, as though people were determined to have one last go at the good life, perhaps sensing that next Christmas the shopping malls might be turned into homeless shelters. I watched with great interest as people stood in long lines to pay for the on-sale merchandise they clutched tightly in their arms.
Strolling through Foot Locker, I examined a number of tags to see where the goods had been manufactured. No Honduras or Sri Lanka here. No sir. Virtually everything I looked at was made in none other than Cambodia.
My mind became an instant time machine. It hasn’t been that long ago that Richard Nixon was explaining that the reason he secretly bombed Cambodia was to “end the Vietnam War sooner.” Hmm … as I recall, that one didn’t work out too well.
It also hasn’t been that long ago that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge slaughtered 2 million of their own countrymen, leaving their skulls neatly stored on rows of shelves in warehouses. Cambodians have always been fastidious about such matters, you know. Just one of those unfortunate things that seems to happen when communist revolutions are carried out in the name of “the people.”
But all is well now, because the Khmer Rouge are long gone and Foot Locker has found a great new labor force to satisfy Americans with big appetites for material things and too little cash to pay for them. Now, however, even Cambodian products have to be put on sale in order to entice cash-strapped shoppers to buy.
What I thought about mostly, though, as the mob threatened to swallow me alive, was the contrast between the salivating materialism at the mall and the show that Dateline had done on evictions the night before. The show was grim, to say the least … especially grim considering it was Christmas time.
The Dateline documentary featured a lot of people who were crying and lamenting that they hadn’t read the fine print in their loan agreements when they bought their houses. Many, of course, couldn’t even afford their houses even at the original interest rates they paid. But many more found themselves in trouble when the ARM time bombs built into their mortgages exploded.
Dateline didn’t leave anything to the imagination — sheriffs serving eviction notices on visibly shaken people, movers putting furniture and personal belongings out on front lawns (where their owners had twenty-four hours to take them away), tears streaming down people’s cheeks as they bemoaned the sobering reality that they had no place to go.
One young man, with his daughter’s arm around his shoulders, sat on his front step and, with tears in his eyes, kept repeating, “I’m a loser.” You’d have to be pretty hardhearted for that not to grip you. Having been homeless myself, I could relate. I know what it feels like to have nowhere to sleep. (The details of that story can be found in Looking Out for #1.)
So, I have a message for that young man in Las Vegas. Even though I don’t know you, the odds are that you probably are not a loser. You’re just a person who’s made some bad decisions, and now, like me and everyone else who has made bad decisions, you’re experiencing the consequences of your actions.
But that shouldn’t stop you from learning from this experience and profiting from it in the future. In the words of Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad (who was once so broke that he and his wife had to sleep in their car), “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.”
The day I started paying closer attention to the news is the day I started realizing that I wasn’t uniquely stupid in making many bad decisions. Just look at today’s headlines:
How smart were the wealthy people who invested in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme?
How smart were the top brass at the Big Three automakers?
How smart were Barney Frank & Friends for pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into making sub-prime loans to people who couldn’t afford any kind of loan?
How smart were the corporate boards of Citigroup, Wachovia, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, et al. that are either bankrupt or were not able to continue without handouts from taxpayers?
And many, many more.
If you’ve lost your home, your business, and/or your money, don’t be intimidated. The guys running many of the biggest corporations in the world have managed to lose billions, which makes them many times dumber than you are.
Sure, the deck is stacked against you, because you don’t have billions to work with and you don’t qualify for a taxpayer bailout. But the way I look at it, the deck is stacked against everyone from the day they’re born, because no matter what they do, they aren’t getting out of here alive anyway. Maybe British economist John Maynard Keynes was onto something after all.
January is the perfect time to get all this squared away in your mind. Get up off the floor and listen: You’re not dumb, and you’re not a loser. You just haven’t learned to be as clever as the guys who make super-dumb decisions and still walk away with millions.
Regardless of where you are in life today, I can tell you where you will be next January: exactly where you should be according to how resilient you are over the next twelve months, how determined you are, how hard you work, and how good your decisions are.
A loser is somebody who quits. If you never quit, you never lose. Just be sure to keep in mind Robert Kiyosaki’s warning that people who avoid failure also avoid success. And, above all, remember that there’s a lot more to success than just bean counting. If you have love and good health, you’re already successful.
Sometimes it’s difficult to muster up the positive mental attitude to see opportunity in a bad situation. Things get so out of hand that it’s easy to become discouraged to the point of feeling despair. Those are the times when your mettle and sinew are really put to the test — sometimes very long tests.
The longest tests usually come in the form of mass oppression. To man’s shame, history’s list of brutal oppressions is a very long one. From the Jews in ancient Egypt to today’s citizen slaves in North Korea, oppression has been an integral part of human history.
But there’s also an interesting twist to oppression. It’s a cloud with a silver lining. In virtually all cases, the oppressed eventually escape or overthrow their oppressors and, quite often, begin life anew on a higher plane than before their oppression began.
How this phenomenon occurs is summed up quite simply in the words of English poet Francis Quarles. In his description of the concept of compensation, he opined that “there is no worldly loss without some gain.”
Which is to say that every adversity brings with it an equivalent or greater opportunity for success. We see this in a macro fashion in the rise of previously oppressed peoples, such as American and South African blacks.
And, of late, we watch in awe as Indians continue their incredible rise to the top of the economic ladder. Not American Indians, but the ones who live on that funny-shaped subcontinent of Asia. (American Indians haven’t done so well, but that’s been changing for the better at an accelerating pace over the past thirty or so years. At the rate they’re going, it may just be a matter of time until they move into town and take over Las Vegas.)
The rise of India to its place of prominence in the modern world is fascinating. For nearly two centuries (1757-1947), the British had that vast Land of Enchantment by its political and economic throat. And, for the most part, Indians were loyal, well-behaved subjects. They even fought in the British Army during World War II.
Until the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, it appeared that India would be a permanent fixture in the British colonization scheme. But, as is almost always the case with oppressed peoples, once the freedom genie was out of the bottle, India’s movement for independence became unstoppable.
In the end, it was left for Mohandas Gandhi to be the historically romantic figure most credited with driving out the Brits, but the reality is that the die had been cast long before his highly publicized fasting protests began.
There is no question that the British devoured India’s vast wealth and kept its citizenry in check for nearly two hundred years. But there’s a silver living in this dark cloud, too. To its credit, when Britain finally threw in its colonial towel in 1947, Indians took over a country with a ready-made, highly educated workforce. The British also left the India with a language that made it easy for them to communicate with the rest of the industrialized world, a democratic government that protected both individual liberties and private property, and a reasonably modern infrastructure.
They even rid the land of much of its Hindu-versus-Muslim bloodshed by chopping off the country’s northwest corner in 1947, calling it Pakistan (originally West Pakistan), and giving it to the Indians in that region who were adherents of that infamous “religion of peace.” Other than a little skirmish now and then, India doesn’t have much of an internal Muslim problem anymore. (The recent Mumbai attacks were carried out by Pakistani Muslims.)
Given its pro-Western lifestyle and the fact that English is now the official language of the country, it would not surprise me if India became the world’s number-one economic power in the next fifty years, surpassing both China and the U.S. in the process.
In Part II of this article, I’m going to make the case that the adversity-leading-to-opportunity syndrome is just as true on the micro level as it is on the macro level — with one big difference. And it’s a difference that I believe will give you a more optimistic way of looking at the adversity in your own life.
As religious fanaticism continues to pester civilized people, one wonders how civilization has managed to advance as far as it has. One would have thought that by this time, religious fanaticism and intolerance would have become passé.
Religion aside, it would seem that the least everyone could agree on is a single, self-evident point: that a Universal Intelligence exists. I guess if an individual chooses not to believe that there is a Universal Intelligence (“God,” “Conscious Universal Power Source,” “the Universe,” “Supreme Being,” etc.), there’s nothing wrong with that — provided he doesn’t try to interfere with the rights of others to connect in their own way.
Over the past twenty-five years or so, an increasing number of scientists have arrived at the conclusion that there is something unknowable beyond science, primarily because science cannot answer the “how” and “why” questions: Why do scientific laws work the way they do? Why do human beings have the ability to discover and understand these laws? If the universe is “dead,” how could we have evolved from dead cosmic dust into cognitive beings? And so on.
To those who insist that humankind is the result of one big accident, I must confess that I don’t know what they mean by the word accident in this context. How does dead matter “accidentally” become conscious matter — atoms combined in such a way that the resulting mass can reflect on its own existence? Quite an accident, to say the least.
Many people get off track because they begin with a false premise — that science is in opposition to God. On the contrary, I believe that science, along with everything else in the universe, is part of the Universal Intelligence. In fact, science itself, which is bound by universal laws, is a miracle. Why? Because it works! No one has, or will ever have, any idea why it works — or why it works the way it does. It just does.
I’m not a proselytizer. I’m a social observer and social commentator. My only reason for sharing my insights into this subject is because I genuinely believe that you can benefit — right here and now, in this life — by making the effort to connect with Universal Intelligence. Regardless of your belief system, you’ve probably already done it many times over the years, though you may not have been consciously aware of it.
Has anyone ever called you at almost the exact moment you were thinking of him, someone with whom you had not spoken for many months, or even years? Have you ever taken action on a hunch, and it led you to something wonderful that you would never have been able to imagine?
My doctor recently told me that he was introduced to his wife at a party by a woman — a total stranger — who said she believed they would make a perfect couple. Sure enough, it was love at first sight, and they’ve been happily married for more than thirty years. But guess what? Neither of them ever saw that mysterious woman again, nor do they have any idea who she was. It makes one wonder why the metaphysical world operate the way it does.
Try making a list of all the big “coincidences” in your life — things you cannot explain in logical terms — and dump them into a mental compartment labeled “Universal Intelligence.” Then, be sure to review its contents — often. If you’re not already there, you may ultimately come to the conclusion that pretty much anything is possible if you can just find a way to plug into the Infinite Power Source that is behind those things we cannot explain.
Which brings me back to how each of us chooses to relate to the Universal Intelligence of which all atoms are a part. What the precise form of that Power Source is, no one can say with any degree of certainty. And how a person chooses to “worship” Universal Intelligence is most decidedly his own business. Surely, all rational, civilized people can agree on this self-evident, natural right.
Sadly, however, they do not. Which makes this the overriding question of our time: What are we to do with the childish but dangerous religionists who seem more intent than ever on making other people’s spiritual business their business? It is the prime question that civilized people around the globe must answer as our world continues to spin ever faster out of control.
The survival of modern civilization may very well depend on the answer.
I use the term “active visualization” to describe the conscious attempt to influence the outcome of events by vividly picturing those outcomes in advance. This is a very powerful concept that can produce truly amazing results for the person who is willing to concentrate with intensity.
As a teenager, my second most favorite sport (after basketball) was fast-pitch softball. I was a catcher, slow afoot but determined. If you’ve ever played fast-pitch softball, you know that the ball is on top of you so quickly after leaving the pitcher’s hand that you can’t afford to blink. Which is why I almost never hit the ball out of the infield the first year I played in an organized league.
When I came to bat during one particular game, the second baseman for the other team yelled to the outfielders, “Move in. This guy’s an infield hitter.” Sure enough, I hit a dribbler to the right side of the mound. But the second baseman’s remark really ticked me off — so much so that it made me determined to do something about my meek infield hitting. I began by spending hours visualizing and intellectualizing my hitting stance and how I swung the bat.
The first mistake I realized I was making was that I was putting my left foot “in the bucket” — stepping toward third base instead of toward the pitcher. When your first step is away from the mound, it gives you a head start on getting out of the way if the pitch ends up coming straight at you. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to hit with power when your pivot foot is preparing to head for the hills.
Second, I realized that I wasn’t swinging the bat with authority. Experienced Major League scouts often categorize players as having a “quick bat” or “slow bat.”
Third, I was making the mistake of taking my eye off the ball, a result of focusing on getting out of the way.
Fourth, I was hitting the ball with a stiff swing — i.e., I wasn’t “breaking my wrists” at the moment of impact.
These four steps are a lot to concentrate on when the ball is coming at you, from fifty feet away, at breakneck speed. But I was determined to become a good hitter, so I started practicing them in my backyard every evening.
I got down in my batting crouch hundreds of times during each session and, with intense concentration, visualized the pitcher going through his windup and letting go of the ball. As I pictured the windup, I focused on stepping directly toward the pitcher with my left foot, which was a bold psychological statement that I intended to meet the pitch head on.
In step two, I swung the bat as hard as I could — initially in slow motion, then working up to full speed. For the first time, I was attacking the pitcher.
In step three, I practiced keeping my eyes glued to the end of the bat and visualized it making contact with the ball.
Finally, at the last instant, I sharply broke my wrists.
Each evening, after practicing these four steps hundreds of times in slow motion, I would begin to gradually increase my speed until I was swinging at full throttle. But whether fast or slow, I would mentally count the steps — one, two, three, four — in order to give myself a rhythm.
I still remember the first game in which the power of my 1-2-3-4 visualization practice produced positive results. The other team had a very fast left-handed pitcher who was pretty wild — just the kind of pitcher that would have scared me to death prior to my visualization practice.
I don’t know exactly how to express what I felt the first time I came to bat, but I distinctly remember there being no doubt in my mind that I was going to hit the ball hard to the outfield. I had visualized and practiced it so many times that I almost felt as though I had an unfair advantage.
In fact, I played a mental game with myself and pretended I was practicing in my backyard. When the pitcher went into his familiar windmill windup, I knew the instant I stepped directly toward him that I was going to make solid contact with the ball. And I did — a cannon shot that almost took his ear off.
I went three for three that day, all line drives to the outfield. After four straight games of great hitting, the manager installed me as the cleanup hitter, and I remained there for the rest of the season.
Instead of meekly dribbling the ball to the right side of the infield, I now pulled everything to the left, because I was always way out in front of the pitch. So much so that I hit a lot of line drives down the left-field line that went foul, and teams actually starting shifting both their infields and outfields toward the left side of the diamond when I came to bat.
Little did I realize at the time that my successful experiment with the power of visualization would be one of the most important tools I would frequently employ years later in the business world. Before business meetings, I would play out in my mind every possible objection, question, and scenario I could imagine. And I would think through and practice how I would handle just about any obstacle that was placed in my path.
Preparation through visualization takes an excruciating amount of mental effort, but once you begin reaping the benefits of your efforts, you’ll find that the results are worth it. What it gets down to is paying the price out front … and enjoying the benefits down the road.
It’s a serious mistake to allow yourself to get caught up in the “what-if” and “how-to” trap — attempting to project all problems and solutions in advance of taking action. The reality is that no one can ever hope to know all the problems in advance, let alone all the solutions.
Further, most of the things people worry about never even come to pass. Or, if they do, they end up being not nearly as bad as envisioned. Even better, some of the most ominous circumstances often turn out to be nothing more than disguises for great opportunities. So, don’t worry.
Taking bold action, instead, is almost always a good idea. I thought about this a couple of months ago when my son asked me if I would take him to a University of Maryland football game on a perfect-weather Saturday.
It was quite a request, considering (1) I had never been to Maryland’s Byrd Stadium, and was not certain how to get there; (2) I estimated that the University of Maryland campus was at least an hour away in modest traffic; (3) it would take us about an hour to get ready to leave the house; (4) it was 10:00 a.m. — two hours before kickoff; and (5) we had no tickets.
Nevertheless, seeing an opportunity to be anointed Father of the Week, I replied, without hesitation, “Sure, let’s do it.” Some might call this impulsive; others might refer to it as abject stupidity. However, I would argue that a fair and enlightened individual would recognize it as nothing more than temporary insanity.
But something just felt right about it. It was a beautiful, sunny day; I felt like I could run a marathon backwards; and I saw it as one of those great Steve Martin-type bonding opportunities (as in Father of the Bride).
We pulled out of the driveway at 11:00 a.m., an hour before game time. Surprisingly, traffic was unusually light, even as we began to near the University of Maryland campus. Even more surprising, the stadium came into view about forty minutes after we left the house. I still haven’t figured out how that was mathematically possible.
Now for the not-so-small matter of parking. Cars were jammed into every square inch of space on the side of every road anywhere within sight of the stadium, so I frantically looked for a parking garage. But before I could locate one, would you believe that a single parking space on the side of the road suddenly appeared — amidst thousands of parked cars — about five minutes’ walking time from the stadium?
After I parked the car, my son and I jumped out and began following the crowd toward Byrd Stadium. At this point, I was thinking what a shame it would be if it were a sellout and we’d have to turn around and go home.
Amazingly, however, as we approached the front gate, two men were standing right in front of us, one holding up a pair of tickets. He said they were his season tickets, but that he was going to be sitting elsewhere with his friend that day, so he just wanted to “get rid of them.”
He told me they were on the fifty-yard line and that he had paid $40 apiece for them. I braced myself for his asking price — $75? $100? $150? Another surprise: In an almost apologetic tone, he asked if $20 a ticket sounded reasonable to me. I refrained from hugging him, and quickly peeled off two $20 bills from the cash stash in my pocket.
Thus far, I had been wrong about every dire thought that had crossed my mind before agreeing to take my son to the game, but I felt certain I would be right about one thing: I wasn’t holding 50-yard-line seats in my hand. Scalpers are hardworking entrepreneurs, but they have been known to sometimes shade the truth a bit.
Surprise again: Our seats were, indeed, smack-dab on the fifty!
At halftime, since I hadn’t eaten anything before leaving the house, I needed a substitute for the apple, banana, and green tea I normally consume for breakfast. Perusing the menu board at a garbage … er, concession … stand, it became evident that my substitute breakfast was going to be two hotdogs, an ice cream sandwich, and a Pepsi.
To avoid apoplexy, I reminded myself that what I was about to eat was at least healthier than cyanide-laced Kool-Aid … though not by much. Besides, the dogs were only $2.50 apiece, which wouldn’t even buy you a bun at Orioles Stadium.
After we finished “breakfast,” we stopped by one of the restrooms for a little relief. How pleasant. It made the rest rooms at RFK Stadium look like the Ritz-Carlton. Shows how easy it is to please college kids. Good thing they think it’s noble to suffer with the masses — because they definitely were suffering.
The bottom line is that it was a great day, a day when everything that seemed like a problem ended up being a plus. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that things turned out so well, because I’ve witnessed the playing out of this type of scenario so often over the years.
The moral is that when you really want to do something but are apprehensive because you see so many “problems” on the horizon, try something novel: Do it anyway! Don’t worry about it. You won’t bat 1,000 percent, but if you continually fail to take action, you’re guaranteed to bat zero.
And even if things don’t work out as you envisioned, you’ll find that in a vast majority of cases the fallout is not nearly as bad as you imagined. More than offsetting any pain you might endure from your missteps are the many wonderful, unexpected things that will often come into your life as a result of taking action.
In this, the final installment of my five-part article on peace of mind, I’m going to share with you two anti-stress techniques that can be very difficult to master. Even so, I can assure you that it will be worth your while to try, because I don’t believe a low stress level and peace of mind are possible without them.
Don’t try to make the world bend to your will.
Trying to get everyone to do things your way goes beyond stress. It’s a frustrating, hopeless exercise that can drive a person mad. I know one wealthy individual, in particular, who long ago lost his ability to think rationally because of his frustration over not being able to force everyone around him to conform to his wishes.
One of the rules of a good delegator is to tell people precisely what you want them to do, then let them do it their way. President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that the mark of a good executive is when someone hands him a letter that he knows he could have written better, he signs it anyway.
This is an area where you have to be careful, even when dealing with your own children. While it’s a parent’s responsibility to teach and guide his/her children, the wise parent learns early on that they cannot and will not do everything exactly as their parents want them to. The reality is that your children are different human beings than you, so it would be unnatural for them to mirror you 100 percent of the time.
Control anger and bitterness.
It’s worth repeating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous words: “For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.” You need to be able to control your thoughts. The late Jim Blanchard was a great teacher for me in this respect. Jim was one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever known. A paraplegic from the age of eighteen, he not only built a fortune while working from a wheelchair, he traveled the world extensively and did almost everything “normal” people do — and more.
I remember Jim once telling me about a guy who had shafted him out of a lot of money. I asked how he could be so calm about it, and I’ll never forget his response: “I’ve found that it’s disarming to just smile, be polite, and act as though nothing is wrong. Not only do you avoid making enemies by handling things in this manner, you also save yourself a ton of aggravation. All you need to do is avoid having business dealings with that person in the future. And to the extent you are cordial, he’ll probably even sing your praises to everyone — which means you win all the way around.”
I admit that Jim was special when it came to handling people, but his words help me to this day. Whenever I become angry, I give myself time to cool off before saying or doing something that I might later regret.
For example, if I impulsively write a quick letter in a heated state of mind, I let it sit for a day or two before mailing it. It’s amazing how much of the angry edge you can take off a letter by editing it a couple of days after you wrote it.
One last thing worth thinking about when it comes to achieving peace of mind. In his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Deepak Chopra says that worrying about stress is more damaging than stress itself. Which brings me back to something I said in Part I of this article: It is not events that shape your world, it is your thought processes. When you learn to control your thoughts, you establish the boundaries of negative influences upon your life. Remember, no matter how long a list of stress inhibitors you compile, your mental state will always be the most important factor when it comes to achieving peace of mind.
In Part III of this article, I discussed two important mind techniques for reducing stress: (1) breaking the habit of fretting and stewing about problems that don’t exist, and (2) recognizing that for every negative, there’s an offsetting positive. Continuing with this mental approach in today’s Part IV, I’m going to discuss three more tools that I believe you’ll find to be particularly effective.
Accept the inevitable.
Notwithstanding the Natural Law of Balance, there are some things you simply can’t do anything about. However, it’s important to be able to discern the difference between inevitable and difficult. For example, success can be difficult, but, regardless of one’s circumstances, failure is not inevitable. Accepting the inevitable is not being negative, it’s actually positive. What’s negative is not being able to ignore the inevitable and move on with your life.
As Charles Swindoll put it, “We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. … I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it.”
Accepting the inevitable and focusing on opportunities in your life is virtually guaranteed to lower your stress level.
Refuse to react to the lies and negative remarks disseminated by others.
There is no person on this planet who cannot relate to this issue, especially those who have high public profiles. Can you imagine enduring the hatred, slander, and defamation that people such as Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, George Bush, and Bill Clinton have had to put up with over the years?
I am convinced that what keeps these people going is a powerful capacity to ignore the vile accusations directed at them. Even if they hear something that bothers them, they are usually able to control themselves.
In my early years as an author, I allowed the media to get to me. It seemed as though every other sentence written about me was a total fabrication. When I complained to my attorney, he explained three things to me that had a dramatic impact on how I handled the media fiction machines from that point on.
First, he told me to forget about filing lawsuits. He said that after spending an enormous amount of time and money, I’d still lose … even if I won the case. Why? Because in libel suits, you have to prove damages, which is a near-impossible task.
Second, the more you complain about being defamed or slandered, the more attention you draw to the defamatory or slanderous remarks. When we read or hear something negative about ourselves, we tend to blow it way out of proportion.
On more than one occasion when I mentioned a negative article about myself to someone, that person would respond with something like, “Gee, I read that article, and I thought it was pretty good.” In other words, what I was reading into the article, through my own sensitive eyes, was very different from the interpretation of others who had read the same article.
Third, it makes you appear to be above the fray when you ignore the mudslinging, step back, and let your supporters defend you. I’ve been doing that for years, and it’s always a great feeling when a reader sends me a copy of a letter he sent to a publication, blasting it for something it printed about me that was untrue.
In most cases, those who admire and respect you — especially if they know you well — will defend you when you’re attacked. Just don’t make the naive mistake of expecting everyone to love you, because they won’t. Remember, even Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated.
Intellectualize the reality that life isn’t perfect.
I say intellectualize, because just about everyone claims to understand this reality, but I don’t believe most people take the trouble to analyze what it really means. In The Road Less Traveled, Dr. M. Scott Peck pointed out that one of the most traumatic moments of a child’s life is when he discovers that his parents aren’t perfect.
Likewise, I believe that one of the most traumatic moments of a parent’s life is when he/she discovers that his/her child isn’t perfect. You can reduce your stress many times over by accepting the reality that there is no perfect child, parent, spouse, home, city, or job.
Learn to take life one wave at a time. Focusing on the Natural Law of Balance will bring an abundance of peace and tranquility into your life.
In the fifth and final installment of this article, I’ll be covering the final two mind techniques for reducing stress: (1) not trying to make the world bend to your will, and (2) controlling anger and bitterness. I consider these two components to be absolutely essential to achieving peace of mind.
In Parts I and II of this article, I emphasized that stress is a self-imposed mental state. In today’s Part III, as well as in Parts IV and V, I’m going to suggest some healthy thoughts that I believe will help you use the power of your mind to overcome a stressful mind-set. Toward that end, I strongly encourage you to employ the two mental tools described below.
Shake the habit of fretting and stewing about problems that don’t exist.
It’s amazing how many people live in a “what if” world. Projecting medical problems is an excellent and all-too-common example of this. My doctor once told me that medical students are notorious for imagining that they’ve contracted some terrible disease.
The reason, of course, is that they study diseases on a daily basis. Because they are trained to be constantly on the lookout for the life-threatening symptoms they are learning about, it’s understandable that they would sometimes imagine they have some of those same symptoms.
Can there be a better definition of joy than the feeling you have when the results of your prostate exam, colonoscopy, pap smear, or mammogram come back negative? Until you get that thumbs-up feedback from your doctor or lab, it’s very easy for your mind to play tricks on you and stress you to the limit. It’s a classic example of being stressed over a problem that doesn’t exist. The problem becomes real only if, and when, the results come back positive.
This is precisely what happened to me some years ago when I was told that my PSA reading was slightly on the high side. I had recently watched a couple of shows on television about prostate cancer, and a 20/20 segment by Hugh Downs put me over the top.
To make a long story short, I began sweating heavily at night, my left leg was tingling, and I lost my appetite. I found myself lying in bed and thinking about what a prostate operation would be like, how much pain would be involved, how much recuperation time would be required — and if I would even survive.
Guess what? My symptoms were 100 percent self-induced. When I visited a second urologist, everything checked out perfectly — including a PSA reading on the low side.
On reflection, however, I’m glad I had that experience, because it taught me how easy it is to induce stress — and even medical symptoms — through the power of the mind. If you excessively dwell on bad things that might happen in your life — medical or otherwise — you only succeed in increasing the chances of their actually happening.
In the words of Thomas Carlyle, “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” In other words, focus on today’s problems, because, in most cases, that’s a full-time job. The late Tony Snow was an incredibly inspiring example of this kind of attitude.
Recognize that for every negative, there’s an offsetting positive.
In Million Dollar Habits, I discuss a principle that I refer to as the Natural Law of Balance. In pointing out that the universe is in balance, I use such examples as electrons and protons, night and day, male and female, hot and cold, and life and death. The reality is that for every positive, there’s an offsetting negative, and for every negative, there’s an offsetting positive. Balance is the natural order of the universe.
The nice thing about it is that when you understand and believe in universal balance, it gives you the mind-set to look quickly and automatically for the offsetting positive in every negative situation. Put another way, think of every negative occurrence as nothing more than an illusion hiding something of value to you. As Richard Bach so eloquently put it in his book Illusion, “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.”
In Part IV of this article, I’ll be covering three additional thought processes that I know, from personal experience, are capable of reducing the amount of stress in your life and bringing about peace of mind.
The foundation for handling sadness and misfortune, and thus for leading a low-stress life, is what I like to refer to as “living right.” What I mean by this term is consistently being conscious of, and vigilant about, trying to make good choices.
Please, no relativism copout here when it comes to deciding what “living right” and “good choices” mean. I’d be willing to bet that you’ve had more experiences than you can count where you did something that, in your gut, didn’t feel right. And just as many experiences where you did not do something that you knew, deep down inside, you should have done.
In fact, you can apply the “feels right/feels wrong” barometer to virtually any aspect of life. Whenever a person who’s a hundred pounds overweight walks by me at a ballpark — beer in one hand and container of gooey, cheese-covered nachos in the other — I think to myself, “Surely this gal must know that what she’s doing is not in her best interest.”
Specifically, she knows that it’s wrong for her health and longevity, not to mention her energy level and capacity for enjoying life. In reality, of course, she doesn’t think about it in such specific terms. Her stress level simply rises and brings with it a higher level of unhappiness.
Another example is when you allow a sales clerk, customer rep, or maintenance person to intimidate you into accepting a less than satisfactory solution to your problem. How many times have you felt stressed and inwardly angry for allowing yourself to be intimidated in such situations?
Or how about when you do something that, at the deepest level of your moral foundation, doesn’t feel honest? In such a situation, if you’re basically an honorable person, your conscience won’t let you get away with it. This often brings the Guilt Fairy into your life, and along with her enough stress to take your mind off other important matters.
And, of course, there’s being late for appointments, particularly if it becomes a way of life. Being late is not just a blatant display of rudeness, it also makes you look weak in the eyes of others. Worse, it causes you to feel weak.
We all desire love, understanding, and recognition, but none of these is foundational to serenity. Nor is alcohol, pills, sexual pleasure, fame, or wealth the antidote to stress. Millions have tried all of these without conquering their stress, and all too many have lived unnecessarily short lives as a result.
The real key to conquering stress is self-examination — continual, honest self-examination regarding the harmony and disharmony in your life. Inner conflict causes stress. By contrast, leading a concentric life (i.e., one in which what you do matches up closely with what you believe in and what you say) brings harmony into your world. Harmony is directly related to how often you follow through and do what you know is right. Likewise, harmony is related to how often you demonstrate the self-discipline to refrain from doing that which you know is wrong.
Finally, if you’re a religionist, stress is a signal that you are disconnected from God. How can you be stressed if you are connected to an infinite source of power that is presumed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent?
Similarly, if you’re an atheist, stress is a signal that you are disconnected from the infinite power of the universe, whatever the ultimate scientific explanation of that power may be. In this respect, I agree with Viktor Frankl’s view that there is much less difference between a religionist and an atheist than most people might suspect. The more I examine this issue, the more convinced I am that it’s very much an issue of semantics.
In Part III of this article, I’m going to suggest some specific actions you can take to lower your stress level and bring more serenity, peace of mind, and tranquility into your life.
In Part I of this article, I offered some examples of people who seem to have paid for their bad deeds with “compound interest” added. The belief that everything that goes around comes around is a comforting view of the world, but two other possible scenarios destroy the idea that the world operates in such a manner on a consistent basis. They are:
When bad things happen to good people, and …
When good things happen to bad people.
In thousands of years of recorded history, no one has even come close to being able to explain why bad things sometimes happen to good people. It could be that God has a plan to which we are not privy. Or that appropriate rewards will be forthcoming in the afterlife. Or perhaps that God doesn’t care about earthly events. Who knows?
As for good things happening to bad people, it’s a scenario that is every bit as frustrating to most of us. We all know bona fide scoundrels and full-blooded vermin who appear to live charmed lives, with their debts never seeming to come due.
So, where does that leave Jack Tatum, Mike Nifong, Johnny Cochran, and untold numbers of other immoral rascals? Were they just unlucky folks who got caught in the gears of a random universe, while even worse characters, through nothing more than the luck of the draw, got off scot free?
I don’t think so. While I haven’t been appointed to speak on behalf of the Final Judge, my gut tells me that the Tatums, Nifongs, and Cochrans of the world do, in fact, fall into the “everything that goes around comes around” category.
But humility and honesty compel me to admit that I have no explanation for why good people sometimes get punished and bad people often get away with murder (in some cases, literally). That being the case, I choose not to fret about when, where, and how punishments will be meted out, with or without compound interest, to those who make careers out of lying, stealing, cheating, and hypocrisy — not to mention those who excel at extracurricular activities such as murder, rape, and pillage.
My mantra is this: Don’t try to direct traffic unless God has personally appointed you to that role. Just be patient and watch in awe as events unfold through the years. Even more important, live your own life on the premise that everything that goes around does, indeed, come around.
And understand going in that no matter how righteous you may be, you still may get struck down by a brain tumor or diabetes. Even so, what do you have to lose by striving to be kind, compassionate, honest, and civil?
It’s true, of course, that even if you invest an extraordinary amount of effort into living your life on the high road, you will fall far short of moral perfection. Which begs the question: Is it worth it? I believe it is, because striving for moral perfection, of and by itself, is a great reward.
When all is said and done, no one can say with certainty whether or not an abstract phenomenon such as karma is at work in our universe. But why tempt fate and run the risk of finding out the hard way that it is?
That said, I pledge to you that the moment I come up with answers to why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people, you’ll be the first to know. However, in all candor, I must admit that I do not expect the Conscious Universal Power Source to share the answers to those questions with me anytime soon.
In the meantime, my best advice is to live your life as though you believe that karma is a reality. Or, to put it in more secular, pragmatic terms, to live every moment as though the whole world were watching.
When asked what he believed to be the greatest discovery of the 20th century, Albert Einstein is said to have answered, “Compound interest.” And wealthy people — you know, the ones who clip debt-instrument coupons as a pastime — would undoubtedly agree with him.
Compound interest, however, can accrue on things other than money. When I was a very young man, I observed that I almost always ended up paying considerably more for a “wrong” action than what I had hoped to gain from it. When the payment came due, it was like an invisible balloon note that carried onerous, compounded interest. (Sound familiar?)
I thought about this when Reader Maria Anastasia recently sent me an e-mail that read, in part:
“In a future edition of the book [Action!], you may want to insert something regarding the fact that many cultures (and some open-minded people) believe in karma and reincarnation. I am not sure if it exists or not, but it sure seems to explain the differences and seeming injustices in this world. Or, simply put, reaping what you sow — both in this lifetime and potentially in future lifetimes. … An excellent example is Jack Tatum — the football player who maimed so many other players.”
Ms. Anastasia went on to say that she wonders if former Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum, now severely diabetic (and having lost his left leg and five toes on his right foot as a result), is reaping what he sowed. In his playing days, Tatum’s nickname was “The Assassin,” and he let it be known that when he took the field, his goal was to maim his opponents.
On August 12, 1978, in a preseason game, he took that goal to its extreme with a brutal hit on Darryl Stingley of the New England Patriots. Stingley had been vulnerable while reaching for a high pass over the middle from quarterback Steve Grogan.
At the moment of impact, Stingley’s life was forever changed. He spent his remaining years as a quadriplegic. (He recently passed away at age fifty-five.)
Hard as it is to believe, Jack Tatum never once tried to contact Stingley to apologize — or even to see how he was doing. When asked by a reporter about the incident, he simply said, “I was just trying to do my job. It’s unfortunate, but it happens.”
Do Tatum’s horrific health problems comprise compounded interest that has come due on his karma debt?
And what about the now-disgraced Mike Nifong, the rogue prosecutor who tried to railroad three Duke lacrosse players into life sentences for a crime they didn’t commit? Nifong has lost everything — his prestigious district attorney title (that he was willing to commit criminal acts to retain), his license to practice law, the respect of friends, family, and the public, and, most assuredly, respect for himself.
Do Nifong’s enormous losses comprise compounded interest that has come due on his karma debt?
As a final example, I can’t help thinking of the late Johnny Cochran, who died of a brain tumor in 2005. Every non-comatose adult can vividly remember Cochran’s transformation of the O.J. Simpson trial into the Mark Fuhrman trial. And his ludicrous attempt at Muhammed Ali-like poetry that cinched the deal for his murderous client: “If it [the glove] doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
For years, Cochran, with a straight face, insisted in his frequent television appearances that O.J. was innocent. This, even after the infamous Bruno Magli shoe pictures were published. It was, of course, a bold-faced lie. Cochran had a razor-sharp mind and was certainly no Pollyanna. He knew that O.J. was guilty as sin.
Was Cochran’s gruesome death compounded interest that came due on his karma debt?
I could make a pretty long list here — as I’m sure you could — but you get the idea: “Everything that goes around comes around.” It’s a nice, tight philosophical view of life that is very comforting — that is, until we come up against two scenarios that don’t fit the karma mold, scenarios I’ll be discussing in Part II of this article.
Some months ago, following a keynote address I had given, a middle-aged lady approached me and asked if she could speak with me for a few minutes. I told her I’d be more than happy to speak with her, whereupon she began to share with me the difficulty she was experiencing in trying to cope with stress.
Her demeanor was hyper — talking very fast, highly animated, and tending to offer answers to her own questions. We spoke for about ten minutes, and during that short period of time her cellphone not only rang three times, but with each ring she interrupted our discussion to answer it. While I was taken aback by her cellphone compulsion, I didn’t take it personally. I felt pretty certain that it was a way of life for her.
The woman explained that she was a single mother with two boys, ages eleven and thirteen. Her husband had left her several years ago for another woman, and, though she had a full-time job, she was having a very difficult time making ends meet.
In a frustrated tone, she listed the causes of her stress. She told me that her apartment was always “a mess,” because between her job obligations, commuting back and forth to work, grocery shopping, cooking, endlessly chauffeuring her boys, and more, she didn’t have time to straighten it let alone clean it. She was talking at such a rapid pace that it appeared she was afraid she would not get in everything that she wanted to say.
Obviously, I wasn’t able to give this woman much concrete advice in just ten minutes, but I did emphasize one important point to her. I told her that in relating her situation to me, she could have been describing any one of millions of women who find themselves in pretty much the same circumstances day in and day out.
Or, for that matter, men. Most men are overloaded with work and obligations that often push them to the brink. The majority of men I talk to are stressed and frustrated by a lack of that ever-dwindling commodity — time.
Since my brief chat with that frazzled woman, I’ve given a lot of thought to the widespread problem of stress. It’s a menace that knows no racial, ethnic, religious, or gender boundaries. Clearly, it is endemic in modern Western culture.
However, I’ve come to the conclusion that children, job, lack of time, and other frazzling issues that most of us have to deal with are not the underlying causes of stress. Rather, I am convinced that stress is a self-imposed mental state.
Stress is the antithesis of serenity, peace of mind, and tranquility. Which is why an important factor in reducing stress is to strive for peace of mind. You cannot simultaneously experience tranquility and stress.
So, how do you capture that elusive mental state known as peace of mind? A good start is to recognize that true peace of mind does not shift with changing circumstances. If you have peace of mind, you can handle both adversity and good fortune with calm confidence.
In other words, true peace of mind gives you the strength to stay on course in the face of adversity. What I’m saying here is that you live within your mind. It is not events that shape your world. It’s your thought processes.
To paraphrase something Dale Carnegie said more than fifty years ago, as you and I pass through the decades of life, sadness and misfortune will cross our paths. This is a truism that would be difficult to argue against.
Fear, loneliness, rejection, illness, death, financial failure, and loss of love are just a few examples of the kinds of sadness and misfortune we all have to deal with from time to time. Where we differ is how each of us handles the negatives that come into our lives. This, in turn, goes a long way toward determining whether our lives will be stressful or tranquil.
In Part II of this article, I’ll be discussing the importance of “living right” as a key factor in reducing the amount of stress in your life.
