
Alcoholics Anonymous | Big Book 4th Edition | Book Summary
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Alcoholics Anonymous 4th Edition
Many thousands have benefited from The Big Book and its simple but profound explanation of the doctrines behind Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith.
Preface
THIS IS the fourth edition of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.” The first edition appeared in April 1939, and in the following sixteen years, more than 300,000 copies went into circulation. The second edition, published in 1955, reached a total of more than 1,150,500 copies. The third edition, which came off press in 1976, achieved a circulation of approximately 19,550,000 in all formats.
We think this account of our experiences will help everyone to better understand the alcoholic. Many do not comprehend that the alcoholic is a very sick person. And besides, we are sure that our way of living has its advantages for all.
Strenuous work, one alcoholic with another, was vital to permanent recovery.
By the end of 1939 it was estimated that 800 alcoholics were on their way to recovery.
In the spring of 1940, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave a dinner for many of his friends to which he invited A.A. members to tell their stories. News of this got on the world wires; inquiries poured in again and many people went to the bookstores to get the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.’’ By March 1941 the membership had shot up to 2,000.
By the close of 1941, A.A. numbered 8,000 members. The mushrooming process was in full swing. A.A. had become a national institution.
Of alcoholics who came to A.A. and really tried, 50% got sober at once and remained that way; 25% sobered up after some relapses, and among the remainder, those who stayed on with
- showed improvement. Other thousands came to a few A.A. meetings and at first decided they didn’t want the program. But great numbers of these—about two out of three—began to return as time passed.
Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religious organization. Neither does A.A. take any particular medical point of view, though we cooperate widely with the men of medicine as well as with the men of religion.
By March 1976, when this edition went to the printer, the total worldwide membership of Alcoholics Anonymous was conservatively estimated at more than 1,000,000, with almost 28,000 groups meeting in over 90 countries.
Each day, somewhere in the world, recovery begins when one alcoholic talks with another alcoholic, sharing experience, strength, and hope.
FOREWORD TO FOURTH EDITION
THIS fourth edition of “Alcoholics Anonymous” came off press in November 2001, at the start of a new millennium. Since the third
edition was published in 1976, worldwide membership of A.A. has just about doubled, to an estimated two million or more, with nearly 100,800 groups meeting in approximately 150 countries around the world.
Currently, “Alcoholics Anonymous” has been translated into forty-three languages.
Taking advantage of technological advances, for example, A.A. members with computers can participate in meetings online, sharing with fellow alcoholics across the country or around the world. In any meeting, anywhere, A.A.’s share experience, strength, and hope with each other, in order to stay sober and help other alcoholics. Modem-to-modem or face-to-face, A.A.’s speak the language of the heart in all its power and simplicity.
We who have suffered alcoholic torture must
believe—that the body of the alcoholic is quite as abnormal as his mind. It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life, that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright mental defectives. These things were true to some extent, in fact, to a considerable extent with some of us. But we are sure that our bodies were sickened as well. In our belief, any picture of the alcoholic which leaves out this physical factor is incomplete.
Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.
On the other hand—and strange as this may seem to those who do not understand—once a psychic change has occurred, the very same person who seemed doomed, who had so many problems he despaired of ever solving them, suddenly finds himself easily able to control his desire for alcohol, the only effort necessary being that required to follow a few simple rules.
The classification of alcoholics seems most difficult, and in much detail is outside the scope of this book. There are, of course, the psychopaths who are emotionally unstable. We are all familiar with this type. They are always “going on the wagon for keeps.’’ They are over-remorseful and make many resolutions, but never a decision.
There is the type of man who is unwilling to admit that he cannot take a drink. He plans various ways of drinking. He changes his brand or his environment. There is the type who always believes that after being entirely free from alcohol for a period of time he can take a drink without danger. There is the manic-depressive type, who is, perhaps, the least understood by his friends, and about whom a whole chapter could be written.
Then there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect alcohol has upon them. They are often able, intelligent, friendly people.
All these, and many others, have one symptom in common:
they cannot start drinking without developing the phenomenon of craving. This phenomenon, as we have suggested, may be the manifestation of an allergy which differentiates these people, and sets them apart as a distinct entity. It has never been, by any treatment with which we are familiar, permanently eradicated. The only relief we have to suggest is entire abstinence.
Chapter 1: BILL’S STORY
Liquor ceased to be a luxury; it became a necessity.
The remorse, horror and hopelessness of the next morning are unforgettable. The courage to do battle was not there.
In alcoholics the will is amazingly weakened when it comes to combating liquor, though it often remains strong in other respects.
God had done for him what he could not do for himself. His human will had failed. Doctors had pronounced him incurable. Society was about to lock him up. Like myself, he had admitted complete defeat. Then he had, in effect, been raised from the dead, suddenly taken from the scrap heap to a level of life better than the best he had ever known!
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning. I saw that growth could start from that point. Upon a foundation of complete willingness I might build.
Thus was I convinced that God is concerned with us humans when we want Him enough. At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.
There I humbly offered myself to God, as I then understood Him, to do with me as He would. I placed myself unreservedly under His care and direction. I admitted for the first time that of myself I was nothing; that without Him I was lost. I ruthlessly faced my sins and became willing to have my newfound Friend take them away, root and branch. I have not had a drink since.
I was to test my thinking by the new God-consciousness within. Common sense would thus become uncommon sense. I was to sit quietly when in doubt, asking only for direction and strength to meet my problems as He would have me. Never was I to pray for myself, except as my requests bore on my usefulness to others. Then only might I expect to receive. But that would be in great measure.
Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness. I must turn in all things to the Father of Light who presides over us all.
These were revolutionary and drastic proposals, but the moment I fully accepted them, the effect was electric. There was a sense of victory, followed by such a peace and serenity as I had never
known. There was utter confidence. I felt lifted up, as though the great clean wind of a mountain top blew through and through. God comes to most men gradually, but His impact on me was sudden and profound.
Faith without works was dead, he said. And how appallingly true for the alcoholic! For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead. If he did not work, he would surely drink again, and if he drank, he would surely die. Then faith would be dead indeed. With us it is just like that.
Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish.
Bill W., co-founder of A.A., died January 24, 1971.
Chapter 2: THERE IS A SOLUTION
We of alcoholics anonymous know thousands of men and women who were once just as hopeless as Bill. Nearly all have recovered. They have solved the drink problem.
We know that while the alcoholic keeps away from drink, as he may do for months or years, he reacts much like other men. We are equally positive that once he takes any alcohol whatever into his system, something happens, both in the bodily and mental sense, which makes it virtually impossible for him to stop. The experience of any alcoholic will abundantly confirm this.
The main problem of the alcoholic centers in his mind, rather than in his body.
At a certain point in the drinking of every alcoholic, he passes into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of absolutely no avail. This tragic situation has already arrived in practically every case long before it is suspected.
The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our socalled will power becomes practically non-existent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the
suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink.
Chapter 3: MORE ABOUT ALCOHOLISM
Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows.
Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.
We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals usually brief—were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.
We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones. Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men. We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.
Despite all we can say, many who are real alcoholics are not going to believe they are in that class. By every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore nonalcoholic. If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right-about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him. Heaven knows, we have tried hard enough and long enough to drink like other people!
Here are some of the methods we have tried: Drinking beer only, limiting the number of drinks, never drinking alone, never drinking in the morning, drinking only at home, never having it in the house, never drinking during business hours, drinking only at parties, switching from scotch to brandy, drinking only natural wines, agreeing to resign if ever drunk on the job, taking a trip, not taking a trip, swearing off forever (with and without a solemn oath), taking more physical exercise, reading inspirational books, going to health farms and sanitariums, accepting voluntary commitment to asylums—we could increase the list ad infinitum.
Though there is no way of proving it, we believe that early in our drinking careers most of us could have stopped drinking. But the difficulty is that few alcoholics have enough desire to stop while there is yet time. We have heard of a few instances where people, who showed definite signs of alcoholism, were able to stop for a long period because of an overpowering desire to do so. Here is one.
A man of thirty was doing a great deal of spree drinking. He was very nervous in the morning after these bouts and quieted himself with more liquor. He was ambitious to succeed in business, but saw that he would get nowhere if he drank at all. Once he started, he had no control whatever. He made up his mind that until he had been successful in business and had retired, he would not touch another drop. An exceptional man, he remained bone dry for twenty-five years and retired at the age of fifty-five, after a successful and happy business career. Then he fell victim to a belief which practically every alcoholic has —that his long period of sobriety and self-discipline had qualified him to drink as other men. Out came his carpet slippers and a bottle. In two months he was in a hospital, puzzled and humiliated. He tried to regulate his drinking for a while, making several trips to the hospital meantime. Then, gathering all his forces, he attempted to stop altogether and found he could not. Every means of solving his problem which money could buy was at his disposal. Every attempt failed. Though a robust man at retirement, he went to pieces quickly and was dead within four years.
“Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.’’ Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever. If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of
any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.
For those who are unable to drink moderately the question is how to stop altogether. We are assuming, of course, that the reader desires to stop. Whether such a person can quit upon a nonspiritual basis depends upon the extent to which he has already lost the power to choose whether he will drink or not. Many of us felt that we had plenty of character. There was a tremendous urge to cease forever. Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it—this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish.
What sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of the first drink?
In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. We now see that when we began to drink deliberately, instead of casually, there was little serious or effective thought during the period of premeditation of what the terrific consequences might be.
The actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize, to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience.
He was positive that this humiliating experience, plus the knowledge he had acquired, would keep him sober the rest of his life. Self-knowledge would fix it.
Not only had I been off guard, I had made no fight whatever against the first drink. This time I had not thought of the consequences at all
If I had an alcoholic mind, the time and place would come—I would drink again. They had said that though I did raise a
defense, it would one day give way before some trivial reason for having a drink.
I knew from that moment that I had an alcoholic mind. I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots.
An alcoholic mentality was a hopeless condition. They cited cases out of their own experience by the dozen. This process snuffed out the last flicker of conviction that I could do the job myself.
The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense. His defense must come from a Higher Power.
Chapter 4: WE AGNOSTICS
In the preceding chapters you have learned something of alcoholism. We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. If, when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or if when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. If that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer.
To one who feels he is an atheist or agnostic such an experience seems impossible, but to continue as he is means disaster, especially if he is an alcoholic of the hopeless variety. To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face.
Find a Power greater than yourself which will solve your problem.
As soon as we were able to lay aside prejudice and express even a willingness to believe in a Power greater than ourselves, we commenced to get results, even though it was impossible for any of us to fully define or comprehend that Power, which is God.
Much to our relief, we discovered we did not need to consider another’s conception of God. Our own conception, however inadequate, was sufficient to make the approach and to effect a contact with Him. As soon as we admitted the possible existence
of a Creative Intelligence, a Spirit of the Universe underlying the totality of things, we began to be possessed of a new sense of power and direction, provided we took other simple steps. We found that God does not make too hard terms with those who seek Him. To us, the Realm of Spirit is broad, roomy, all inclusive; never exclusive or forbidding to those who earnestly seek. It is open, we believe, to all men.
Are not some of us just as biased and unreasonable about the realm of the spirit as were the ancients about the realm of the material?
When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.
The Wright brothers’ almost childish faith that they could build a machine which would fly was the mainspring of their accomplishment. Without that, nothing could have happened. We agnostics and atheists were sticking to the idea that self-sufficiency would solve our problems. When others showed us that “God-sufficiency’’ worked with them, we began to feel like those who had insisted the Wrights would never fly.
When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?
For faith in a Power greater than ourselves, and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives, are facts as old as man himself.
Chapter 5: HOW IT WORKS
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely
give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way.
Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol— that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can’t go through with it.’’ Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to
maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
Our description of the alcoholic, the chapter to the agnostic, and our personal adventures before and after make clear three pertinent ideas:
That we were alcoholic and could not manage our own lives. That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism.
That God could and would if He were sought.
Being convinced, we were at Step Three, which is that we decided to turn our will and our life over to God as we understood Him. Just what do we mean by that, and just what do we do?
The first requirement is that we be convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success. On that basis we are almost always in collision with something or somebody, even though our motives are good. Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.
We alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us! God makes that possible.
This is the how and why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom.
When we sincerely took such a position, all sorts of remarkable things followed. We had a new Employer. Being all powerful, He provided what we needed, if we kept close to Him and performed His work well. Established on such a footing we became less and less interested in ourselves, our little plans and designs. More and
more we became interested in seeing what we could contribute to life.
We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: “God, I offer myself to Thee—to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!’’ We thought well before taking this step making sure we were ready; that we could at last abandon ourselves utterly to Him.
Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.
Therefore, we started upon a personal inventory. This was Step Four. A business which takes no regular inventory usually goes broke. Taking a commercial inventory is a fact-finding and a fact-facing process. It is an effort to discover the truth about the stock-in-trade. One object is to disclose damaged or unsalable goods, to get rid of them promptly and without regret. If the owner of the business is to be successful, he cannot fool himself about values.
But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short lived.
It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feelings we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.
If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God. Instead we let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do. We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us be. At once, we commence to outgrow fear.
Chapter 6: INTO ACTION
This is perhaps difficult—especially discussing our defects with another person. We think we have done well enough in admitting these things to ourselves. There is doubt about that. In actual practice, we usually find a solitary self-appraisal insufficient. Many of us thought it necessary to go much further.
If we skip this vital step, we may not overcome drinking. Time after time newcomers have tried to keep to themselves certain facts about their lives. Trying to avoid this humbling experience, they have turned to easier methods.
More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor. To the outer world he presents his stage character. This is the one he likes his fellows to see. He wants to enjoy a certain reputation but knows in his heart he doesn’t deserve it.
The inconsistency is made worse by the things he does on his sprees. Coming to his senses, he is revolted at certain episodes he vaguely remembers. These memories are a nightmare. He trembles to think someone might have observed him. As fast as he can, he pushes these memories far inside himself. He hopes they will never see the light of day. He is under constant fear and tension—that makes for more drinking.
The rule is we must be hard on ourselves, but always considerate of others.
When ready, we say something like this: “My Creator, I am now willing that you should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that you now remove from me every single defect of character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go out from here, to do your bidding. Amen.’’ We have then completed Step Seven.
Now we need more action, without which we find that “Faith without works is dead.’’ Let’s look at Steps Eight and Nine. We have a list of all persons we have harmed and to whom we are willing to make amends. We made it when we took inventory. We subjected ourselves to a drastic self-appraisal. Now we go out to our fellows and repair the damage done in the past. We attempt to sweep away the debris which has accumulated out of our effort to live on self-will and run the show ourselves. If we haven’t the will to do this, we ask until it comes. Remember it was agreed at the beginning we would go to any lengths for victory over alcohol.
Simply we tell him that we will never get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past. We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worth while can be accomplished until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is calm, frank, and open, we will be gratified with the result.
In nine cases out of ten the unexpected happens. Sometimes the man we are calling upon admits his own fault, so feuds of years’ standing melt away in an hour. Rarely do we fail to make satisfactory progress. Our former enemies sometimes praise what we are doing and wish us well. Occasionally, they will offer assistance. It should not matter, however, if someone does throw us out of his office. We have made our demonstration, done our part. It’s water over the dam.
So, we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness and love.
The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole
attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
This thought brings us to Step Ten, which suggests we continue to take personal inventory and continue to set right any new mistakes as we go along.
That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation. We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected. We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is our experience. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.
It is easy to let up on the spiritual program of action and rest on our laurels. We are headed for trouble if we do, for alcohol is a subtle foe. We are not cured of alcoholism. What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition. Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God’s will into all of our activities. “How can I best serve Thee— Thy will (not mine) be done.’’ These are thoughts which must go with us constantly. We can exercise our will power along this line all we wish. It is the proper use of the will.
Step Eleven suggests prayer and meditation. We shouldn’t be shy on this matter of prayer.
We alcoholics are undisciplined. So we let God discipline us in the simple way we have just outlined.
But this is not all. There is action and more action. “Faith without works is dead.’’ The next chapter is entirely devoted to Step Twelve.
Chapter 7: WORKING WITH OTHERS
Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics. It works when other activities fail. This is our twelfth suggestion: Carry this message to other alcoholics! You can help when no one
else can. You can secure their confidence when others fail.
Remember they are very ill.
Life will take on new meaning. To watch people
recover, to see them help others, to watch loneliness vanish, to see a fellowship grow up about you, to have a host of friends— this is an experience you must not miss. We know you will not want to miss it. Frequent contact with newcomers and with each other is the bright spot of our lives.
We have no monopoly on God;
Helping others is the foundation stone of your recovery. A kindly act once in a while isn’t enough. You have to act the Good Samaritan every day, if need be.
This truth: Job or no job—wife or no wife—we simply do not stop drinking so long as we place dependence upon other people ahead of dependence on God.
Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone. The only condition is that he trust in God and clean house.
Assuming we are spiritually fit, we can do all sorts of things alcoholics are not supposed to do. People have said we must not go where liquor is served; we must not have it in our homes; we must shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures which show drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide their bottles if we go to their houses; we mustn’t think or be reminded about alcohol at all. Our experience shows that this is not necessarily so.
We meet these conditions every day. An alcoholic who cannot meet them, still has an alcoholic mind; there is something the matter with his spiritual status. His only chance for sobriety would be someplace like the Greenland Ice Cap, and even there an Eskimo might turn up with a bottle of scotch and ruin everything!
In our belief any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure. If the alcoholic tries to shield himself he may succeed for a time, but he usually winds up with a bigger explosion than ever. We have tried
these methods. These attempts to do the impossible have always failed.
After all, our problems were of our own making. Bottles were only a symbol. Besides, we have stopped fighting anybody or anything. We have to!
“He wants to want to stop.”
Chapter 9: THE FAMILY AFTERWARD
All members of the family should meet upon the common ground of tolerance, understanding and love. This involves a process of deflation. The alcoholic, his wife, his children, his “in-laws,” each one is likely to have fixed ideas about the family’s attitude towards himself or herself. Each is interested in having his or her wishes respected. We find the more one member of the family demands that the others concede to him, the more resentful they become. This makes for discord and unhappiness.
Henry Ford once made a wise remark to the effect that experience is the thing of supreme value in life. That is true only if one is willing to turn the past to good account. We grow by our willingness to face and rectify errors and convert them into assets. The alcoholic’s past thus becomes the principal asset of the family and frequently it is almost the only one!
Cling to the thought that, in God’s hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have—the key to life and happiness for others. With it you can avert death and misery for them.
First Things First, Live and Let Live, Easy Does It.
Chapter 10: TO EMPLOYERS
Understand that he must undergo a change of heart. To get over drinking will require a transformation of thought and attitude. We all had to place recovery above everything,
The greatest enemies of us alcoholics are resentment, jealousy, envy, frustration, and fear. Wherever men are gathered together in business there will be rivalries and, arising out of these, a
certain amount of office politics. Sometimes we alcoholics have an idea that people are trying to pull us down. Often this is not so at all. But sometimes our drinking will be used politically.
Chapter 11: A VISION FOR YOU
The familiar alcoholic obsession that few knew of his drinking.
They must help other alcoholics if they would remain sober, that motive became secondary. It was transcended by the happiness they found in giving themselves for others. They shared their homes, their slender resources, and gladly devoted their spare hours to fellow-sufferers. They were willing, by day or night, to place a new man in the hospital and visit him afterward. They grew in numbers. They experienced a few distressing failures, but in those cases they made an effort to bring the man’s family into a spiritual way of living, thus relieving much worry and suffering.
Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask Him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man who is still sick. The answers will come, if your own house is in order. But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got. See to it that your relationship with Him is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is the Great Fact for us.
Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us. We shall be with you in the Fellowship of the Spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny.
May God bless you and keep you—until then.
DOCTOR BOB’S NIGHTMARE
A co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The birth of our Society dates from his first day of permanent sobriety, June 10, 1935.
To 1950, the year of his death, he carried the A.A. message to more than 5,000 alcoholic men and women, and to all these he gave his medical services without thought of charge.
June 10, 1935, and that was my last drink.
As I write, nearly four years have passed.
The question which might naturally come into your mind would be: “What did the man do or say that was different from what others had done or said?” It must be remembered that I had read a great deal and talked to everyone who knew, or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism. But this was a man who had experienced many years of frightful drinking, who had had most all the drunkard’s experiences known to man, but who had been cured by the very means I had been trying to employ, that is to say the spiritual approach. He gave me information about the subject of alcoholism which was undoubtedly helpful. Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language. He knew all the answers, and certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading.
I spend a great deal of time passing on what I learned to others who want and need it badly. I do it for four reasons:
- Sense of duty.
- It is a pleasure.
- Because in so doing I am paying my debt to the man who took time to pass it on to me.
- Because every time I do it I take out a little more insurance for myself against a possible slip.
Unlike most of our crowd, I did not get over my craving for liquor much during the first two and one-half years of abstinence. It was almost always with me. But at no time have I been anywhere near yielding. I used to get terribly upset when I saw my friends drink and knew I could not, but I schooled myself to believe that though I once had the same privilege, I had abused it so frightfully that it was withdrawn. So it doesn’t behoove me to squawk about it for, after all, nobody ever had to throw me down and pour liquor down my throat.
If you think you are an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptic, or have any other form of intellectual pride which keeps you from accepting what is in this book, I feel sorry for you. If you still think you are strong enough to beat the game alone, that is your affair. But if you really and truly want to quit drinking liquor for good and all, and sincerely feel that you must have some help, we know that we have an answer for you. It never fails, if you go about it with one half the zeal you have been in the habit of showing when you were getting another drink.
After reviewing these things and realizing what liquor had cost me, I went to this Higher Power that, to me, was God, without any reservation, and admitted that I was completely powerless over alcohol and that I was willing to do anything in the world to get rid of the problem. In fact, I admitted that from then on I was willing to let God take over instead of me. Each day I would try to find out what His will was and try to follow that, rather than trying to get Him to always agree that the things I thought up for myself were the things best for me. So, when they came back, I told them.
Whether you quit six days, months, or years, if you go out and take a drink or two, you’ll end up in this hospital tied down, just like you have been in these past six months. You are an alcoholic.” As far as I know that was the first time I had ever paid any attention to that word. I figured I was just a drunk. And they said, “No, you have a disease, and it doesn’t make any difference how long you do without it, after a drink or two you’ll end up just like you are now.” That certainly was real disheartening news, at the time.
The next question they asked was, “You can quit twenty-four hours, can’t you?” I said, “Sure, yes, anybody can do that, for twenty-four hours.” They said, “That’s what we’re talking about. Just twenty-four hours at a time.” That sure did take a load off of my mind. Every time I’d start thinking about drinking, I would think of the long, dry years ahead without having a drink; but this idea of twenty-four hours, that it was up to me from then on, was a lot of help.
“If they can do it, I can do it!” Over and over he said this to himself. Finally, out of his hope, there burst conviction. Now he
was sure. Then came a great joy. At length, peace stole over him and he slept.
It was in the next two or three days after I had first met Doc and Bill that I finally came to a decision to turn my will over to God and to go along with this program the best that I could. Their talk and action had instilled in me a certain amount of confidence, although I was not too absolutely certain. I wasn’t afraid that the program wouldn’t work, but I still was doubtful whether I would be able to hang on to the program, but I did come to the conclusion that I was willing to put everything I had into it, with God’s power, and that I wanted to do just that.
I remember telling them too that it was going to be awfully tough, because I did some other things, smoked cigarettes and played penny ante poker and sometimes bet on the horse races, and they said, “Don’t you think you’re having more trouble with this drinking than with anything else at the present time? Don’t you believe you are going to have all you can do to get rid of that?” “Yes,” I said, reluctantly, “I probably will.” They said, “Let’s forget about those other things, that is, trying to eliminate them all at once, and concentrate on the drink.”
I’ve heard people get up in meetings and say it—is this statement: “I came into A.A. solely for the purpose of sobriety, but it has been through A.A. that I have found God.”
I became an active alcoholic from that first day, when alcohol produced a very special effect in me. I was transformed. Alcohol suddenly made me into what I had always wanted to be.
Alcohol became my everyday companion. At first, I considered it a friend; later, it became a heavy load I couldn’t get rid of. It turned out to be much more powerful than I was, even if, for many years, I could stay sober for short periods. I kept telling myself that one way or another I would get rid of alcohol. I was convinced I would find a way to stop drinking. I didn’t want to acknowledge that alcohol had become so important in my life. Indeed, alcohol was giving me something I didn’t want to lose.
I will keep my job for a year while you go save the drunks.” That is exactly what I set out to do.
As I look back on it now, I did everything wrong, but at least I was thinking of somebody else instead of myself. I had begun to get a little bit of something I am very full of now, and that is gratitude.
“Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us.” It is very simple—though not always easy. But it can be done.
I know the Fellowship of A.A. doesn’t offer any guarantees, but I also know that in the future I do not have to drink. I want to keep this life of peace, serenity, and tranquility that I have found.
When I entered a sanitarium for prolonged and intensive psychiatric treatment, I was convinced that I was having a serious mental breakdown. I wanted help, and I tried to cooperate. As the treatment progressed, I began to get a picture of myself, of the temperament that had caused me so much trouble. I had been hypersensitive, shy, idealistic. My inability to accept the harsh realities of life had resulted in a disillusioned cynic, clothed in a protective armor against the world’s misunderstanding. That armor had turned into prison walls, locking me in loneliness—and fear. All I had left was an iron determination to live my own life in spite of the alien world—and here I was, an inwardly frightened, outwardly defiant woman, who desperately needed a prop to keep going.
Alcohol was that prop, and I didn’t see how I could live without it.
I wasn’t mad or vicious—I was a sick person. I was suffering from an actual disease that had a name and symptoms like diabetes or cancer or TB—and a disease was respectable, not a moral stigma!
“We cannot live with anger.” The walls crumpled—and the light streamed in. I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t helpless. I was free, and I didn’t have to drink to “show them.” This wasn’t “religion”—this was freedom! Freedom from anger and fear, freedom to know happiness, and freedom to know love.
“The thing I do is to say ‘God, here I am and here are all my troubles. I’ve made a mess of things and can’t do anything about it. You take me, and all my troubles, and do anything you want with me.’ Does that answer your question?”
I am learning that I cannot have my own way as I used to. I blame my wife and children. Anger possesses me, anger such as I have never felt before.
Strength has come from weakness.
I learn that honesty is truth and that truth shall make us free!
Invariably reward myself for my efforts with that “first” drink.
Every time I blacked out, and that was every time I drank, there was always that gnawing fear, “What did I do this time?”
The mental state of the sick alcoholic is beyond description.
But we were staying sober as long as we kept and talked together. There was one meeting a week at Bill’s home in Brooklyn, and we all took turns there spouting off about how we had changed our lives overnight, how many drunks we had saved and straightened out, and last but not least, how God had touched each of us personally on the shoulder. Boy, what a circle of confused idealists! Yet we all had one really sincere purpose in our hearts, and that was not to drink.
Our one desire is to stay in A.A. and not on it. Our pet slogan is “Easy Does It.”
I got to the place where I’d look forward to the weekend’s drinking and pacify myself by saying that the weekends were mine, that it didn’t interfere with my family or with my business if I drank on the week- ends. But the weekends stretched on into Mondays, and the time soon came when I drank every day.
One clear thought came to me: Try prayer. You can’t lose, and maybe God will help you —just maybe, mind you. Having no one else to turn to, I was willing to give Him a chance, although with considerable doubt. I got down on my knees for the first time in thirty years. The prayer I said was simple. It went something like this: “God, for eighteen years I have been unable to handle this problem. Please let me turn it over to you.”
Nothing had changed and yet everything had changed. The scales had dropped from my eyes, and I could see life in its proper
perspective. I had tried to be the center of my own little world, whereas God was the center of a vast universe of which I was perhaps an essential, but a very tiny, part.
There have also been numerous times when I have thought about taking a drink. Such thinking usually began with thoughts of the pleasant drinking of my youth. I learned early in my A.A. life that I could not afford to fondle such thoughts, as you might fondle a pet, because this particular pet could grow into a monster. Instead, I quickly substitute one or another vivid scene from the nightmare of my later drinking.
The Six-Step program as it was at that time. The six steps were:
- Complete deflation.
- Dependence and guidance from a Higher Power.
- Moral inventory.
- Continued work with other alcoholics.
When you are right and the time is right, Providence will provide.
One could not take the moral inventory and then file it away; that the alcoholic has to continue to take inventory every day if he expects to get well and stay well.
I was thirty-three years old and my life was spent. I was caught in a cycle of alcohol and sedation that was proving inescapable, and consciousness had become intolerable.
Every doctor gets his quota of alcoholic patients. Some of us struggle with these people because we know that they are really very sick, but we also know that, short of some miracle, we are not going to help them except temporarily and that they will inevitably get worse and worse until one of two things happens. Either they die of acute alcoholism or they develop wet brains and have to be put away permanently.”
He further explained that alcohol was no respecter of sex or background but that most of the alcoholics he had encountered had better-than-average minds and abilities. He said the alcoholics seemed to possess a native acuteness and usually excelled in their fields, regardless of environmental or educational advantages.
“We watch the alcoholic performing in a position of responsibility, and we know that because he is drinking heavily and daily, he has cut his capacities by 50 percent, and still he seems able to do a satisfactory job. And we wonder how much further this man could go if his alcoholic problem could be removed and he could throw 100 percent of his abilities into action.
“But, of course,” he continued, “eventually the alcoholic loses all of his capacities as his disease gets progressively worse, and this is a tragedy that is painful to watch: the disintegration of a sound mind and body.”
More often, I was having these little moments of clarity, times I knew for sure that I was an alcoholic. Times when I was looking at the bottom of my glass asking myself, Why am I doing this? Something had to give, something had to change. I was suicidal, evaluating every part of my life for what could be wrong. It culminated in one last night of drinking and staring at the problem. It made me sick to think about it, and even sicker to continue drinking it away. I was forced to look at my drinking as the chief suspect.
The idea that religion and spirituality were not one and the same was a new notion. My sponsor asked that I merely remain open-minded to the possibility that there was a Power greater than myself, one of my own understanding. He assured me that no person was going to impose a belief system on me, that it was a personal matter. Reluctantly, I opened my mind to the fact that maybe, just maybe, there was something to this spiritual lifestyle. Slowly but surely, I realized there was indeed a Power greater than myself, and I soon found myself with a full-time God in my life and following a spiritual path that didn’t conflict with my personal religious convictions.
I started drinking nearly thirty years ago—right after I was married. My first drinking spree was on corn liquor, and I was
allergic to it, believe me. I was deathly sick every time I took a drink. But we had to do a lot of entertaining. My husband liked to have a good time; I was very young, and I wanted to have a good time too. The only way I knew to do it was to drink right along with him.
I am trying now, each day, to make up for all those selfish, thoughtless, foolish things I did in my drinking days. I hope that I never forget to be grateful.
I should have realized that alcohol was getting hold of me when I started to become secretive in my drinking.
I never knew which came first, the thinking or the drinking. If I could only stop thinking, I wouldn’t drink. If I could only stop drinking, maybe I wouldn’t think. But they were all mixed up together, and I was all mixed up inside. And yet I had to have that drink.
After that I sat for a week, a body in a chair, a mind off in space. I thought the two would never get together. I knew that alcohol and I had to part. I couldn’t live with it anymore. And yet, how was I going to live without it? I didn’t know. I was bitter, living in hate. The very person who stood with me through it all and has been my greatest help was the person that I turned against, my husband. I also turned against my family, my mother. The people who would have come to help me were just the people I would have nothing to do with.
Nevertheless, I began to try to live without alcohol. But I only succeeded in fighting it. And believe me, an alcoholic cannot fight alcohol. I said to my husband, “I’m going to try to get interested in something outside, get myself out of this rut I’m in.”
Mere cessation from drinking is not enough for an alcoholic while the need for that drink goes on.
“Half measures availed us nothing”; No one made me drink, and no one was going to make me stay sober. This program is for people who want it, not people who need it.
If everyone who needed A.A. showed up, we would be bursting at the seams. Unfortunately, most never make it to the door.
Following the principles laid out in the Big Book has not always been comfortable, nor will I claim perfection. I have yet to find a place in the Big Book that says, “Now you have completed the Steps; have a nice life.” The program is a plan for a lifetime of daily living. There have been occasions when the temptation to slack off has won. I view each of these as learning opportunities.
“You hit bottom when you stop digging.” DENIAL IS THE MOST cunning, baffling, and powerful part of my disease, the disease of alcoholism.
I found everything I had ever looked for in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I used to thank God for putting A.A. in my life; now I thank A.A.
for putting God in my life.
As long as I put A.A. first in my life, everything that I put second would be first class.
I asked the therapist I was seeing, sometimes with beer in hand, would I have to stop? His answer was that we had to find out why I drank. I’d already tried but was never able to find out why until I learned the answer in A.A.—because I’m an alcoholic.
I learned that alcoholism isn’t a sin, it’s a disease.
The slogans on the walls, which at first made me shudder, began to impress me as truths I could live by: “One Day at a Time.” “Easy Does It.” “Keep It Simple.” “Live and Let Live.” “Let Go and Let God.” “The Serenity Prayer.”
Commitment and service were part of recovery. I was told that to keep it we have to give it away.
HOW CAN a person with a fine family, an attractive home, an excellent position, and high standing in an important city become an alcoholic? As I later found out through Alcoholics Anonymous, alcohol is no respecter of economic status, social and business standing, or intelligence.
In the first step of the Twelve Steps of A.A. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become un-manageable.”
The explanation that alcoholism was a disease of a two-fold nature, an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind,
The obsession of the mind was a little harder to understand, and yet everyone has obsessions of various kinds. The alcoholic has them to an exaggerated degree. Over a period of time he has built up self-pity and resentments toward anyone or anything that interferes with his drinking.
He suggested that for me a good starting point would simply be recognition of the fact that I had failed in running the world—in short, acceptance of the fact that I was not God. He also suggested that I might try occasionally to act as if I believed. Somewhere I had heard that it is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting, and this made sense in the context of “acting as if.”
I remember telling a friend years ago that I didn’t have a drinking problem, I had a stopping problem. We laughed. It was true, but there was something else going on, something that never occurred to me until I came to A.A. I didn’t just have a stopping problem. I had a starting problem too.
In working the steps, my life changed. I think differently today; I feel different today. I am new. We have a sign at the A.A. meetings I go to that says, “Expect a Miracle.” My sobriety is full of miracles.
“Don’t drink! Don’t think! Go to meetings!”
Many years later, although alcohol is not part of my life and I no longer have the compulsion to drink, it can still occur to me what a good drink tastes like and what it can do for me, from my stand-at-attention alcoholic taste buds right down to my stretched out tingling toes. As my sponsor used to point out, such thoughts are like red flags, telling me that something is not right, that I am stretched beyond my sober limit. It’s time to get back to basic A.A. and see what needs changing. That special relationship with
alcohol will always be there, waiting to seduce me again. I can stay protected by continuing to be an active member of A.A.
Later I learned the definition of a social drinker: some-one who could take it or leave it.
They said I only had to go to meetings on days I would have had a drink. They said I needed to identify, not compare. I didn’t know what they meant. What was the difference? Identifying, they said, was trying to see how I was like the people I was with. Comparing, they told me, was looking for differences, usually seeing how I was better than others.
By taking care of the internal environment via the Twelve Steps, and letting the external environment take care of itself.)
“I’m a success today if I don’t drink today,”
(Today there is absolutely nothing in the world more important to me than my keeping this alcoholic sober; not taking a drink is by far the most important thing I do each day.)
It helped me a great deal to become convinced that alcoholism was a disease, not a moral issue; that I had been drinking as a result of a compulsion, even though I had not been aware of the compulsion at the time; and that sobriety was not a matter of willpower.
At last, acceptance proved to be the key to my drinking problem.
When I stopped living in the problem and began living in the answer, the problem went away.
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.
Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.
- and acceptance have taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God and we each have a right to be here. When I
complain about me or about you, I am complaining about God’s handiwork. I am saying that I know better than God.
Before A.A. I judged myself by my intentions, while the world was judging me by my actions.
One of the primary differences between alcoholics and non-alcoholics is that non-alcoholic change their behavior to meet their goals and alcoholics change their goals to meet their behavior.
“You don’t have to drink over it.”
“It’s not how much you drink, it’s what drinking does to you.”
The tides of life flow endlessly for better or worse, both good and bad, and I cannot allow my sobriety to become dependent on these ups and downs of living. Sobriety must live a life of its own.
There is a saying that alcoholics either get sobered up, locked up, or covered up.
From experience, I’ve realized that I cannot go back and make a brand-new start. But through A.A., I can start from now and make a brand-new end.
I went to meetings every day and started taking the steps. The First Step showed me that I was powerless over alcohol and anything else that threatened my sobriety or muddled my thinking. Alcohol was only a symptom of much deeper problems of dishonesty and denial.
What I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter what hardships and losses I’ve endured in sobriety, I have not had to go back to drinking. As long as I work the program, keep being of service, go to meetings, and keep my spiritual life together, I can live a decent life.
As my faith grows, my fears lessen.
True happiness is found in the journey, not the destination.
Humility is the key.
Some people get sober because they’re afraid to die. I knew I would live, and that was far more terrifying. I had surrendered.
For each step, I still had to go through the process of recognizing that I had no control over my drinking. I had to understand that the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous had helped others and could help me. I had to realize that if I did want sobriety, I had better do the steps whether I liked them or not. Every time I ran into trouble, I ultimately found that I was resisting change.
My mentor had to remind me that A.A. is not just a project. A.A. offers me an opportunity to improve the quality of my life. I came to recognize that there is always a deeper and wider experience awaiting me.
All my sobriety and growth, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, are dependent upon my willingness to listen, understand, and change.
“There is just one good drunk in every alcoholic’s life, and that’s the one that brings us into A.A.,”
The A.A. members who sponsored me told me in the beginning that I would not only find a way to live without having a drink, but that I would find a way to live without wanting to drink, if I would do these simple things. They said if you want to know how this program works, take the first word of your question— the “H” is for honesty, the “O” is for open-mindedness,
and the “W” is for willingness
“If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free. Ask for their health, their prosperity, their happiness, and you will be free. Even when you don’t really want it for them and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks, and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.”
“The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.”
“A.A. does not teach us how to handle our drinking,” he said. “It teaches us how to handle sobriety.”
It’s no great trick to stop drinking; the trick is to stay stopped.
I have come to realize that the name of the game is not so much to stop drinking as to stay sober. Alcoholics can stop drinking in many places and many ways—but Alcoholics Anonymous offers us a way to stay sober.
God willing, we members of A.A. may never again
have to deal with drinking, but we have to deal with sobriety every day.
THE A.A. TRADITION
The Twelve Traditions
One—Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.
Two—For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority— a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
Three—The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.
Four—Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.
Five—Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
Six—An A.A. group ought never endorse, finance or lend the A.A. name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
Seven—Every A.A. group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
Eight—Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever nonprofessional, but our service centers may employ special workers.
Nine—A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.
Ten—Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.
Eleven—Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
Twelve—Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.
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Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin | Book Summary
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Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich by Duane Elgin
First published in 1981, VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY was quickly recognized as a powerful and visionary work in the emerging dialogue over sustainable living. Now-more than 44 years later and with many of the planet′s environmental stresses more urgent than ever-Duane Elgin has once again revised and updated his revolutionary book.
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY is not a book about living in poverty; it is a book about living with balance. Elgin illuminates the changes that an increasing number of Americans are making in their everyday lives-adjustments in day-to-day living that are an active, positive response to the complex dilemmas of our time. By embracing the tenets of voluntary simplicity-frugal consumption, ecological awareness, and personal growth-people can change their lives and, in the process, save our planet.
What is Voluntary Simplicity?
It turns out voluntary simplicity has a lot of synonyms that Elgin uses throughout the book including:
Green lifeways, Earth-friendly living, soulful living, simple living, sustainable lifestyles, living lightly, compassionate lifeways, conscious simplicity, Earth-conscious living, simple prosperity
What does “voluntarily” mean?
“To live more voluntarily is to live more consciously. To live more consciously is to live in a life-sensing manner. It is to taste our experience of life directly as we move through the world.”
“To live more voluntarily is to live more deliberately, intentionally, and purposefully—in short, it is to live more consciously…To act in a voluntary manner is to be aware of ourselves as we move through life. This requires that we pay attention not only to the actions we take in the outer world, but to ourselves acting—our inner world.”
What does “simply” mean?
“To live more simply is to live in harmony with the vast ecology of all life. It is to live with balance—taking no more than we require and, at the same time, giving fully of ourselves.”
“To live more simply is to live more purposefully and with a minimum of needless distraction…To live more simply is to unburden ourselves—to live more lightly, cleanly, aerodynamically. It is to establish a more direct, unpretentious, and unencumbered relationship with all aspects of our lives: the things that we consume, the work that we do, our relationships with others, our connections with nature and the cosmos, and more. Simplicity of living means meeting life face-to-face. It means confronting life clearly, without unnecessary distractions. It means being direct and honest in relationships of all kinds. It means taking life as it is—straight and unadulterated.”
And, when you put it all together into “voluntary simplicity”:
“When we combine these two concepts for integrating the inner and outer aspects of our lives, we can then say: Voluntary simplicity is a way of living that is outwardly simple and inwardly rich. It is a way of being in which our most authentic and alive self is brought into direct and conscious contact with living.”
What are the Goals of Voluntary Simplicity?
Simplicity can be applied to every aspect of your life. Elgin acknowledges that those who adopt life changes of simplicity often do so after “deep soul-searching.”
He sums up the objective as:
The objective of the simple life is not to dogmatically live with less but to live with balance in order to realize a life of greater purpose, fulfillment, and satisfaction.
First, we must wake up:
We can awaken ourselves from the dream of limitless material growth and actively invent new ways to live within the material limits of Earth.
With conscious simplicity, we can seek lives that are rich with experiences, satisfaction, and learning rather than packed with things.
You can change your life and change the world:
By embracing a lifeway of voluntary simplicity — characterized by ecological awareness, frugal consumption, and personal growth — people can change their lives. And in the process, they have the power to change the world.
And, connect directly with the world:
Simplicity fosters a more conscious and direct encounter with the world.
In living more simply we encounter life more directly—in a firsthand and immediate manner. We need little when we are directly in touch with life.
How You Can get Started with Voluntary Simplicity and Live Simply:
The simplicity movement is a global “leaderless revolution.” But, there are many ways you can get involved if you choose to do so (and I hope you do!):
“When people ask me, ‘What can I do?’ I often reply that one of the most powerful things we can do is to start talking with other people about our personal hopes and fears for the future.”
“As individuals we are not powerless. Opportunities for meaningful and important action are everywhere: in the food we eat, the work we do, the transportation we use, the manner in which we relate to others, the clothing we wear, the learning we acquire, the compassionate causes we support, the level of attention we invest in our moment-to-moment passage through life, and so on. The list is endless, since the stuff of social transformation is identical with the stuff from which our daily lives are constructed.”
“The character of a society is the cumulative result of the countless small actions taken day in and day out, by millions of persons.”
“Traditional political and economic perspectives fail to recognize the most radical change of all in a free-market economy and democratic society: the empowerment of individuals to consciously take charge of their own lives and to begin changing their manner of work, patterns of consumption, forms of governance, modes of communication, and much more.”
“Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a community choice, a national choice, and a species choice.”
“The outcome of this time of planetary transition will depend on the choices that we make as individuals. Nothing is lacking. Nothing more is needed than what we already have. We require no remarkable, undiscovered technologies.”
“Our choice is ruin or responsibility.”
“As we become empowered to take charge of our lives, we feel that no one is to blame other than ourselves if our experience of life is not satisfying.”
“To live sustainably, it is vital that we each decide how much is ‘enough.’”
“Conscious simplicity is not an alternative way of life for a marginal few; it is a creative choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations.”
The History of Simplicity:
Simplicity has been a theme in all the world’s wisdom traditions: Christian, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Puritan, Quaker, Transcendentalist, you name it. The Greeks have the “golden mean” and the Buddhists have the “middle way.”
“Living more consciously seems to be at the core of a path of simplicity and, in turn, makes it clear why this way of life is compatible with Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, Zen, and many more traditions.
“An old Eastern saying states, ‘Simplicity reveals the master.’ As we gradually master the art of living, a consciously chosen simplicity emerges as the expression of that mastery. Simplicity allows the true character of our lives to show through.”
“Historian of the simple life David Shi describes the common denominator among the various approaches to simpler living as the understanding that the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the soul, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society.”
Elgin spends some time highlighting the work of Richard Gregg, who coined the term “voluntary simplicity” in the 1930s:
“(Richard Gregg) said that the purpose of life was to create a life of purpose.”
“Gregg saw a life of conscious simplicity and balance as vital in realizing our life purpose because it enables us to avoid needless distractions and busyness.”
“Simplicity is a relative matter depending on climate, customs, culture, and the character of the individual.” — Richard Gregg
“Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose and sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose. Of course, as different people have different purposes in life, what is relevant to the purpose of one person might not be relevant to the purpose of another…The degree of simplification is a matter for each individual to settle for himself.” — Richard Gregg
Simple Living Myths & Misconceptions:
Elgin says, “Contrary to media myths, consumerism offers lives of sacrifice while simplicity offers lives of opportunity.” In the media, simplicity is often presented as: 1) Crude or Regressive Simplicity (anti-technology, anti-innovation, back-to-nature movement), 2) Cosmetic or Superficial Simplicity (shallow simplicity, green lipstick on our unsustainable lives), or 3) Deep or Conscious Simplicity.
Myth #1: Simplicity means poverty
“It makes an enormous difference whether greater simplicity is voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed.
“Simplicity is not about a life of poverty, but a life of purpose.”
“Voluntary simplicity is not about living in poverty; it is about living with balance.”
“Poverty is involuntary and debilitating, whereas simplicity is voluntary and enabling. Poverty is mean and degrading to the human spirit, whereas a life of conscious simplicity can have both a beauty and a functional integrity that elevates the human spirit. Involuntary poverty generates a sense of helplessness, passivity, and despair, whereas purposeful simplicity fosters a sense of personal empowerment, creative engagement, and opportunity.”
“A conscious simplicity, then, is not self-denying but life-affirming. Voluntary simplicity is not an ‘ascetic simplicity’ (of strict austerity); rather, it is an ‘aesthetic simplicity’ where each person considers how his or her level and pattern of consumption can fit with grace and integrity into the practical art of daily living on this planet.”
Myth #2: Simplicity means rural living
“Instead of a ‘back to the land’ movement, it is much more accurate to describe this as a ‘make the most of wherever you are’ movement.”
Myth #3: Simplicity means ugly living
Myth #4: Simplicity means economic stagnation
“Although the consumer and material goods sectors would contract, the service and public sectors (education, health care, urban renewal) would expand dramatically. When we look around at the condition of the world, we see a huge number of unmet needs: caring for the elderly, restoring the environment, educating illiterate and unskilled youth, repairing decaying roads and infrastructure, providing health care, creating community markets and local enterprises, retrofitting the urban landscape for sustainability, and many more. Because there are enormous numbers of unmet needs, there are equally large numbers of purposeful and satisfying jobs waiting to get done. The difficulty is that in many industrialized nations there is such an overwhelming emphasis placed on individual consumption that it has resulted in the neglect of work that promotes public well-being.”
Wake up & break out of Society’s Automation:
“Simplicity is the razor’s edge that cuts through the trivial and finds the essential.”
“To live voluntarily requires not only that we be conscious of the choices before us (the outer world) but also that we be conscious of ourselves as we select among those choices (the inner world). We must be conscious of both the choices and ourselves as the chooser. Put differently, to act voluntarily is to act in a self-determining manner. But who is the ‘self’ making the decisions? If that ‘self’ is both socially and psychologically conditioned into habitual patterns of thought and action, then behavior can hardly be considered voluntary. Therefore, self-realization—the process of realizing who the ‘self’ really is—is crucial to self-determination and voluntary action.”
“If we do not become conscious of these automated patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, then we become, by default, human automatons.”
“An old adage states, ‘It’s a rare fish that knows it swims in water.’ Analogously, the challenge of living voluntarily is not in gaining access to the conscious experiencing of ourselves but rather in consciously recognizing the witnessing experience and then learning the skills of sustaining our opening to that experience.”
“The capacity to move through life with conscious awareness is central to our species identity. We have given ourselves the scientific name Homo sapiens, which means that we are a species that not only ‘knows’ but ‘know that it knows.’ We have identified our core trait as a species—our capacity for reflective consciousness. Living ever more consciously goes to the very heart of our species natures and to our core evolutionary journey as a human community.”
“To the extent that we are able to see or know our automated patterns, we are then no longer bound by them. We are enabled to act and live voluntarily.”
“As we learn to watch ourselves ever more precisely and intimately, the boundaries between the ‘self-in-here’ and the ‘world-out-there’ begin to dissolve. In the stage beyond self-reflective consciousness, we no longer stand apart from existence as observers; now we are fully immersed within it as conscious participants.”
On Media (TV & Internet):
“As the Internet fosters a new capacity for rapid feedback from citizens and organizations around the world, the human family is developing a level of collective awareness, understanding, and responsiveness to the well-being of the Earth that previously would have been unimaginable.”
TV: “Mass entertainment is used to capture the attention of a mass audience that is then appealed to by mass advertising in order to promote mass consumption.”
“Because television’s being programmed to achieve commercial success, the mind-set of entire nations is being programmed for ecological failure.”
“The most precious resource of a civilization—the shared consciousness of its citizenry—is literally being prostituted and sold to the highest corporate bidders.”
“Because the overwhelming majority of prime-time hours on television are devoted to programming for amusement, we are entertainment-rich and knowledge-poor.”
On Identity:
“The hallmark of a balanced simplicity is that our lives become clearer, more direct, less pretentious, and less complicated. We are then empowered by our material circumstances rather than enfeebled or distracted by them. Excess in either direction—too much or too little—is complicating.”
“When we engage in ‘identity consumption,’ we become possessed by our possessions, we are consumed by that which we consume.”
“We begin a never-ending search for a satisfying experience of identity. We look beyond ourselves for the next thing that will make us happy…But the search is both endless and hopeless, because it is continually directed away from the ‘self’ that is doing the searching.”
“It is transformative to withdraw voluntarily from the preoccupations with the material rat race of accumulation and instead accept our natural experience — unadorned by superfluous goods — as sufficient unto itself.”
“A self-reinforcing spiral of growth begins to unfold: As we live more consciously, we feel less identified with our material possessions and thereby are enabled to live more simply. As we live more simply and our lives become less filled with unnecessary distractions, we find it easier to bring our undivided attention into our passage through life, and are thereby enabled to live more consciously.”
On Inner & Outer Alignment:
“Simplicity has as much to do with each person’s purpose in living as it does with his or her standard of living.”
“Voluntary simplicity, then, involves not only what we do (the outer world) but also the intention with which we do it (the inner world).”
“The ecological crisis we now face has emerged, in no small part, from the gross disparity that exists between our relatively underdeveloped inner faculties and the extremely powerful external technologies at our disposal.”
“Throughout history, few people have had the opportunity to develop their interior potentials because much of the human journey has been preoccupied with the struggle for survival.”
“Simpler living integrates both inner and outer aspects of life into an organic and purposeful whole.”
On Work:
“Given the drive to find meaningful work coupled with the shortage of such work in today’s economy, it is not surprising that many choosing a simpler way of life are involved in starting their own small businesses.”
“When our work is life-serving, then our energy and creativity can flow cleanly and directly through us and into the world without impediment or interruption.”
“Overall, people viewed work in four primary ways:
As a means of supporting oneself in activity that is meaningful and materially sustaining
As an opportunity to support others by producing goods and services that promote a workable and meaningful world
As a context for learning about the nature of life—using work as a medium of personal growth
As a direct expression of one’s character and talents—as a celebration of one’s existence in the world”
On Money & Materialism:
“Once a person or family reaches a moderate level of income, here are the factors that research has shown contribute most to happiness: good health, personal growth, strong social relationships, service to others, connection with nature.”
“Until the last few generations, a majority of people have lived close to subsistence, so an increase in income brought genuine increases in material well-being, and this has produced more happiness. However, in a number of developed nations, levels of material well-being have moved beyond subsistence to unprecedented abundance.”
“The more materialistic values are at the center of our lives, the more our quality of life is diminished…reported lower levels of happiness and self-actualization and higher levels of depression, anxiety, narcissism, antisocial behavior, and physical problems such as headaches.” — Tim Kasser
Questions to Ponder:
Elgin poses many thought-provoking questions throughout the book. Here are my favorites that are worth thinking about:
“Who are these people who want to slow down, lighten their impact on the Earth, and grow the quality of their relationships with the rest of life?”
“Why would an individual or couple adopt a way of life that is more materially frugal, ecologically oriented, inner-directed, and in other ways removed from the materialism of much of Western society?”
“What is the pathway from consumer to conserver?”
“If the material consumption of a fraction of humanity is already harming the planet, is there an alternative path that enables all of humanity to live more lightly upon the Earth while experiencing a higher quality of life?”
“Instead of visualizing how material limitation can draw out new levels of community and cooperation, many people see a life of greater ‘simplicity’ as a path of sacrifice and regress. Living within the limits that the Earth can sustain raises a fundamental question: Can we live more lightly on the material side of life while living with greater satisfaction and meaning on the nonmaterial side of life?”
“They all share 3 concerns:
How are we to live sustainably on the Earth?
In harmony with one another?
And in communion with the universe?”
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Pathways to Bliss | Mythology and Personal Transformation by Joseph Campbell | Book Summary
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Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation by Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as “other people’s religion.” But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment ― or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world’s most powerful myths support the individual’s heroic path toward bliss.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic best-selling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell’s popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology’s symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives.
Campbell dwells on life’s important questions. Combining cross-cultural stories with the teachings of modern psychology, he examines the ways in which our myths shape and enrich our lives and shows how myth can help each of us truly identify and follow our bliss.
Short Summary of Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell
Mythology provides a role model for people to follow if they hope to have “lives well-lived”.
Myths fulfill four functions in society:
- Mystical: provides a sense of awe, wonder, and unity with the universe.
- Cosmological: explains the stars and the planets.
- Sociological: establish an order for people to be able to live together.
- Psychological: helps one realize themselves and find meaning in life.
The psychological function is important as it is the one helping people transcend and attain bliss. Myths give individuals clues regarding their path and their hero’s journey which enables them to live the life they were meant to live.
They also provide images and symbols that help them go through the three stages of life (childhood, adulthood, and old age and death.)
All myths resemble one another because they come from the unconscious, and everyone’s unconscious is more or less the same because as humans, we’re all going through the same experience.
Therefore, myths act as a door to the unconscious. Why would you want to have that?
Because the hero’s journey is not only real – it’s also psychological. When you act out your hero’s journey in real life, you undergo a psychological transformation that helps you get closer to the state of bliss, to individuation, that is, becoming fully integrated with yourself.
You find your journey by paying attention to the recurring themes in your life, your dreams, and your shadow.
There have been three mythological periods:
- Myths embrace life as it is and accept that life, to thrive, must feed off death.
- 8th BC: Myths reject life as it is and seek to escape from the cycle, to transcend it (Eg: Buddhism)
- Zoroaster: Life is a result of the fight between good VS evil, and we can weigh into the fight by choosing the side of the good.
The Western myths come from the idea of God creating the universe: creator ≠ creatures. People’s model is the prophets (Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) -> rise of individualism.
The Eastern myths come from the observation of the cosmic cycle as the overarching rule of the way things ought to be: people should strive to become a cog in the machine, to become perfectly integrated into the grand scheme of things to reach the Great Harmony -> individualism (the ego) should be crushed.
Introduction
[Campbell] felt that myth offered a framework for personal growth and transformation, and that understanding the ways that myths and symbols affect the individual mind offered a way to lead a life that was in tune with one’s nature—a pathway to bliss.
Myths provide people in society with role models to follow. The myths show how cosmic energy manifests itself and how these manifestations change form and nature.
The gods, for example, represent the “powers” that support you (or not). By contemplating the gods and what they do, you find inspiration to do like them.
Myth is the transcendent in relationship to the present.
The question is: what do you do when you have no mythological model to follow?
-> you invent folk heroes.
Folk heroes are real people who have been “mythologized” (Eg: Napoleon).
What the myth does is to provide a field in which you can locate yourself.
If life is a labyrinth, the myth provides you with an individual (a model) who got out of it.
The psychiatrist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim believed that we’re all the manifestation of the power of life, a transcendent which comes from beyond and flows through us.
When we get anchored too much in reality, we stop letting this energy flow and we become sick as a result.
Keep moving, let the energy flow.
-> make yourself transparent to the transcendent.
Myth points out the transcendent.
When you have a deity as your model, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent.
When you trap the transcendent into a concrete reference, you get an allegory, something that is no longer transcendent (aka moving forward), and which becomes a final fact rather than a dynamic image.
To reach the transcendent, you first have to go through “the local” which is your own tradition, your own culture.
Eg: the shaman in the tribe provides this road to the transcendent.
If your myths are relevant to your society, repeating the myth and enacting its rituals center you.
Ritual is simply myth enacted.
Eg: Mass.
The Egyptians believed in eternal time and built the pyramids to this end. But eternity has little to do with time – time shuts down eternity.
Eternity is the “now”.
Eternity is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.
Myth makes the link between mental wisdom and life-body wisdom.
It tells you that if you live in a certain way – if you imitate the gods, Christ, the Buddha, etc – you are “under the protection” of the gods or whatever deity we’re concerned with.
This model is the model of the past and no longer exists today. Everything changes very fast and we don’t have the stasis (state of harmony in which opposing forces are equalized) necessary for the formation of a mythic tradition.
The present is a fall into the future, and myths no longer guide people in the fall.
Fortunately, you can find two other guides:
- Someone who inspired you in your childhood.
- Your bliss.
In Sanskrit, there are three points that are really close to the transcendent: being, consciousness, and bliss.
The author doesn’t know what being or consciousness are, but he knows what bliss is: the sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.
If you can follow your bliss, you’re edging on the transcendence side.
Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you.
Your bliss is your own personal myth. You can use earlier myths as clues, but they can’t be anything more than that. You need to find the wisdom inside them, the inexpressible.
The best things can’t be told.
These are transcendental experiences.
The second-best things are misunderstood: these are the myths.
And the third-best things come from disciplines like history, science, etc. It’s the only type of talking that can be understood.
You use the third kind to talk about the first kind, but people misunderstand you and think you speak about the third kind.
Following your bliss means entering your own path, that is, making your own path. If the path you enter has already been traced, it isn’t yours.
Part I: Man and Myth
Chapter 1: The Necessity of Rites
Traditionally, the first function of a living mythology is to reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence; that is to say, to the nature of life.
Life is horrible because it feeds off life – something needs to die for something else to live.
The first purpose of myth is to reconcile that horrible fact with your consciousness.
The first mythologies embraced this principle, they embraced nature – they didn’t go against it. They recognized the horrors of life through horrible rites (sacrifice) that made people feel grateful to live despite the suffering -> life was beautiful.
Then in the eighth century BC, people took the opposite stance: life is horrible and should not be lived (Eg: Buddhism). This is the second order of mythology, the second type.
The mythologies that appeared then were ones of retreat, dismissal, and renunciation.
Then a third order of mythology came with Zaratustra, an Iranian prophet. The idea was that life is both good and evil, and that you can tip the balance towards the good by doing good things (which translates to “progressivism” in the secular world.)
These are the three mythological orders.
A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning.
That order itself has no meaning, but the mind asks for one as the mind cannot play games without rules.
Mythologies present games to play and people that play them well experience “living meaningfully” -> first function of mythology (mystical): giving a sense of awe in the face of the horrific thing that life is.
The second function of mythology is to present an idea of the cosmos (cosmological) that will maintain the feeling of awe we got from the first function. Whether the image is true or not is irrelevant.
The third function is to maintain a sociological system (what you should and should not do, Ten Commandments, etc). These laws are in the same order as the laws of the universe: you cannot change them.
The fourth function of myth is psychological: the myth must carry the individual from birth to death. Today, we call this function “pedagogical”.
The second and third functions have been taken over by secular institutions. Our idea of the universe is scientific and changes all the time and our laws change all the time too.
So we’ll talk about the first and fourth functions.
Myth and the Development of the Individual
The psychological is the most constant function of myth across cultures. Human beings are born too soon: puberty doesn’t hit before 12 years old, and we don’t reach physical maturity before our twenties.
In the beginning, we’re dependent on an authority – our parents. But as we grow, we should get out of it and become the authority ourselves – become parents ourselves.
Some people (PhDs, for example) never fully free themselves from authority and hence, never fully acquire full confidence.
The purpose of the rites that young boys had to go through at puberty was to facilitate this transition. Neurotic people are people that never fully became independent. When a problem hits, they ask their parents what to do before realizing they are the parents.
So, everyone is raised with an attitude of submission to authority and fear of punishment: always looking to those above you for approval or disapproval.
In most tribes, the survival of the group depended on the behavior of the individuals. To make sure they would behave accordingly, the rites of passage were often extremely violent (children that disobeyed or failed to show specific qualities were killed).
As a result, societies did not evolve forward -> absence of individual freedom -> you had to become exactly what society wanted you to be.
In Western society, it’s the opposite. We encourage people at being critical individuals who think for themselves -> individualism, inherent to Western society -> to become somebody is to become exactly who you want to be.
The next thing myth helps people with is growing old.
When it seems that you have learned and done everything you had to do, you suddenly lose your capacities.
In the Western world, men work hard now to retire and do fun stuff later. Then they get to “later” and realize that working hard wasn’t worth it – that they can no longer do the stuff they really wanted to do when they were working hard.
As for women, they work hard to give birth and raise children, and these children grow and get their own life. And they end up alone.
The myths address this problem of growing old and not being wanted anymore.
When societies didn’t evolve, old people could give advice as whatever would happen had already happened.
It’s not the case in our society any more as everything is constantly new -> old people are no longer needed.
Finally, the last thing myth must help people with is dying.
To let them go peacefully, the myth says that “life after death is going to be beautiful”.
-> something all religions do.
Myths for the Future
The baby kangaroo is also born too early, so he waits a few more weeks in the pouch of its mother before being strong enough to get out.
Myth is to humans what the pouch is to the kangaroo.
Our society (science) has ripped this pouch (religion) apart. As a result, most people never have the chance to “be born a second time”. They’re thrown out into the world, but too weak to survive.
The problem with science is that there are no facts, just theories that are disproved one after the other. Religion, on the other hand, was true forever.
We cannot hang on to anything, we have to “stay open”.
But can we handle it?
Chapter 2: Myth Through Time
The Surface and Substance of Myth
One might reasonably define mythology as other people’s religion. The definition of religion is equally uncomplicated: it is misunderstood mythology.
It is misunderstood because we interpret mythological symbols as historical facts.
All religions have a foundation of mythology that represents the human psyche – that is, all religions look alike.
All religions are a reflection of the human psyche, which is why all religions look alike.
Eg: Eastern European religions fear the dark forests with the wolves, while the Polynesians fear the dark ocean with the sharks -> same things.
Symbols in religions are not historical events.
Eg: Jesus VS Christ. Jesus is a historical character, Christ is the Son of God. The former was the incarnation of the latter.
It is of more worth to God that Christ should be born in the virgin soul than that Jesus should have been born in Bethlehem.
Meister Eckhart
Many things in our religions that have been interpreted as historical were in fact symbolic.
We have a collision between these articles of faith and the historical and physical sciences, which we have to admit are ruling our lives, giving us everything that we live by from day to day. This collision has destroyed people’s belief in these symbolic forms; they are rejected as untrue.
Now, it’s not because we know it’s impossible to walk on water that we should discard these myths altogether. In fact, we should keep the symbolism, as it is the vehicle that helps us communicate with our subconscious.
Myths act as a channel between your consciousness and subconsciousness.
When these symbols are taken away, we lose contact with this deeper part of our psyche.
A deity is a personification of a spiritual power. And deities who are not recognized become demonic; they become dangerous.
When you are not talking to these deities aka when you are not in touch with your subconscious, these deities break through to your consciousness which becomes overthrown.
Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world.
The Medieval age was built on the fall and redemption of Man, then was dissolved when we rediscovered the Roman and Greek myths leading up to the Renaissance.
The Birth of Myth: Primitive and Early Societies
There are three great periods in the history of the human race.
- The primitive period
From consciousness to writing. Men hunt and fight -> emphasis and attention on masculine prowess (courage, skill, success).
- The middle period
From 3500 BC in Mesopotamia (with the establishment of cities, discovery of mathematics, etc) to the Renaissance in Europe.
The earth is a tool that needs to be mined and utilized for prosperity.
- The modern period
The Renaissance in Europe (scientific method, empiricism, industrialization, etc) up to now.
Let’s talk about the primitive period.
In the north, people lived off death: hunting, eating, wearing animal skins, etc. They have to kill to survive.
To protect themselves against this death, death does not exist -> beliefs in reincarnation + gratitude toward the animals and the earth (no intensive hunting, respect of nature).
The structure of myth in northern pagan societies.
In the south, people lived off vegetables -> no bravery in picking up a banana -> females become the most important sex as they give birth -> females become associated with the earth.
Now, in the rain forest, you see lots of dead plants from which grow brand new plants -> life comes from death -> more death means more life -> justifies sacrifices.
The structure of myth in southern pagan societies.
A culture’s rites repeat the underlying myth of that culture. One could— as I have—define a ritual as the opportunity to participate directly in a myth. It is the enactment of a mythical situation, and, by participating in the rite, you participate in the myth.
By practicing the rites of the myths, you directly participate in them.
It is from the planting zone that the Neolithic emerges with the first permanent settlements.
Since the first great civilizations come from southeast Asia (rain forest), we are influenced by the idea that life comes from death. Eg: Jesus’crucifixion.
Over the centuries, real sacrifices slowly transformed into symbolic sacrifices.
In foraging societies, all adults were equivalent and of equal status as they controlled the whole culture.
When cities were established, trade, crafts, and arts were invented. Individuals no longer controlled the whole but became a part of it and specialized in one specific thing.
People had to live with people completely different than them.
This created new problems psychologically, and sociologically.
The priests were the most important and educated people. They used mathematics and writing to understand the movement of the star and sun. They created an idea of the cosmic order from their studies.
It was the revelation, namely, of a universal process, an impersonal, implacable power (…) absolutely impersonal and mathematically measurable, to which the ordinances of civilization should be brought into accord. That’s the basic mythic concept of the first high civilizations.
Society down below should imitate the order of the cosmos.
The Birth of East and West: The High Cultures
The high cultures can be divided into two great domains: Orient (everything east of Persia), and Occident (everything west).
There are two great creative centers in Orient, both isolated: northern India, and Japan-China-Southeast Asia. We recognize the ancient Bronze Age worldview brought in from Mesopotamia: the great impersonal cycle.
In Occident, we have the Near East, where the stress is put on the individual participating in the group, and Europe, where the stress is put on the individual.
These two centers are constantly in interplay with each other. In Europe, people located in the middle (agricultural people) suffer invasions from the Aryans up north, and the Semites down south. Both Aryans and Semites honor a masculine god, while the land-based group celebrates the goddess Earth.
The mythology of Europe is the result of this conflict. The Old Testament is about the warrior god saying you can just go and take what belongs to others.
The barbarians became the dominant force in cultures that honored the cosmic cycle. Man god fought mother Earth’s female god. While the Aryans had “a god”, the Semites had a deity attached to the tribe -> Semites regard themselves as unique.
The Barbarians dominated -> Adam (a man) gives birth to Eve. The entire Old Testament is about the masculine god oppressing the feminine mother Earth goddess.
While it sounds like God is masculine, your psyche understands it as being feminine -> all of the symbols are speaking double-talk.
The Orient doesn’t have this problem. The cosmic cycle transcends gender. It transcends even words, so we can’t describe it – it is the essence of your own being -> you are it. The idea is to make you realize that you are “one” with the mystery of the universe.
In the West, God created the world -> the creator and its creatures aren’t the same.
When Jesus said he was “One with the Father”, he was crucified for it.
What we begin to realize now is something India realized 3000 years ago: our myths can no longer be read the way we have been reading them (that is, historically, for Christianism).
The myth is there to help us understand what’s inside us, as the Orient already understood.
The Church has the lessons and symbols to do so, so it shouldn’t tell people what they are supposed to experience – just let them experience it.
The real, important function of the Church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it.
Part II: Living Myth
Chapter 3: Society and Symbol
The Mechanism of Myths: How Symbols Work
Mythologies use symbols that release energy and channel it. All mythologies use universal symbols -> are the symbols learned (imprinted), or organic (stereotyped)?
They’re likely imprinted. What explains, then, that there are universal?
-> it’s because the human experience in infancy is the same across all cultures.
Society, Myth, and Personal Development
Freud explains that children are born with desires, but not all of them can be fulfilled. When a desire cannot be fulfilled, it goes down into the subconscious and takes with it the forbidding of this desire -> you want something but you know you shouldn’t have it. Freud calls this ambivalence.
Women give birth to the physical body of their child while men give birth to the spirit -> men should be in charge of their children’s education.
Up until 12 years old, children depend on their parents. After 12 years old, a crisis hits during which the child has to become independent rather than asking his parents for solutions.
This experience is universal in all societies.
Primitive societies used rites that compel children to face problems and “grow up”.
The educational ritual translates the inevitable, universal images of infancy into images that will link the individual to the society.
Gods inspired individuals to behave and be responsible.
Nowadays, people who hesitate between dependency and responsibility are neurotic, pulled into two directions.
Until he can face a challenge without running back to his parents internally, a child can never be a true adult.
The adult eventually declines and must prepare for death, using the same images he did to become an adult.
The Ego: East and West
Freud explains that your desires come from your subconscious, out of the id. When you’re born, the id knows that you have needs.
As we said above, you cannot and should not satisfy all of your desires. All of these “I should not” go into the subconscious with the attached desire.
The ego helps you judge things by yourself -> develops your individuality.
In Orient, you should drop the ego and behave how society wants you to behave. They even equalize the ego with the id, so it’s a battle between “I want” VS “you should”. “I should” (the ego) does not exist.
This idea of complete obedience is found in the Bible.
We find there the oriental idea that the smaller societal structure should imitate the way the cosmos works -> Great Harmony.
Individuals must fill a role dictated by priests and given at birth to be a part of this order.
Eg: a mouse should fill the role of a mouse -> education is about teaching you your role, not teaching you individualism -> superego is the sole ideal -> other people decide for you (arranged marriage, etc).
It’s totally different in Occident.
God makes man, and God isn’t man -> symbols are based on the relationship between God and man.
Chapter 4: Myth and the Self
Jung and the Polarities of Personality
Freud thought sex was the main determinant in psychology. Adler disagreed and thought the main determinant was the will to have power, whose sex was a function.
Jung finally, thought that the psyche had an energy that contributes to wanting sex and power.
The tendency to want one or the other is called the basic attitude.
Jung called introverts those who were oriented toward power. They’re constantly wondering how well they’re doing and focus inward.
The sex-oriented person is the extrovert.
You are whether introvert or extrovert (eg: 60% introvert, hence 40% extrovert).
When you are in a situation where your drive for sex or power does not work well, you switch to the secondary drive and an inferior personality emerges, characterized by compulsiveness (aka lack of control).
Jung calls this enantiodromia. That’s often what happens during mid-life crises.
Eg: men who retire (got all the power they needed) suddenly pursue young women. Women who after raising their families, become power monsters (mothers-in-law).
The question is: can you integrate that “inferior side” of your personality instead of letting wreak havoc in your life?
Jung pursues and explains that the psyche is dominated by four functions divided into two opposing pairs:
- Rational functions: thinking and feelings
- Irrational functions: sensation (seeing reality as it is) and intuition (predicting the future aka seeing what can not yet be seen).
These two functions are zero-sum games: developing one a lot means not developing the other (eg: the scientist has poor music tastes.)
In order to avoid this midlife crisis, you should develop these four functions together -> achieving wholeness (individuation).
The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
Jung also saw archetypes of the collective unconscious which are structures in the mind that exist in everybody since birth.
The first one is the self. It encompasses all of the possibilities that you could be. As you grow up and become aware of your self, your ego slowly comes out. The ego is the identification with your body, its experiences, and memories.
As you grow up, you need to learn to live in society with all of its rules, demands, expectations, and roles. The latter are called personae. Eg: when you’re at work, you put on your work role – your persona role.
Problems arise when you act out your persona outside of its context (aka lawyers that keep pleading at home) -> separate your sense of yourself (your ego) from the self you show the rest of the world (your persona.)
In the Orient, this is the opposite: you must become selfless and cancel the ego to become fully the role society gave you.
Then finally, there is a lot of “you” which does not seem to be placed in a persona nor in the ego. It’s in the unconscious, in a place called the shadow. The shadow welcomes all of the “mean things” you want to do but that you shouldn’t do.
The shadow is the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you.
The shadow is to the ego what darkness is to light.
The shadow takes the form of monsters in mythology (eg: the dragon).
It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious.
You bury the shadow because it is something your ego doesn’t recognize about you, or doesn’t want to admit.
You can recognize what your shadow is made of by noticing what makes the people you don’t like unlikeable. The traits that annoy you are things you have not integrated into your personality.
These things are rarely as bad as you think originally, and you should find a way to integrate them.
Next comes the anima, the repressed feminine side in men; and the animus, the repressed masculine side in women.
These repressed sides represent the ideal of the opposite sex. We project these onto other people we fall in love with. Then we marry, then we find out who the real person is, and we get divorced.
The only way you have not to get a divorce is to have compassion. You married a human, not a perfect person.
In fact, have compassion for the world in general, even if it’s really crappy.
Nothing alive fits the ideal.
Jung advised releasing all projections and ideals, a process he calls individuation.
There are four types of crises that can trigger enantiodromia.
- You passed from one life stage to another without knowing it.
- Relaxation of life requirements: you’ve worked a lot and now you don’t have to anymore, and you suddenly become a sex addict, or power-hungry -> sense that it is too late for these things.
- Loss of confidence in your moral ideas: you meet someone with different morals, which change yours, and since morals retain (understand: refrain) other types of behaviors, these behaviors emerge. Eg: the nice innocent kid who meets a not-so-innocent kid and they do bad stuff together.
- Doing something you really don’t want to do (due to shame, conflict with your values, etc). Eg: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.
Chapter 5: Personal Myth
Jung: What Myth Do I Live By?
We no longer all live through the same myth, especially in Western civilization where we now have a secular view of life.
Yet we all have a myth that’s driving us, whether we know it or not. Social life today is taken care of in another better way, but at the cost of leaving the individual mythless.
Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious.
Myths act as a channel between your consciousness and subconsciousness.
When you lack these images, you’re out of touch with your deepest part -> find your own myth!
A lot of people live according to a religious myth and this is fine for them. Those who don’t are deeply troubled when a crisis arises.
One of the ways you uncover your myth is by wondering what you would look for should you lose it all tomorrow.
Another way is to look for things that pull you out of the mundanity of life; things that inspire a feeling of awe.
Two things pull people together: aspiration and terror.
When you look at the Western world during the Middle-Age, you see inspiration and terror – which is no wonder why all European cathedrals were built at that time.
When doubts about religion came, society fell apart.
The main mistake the Catholic Church made was to insist on the historical veracity of the myth rather than insist on its psychological relevance.
Mythic images (…) come from the psyche and talk to the psyche; their primary reference is to the psyche.
If you learn religion as being historical rather than learning it as being symbolic, and you begin to doubt the historicity of it all, then you will lose the symbol because you reject it, hence the access to your subconscious.
Jung sought his own myth by wondering what he liked to do as a boy (piling up stones to make “cities”) and enacting it as an adult.
He also recorded his dreams and used mythology to interpret them.
He realized that there were two types of dreams:
- Little dreams: used to deal with the expansion of consciousness and the uncovering of taboos from your childhood.
- Big dreams: those where you wonder about the origin of the universe, and the death.
There are two types of symbols: local, and universal. The universal symbols lead to enlightenment while the local symbols lead to one’s culture.
Make sure that you’re seeking and living the stage of the archetype you are in. It leads to neuroticism otherwise (eg: adults who lack confidence in their judgment and are hence constantly looking for approval from authorities).
When the whole society loses its symbols, people stop turning outward for answers and turn inward, using drugs, meditation, etc as a gateway to wisdom.
Our world now is what could be called a terminal moraine of broken mythological traditions. All the mythical images of mankind are known to us in the museums and everywhere.
Western culture is the only culture that enabled the individual to develop and break free from the demands culture imposes on you. In the Orient, people who live eventually die and are replaced by people who will live the same way. Life is a cycle, and it doesn’t evolve; it doesn’t change.
In the West, people are encouraged to actualize their potential.
The only place to look for blame is within: you didn’t have the guts to bring up your full moon and live the life that was your potential.
Part III: The Hero’s Journey
Chapter 6: The Self as Hero
In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you?
The only way to observe your myth is to pay close attention to your thoughts, symbols, and recurring themes in your life.
Overall, every human follows more or less the same hero’s journey which Campbell wrote about in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
This journey goes like this:
First, you leave where you are after you have been called to an adventure. Those who refuse the adventure become “hollow men”. Those who accept it get into a dangerous, unknown, and unbeaten path.
The hero journey (…) is simply a journey (…) where you go beyond good and evil.
In stories, this is when the hero goes “past judgment”, into another world. Often the challenge to get there is to face and fight a villain, a dragon, which is the metaphor for the hero’s own shadow.
In some stories, the hero arrives in the other world already dead (Eg: Osiris, Christ, etc) and is resurrected (aka transformed) later on.
Once you have got into the other world, helpers will come along to provide help.
After that, you will have to pass trials and fight off threats that represent the shadow (again) and the repressed parts of yourself.
The deeper you go, the tougher these “monsters” are.
There are four kinds of hurdles along this road:
- Meeting the goddess: integration with the anima/animus. Eg: Prince reaching Sleeping Beauty for men, Europa being impregnated by Zeus for women.
- Atonement with the father: the hero finds his father in the depth of the abyss. The woman becomes either a guide to it, or an obstacle.
- Apotheosis: the hero realizes he is what he is seeking. Eg: The Buddha realizes he is the Buddha.
- The symbols above are the main realization symbols. The fourth one is different: The Promethean theft: the hero lost his lover to an ogre and goes after it (Troy). Once he takes her back, the ogres are angry: no reconciliation with the power of the unconsciousness -> the hero must escape quickly and come back by the path he took to get in. Eg: Moses: arrives as a prince in Egypt through the water, and escapes through the water too.
The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself. The whole point of this journey is the reintroduction of this potential into the world; that is to say, to you living in the world.
You have then to integrate this potential into your life -> super difficult.
Whatever you bring back should be something the world doesn’t have but wants.
There can only be three times of reactions when you show what you brought back.
- No one cares. Screw it, you say, and start doing your work for yourself.
- You make something that people care about at the price of losing your authenticity and originality -> you become “commercial”.
- You find the intersection between the thing you want to do and the thing others want to receive.
The characteristic of monsters is that they mistake shadow for substance.
Today, the function of artists is to create symbols that inspire awe in people, that inspire radiance.
A good life is one lived with heroes’ journeys -> don’t be scared to go on that journey.
Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.
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Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey by Bob Hoffman | Book Summary
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Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey by Bob Hoffman
In marketing today, delusional thinking isn’t just acceptable — it’s mandatory. In “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey”, Bob Hoffman, author of “101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising” and “The Ad Contrarian” explains how marketers and advertisers have lost touch with consumers and are living in a fantasy land of their own invention — fed by a cultural echo chamber of books, articles and conferences in which people like them talk to people like them.
What you will learn from reading Marketers are from Mars:
– Why there is an increasing disconnect between marketing and reality.
– How marketers hide behind jargon and vague concepts.
– The rise of fraud in digital advertising and where your ad spend actually goes.
Reality Check – The real reasons why people buy:
You can’t advance your career by speaking plainly and asserting the indisputable — that the reason people buy most products is because they are cheaper, tastier, prettier, work better or are simply more readily available.
Or they are made to believe they have a problem.
Two very different mindsets:
How marketers think: How can I engage consumers with my brand? How do I connect the personality of my brand with my target audience? How can I co-create with my target and develop a conversation?
How consumers think: Is there parking? Will this fucking thing work? How badly are they going to screw me on the price? Will there be anyone there who knows what the fuck he’s talking about?
How can you align the two?
Consumers want clarity and simplicity. Marketers want to complicate things.
The Latest (marketing) Fad always begins with “this changes everything”:
Using hysteria – everything has changed, this changes everything… The fact is habits die hard.
The “thought leaders” of the marketing industry are no less guilty of playing the hysteria card to buy themselves status (and consulting gigs) than the media are. They have created an avalanche of exaggerated claims and dire warnings that gain them attention and a nice little profit from the increased viewership/listenership/readership.
The 21st Century brand engagement – No, consumers do not want to have a conversation with your brand, or an “authentic relationship” with it, or co-create with it, or engage with it, or dance with it, or take a shower with it. They want it to work well, taste good, be reasonably priced, and look pretty. End of story.
Consumers want their predicted end goal not to engage with your brand:
Prof. Byron Sharp has said much more articulately in his book, How Brands Grow most of what we call “brand loyalty” is simply habit and convenience.
Useful Advice: Create a great product – Well, I’m afraid Bob has a very old guy opinion. You want customers raving about your brand? Sell them a good fucking product. Steve Jobs had it right. At Apple “brand” was a “dirty word” and Steve “dreaded, hated” the word “branding.”
Interesting Insight – People love bullshit: In trying to analyze the reason for this sudden popularity, I’ve noticed something. People seem to love posts with the word “bullshit” in the title. (One word persuasion, something they believe isn’t quite right)
The ugly truth – The point is this: our brands are very important to us marketers and very unimportant to most consumers. Please read that again.
Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Targeting:
“But, with digital we have comprehensive targeting ability….”
Targeting has it’s pro’s like everything it’s a tool.
The present obsession with media delivery systems may help our media people locate a certain type of person more easily, but is never going to provide the spark of brilliance on how to motivate this person.
The other exception occurs when people are shopping. Someone actively looking for something is willing to connect.
Here are the 6 stages of digital delusion:
- The Miracle Is Acknowledged: It may be podcasting or banner advertising, YouTube, The Ice Bucket Challenge, or Big Data. Whatever it is, it is going to “change everything.”
- The Big Success: A company somewhere has a big success with it. This is where the danger starts. The success is plastered all over every trade magazine and analyzed at every conference.
- Experts Are Hatched: Clever entrepreneurs gather up a Powerpoint full of cliches and march them around from conference to conference.
- The Bandwagon Rolls: Everyone who knows nothing is suddenly asking the marketing department, “what is our (the new miracle) strategy?”
- Reality Rears Its Ugly Head: The numbers dribble in. Oops… people are ignoring our miracle by the millions. The miracle seems to be working for everyone but us!
- The Back-Pedaling Begins: “Well, it’s just part of an integrated program…” say the former zealots. The experts start blaming the victims.
Now an important question — What is content?
So they’ve renamed it all “content” because it is non-specific — no one knows what the hell it is. And if you don’t know what it is, how can you criticize it?
Content is anything you can upload to the web. In other words, it is pretty much anything. It is a Shakespeare sonnet and a picture of my cat’s ass.
Distinguishing – The idea that “content” as a concept is an important marketing discipline is absurd. An old pizza crust is garbage. But an uploaded picture of an old pizza crust is “content.”
The selfie – and gives it status. You’re not guilty of narcisstic self-indulgence, you’re creating content!
Content is everything, and it’s nothing. It’s an artificial word thrown around by people who know nothing, describing nothing.
By invoking the c-word they are doing what marketing people do best — avoiding the specific and hiding behind jargon.
New Paradigms, ignorance and conformity:
If you don’t buy into new paradigms – When I left the agency business, people within agencies were essentially forbidden from saying this. If you did, you were labeled a Luddite, a dinosaur, or just plain stupid. You “didn’t get it.” It was a one-way ticket out the door.
Jes’s Insight – Ignorance demands conformity. Because everyone knows they are faking it, they seek comfort in the warmth of consensus.
Fraud in digital advertising:
We have failed to educate our clients on the serious deficiencies related to web advertising: -62% of web traffic is reportedly phony -54% of display ads paid for reportedly never ran -57% of video ads paid for are apparently never seen -Fraud and corruption are massive and reportedly in the billions.
It never ends:
For one thing, online work is never done. A website is never finished, a social media or content program always needs feeding, and display advertising always needs optimizing.
If you don’t have negative punishment how can it be stopped? Thinking financiers.
Self-interest has come into conflict with responsibility. Take a guess what’s winning?
In fact, there is only one lesson to be learned from the Ice Bucket Challenge: sometimes silly shit catches on.
A whole generation of marketing and advertising people been taught an entire set of principles that is so lacking in a factual basis, and so influenced by anecdotes and fantasies.
Marketers use Gobbleteegook to hide the fact what they say is meaningless:
Most of the time it doesn’t matter. You can get away with not knowing anything by talking in riddles, parables, and indecipherable jargon.
People, being the insecure dimwits they are, assume that since you’re an expert and they’re not, all this hogwash must mean something.
Because if you’re a prototypical marketing professional pretty much everything you say has already been said a thousand times and is going to turn out to be wrong.
Three effective strategies for being dead wrong, but maintaining your “expert” status:
- “I wasn’t wrong, I was ahead of my time.” This is also known as the “just wait, you’ll see” defense.
- “Of course, I didn’t mean it literally.”
- “It may seem like I was wrong, but if you look beyond…” This is the “broader view” defense.
Arguments against the older generation can be wrong
Everyone’s opinions are shaped by their circumstances — digital zealots no less than old traditional ad people. Their criticism implies that the only valid opinions are those of people who are a blank slate.
My opinions may be dead wrong. But the criticism that they are tainted because I started as a “traditional ad guy” is as stupid as criticizing a baseball manager because he started as a player.
Those who can’t argue on merit argue about you:
This is not the basis for serious debate. However, it is the only line of defense for people who can’t argue on merit.
In fact, the most important success factor for mainstream consumer brands is not how many loyal customers you have, but how many total customers you have. Which is why the current obsession with “engagement” is so misguided.
Most of what I read about the advantages that tech-based advertising (i.e., online advertising) has over traditional advertising seem to be opinions masquerading as facts. Is expanded reach actually a benefit?
If your product is lousy, marketing can’t fix that. If your location is lousy, marketing can’t fix that.
Jes’s Insight – As always with irrational human behaviour we conform to the majority and the cocksure and we forget to question where there beliefs were founded.
Important competitive insight:
As new technology is adopted by everyone, what starts as a competitive advantage often quickly evolves into just another cost of doing business.
It is remarkable to me how much time is spent on technology voodoo and how little time is spent on solving the real problems of real customers.
Technology seduces us into thinking we can solve our problems by spending money instead of changing behaviours. Which is about the most damaging trap a business can fall into.
Here are Bob Hoffman’s 7 secrets of success:
- Assume everyone is faking it. Nobody knows a thing about advertising. All the rules are bullshit. There are a few people who can make good ads. That’s all there is.
- Preparation is everything. If you are not the best prepared person in every meeting you are in for trouble.
- Do as little work as possible at the office. Do your real work somewhere else. It’s almost impossible to do anything useful in an office. Offices are for meetings and phone calls and memos and emails and Powerpoints and politics and bullshit.
- Worry about everything. If you don’t worry you don’t care. Figure out what’s going to go wrong and be prepared when it does.
- Stay as far away from big organizations as possible. Corporations will suck all the joy out of your life.
- Pay no attention to the industry. The more you read about what other agencies or other clients are doing the more you’re going to become a cliché spewing zombie
- Be satisfied. You don’t have to work for the biggest agency in the world or be the best art director on the planet to be successful and happy.
Generation gap and misperceptions:
Anyone who’s ever had a parent knows one thing for sure: Old people think young people are idiots.
It’s no coincidence that people in the ad industry tend to be young. All this youth worship is really just narcissism masquerading as business strategy.
Realistic look at demographics – Youth: Even if they wanted a Pontiac (which they didn’t and never would) young people can’t afford new cars, and no lender in his right mind will finance them. Chevy is flirting with frittering away its whole culture on people who don’t buy cars, don’t want cars, and can’t afford cars.
Do not hold up a mirror. Don’t try to show them who they are or tell them what they believe. Older people want to be youthful, but they do not want to be like young people.
Contrary to popular belief – It turns out that the average consumer has a lot more on her mind than conducting online conversations about fabric softener.
Why people change brands:
Enthusiasm about a brand or convenience – Believers in this ideology assumed that a person’s use of a product was a demonstration of enthusiasm for the brand. Sadly, in the vast majority of cases, it is merely an indication of habit, convenience, or mild satisfaction.
In most cases people will change brands with very little bother if it turns out to be convenient or otherwise beneficial.
The State of Social Media:
Social media sites are quickly evolving into just another channel for delivering traditional interruptive advertising.
There are only two possible explanations. The first is that they are not capable of creating anything that anyone wants to read. I doubt that this is the reason. I think the real reason is the second possibility — they’re full of shit.
“The Future Of Data Driven Infometrics.” Let’s be honest here…none of us really gives a shit about the future of anything except ourselves. – Tell me how this will benefit me.
A Hilarious interpretation of current state of social media consultants – According to one theory proposed by physicists at the Very, Very Small Teflon Collider in Rhode Island, there are actually more bosons in the universe than social media consultants in Brooklyn.
Issue the following statement: “Sometimes process can be the enemy of progress. We’ve learned something from this and are streamlining everything we do.”
The truth of Social Media:
Your social media strategy doesn’t suck because Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs can’t reach people. It sucks because you’re stuffing it with crap that no one is interested in.
Maybe ask yourself this question before you create social content: Do you have something worth saying?
Online Fraud:
CNET reported on a study by research firm Incapsula that found only 38% of traffic on the web is human. – fake traffic is essentially systemic to advertising—it’s part of how the business works.
Every study ever done tells the same story — display ads are overwhelmingly ignored.
Internet is full of phonies:
Phony traffic – Bot-nets generate billions of phony visits to websites daily, which advertisers pay for. Phony clicks – Likewise
Phony websites – Sometimes called “spoofing,” phony websites pretend they’re real websites and sell imaginary ad space to knuckleheads Invisible ads –
Euphemistically called “unviewable,” these are ads that “technically” appear but are invisible.
A company in the advertising fraud detection business recently estimated that just one average sized bot-net could be responsible for one billion fraudulent ad impressions every day.
The digital industry is full of sneaky little bastards whose “facts” and “data” usually turn out to be either intentionally misleading, willfully incomplete, or stone cold bullshit.
The research industry, heavily dependent on the digital ad industry for business, is complicit and almost always spins its findings about digital in the most positive light.
The pitiful trade press — devoid of perspective or skepticism — swallows this garbage whole and publishes it with a tone of gee-whiz boosterism
Using logic and reason to persuade:
Current Marketers Brains operate like this —- “While I haven’t seen any research that confirms this hypothesis, it seems logical to me and I think it’s probably true.”
Naughty words have a use — they remove any hint of ambiguity.
People keep saying this “the internet now means people are in charge of their choices: Look at what statements assume — consumers are now in-charge of making there own decisions thanks to the internet – It assumes that there was a time in the past when the consumer was not in charge of making buying decisions. I’d love to know when that was.
It assumes the usual bullshit about the web having “changed everything.”
Most depressingly, it shows a remarkable and frightening lack of understanding about what’s going on.
Political reality –
You will think of your agency as “your team.” And, like all teams, they will have a limitless capacity for petty grievances and will go out of their way to undermine each other.
There’s way too much consensus. Way too much cordiality. Way too little controversy.
Nobody seems inclined to challenge the wearisome assertions of modern-day wizards, no matter how many times they’ve been wrong.
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How to Be an Adult in Relationships by David Richo | Book Summary
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How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo
“Most people think of love as a feeling,” says David Richo, “but love is not so much a feeling as a way of being present.” In this book, Richo offers a fresh perspective on love and relationships-one that focuses not on finding an ideal mate, but on becoming a more loving and realistic person. Drawing on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, How to Be an Adult in Relationships explores five hallmarks of mindful loving and how they play a key role in our relationships throughout life-
1. Attention to the present moment; observing, listening, and noticing all the feelings at play in our relationships.
2. Acceptance of ourselves and others just as we are.
3. Appreciation of all our gifts, our limits, our longings, and our poignant human predicament.
4. Affection shown through holding and touching in respectful ways.
5. Allowing life and love to be just as they are, with all their ecstasy and ache, without trying to take control.
When deeply understood and applied, these five simple concepts-what Richo calls the five A’s-form the basis of mature love. They help us to move away from judgment, fear, and blame to a position of openness, compassion, and realism about life and relationships. By giving and receiving these five A’s, relationships become deeper and more meaningful, and they become a ground for personal transformation.
Chapter 1 – Five parts of careful loving are fundamental to love relations.
What’s your first beloved memory? Maybe it’s your folks perusing you a story, or wrapping your knee after you fell.
As youngsters, we depend on our folks to meet our enthusiastic needs and to cause us to feel protected and needed.
The passionate help we look for when we’re youthful can be separated into what the creator calls the five A’s. They are consideration, acknowledgment, thankfulness, friendship, and permitting others to be what their identity is.
Getting these five signs of affection is pivotal to building a rational character and character and creating confidence. But on the other hand, they’re fundamental to building solid securities with our accomplices in adulthood.
At each phase of our lives, we need the nurturance of adoring individuals who are receptive to our sentiments and receptive to our necessities. The five A’s layout all the things we need as people to encourage individual force, develop quietness, and improve our capacity to cherish and be adored.
How about we investigate these five things.
First up, attention. Seeing someone, being mindful of our accomplices implies tuning in to their considerations and feelings. Frequently, this includes being what the creator calls a “careful observer.” Our friends and family may have endured misuse, treacheries, or damages previously and, as their accomplices, we must tune in to their accounts deferentially.
Second, there is acceptance – of ourselves as well as other people. Shared acknowledgment is the bedrock of a sound relationship. At the point when we discover somebody who adores us – with every one of our sentiments and enthusiastic weights – we feel free. We don’t need to hole up behind a veil because our accomplice cherishes us for all that we are.
The third thing is appreciation. This includes esteeming our accomplices’ blessings, knowing and understanding their constraints, and supporting them in the quest for their fantasies and wants.
The fourth thing on the list is the affection. It includes holding and contacting our accomplices in aware manners. Getting fondness as kisses, embraces, or even a delicate grin over a room causes us to feel adored and needed. It meets our virtuous need to have a sense of security.
The fifth and last A is allowing life and love to be exactly what they are – with all their distress, bliss, and anguish – without attempting to take control. This is the stuff to be available in a relationship: to adore and to be cherished.
Chapter 2 – Youth can leave us with enthusiastic scars that influence our grown-up relationships.
At the point when David Richo was a youngster, he went through half a month each mid-year at his Aunt Margaret’s homestead. He recalls how her refrigerator was continually overflowing with food, while the one at his folks’ home was consistently unfilled.
Further down the road, the creator understood that he had burned through the majority of his youth feeling hungry – genuinely, however inwardly, as well. He attempted to reveal to himself that his folks “did as well as could be expected.” But he was unable to shake the inclination that he’d been denied of affection and backing as long as he can remember.
Our encounters growing up impact our conduct in later relationships. For instance, individuals with miserable childhoods might be bound to endure maltreatment from their partners in adulthood. This is because their base needs – the five A’s – were neglected when they were youngsters.
What’s the brain science behind this? At the point when manhandled youngsters feel disliked, they prop up back to their folks to make up for the shortcoming – just to be evaded once more. They contemplate internally, “You continue harming me, however, I can’t leave you.”
This is the reason numerous individuals remain in injurious relationships in adulthood: rather than imagining that their partners weren’t right to mishandle them, they accept that they are the ones who are deficient. They prop up to their partners for affection, just to find that those partners have none to give.
Numerous youngsters who have been manhandled can’t connect for help with these injuries. Rather, they may reenact the past in their relationships. For instance, grown-ups who experienced childhood in turbulent family units may consider worry to be ordinary. So when things are running easily with their partners, they figure out how to make agitation.
How would you break out of this endless loop?
Indeed, first, you need to mend your previous injuries. That implies lamenting your youth sentiments of misfortune or disregard.
To start this cycle, you have to impart your excruciating recollections to an individual you trust, similar to an advisor or a companion. Talking so anyone might hear about past maltreatment can prompt what the creator calls “reflecting” – implying that we comprehend, acknowledge, and permit our emotions.
At the point when we have our sentiments reflected by a careful audience, we no longer need to feel sincerely denied. Rather, we can figure out how to give and get plentiful love and trust.
Chapter 3 – Working through our issues includes focusing and giving up.
Have you ever constructed bread? If you have, at that point you’ll know how the cycle goes. You need to manipulate the batter, and afterward sit and sit tight for it to rise. At exactly that point would you be able to place it in the stove to heat.
This is like the author’s method of working through issues. This training consolidates the exertion of uncovering negative musings and feelings with the tranquility of sitting and pausing.
At the point when the author’s works with customers, he draws on the apparatuses of Western mental treatment and the act of care. Sound muddled? We should investigate how this functions.
In his brain science work, the author urges customers to distinguish their issues and focus on the emotions appended to them. At that point, he requests that his customers hold these sentiments until they change, or uncover something more profound inside them.
After this, he presents care – an antiquated Buddhist practice that carries our consideration regarding what’s going on in the present. Through care methods, customers figure out how to see the considerations or sentiments that emerge inside them – however, rather than clutching them, they figure out how to release them.
Care is tied in with applying the five A’s to the real factors and restrictions of your life: you take care of them, acknowledge them, welcome them, feel love for them, and permit them as they seem to be.
So how might you apply care to your day by day life?
All things considered, one path is through contemplation. You can begin by reflecting for a couple of moments daily, and afterward, increment the length after some time.
To start, sit in a calm space with your eyes open or shut, your back straight, and your hands put in your lap. Focus on your breath. At the point when considerations or nerves enter your brain, notice them, mark them as “contemplations,” and afterward re-visitation of your relaxing. This takes practice. Inevitably, your breath will muffle any diverting musings in the rear of your brain.
Thus, much the same as the work of heating bread, staying genuinely and profoundly sound takes the order, work, and persistence. To resolve past issues, you need to get settled with effectively working through your issues, and afterward permitting them to float away.
Chapter 4 – When we realize how to think about and regard ourselves, we can participate in beneficial relationships.
Love is regularly depicted as a glad mishap in movies.
A commonplace scene may go this way: A lady strolls down the road and chances upon a man. His espresso goes flying. As she attempts to assist him with cleaning his grimy coat, the pair lock eyes and grin. After talking for some time, the person writes down his number on the rear of a receipt, and they consent to meet once more. Before the finish of the film, church chimes are ringing.
This situation may sound unrealistic. In any case, it’s not a long way from what can occur, all things considered. Truth be told, when we don’t effectively search for adoration – and are content with ourselves – we open up space for the opportune individual to stroll in.
Becoming more acquainted with somebody can be alarming – particularly for the individuals who have been harmed previously. That is the reason for dealing with yourself in the dating game is fundamental. So how might you do this?
To begin with, you make yourself an unequivocal guarantee that you won’t change yourself to make somebody need you. Doing this will just unleash destruction on your confidence.
Before you go on your next date, have a go at saying the accompanying: “I need an accomplice, and I am dealing with myself as the initial step.” And, “I remain the guard over my weak internal identity during this cycle.”
As far as picking an accomplice, it’s critical to pick somebody who needs a similar style of the relationship as you do.
For instance, not every person is ready to deal with a completely serious relationship – some are content with light relationships or companionships, and appreciate just intermittent closeness. Then again, a few people need to feel a profound association with a critical other and appreciate the closeness that dedication can bring.
Before entering a relationship, make a rundown of your needs, qualities, and wants for you – and what level of duty you want. At that point, share it with your expected accomplice. The ideal situation? Both of you are on the same wavelength and ready to address each other’s issues.
Finding the correct accomplice includes being available to individuals strolling into your life. In any case, you likewise need to adore yourself enough to put your necessities and needs on the table.
Chapter 5 – Relationships develop through three stages to arrive at their maximum capacity.
Albert Einstein once said that investigating nature can assist us with understanding our human story. What was the meaning of his saying?
All things considered, nature works in cycles. A rose begins as a bud; it blossoms, it kicks the bucket and afterward returns as a bud.
This is the way we can consider relationships, as well: they begin with the sentiment, they progress into the struggle, and afterward rest in responsibility. What’s more, these cycles can rehash themselves and once more.
We realize that affection is bona fide when it remains unblemished through these stages.
We should inspect every one of these stages.
First up is sentiment, which can be portrayed as a profoundly moving encounter of satisfaction. In this phase of a relationship, we become encompassed in the other individual. We’re captivated by all that they are.
The thing is, the sentiment is brief. Nature planned sentiment to unite couples to mate and proliferate the species – yet it was never intended to last. That is the reason a few couples separate after the sentiment stage: they get so made up for a lost time in the adventure of being infatuated that they are disillusioned when the fervor blurs.
After sentiment, couples normally progress into strife. In this stage, the sentimental picture you and your accomplice have of one another transforms into the genuine picture. You start to see the hazier sides of one another’s character, which you might not have seen previously.
This stage is typical. Also, it’s an important piece of building an enduring bond. Without the battle of contention, we may become mixed up in each other, and lose ourselves en route.
If couples can work agreeably to resolve their issues in the contention stage, they would then be able to go into the period of duty. Be that as it may, what does responsibility resemble?
In a serious relationship, couples can give and get the five A’s. They let go of their longing to be directly in contentions, and rather look for a bargain. They may in any case battle, yet they don’t quit adoring one another.
So on the off chance that you have a feeling that your relationship is changing from a period of sentiment into the struggle, stay with it. Having the option to relinquish one phase and move into another makes for sound relationships that stand the trial of time.
Chapter 6 – Relinquishing fears can make an enduring relationship among you and your accomplice.
At the point when we’re up to speed in the pains of love, it’s difficult to envision regularly feeling frightened to be with the individual we love. However, as relationships progress, and couples develop nearer, fears of selling out and closeness – just as different things – can emerge.
Try not to stress – this is ordinary. Truth be told, fears can even assist us with reinforcing our relationships– as long as we don’t let those apprehensions control us.
As indicated by the author, engulfment and surrender are the focal relationship fears that couples need to survive. So I’m not catching their meaning?
All things considered, engulfment is the dread that, on the off chance that somebody gets excessively near us genuinely or inwardly, we’ll lose our opportunity. In this situation, the five An’s are cockeyed: when we feel inundated, our accomplices are giving us an excessive amount of consideration or love, and insufficient acknowledgment and permitting.
At that point, there’s deserting – the dread that on the off chance that somebody leaves us, we may not endure inwardly. If we recall the five A’s once more, surrender implies lost consideration, gratefulness, or love.
In the two cases, our dread originates from feeling weak. We feel caught, controlled, and helpless before others. So how might we figure out how to deal with these feelings of trepidation?
The author suggests utilizing the Triple-A methodology, which represents Admit, Allow, and Act As If.
To start with, you need to concede your apprehensions to yourself as well as other people. This includes naming your feelings of trepidation without accusing anybody. For instance, you could state to your accomplice, “I am frightened to draw near to you because. . . ,” or “my dread of disloyalty originates from . . . .”
At that point, you need to permit yourself to feel your apprehensions, without deciding between them. This lines up with our act of care: we permit our sentiments to develop, we see the truth about them, and afterward, we let them go.
Next up, go about as though you have no dread. For instance, on the off chance that you dread deserting, attempt to move open to being endlessly from your accomplice for brief all the more every day. Furthermore, if you dread engulfment, attempt to avoid your accomplice for one moment less.
Working through our feelings of trepidation includes permitting ourselves to feel them. We can ace dread on the off chance that we figure out how to endure its inconvenience.
Chapter 7 – At the point when relationships end, resolve your issues, and leave calmly.
If you’ve ever left a relationship, you’ll realize how difficult it tends to be.
When relinquishing an accomplice, you’re not just surrendering the bond both of you had – you’re likewise surrendering the expectation and work you put resources into propping the relationship up.
The thing is, battling to keep something alive that has just terminated is, at last, more difficult than allowing the relationship. If you feel that the relationship among you and your accomplice is disappearing, it may be better, over the long haul, to cut off the association and proceed onward.
Here are a couple of signs that your relationship may you close to its end.
A major marker that a relationship is on out is on the off chance that you no longer feel glad and safe in one another’s company. In case you’re not normally setting aside a few minutes for each other, and on the off chance that you battle to be close explicitly, these could be signs that your enthusiastic bond is dispersing.
Another pointer is on the off chance that you no longer trust your partner. Possibly you’re continually checking the other individual’s telephone, frightened by the idea that the person is faithless. Or then again perhaps you find yourself stressing that your partner may forsake you. These activities show that your enthusiastic needs – the five A’s – are not being met.
At last, on the off chance that you have a feeling that you can’t love, regard, and backing your partner – and the person can’t do likewise for you – at that point, it may be an ideal opportunity to consider cutting off the association calmly.
Here are a few procedures for how to do as such.
In the first place, try to examine with your partner the reasons why you need to cut off your association. It’s significant for both of you to work everything out with the goal that you can address, cycle, and resolve your interests together.
Next up, give yourself the space to lament alone and let go. It’s no utilization bouncing into another relationship trusting it’ll recuperate the injuries; you have to allow yourself to grieve the relationship and gain from it.
The most significant thing? Make an effort not to consider leaving to be a relationship as a negative thing. Rather, consider it to be a fresh start. When you’ve let the chips fall where they may, you can utilize the pieces you’re left with as instruments for building whatever comes straightaway.
Chapter 8 – To love one individual shows us how to adore the remainder of the world.
One of the author’s soonest memories is feeling loved by his grandmother.
At the point when his mom was missing, his grandmother would sit close to him as he took a shot at a riddle or tuned in to his preferred public broadcast.
Presently, as a grown-up, the author consistently recollects the solace and security he got from this more established female presence. It was the adoration he got from his grandma that showed him how to cherish, as well.
At the point when we grow up and enter grown-up relationships, we figure out how to cherish someone else personally. The author accepts that this at that point shows us how to adore the whole world.
How? Through duty. By giving and getting the five A’s, settling issues, and keeping our concurrences with and vows to one individual, we figure out how to do it with others.
Our associations with our quick partners can likewise instruct us to be merciful. At the point when we go into a grown-up association, we acknowledge that our better half is flawed, yet we subscribe to acknowledge and adore that individual at any rate.
How about we see how love and sympathy happen, all things considered.
Think about the accompanying circumstance: you’re a chief at an enormous enterprise, and you need to cultivate collaboration and positive sentiment among your staff. How would you do that?
All things considered, you can utilize the five An’s as a plan for supporting your staff inwardly – similarly as you would for your accomplice.
Focus on your workers’ emotions and concerns. Acknowledge their endowments and constraints, and value their achievements and challenges. You can likewise show individual fondness – through trust and support – and permit them dynamic force.
Also, shouldn’t something be said about sympathy? Indeed, being humane fundamentally implies being deferential of the force and potential others have inside them.
In case you’re a supervisor, give your representatives the apparatuses to get familiar with another aptitude – and afterward, venture back and permit them to work things out for themselves. Be available when they request to uphold.
Thus, when we make a promise to an accomplice by giving the five A’s, we’re ready to convey these five parts of affection to the world. We all are brought into the world with the plentiful chance of carrying affection to the world – and we can show ourselves as well as other people how to do this.
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Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success by Benjamin Hardy | Book Summary
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Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success by Benjamin Hardy
We rely on willpower to create change in our lives…but what if we’re thinking about it all wrong? In Willpower Doesn’t Work, Benjamin Hardy explains that willpower is nothing more than a dangerous fad-one that is bound to lead to failure. Instead of “white-knuckling” your way to change, you need to instead alter your surroundings to support your goals. This book shows you how.
The world around us is fast-paced, confusing, and full of distractions. It’s easy to lose focus on what you want to achieve, and your willpower won’t last long if your environment is in conflict with your goals–eventually, the environment will win out. Willpower Doesn’t Work is the needed guided for today’s over-stimulating and addicting environment. Willpower Doesn’t Work will specifically teach you:
- How to make the biggest decisions of your life–and why those decisions must be made in specific settings
- How to create a daily “sacred” environment to live your life with intention, and not get sucked into the cultural addictions
- How to invest big in yourself to upgrade your environment and mindset
- How to put “forcing functions” in your life–so your default behaviors are precisely what you want them to be
- How to quickly put yourself in proximity to the most successful people in the world–and how to adapt their knowledge and skills to yourself even quicker
- How to create an environment where endless creativity and boundless productivity is the norm
Benjamin Hardy will show you that nurture is far more powerful than your nature, and teach you how to create and control your environment so your environment will not create and control you.
Chapter 1 – Willpower is less relevant than the environment when it comes to attempting to accomplish the goals.
People usually say that willpower is like a muscle; the longer you use it, the more you wear it out. And just like any other muscle, over time you will improve your willpower – perhaps today’s practicing self-control will make tomorrow a little easier.
Therefore, it’s easy to better oneself, correct? We need to force ourselves a little bit stronger every day to change our lives – and we’ll be set to conquer the world before long! Well, maybe not.
The issue with the willpower is that this muscle is pretty powerless. These days our abilities of self-control are almost fully drained, but it is not our mistake.
Let’s dig at the obesity crisis. The numbers are pretty strong: By 2025, most people in the world are expected to be overweight or obese. Is this due to a willpower weakness? Was it more self-control that was keeping our ancestors skinny?
Certainly not. People in the past didn’t have to depend on willpower to remain skinny. Since then what’s evolved is our environment. Many of us have inactive jobs these days and sit at our desks all day instead of going outside. And the nutrition we rely on is almost always from a harmful box.
Our environment has caused our excess weight as the writer puts it. But fortunately, the environment’s influence can also be a positive thing. How will that be? Note the comparison Darwin makes between natural evolution and domesticated evolution.
In a natural evolution, the species are adapting to the condition they are in. So if being smaller is beneficial, then a species can begin to shrink. They’re required, basically, to adjust to their environment.
Comparing this to domesticated evolution, the evolution of animals and plants under human guidance. Since we regulate the habitats of these species, we may create beneficial features that wouldn’t exist in the wild – like bigger fruits and fatter animals.
When it comes to humans, the majority of us are much like animals in the wild witnessing natural evolution. We are also unable to adjust our conditions so often we adapt to them – unaware of whether this would help us in the long term. Others are doing the reverse of it. They build their habitats similar to how we handle the animals we domesticate, so that each change is simply an upgrade, taking them a step closer to their targets.
The trick is to create an environment that leaves you with no alternative but to “adapt” to your optimal self. We’ll look at certain ways to do exactly that in the overview that follows.
Chapter 2 – Plan the environment with two spaces-one structured for work and one for recreation.
Ever worked at home? You’ve already encountered some usual issues if you did. Any parent of young kids can appreciate the struggle of having to work where you live – but even for the rest of us, working in a place where we usually enjoy can be a challenge.
But perhaps the saying “work hard, play hard” requires an update: work hard and play hard, sure, just make sure you do each one in a different location! In fact, when individuals can make use of two vastly distinct environments – one high-stress and the other high-recovery, they have been found to work at their best.
We always learn of the rewards of a “stress-free” life these times, but such thought lacks all the good aspects that can come out of healthier stress levels. There’s a word for controlled tension of this kind. It is called eustress, and in reality, it makes us achieve our maximum potential. The added stress ensures that we are less likely to be frustrated and inefficient, meaning the job at hand is given our full attention. And creating environments that deem eustress is a perfect way to improve efficiency!
Consider Courtney Reynolds, a young entrepreneur who divides her time between Denver and Las Vegas. Reynolds is in eustress mode while she is in Denver and she lets her environment show that. This means she keeps her place in Denver distraction-free, with limited furniture and just the items she wants for the job.
It’s a different situation in Las Vegas; this is the rehab environment for Reynolds. Her Vegas home is richly furnished with luxury furniture and a palette of bright colors. In her recuperation environment, even her social life shifts. Reynolds works in Denver from morning to night while she likes to spend her days socializing with friends in Vegas.
Believe this or not, when you are resting you will most likely be hit by fresh thoughts and new ideas. Neuroscientists have found that only 16 percent of mental breakthroughs exist while you are at work. You give your brain the opportunity to establish new links as you loosen up and encourage your mind to drift – contributing to fresh thoughts.
Reynolds has reached into a basic element of human nature with her lifestyle. When we switch back and forth between absolute work and absolute play, we work best. By creating different worlds for each state you make work hard and play hard much easier for the mind.
Chapter 3 – By accepting “peak experiences,” you will improve your creativity.
Tsh Oxenreider’s been caught in a rut. Her life hadn’t gone in the right direction for some time. She had many aspirations, dreams, and ideas but she couldn’t find it in herself to truly devote to them.
Tsh and her husband then planned to explore the world with their children on a whim. The impact of Tsh was a significant one. As the family traveled from place to place, she realized she could work with a freshly developed sense of purpose. In brief, her thoughts started to flow.
What went differently with Tsh? Is there something back home in the breeze that had stopped her from reaching her maximum capacity? Not quite.
It turns out that Tsh has been able to achieve a peak experience simply by adjusting her environment, which is a remarkable, exhilarating moment in which you feel and perceive with enhanced perception and sensitivity. For Tsh, one of those remarkable moments was the uprooting of her life and wandering the globe – and seeing it helped her to finally see what her life has been lacking.
It’s typically at those periods when creativity hits, and we get those all-important “lightbulb moments.” And as we’ve discovered earlier, this happens more frequently than not when we’re in relaxing mode.
The nice news is, you don’t have to sit around and expect that one day you’ll be fortunate enough to have a peak experience. If you’re wise about it, you might really make them a daily part of your life.
How? Well, the solution to that is clear. First, you have to disconnect, then go somewhere new. This place need not be the environment for your recovery. You can drive only 30 minutes away from home if you like. Take out your notebook when you’re there, and begin writing. Start by showing appreciation for everything you enjoy in your life and focus on what’s going on in your world. Don’t be scared, be open about your shortcomings with yourself. Did you achieve your targets or slack yourself off? Write down every feeling you have.
Then, write your dreams of “big picture.” What would you like to do in the coming months? What if in a year’s time? What is your meaning in life? At first, it will be hard but try to define the simple “Why? “What is the fundamental reason for something you want to accomplish?
By changing out of your habit in this manner and giving yourself time to ponder the big picture, you’re training your mind for the peak experiences. They can sound challenging – but its payoff is worth the effort.
Chapter 4 – Now act decisively, extracting dead load from your life.
The popular corporate CEO Gary B. Sabin shares an amusing and instructive tale about the illogical ways we escape the pain. One time, he’d given a party to Boy Scouts on a desert camping trip. They arrived in a great time at their location, set up camps, and hunkered down for the night.
But in the morning, when Sabin woke up, he found that one boy seemed tired and disheveled. The reason why? It turned out that night, he didn’t use his sleeping bag because he didn’t want to pick it up in the morning. To put it in other words, he must have been frozen for hours just to spare himself a few minutes’ work!
Sometimes we follow a certain irrational approach when it comes to making difficult decisions in life. We hold off any decisive action promptly and as a result are enduring long-term regret. The solution is easy all the while: Bite the bullet, and organize our lives according to our objectives.
An instance of the many ways in which we hamper our long-term ambitions is to spend time on the internet. We all did it. You’re working on a job and it’s getting difficult so you’re looking at your phone. You get irritated by replying to emails so you check your social media sites. Rather than concentrating on our actual jobs, we are giving way to the internet’s shallow attractions.
You ought to be strong and definitive in counteracting that. Eliminate any applications that get in the way of your goals. No ifs or buts – just go ahead and drop them. When eliminating distractions from your life, you’re making sure that willpower doesn’t even enter the equation. You can’t, after all, yield to a lure that doesn’t exist!
When you have eliminated your phone’s lure, take the same concept, and extend it directly to your life. Is there food in your freezer that you don’t want to eat? Get rid of it – the dead weight is gone. When you do this you would be shocked how much better it is to make choices.
As Dr. Barry Schwartz pointed out in his book The Paradox of Choice, making so many choices can be a negative thing too. We frequently behave in a half-hearted and uncommitted fashion by focusing upon all of our future choices. Rather than behaving with confidence, we wait and worry over the specifics of any little chance.
But there’s a simpler way: understand and let go of the dead weight of your life. Eliminate everything else from the photo once you’ve defined the options that fit your objectives.
Chapter 5 – Make use of implementing intentions to ensure that you remain on board.
We also heard of the “strength of constructive thought.” According to this principle, once you believe that anything can be accomplished, you are now one step closer to getting it done. Only don’t dwell on the possibility that you can fail.
It’s a common thought-but what if it’s totally wrong? What if worrying about the ways you can struggle is really a better way to make sure you are achieving your goals?
Let’s begin with what the implementation intentions really are. They’re a type of preparation that includes defining how failure might occur – but only to nip it in the bud.
Typically this technique takes the form of an “if-then” response. Think about it like this: anytime you say to yourself, “I’m going to drink water every time I want a soda,” you’ve already made use of an implementation intention. Your “if” was the need for a soda; your “then” was the option to drink water as a replacement.
The trick here is to stick with the strategy long enough to automatically make the change from the “if” to the “then.” It shouldn’t take much mental effort after a while at all, and the need for a drink would easily cause thoughts of a better replacement.
In fact, psychologists have found that the implementation intentions are very successful for students. When schoolchildren were asked to consider how they could stop falling short of their targets, they all improved their grades, attitudes, and attendance.
Along with helping you overcome temptations, this technique will also promote the recognition of when to leave. It’s quick to get distracted and bow out early, as we face major challenges. But if you’ve identified the “if” that means it’s time to call it a day, you can continue to give it all until you hit your capacity.
For an ultramarathon runner, this will only mean leaving the course if his eyesight fails. If he realizes he’s just going to stop running if he can’t see anymore, he would have the courage to be able to push through some small difficulties.
What is crucial is to have specific markers, so that when your “if” has been reached it is visible.
Chapter 6 – To force you to accomplish your objectives use forcing functions.
We just don’t like being pushed to do anything, right? If we find we need to do something, so we should still get up and do it willingly. But it isn’t always the case, as you might have heard. We are aware of the fact that we should start working out, but we don’t. We are aware of the fact that we should be working, but we keep wasting our time.
There are a number of explanations for this behavior — such as laziness, frustration, and fear — and the end result is still the same: disappointment and remorse at our behavior. Willpower alone is very seldom up to the task, but what do we do to become our best selves?
One way of doing this is by using forcing functions. These are self-imposed restrictions that force you to behave according to your objectives. For instance, you could suggest leaving your phone in the car when you get home if you want to be more involved with your family after work. This way, it’s not really a choice to take calls and answer emails, so you “force” yourself to disconnect from the world outside your family.
Entrepreneur Dan Martell uses one specific method in pressuring his productivity to improve. Martell takes his laptop to a local cafe anytime he really wants to do something, then purposely leaves his computer at home. Why? Knowing he only has a few hours of battery left, Martell ends up working much more effectively than allowing himself the whole day. Martell is forced to work at maximum speed by enforcing a non-negotiable timetable for as long as his computer is working.
A further powerful driving feature is the force of social pressure. No one likes to appear like a loser to their peers and most people will go to great lengths to maintain their colleagues’ respect. So say what your goals are-and be precise.
Knowing that you are liable to your colleagues would help you accomplish your objectives. The terror of having to say we’ve failed is always enough to drive us towards success.
Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success by Benjamin Hardy Book Review
It’s not only difficult to focus on willpower to get stuff accomplished, it’s a shockingly counterproductive improvement technique. The easiest way to change your life for the better is by building an environment that will motivate you to live according to your goals. You can achieve this by using forcing functions and implementation intentions – and by stripping your life of burdens.
Get rid of your nine to five routine for thinking creatively.
When most people were engaging in hard labor or routine, emotionally undemanding jobs, the traditional eight-hour workday made sense. But the timetable is past its expiration date in today’s knowledge-based job environment. When you want to retain total concentration every day from nine to five, the consistency of the job diminishes quickly – but don’t be afraid to compact the working hours into a narrower timeframe.
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What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence by Stephen A. Schwarzman | Book Summary
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What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence by Stephen A. Schwarzman
From Blackstone chairman, CEO, and co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman, a long-awaited book that uses impactful episodes from Schwarzman’s life to show readers how to build, transform, and lead thriving organizations. Whether you are a student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, executive, or simply someone looking for ways to maximize your potential, the same lessons apply.
People know who Stephen Schwarzman is–at least they think they do. He’s the man who took $400,000 and co-founded Blackstone, the investment firm that manages over $500 billion (as of January 2019). He’s the CEO whose views are sought by heads of state. He’s the billionaire philanthropist who founded Schwarzman Scholars, this century’s version of the Rhodes Scholarship, in China. But behind these achievements is a man who has spent his life learning and reflecting on what it takes to achieve excellence, make an impact, and live a life of consequence.
Folding handkerchiefs in his father’s linen shop, Schwarzman dreamed of a larger life, filled with purpose and adventure. His grades and athleticism got him into Yale. After starting his career in finance with a short stint at a financial firm called DLJ, Schwarzman began working at Lehman Brothers where he ascended to run the mergers and acquisitions practice. He eventually partnered with his mentor and friend Pete Peterson to found Blackstone, vowing to create a new and different kind of financial institution.
Building Blackstone into the leading global financial institution it is today didn’t come easy. Schwarzman focused intensely on culture, hiring great talent, and establishing processes that allow the firm to systematically analyze and evaluate risk. Schwarzman’s simple mantra “don’t lose money” has helped Blackstone become a leading private equity and real estate investor, and manager of alternative assets for institutional investors globally. Both he and the firm are known for the rigor of their investment process, their innovative approach to deal making, the diversification of their business lines, and a conviction to be the best at everything they do.
Schwarzman is also an active philanthropist, having given away more than a billion dollars. In philanthropy, as in business, he is drawn to situations where his capital and energy can be applied to drive transformative solutions and change paradigms, notably in education. He uses the skills learned over a lifetime in finance to design, establish, and support impactful and innovative organizations and initiatives. His gifts have ranged from creating a new College of Computing at MIT for the study of artificial intelligence, to establishing a first-of-its-kind student and performing arts center at Yale, to enabling the renovation of the iconic New York Public Library, to founding the Schwarzman Scholars fellowship program at in Beijing–the single largest philanthropic effort in China’s history from international donors.
Schwarzman’s story is an empowering, entertaining, and informative guide for anyone striving for greater personal impact. From deal making to investing, leadership to entrepreneurship, philanthropy to diplomacy, Schwarzman has lessons for how to think about ambition and scale, risk and opportunities, and how to achieve success through the relentless pursuit of excellence. Schwarzman not only offers readers a thoughtful reflection on all his own experiences, but in doing so provides a practical blueprint for success.
Rule #1 Set overarching goals.
It’s easy to do something big as it’s to do something small. Aim for a goal worthy of your pursuit, with rewards commensurate to your effort.
Rule #2 Set an example.
The best executives are made, not born. They study the people and organizations that have had enormous success. And they pay it forward to the world by being a free course everyone can learn from.
Rule #3 Connect with new people.
Reach out to the people you admire. You never know who is willing to meet with you and offer you the advice you’re looking for. You may even end up forming a connection you can leverage for the rest of your life. Meeting people early in your life can almost always work in your favor.
Rule #4 Provide people with new perceptions.
When you’re going through tough times, it’s too easy to think nothing in the world seems bigger than your own problems. The solution is to think about what others are dealing with, and find ways to provide them with thoughtful ideas and new perceptions.
Rule #5 Collaboration is key, not competition.
Every business is a set of distinct but closely interconnected functions. The best managers understand how each team works on its own and how it functions in relation to others.
Rule #6 The more you know, the more you can spot the patterns.
Information is one of the most important assets in business. The more you know, the more perspectives you have and the more likely you’re to spot the patterns and anomalies before your competition does. Always be open to new ideas whether they’re people, experiences or knowledge.
Rule #7 Prioritize learning over money, early in your career.
First you learn, then you earn, goes the conventional wisdom. When you’re early in your career, work for jobs that provide you with a steep learning curve and training opportunities. That includes saying no to prestigious companies and jobs that aren’t right for you.
Rule #8 Pay attention to your first impressions.
First impressions really matter. When you’re going to a meeting or an interview, you must get your presentation right. The other person will be watching out for all sorts of clues and cues that tell who you are. Be punctual and prepared.
Rule #9 Talk openly and exchange ideas.
No one can solve every problem on their own. But an army of smart people talking openly and exchanging information with each other will.
Rule #10 Be a problem-solver and pain-reliever to others.
When we’re in a tough spot, we tend to focus on our own problems. In these times, nothing in the world seems bigger than what we’re dealing with. The answer to this usually lies in identifying and trying to fix someone else’s problems.
Rule #11 Strive for something bigger than yourself.
Strive for something bigger than yourself and your needs. It can be your family, company, country or a duty for service. If you take on any challenge with such belief and intention, your goal will not only be fulfilling, also meaningful.
Rule #12 Integrity is the name of the game.
Never deviate from your sense of right and wrong. Integrity is the name of the game. It’s easy to maintain your integrity when things are going well. But it’s hard when everything is falling apart and you don’t have a check to write. Always do what you say you will and never ever mislead people for your own good.
Rule #13 Act when the time is right. Never hesitate.
Have courage and confidence to act when the moment seems right. Don’t fall into the trap of paralysis by analysis. Successful business owners accept risk when others are cautious and take action when everyone is frozen. And they do so by betting on informed, educated guesses.
Rule #14 Complacency is the enemy.
Never let complacency take over you. When you’re winning, it’s too easy to get complacent. Nothing in the world is forever. When you stop trying, you’re giving your competition permission to defeat you. So always be seeking ways to reinvent and improve yourself. Organizations are more fragile than you think.
Rule #15 Master the art of selling.
Sales rarely happen on the first pitch. Just because you believe in your idea and what you’re selling doesn’t mean everyone else will. You need to articulate and sell your vision over and over again with conviction.
Rule #16 Go where people don’t.
If you see a huge, transformative opportunity, don’t worry that no one else is pursuing it. Chances are you’re seeing what others don’t. The harder the problem, the more limited the competition, and the greater the rewards for whoever can work on it.
Rule #17 Always stay alert for opportunities and threats.
Sometimes, the best opportunities come in the blink of an eye. Be alert, open and ready to pounce when the time is right. If you’re not prepared to apply massive effort, either the opportunity isn’t compelling enough as you think or you’re not the right person to pursue it.
Rule #18 Don’t wait too long for an agreement.
Time wounds all deals, sometimes even fatally. More often than not the longer you wait, the more surprises await you. In difficult negotiations especially, keep everyone at the table long enough to come to an agreement.
Rule #19 Don’t lose ‘money’.
Cash is king. Don’t lose money. Before you pursue an opportunity, assess the situation and objectively see both risks and rewards.
Rule #20 Don’t act under pressure.
Make a decision when you’re ready. But avoid making decisions when you’re under pressure. Don’t feel pressured by people pushing you for a decision for their own purposes. When in doubt, you can almost always say “I need a little more time on this. I’ll get back to you.”
Rule #21 The right amount of skepticism can be healthy.
Skepticism can be an active and liberating activity. If channeled properly, it allows you to identify the downside of any situation and drives you in the right direction.
Rule #22 Look at the failures (and successes) objectively.
Failure is the best teacher in almost any organization. Be willing to share your failures openly and objectively, and encourage your people to do the same. When things go wrong, don’t play the blame game. Instead, look at the failure objectively and analyze what went wrong. You’ll learn new rules for decision-making and organizational behavior.
Rule #23 Hire the best talents.
Hire 10s whenever you can. Your 10s are proactive about sensing problems, designing solutions and taking a business to new opportunities. They also attract and hire other 10s.
Rule #24 Be kind.
A random act of kindness can change the course of someone’s life and create life-long friendship and loyalty. Be there for people you know to be good, even when everyone else is walking away. Anyone, no matter how successful and happy they’re on the outside, can end up in the most difficult situations.
Rule #25 Lift others up.
Everyone has dreams. Help each other as you climb to the top of the mountain together. And when you reach the peak, do whatever you can to bring others up and help them achieve the most beautiful vision of their lives.
The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz | Book Summary
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The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
This groundbreaking New York Times bestseller has helped hundreds of thousands of people at work and at home balance stress and recovery and sustain high performance despite crushing workloads and 24/7 demands on their time.
We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We’re wired up, but we’re melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. As bestselling authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz demonstrate in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement is a highly practical, scientifically based approach to managing your energy more skillfully both on and off the job by laying out the key training principles and provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will help you to:
* Mobilize four key sources of energy
* Balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal
* Expand capacity in the same systematic way that elite athletes do
* Create highly specific, positive energy management rituals to make lasting changes
Above all, this book provides a life-changing road map to becoming more fully engaged on and off the job, meaning physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused, and spiritually aligned.
The authors worked with the best athletes and executives for years, and found that the best ones knew how to push themselves, then recuperate, push, recuperate. Take this same approach to your emotional, mental, physical, and even spiritual life, and it’s a powerful metaphor. Think of sprints, not marathons. Be fully in whatever you’re in, then give time to recuperate. But push futher each time, past your comfort zone, like a good exercise plan.
Every one of our thoughts, emotions and behaviors has an energy consequence.
Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.
To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned.
Immerse yourself in the mission you are on.
Eager to get to work in the morning, equally happy to return home in the evening – and capable of setting clear boundaries between the two.
Professional athletes typically spend about 90 percent of their time training, in order to be able to perform 10 percent of the time. Their entire lives are designed around expanding, sustaining and renewing the energy they need to compete for short, focused periods of time. At a practical level, they build very precise routines for managing energy in all spheres of their lives – eating and sleeping; working out and resting; summoning the appropriate emotions; mentally preparing and staying focused; and connecting regularly to the mission they have set for themselves.
The primary markers of physical capacity are strength, endurance, flexibility and resilience. These are precisely the same markers of capacity emotionally, mentally and spiritually.
Stretching increases flexibility.
Emotional flexibility reflects the capacity to move freely and appropriately along a wide spectrum of emotions rather than responding rigidly or defensively.
Emotional resilience is the ability to bounce back from experiences of disappointment, frustration and even loss.
Mental endurance is a measure of the ability to sustain focus and concentration over time.
Mental flexibility is marked by the capacity to move between the rational and the intuitive and to embrace multiple points of view.
Spiritual strength is reflected in the commitment to one’s deepest values, regardless of circumstance and even when adhering to them involves personal sacrifice.
Spiritual flexibility reflects the tolerance for values and beliefs that are different than one’s own, so long as those values and beliefs don’t bring harm to others.
We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints – fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray.
To build capacity, we must push beyond our normal limits, training in the same systematic way that elite athletes do.
Building “muscles” in every dimension of our lives – from empathy and patience to focus and creativity to integrity and commitment.
We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our ordinary limits and then recovering. Expose a muscle to ordinary demand and it won’t grow. With age it will actually lose strength. The limiting factor in building any “muscle” is that many of us back off at the slightest hint of discomfort. To meet increased demand in our lives, we must learn to systematically build and strengthen muscles wherever our capacity is insufficient. Any form of stress that prompts discomfort has the potential to expand our capacity – physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually – so long as it is followed by adequate recovery.
Will and discipline require pushing yourself to a particular behavior.
A ritual PULLS at you.
The power of rituals is that they insure that we use as little conscious energy as possible.
Imagine that every time you failed to focus your attention fully on the task at hand, you put someone’s life at risk. Very quickly, you would become less negative, reckless and sloppy in the way you manage your energy. We hold ourselves accountable for the ways that we manage our time, and for that matter our money. We must learn to hold ourselves at least equally accountable for how we manage our energy.
Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.
“How should I spend my energy in a way that is consistent with my deepest values?”
It is impossible to chart a course of change until you are able to look honestly at who you are today.
Face the Truth. Denying to ourselves that the choices we are making are having a consequential impact on the quantity, quality, force and focus of our energy.
Some of our existing habits help us get through the day, but take a long-term toll on our performance, health and happiness. Examples include relying on junk food for bursts of energy.
Building rituals requires defining very precise behaviors and performing them at very specific times – motivated by deeply held values.
Great leaders are stewards of organizational energy. They begin by effectively managing their own energy. As leaders, they must mobilize, focus, invest, channel, renew and expand the energy of others.
The powerful source of energy that can be derived from connecting to a clear sense of purpose.
Unmoored from deeply held values, he didn’t have much motivation to take better care of himself physically, or to control his impatience, or even to prioritize his time and focus his attention.
An imbalance between the expenditure and the recovery of energy: they were either overtraining or undertraining.
Both overtraining and undertraining have performance consequences that include persistent injuries and sickness, anxiety, negativity and anger, difficulty concentrating, and loss of passion.
When we expend energy, we draw down our reservoir. When we recover energy, we fill it back up. Too much energy expenditure without sufficient recovery eventually leads to burnout and breakdown. (Overuse it and lose it.) Too much recovery without sufficient stress leads to atrophy and weakness. (Use it or lose it.)
The benefits of a sustained fitness program decrease significantly after just one week of inactivity – and disappear altogether in as few as four weeks.
Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings. Mental acuity diminishes in the absence of ongoing intellectual challenge. Spiritual energy capacity depends on regularly revisiting our deepest values and holding ourselves accountable in our behavior.
We assume that we can spend energy indefinitely in some dimensions – often the mental and emotional – and that we can perform effectively without investing much energy at all in others – most commonly the physical and the spiritual.
In the sixteen to twenty seconds between points in a match, the heart rates of top competitors dropped as much as twenty beats per minute. By building highly efficient and focused recovery routines, these players had found a way to derive extraordinary energy renewal in a very short period of time.
Many of us treat life as a marathon that doesn’t end until it finally ends for good.
We must learn to establish stopping points in our days, inviolable times when we step off the track, cease processing information and shift our attention from achievement to restoration.
To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves to more stress – followed by adequate recovery.
We grow at all levels by expending energy beyond our normal limits, and then recovering.
The catch is that we instinctively resist pushing beyond our current comfort zones.
The best moments in our lives usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
The deepest satisfaction comes from our willingness to expose ourselves to new challenges and engage in novel experiences.
The willingness to challenge our comfort zones depends partly on our degree of underlying security. To whatever degree we are consumed by anxious concerns, we are less willing to expose ourselves to any discomfort.
Gradual and incremental exposure to increasing doses of stress.
The size of our energy reservoir depends on the patterns of our breathing, the foods that we eat and when we eat them, the quantity and quality of our sleep, the degree to which we get intermittent recovery during the day, and the level of our fitness.
Breathing in to a count of three and out to a count of six, lowers arousal and quiets not just the body but also the mind and the emotions.
Even if you don’t feel consciously hungry, eating breakfast is critically important. It not only increases blood glucose levels, but also jump-starts metabolism.
The frequency with which we eat also influences our capacity to stay fully engaged and to sustain high performance. Eating five to six low calorie, highly nutritious “meals” a day insures a steady resupply of energy. Even the most energy rich foods won’t fuel high performance for the four to eight hours that many of us frequently permit to pass between meals.
Snacks between meals should typically be between 100 and 150 calories and once again should focus on low-glycemic foods such as nuts and sunflower seeds, fruits.
The shifts of energy that we experience are tied to the ultradian rhythms that regulate physiological markers of alertness at 90-to 120-minute intervals.
It took him four weeks to lock in these new rituals so that they began to exert a noticeable pull on him.
Recommended exercise protocol is twenty to thirty minutes of continuous exercise, three to five days a week, at 60 to 85 percent of maximum heart rate.
Sprinting, walking up stairs and down, bicycling and even weight lifting, so long as the effect is to rhythmically raise and lower heart rate.
Stress inoculation occurs only when the stress intensity is at the optimal level – high enough to activate a person’s psychological and biological systems, but low enough so as not to overwhelm them. If the stress level is not high enough, inoculation will not occur; if the stress level is too high, stress sensitization will occur, and the individual will probably perform less effectively when he is stressed again. In short, minimizing or avoiding stress is just as destructive to capacity as excessive stress without recovery.
Researchers looked at the effects of bed rest on some 16,000 patients with fifteen different medical problems. It turned out that patients got no significant beneficial effect from prolonged bed rest, regardless of their medical condition. To the contrary, bed rest tended to delay recovery and in some cases cause further damage to the patient. These conclusions even applied to conditions for which bed rest has long been recommended, including low back pain, recovery after a heart attack.
He had never stuck with an exercise program long enough to derive any benefits.
Committed to an exercise program for sixty days – the outer limit of what it typically takes to put a new ritual into place.
The key to any new fitness regimen is to start slowly and build incrementally.
Heart-rate monitor. Target heart rate. he could reach that rate simply by walking fast. He maintained it for sixty seconds and then slowed down until his heart rate dropped to 90.
Repeated the same up-and-down sequence for the next twenty minutes. Rather than pushing himself continuously for twenty or twenty-five minutes, he was teaching his body both to tolerate stress and to recover efficiently.
Emotional intelligence is simply the capacity to manage emotions skillfully in the service of high positive energy and full engagement. In practical terms, the key “muscles” or competencies that fuel positive emotion are self-confidence, self-control (self-regulation), social skills (interpersonal effectiveness) and empathy. Smaller, supportive “muscles” include patience, openness, trust and enjoyment.
When our emotional muscles are weak or insufficient to meet demand – if we have a lack of confidence or too little patience, for example – we must systematically build capacity by devising rituals to push past our current capacity and then recover.
Epidemiologist David Snowdon, study of 678 aging nuns who had been required to write a personal essay when they came into the order in their early twenties. Those nuns whose writing expressed a preponderance of positive emotions (happiness, love, hope, gratitude and contentment) tended to live longer and more productive lives. Nuns with the highest number of positive-emotion sentences had half the risk of death at any age as those with the lowest number of such sentences.
Undertake activities simply because they are enjoyable and emotionally nourishing.
Keeping this physical routine helped anchor him to a sense of normalcy and provided a source of emotional recovery each day.
Talking freely with her new friends. She became as invested in their lives as they did in hers.
True empathy requires letting go of our own agendas, at least temporarily.
All virtues are entailed. Honesty without compassion, for example, becomes cruelty.
To perform at our best we must be able to sustain concentration, and to move flexibly between broad and narrow, as well as internal and external focus.
The key supportive muscles that fuel optimal mental energy include mental preparation, visualization, positive self-talk, effective time management, and creativity.
Agents who scored in the top 10 percent for optimism sold 88 percent more than those ranked in the most pessimistic 10 percent.
Da Vinci wrote, “It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation…. When you come back to the work your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.”
Sequential steps of the creative process. Five stages are now widely recognized: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination and verification.
The highest form of creativity depends on a rhythmic movement between engagement and disengagement, thinking and letting go, activity and rest.
Exposing one’s self to short-term stress, for example, can stimulate a burst of adrenaline that actually improves memory.
A Japanese neuroscientist put a group of young people on a jogging program of thirty minutes, two to three times a week. When he tested them at the end of twelve weeks on a series of memory skills, their scores significantly increased, and so did the speed with which they completed the tests. Of equal note, their gains disappeared almost immediately when they stopped jogging.
The key muscle that fuels spiritual energy is character – the courage and conviction to live by our values, even when doing so requires personal sacrifice and hardship. Supportive spiritual muscles include passion, commitment, integrity and honesty. Spiritual energy is sustained by balancing a commitment to others with adequate self-care.
The disconnection from a compelling sense of purpose had robbed him of passion and of any clear sense of direction.
Expanding spiritual capacity requires subordinating our own needs to something beyond our self-interest. Because we often perceive our own needs as urgent, shifting attention away from them can prompt very primitive survival fears. If I truly focus my attention on others, we worry, who is going to look out for me? It is a mark of courage to set aside self-interest in order to be of service to others or to a cause.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.
“We are much better than we know. We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis. So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it’s meant to improve us.” – Lance Armstrong
We become fully engaged only when we feel that what we are doing really matters.
Purpose creates a destination.
Look at someone that you deeply respect. Describe three qualities in this person that you most admire.
Create a vision for how we intend to invest our energy.
To provide inspiration it needs to be lofty, ambitious and even a bit overreaching. It needs to be realistic, specific and personal.
“Every form of addiction is bad,” wrote Carl Jung, “no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”
We deceive ourselves in order to protect our self-esteem – our image of who we are or wish to be.
Intellectualizing is a means of acknowledging a truth cognitively without experiencing its impact emotionally.
But why were the most successful leaders also so consistently self-effacing, modest and eager to share credit? In part, it was that their humility gave others room to flourish.
The success of any large venture depends on giving people a sense of ownership and a feeling of being valued and valuable. Genuine humility also meant that these leaders were open to opinions contrary to their own and to the possibility that their views weren’t always necessarily right. They were confident enough to be wrong without feeling diminished.
“Ask someone to give a description of the personality type which he finds most despicable, most unbearable and hateful, and most impossible to get along with,” writes Edward Whitmont, “and he will produce a description of his own repressed characteristics….These very qualities are so unacceptable to him precisely because they represent his own repressed side; only that which we cannot accept within ourselves do we find impossible to live with in others.”
Like all of our “muscles,” self-awareness withers from disuse and deepens when we push past our resistance to see more of the truth. We fall asleep to aspects of ourselves each and every day. Much as we must keep returning to the gym and pushing weight against resistance in order to sustain or increase our physical strength, so we must persistently shed light on those aspects of ourselves that we prefer not to see in order to build our mental, emotional and spiritual capacity.
When it comes to absorbing the truth, too big a dose can be overwhelming, and even self-defeating. Some truths are too unbearable to be absorbed all at once.
Ivan Lendl was far from the most physically gifted tennis player of his era, but for five years he was the number-one-ranked player in the world. His edge was in the routines that he built. He followed similar routines in every dimension of his life. He developed a rigorous fitness regimen off the court, which included sprints, middle-distance runs, long bicycle rides and strength training. He did regular ballet bar exercises to increase his balance and grace. He adhered to a low-fat, high complex-carbohydrate diet and ate at very specific times. Lendl also practiced a series of daily mental-focus exercises to improve his concentration – and regularly introduced new ones to assure that they remained challenging. At tournaments, he gave clear instructions to friends and family not to burden him with issues that might distract him from his mission. Whatever he did, he was either fully engaged or strategically disengaged. He even meticulously scheduled his time for relaxation and recovery, which included recreational golf, daily afternoon naps and regularly scheduled massages. On the court, during matches, he relied on another set of rituals to keep himself centered and focused, including visualizing entire points before playing them and following the same multiple-step ritual each time he stepped up to the line to serve.
It is perfectly logical to assume that Lendl excelled in part because he had extraordinary will and discipline. That probably isn’t so. A growing body of research suggests that as little as 5 percent of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. We are creatures of habit and as much as 95 percent of what we do occurs automatically or in reaction to a demand or an anxiety. What Lendl understood brilliantly and instinctively was the power of positive rituals – precise, consciously acquired behaviors that become automatic in our lives, fueled by a deep sense of purpose.
Positive energy rituals are powerful on three levels. They help us to insure that we effectively manage energy in the service of whatever mission we are on. They reduce the need to rely on our limited conscious will and discipline to take action. Finally, rituals are a powerful means by which to translate our values and priorities into action – to embody what matters most to us in our everyday behaviors.
Rituals serve as anchors, insuring that even in the most difficult circumstances we will continue to use our energy in service of the values that we hold most dear.
Every time we participate in a ritual, we are expressing our beliefs, either verbally or more implicitly.
The sustaining power of rituals comes from the fact that they conserve energy. “We should not cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,”
Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Discipline, which imply PUSHING ourselves to action, a well-defined ritual PULLS us. We feel somehow worse if we don’t do it.
It is possible to strategically build the muscle of self-control. The same training regimen applies. Exercise self-control or empathy or patience past normal limits, and then allow time for rest and these muscles become progressively stronger.
Shift from the mentality of a marathoner to that of a sprinter.
Because Peter told us that he felt freshest early in the morning, we had him begin his workdays at 6:30 A.M. and write for ninety minutes before he did anything else. At 8:00 A.M., Peter stopped to have breakfast with his wife Peter returned to work at 8:30 A.M. and wrote without interruption until 10:00. At that point, he took a twenty-minute recovery break – ten minutes of training with light weights followed by ten minutes of meditation. He also ate a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts before heading back to his desk. Peter’s third writing session went from 10:30 until 12:00 NOON, at which point he went jogging and then ate lunch. During those 41/2 hours of focused morning work, Peter was able to write nearly twice as much as had sitting at his desk for up to ten hours a day in previous years.
If our rituals become too rigid, unvarying and linear, the eventual consequence is boredom, disengagement and even diminished passion and productivity.
Hold fast to our rituals when the pressures in our lives threaten to throw us off track, and to periodically revisit and change them so that they remain fresh.
There are several key elements in building effective energy-management rituals but none so important as specificity of timing and the precision of behavior during the thirty-to sixty-day acquisition period.
Specificity of timing and precision of behavior dramatically increase the likelihood of success.
By determining when, where and how a behavior will occur, we no longer have to think much about getting it done.
The less thinking people have to do under adverse circumstances, the better.
Build rituals in increments – focusing on one significant change at a time, and setting reachable goals at each step of the process.
Create a daily accountability log. This exercise can be as simple as a yes or no check on a sheet kept by the side of your bed.