TEN COMMANDMENTS OF CONFIDENT THINKING: NUMBER THREE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006
SEE YOURSELF AS SUCCESSFUL, DEVELOP SELF-IMAGE OF SUCCESS IN YOUR OWN TERMS, LEARN TO PERSEVERE, AND KNOW WHEN TO TAKE “TIME OUT.”
The MODERN MAN looks after himself, because no one else does. He eats the food that would not destroy his body with cholesterol, he drinks sparingly and never to excess, he keeps his muscles fit, he pursues advancement in his career by saying the right things to principal people, he lets the new technological electronic innovations take the strain off his life, and he is sensible. He stands out in a crowd as one marked for advancement, certain to prosper in progress. He is nobody’s fool, not afraid of work, a person with aptitude for decision-making and taking charge and an independent thinker. Somehow, however, his career, his future, the success he so cherished has collapsed with the finality of an outdated computer system because he has never gotten around to doing what he truly loves. His confidence is a sham. He is on life support and doesn’t know it.
Success is one of those ambiguous words. We equate success with financial security, celebrity prominence, athletic prowess, political clout, intellectual acumen, artistic genius, scientific distinction, and military hegemony. There is a pattern here.
Success in most American eyes is financial independence. This is the perspective of those without it, seldom of those with it. The Steven Jobs, Bill Gates, Rick Waggoners, and Tom Fords are some of the hardest working people and they need not work at all. They could sit back on their billions or millions and vegetate for the rest of their lives. They choose not to because that is not what life is all about.
There are many people that hunger for success in the form of adulation and celebrity. They need an audience upon which to feed. Success goes beyond financial or professional security. They need a full-time entourage of sycophants to feed them reassuring morsels of appreciation while buffering them from the reality or experience.
We have become spectators to life finding vicarious satisfaction in adoration of performers. Take the television show “The American Idol.” Amateurs vie for recognition as entertainers. Over fifty million voted in the May 2006 “American Idol” contest, which demonstrates this pattern.
The 2006 World Cup of Soccer, which took place in Germany, had a television global audience of nearly two billion people, while hundreds of thousands traveled to Germany to attend the contests. Seventy-five thousand from Sweden, alone, were on hand for the opening match of that nation’s team.
Folly is not a matter of devotion to your favorites in sport or entertainment; folly is in attempting to emulate these idols at the expense of developing your innate talents. Tennis great Arthur Ashe once wrote that a member of his African American race had one chance in 50,000 of ever getting on the professional tennis circuit. The odds of being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or scientist for those same African American boys were close to one in 100 if the same energy committed to sport was committed to education.
People see their idols as somebody doing something going somewhere whereas merely being a doctor, lawyer or engineer, well, it’s not the same, is it?
Many little boys want to be NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB players today. They’ll devote their time, energy, interests and their dreams towards that fantasy. When I was a boy, it was only MLB because baseball dominated American professional sport. We played baseball from sun up to sun down in the summer on the courthouse lawns in Clinton, Iowa, and attended all the Industrial League baseball games in Riverview Stadium, dreaming of the day we would have a minor league contract on our way to the majors. In a town of 33,000, no one has ever made the major leagues as an everyday player.
So, success, indeed, is an ambiguous word. People are disinclined to see success in terms of their essence and personality, circumstance and opportunities. Many drift through life chasing dreams that will never materialize.
This is not to discourage you from seeing yourself as successful, but to send the message success is a deeply personal affair. Success is a kind of work in terms of love that you have been able to make visible.
Think about that a moment, what gives you the most satisfaction? What is it you do especially well? An irony is we don’t know what we do well until someone tells us. That means we must listen. The inclination is to take for granted our special talent as if everyone has it, when not everyone does. Dean Pieper was at Clinton High in my hometown more than a half century ago, running around the track like everyone else in gym class. His gym teacher noted his speed, endurance and the ease with which he ran. He encouraged him to go out for the track team. He did, and ran the fastest mile in the United States that year, 4:21.6 minutes. He never thought he was especially talented as a runner. His talent provided him with a full scholarship to Northwestern University when otherwise he would not have been able to afford a college education.
There is a hierarchy of what we deem success when we are young. With boys in my day from age four to six, it was skill at playing common games (marbles, checkers); from six to twelve it was physical prowess in running, hitting, shooting, throwing, jumping with some kind of ball; from twelve to eighteen it was organized sport such as football, basketball, track and baseball on high school teams. Separation from doing to observing accelerated with spectator sports as only eleven players are on a football team, five on a basketball team, thirty or so in track, and nine on a baseball team.
What is unfortunate is that those who excel in sport can and commonly do neglect other talents that ensure long-term success, freeze framing them in eternal adolescence never to mature into responsible adults.
Meanwhile, again in my day, with girls from age four to six, dolls were important; six to eight the focus shifted to social activities and peer relationships; eight to twelve self-awareness brought out competitive instincts academically, socially and in terms of appearance, being increasingly goal oriented; twelve to eighteen boys were discovered against a broad band of parent-teacher attention and approval criterion with 80 percent of academic honors going to girls.
Academic achievement in college proved a reversal of this 80-20 rule with 80 percent of the academic honors going to young men. Academia took on precedence because young men, in the main, were to be the professionals, not young women.
It is a much healthier climate today, fifty years later, not only in terms of professional status, but also across the board as high school girls and young women in college are now enjoying parity in sport and disciplines formerly dominated by men.
College women have come to assert themselves academically. Nearly 70 percent of female high school graduates attend college compared to less than 60 percent of male high school graduates. Women are over 60 percent of all master degree students and earn better than 50 percent of all master degrees. Today women earn 50 percent of all doctoral degrees, while over 50 percent of medical school students are women with more than 40 percent earning medical degrees. Nearly 50 percent of those earning law degrees are women while the same number are dental students with the better than 40 percent receiving dental degrees. Likewise, women earn a majority of the degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine. The only disciplines in which they still lag are mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and engineering. Even in these disciplines, they have been making tremendous strides in the last quarter century.
Although there seems to be growing parity between white men and women, the same cannot be said for black and Hispanic students. Three quarters of college graduates and professional students among the black and Hispanic population are women, not men.
The success of the Feminine Movement has influenced women in giving them permission to succeed on male turf. The glass ceiling has been fragmented, and somewhat shattered but it has not collapsed. There is still inequity in pay and promotion for women despite their credentials and competence.
Still, the focus on college exclusively has generated the myth that after high school it is college or nothing, which is not true. Many positions that are only open to college graduates today could be better done with people with practical experience and special training, not necessarily college. College mania is part of the American syndrome.
The United States is a reactive society. It was obvious on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was again apparent on September 11, 2001 when the projectile of two American commercial planes manned by terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, killing more than 3,000 innocent American civilians.
Between these two tragedies, there was another shock. The Soviet Union’s successfully launched Sputnik into space in 1957. Predictably, there followed a hysterical drive toward science at the exclusion of everything else in our educational system. First there was the new math, then the new science, and then there was the push to make everyone a college graduate.
Perhaps no more than 20 to 30 percent of the American population is serious about academia or extended book learning.
To make the US an academic society has resulted in a “dumbing down” of education to the point that a college graduate today is not as well rounded as a high school graduate was in the 1940s, indeed, even earlier.
Listen to the letters of ordinary soldiers in Ken Burns televised “The American Civil War.” These soldiers from both sides showed an appreciation of clarity in writing. For ten years, I was an adjunct professor teaching graduate students in MBA programs for several universities and I found less than one in twenty could write a simple declarative sentence and all of them were college graduates.
We have gained technology and toys but we have lost something in the past when it comes to education. We not only have language barriers between ethnic groups but in communicating what we think to ourselves much less to anyone else.
The academic world is not for everyone. We need scholars, scientists, teachers, doctors, and the educated to man the infrastructure of society. We also need carpenters, road workers, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, plumbers, pipe fitters, electricians, television and computer repairmen, bakers, butchers, printers, assembly workers, painters, roofers, air conditioning mechanics, bricklayers, salespeople, farm workers, practical nurses, livestock handlers, cosmetologists, hospital technicians, and surveyors.
These people need special education and training, but not necessarily four long years in a university that suspends life in meaningless nonproductive work, acquiring degrees that have little value added to anyone, leastwise to them.
When you force a person into a profession, you do him and the profession a disservice.
I saw that happen to a friend whose father insisted he become a professional man, when he preferred to continue farming his family’s 2,000 acres of rich Iowa loam soil. His father, a fifth generation farmer, had fought off corporate agribusiness predators his son’s whole life and didn’t want that to be his son’s legacy.
So, my friend became a dentist, which he hated, instead of a farmer, which he loved. He tried to convince his father to allow him to go into agricultural management at Iowa State instead of dentistry at Iowa, thinking he could rally independent farmers to resist corporate takeovers. It might have worked. He had a talent for strategy and planning.
Was my friend’s life a failure? I think so. When he failed to convince his father to finance his desired education, he could have rebelled and taken control of his life. He didn’t. He could have used his skills to persuade his father to think differently, but he caved in without a fight. He is now retired, looking back on a very unhappy forty years in dentistry, still fantasizing about how it might have been.
The wonder is how many doctors, lawyers, psychologists, engineers, chemists, executives and teachers are not doing what they would prefer to be doing.
My professor said I belonged in the humanities and not in science. This incensed my working class father. He saw such people on his trains unkempt with long hair, tennis shoes, and dirty clothes, with one word to describe them. “Can I ask you a question, Jimmy?” I nodded. “You’re not a goddamn fag are you?”
That summed up his view of humanities majors. I was not gay but I had nothing against gayness even then, and that confused and angered him. Sexual preference held no interest to me, but I stayed in chemistry showing no more courage than my friend.
My da couldn’t picture his son making a living throwing words around and getting paid for it, or sitting in a classroom throwing ideas around to students who would rather be somewhere else. So, there was certain legitimacy to his concern, which he unfortunately wrapped up in a stereotype.
So, I became a chemist with a facility for chemical theory but not for laboratory work, mainly because I am not mechanical. In my day, you had to improvise a good deal of your instrumentation for experiments. Subsequently, I went into chemical sales, not because I was interested in selling, but because I was a failure in the lab and needed to make some money quickly. I had won a fellowship to an eastern university to pursue graduate work in theoretical chemistry. This was the era of the Francis Crick and James Watson model building of DNA, with theoretical chemistry opening up. Unfortunately, my wife had our third child, and the stipend was not sufficient to carry us financially. The graduate curriculum appeared too challenging leaving little time for family or an outside job.
I continued in what I thought was an interim activity, chemical sales engineering, only to find I had a facility for reading people. I read them like a book and would one day write one about this success (Confident Selling 1970). I could feel them, feel when they were lying, and feel when I had them. I also discovered I had the “killer instinct” for closing the sale. Success followed, along with promotions, ultimately finding me working around the world.
It was in South Africa where I had my epiphany. The world I had created in my head didn’t bear out in reality. I resigned with no certainty as to my future. Returning to the US in Florida, for the next two years, I lived on savings, reading, writing and thinking, finding little clarity or direction for the exercise.
Where I had lacked the courage to resist my da’s wishes before, I was now my own man only with a family. When I was nearly broke, instead of acquiring a job, I went back to the university full-time to see if I could find answers there. I found none. I discovered instead that the university reflected the corporate world I had abandoned. Professors were like sycophant managers with little power, but an appetite for gossip, and an aptitude for passive aggression, usually directed at their students.
Managers had performance appraisal to hold over workers, whereas professors had the grade, making each a caricature of the other. Managers tended to get in the way of work by their obstructing interference. Professors got in the way of learning relying on ancient notes and failing to be students of their disciplines.
Indolence comes to mine, but what might better describe them is that they were not doing what they would prefer to be doing. I seldom came across a professor or a manager with a passion for work; more common was an obsession with ritual. Professors rested on their tenure; managers on their accruing retirement pension points.
There is an explanation for this: we all have rocks in our heads, and on those rocks are snakes sunning in our secret garden. These snakes symbolize our repressed failures, insecurities, fantasies and weaknesses that we would rather not face. To deny their existence is to throw our lives out of control, as snakebite can paralyze progress.
Doing is one thing; thinking is quite another. Balance and harmony come when what we think and do have consistency. They don’t when we are stepping on snakes.
No one is absolutely good or evil, brilliant or stupid, competent or incompetent, secure or insecure, successful or unsuccessful, but a combination. If we ignore our evil, stupidity, incompetence, insecurity or failure, these snakes sunning on the rocks in our head if provoked can cut us down in an instant. Alert to what we are can be powerful medicine for the soul. We must be eternally vigilant, self-aware and self-accepting in order to prove self-confident thinkers, and then nobody can fool us because our snakes are quiet.
Former president Richard Nixon broke in to the dean’s office to see his grades at Duke University when he was a law student and was caught. He had all “A’s,” and finished third in his class. The Watergate break-in was orchestrated on his watch to ensure his reelection. He was elected in a landslide, but was driven out of office in the cover-up. The same snake bit him twice.
Know this: these snakes cannot be removed. They are part of you and make you human. If aware of them, you can gingerly step around them, knowing when you see them in others, you have an advantage. It was why I could read people; my snakes and I were friends. These snakes are as much a part of you as your heart and lungs are.
Success comes from being aware of these snakes and avoiding their wrath. This may mean avoiding certain people, places and things. You will better understand what throws you off stride and why, and be able to adjust. Insecurity dogged ex-president Nixon, which he never got a handle on, but was otherwise brilliant.
It is no accident that the most successful people tend to have the largest menagerie of sunning snakes on the rocks in their heads. Life experience gives birth to these venomous creatures, which are most docile if acknowledged and treated with humor.
Next to persistent alertness is prudence. You cannot be afraid to back away and take a “time out” when stress and strain prove overwhelming. Retreat is not deemed a brave strategy in our culture when sometimes it is the only strategy.
To stay the course could actually eat away as if it were a cancer killing your spirit, poisoning your resolve and collapsing your will to survive. Society forgives us when we are physically ill but is ambivalent when we are emotionally weary. This is sad because it is our sick culture that most likely made us ill in the first place.
I took a “time out” after South Africa that I called a two-year sabbatical. Was it necessary? Had I not taken it I don’t think I would be writing these words. Friends and family reminded me I had a wife and four small children to support, that it was not morally correct to leave my job and promising career. Even coworkers were critical often behind my back. I appreciated their sincerity, but their sentiments did not influence me.
They did not understand what was obvious to me: I was heading for a nervous breakdown. Composed on the outside, I was a wreck on the inside, fatigued, disillusioned, depressed and demoralized. South Africa was 180 degrees out of phase with who and what I thought I was. Nothing any longer made sense to me. I was programmed to respond to superiors, direct reports and the troops, which now left a bad taste in my mouth. The lie I was living weighed heavily on my heart. My mind started to think what a relief it would be to die and escape all this. My life had no meaning. It was inconsequential, a total failure while being a financial success.
So, before it was popular to drop out, I took a “time out.” Did I ask anyone for advice? No. My boss, while in London invited me up from Johannesburg for an afternoon chat. I found it ludicrous cabling: “Cannot come. Too busy. I resign. Send paperwork.” Traveling 12,000 miles for a chat was simply a power move and I was fresh out of patience with the game. Have I regretted that action? No. Have I ever been as successful? Not financially, but intellectually, yes. Would I do it again? Yes.
Confident thinking is not driven by an arbitrary standard of morality, but by a morality consistent with the constitution of the person. The only sin is waste and I was wasting away. Confident thinking demands sifting through all the conditioning that bombards our senses from early development on to discover our center. Society’s arbitrary standards are spirit killers, and one of the greatest spirit killers is its capricious definition of success.
If your success makes little sense to you, it is time to examine your programming. Don’t confuse this meaning with escaping your programming. That is impossible. Your programming produced the snakes sunning themselves on the rocks in your head. Recognize this; accept it.
Acknowledge your programming and it won’t get in your way. Reconsider some of the things you have been told to believe, to value, to consider important, to be true. Now be honest: how do they actually stack up with you?
Reflect on some of the things people say about you that are unflattering. Yes, you’ll experience hurt, but try to understand them from their vantage point. Remember: 99 percent of the people you meet have only a vague notion of themselves. That is why when they are giving you advice they are talking to themselves without knowing it.
Should they say, “Mend your ways, come back into the fold, and behave as we do!” Since you are not they, as they are not you, you could say, “Thanks but no thanks.” It is the recognition that whatever others say nobody can truly hurt you except yourself, and you are capable of self-destruction. They can talk about you, sabotage you, blackmail you, but they cannot derail you unless you capitulate to their whims.
Whatever their motivation, fear is a common factor because people are afraid to know themselves and will resent you for knowing yourself. They fear confident thinking. That doesn’t mean you have to duplicate my approach to realize your health, but it does mean that your success definition must be yours, alone. That is the key to success and the route to confident thinking.
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