CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 9 -- PLAN YOUR WORK & LIVE YOUR OWN AGENDA!

CONFIDENT THINKING NO. 9

PLAN YOUR WORK, AND THEN WORK YOUR PLAN!
WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO IN LIFE?
THE PURPOSE OF YOUR LIFE IS WHAT YOU DO!
LIVE YOUR OWN AGENDA!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2006

If you are not organized, you are going to get somewhere but not necessarily where you would like to go. Ask yourself, “Am I in the pilot’s chair, or in a passenger’s seat?” You don’t have to be a captain of industry, only the captain of your own destiny.

Be patient and your patience will be returned tenfold. Don’t be taken in by the tough exteriors of others. We all walk this earth with great vulnerability. It is therefore an asset to be acquainted with our own, not to be embarrassed by it, or apologetic for it. To be vulnerable is to be alive and receptive to experience.

When we think of planning a life, and working a plan, we often think of something written in concrete, well defined with little left to chance. That is not the case at all. Planning is not about the ultimate goal, but rather preparation for and exhilaration with the unfolding journey at hand.

A well-planned life is first of all an exploration of many sides of our unique character, disposition and talent. The two defining parts in all of us are our essence and our personality. These must be in balance in order for us to prosper in life. If one is developed at the expense or exception of the other, then we lose.

Personality is the acquired self. It is the many masks we wear in public given the situation and the circumstances. There is a time when personality displays its assertive side, other times its conciliatory side, and still other times its light-hearted humorous side. It is when one of these sides on display is inappropriate that a person can be perceived as a tick out of sync, or off center.

With personality, there are numerous unwritten but well-defined behavioral expectations that make others comfortable or uncomfortable. A person can become so obsessed with these unwritten rules, wanting so desperately to behave as expected that the person is generally uptight and self-defeating from the first.

One time in undergraduate school, the most brilliant member of my class, who had this inordinate need to please and fit in, invited me to have a coffee with him. Once we were seated, he grabbed my shoulders and looked into my eyes, and said, “Teach me how to be sincere!”

Essence is that raw indefinable yet not realized sleeping talent in a person crying out to be expressed. Virtually everyone has a deep reservoir of talent. The problem is that the talent a person has is never the talent another person has, and therefore if the focus is on comparing and competing with someone else, to be just like them, the result is bound to be disappointing and usually at the expense of that raw talent that lies dormant in its deep dark chamber.

It takes awareness, judgment, diagnostic skills, and risks to wrest this raw talent from its dark chamber and put it to some kind of use, which of course always begins with a test. The pleasant thing about talent is that we often discover we have it quite by accident, or in play.

We may be doodling to while the time away, and discover we have the ability to draw.

We may like organizing the kids in the neighborhood to create a pretend drama, and discover we have the nascent gift of the dramatist.

We may be humming a tune we hear on the radio and find we have a voice that can carry it like a songbird.

We may tinker with an old radio on the blink and discover we can think in three dimensions and have mechanical aptitude.

We may read a few lines in a book, or hear a teacher speak and find later we can remember nearly every word spoken, and also can find buried quotes in the book going directly to the page upon which they occurred, assets for a writer.

People listen to us; want to be in our company, and to go where we are going, and qualities of the leader.

We find mathematics not only easy but also stimulating. The language of mathematics speaks to us in a way that makes our understanding of physics, chemistry and biology moving, qualities of the budding scientist.

We have moving pictures in our heads that are like our own private screening, rolling stories out as if they were already in print.

These talents are expressed in biographies of individuals who often came quite by accident to realize they were special. The point is everyone is special, but unfortunately too few run so far and so hard and so long to exploit their specialness.

* * * * * *

Since so many have absolutely no idea they have a special talent, they need someone else to point this out.

One time I was in Denver giving a seminar, and my cousin, an engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, invited me to a party of his friends. They were all talking about an individual not there who apparently had incredible skills in quantum mechanics and related engineering principles. Episode after episode was related about his astounding work in the laboratory, and yet to a person, they thought he undervalued and underutilized his supreme talent.

“There is no question in my mind,” said one, “if he focused on this discipline he would come up with a Nobel Prize making project.” The heads all nodded in agreement.

During this discussion, I had remained silent, and so it was a bit of a shock when I said, “It will never happen.”

They all turned to look at me suspiciously, me the intruder, disturbing their hagiography. Then I smiled, “Until someone tells him he is special, and has this possibility, it won't happen. We tend to take for granted what we do with ease as if everyone else possessed the same capability."

They all seem to take this in with quiet reserve. “I wonder,” I said finally, “has anyone here ever talk to him the way you are talking about him now?” No one ever had. “Well, then, there is the problem," I said quietly.

Years later I asked my cousin if anyone had ever taken up my challenge. “I did,” he said, “and he was stunned.” Did he do anything with it? “Well, he didn’t win the Nobel Prize," he laughed, "but he did become head of our department, and then went on into intelligence work for the government.” My cousin had gone with him.

* * * * *

There is a twenty-two-year-old baseball player by the name of Scott Kazmir. He plays for the Tampa Bay Devil Ways in the American League. When he was a boy of nine-years-old trying out for the Little League team, the coach was hitting ground balls to each player at shortstop. When the ball was hit to Scott, it went through his legs and rolled all the way to the center field fence. He ran out, picked it up, and threw a strike to first base. The throw traveled more than 200 feet away on a straight line.

This was no small of achievement for a boy so young. His coach told him that few boys have such a good arm. “I’m going to make you a pitcher,” he declared, and he did. Up to that point, Scott had no idea that his arm was special. In 2006, he was a member of the American League all-star baseball team, having won ten games in the first half of the season. Only ten other pitchers so young in the more than hundred year of major league baseball history have won so many games.

So, it was this scrawny little kid, Scott Kazmir, whose talent was first noted and then molded has made him into a major league baseball player.

* * * * *

It doesn’t always work out that way. When I was a boy, playing baseball on the courthouse lawn between the jail and courthouse in Clinton, Iowa, a patch sheriff Ky Petersen had converted into a baseball diamond for us, Dick Tharp had an arm not unlike Scott Kazmir’s.

Only it was Dick’s misfortune it was the time of World War II. There was no Little League, no organized baseball for boys of the ages of 9 to 12 to profile their talents, just pick up baseball among kids.

That said Dick had an arm that could throw the baseball 300 feet on a line, and many of us watched this in awe as he demonstrated it repeatedly.

One time he even threw the baseball from home plate in Riverview Stadium hitting the scoreboard on the fly 390 feet away. But there was no major league scout assessing Dick's talent, only the Courthouse Tigers, a neighborhood team, playing against other neighborhoods in the city.

Dick turned out to be a good pitcher but without anyone to promote his talent. Instead, he became a cross-country truck driver and that became his life’s work.

* * * * * *

A moment of déjà vu was experienced when I was invited to his home outside Orlando (Florida) to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary. I hadn’t seen Dick since we were kids. It was a country home with a large open field behind the house, a pasture for his horses. After dinner, I mentioned to his wife what a great arm he had as a boy, only to have his thirty-three-year-old son interrupt me, “I’ve got a better arm than dad had, don’t I dad?”

Dick smiled, and said nothing. His son, a devil-may-care kind of guy, a smoker and drinker, who still doesn’t like the idea being nailed down to anything permanent, looked a bit wasted, leading me to say. “I hardly think so.”

“Want me to prove it?” he asked. Dick’s son picked up a new baseball with his left hand -- Dick had been right handed -- took the cigarette out of his mouth, rolled up his left sleeve, and said, “What do you want me to hit?”

The red wood fence at the edge of the pasture was at least 300 feet away. I said in an incredulous voice, “Hit the fence.”

Undaunted, ignoring my sarcasm, he said, “Where do you want me to hit it?”

Well, I couldn’t help myself; I roared with laughter, “Where do I want you to hit it? Anywhere, okay?” I thought he was putting me on. Sensing this, he said, “I’m serious. Where do you want me to hit it?”

Well, there was a red post that joined the two sections of the fence together with a diameter of about ten inches. “Hit that post!” I laughed again.

It was obvious that he now felt the challenge. “Where do you want me to hit it, high, low, or in the center?”

“Come on now, this has been enough fun," I said, "You don’t have to hit it at all. I apologize for putting you on like this.”

I was ready to go back into the house when he said; “I’m going to hit it about in the middle if that is okay by you.” And he did. On the fly. It was simply beautiful to watch. That white new baseball flying through the air as if it had eyes, a jet propulsion motor, and an electronic guiding system made that wonderful baseball sound as baseball and wood collided. I was back at the courthouse, back to those many years before with Dick Tharp's beautiful arm on display.

* * * * * *

Two talented left handed arms, one realized and one clearly not, both gifted by genetics, one gifted by discipline and the other not. Scott Kazmir received a $2 million signing bonus when he turned professional. Dick’s son has never pitched professionally. He confesses he wasn’t interested, but I suspect he didn’t want to submit to the discipline. His arm was simply something to show off, like for me, and to stay loose from any formal commitments, such as a baseball contract.

* * * * * *

Athleticism is one talent. There are many others. Musical. Talent to write. To paint. To draw. To acquire foreign languages. To excel in mathematics and science. To think conceptually.

All these talents can be realized only if the person recognizes talent as a gift, and then develops it. This takes discipline to bring out the latent talent and then to perfect it as something special and useful to others. It means taking the bumps in the road when the pavement ahead is not always smooth, when broken down bridges can derail your effort if you are not hardened to the task at hand.

Some of us acquire mentors that recognize in us something special and then assist us in developing it. I have been lucky to have had many mentors in my life.

When I was in undergraduate school, taking a required core course in “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible,” a professor had me take a make-up examination orally rather than written. I sensed that he didn’t want to grade another paper with the semester near ending. Previously, I had written a paper on “The Influence of Religion in My Life,” which was rather long and somewhat complex and I think this was another factor contributing to the oral examination.

In any case, the oral examination was on James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” The examination started with a few routine questions, which I answered, then interrupting said, “Would it be possible if I could tell you what the book meant to me and how I interrupted it in light of my own experience?”

Behind a veil of spiraling cigarette mist, I couldn’t quite make out his face. I thought I heard a sigh, and then, “Indeed. Go on.”

For the next forty-five minutes I weaved the story of Joyce’s art with that of Stephen Dedalus, the main character, who was obviously Joyce, and his war with his religion, family, youth, and all the wild fury of his tormented soul. It was the sublimation of his personal confusion into his artistic compulsion, and the events that led him to think and act as he did. It was as if I was reading my own life. I not only had read the book, but also had reread it as if the bible, experiencing something like an epiphany.

Here I was a lad from a small Iowa town with no books on literature in my home, never having heard of James Joyce, but yet I could see an empathetic soul and parallel life with my own in his words.

It astounded me that someone could describe what had no language but gnawed at my conscience every day. I wondered how anyone could be so honest and forthwith, and yes, so gifted. My face burned with passion as I concluded my remarks and looked to the professor.

For a long moment, the room was silent. Then the professor asked, “What is your major?” I said that I was a chemistry major. He replied, “What are you doing in science?” I said self-consciously if not a bit arrogantly, “I’m good at it.” He said flatly, “You should be in the humanities, not science.”

The professor wanted to recommend me for the Honor’s Program at the University of Iowa, a program with international prestige, where I would pursue literature and the possibly of becoming a writer.

When I broached the subject with my railroad brakeman da, he was incensed, claiming such people road his trains: “Reading books, long hair, dirty, unkempt, hanging on each other.” Then he exploded a bomb. “Jimmie, can I ask you a question?" I nodded. "You’re not a goddamn fag are you?”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t. It was clear he would be ashamed of me if I left science for the arts. I didn’t. I became a chemist.

What resulted from the professor’s observation is that I became a reader to which I have been loyal all my life. Writers who have influenced Western thought have been my constant companions. It has also made me a devout student of culture and its impact on behavior. You could say it was a combination of my reading and my international career that found me abruptly retiring, the first time, in my thirties to assess where I was and where I was going.

During this two-year sabbatical, I wrote one book, but instead of rejoining the workforce I returned to the university to earn my doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. Armed with this training, I eventually returned to industry, only to retire a second time in my fifties to pursue the promise my good professor had suggested so many years before. It is never too late to start again.
As long as the mind is alive, the body healthy, and soul not ignored, it is possible to do what you have always postponed doing. The time is right, right now! More on this later.

THE COUNTERINTUITIVE PLAN OF THE MIND SET FREE

There are many factors that go into a life’s plan. Often they are composed of ideas we believe we should do with little room for variance. It is counterintuitive to think that the best plan is an open ended plan, or essentially no plan at all.

Intuitively we think getting there is all the fun, when that is not the case at all. We have this mania for sticking with things that become meaningless because we don't want to be seen as quitters, or we have this mania for completing tasks that take us where we don't want to go. I am talking from experience. We need people to point out our assets so that we can recognize and use them. We need to listen to people when their counsel makes sense to us. A plan has to breathe in order to live.

Sometimes we become stuck because no one is there to remind us of our talent. I think that is rare. More commonly, we take the safe road, the road most traveled. In my day, the safest road was to become a doctor of medicine, with it came a guaranteed income, communal prestige as a healer, and recognition of a person of substance, intellect, compassion, and caring.

Medical doctors have come in for a lot of heat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Many MDs are leaving the profession because of the exorbitant malpractice insurance costs.

Medicine was once a male-dominated profession, but now more women than men are in the medical schools across the land.

Men like certainty. Western man has a reputation for being left-brain thinkers: logical, analytical, rational, sequential, digital, in a word, walking computers. And like computers, a lot that is going on can be missed, driving the good doctors into malpractice suits.

Women, on the other hand, while being left-brain efficient, are equally comfortable being right brain thinkers: holistic, intuitive, conceptual, non sequential, spatial, analogical. They think comfortably outside the box, be the box a computer or conventional wisdom. This is mainly because they have been traditionally treated on the periphery of serious thought. All that is changing now.

The medical analogy is given because both hemispheres of the brain can and should be used by everyone instead of the two hemispheres being at war with each other.

* * * * * *

We are moving through that wonderful Machine Age thinking where there was a place for everything and everything in its place to where we are today, living in total chaos. What we are doing now we probably won't be doing tomorrow because it and we won't be there for the doing.

Psychologist B. F. Skinner was first into music; Albert Schweitzer was first an organist, then a theologian, then a medical missionary, and finally a philosopher. There is a musicality to Skinner’s behavioral theories, as there is to Schweitzer’s philosophy. Both were Machine Age thinkers who had a confident sense of morality, humanity, and its predictability. Few read them anymore.

It is my belief that nothing we learn is ever lost but is integrated into patterns of our lives as we venture into the wilderness of the new. A chemist or engineer that becomes a psychologist will invariably bring his sense of balance into play in his theories and applications.

Such is the case with David McClelland’s theory of “expectancy valence motivation.” This comes right out of chemistry and atomic physics. Valence is the electronic charge on an ion, the higher the positive or negative charge the greater the magnetic attraction or separation, which dictates activity in a liquid or gaseous medium. Likewise, "expectancy valence motivation" is the theory that behavior will change as the valence of success builds to greater success. This encourages the individual to seek new challenges and higher expectations.

* * * * * *

It would seem there is an unrevealed plan inside everyone’s mind that is waiting to be unfolded. It is a plan of many roads and many junctions, and even with a timetable as to when best to take one or another road, while making it clear that you can always double back if you should choose, or find yourself lost.

This life road map has four-way stops and two-way roads, or super highways separated by islands in the middle with the roads going in all possible directions. There are road signs suggesting miles to desired destinations, informing of detours and rest areas as well for the traveler.

The signs indicate the possibilities ahead, which might be read intuitively or counter intuitively, that is, taking as given consistent with logic and speedy arrival, or as being too mundane causing the traveler to venture into the countryside with no clear idea where the road may go, reveling in the surprises along the way.

* * * * * *

Such was my counterintuitive experience after completing an assignment in South Africa, and retiring the first time.

Life made no sense to me. I was making a good living but I was not happy with what I saw, and experienced. It was inconsistent with my beliefs and values. It was the era of apartheid in South Africa.

I could ignore it and simply do my job, and let it go at that. But something in me would not allow that. Logic told me that I was too young to retire in my thirties. Logic further told me I had a wife and four small children to support. Beyond that no one in my extended family appreciated the idea, yet I did it. I took a two-year “time out,” and then backtracked on a road I had already taken, going back to school full-time and consulted on the side. Madness of course.

It has all worked out well for me but the road ahead would be bumpy with many potholes, washed out bridges, and sometimes roads completely blocked off or closed. After getting my doctorate, I had enjoyed a second ten-year career in industry, and was happily retired for the second time publishing a series of books and articles, making speeches and consulting. Life was good.

In the world of counterintuitive wisdom the mind is free and may sometimes find itself in surprising territory. When you are so self-absorbed, you forget about something as mundane as mortality, that is, until a close friend dies, and then everything changes.


That was the case with me when a dear childhood friend died. He was in his fifties at the height of his career. His death set my mind to remembering those halcyon Courthouse Tiger days. It found me doing field research for thirteen years (1990 - 2003) collecting information of that boyhood in the 1940s in my hometown, eventually publishing a memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse” (2003).

Were it not for taking that road less traveled, the book would never have been written. The book is now frozen music of a time, which cannot be changed even though there is no longer a courthouse lawn. A large public safety building has been constructed in its place. Nor is there the complex of St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Church and Rectory where we both were programmed as Irish Roman Catholic students. This complex is pivotal to the courthouse story. That, too, has been erased from the community.


If I never write another book, I am glad this book was written. It is a snapshot of a period (1941 – 1947) when such lads as we came of age in the shadow of the courthouse while the United States struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.

THE BEST LAID PLANS GO AWRY OR THE POWER OF SURENDIPITY

Planning in confident thinking is a learning process in constant motion, a journey not an end, full of surprise and happenstance. Its only demand is the effective utilization of your inherent ability in the service of others.

Since our talent is not usually revealed to us whole, obstacles are to be expected as it fights its way to the surface of our being. It is the reason why we are half finished to the end.

So, in planning our work and working our plan, we are in the learning business from the beginning to the very end of our lives.

* * * * * *

Take the case of Seamus Farrell. Seamus was a good high school student taking a college preparatory course of four years of English, two years of Latin, four years of mathematics, physics, chemistry, social science, psychology and ancient and American history.

He majored in chemistry at a midwestern university, took a degree in it, and a position in research and development with a food processing company.

The “first obstacle” he encountered was to find he was not a competent bench chemist.

He lacked the mechanical aptitude to set up experiments, a crucial skill. Like others university trained students who had come to find themselves incompetent in the workplace, he thought the answer to his problem was more education. He applied for and was granted a fellowship to an eastern university to pursue graduate work in theoretical chemistry, thinking he would be happier building chemical models than monitoring laboratory experiments.

Already the father of two children under the age of four, he learned his wife was pregnant with a third child due when he was to assume his fellowship. Given the size of the grant, the expected course load, it was clear he could not satisfy the fellowship and support his family. He needed to make some honest money in a hurry.

"Chemical & Engineering News" had an interesting ad for a chemical sales engineer. He applied for the position and was hired. This meant relocating his family 350 miles from his hometown, where he was employed. He didn't like it much but was convinced that it would prove the right move; besides, it was only for nine months, or until he had to report to the eastern university.

Seamus had never sold anything, but that did not concern him. He had this vague notion that salesmen made money quickly and easily. Therefore, no problem, this detour would keep his plan on track.

The youngest member of a field district staff of eight seasoned sales engineers, he rode with the area manager the first two weeks in the field. At the end of that period, he was asked to critique what he had learned.

Now, it should be mentioned that Seamus was by nature opinionated, suffered fools poorly, and tended to be blunt and to the point of callousness, be the comments about him or others.

Conceived in innocence and molded in naiveté, Seamus, who had nearly a photographic memory, launched into a critique of each day and every call.

The substance of this analysis was that the sales calls were little more than social calls, that the area manager dominated the conversation in every instance never allowing the prospect to either express his interests or needs, that the focus was always on how wonderful our company’s products were, along with our company’s standing in the industry, but never any discussion of the customer's chronic problems or the cost benefits we might provide to the operation using our products. The area manager's face was burning, but Seamus was not through. "Plus, you never asked for an order.”

The following Monday, when Seamus went to the office, only his district and area manager were present, his seven colleagues were conspicuously absent. It was soon apparent that he was in trouble. He was told that he was obviously not cut out for this kind of work, that technical competence was not enough to succeed in the field, and that he should start looking for another job.

His mind raced. He was close to losing his composure. 'Oh my God, what a mess I've made of things,' he thought. 'I've disrupted my family, cut off my wife from her mother, the children from their grandparents. I've placed all my plans in jeopardy, plans my bosses know nothing about.'

One of his redeeming graces, something that he developed as a small child in the trauma of living in foster homes those first five years of his life, is to contain his emotions in the steel grip of contretemps of silence.

Noting this painful silence, the district manager looked to the area manager and nodded, and then said. "We will give you a complement of marginal accounts to service, which you are free to upgrade for the commission." Then packing his cigarette holder with a fresh cigarette, and lighting it, added, "And of course if you have a mind to call on competitor accounts in the area, feel free to do so."

Then the area manager broke the good news climate with, "Remember! This is only for 90-days. We expect you to have found another job before the end of this period."

* * * * * *

It was also during this same morning session that Seamus learned the company had a three-year sales training program in which the salesman was not expected to sell. The focus was primarily on developing technical skills to call on major utilities, paper mills, chemical and mechanical manufacturers, and the petroleum industry.

Out of this technical proficiency came the demand for the company’s products and services. There was apparently no need for any sycophantic salesmanship. The company, indeed, was designed to wow the customer into buying. The area manager was the prototype of the company's product, and Seamus had crashed him and the company with one blast of his mouth.

This information was a shock and surprise, as he needed to make commission money now, not three years from now. He never told anyone that the job was an interim step to his academic objective. Nor did he buy into the company’s elitism. The company claimed it recruited only chemists and chemical engineers; that only one of every 200 interviewed for selling positions was hired. True, the company had an elaborate screening process including an intelligence test, a three-hour session with a psychiatrist, and a full day of interviews with company executives. In the late 1950s, that was par for the course for most companies.

“Chemical & Engineering News” had duped him. Its advertisement had displayed the company’s field test kits, which were the reason he had applied for the position. These portable laboratories made him feel it was not too big a jump from the R&D laboratory. It made the transitioning from the lab to the field seem less radical.

Now, after this session with his bosses, it appeared he was not likely to make any quick cash, but more likely to lose his new job. He had gambled in the first place taking the position on a draw that was less than he had been making as a monthly salary in the laboratory.

So, the “second obstacle” was to upgrade the accounts he was given, and to find some way to breakthrough to sell accounts now held by competitors without any sales training.

His orientation in the company was a month’s technical training course at the company’s headquarters in Chicago. This course did not spend one minute on the selling situation. Complicating the matter further, Seamus was an introvert and introspective. No one could be further from a hearty fellow well meant like his area manager. Seamus was a better listener than an ad-libber, more inclined to study the customer and the surroundings than to bang his company's drums. He had no idea this would be found appealing to customers and prospects alike.

Seamus knew chemical engineering processes from pilot plant experience, but he did not know company products and applications. His low-tech marginal accounts seemed to enjoy his attention, happy to explain processes using his company’s products and how they worked or failed to work.

Often, these operations ran 24/7. Being on the road, Seamus was happy to work 12-hour days, calling on customers well into the night. What made this an easy option was the fact that he didn't watch television and had no inclination to hang out at bars. When in his motel, he either read books or planned for the next day. He also kept copious records of his calls as a way to check for consistencies and patterns of comments and complaints. He found by this device that there were only about 50 different ways prospects said "no," and not a single one beyond that. He found this both amazing and exhilarating. It meant it was easy for him to control the interviewing process, noting which prospects were likely to use which type of comments. He was on a steep learning curve but found it surprisingly easy.

His managers were mildly surprised when the first week he upgraded all the accounts he called on by at least 25 percent. This was a modest sum because they were small accounts. But the second week, he repeated the performance by upgrading another group of accounts by more than 33 percent. Then on the third week he went beyond the point of credulity. He sold the largest account of the district in the past three years.

In a small industrial town, one national company had three large plants employing a total of some 3,000 workers. It was Seamus's company's major competitor, who had held the account for the past quarter century. It was considered so solid no one called on it before Seamus did.

More remarkably, Seamus was given a blanket order for products and applications he knew only theoretically. It required his area manager to assist him in surveying these plants, ordering the appropriate chemicals, feeding and monitoring equipment. All the time the area manager was making these calculations, he kept shaking his head. Finally, he asked Seamus, “How did you do it?”

His immediate reaction was to lie, to hit back as hard as he had been hit, choosing to say simply, “I asked for the order.”

Actually, it was much more complicated than that. Seamus had learned some powerful lessons in servicing his marginal accounts.

All the problems his accounts were experiencing using his company’s products he assumed were problems for competitors' accounts using their similar products.

Success and failure was not unique to either but consistent with two other factors: how interested customer personnel were in applying his company's products correctly; and how well trained and motivated they had been by his company's sales engineer.

Seamus found it was easy to motivate technicians to test correctly and to modify pump feed and chemical dosages based on test results. It was also easy to show them how using more appropriate chemicals (chemical and system upgrades) the results would be even better and more cost effective, making their jobs easier and leading to kudos for jog performance.

The other thing he learned is that customer technicians enjoyed training him in better understanding his own company's technology. Changing roles as teacher and student seemed to solidify his relationship with these small accounts. But more importantly, Seamus was becoming savvy on applications. Many of these application engineers had inventive ideas for optimal performance of his company’s products.

This became the boilerplate of his presentation. He also discovered he had a facility for drawing visual schematics of systems capturing how they worked and where the trouble spots were likely to occur. He never used company brochures or product bulletins but used the spontaneity of creating process flow charts to illustrate his points.

A CASE IN POINT

His signal opportunity came when he called on this major competitor’s account in this small town with its three large plants of a national company.

While the superintendent of operations was busy putting out fires, his secretary escorted Seamus to the superintendent’s office in the middle of a seven-acre plant. Here Seamus could see just how chaotic operations were. When the superintendent finally appeared, nearly an hour later, he lit a cigarette, leaned on his desk, and said, “Okay, sport, you’ve got five minutes. What have you got for me?”

The previous 45 minutes Seamus observed the frantic behavior of people coming in and leaving the office, the samples of failed equipment on every surface, the constant ringing of the telephone that was never answered, the overflowing ash trays of cigarette butts, the coffee stains on papers and documents on desks and chairs, clipboards everywhere with highlighted action lists, and with the weary look on the face of the superintendent, he found himself saying, “I’m here to save your job!”

The superintendent almost swallowed his cigarette, but then broke into a gut-wrenching laugh that broke the tension and gave him a gleeful appearance. He relaxed and fell into his chair behind his desk. “You’re going to save my job!”

Then without preamble Seamus stepped behind the desk, beside the superintendent, and started to draw schematics of systems he was certain had failed, indicating where chronic problem were likely to be occurring and why, which gained the superintendent’s attention. He did this for every system he could think of with the superintendent correcting and adding detail. He then laid the several pages out neatly before him showing where the problems were, and how these problems could be systematically addressed.

Then without hesitation, Seamus asked for a month’s order in which he would install monitoring devices in the processes that would be evaluated on a weekly basis with chemical dosage levels adjusted until all systems were up and running to capacity.

You could say it was serendipity, luck of the novice, and there were grounds for such thinking. More accurately, it was confident thinking that was built on a base of listening and learning and relating to the fact that applications critical to success are the same for all competitors. Seamus saw it in his own accounts: applications could easily devolve to complacency that had little to do with the merit of one company’s products over another’s.

There was no way for Seamus to explain his success because he didn’t have the language of selling upon which to rely. Other successes followed. Regional managers invited him to explain how he planned and worked his plan in acquiring new business. He had to read selling books to approach making his ideas comprehensible, but found them inadequate to express his typology and methodology.

Sales books all focused on the customer as adversary, someone that had to be finessed, when he saw the obstacle to selling the arrogance of the salesman. Seamus developed a jingle to express this: To sell to Mr. Blue what Mr. Blue will buy, you must see Mr. Blue through Mr. Blue’s eyes.

The irony is that Seamus did, but he could never convince others in his company that it was that simple

A TOUCH OF RADICALISM SOMETIMES IS NECESSARY

So, thus far we have the career of a student who becomes a chemist, finds that not of his liking, seeks a grant to further his training in chemistry, only to be derailed by the pending arrival of a third child, where he attempts to take a detour into selling to keep his graduate plan on course to supplement the grant money, only to find he is almost fired from day one, but somehow is given a second chance, and succeeds beyond his wildest expectations.

So, Seamus stays in selling, with many wishing to learn of his success. This gives him exposure to the company brass, which he eventually joins, finding him an international troubleshooter for the company, eventually landing in South Africa.

It is 1968, a time of turmoil. The Untied States seems to be coming apart at the seams with riots in Chicago and Miami at the national presidential nominating conventions, with riots on college campuses across the nation over the draft and the war in Viet Nam, Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated, students are burning their draft cards, fleeing to Canada, and African American medal winners are raising their black gloved fists in defiance at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. All of this is seem by from South Africa while experiencing apartheid or the separation of the races with draconian finality.

Yes, Seamus is yours truly.

When nothing makes sense, there are two options: deny it and go forward as usual, or deal with it and act accordingly to the dictates of your will. That may necessitate a bit of radicalism to break free from the modus operandi.

Radicalism can be self-creative or self-destructive. For example, a person, who has never been a drinker, turns to drink or drugs, who has never been a smoker, takes up smoking, who has never been promiscuous, becomes preoccupied with pornography, who has never been unfaithful, becomes adulterous. Such radicalism destroys. Equally destructive is to give up and give out and become embittered with life and everyone in it as if this turmoil will not pass.

Radicalism can be self-creative by taking a break from the grind, going on holiday, visiting the old neighborhood, and reliving the nostalgia that are the linchpins that have made you who and what you are. Life can take you out of the neighborhood, but never the neighborhood out of you. You carry it wherever you go, as it is part of your geography.

You could also take a total break as I did. In the back of my mind, once I was no longer working for a company, was the idea that I would be a successful writer, having no sense of what a ludicrous idea that was. I had published a book and a few articles, but it was clear that a freelance writing career was not sufficient to support my family.

My radicalism was then compounded when instead of seeking a full-time job; I went back to school full-time for the next six-years, year around to earn my master’s and doctor’s degree. I did that because I thought the university had answers. It did not.

The factory mentality has metastasized to citadels of learning. To be fair, the university made me aware of how my thinking had been carefully programmed into me. Its function was to prepare me to fill a certain slot in society with sufficient training. I was expected to be content with that status for the duration of my working life. The university had no qualms about making me aware that subliminal stimulation programmed me to be a conspicuous consumer and a slave to my lifestyle appetites. It was how society controlled me. My problem was not with what the university taught, but its complicit corruption in feeling its role was ended with the message.

The lack of self-creative radicalism is indicative that individualism, which Americans cherish, is actually nonexistent.

We are all conformists; even radicalism when it is expressed gives off the odor of conformity. Whatever we do, whatever we are we occupy well-defined slots to support the utopian clock that is always running faster and faster. Speed is the measure of all things. The unintended consequences of this are that we lose ourselves in being in constant motion.

THE CONFLUENCE OF ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY

Everything starts with the individual. We get better one person at a time. To be useful to others we must first be useful to ourselves. This is considered being selfish, as selfishness is defined. However, to be comfortable with others we first must be comfortable with ourselves. This means meeting our needs, which then become self-generating and available to meet those of others.

Stated another way, to please others at the expense of pleasing ourselves is to find us being used rather than being useful, exploited rather than positively engaged. We develop a codependency in which we are used until we have nothing left to give, and for the trouble we weaken the person and his resolve to help himself. This means that we must know, understand and accept ourselves as you are in order for us to be tolerant of others as we find them.

People are the same only different. This may sound as if a play on words but it is true. A society that sponsors comparing and competing is a society that is imitative, lacks originality, and is fearful of embracing the new or dealing with others that are different. People so inclined can only see and understand others as reflections of how they see and understand themselves.

A society is an organism not unlike the individual. If a society can only see other societies in its own image, then it is a blind society. Whatever its plans it will quicken its doom. Likewise, an individual who plans his work and works his plan without anticipating the need for correction, compromise, regrouping and refocusing, backtracking and reprioritizing as he encounters others and differing circumstances will never find satisfaction.

Ergo, it is not enough to know oneself, but one must also accept oneself as one is with the full knowledge and understanding of how that self came to be. For example, when we are reared as a goal oriented child, getting good grades in grammar school, high school and college, chances are we cannot turn off the pressure to continually seek such arbitrary standards. In school, it is grades; in adult life it is income, status and prestige. Lost in the equation is the simple pleasure of doing what one enjoys for its own sake. I know.

Once back in school as a mature adult, as disenchanted as I was with the graduate curriculum, as much as I thought it was more oriented to psychobabble than creative thinking, as much as I found many of my studies reification of the obvious, I stuck with them until I graduated with my doctorate. I didn't want to see myself as a quitter. Yet, perhaps the greatest quitter in history was Leonardo da Vinci. He never completed anything, not even his paintings. I've envied him his freedom. He seemed to know that in every case a life is half finished. He left others that followed him to finish his work.

To look at the various detours we take in life to get to where we eventually arrive is to realize nothing is ever wasted. Nothing. No matter how many turns you make to get where you are going you are picking up valuable material along the way. Graduate school acquainted me with studies and gave me a language to express my thoughts here. It also made me aware that as mechanical as society may be that I moved in robotic confluence with it. I read, write, walk, play tennis and basketball, eat and sleep, watch television and films with my wife, visit my grandchildren, and publish books and articles. What could be more robotic than that?

No one escapes the culture of his time. It impacts both his essence and personality. But it comes to dominate when we believe we are in charge and operate with free will unencumbered by social convention. This is never the case. It is in recognizing this that suitable choices can be made. Then we have confidence in the knowledge of why we are the way we are, or a natural confluence between our essence and personality.

So often when it comes to planning it is with the idea that I’m going to be this or that, do this or that, or become this or that come hell or high water. Such pressure can destroy and take all the fun out of discovery. We may find time to be and do all these things, and again we may lose interest early on and decide to be and do something entirely different. That is not being indecisive. That is being open to life and its possibilities when life touches us in all its amazing hues. Nothing is forever including life. Maddening consistency, besides living life like a puppet on a string, is boring.

THE PRUDENCE OF DESTINY

Confident thinking is not about impressing. Confident thinking is about expressing our uniqueness in useful ways. If our plan doesn’t have a benefit to others than it is an irresponsible plan. We are here on earth to be used in a positive sense, which translates into being useful to others. I have revealed some of my plans and how they have played out to illustrate how crooked the timber that is man, and to suggest no straight line plan has ever been made by anyone.

Our life does have a plan, and since we don’t know the plan, we don’t always pick up the gauntlet to the plan when we should. We need someone to tell us. That was the reason for sharing the case of the nuclear scientist in Denver whose colleagues thought he was so great, but he had no idea of his greatness.

There is a terrible waste of talent because such talent is not harnessed. That was the case of the man with the powerful left arm that could hit a spot in a fence with a baseball 300 feet away. Thinking of my own career, I should have listened to that professor in a core course that introduced me to myself. I backed away from that introduction, and stayed in chemistry.

It was my life in the chemical industry that allowed me to retire early and go back to school and become a psychologist, and later a writer, where the good professor thought from the beginning I belonged. In a way, I have had my cake and have been able to eat it, too.

Some might suggest I have been lucky, and I have. But luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Luck is not a mystical thing. Some are looking for that "lucky break," waiting for something “real” to happen, something that will move them off the dime. Nothing will. They are looking for answers in all the wrong places. When they are not discovered, such break-obsessed people will collapse in self-pity and fold in bitterness. They have had plans but their plans have gone awry. They don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel because they are looking into their cage, not out of it.

Asked where they would like to be; what would they like to do; what gives them satisfaction, the common answers are all flippant: “Certainly not doing what I’m now doing,” or “Making enough money that I can take a vacation now and then,” or “Being my own boss.” Asked again, “Doing what?” Answer in same, “I don’t know, something important, something where you get some respect.” Flippant. Not real because they have not thought seriously about pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and working their way into something worthwhile. They are looking to win the lottery.

The confident thinker thinks about success, and recognizes success is in the eye of the beholder, and that it is a journey, not an end. He knows little triumphs can lead to larger ones, always recognizing setbacks can occur at any moment, setbacks necessitating periodic detours in quest of the objective.

The confident thinker knows that he can start at any time in his life to reboot his career to another plane and dimension. I retired from gainful employment the first time in my mid-thirties, and published my first book when I was 37. I was 39 when I went back to school full-time for six years, year around. I was 57 when I published my second book. Since then six books and hundreds of articles have followed. I am now in my seventh-decade and still writing, speaking, publishing, reading, walking, and playing tennis and basketball with new ideas for articles and books constantly surfacing in my mind.

Some might suggest I took the selfish course; that I punished my family by changing the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. My children are now adults with the youngest in his mid-forties, and they are all doing just fine on their own. Actually, three of them are doing better financially than their father ever did in his best years. It would appear they remembered that lifestyle and were willing to work their way back into it, no credit to their father, all credit to them and their persistence. My children could have become bitter. They could have collapsed into self-pity. They could have blamed their father for damaging their existence and causing them to go through life as emotional cripples. But they didn’t. They moved on.


One of my blessings was that I was born poor. Whatever I did I knew there would not be a golden parachute to break my fall. I had no extended family "with connections," no powerful, well-placed friends to ease me into a safety should I become reckless and unconscionable. If I didn’t succeed, if I didn’t come up with some strategy to move forward, then I was doomed. I had no one to blame but myself. Can you imagine how much that makes you rely on your own engine? I was born in the depression when the world was engulfed in poverty, a world without grandparents who were already deceased, but a world of a two-parent family that struggled to make ends meet week-to-week.

You become enterprising, self-reliant, a planner, a schemer, an exploiter of advantage, a utilizer of your assets, always knowing that failure is part of success, but also knowing the wisdom of insecurity gives you an edge on the inevitable intimidators you are sure to encounter, because you know you could never be as poor as you once were. It is a wonderful feeling to know you have no choice but to pick yourself up and move on without complaint. Whenever I made a move, and it didn't work out, I had no choice but to accept it, and now in my advance years I still accept it.

THE PRECEDENCE OF ETERNAL POSSIBILITY

So, what is the age when you can best start becoming a planning confident thinker?

Anna Mary Robertson, better known as “Grandma Moses,” began to paint childhood country scenes at about the age of 75, when arthritis made it too difficult for her to sew. Two of her famous paintings are “Catching the Thanksgiving Turkey,” and “Over the River to Grandma’s Home.” She had her first show in New York City at the age of 80 in 1940, and lived to 101, dying in 1961.

There is no certain age that you can move in the direction of your talent. Likewise, there is no activity useful to others and self-generating that is not of consequence. I have known people who have turned hobbies into livelihoods, and I'm sure so have you.

Eric Hoffer became blind as a youngster of seven with his sight not returning until he was fifteen. When his eyesight returned, he was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. He went to the library and checked out the largest book of essays with the smallest print, and relished the stylish sentences of Montaigne.

During the subsequent years as a migrant worker, gold miner, and longshoreman, Hoffer began to capture his insights into thought provoking epigrams and poignant sentences.

In 1950, he sent a handwritten manuscript to what he thought was the best publisher, Harper & Row, which published “The True Believer” in 1951. He was 49-years-old.

His work was mildly well received, but it wasn’t until he appeared with Eric Sevareid in an hour-long conversation on CBS-TV in 1967 at the age of 65 that he became really famous. Hoffer came on the American seen in the confusing and chaotic 1960s. He successfully pulled aside the veils of supposed sophistication and, in new ways, showed Americans again the old truths about America, and why they remain alive and valid.

There is no limit to what talent lies right under a person’s nose. It could be a painting or the written word as was the case with these two, or it could be a talent for systematic thought, creating mechanical objects, homemaking, or a zillion other possibilities.

It is ordinary people as visionaries who create things that have changed the way we think, behave, believe, and what we appreciate. Even the revised popularity of our comic heroes is part of this precedence. A Jewish artist who could not find his niche as an artist because there already was a Marc Chagall invented “Superman”.

The creator of “The Twilight Zone” of television, Rod Serling, couldn’t find a sponsor for his work, or a network amendable to his stories because they were considered too controversial. He got around that by creating the same ideas in trenchant sci-fi fantasy parables. He was free in this medium to explore and express humanity's hopes, despairs, pride and prejudices in metaphoric ways conventional television considered too sensitive.

So it is and so it will always be. People find their niche by exploring their latent talent and when they encounter conventional resistance, create new ways to circumvent it. That is why planning is one of the ten commandments of confident thinking. Planning with such thinking is always moving over and around and above and below obstacles it encounters in a continuing drive to self-realization.

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