LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 16, 2009

“Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world. He knows the world only within himself, and he is aware of himself only within the world. Each new object, truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.”

Goethe (1749 – 1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and court official.

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REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING.

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Many of us have little idea we have special talent, and need someone to point this out to us. One time I was in Denver giving a seminar, and my cousin, an electrical engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, invited me to a party of his friends. They were all talking about an individual absent from the group who apparently had astonishing skills in quantum mechanics, but did nothing exceptional with his talent.

Episode after episode was related about his astounding work in the laboratory, and yet to a person, they thought he undervalued and underutilized his special genius. “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 the discussion, as I was an outsider and not privy either to the man or the complexities of the 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 veneration of a colleague. Then I smiled, “Until someone tells him he is special, and introduces him to himself.”

They looked to my cousin, as if to say, who is this guy? Undismayed, I continued, “For most of us, we need someone to point out our essence. Otherwise, it is taken for granted as if common to everyone. It isn’t.”

They all seem to take this in with some degree of cynicism. “I wonder,” I said finally, “has anyone here ever had a candid discussion like this with him?” No one had. “Well, there’s the problem. We don’t gain personal insight by osmosis.”

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, but he did become head of our department, and then went into intelligence work for the government.”

THE WISDOM OF AN OPEN ENDED PLAN

There is a young Major League baseball player by the name of Scott Kazmir currently playing for the Tampa Bay Rays 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 and picked it up and threw a strike to first base. The throw traveled more than 200 feet on a straight line.

This was no small 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 did.

Up to that point, Scott had no idea his arm was special. He is now pitching in the big leagues. In 2006, he was a member of the American League All-Star Team, having won ten games in the first half of the season. Only ten other pitchers so young in the more than hundred year history of Major League Baseball have won so many games.

So, this scrawny little kid, Scott Kazmir, whose talent was first noted as a boy, was molded into a pitcher and made it into the big leagues. The second half of the 2006 season did not go so well. Most of his time was spent on injured reserve winning only one more game. Surgery on his arm in the off-season placed his future in jeopardy, but he came back and helped the Tampa Bay Rays make it to the 2008 World Series, where they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies. What Scott Kazmir has achieved is rare as few aspiring athletes ever make it to major leagues at all.

When I was a boy, I played baseball on the courthouse lawn. This was located between the jail and courthouse, which sheriff Ky Petersen had converted into a playground for neighborhood kids. There I saw Dick Tharp demonstrate an arm not unlike Scott Kazmir’s. Only it was Dick’s misfortune to be a kid during World War II, when there was no Little League, and no organized baseball for a nine-year-old to profile his talent.

Dick Tharp in fact at age ten could throw a baseball 300 feet on a line, which many of us watched repeatedly in awe. One time, when he was eleven, he even threw the baseball from home plate at Riverview Stadium hitting the scoreboard on the fly 390 feet away. No major league scout was in Clinton, Iowa to see that, only the Courthouse Tigers, a neighborhood team, playing against other neighborhoods in the city recreational league.

Dick turned out to be a good pitcher but without guidance, mentoring, or anyone promoting his talent. It was never developed that it could become the basis of a career. Instead, he became a cross-country truck driver and that became his life’s work.

A moment of déjà vu was experienced when I attended his fiftieth wedding anniversary outside Orlando, Florida. I hadn’t seen Dick since we were kids. It was a country home with a large open field behind the house with a pasture of grazing horses. After dinner, I mentioned to his wife, whom I had never met before, what a great arm her husband had as a boy, only to have his thirty-three-year-old son interrupt, “I’ve got a better arm than my dad, don’t I, dad?”

Dick smiled, and said nothing. His son, a devil-may-care kind of guy, a smoker and drinker, and still didn’t like the idea being nailed down to anything permanent. In fact, he looked a bit wasted, which led me to say. “I don’t think so.”

“Want me to prove it?” he asked. Dick’s son picked up a new baseball with his left hand; Dick having 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 wooden fence at the edge of the pasture was at least 300 feet away. I said dismissively, “Hit the fence.”

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

I couldn’t help myself; I roared with laughter, “Where do I want you to hit it? Anywhere, okay?” I thought at this point 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 red 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 fun enough, I said, “You don’t have to hit it at all. I apologize for egging you on.”

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 baseball flying through the air as if it had eyes, and a jet propulsion motor and an electronic guiding system. What a waste!

It was as if I was back at the courthouse many years before and Dick Tharp, with that beautiful arm, was displaying his talent. I got tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was nostalgia, disappointment, or what, but seeing one great talent wasted, and another wasting before my eyes. It was too much. Father and son were gifted by genetics but not visited by providence.

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, or possibility of not measuring up. His arm was simply something to show off to people such as me who might wonder, what if.

Athleticism is one talent. There are many others. Musical talent. Talent to write. To paint. To draw. To acquire foreign languages. To excel in mathematics and science. To think conceptually. To function well in a social environment. To handle pressure.

Talent demands discipline, organization, and drive to bring out its latency, and then the dedication to perfect that talent into something useful to others. It means taking the inevitable disappointments and failures in stride. They can’t be avoided. That said some stop when they hit a disappointment or experience a failure, and stay stuck there the rest of their lives. They allow a single misfortune to derail their efforts because their plan is one-dimensional, but life is multidimensional. Imagine how boring life would be if there was no struggle. Struggle is key to everything without exception. There is not a single person who achieves conspicuous success that is not ambitious, not driven, and does not make serious sacrifices toward that ambition.

MENTORING YOUR WAY TO FULFILLMENT

Some of us have minders who put us back on track when we derail. These mentors recognize special talent and know what is best for us. They are not in competition with us. I once had a boss, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, a wonderful mentor and the first man whoever got me to behave. He claimed he always hired people smarter than he was, which of course was ludicrous. He saw himself as a catalyst to developing people, which he was.

He was one of many mentors it has been my good fortune to have. He assessed what I could and would do. That was his “coaching style.” He estimated how far I could go, and created a climate for that possibility developing benchmarks to measure my competency. That was his “leadership style.” He alerted the corporate directors of these competencies and my readiness for a more challenging assignment. That was his “management style.” He set up a career track and monitored my progress. That was his “educator style.”

That doesn’t mean I always heeded his advice. In fact, I’ve been called a difficult person to manage. Someone once asked me why Dr. Pesuth was the exception. I answered simply, “I love the guy.” I discovered that love is a great motivator with me, and the love was derived from his being consistently firm, fair, honest, and in my face if he had a problem with me. He was passionately loyal to the company and his management, but also displayed the same passion and loyalty outside of work to family, friends and his religious faith.


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When I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, taking a required course in “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible,” my professor Dr. Armens had me take an oral instead of a written make-up examination after being released from the university’s infirmary where I had been confined with infectious mononucleosis. It was at the end of the term and I sensed he didn’t want to grade another paper. My essays tended to be voluminous. Previously, I had written a paper on “The Influence of Religion in My Life,” which was long and complex and I think this factored in to his decision.

The examination was on James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” It started routinely with my professor asking me a few general questions about the work, which I answered, but then I stopped him suddenly. “Would it be possible to tell you what the book meant to me and how I read it in light of my own experience?”

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

For the next forty-five minutes I weaved the story of Joyce’s artist, Stephen Dedalus, the obvious alter ego of the author, and his war with Irish Catholicism, priests, his family, his youth, and the fury of his tormented soul, which resonated with me. I had not only read the book, but also devoured it, sensing I was experiencing an epiphany. “I was not the first to be so angry at my religion nor yet so consumed by it!”

Here I was, a lad, who had come from a small Iowa town with no books on literature in my home, who had never heard of James Joyce (although later I learned my mother had read him), but could see in the book a sympathetic soul parallel to my own.

It astounded me that words in a novel could speak so profoundly to what troubled me; that someone could describe what I thought had no language but gnawed at my conscience every day. I was ashamed of my impurity of thoughts; amazed that someone could be so honest and forthwith about such things, and yes, so gifted, to speak to my most private self. 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, “I’m good at it.” He said flatly, “You should be in the humanities, not science.” Then he added, “I didn’t have you read your paper on religion to the class, first because it was too long, but more importantly, too personal, too honest, too sincere. Many of these students are already jaded and would have laughed at your innocence. Joyce had that, too, and turned it into art. That could one day be you.”

He wanted to recommend me for the Honor’s Program, where I would pursue literature and possibly go on to become a writer.

When I broached the subject to 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 my idealistic trance with this question, “Jimmy, 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.

The professor’s recognized my essence, which I denied, but I did become a reader of books 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.

I wrote some, but after a two-year sabbatical returned to the university to earn my doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. Armed with this training, I returned to industry again, retiring a second time in my fifties to once more pursue the field my good professor suggested so many years before, writing. I share this with you because it is never too late to reacquaint oneself with oneself, and allow that self to bloom to fulfillment.

As long as the mind is alive and the body healthy, and soul not ignored, it is possible to do what you have always postponed doing. The time is right, right now!

COUNTERINTUITIVE WISDOM, THE MIND’S PLAN 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 a plan that has no rigid components, a plan that breathes and allows essence to rise and fall to the rhythm of the occasion when it is ready, and not before.

What if there is no one to remind us of our essence? I think that is rare. More common is that we don’t want to listen. We have our mind made up and that is all there is to it. We see the road we have in mind as the safe road, the road most traveled, and that is to be our road, talent be damned!

In my day, the safest road of all was to become a doctor of medicine. That was a guaranteed income, prestige of the community as a healer, and a recognized person of substance, intellect, compassion, and caring.

MDs have come in for a great deal of heat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, many are leaving the profession because of the exorbitant malpractice insurance costs. It was once a male-dominated profession, but now more women than men are in medical schools across the land. In a word, medicine has become an uncertain future.

The best and the brightest, graduates of our prestige universities, armed with MBA’s, a vision of money with its implicit power, have gone to Wall Street in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, only to have a severe economic meltdown in 2008 forcing panic retreat from that profession into cynicism. Economists have become the witch doctors of the postmodern world where the dinosaurs of greed have eclipsed the certainty of their sacred algorithms.

Men like certainty. Western man is guided primarily by his left-brain: logical, analytical, rational, sequential, and digital thinking. In this electronic age, man is a walking computer and slave to its matrixes. And like a computer, much of what is going on can be missed, driving the good doctors into malpractice suits, and others with the most sophisticated of educations into aberrant behavior. With lopsided minds, men often end up where they least expect to find themselves, weighed down by one side of their brain.

Women, on the other hand, while being left-brain efficient, are equally comfortable being right brain thinkers: holistic, intuitive, conceptual, non sequential, spatial, and analogical. Medicine, like many other professions, requires the bicameral mind using both hemispheres of the brain to give balance, humor, and proportion to thinking. Instead, often the two sides of the brain are at war with each other.

We are moving from “Machine Age” thinking where there is a place for everything and everything in its place to the world of general chaos. Where you are today doing what you are doing may in one sense have little to do with what you will be doing tomorrow, but in another sense be the reason you are doing it.

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 meter and morality to Schweitzer’s philosophy.

Nothing we learn at any level is lost or discarded but is integrated into the new pattern of our life and thinking as we venture forward away from our initial experience and base.

Chemists and engineers who eventually become psychologists manage to build their earlier disciplines into their theories, such as David McClelland’s theory of “expectancy valence motivation.” Valence is the charge on an atomic electron, which dictates its activity. Expectancy valence is the theory that little successes lead to the expectation of greater success. This encourages us to mount greater challenges. Expectations have appreciated. In chemistry, the higher the valence the greater the electron activity.

Counterintuitive thinking suggests 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.

This life map has four-way stops and two-way roads going in all directions with suggested signs but only suggested signs for the traveler. The signs indicate the possibilities ahead, which might be read intuitively or counter intuitively, that is, taking a given road may not be consistent with logic, good sense, or pragmatic considerations, but it may be the best road for you.

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Such was the case when I retired the first time, after completing an assignment in South Africa. Life made no sense to me. I was making a good living but I was not happy with what I was, where I was, or with what I had experienced as it clashed with my beliefs and values. It was the era of apartheid in South Africa. I could not ignore it and simply do my job, and let it go at that. Something in me would not allow that.

Logic told me that I was too young to retire in my thirties, making too much money, had too many responsibilities, and should appreciate my success, and deal with it as an adult.

Logic further reminded me I had a wife and four small children to support and no inherited wealth to carry me in a pinch. In fact, my extended family was openly hostile to the idea that I retire; 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, year around for six years, treating the pursuit of a doctorate in psychology as my therapy while consulting on the side. I also wrote and had my first book published, “Confident Selling” (1970).

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. In the world of counterintuitive wisdom the mind is free and may sometimes find itself in surprising territory.

After a second executive career as a corporate executive with Honeywell Europe, where I witnessed Europe’s struggle to become an integrated economic community, I retired again in the early 1990s to write about such struggles in the postmodern world of business:

n Between managers and the emerging professional class.

n Between old Europe being reborn as the European Economic Community.

My writing gained international exposure and I was riding high. Here I was writing about the death of corpocracy or top-down management and the emergence of knowledge power to replace position power; and the death old fragmented Europe being reborn as a new integrated community, when one day the idea of my own mortality kicked in.

That was the case when a dear friend died young, Bobby Witt, setting my mind to remembering those halcyon Courthouse Tiger days, finding me eventually writing a memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse; Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel” (2003).

Were it not for taking that road less traveled, that book would never have been written. The book is now the 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 are there any longer a St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Church and Rectory, which is pivotal to the courthouse story. The Bishop of the Davenport Diocese of Iowa has erased this complex 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 we all 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.

BEST LAID PLANS SOON GO AWRY OR THE POWER OF SURENDIPITY

Planning in terms of Confident Thinking is a learning process in constant motion, a journey not an end, a surprise filled series of happenstances with a faithful commitment to the effective utilization of one’s inherent ability in the service of others. The reason for this is that our essence is not usually revealed as a whole. Obstacles are invariably encountered that test our resolve and hide our authentic self from us. So, in planning your work and working your plan, remember you are in the learning business from the beginning to the very end of your life.

Goethe seems to have had this in mind in “Faust” (1790) when he gave expression to the concept of the “ever striving man”:

“Neither knowledge nor power nor sex can give an ultimately satisfactory answer to the question which man is asked by the fact of his very existence. Only the free and productive man, united to his fellow man, can give the right answer to man’s existence.”