WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES!

WINNERS AND LOSERS AND HOW EASILY THEY REVEAL THEMSELVES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 30, 2009

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Everyone is a winner but also a loser. Winning and losing are inextricably connected. That is the nature of life. Winning becomes a problem when we need to win at any cost. Losing becomes a problem when we are so fixated with losing we cannot get beyond it. This is written to provide some insight from someone who has had his share of wins and losses, and is still standing.

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In 1974, five years after I retired the first time, and four years after my first book CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1970) was published, I got a call from Cincinnati, Ohio from a division of Bristol Myers, Inc., the Dracket Company, makers of “Drano.” The executive vice president of Bristol Myers had read my "Confident Selling" and wanted to interview me for the position of vice president and national sales manager of the Dracket division.

This presented a peculiar set of circumstances:

(1) I wasn’t looking for a job, but was pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational-industrial psychology;

(2) I was using my G.I. Bill, which was quite generous for a full-time student and father of four. This was supplemented by doing seminars for the Professional Institute of the American Management Association across the country;

(3) I had not yet gotten the bad taste out of my mouth for corpocracy;

(4) I was teaching a course at St. Petersburg Junior College (now four-year St. Petersburg College) based on “Confident Selling”; and

(5) Although encountering failure after failure to get published after successfully launching my writing career with “Confident Selling,” I had run into a wall but still persisted in becoming an author.

An exchange of letters accompanied with incentives found me traveling to Cincinnati to interview for the job. The vice president of Bristol Myers from New York City treated me as if I was already hired. I left the company after three days of interviews with the job in hand.

The next four weeks, a man flew down from Cincinnati every week, and briefed me on company business to give me a running start when I got my affairs in order, acquired transcripts of my academic work to transfer to Xavier University, sold my house, found schools for my children, and other details.

Then the unexpected changed everything: OPEC in 1974 placed an embargo on oil, which essentially dried up American automobiles at the gas station pump. Dracket made its products from petrochemicals. Petrochemicals came from crude oil. Dracket, in a panic, placed an immediate freeze on all hiring. So, I was hired and fired before I assumed my new job.

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That may seem traumatic but it wasn’t. It was comedic and made me, once again, aware of how fickle corpocracy is, and how quick to panic.

Still, I didn’t come away from the experience empty handed. The Bristol Myers vice president was a minority owner of the Cincinnati Bengals, and a personal friend of Paul Brown, the owner, general manager, and coach of the Bengals, and former legendary coach of the Cleveland Browns when the legendary Jim Brown played for him.

It was the fall of the year and the NFL was ending preseason play. “The other day I attended a Bengals practice,” the vice president told me, “and I noticed that some of the guys were working their butts off while others were jawboning and jiving. So, I asked my friend looking at these men, coach, how do you decide who will make the team and who won’t? The coach looked at me and said, ‘I don’t decide. They do.’

“Now, if you know the coach you know he often talks in riddles and this was yet another. I told him that didn’t make sense. ‘But it makes perfect sense,’ he answered. ‘Look at those guys over there.’ They were the ones doing nothing. ‘They've already decided they’re not going to make the team. When I tell them, it will only be anticlimactic, simple as that.’ I understood then what he meant.”

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A COACH TO PICK OUT WINNERS AND LOSERS

Anthropologists define winning and losing, sociologists chart these attributions, while coaches deal with the fact with grown men, men who are not likely to have matured beyond adolescence. Losers project how the die will be cast by dogging it, while winners are working their tails off. Most of us fall somewhere between these perimeters as winners hang out with winners and losers with losers. To wit:

(1) Young people of high moral character hang out with other young people of similar character.

(2) Bright students are attracted to other bright students.

(3) Motivated workers are a magnet to other motivated workers.

(4) Students who are aggressive, extroverts, adventuresome and defy the status quo find each other with little trouble.

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Some years ago when I was counseling a young man who had spent time in Raiford, a maximum security prison in Florida, I asked him, a nice man in many respects, why he got into such serious trouble? He answered, “Trouble followed the people I hung out with.” But why those people? He replied, “They were the only ones who would accept me.” Billy, practically illiterate with little formal education, abandoned by his prostitute mother, and beaten often by her drunken lovers, discovered he had much in common with other damaged young men, and got caught up in petty crime that gravitated to felonies.

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5) The bully is attracted to other weak-minded individuals. Bullies hide their cowardice in the patina of false courage. Bullies can smell fear and are quick to exploit it.

(6) Poor students hang together and make fun of excellent students who also hang together.

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Where it gets more complicated is when physical attractiveness and popularity is the primary gauge of acceptance.

As fading as physical beauty, our culture is obsessed with it. We don't want to grow old so we never plan on growing up. We have made the cosmetic and plastic surgery industry a multi-billion dollar business. It then follows that sincerity between beautiful people is often like watching a pretend drama on screen, especially when conversation seldom rises above banal nonsense. This was once limited to Hollywood; now it is a problem of everyone of every age.

An index of this cultural proclivity is the prominence of cheap gossip, celebrity worship and bizarre self-disclosure, once limited to television, radio and gossip columns, now a staple of the Internet on FaceBook.

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When nothing is personal or sacred to the individual, then winning and losing is a moot point because there is no “is” there. And when there is no “is,” then a society of gangs fills the vacuum, which is the case today.

Everyone belongs to some kind of a gang.

Check out anyone’s association, and you will see they qualify as gang status. Gangs are loose federations of individuals that provide identity with dress, manner, rites and rituals, as well as language, interests and values, less we forget, equal contempt for nonmembers.

Gangs strut their stuff as if the world is envious of them when they are prisoners of compare and compete.

Gangs think it is “cool” to paint their bodies with tattoos because it gives them gang status and identity.

Gangs think one political party is superior to another when they are both vying for the same thing and in the same way. All politicians are professional seducers. They woo people for a living. If they are clever, and good at what they do, they'll strike a popular chord, and will prosper. So, when you hear advocates of one political party or another, you don't hear the speaker's voice but that of the politician. Professional seducers trade on mass appeal, count on it.

Name any subject of value and you will reveal a multitude of gangs. Notice I have not called such status “tribes.” We once were tribes but the lines between tribes have been obliterated so that no tribes exist except in gang status. Notice also that I haven't limited gangs to the nefarious counterculture ethnic gangs that plague our cities. Gangs exploit what is precious to the wider culture, but in a less systemic or critical way than politicians.

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We are now in an economic downturn, and have been sold on the idea that the problem is one of money. We have been programmed to associate money and jobs as interchangeable, when they are not.

We all need money to live on, but we need a job to have a sense of purpose, and somewhere to go and something to do. A job gives meaning to life.

We are not programmed to vegetate at any age. That is a myth that has kept medical doctors, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies in business. Raised to prominence are gurus with their simple-minded theories of health, wealth and purpose. Meanwhile, as relief from this fact, we have the gossip and sexual innuendo industry of matrons, madams and gents promoting exhibitionism on television as if society has become a merry madhouse.

The purpose of life is what we do. We have all been put on earth to do something. Choosing not to find out what that is fuels anxiety, angst and aggravation. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I indicate on how we have stayed the same, missed the changes and left the future up for grabs.

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Economic Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is even more blunt. He calls the decade we are leaving the “big zero decade” with zero job creation over the decade, zero gains in homeownership (25% of all mortgages in America and 45% of mortgages here in Florida find homeowners owing more than their houses are worth), zero gains for stocks even without taking inflation into account, while the celebrated dot-com bubble has deflated.

Krugman adds, “What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.” Economics are always in a state of instability but the same people are the victims of this instability because they are in a state of perpetual denial and choose to never see beyond their noses.

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Last night I was shopping late with BB in a department store in a large mall. One sales lady was complaining to a colleague about how tired she was, how long she had been working that day. The other young lady, who had been working equally long, but was listening patiently, said finally, almost voce sotto, “I feel lucky to have a job.” If you’re interested in stereotypes, the complainer was white; the accepting young lady was black.

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Losers are the last to come into work and the first to leave.

Losers do exactly as they are told and no more, and often less.

Losers are quick to say, “that’s not my job” when someone needs help and is too busy to complete a task.

Losers are always waiting for the big break, the big score, the right connection, the right patsy to snow and exploit, or to make the well-heeled feel obligated to bail them out when they get in over their head.

Losers are knowers and never learners. They are too smart to take an entrance level job, or go back to school because they don’t want to sacrifice the time or make the commitment for fear of failure, plus there are no guarantees that the effort will be worth the cost. Besides, they might have to give up their beer, time with their friends, who also are knowers and would never think of going back to school and breaking their routine.

Losers want “theirs” but the last thing they are willing to do is to work for it.

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When I was in my late thirties, I went back to school sitting in classes with students ten to fifteen years younger, and they would say, “Aren’t you a little old to be here?” When I got my Ph.D., one of my classmates, much older than I was, in his late sixties, was asked, “Now that you’ve spent all this time going through this ridiculous process, what are you going to do with your Ph.D.?” He smiled, and said simply, “Enjoy it.”

Over my long life, I have encountered far more losers than winners because winners have 80 percent of the power and money, and are only 20 percent of the people.

Winners also own 80 percent of the real estate and investment capital, enjoy 80 percent of the leisure, and live longer and more productive lives than losers.

If you think this is a phenomenon of capitalism, you would be wrong. This has been true in feudalism, communism, socialism and combinations of these isms. Opportunity to break this Pareto differentiation is possible in the United States, but less so in Western Europe, yet the differentiation holds firm.

Why? Because we are programmed from birth and inculcated with a culture, value system, education and mindset of exceptionalism. We are drugged with social, economic and cultural nets to break our fall and prevent us from failing and therefore from succeeding to a large extent.

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Winners are not smarter, more gifted, or talented, or in any way superior to losers, except in one dimension: they are willing to take risks and endure the pain of failure, embarrassment and losing everything in order to grow and keep growing. We treat them as exceptional when they only stay with a problem longer.

Winners do not take risks with reckless abandon but with simple, persistent and determined effort with benchmarks along the way focused on the process not the outcome.

Winners get there because the pleasure is in the risk taking, and the delight in the process of failing and then succeeding in a continuous journey of highs and lows with progress measured in inches and not miles.

Winners are not focused on retirement, on wealth creation, per se, or on accolades and celebrity, but on the excitement of being alive in the spirit of work, enjoying the moment with every day an opportunity and challenge to encounter the unexpected. Certainty is not in winners’ vocabulary because they know certainty is a myth that losers embrace at the expense of gainful experience.

Losers are looking for guarantees, for the certainty that the company, the country, the government will bail them out of their excesses, or take the blame when their failure to be winners sinks the company, country, the industry and themselves into the tank.

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No worker, whatever the profession or job, should expect more than a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. Beyond that it is nigh impossible of the 20 percent winners to carry the 80 percent losers for the long haul, as recent events have proven.

Are the fat cats on Wall Street winners because they get multimillion-dollar bonuses?

Hardly. They are one-dimensional personalities that believe money spells the difference between winning and losing in life. Beyond basic necessities for health and comfort, wealth is relatively irrelevant.

Two-thirds of the world is impoverished with the simple conveniences of a roof over people’s heads, food on the table, adequate schooling for the children, medical facilities for the sick, and proper drinking water and sanitation for all as if this described Paradise.

In my long life, I have seen people become spectacularly wealthy overnight, think like they were part of the elite, behave like they were living in a film, and then see the wealth disappear, along with their fair weather friends, and then blame each other for the crash. They were into fast cars, upscale dwellings, boats and all the other accouterments that define the wealthy from the rest of us, and yet in the end, they acted as losers.

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An entire fantasy industry has played with the mind of instant millionaires, and that is the industry of self-help books, self-esteem psychologists, and men of the cloth promoting purposefulness.

We are in the age of canned goods and microwave dinners, which this fantasy industry has now borrowed with spectacular success. Self-help books are nothing more than canned goods, while self-esteem psychology relies on microwave theories to provide quick fixes. Add to the spiritual recipes of purposefulness and you have a description of the moral dilemma of our times: shortcutitis!

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When I was a Honeywell psychologist, people would come to me and say they suffered from a low sense of self-esteem or self-worth. Bluntly, I would say, “What do you expect me to do about it?” They would look at me aghast. “Isn’t that your job?” I would smile, and say, “No, it is yours. And guess what? Do something worthwhile and you will discover self-esteem.” I would then turn my attention to that challenge.

PBS has a popular psychological evangelist who promotes self-esteem dribble, and people buy it because they want easy answers to difficult questions. They want to join the winners who represent only 20 percent of the people by taking short cuts, by attending seminars, reading self-motivational books, complaining constantly that they are surrounded by negativism, while never thinking of getting off their asses and doing something, including leaving and doing something else if the climate is too confining. They want inspiration without perspiration, which is like wanting to breathe without oxygen. They want instant relief from what is crashing down on them without doing anything other than complaining, acquiring a personal trainer, or something cosmetic like attending a seminar or reading a book to correct the problem. Ironically, corpocracy acts in the same way as the individual with the same dispirited outcomes.

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Winners don’t dwell on being positive or negative. They don’t have that luxury, as they are too busy focused on the process of doing. They are not waiting for inspiration but exerting perspiration. They work long hours and don’t complain. They have no time for bromides or cliché but are in the business of giving their all and not worrying about what they will get for the giving.

Winners can be polite or brash, but in either case it is a matter of patience with them, as they hate to spend much time jawboning about things that move nothing in any direction other than forward inertia.

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We have expensive clinics for drug addicts, alcoholics and the obese. People pay as much as $10,000 a week for some of these digs, when the cure for such addictions would be much more effective, much more permanent and much more meaningful were the suffering addicts to disassociate themselves with others with the problem behavior.

Addicts, whatever the addiction, are attracted to other addicts. To break connection with this downward spiral requires painful and complete separation. To do otherwise means the cure, as expensive as it might be, will not take for long.

THEN THERE ARE LONERS

Over the course of my life, living in many parts of the globe, experiencing various cultures and people, studying in various institutions, and reading thousands of autobiographies and biographies, I have been amazed at the disproportionate number of high achievers who described themselves as loners.

Most high achieving writers admit to being loners straightaway. You would think it fits them given that writing is a singular activity between the writer, his material and his mind’s ability to organize data into some semblance of thought or stories of interest.

But then I found this is not always the case. Popular novelists can be quite gregarious. This is especially true since the publishing industry sells authors the way the food industry sells cereal. Books are packaged, programmed, promoted and sold identical to Quaker Oats. It is no accident books appear on supermarket shelves the same as cereals where books outsell conventional bookstores. Popular novels have become a staple at Super Wal-Marts for example.

And like cereal, the popular novelist is likely to create the raw material of an outline of a story while a grunt does the dirty work of turning it into a book, sharing royalties and book credit, but leaving no doubt that the marquee of the product is that of the celebrated celebrity novelist. His name sells the book just like Quaker Oats sells a proprietary product.

Even dead authors are reaping the benefits of this new industry such as the late Robert Ludlum. Yet it fails to alarm the reader that the author’s latest novel differs little with his previous twenty or thirty because it follows a formula that the living grunt writer honors with great integrity. How do they get away with this? Ask a reader to describe the book just read two days after the fact, and you will find the reader has already forgotten the storyline. The industry is counting on this.

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Formula thinking and writing offend the loner because the loner writes about the timeless. J. D. Salinger wrote a book about a young man’s angst and boredom written more than fifty years ago that is still a perennial seller, but he no longer publishes, and lives as a hermit. He has no desire to compete with potboilers.

Loners take the risks and endure the pain of embracing if precariously universal themes. Philip Roth is another American author who continues to write and live in the bosom of society that will also be read far after his earthly days, but alas, I think more enduring fiction will survive written by women. Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and Doris Lessing in 2007 both incidentally are European women.

Too many fiction authors, male and female, write the way the fat cats of Wall Street leverage residuals, measuring their literary significance by how many books they sell and royalty income they receive. Few if any of these mega-authors will be in print in 100 years.

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It has been my privilege to know and study under several loners in the scientific and engineering community from high school on, and to marvel at their expertise and humility, far from the maddening crowd.

Such people provided tools to the Steven Jobs and Bill Gates of this world. These loners quietly applied their trade as these students soared to billionaire status. So, it has been over the past 500 years: the loners create and the entrepreneurs exploit. The hard work and heavy lifting, the grueling science of inquiry, wondering, pondering, failing and succeeding in a quest to understand Nature’s mysteries has been the isolated lot of loners, and the supple material of technologists. Loners are not complaining as they are in to process not product.

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It is when this grueling work is done for glory that losers are treated as winners. This was the case when Rosalind Franklin discovered the stucture of DNA studying coal. She took the famous “Photograph 51,” which revealed the B form of DNA. James Watson literally stole this research as he now could see the DNA molecule was a “double helix.”

Franklin, after spending thousands of hours x-raying coal, suffered severe radiation damage to her system and died in her mid-thirties before James Watson, Francis Crick, and her boss, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize for her work. If this were not enough, posthumously, she was called the “Dark Lady” in Watson’s book, “The Double Helix” (1968) with no mention that she had died. Only the living are awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sobriquets that diminish a person have always offended me. I feel the same way about people called “nerds” or some other deprecating term to make them seem more odd and out of the mainstream, especially when they stir the mainstream’s drink.

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The absurdity of the times finds the identity of people once on the fringe, such as people plastered with tattoos, now mainstream. People today would rather appear to look rebellious than to rebel, to seem unconventional when conforming to uncertain identity, to parade about with body paint symbols of values as if human billboards while professing no particular faith in anything.

Another absurdity, as we become increasingly amalgamated into a homogenous society the more we retreat into polarized monolithic biases, of either/or as if all goodness or badness was proprietary to one group or another, when that could never be the case in the best of circumstances.

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In a celebrity culture, which we have at the moment, winners and losers are irrelevant as society’s awareness of itself is skin deep. The bottom feeders better known as “Main Street” have spent the past score of years living and behaving as if they were “Wall Street.” But now that mass excess has hit overload, they want to distant themselves from societal greed, fraud, corruption, and failure, as if they were not complicit in its creation.

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In the beginning of the twenty-first century, money was loose in the United States, but from another angle it was tight. The end of the Cold War made money tight at the top. This was a result of a reduction in defense spending, heavy manufacturing shifting abroad, collapse of the automotive industry, and a general belt-tightening of the national economy as it made adjustments to a peace economy. The men at the top looked gloomily at this situation and contrived a counterattack. Money already loose to bottom feeders was made even looser to them so as to restore looseness at the top.

Credit became the new guise for men at the top to regain the advantage. Good credit, bad credit, or no credit, it didn’t matter, anyone could purchase anything from household staples to homes to automobiles to boats and other big-ticket items as the purse strings were loosened to the point of being nonexistent. Cash flowed back to the men at the top to eclipse the cold war economy.

Clever people devised ways to make the poor, the disadvantaged, the indulgent, and the derelict carry the red ink for them as they painted their world green with capital. With the Twin Tower terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the decade of greed followed fueled by fear and paranoia. It loosened money even more for men at the top with the willing participation of bottom feeders in the charade.

When the collapse came, it was a complicit fall, which media and everyone else has chosen to ignore. It is the fault line in capitalism, and it has been so since the early eighteenth century.

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