Are You Trying Too Hard?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 26, 2014

It has been the glory of the great masters in all arts to confront and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of science.  Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the Supreme guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and loves us better too.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.

                            Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Irish statesman and philosopher

The challenges we face are never as great as we think they are, never as difficult to overcome as we present them to be, and never as critical to our success as we paint them to be.  This is as true on a personal as it is on a societal level. 

A nation as well as an individual can take itself too seriously.  It can become traumatized with the fear that it cannot keep up the pace.  The fear of success can paralyze as much as the fear of failure.  Then it is difficult to act prudently and wisely.  We see this in students who fall apart when their academic careers suddenly crash, in young people when their romances abruptly crumble, in athletes who blow out a knee, in career workers who fail to win an expected promotion, in families who are visited with misfortune. 

Given these circumstances, a tranquil nation can become bellicose, a temperate individual aggressive, a failing student depressed, a loving couple conflicting, the athlete embittered, the career worker passive aggressive, and the family self-destructive.

[Darrin Campbell, an executive who was staying out a mansion owned by ex-tennis star James Bake, killed his whole family before killing himself.

Campbell, who lived in Tampa Bay, executed his family “systemically,” officials reported according to The Tampa Bay Times. He killed his wife, 51-year-old Kimberly Campbell, and his two children–15-year-old Megan Campbell and 18-year-old Colin Campbell–before killing himself.

“This has been determined to be a murder-suicide,” Hillsborough County sheriff’s Col. Donna Lusczynski told The Tampa Bay Times.

It’s unclear why he killed his wife and children, she said, but he “systematically shot his son, his daughter and his wife in the head. He then placed fireworks throughout the residence, used an accelerant to assist in lighting the fire, lit the fire, and then shot himself,” she added.

 Campbell, 51, was leasing a five-bedroom home in the exclusive gated community of Avila.  He had been a top executive with several companies and was said by neighbors to be a calm and cordial resident of the community.]

Hard times are actually endemic to our thinking.  We are programmed to have a stiff upper lip and blast our way through our troubles without a second thought.  We celebrate toughness and give kudos to those who bear up well under pressure and stay the course.  Seldom do we give kudos to those who welt, who ask themselves what has gone wrong, and decide to change course completely.  Dropping out or retreating from the fray are discouraged when that might be the best therapy.  So, many try to make the impossible possible and never seem to notice the difference until all passion is spent.  

History tells us that no international problem has ever been sufficiently resolved militarily.  More successful has been prudent politics and pragmatic diplomacy.  Yet diplomacy invariably gets short shrift.  Military solutions are first on the table, driven by fear, revenge or paranoia from the avenger’s corner.  This often proves expensive, embarrassing and counterproductive. 

It is no accident that people of such persuasion frequently rise to leadership roles and are called “hard liners.”  This has been personified in recent history by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in President George W. Bush’s administration and the preemptive war in Iraq that they orchestrated.  What emanates from above trickles down to the lowest echelons of society. 

This should give pause as it echoes the vitriolic sentiment through society, “I don’t get mad I get even.” 

Why is it on a personal and national level we cannot see our behavior contributes to the fix we find ourselves in, that our behavior by commission or omission was fundamental to the tangled web of circumstances?  Why indeed.

My interest here is on the personal or the psycho-social level.  You cannot separate that level, however, from the corporate guns that set the boilerplate.  

The collective inanities of society spring from the top, where the world is sometimes seen in isolationist or xenophobic terms.  It is hard to imagine anyone in charge when changes are missed or denied, gridlock is the status quo, and the future is playing on another circuit. 

Perhaps the American Century ended with the twentieth century because we as a nation tried too hard to be everything to everybody across the globe and were begrudged for doing so.  Perhaps it is time we try less hard and to let the community of nations find their own way. 

The answers in leadership are to become less dependent at the national level and more dependent at the local level.  It starts with the individual.  

Ideally, everyone is for democracy.  When it comes to a vote, stability wins more often than not. Stability, as we have seen, means the sacrifice of freedoms.  Likewise, we like the benefits of big government, but we don't like to assume its costs.  Can you see a pattern here?           

From my own files:

The red flag of a failing student proved a blessing in disguise.  It told him important things about himself he had previously ignored. 

A successful executive failed medical school, only to realize years later he never wanted to be a doctor.

An internationally recognized choreographer on Broadway admitted he failed to earn his Ph.D., although he submitted his dissertation several times, only to have it repeatedly rejected.  Scholarly work requires writing skills.  He lacked such skills.  What was his talent?  Choreographic set design.  This came easy to him, as did the intrinsic requirements of engineering, architectural, spatial and mathematical acumen.  These he picked up along the way, and took for granted.  He thought he wanted to be a fine arts professor and “Not a backstage jockey.”  What came easy and for which he was celebrated failed to ease the pain of his early academic failure.        

One of the great myths of romance is that it can sustain a relationship.  It dies like the quail, but can be resurrected as the dove of respect, trust, affection, tolerance and acceptance.  This involves accepting the other person as he or she is. 

It is not romantic love that sustains a relationship but acceptance, and the desire to be with and close to the other person. 

The mind cannot be forced to like, that is be accepting of another as easily as it can be tricked into believing it is in romantic love.  If you have to work hard at a relationship, chances are there is no relationship in the first place.  You are working hard towards tolerating what subconsciously is intolerable.  You have not accepted the reality of differences, and differences always exist between two people.  So, when a romance goes sour, and acceptance does not fill the void, it is best both parties move on.

Arthur Ashe, the great American tennis player and only black male American to win at Wimbledon, once said that the odds of a black athlete making it to the top ranks in professional sport were 1 in 500,000, whereas the chances to become a doctor of medicine dropped the odds down to 1 in 500.  Despite this, he said, where do we see young black males?  We see them on the playgrounds, in the neighborhood recreation centers or outdoor basketball courts, not in the libraries.  They punish themselves playing against the odds rather than having the odds work for them.  

A family can experience misfortune with the aftershock being felt for generations.  President Richard Milhous Nixon suffered a consuming paranoia for his family’s early misfortune.  The Nixon family was near destitute and forced to sell its family farm during the Great Depression.  Later, oil was discovered on the land that would have made the Nixon family millionaires. 

Perhaps because of this, Nixon became the quintessential grind, the person who used football imagery to illustrate his “try harder” toughness.  This surfaced in law school at Duke University.  He was called “iron butt” because he did little else but sit on his behind and study.  His pervading paranoia showed up when he broke into the Dean’s office to check his grades and was caught.  He couldn’t wait for them to be posted; yet he would finish third in his class.  

Once president, leading in the polls for a second term, there was the Watergate break in, and the subsequent cover-up.  Reelected with a comfortable margin, he was forced to resign the presidency to avoid being impeached, the first president ever to do so.  The seeds of this were planted early.  

We never overcome who and what we are, not heads of state or brakemen on the railroad if we never invite our real self to our conscious mind.

The Folly of Competition

The greatest obstacle to success and happiness is seldom the object of our attention but rather the attention of the object.  It is ourselves.  Goethe says:

Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves is destructive.  

We are great mythmakers in the scheme of things.  We invent slogans to justify our insanities, chief of which is the one claiming without pain there is no gain.  Marathon runners talk of running into a wall of resistance.  Only the hardy prevail in blasting through it.  So compelling is this myth that all runners talk of confronting the wall when the wall is a case of stamina clashing with a conscious state of mind.

For thousands of years, men of science claimed that a human being was incapable of running a four-minute mile, or four 60-second quarter miles in succession.  Roger Bannister, a medical doctor, destroyed that myth on May 6, 1954 in Oxford, England running the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. 

Sixty years later, hundreds of milers have broken the four-minute barrier.  After his success, Bannister admitted that he used his knowledge of physiology to train properly, but concluded, “I still had to overcome my doubt that I could do it.”

Another great American myth is that competition is good for the soul and the high ground to greatness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yet Americans assume competition is the reason for their personal greatness.  Alas, the belief persists that competition is as inherent to an American’s nature as is breathing.  Consequently, Americans wear it as a badge and swagger with a sense of having the competitive edge. 

Economist Walt Whitman Rostow sees this as part of our damaged psyche stating that before America can compete it must learn how to cooperate -- something that has been missing more often than not in the national psyche. 

The United States prefers to go it alone.  For this preference, Rostow fears the US may go the way of Great Britain for its lack of tribal capacity for communal action on an international scale.  Between 1870 and 1971, as a reference point, he reminds us that Great Britain went from 32 percent of the world’s industrial production to generating less than four percent.

Competition measures differences and attacks them.  Cooperation assesses commonalities and builds bridges across them.  Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher writing in Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-reliance and Maturity (1966) observe:

Competition enslaves and degrades the mind.  It is one of the most prevalent and certainly the most destructive of all the many forms of psychological dependence.  Eventually, if not overcome, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual who is devoid of initiative, imagination, originality and spontaneity.  He is humanly dead.  Competition produces zombies!  Nonentities!

Think about it.  Competition imitates initiative.  We see this as those in competition training hard to outperform each other doing the same thing. In the era of visual media from television to iPhones, little tots dress and display the manner and peccadilloes of professionals. 

Next, we will have eight-year-olds with body tattoos to perfect the imitation.

Providing those in competitive mode are successful, they remain in a reactionary style, becoming like their competition only better. 

This trickle down nonsense continues through society from competitive companies to universities, from artists to writers.  An incredible sameness pervades the universe when comparing and competing is the mania.

Deifying competition has saddled the times with a repetitive dullness displayed in sport, television series, novels, alas, in all of modern life.  Yet, seemingly, everyone is working hard to produce these competitive products, but to what end?

Watch a Major League Baseball game on television and you see the same car commercial four times over the course of the game, only to be followed by a competitor car company's commercial on the same telecast five times.  Our collective boredom is advertisers' paradise.  With apologies to Marshall McLulan, the media isn’t the message, the subliminal bombardment is.

When someone breaks through this monotonous monopoly, do we celebrate them?  Hardly, we denigrate the new genre, its product and the audacity of the author to impinge on the sacred turf of (in this instance) academia, while rendering our own more scholastic version. 

Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) inspired an industry of imitators.  Tom Clancy’s The Search for Red October (1984) spawned the techno-thriller market.  

Academics are masters at sullying the reputation of originators of genre.  The New York Review had this to say about a professor's book on Dan Brown's theme:  

For the last few years, the dramas of scholarship have attracted a striking number of readers.  This unexpected and welcome development, a rare moment of sun in publishing’s Ice Age, resulted in part from extraordinary stylistic gifts of writers. 

Then with faint praise to Brown:

It helps to explain the vogue of novels like “The Da Vinci Code” – a sillier book, and far worse written (than the academic’s book being reviewed).  At no point does he (the academic) acknowledge the debt owed Brown for appealing to an audience beyond academics and students.  "The Da Vinci Code" caught the imagination of the general reader.  He admits his student’s book is mainly a “campus book” and that says a lot.

My wonder is why academics are so petty, their review of books outside their confines so pathetic.  As a person who has lived most of his life in the real world, but nine years matriculating in academia, I have met precious few professors who could write. 

Dr. Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, not by being more competitive, but being more creative.  He didn’t imitate the training ordeal of great former middle distant runners, but applied his knowledge of physiology.  He trained against his own standards, erasing from his mind the psychological limitations imposed since the age of the Ancient Greek Olympiad.

 

It is easy to confuse being competitive with being competent.  Imitators are the pyramid climbers up the organizational ladder to executive status.  They eventually become our leaders in all walks of life.  They mirror the values, beliefs, interests and behaviors of their superiors.  

Put another way, while magnifying their superiors’ strengths in imitation, they also magnify their weaknesses.  Where success requires initiative and creative engagement to deal with ambiguities, they are out to lunch.  Evidence suggests this is a global syndrome. 

No one is questioning the fact that leaders work hard in all endeavors.  Take coaches in the National Football League (NFL).  The majority are known to spend as many as 80 hours a week working: reviewing film, conducting strategy sessions, studying the team’s playbook, which is as detailed as the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

Grown men put their lives and families on hold in quest of the Holy Grail, which is the Super Bowl, which only a handful of them will ever win.  No one seems to see the futility in this.  No one. 

It doesn’t stop there.  The same behavior is repeated at the college, high school, and even the Pee Wee Football League level where eight and nine-year olds prefer this crushing sport to academics.

The mania goes well beyond NFL coaches and players.  Hordes crowd into $ billion stadiums, while millions watch games on television, just as the Roman hordes watched gladiators in coliseums a thousand years ago.  The NFL is the popular palliative of the moment to dull the collective conscience to the reality and temper of the times.   

Eric Hoffer registers concern for this uninhibited self-indulgence.  He writes:

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.  Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakers of the nature of a protest.  A society, which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness.  On the other hand, where communal discipline is strict but not ruthless – an annoyance, which irritates, but not a heavy yoke which crushes – originality is likely to thrive.  It is true that when imitation runs its course in a wholly free society, it results in uniformity, which is not unlike a mild tyranny.  Thus the fully standardized free society has perhaps enough compulsion to challenge originality.

Tension and Noise

Tension should not be misconstrued as something to avoid when it is suggested you are working too hard.  Hans Selye reminds us in Stress Without Distress (1974) that tension reminds us we are alive.  Tension that is embraced produces music.  Tension that is avoided produces edginess, then noise. 

Tension is as natural to the American spirit as joy is foreign to it.  It is captured in the mantra: I work hard and play hard.  You might think the word "hard" was part of our DNA.  Notice we don't say, I work creatively and play creatively. 

“Hard” is the operational word.  We describe a task in terms of how hard it is to do, and equate performance in terms of this difficulty in how many hours are spent in the doing, seldom in terms of results realized. 

We associate education in terms of contact hours spent in the classroom, not on what has been learned.  We treat learning as if something to endure, not something to cherish.  We pursue degrees, rewards, bonuses, accolades, and payoffs, finding little exhilaration in the experience at hand.  We live for the future that never comes.

No surprise, we see life an end instead of a happy journey; earning a degree as the ticket to the good life, a good job and a comfortable retirement instead of an enlightening experience.   

There are exceptions.  

Years ago, I had a colleague in my doctorate program who was well into his 60s.  Another student was curious and and asked, “What do you plan to do with your Ph.D.?  You’re already passed social security age?”  The elderly gentleman smiled, “Oh, I hope to enjoy it of course.”  The questioner shook his head and wondered off in confusion, saying under his breath, “Enjoy it?  What’s there to enjoy?”

We Americans are tense and intense and find it difficult to deal with things going well.  If something is easy, or we are not struggling to achieve it, something is wrong.  

It never occurs to us to go with the flow, to discover the rhythm of Thoreau's drum.  We are waiting, always anxiously for the other shoe to fall.  A common expression is, Shit happens, then you die!  Perhaps that is why being happy is hard work, leisure intimidating, and life a grind.  

On holiday, we have to go somewhere, do something, and be with someone.  We can never be alone.  If caught reading a book, we apologize for doing nothing.  We might be found lazy if we were to admit we were reading simply for pleasure.  

Students are exempted for reading has to have some instrumental value.  How often I have heard: “I never took a book home in all of high school,” or “I haven’t read a book since high school?”  This is always said with nonsensical pride.   We must be motivated to be better, to do better, to not waste time, to be engaged, to not simply vegetate.

A quite successful man confessed to me that he kept getting married and divorced because “I’ve got to keep my nose to the grindstone, otherwise I’d shrink into a flabby old man.  My obligations keep me focused.”  He apparently believes to look old and flabby is unAmerican.

For this businessman, working hard was an artificial construct fed by a need to be married to insolvency.  Such people buy automobiles and houses they can’t afford, join upscale country clubs they never visit, send their children to prestigious private schools that finds them chronically delinquent in the fees required, or divorced paying alimony and child support.  Such providers typically enjoy six figure incomes, but are in constant debt continuously robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is a lot of tension in such a provider but very little music.

Foot on Gas & break at once

Alan W. Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) describes this trying too hard in the most graphic terms.  He writes: Man in modern society has his foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. 

William F. Buckley, Jr. has described this as “forward inertia.”  Both expressions are quite apt for revealing the probable cause of employee and executive “burn-out.”   

We are blighted with "progress fatigue."  Gregg Easterbrook has an intriguing theory about the contradictions of modern life in The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (2003).  Research shows that most people judge their well-being not by where they stand but rather their circumstances and income will improve in coming years. 

This is the "compare and compete" syndrome on display.  Not content with who, what and where they are, they see on television or read in the newspaper or find out at their church or temple or club that an acquaintance is doing better than they are.  

Easterbrook calls this “catalog-induced anxiety.”  People look to what they don’t have, not what they have.  They fear it can be taken away from them, leaving no time for gratitude.  

Progress, like greed, is never satisfied.  There must be more.  This means the pursuit of progress must be intensified to be sustained.  With no time to let up or let go, progress has become synonymous with greed.

I once wrote a piece titled, “Learn to Let Go!”  It failed to generate a reaction.  The piece suggested that people spend more time working smart and less time working hard, more time focusing on the “right things” that make 80 percent of the difference, and less time “doing everything right the first time” that makes only 20 percent of the difference in the scheme of things.

This was not what readers wanted to hear.  They wanted to be reassured in what they were doing, and a thumbnail guide to a better quality of life.  They were not interested in tabling their “shoulds” and “should-nots,” or finding their own centers. 

To my suggestion that they pray for guidance, they confessed the idea made them uncomfortable. Praying is but a form of meditation.  One reader wrote that he was an atheist.  I wrote back, “What has atheism got to do with a rejection of meditation?”

The aim was for them to get in touch with their primordial self.  Praying with beads, feeling the wind in the hair on a summer's stroll, kicking water with bare feet at the edge of a dock, pealing an orange and smelling its fragrance are all forms of prayer.  Jogging or walking without headphones is yet another.  The mind grows quiet and all sorts of wonderful thoughts come up from the soul.  Life is experienced on another plane.

Hence, you could say, I haven’t departed too far from letting go and going with the flow.  We can step out of our cage at any time and experience the wonders beyond.  Easterbrook writes:

Surveys show the majority of Americans think only the very rich are well-off; that no matter how much they make, most Americans believe twice as much income is required to “live well.” 

In terms of Eric Berne's transactional analysis (TA), it would suggest the mindset of the child controlling the thinking of the parent and/or the adult.

So, what?

If people don’t believe they are working too hard and feel they are working smart, then the rest is academic, isn’t it?   

Likewise, if that is the case, it would imply they are happily in harness doing what they are doing being where they are. 

Chances are they have been content in every job they have had, from being a student, which was their first job, to that with a company, and then as a husband or wife, mother or father, and all the associations those endeavors entailed.  They have discovered that happiness is a state of mind, not a condition, or a designation.

Happiness is not without pain and sorrow, disappointment and surprise, tragedy and fear, longing and regret.  Happiness recognizes the cage, and on occasion has visited its confines but never sought residence there.  

Happiness is not a serene state of uninterrupted euphoria, but the human experience that oscillates with the finality of the heart beat that registers its rhythm. 

If the reader is ambivalent about trying too hard, this frustration may have become a cage.  There is no definitive assessment of this status.  Nor is there a recipe for escape that fits all.  

Poet John Donne notwithstanding, “Every man is an island unto himself.” We are inclined to be mesmerized by the cage seeing it as a refuge rather than a prison.  Only listening to the rhythm of our own hearts can we hope to find the peace that suits us.  There is no other way.      

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