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by Steve Salerno
My college football coach was the kind of guy Stanley Kubrik must have had in mind
when he conceived the over-the-top drill sergeant for his classic Vietnam film,
Full Metal Jacket. During one game midway in my sophomore year, my offensive-line
cohorts and I were having trouble opening holes for our ball carriers. Coach
pulled us aside at half-time and lined us up against a wall. He then walked the
line and — from a distance of maybe two inches — screamed into each of our faces
in turn, “I want you to tell me now, are you ever gonna miss another block!?”
There was a pungent Anglo-Saxon gerund between another and block, but good taste
compels me to omit it.
The only acceptable answer was “No sir!”, which we too were expected to scream at
ear-splitting volume. This would assure Coach of our mettle, dedication, and
worthiness to have him browbeat us for the rest of the season. But to me, Coach’s
question sounded unreasonable. I still had two-and-a-half seasons of football
ahead of me. What assurances could I give? And so, when my turn came, I drew a
breath and said, “Look, Coach, I certainly don’t want to miss another block! But
probably yes, I think I will miss a few. Now and then.”
From the bewildered look on Coach’s face, you’d think I’d just morphed into a six-
foot-four-inch wombat right before his eyes. For a moment he just stared at me.
Then he exploded. Labeling me “a smart-ass” who was “out to show him up,” he
banished me to the end of the bench. Not long after play resumed, however, he
quietly inserted me back in the game. It seems my replacement — one of those
players who would “never miss another block” — was missing quite a few of them.
There’s no mistaking the allure of an outlook in which you’ll make every block,
get every job you apply for, close every sales call, and win the heart of every
man or woman who catches your eye. This became clear to me many years post-college
when I began research for a book about the human-potential movement. I quickly
realized how invested Americans were in their optimism — and how irate they’d
become at being challenged, or even just questioned, on it; I was encountering
what essayist Barbara Ehrenreich, writing later in Harper’s, would bracket as
“pathological” hope. It’s a world-view that’s seductive and uplifting and
ennobling — all of that — and yet, evidence and common sense suggest it has
nothing to do with setting (and implementing) realistic goals, establishing (and
observing) priorities and, perhaps most important, recognizing valid limitations
and obstacles.
The corporate world is fully bought-in. According to the American Society for
Training and Development, increasing portions of the $50 billion or so that
companies invest annually in training are earmarked for motivational speakers,
off-site seminars, and “wilderness programs” designed to instill a positive,
confident outlook. When Meeting Professionals International surveyed its
membership in 2004, 81% preferred celebrity-delivered motivation over skills-
intensive training. On the lecture circuit, Tony Robbins and his fellow
motivational speakers and self-help coaches have been joined by a colorful and
improbable cast of self-styled gurus including victims of Alpine disasters, former
gang-bangers, and confessed crack addicts; there’s even room for a mob turncoat
like erstwhile Colombo Family underboss Mike Franzese. All dutifully explain how
they couldn’t have done it without their PMAs.
Optimism or the lack thereof drives the oscillations of U.S. financial markets to
a greater degree than the measurable performance of the companies listed there.
Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan certified this truism in that memorable
December 1996 speech wherein he used the phrase “irrational exuberance” to
characterize the climate of investment. Though Fortune 500 America was no less
solvent the day after Greenspan’s remarks than the day before, Wall Street — its
own optimism badly shaken — went into a nosedive.
But even politics takes a back seat to sports, where winning and losing are
explained almost entirely in terms of PMA. In post-game interviews, athletes and
their coaches glorify the “mental game,” speaking of gut checks and emotional
turning points and fire in the belly — everything but the raw physical skills that
separate a Roger Federer or Serena Williams from you and me. The media, too,
suspend disbelief when it comes to the putative link between wanting and winning.
Given a successful outcome, sportswriters ignore obvious explanations (talent?
lots of practice? “the breaks”?) and strain instead to find the PMA that presaged
it. “He just wanted it more” is an oft-heard explanation for why one athlete
bested another, even when it comes down to a fractional difference in points or
time that could have just as easily gone the other way. When the Miami Heat bested
the Dallas Mavericks in the 2006 NBA Finals, AP set the tone for the authorized
media story line by keying its wrap-up to Heat Coach Pat Riley’s “promise” to
bring an NBA title to Florida. That Riley, himself a banquet superstar, made this
promise when he first took the helm of the team in 1995 did not seem to trouble
anyone; no more than the fact that a number of teams whose coaches hadn’t made any
promises managed to win titles in the interim. The sports-pundits followed the
script, framing the Heat’s victory as vindication of that dusty, 11-year-old oath.
Such tendencies have produced some exquisitely silly Olympic moments — like the
day in Atlanta in 1996 when NBC’s track announcers seemed determined to credit
sprinter Michael Johnson’s heroics to everything but his foot-speed. They hailed
Johnson’s confidence, his mental preparation, his inner resolve. You’d have
thought the possibility that Johnson was simply faster than his opponents didn’t
occur to anyone.
The irony is this: The notion that the riddle of success is more easily solved by
attitude than aptitude may be one of the more subtly destructive forces in
American society. Not only is it a reproach to rational thought, but in a society
already veering ominously towards narcissism, this “hyping of hope” also erodes
reverence for hard work, patience, scholarship, self-discipline, self-sacrifice,
due diligence and the other time-honored components of success.
The Secret of Self Esteem
Like many of the touchy-feely messages that flood modern America, The Secret is
about the rejection of the “inconvenient” truths of the physical world. In the
broad culture, science and logic have fallen out of fashion. We are, after all, a
people who increasingly abandon orthodox medicine for mind-body regimens whose own
advocates not only refuse to cite clinical proof, but dismiss science itself as
“disempowering.” (The rallying cry that “you have within you the energies you need
to heal” is one reason why visits to practitioners of all forms of alternative
medicine now outnumber visits to traditional family doctors by a margin
approaching two-to-one.) What I find most remarkable about The Secret, however, is
that it somehow mainstreamed the solipsistic “life is whatever you think it is”
mindset that once was associated with mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The
Secret was (and remains) the perfect totem for its time, uniquely captivating two
polar generations: Baby Boomers reaching midlife en masse and desperate to
unshackle themselves from everything they’ve been until now; and young adults
weaned on indulgent parenting and — especially — indulgent schooling.
Indeed, if there was a watershed moment in modern positive thinking, it would have
to be the 1970s advent of self-esteem-based education: a broad-scale social
experiment that made lab rats out of millions of American children. At the time,
it was theorized that a healthy ego would help students achieve greatness (even if
the mechanisms required to instill self-worth “temporarily” undercut traditional
scholarship). Though back then no one really knew what self-esteem did or didn’t
do, the nation’s educational brain trust nonetheless assumed that the more kids
had of it, the better.
Amid all this, kids’ shirts and blouses effectively became bulletin boards for a
hodge-podge of ribbons, pins and awards that commemorated everything but real
achievement. Sometimes, the worse the grades, the more awards a student got, under
the theory that in order to make at-risk kids excel, you first had to make them
feel optimistic and empowered.
Tellingly, when psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler compared the
academic skills of grade-school students in three Asian nations to those of their
U.S. peers, the Asians easily outdid the Americans — but when the same students
then were asked to rate their academic prowess, the American kids expressed much
higher self-appraisals than their foreign counterparts. In other words, U.S.
students gave themselves high marks for lousy work. Stevenson and Stigler saw this
skew as the fallout from the backwards emphasis in American classrooms; the
Brookings Institution 2006 Brown Center Report on Education also found that
nations in which families and schools emphasize self-esteem cannot compete
academically with cultures where the emphasis is on learning, period.
Today academic journals brim with revisionist articles that lament the plundering
of American schools in the name of positivity. The failure is so complete that
self-esteem-based education has been repudiated even by some of its most
passionate early voices. (William R. Coulson, for example, during the 1990s became
something of a lachrymal troubadour who traversed the American landscape,
confessing his error and begging schools to rethink their programs in self-
esteem). The overall cynicism is perhaps best captured by the title of Charles
Sykes’ provocative 1995 book, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel
Good About Themselves but Can’t Read, Write or Add.
The real lesson here, though, isn’t that massive doses of positivity failed to
yield brilliance — it’s that the obsession with cultivating optimism and “inner
strength” actually proved counterproductive. It is now clear that not only did
self-esteem-based educational methodologies not produce excellence, they actually
undermined it.
Evidence suggests there have been darker consequences as well. In falsely praising
students and shielding them from failure, the educational system was also
“shielding” them from the resilience and coping skills that allow the mature adult
to process adversity. Raised in the protective cocoon of the school system, often
with ambient reinforcement from hovering moms and dads, kids came of age
unprepared for an unforgiving Real World.
So it would seem that if the school system failed to imbue students with genuine
self-esteem, it was more successful at fomenting narcissism. In the simplest
clinical sense, narcissism can be defined as an exaggerated sense of one’s place
in the world. True narcissists need others only for their usefulness to feed their
sense of grandiosity. And yet narcissism is a paradoxical affliction, in that
narcissists are never truly secure in their bloated sense of self-worth; they
crave constant validation. Is it not reasonable that such a condition might result
from schooling that touts empty, unsubstantiated self-worth? That’s precisely what
psychologist Charles Elliott concludes in his book, Hollow Kids: Recapturing the
Soul of a Generation Lost to the Self-Esteem Myth. And Elliott is hardly a lone
voice in the wilderness.
“One of the most troubling aspects of self-esteem for its own sake is that you run
the risk of producing kids who can’t tolerate challenges to the façade you’ve
built up in them,” academic psychologist Roy Baumeister, a leading figure in self-
esteem research, told me in a 2004 interview for my book, SHAM: How the Self-Help
Movement Made America Helpless.
It bears noting that the self-esteem movement was the result of one of the most
colossal logical gaffes on record. Educational psychologists had observed that
children who make good grades generally scored a bit higher in self-esteem than
poor students. So — they reasoned — all they had to do to transform low achievers
into high achievers was “bolt on” some extra self-esteem. What the educators
failed to realize, of course, was that they’d inverted causation: The kids with
good grades had higher self-esteem because of the grades, not vice versa.
The “zero limits” subculture argues that anything is possible through the sheer
and single-minded application of will. Lampooning the idea, management consultant
Payson Hall writes: “The other day I broke a 12" x 12" x 1" pine board with my
bare hand after listening to a 90-minute motivational talk about breaking barriers
to achieve goals. [But] the inspirational message, ‘you can do whatever you are
committed to,’ troubled me… I suspect the session facilitator would have agreed,
particularly if I had produced a 12" x 12" x 1" steel plate.”
Then again, common sense never deterred a PMA guru intent on making his point. Nor
did good taste. When parts of San Diego were engulfed in flames in 2007, self-help
guru Joe Vitale noted on his blog that the inferno had spared the homes of some of
his fellow contributors to The Secret, strongly implying that less fortunate
homeowners had brought the cataclysm on themselves by being insufficiently
optimistic.
Far worse is when the gurus of PMA actually use the likes of Gates and Turner as
“proof” of “why a college degree isn’t as important as a good attitude.” Gates and
Turner beat the odds. The vast majority of college dropouts don’t fare as well, no
matter how positive they may be.
A Proven Winner: The Champion Mindset in Sports
Hoping to imbue their ideologies with a mystical panache, the PMA crowd has
invented an argot of high-minded nonsense — phrases that can’t truly be defined,
let alone quantified or applied to real life. This fusillade of clichés and
buzzwords seldom resolves into a cohesive philosophy. I’m watching the Beijing
Olympics as I write this, and judging by the commentary from various commentators
— all experts in their respective sports — the ideal Olympian is a calm yet fiery
competitor who’s both relaxed and driven, patient and hungry; an athlete who stays
within himself while knowing how to stretch. This supremely confident (but not
overconfident) individual goes into competition with a clear mind as well as
intense concentration; perceives the importance of winning but doesn’t worry about
losing; knows how to pace himself but always gives 110% — and still has another
gear left if he needs it. This is a competitor who leaves it all on the field
while also knowing that sometimes it’s best to live to fight another day…
I defy anyone to find all of those disparate qualities in the same (sane) person.
Clearly, at the end of the day, the so-called champion mindset is whatever works
for the champion in question. Which means, in effect, there’s no such thing as a
champion mindset, per se. It could be an insufferable braggadocio for one athlete
and an aw-shucks modesty for his chief rival. We saw this at Torino, in fact, in
the stark contrast between U.S. skiers Bode (the walking ego) Miller and Ted (“I’m
just happy to be here”) Ligety.
Similarly, the seminar giants speak of superstar players involved in complex team
enterprises as if such players can reach out, Uri Geller-like, and bend dozens of
unknown variables into an orderly pattern that leads inexorably to victory.
Consider: “He’s a proven winner” or, more specifically, “He knows how to win,”
accolades often bestowed on top-tier athletes like, say, New York Yankees
shortstop Derek Jeter. What does that mean? How could it possibly be so? Does
Jeter, standing at short, emit waves of invisible energy that somehow prevent his
pitcher from giving up runs? And if Jeter can motivate himself (and/or a teammate)
to get that clutch hit in the ninth inning — why does he wait so long? Why not put
the game safely out of reach much earlier? Moreover, how does one explain crushing
Yankees losses? If the man can simply “conjure” victories at will, then why, in
2002, the year the Yankees swept to a pennant by winning 103 games during the
regular season, did Derek Jeter permit the team to get drummed out of the playoffs
by the California Angels? Did he suddenly forget how to win when it mattered most?
You Too Can Be President: Delusional Optimism
A more truthful message would be, “You have much higher odds of being struck by
lightning than of ever becoming president of the United States. But relax; there’s
virtually no chance that you’ll ever be struck by lightning, either.”
Once again here — as we saw with self-esteem — this isn’t merely silly. There’s a
distinct downside to baseless positivity.
In the business world, positive thinking too often expresses itself as an aversion
to contingency planning. Surely one of the most vexing aspects of today’s PMA-
driven corporate culture is the way it bullies cautious workers into remaining
close-mouthed about any red flags they see in a given strategy or undertaking.
Frank discussions of risk are construed as evidence of negativity, or even “laying
the groundwork for failure.” Employees who voice reasonable concerns may be
labeled “gloom-and-doomers” — and hear themselves disparaged during periodic
evaluations for “not being team players.” In their Harvard Business Review
article, “Delusions of Success” — about the current atmosphere in corporate
America — authors Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman are forthright: “We reward
optimism and interpret pessimism as disloyalty.”
Ironically, the failure to address risk — what Lovallo and Kahneman call
“delusional optimism” — becomes a risk factor in its own right. One is mindful of
the memorable quote from Russell Ackoff in his classic book, Management in Small
Doses: “The cost of preparing for critical events that do not occur is generally
very small in comparison to the cost of being unprepared for those that do.”
Farther along in an ill-fated project, PMA again rears its ugly head in the form
of a dogged refusal to acknowledge defeat. As consultant Payson Hall writes, the
idea that “any project is possible, given a ‘can do’ attitude” has “proven to be a
very expensive and destructive misconception.” Good money gets thrown after bad,
because, after all, if you truly believe … how can you fail?
Management consultant Jay Kurtz has a more colorful spin on the same familiar
pitfall. “The most dangerous person in corporate America,” Kurtz once told me, “is
the highly enthusiastic incompetent. He’s always running too fast in the wrong
direction.”
Positive Productivity v. Cranky Competence
For the record, studies of the alleged link between positivity and productivity
hardly show a straight-line correlation. Though surveys do show that American
workers are both highly productive and relatively upbeat, one cannot posit a
causal relationship without adjusting for the myriad ambient variables that make
American life so much more uplifting to begin with. History’s most rigorous
studies, like the bellwether 1985 effort by occupation psychologists Hackett and
Guion, cast doubt on even the most basic correlations you’d expect to find — for
example, between job satisfaction and low absenteeism. It should be noted that in
Japan, the very wellspring of “5S” and other vaunted productivity programs
currently overspreading Fortune 500 America, employees aren’t exactly giddy.
According to a 2002 study by Andrew Oswald, an economics professor at University
of Warwick, UK, just 30% of Japanese workers describe themselves as “happy” on the
job.
In the end, there’s scant reliable evidence that a positive attitude has much to
do with the result of any objectively measurable enterprise. There is, in fact,
modest but intriguing evidence that a positive outlook may be bad for business.
Last year a University of Alberta psychology team studied multiple groups of
workers assembling printed circuits and deemed the crankier employees superior to
their upbeat counterparts. The cheerful people were too invested in their
cheerfulness and devoted significant energy to perpetuating it. Their grimacing
co-workers simply threw themselves into their work — and did it better:
Malcontents made half as many mistakes. (Nor, for that matter, should we dismiss
the role played by undue optimism in the recent mortgage/housing meltdown — on the
part of lenders and borrowers alike.)
Bodybuilder Mike Mahler, meanwhile, breaks ranks with most of those in the
physical-training arts by indicting today’s attitude über alles culture as “a
guaranteed way to never achieve your goals… Let’s say that you are broke,
overweight, and have no friends. You decide to apply positive thinking… You tell
yourself that you are lucky to be you and walk around with a smile on your face.
Is this really addressing the problem?” Sagely, Mahler notes that it is discontent
that “motivates action and change.” Discontent and — just maybe? — the willingness
to accept failure.
Expect Failure … But Keep Trying
Meet Dr. James Hill. He’s director of the Center for Human Nutrition, an NIH-
funded agency that Hill oversees from his post as professor of pediatrics at the
University of Colorado. Hill wondered why most folks who lose weight on fad diets
soon regain it all and then some. Working jointly with counterparts at the
University of Pittsburgh, Hill’s team has compiled a National Weight Control
Registry comprising 4500 individuals who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it
off for at least a full year. After surveying and studying that database, Hill has
identified key characteristics that enabled these dieters to achieve their
impressive results, and he has distilled them down to a series of tips. Among the
first tips is this: Expect failure…but keep trying.
Expect failure? Not something you’d hear on Oprah, eh? Nonetheless, at least among
Hill’s dieters, it was the anticipation of failure — combined, yes, with the will
to persevere — that paved the way for success.
A mantra like expect failure but keep trying is a perfect example of the
commonsensical middle ground that has zero chance of gaining traction in today’s
pop culture. Americans are conditioned to suckle at the teat of the categorical,
uplifting message. Many of us don’t want to hear “maybe you can do it, and maybe
you can’t.” Even if it’s true.
We’d rather cling to the notion that “of course you can do it!” Even if it’s
false.