It’s All in the Attitude

Several years ago on an extremely hot day, a crew of men were working on the road bed of the railroad when they were interrupted by a slow moving train. The train ground to a stop and a window in the last car – which incidentally was custom make and air conditioned – was raised. A booming, friendly voice called out, “Dave, is that you?” Dave Anderson, the crew chief called back, “Sure is, Jim, and it’s really good to see you.” With that pleasant exchange, Dave Anderson was invited to join Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad, for a visit. For over an hour the men exchanged pleasantries and then shook hands warmly as the train pulled out.

Dave Anderson’s crew immediately surrounded him and to a man expressed astonishment that he knew Jim Murphy, the president of the railroad as a personal friend. Dave then explained that over 20 years earlier he and Jim Murphy had started to work for the railroad on the same day. One of the men, half-jokingly and half seriously asked Dave why he was still working out in the hot sun and Jim Murphy had gotten to be president. Rather wistfully, Dave explained, “twenty-three years ago I went to work for $1.75 an hour and Jim Murphy went to work for the railroad.”

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Stress and Performance

Jeremy Jamieson at Harvard had some students who were prepping for the graduate admissions test read a statement telling them not to worry that feeling anxious will make them do poorly, because research suggests that stress doesn’t hurt performance on tests and can actually help. The students who read the statement scored about 50 points higher on the math section of the practice test than those who didn’t. Plus the students who had been told to interpret the stress positively also did better on the actual GRE, scoring 65 points higher. So in the stressful situations, you want to focus on being excited and challenged rather than worrying that your stress means it’s not going well.

Ashley Merryman quoted in Wired Magazine

This is more important than IQ when it comes to success

Some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you're working to validate your ability. In the second, you're working to acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you're confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative and work hard.

More than IQ, it's discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with a sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success. Study skills and learning skills are inert until they're powered by an active ingredient the active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Manufacturing unhappiness

While riding a train, a minister observed a handsome elderly couple. The wife was dressed in furs and diamonds and was the envy of all the other women on the train, but her disposition did not match her appearance. She constantly complained about everything. She criticized the food, the service, and the railway car.

Her husband, who was striking in appearance, was a calm, considerate man. As his wife raved about the abominable service, he sat calmly, occasionally showing embarrassment at his wife’s attitude. In an attempt to change the tone of the conversation, the husband engaged the minister in a conversation in which they discussed their occupations. Finally the husband said with a grin on his face, “My wife is in the manufacturing business.”

This surprised the minister because the wife certainly did not seem to be the executive type. The minster asked, “What does your wife manufacture?”

“Unhappiness,” her husband replied. “She manufactures her own unhappiness.”

Larry Kennedy, Down With Anxiety

Attitude

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes.

Charles R. Swindoll

Think Yourself Young

According to a wealth of research that now spans five decades people who see the ageing process as a potential for personal growth tend to enjoy much better health into their 70s, 80s and 90s than people who associate aging with helplessness and decline, differences that are reflected in their cells’ biological aging and their overall life span.

“There’s just such a solid base of literature now,” says Prof Allyson Brothers at Colorado State University. “There are different labs in different countries using different measurements and different statistical approaches and yet the answer is always the same.”

Many people will endorse certain ageist beliefs, such as the idea that “old people are helpless”, long before they should have started experiencing age-related disability themselves. Those kinds of views, expressed in people’s mid-30s, can predict their subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease up to 38 years later. 

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life

How your Attitude about Age affects your health

Recent findings suggest that age beliefs may play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Tracking 4,765 participants over four years, the researchers found that positive expectations of ageing halved the risk of developing the disease, compared to those who saw old age as an inevitable period of decline. Astonishingly, this was even true of people who carried a harmful variant of the APOE gene, which is known to render people more susceptible to the disease. The positive mindset can counteract an inherited misfortune, protecting against the build-up of the toxic plaques and neuronal loss that characterise the disease. 

David Robson, The Expectation Effect: How your Mindset Can Transform Your Life

 

Who is best at predicting the future

(In a contest involving hundreds of geopolitical questions) a small number of forecasters began to pull clear of the pack: the titular “superforecasters”. Their performance was consistently impressive. With nothing more than an internet connection and their own brains, they consistently beat everything from financial markets to trained intelligence analysts with access to top-secret information.

They were an eclectic bunch: housewives, unemployed factory workers and professors of mathematics. But Philip Tetlock (who teaches at the Wharton School of Business) and his collaborators were able to extract some common personality traits. Superforecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence was mental attitude. Borrowing from Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian-born British philosopher, Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down into a single slogan. Superforecasters are drawn exclusively from the ranks of the foxes.

Humility in the face of a complex world makes superforecasters subtle thinkers. They tend to be comfortable with numbers and statistical concepts such as “regression to the mean” (which essentially says that most of the time things are pretty normal, so any large deviation is likely to be followed by a shift back towards normality). But they are not statisticians: unlike celebrity pollsters such as Nate Silver, they tend not to build explicit mathematical models.

But superforecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. 

Most important is what Mr Tetlock calls a “growth mindset”: a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one’s mistakes. The best forecasters were less interested in whether they were right or wrong than in why they were right or wrong. They were always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable.

Prediction, like medicine in the early 20th century, is still mostly based on eminence rather than evidence. The most famous forecasters in the world are newspaper columnists and television pundits. Superforecasters make for bad media stars. Caution, nuance and healthy scepticism are less telegenic than big hair, a dazzling smile and simplistic, confident pronouncements.

From a review in The Economist of the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

The miracle question

Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

The Beginner's Mind

A child does not know what is not possible and so was open to exploration, discovery, and experimentation. If you approach create tasks with the beginner's mind, you can see things more clearly as they are, unburden by your fixed views, habits, or what conventional wisdom says it is (or should be). 

One who possesses a beginner's mind is not burdened by old habits or obsessed about "the way things are done around here" or with the way things could have or should have been done. 

If you approach a task with a beginner's mind, you’re not afraid of being wrong. The fear of making a mistake, of risking an error, or of being told you’re wrong is constantly with us. And that’s a shame. Making mistakes is not the same thing as being creative, but if you’re not willing to make mistakes then it is impossible to be truly creative.  

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

The Adventure of Living

Our attitude to life is always a reflection of our attitude to God. Saying “yes” to God is saying “yes” to life, to all its problems and difficulties.  “Yes” instead of “no”, an attitude of adventure instead of one of going one strike. In such an adventure we commit our entire being. It is not an escape. We do not have to give up our reason, our intelligence, our knowledge, our facility to judge, nor our emotions, our likes, our desire, our instincts, our conscience and unconscious aspirations, but rather to place them all in God’s hand’s, so that he may direct, stimulate, fertilize, develop and use them. 

Paul Tournier, The Adventure of Living

The view you adopt for yourself 

For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. How does this happen? How can a simple belief have the power to transform your psychology and, as a result, your life? 

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves — in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? . . .

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.

Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Primed for Action

Does your frame of mind before an event make a difference in the outcome? Read this quote from Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink:

Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The 'professor' group didn't know more than the 'soccer' group. They weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a 'smart' frame of mind and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier - in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked - to blurt out the right answer. The difference between 55.6 and 42.6 percent, it should be pointed out, is enormous. That can be the different between passing and failing.

Call it positive thinking or priming or whatever you like, but don't neglect the mental prep before each "big game." Actors must "get in character" by focusing on the task at hand before the curtain rises. In the same way, give your best effort by first dipping your mind in some positive energy.

Stephen Goforth

Finding Happiness

Remember that thin, watery barley or the oatmeal porridge without a single drop of fat? Can you say that you eat it? No. you commune with it, you take it like a sacrament. Like the prana of the yogis. you eat it slowly; you eat it from the tip of the wooden spoon; you eat it absorbed entirely in the process of eating, in thinking about eating - and it spreads through your body like nectar. You tremble at the sweetness released from those overcooked little grains and the murky liquid they float in. And then - with hardly any nourishment - you go on living six months, twelve months. Can you really compare the crude devouring of a steak with this?

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same way with happiness, the very same. Happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

Focusing on the Bright Spots

Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

The Halo Effect

If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person–including things you have not observed–is known as the halo effect. The term has been in use in psychology for a century, but it has not come into wide use in everyday language. This is a pity, because the halo effect is a good name for a common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations. It is one of the ways the representation of the world that system one generates is simpler and more coherent than the real thing.

You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan's generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And that you believe she is generous you probably like Joan eve better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes.

The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increase the weight of the first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

How to be lucky in life

According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human beings consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

David McRaney -read more here