Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life - Review

Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life

The designers of the book cover knew what they were doing. The jacket is a bright yellow with just the word “Curious?” on the front. It worked. I saw the book in the Self-Development section of Barnes and Noble, picked up the book and opened the table of contents. It is subtitled, Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. A bold claim. One that for the most part holds up, although I’d modify the author’s claim somewhat.

Todd Kashdan, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University, says: “My aim in writing this book is to affect you in two ways. First, by showing you how and why curious exploration is integral to a well-lived life. Second, by providing clear strategies for you to become a curious explorer and to extract greater pleasure and meaning from all of life’s moments and to invest in lasting passions and fulfillment.”

Curious? ties to the previous review I wrote of Mindset in which the author distinguishes between the growth and fixed mindsets and Rapt which holds that “Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life” and “You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.” I can see that being curious relates to these other concepts. If we have a growth oriented mindset and we’re able to manage our mind’s attention we are also more likely to employ an open curious approach. Our ability to manage our attention to live a fulfilled life. Being rapt entails being engaged and curious.

Overall I feel the author oversells a bit about the role of being curious. Kashdan implicitly admits this because he touches on the importance of mindfulness. I think one way of keeping the key concepts that the books I mentioned above, including Curious?, is to use this acronym: COME – Curiosity, Objectivity, Mindfulness and Engaged.

Still I recommend Curious? because it does identify a new aspect to living well.

The Power Presenter Review

In earlier reviews I’ve recommended Jerry Weissman’s earlier two books, Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition and In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts. Presenting To Win shows how to structure and design presentations while In The Line of Fire gives advice on how to handle tough questions and answers. His new book, The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy from America's Top Speaking Coach, fills a gap between the first two books: how to actually deliver the presentation. Like the first two books, Weissman’s latest is a worthy addition.

The Power Presenter offers advice I have not seen elsewhere. Most noteworthy is his recommendation for the presenter to think about how the audience is doing to shift the natural focus away from the “How am I doing?” concern that bedevils most presenters. While Presenting To Win talked about designing your presentation by constantly thinking how your presentation will benefit your audience, The Power Presenter tells the presenter to continuously ask how your audience is doing to counter-act the normal concern about how you, the presenter, are doing. This differs from the usual recommended solutions such as visualizing your audience naked or other tricks to distract you away from being concerned about how you are doing.

The Power Presenter also gives unique advice regarding eye contact and the use of pauses. Weissman tells us to make eye contact with one person in the audience, deliver an entire thought to that person, pause while moving on to another person in the audience then deliver a full thought to the new recipient. He contends this approach converts your presentation into a number of one-on-one conversations with the pauses allowing the audience to absorb your points while you take time to formulate your next thought. I haven’t tested this idea yet but I can see how this will make a presenter look confident. I definitely will apply Weissman’s ideas.

Weissman also takes a different approach on a key question every presenter asks: What do I do with my hands? The current thinking, based on a presentation skills class I took at work and observing TV personalities, is to hold your hands together at waist level in front of our body. Weissman instructs us to let our hands drop at our sides in a “touch-and-go position”. This means you drop your hands for an instant, gesture with one or both hands then drop back to the rest position. He claims this method provides several benefits. First, your hands have to travel a longer distance which makes your gestures more pronounced. Second, dropping your hands avoids the hunching of the shoulders produced by the “body wrap position”. Plus there are other benefits. And third, it opens your body to the audience, showing your confidence to face them openly as opposed to protecting your midsection with your arms.

I do want to comment that Weissman never says how he concluded why certain behaviors or gestures work. Is it based on empirical research? His own personal testing? He doesn’t say. His ideas make sense but I find his silence on this subject interesting.

I’m looking forward to using Weissman’s ideas. I’m sure they work if for no other reason than the impressive list of clients Weissman says he has worked with over the years.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallager - Review

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life has a fairly simple premise that is revealed in the book’s subtitle: the quality of your life depends on what you pay attention to. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? But there is more than meets the eye.

Gallager claims that: “Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.”

And,

If you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.

A hidden lies behind this approach. While you cannot control whether you’ll always be happy, due to circumstance beyond your control, you can choose to be focused, which Gallager says, “is the next best thing.”

Paying attention doesn’t mean just focusing on the external world but also to your internal world, in particular to positive emotions which “literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it.”

Paying attention also doesn’t consist just of sitting “rapt” on nothing particular. Gallager incorporates the concept “flow”, originally identified by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, in which the challenge we tackle stretches us a bit. If the task is too easy we drift into boredom; too challenging and we start to feel anxiety. Csikszenmihalyi’s research into rock climbers, artists, etc. found that people found flow when they became absorbed in their work, losing sense of time and even of self.

To live a life filled with raptness Gallager recommends: “The antidote to leisure-time ennui is to pay as much attention to scheduling a productive evening or weekend as you do to your workday.”

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life.

Recently I reviewed the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I believe there is a natural connection between the two approaches. We can strive to be rapt as much as we want but I think our efforts will be thwarted if we have what Dweck calls a “fixed” mindset, the belief that we are saddled with innate talents with little room for development. I think this mindset will make it more difficult to slide into raptness because we’ll be too concerned about avoiding challenges, one of Dweck’s findings about the consequence of having a fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset fear taking on challenges because should they fail it would reveal that maybe their innate talent isn’t as deep or as strong as they believe. And, having a fixed mindset means they can’t do anything about it!

A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believes they can improve and therefore will look for challenges that lead to raptness.

(Just this week I also picked up another book in the same vein: Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life by Todd Kashdan. It will be interesting to see how his ideas mesh with Gallager’s and Dweck’s. Stay tuned!)

Overall, I highly recommend Rapt. It deserves your focused attention.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Review

Do you believe you are born with certain innate talents that can't be changed? Or do you believe your intelligence and other traits can be developed? According to Carol Dweck, Lewis and Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success the first conclusion represents a "fixed" mindset while the second shows a "growth" mindset.

This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. … [T]hey 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.

So what difference does it make if you have a growth versus a fixed mindset? A lot. People who believe growth is possible will “value of challenging themselves and the importance of effort. Our research has shown that this comes directly from the growth mindset. When we teach people the growth mindset, with its focus on development, these ideas about challenge and effort follow. … When we (temporarily) put people in a fixed mindset, with its focus on permanent traits, they quickly fear challenge and devalue effort.”

In addition Dweck claims growth minded people will also be more honest about their weaknesses and failures because this provides valuable information growers can use to improve themselves. Those with a fixed belief will not be as honest about their mistakes because everything hinges on outcome and validation. Failures thus reflect negatively on -- and possibly undercut -- your innate abilities. She cites examples from business such as Enron whose top leadership exemplified the fixed mindset versus other companies whose leaders are guided by a growth-oriented mentality.

In one world – the world of fixed traits – success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other – the world of changing qualities – it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

So how do these conclusions apply in the real world? At work, for example, “Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking imitative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism.”

In relationships, fixed mindsetters believe problems have no cure because change isn’t possible for either party. The only recourse is to place blame or plot revenge. For growth mindsetters, “it was about understanding, forgiving, and moving on.” They still feel pain but not humiliation, the hallmark emotion for someone with a fixed mindset.

For parents Dweck says they can best help their children by teaching them “to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”

Fixed mindset parents, on the other hand, send a different message to their kids. “’We love you – on our terms’ Those with the fixed mindset feel their parents won’t love and respect them unless they fulfill their parents’ aspirations for them.”

Dweck also comments on the ill-advised attempts to help raise grades, test scores and self-esteem by lowering standards. She feels this approach back fires because it ”just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work.” Amen to that! Dweck also sites Benjamin Bloom’s study of world-class performers which revealed, “their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment.”

Because the growth mindset accepts the idea of continual improvement coaches like basketball’s John Wooden strive to help their players to improve through constant preparation with focused effort. As Wooden explains: “You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.”

Or, as Dweck says: “As parents, teachers, and coaches, our mission is developing people’s potential.” You can’t develop talent if you believe your players, kids or employees have a fixed, unchangeable nature.

As you can tell I liked Mindset. I know reviewers are supposed to find something to criticize and I’m sure I’d find something if I looked long enough. However I believe Dweck’s distinction between growth and fixed mindsets provides a key concept that explains many things about how people act and relate to each other. It also gives us invaluable assistance to improve how we work, relate, parent, coach and grow.

The Talent Code Review

Why do some people excel in their fields while others struggle or stagnate? Is it their genes? Their upbringing? Luck? According to Coyle it's none of the above. Three factors help propel people to achieve more than others: deliberate practice, ignition and master coaches.

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. covers a lot of the same ground as Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else but takes a different approach that is broader by spanning the range from basic neurology to coaching techniques. Both books feature the vital role of "deliberate practice", focused effort to improve. Not just doing something repeatedly but also doing something in a targeted manner that drives improvement.

The Talent Code goes a step further to explain why. Repetition causes myelin to grow around neural paths in the brain. This layer of myelin shields the pathway to reduce signal loss and ultimately accelerates and strengthens the signal. Deliberate practice builds myelin while also forcing the practicer to the edge of their ability where mistakes are made. Fixing these mistakes results in strengthening their skill. Although the author doesn't mention it this process also fosters "flow", the state of being so absorbed in an activity that you lose sense of time and of self.

Deliberate practice requires hours and hours of commitment. What motivates people to invest thousands of hours? Ignition: the desire to become who you want to be. (This resembles the ancient Greek concept of daimonism: becoming your ideal self.) These people have a vision of who they want to become: their vision draws them forward.

Practice and fire by themselves aren't quite enough. We need someone to guide us, to push us to the point where we make mistakes then help us correct them. We need master coaches, or "talent whisperers" as Coyle calls them.

These coaches work their magic not with stirring pep talks but with sharply focused, corrective input. When their student does an act correctly they say, "Good, now do this" and pose a more challenging task. He holds college basketball coach John Wooden as an exemplar of this approach. Wooden prefers to present challenges that his players have to solve. If they don't figure out the solution Wooden helps. (I've used this approach in coaching youth and premier league soccer and believe it helps create players who can think for themselves in competition rather than depending on the coach to give them solutions during the game.)

In essence The Talent Code says:

1. To build myelin use deliberate practice (which encourages flow).

2. To maintain motivation follow your ideal self - ignition.

3. To maintain one's course rely on a master coach.

Speaking as someone in his late 50's The Talent Code also has an optimistic message for people like me. You can grow myelin, hence skill, at almost any age. It just takes longer as you get older.

Do Sports Build Character or Express It? Yes!

I’m sure this isn’t an original thought but it is something I’ve concluded based on my ten years of experience coaching soccer. The common saying is that sports build character. I’m sure at young ages when kids first get involved this is true. They’re being taught the importance of teamwork, doing your best regardless of the circumstances, respect for teammates, coaches, your opponents, officials and yourself and the discipline needed to get good at anything.

Having coached kids from 10 to 18 years old I’ve concluded that participation in sports for older ages is an opportunity to express one’s character, to show what one is made of. I’m sure the coach can still exert some influence on older kids but I think these kids are fairly set in their basic principles and beliefs by the time they enter the later teenage years.

Talent is Overrated Review

Most of believe some people “have it” and some people don’t. What the people “have” is talent. Gobs and gobs of talent that allows them to be world class level competitors. People like Tiger Woods or Alex Rodriquez. CEOs like GE’s Jack Welch. Many of us believe that these people come into this world equipped with talent that allows them to beat the competition and that we who don’t have it will never be able to reach these lofty heights of achievement.

Geoff Colvin disputes this in Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. He claims that the top performers in sports, business, the arts and other areas share something in common: the use of “deliberate practice.”

• The gifts possessed by the best performers are not at all what we think they are.

• Even the general abilities … are not what we think.

• The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice.
• Most organizations are terrible at applying the principles of great performance.

What is deliberate practice? The elements are, as Colvin explains.

It is actively designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help. Identify elements that need to be improved then work intently on them. It can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally; … and it isn’t much fun. … We insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over.

Speaking personally, I heard about the concept of deliberate practice in my research on soccer coaching in which I stumbled upon an article on the subject. I applied the concept to tennis, my sport of choice. By working diligently on my weaknesses (primarily the serve) I have been able to transform my serve from a liability into a weapon.

Colvin also addresses another misconception. We’ve heard many times that we with repetition we’ll get to the point where we don’t have to think what we’re doing. While it is true we can automatize complicated movements to the point where we no longer have to consciously guiding these movements. In fact, we can thwart smooth performance by thinking too much. However Colvin shows that:

Great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chose field. … Ultimately the performance is always conscious and controlled, not automatic.

In other words, top performers maintain a constant awareness of whether their actions are producing desired results. When these results don’t occur, they modify what they are doing to improve their results and use this input to refine the design of their deliberate practice.

In addition to being constantly aware of what they are doing, top performers perceive more. How?

• They understand the significance of indicators that average performers don’t even notice.
• They look further ahead.
• They know more from seeing less.
• They make finer discriminations than average performers.

And top performers “had more knowledge about their field.” They “have better organized and consolidated their knowledge, enabling them to approach problems in fundamentally different and more useful ways.”

In addition to explaining how top performers use deliberate practice to distance themselves from their competitors Colvin shows how we can use the same principles in our own lives.

They approach the job with more specific goals and strategies, since their previous experience was essentially a test of specific goals and strategies; and they’re more likely to believe in their own efficacy because their detailed analysis of their own performance is more effective than the vague, unfocused analysis of average performers. Thus their well-founded belief in their own effectiveness helps give them the crucial motivation to press on, powering a self-reinforcing cycle.

Finally, Colvin explores the role of two kinds of drive: intrinsic and extrinsic. According to his research creative people focus on the task (How can I solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?). This is an example of intrinsic motivation, being driven from within. Extrinsic motivation on the other hand depends on outside factors like rewards or penalties.

Does Colvin argue that extrinsic motivation plays no role? No.

Extrinsic motivators that reinforce intrinsic motivation could work quite effectively. Like what? Recognition that confirms competence turned out to be effective. … ‘constructive, nonthreatening, and work-focused rather than person-focused,’ in Amabile’s words. That is, feedback that helped a person do what he or she felt compelled to do was effective.

Feedback from coaches and teachers focused on the task and doing it better.

Lastly Colvin reveals that the majority of childhood prodigies don’t grow up to be top performers and that top performers are rarely child prodigies. This gives us hope for improving how we perform. “[B]y understanding how a few become great, anyone can become better.”

The Meaning of Success

I reviewed The Happiness Trap last summer.  Subsequently I signed up for the newsletter issued by Russ Harris. The latest one contains some interesting comments on the "success trap."

The “Success” Trap 
What does the word “success” mean to you? When you hear “She is very successful” or “He’s made a success of himself” what does that conjure up for you? Our society generally defines success in terms of achieving goals: fame, wealth, status, respect; a big house, a luxury car, a prestigious job, a huge salary. When people achieve these things, our society tends to label them as “successful”. But if we buy into this popular notion of success, we set ourselves up for a lot of unnecessary suffering. 

How so? Well, this view of success inevitably pulls us into the goal-focused life - always striving to achieve the next goal: more money, larger house, better neighborhood, smarter clothes, slimmer body, bigger muscles, whiter teeth etc. And the illusion is, “When I achieve this, then I will finally be successful”. And of course, the corollary of that is “When I am successful, I will be happy.” The problem is: a) we may never achieve those goals, or they may be a long way off – which leads to chronic frustration and disappointment; and b) even if we do achieve them, they will not give us lasting happiness; usually they give us a brief moment of pleasure, satisfaction, joy – and then, we are focusing on the next goal. 

Furthermore, if you buy into this notion of success, it will put you under tremendous pressure - because you have to keep on achieving and achieving to maintain it. As long as you keep achieving those goals, then you are successful - ‘a winner’, ‘a high-achiever’. But if you stop achieving, then you are no longer successful; you are a ‘has-been’, or ‘a failure’ or ‘a loser’. It is this popular notion of success that leads to the widespread issue of “fragile self-esteem”. Fragile self-esteem is very common in high-performing professionals. These high-achievers often develop a strong positive self-image based on their performance. So as long as they perform well, they have high self-esteem. But as soon as their performance drops, their self-esteem comes tumbling down: from ‘winner’ to ‘loser’, from ‘high-achiever’ to ‘failure’. 

In The Happiness Trap, I suggested an alternative definition of success: success means living by your values. If we redefine success in this way, it makes life so much easier – because in any moment, we can act on our values – even though our goals may be a long way off. Suppose you want to change career and become a cardiac surgeon – well, you are looking at a minimum of ten years of your life before you can achieve this goal. That’s a long time. But suppose the core value underlying that goal is to help others. Well, you can act on that value over and over and over, all day, every day for the rest of your life – even if you never become a cardiac surgeon. 

By the conventional notion of success, Martin Luther King was not successful: he did not achieve his goal of equal rights for people of all skin colors. And yet – we remember, admire and respect him. Why? Because he stood for something: he lived by his values! And when living by our values becomes the definition of success, it means we can be instantly successful right now. All we need to do is act on our values. From this perspective, the mother who gives up her career to act on her values around nurturing and supporting her children is far more successful than the CEO who earns millions but completely neglects his values around being there for his kids. 

Albert Einstein put it this way: ‘Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.’ 

And Helen Keller put it like this: ‘I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.’ 

So next time your mind is beating you up for not being successful enough, try saying ‘Thanks mind!’ And then ask yourself ‘What’s a tiny little thing I can do right now, that’s consistent with my values?’ Then go ahead, and do it. And therein lies the secret of ‘instant success’. 

The Pursuit of Unhappiness

A lot of my reading centers on well-being and living a good life. In this vein I just started reading The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being, by Daniel W. Haybron. He makes a distinction between the approach the ancient Greeks took toward happiness and well-being versus that of the Enlightenment that I have not encountered before. I feel it is worth highlighting this difference before finishing the book. I plan to write a review after reading it. Below are several key quotes from early in the book. (Note these quotes are not contiguous.)

The ancients apparently took it as a given that individuals are not, in general, authorities about their own welfare. Quite opposite: most ancient philosophers followed Socrates’ lead in distinguishing ‘the many’ and ‘the wise,’ with the former and much larger class being, basically dolts. Aristotle notoriously maintained that some of us are so ill-fitted for self-governance that we are better off enslaved, with masters to look after us.

The spirit of modernity is rather different. Inspired by Enlightenment optimism about the individual’s powers of reason and self-government, modern liberals tend to believe in one or another form of the sovereignty or authority of the individual in matters of personal welfare: by and large, people know what’s best for them, and tend to act rationally in the promotion of their interests.

But what if it turns out that people don’t have this kind of authority? What if they frequently and predictably make serious mistakes about what matters in life, act irrationally, or otherwise err in ways that undercut their prospects for well-being? What if, as a result, they tend to botch their lives at an alarmingly high rate, in many cases being unwitting pursuers of unhappiness?

The central thesis of this book is that people probably do not enjoy a high degree of authority or competence in matters of personal welfare.

I’m sure the rest of The Pursuit of Unhappiness will flesh out the empirical case for Haybron’s thesis. I’ve read other books that report results of various studies which reveal the inability of the average person to recognize the effects of genetics, temperament, and subjectivity on decision-making. To me these findings don’t prove it is impossible to be objective, just that it’s work. Sometimes it’s hard work!

In any case, I’ll write more on this interesting book when I’ve finished it. Wanted to throw out these quotes as thought provokers.