You can read an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal of my new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
Excerpt here
As I write this, my book is the #1 seller on Amazon.com in the categories of career guides and also motivation. That should worry you.
Book Link
What’s the difference between a typical religious view of God versus a skeptical view in which there is nothing to the universe but matter and the laws of physics?
Answer: personality
The religious view is that God has a personality of sorts, albeit one that is often unfathomable. And that means God has some sort of intentions, ambitions, goals, or whatever the God version of those impulses might be. If God had none of those impulses, he would just float in space doing nothing.
The problem with the idea that God has a human-like personality is that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize. For example, I might be kind to others because I want them to be nice to me, or perhaps I simply feel guilty when I’m not nice. God wouldn’t have feelings of guilt and he wouldn’t need a strategy just to be loved. He would have everything he needed all the time. Logically, God couldn’t have a personality in the sense that humans do because our personalities are expressions of our defects and our DNA and our neediness.
For example, if you’re ambitious, that’s a romantic way of saying you’re afraid of failure, or you’re greedy, or you want to impress someone. God would not need any of that. Pick any human personality trait and it is either trivial or it is based on some sort of human limitation.
Even your sense of humor is based on a brain limitation. As a professional humorist, I make my living by writing thoughts that the normal human brain can’t process without a hiccup that triggers a laugh response. God wouldn’t have a sense of humor because he always knows how the joke ends, and no idea gives him a hiccup when processing a thought.
You can pick any personality trait and find the human defect that is behind it. Are you a highly social person? It probably means you have a fear of being alone, or you’re so needy that you have to have the approval of others to feel right. Would the creator of universe have social needs? It seems unlikely.
If you agree that God wouldn’t have a human-like personality and human-like needs and ambitions, you end up with a God who is indistinguishable from the sum of the laws of physics.
Language is part of the problem. Did God personally dictate every word in the holy books, or did the laws of physics guarantee that the particles in the universe would bump around until those books were written by someone? If you take away the human personality from God - because it makes no sense that he would have one - then God can still be the “author” of the holy books because he is the sum of all physical laws in the universe. The only difference between a religious and a skeptical interpretation is the choice of words.
My question of the day is this: If you believe in a traditional God, what personality traits do you think he or she possesses that are not based on defects?
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My new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, will be released October 22nd but you can preorder on Amazon.
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I have a hypothesis that emotional intelligence is a function of imagination. In other words, your ability to imagine the future is what drives your decisions today. If your imagined future looks like a big foggy nothing, you might as well enjoy today because tomorrow is unknowable. But if you can vividly imagine your future under different scenarios, you’ll make hard choices today that will, you hope, get you to the future you imagine and want.
You probably saw a news item in which people were shown digitally aged pictures of themselves and asked how much money they were going to save for retirement. The people who saw older versions of themselves saved more. The digitally aged photos were like a substitute for imagination. So we have one data point that is consistent with the hypothesis that imagination is the key to emotional intelligence.
I had intense stomach aches for all of my waking hours during my childhood. I didn’t know it at the time, but my body doesn’t digest dairy or meat well, and I tended to have both of those things with every meal. I spent some part of almost every day doubled up in a fetal position. As an adult, I discovered that adjusting my diet was enough to eliminate my stomach problems. But during my childhood I would withdraw into my imagination to divert my thoughts from the pain. I’ve always wondered if all of that intense imagining made a permanent difference in my brain.
I can imagine the future so vividly that I was planning my retirement before I was out of grade school. That’s literally true. Thanks to my clearly imagined future it seemed easy to modify what I was doing on any given day to make my dreams come true in the future. Today we call that sort of discipline emotional intelligence. At the time it felt like nothing more than a vivid imagination. Perhaps imagination and emotional intelligence are closely related.
This is an important idea because emotional intelligence is highly correlated with success, and I would be surprised if it wasn’t a primary cause. So I wonder if imagination, like most other mental processes, can be improved with practice. If so, it would seem we have a direct lever for improving a person’s emotional intelligence.
If you know some teens, ask them what they see for their future. Some kids will give you a detailed roadmap of their future career plans. I believe those kids imagine their future somewhat vividly and have started their planning early. Other teens seem to have no imagination of their own future and they act recklessly today because they don’t see a compelling reason to plan for the unknown.
If imagination is the foundation of emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is the biggest factor in success, shouldn’t we be training kids to better imagine their futures?
I would think that generic imagination skills alone would not be enough; one needs to imagine oneself in the future. Schools could create assignments in which kids are asked to write stories about their lives in the future. Or they could be asked to draw themselves as adults with their own kids, jobs, and homes. I have a hunch that sort of exercise would make a difference.
If you subscribe to the superstition of “will power” you might believe emotional intelligence is something that you either have or you don’t. Perhaps you think the people who succeed have more of this magic thing called will power because they make hard choices today to improve their lives tomorrow. But will power is an illusion. People simply choose the path that looks best at the moment. And the moment is partly influenced by your imagined future. If you sharpen your imagination of your future, your preferences today might change, and to observers it will seem as though you have will power and emotional intelligence.
Perhaps the link between imagination and emotional intelligence is another reason role models are so important. A role model is a proxy for your imagination. It’s easier to imagine having the life of someone you know than it is to imagine your own unknowable future.
I’ve written quite a bit about something called affirmations, which is a process in which you imagine your own preferred future at least once a day, usually by writing down your objectives multiple times. If the process of imagining your future helps you make hard choices today, it will seem to observers as if you have lots of emotional intelligence.
Does your common sense tell you that vividly imagining your preferred future improves your emotional intelligence today? I give that hypothesis an 80% chance of being right. What odds do you put on it?
I write a length about affirmations in a chapter of my new book, due out October 22nd, titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
I’m planning to do a week of blogging on the topic of success, as part of a lead up to the release of my book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
And so I wondered if you’d like to cue me up with specific topics in the area of success/failure. Is there any accepted wisdom in that field that you’d like to see confirmed or destroyed?
0 CommentsA friend recently asked for advice on how to get started writing a book. I often get that question. You might have an idea for a book, and all the writing skill you need, but how do you go from idea to implementation? It’s a deceptively difficult step.
Part of the problem is that writing a book is the loneliest job in the world, and an immense amount of work. It’s hard to get started on a project so daunting. My new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, took two years to write. For most of that time, no one but me saw any part of it. My publisher and I have a long history, so he lets me run free after the general concept for the book is nailed down. I probably worked for 18 months without anyone else seeing a word of it.
Ask yourself if you could work on a project for 18 months without a single positive word of encouragement, and without really sharing with anyone the thing you have been immersed in day after day. Sure, I often mentioned the book project to friends and family. And I often talked about topics I planned to include. But usually I got blank stares in return. The thing with a well-designed book is that it only works in full form. Any chapter or topic out of context just lays there. I wanted to talk with friends about my writing, but doing so was impractical because it required a book-length explanation.
For nearly two years I plugged away on a collection of ideas around my theme and I have to say that none of it worked until the next-to-last round of edits. With my layered writing process, success tends to be binary. The book is a lifeless bunch of ideas until the moment it isn’t. As a writer, you hope that moment comes, but you can never know for sure. This is yet another case in which my natural inclination for optimism comes in handy. I tell myself I can smell a book before I can see it. I know it’s in me; I just need to write until I find it. I’m not entirely sure if I am intuitive or irrational, or even if those things are different.
If you’re planning to write a book, ask yourself if you are the type of person that can spend that much time completely alone, doing unpleasant work, while receiving nothing in the way of encouragement or positive feedback along the way. You won’t even know if anyone will read your book when you’re done. If you answered “Yes, I can do that,” I recommend these steps:
Step 1: Open a Word document and give it a name. If you don’t have a title yet, choose a working title. Close your empty document and walk away. You have successfully completed step one. It’s important to feel a sense of progress. I start every book exactly this way.
Step 2: You’ve probably been thinking for a long time about the content for your book, and more ideas will come to you. Take notes in bullet form. Every few days, add those notes to your document. Just get them on paper. If your topic is interesting, at least to you, this step will energize you and get the ideas flowing. Your notes should be coming faster and faster over the next few weeks as the ideas build on each other.
Step 3: Once you have several pages of brief notes, start separating them into logical groups. Those groups might become chapters later, but for now it’s just a way to keep ideas organized. When you add ideas, put them in the groups they belong or start new groups.
Step 4: In about a month, one of two things is likely to happen. You’ll either lose interest in your own book idea, because your collection of ideas isn’t as compelling as you hoped, or you’ll feel a compulsion to start writing. If you don’t feel the compulsion after a month of compiling notes, walk away. I only write a book when the urge to communicate its message becomes stronger than my desire for leisure. Writing a book is terrifically hard work with no guarantee of a payoff. You can’t drag a book into existence; the book has to drag you.
Once you’re committed to writing the book, you need a process that works for you. Every writer is different, but I’ll tell you my process as a starting point. I write in layers, roughly like this:
1. Layer one (first draft) involves writing as fast as I can and getting the ideas in sentence and paragraph form. My first drafts tend to be dry and descriptive, and full of redundancies and broken logic. That’s okay for the first draft.
2. Layer two is where I start connecting the logic, putting topics in the best order, removing redundancies, and identifying my most powerful themes. At this point, the draft starts to make sense.
3. Layer three involves writing and rewriting the first chapter until I have the voice and tone I want for the rest of the book. I might rewrite my first chapter thirty times. And when the book is mostly done, I go back and rewrite it a few more times. In terms of importance, both to the writer and the reader, the first chapter is about ten times more important than any other.
4. Layer four involves engineering the wording throughout the book to produce the right sort of emotional response in the reader. At that point I might rewrite nearly every sentence in the book, keeping the meaning the same but changing how it feels when you read it. My latest book is about the topic of success so I packed it with words and concepts that are energizing by their nature. Every sentence in a book needs to have a consistent flavor and feel. When I write humor, I try to make every third sentence a light or funny payoff. And I avoid downer words such as the names of diseases while packing in lots of inherently funny words such as yank, buttocks, Satan, squirrel, and the like.
5. Layer five is when the editors get involved. The first time my editor sees the book, she makes high-level comments about which chapters work better than others, how the ordering of topics is working, how the tone feels, and that sort of thing. No one cares about grammar or sentence structure yet. Once I make the editor’s suggested changes, or in some cases argue them away, this is generally the point at which the book becomes alive. For the first time, I can reread it and say, “This actually works.” That’s a good day.
6. Layer six happens after my editor is happy with the basic flow of the book. Now a second editor - a copy editor - goes over the writing in detail and fills my pages with notes and corrections. It’s a humbling process. After I make those changes, the book is generally done.
All writers have their own process. Now you know mine. The only other thing I would add is that for most people, writing works best in the early morning or late night. I’m writing this piece at about 5 AM. If you aren’t a morning person, try the late night approach.
Good luck!
My prediction is that Apple is going to enter the banking business and disrupt the heck out of it. I sure hope so. I’d switch my account to an Apple Bank on the first day of business if they did it right, and they probably would.
The fingerprint technology on the new iPhones is the first step. Once Apple controls the process of identifying a customer, both by fingerprint and possibly by physical location of the phone, it will have the first phase of a stranglehold on banking.
Retail banking is the most tangled rat’s nest of a legacy system that civilization has ever known. Nothing really compares in terms of how it touches nearly every citizen (or should) and how user-unfriendly it is. Compare the potential of an Apple Bank to the potential of a crappy me-too Apple wristwatch. Now ask yourself if Apple thinks small.
Lately Apple has been too quiet, and probably not because Jobs has shed his mortal coil to become pure energy, or whatever it is that he negotiated with the universe. I think Apple has something big planned, and it isn’t television and it isn’t a watch, although they might take a run at those products too.
Online banking and banking apps are big improvements over the old process of walking into a branch bank. But we’re still clearly in the Sony Walkman phase of where online banking needs to be. It should take three seconds to pay a bill online, not five minutes. I should be able to send money to anyone on my contacts list in seconds. I should never need to carry credit cards and ATM cards again.
Why do you have to fill out so much paperwork to apply for a loan when all of your records already exist somewhere in the cloud? My Apple Bank would know everything about me, including my credit worthiness, at all times. If I want a loan I should have it in less than five seconds from the time I put my thumb on my phone.
I don’t think I need to describe all of the inefficiencies with the current banking system. You get the idea. In my view, the marriage of smartphones with banking represents the largest market opportunity in history. Would Apple stay out of that business just because entering would be hard? I don’t think so.
Disclosure: I own some Apple stock. I often wish I didn’t.
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