1. Make an effort to find your way out but give up fairly early in the process with a “this is too hard”.
2. Put moderate effort into finding one’s way out, but give up at a midway point, perhaps before all one’s energy has been expended.
3. Push yourself continuously, with a never give up mentality until you literally collapse on the ground, dead.

Your answer to this question is important because it will determine how you approach situations that call for enormous effort.  For example, I fall into category 3.  There is no such thing as give up in my vocabulary and while that may sound like an entirely laudable way to go thru life, it does get in the way on more than one occasion.  A head-down-plow-forward approach means that sometimes, ways of doing things with less effort are missed. And, it means that there are times that recognition that the ‘thing is just not going’ and not meant to be, could come sooner and allow for pivoting into an alternative path.

Knowledge Defines the Approach

So knowing which of the three categories you fall into can help guide you to an approach that will allow you to exercise the muscle you personally most need exercised.  For example, I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been doing Bikram Yoga, a 90 minute

yoga class in a 105 degree 40% humidity heated room on a fairly regular basis.  As a true beginner to the practice I recently had the opportunity to be reminded of the category I fall into, when, struggling with round 2 of a particularly contorted pose (each of the 26 poses are performed twice), out of the haze of agony came a thought, quiet at first, but increasingly stronger: “I need a break”.   While it went against my very DNA, I came out of the pose and sat down, caught my breath for a few minutes and rejoined the class at the start of the next set.

For me, ‘my yoga’ was (and continues to be) to go against my nature and acknowledge that I need a break.  For someone in category 1 they may need to ignore early discomfort and plow forward—their yoga may be to develop a stick-with-itness-despite-the-discomfort.  Knowing which category you fall into will help you craft an approach that will allow for continued growth.

I want to challenge this type of thinking that is dependent on the assumption that if I do not specifically and consciously perceive progress in skill development or knowledge acquisition, then I am stuck in place.

Arcing Towards a ‘Click’ Moment

I regularly visit a chiropractor and he has been training a colleague at his practice for the last several months.  The kind of chiropractor I visit is one where the practitioner must diagnose the patient by first making subtle observations about the kind of musculature and breathing rhythms the patient is in that day and then making specific spinal adjustments based on those observations.  It is clear that there are subtle and nuanced observations that must be made in order to diagnose and respond appropriately.

For the last few months, based on conversations that the trainer and trainee have had while treating me and other patients around me, it has been clear that the trainee was struggling to accurately assess the breathing and musculature rhythms.   Many of the conversations were the same month over month as the trainee struggled to pick up on the rhythms.  In talking with him a bit in the office, it did not appear that he had cognitive difficulties and he seemed to be a reasonably smart individual.  Further internet research suggests accurately reading chiropractic rhythms is challenging and requires quite a bit of effort and training.

On one of my recent visits, it was clear something had changed.  The trainee accurately diagnosed the rythms and spoke confidently about what he was seeing.  It was as though something had just ‘clicked’ for him.

Invisible, but not Stagnant

So we think about skill building or knowledge acquisition as a visible, progressive arc.  In reality, while this is often true, it is often analogous to the individual who is observing a construction crew digging, say, a five foot hole for a foundation pylon and pouring concrete into it.  To the observer there is little, if anything visible above ground while in reality all progress is taking place out of sight.

Put another way, in our previous framework of normal progression from concept 1 to 2 to 3, when ‘stuck’, the individual may think themselves hopelessly stagnated at 1, unable to progress to 2. In reality, they may actually be progressing, unaware, from -3 to -2 to -1 (where negative numbers are those steps they are not aware they are progressing through), working towards and past 0, the defining line for when their progress ultimately becomes conscious, much like occurred for our trainee chiropractor who struggled, unaware he was making progress, until finally it just clicked.

Don’t Be Deterred—Progress is Sometimes Unseen

If all of the above is an accurate description of how progress sometimes occurs, I think the takeaways merit some discussion, but the one that seems immediately apparent is that lack of immediately apparent progress on skill building, knowledge acquisition, or perhaps most relevantly, complex system integration (such as a new MD who is trying to synthesize years of training into a cohesive system of practicing medicine, or someone who has started a new job and is struggling to wrap their mind around new processes, people and environment) –this lack of perceived progress should not be a deterrent to the participant because very often we are making progress in ways unseen and are within sight of the finish line where things just ‘click’.

This can sometimes be more difficult than it sounds.   Words can have multiple meanings, tone of voice and body language can be subject to interpretation and the true source of where something came from can be distorted on its trip from the speakers brain to his/her mouth.

Why Does This Matter?

The truth is, in human interaction, knowing the motivations of the person you are interacting with is practically all that matters, and, this is a truth that people inherently know.  Imagine you are walking by someone in your office and their foot sticks out as you walk by and you trip and fall.  If they react by laughing and pointing at you, you might have to be held back from getting up to sock them in the nose.  If they react with an “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry!!” you are likely to graciously brush off the apology and move on.  Same act, entirely different reaction based on your understanding of the source of the act.

Tracing an Act or Statement Back to Its Source

So understanding the source someone is interacting with you from is important.  The better we get at it, the more equipped we are to handle the varied things life throws at us, and the better we will be able to identify how person A usually deals with you versus person B and the more prepared you will be before even coming face to face with them.  But, as we pointed out it can be complicated to sort out the place something is coming from.

The method I have found most helpful in this regard is thinking about where something originates in people (both myself and others) as coming from the back of the brain (as you can hopefully see in my incredibly crude Photoshop job and simplification of the brain segments in the image below).  That is, I can increase my chances of determining the source of an interaction by simplifying its analysis in my own head by asking my imagination to show me visually which part of the brain it sees the interaction as coming from.  Where, I ask, do you see that interaction originating in Bob’s brain?

This method can be especially powerful because as the ‘thought’ travels from its source in the back of the speakers brain through the middle of the brain, through the front of the brain and finally out the mouth, ‘wrappers’ are often added around the thought.  For example, a thought originating from the ‘mean spirited’ part of the brain can be wrapped in a ‘nice’ wrapper as it passes through the middle and front of the brain and out the mouth.  The wrapper can be a distraction to the listener, couching the fact that the comment’s source was mean-spiritedness.  You may not choose to respond to a mean-spirited sourced comment but you are most definitely at an advantage in understanding where the interaction originated.

Why subject yourself to such a thing, you ask? As best as I can tell from internet research and reading a few books on the subject, the combination of the heat and specific yoga postures help stretch the muscles and generally open the body, increasing blood flow to organs etc., and several independent sources claim real health benefits. 

(Of course when it comes to disciplines that ‘maintain’ and ‘promote’ health such as yoga, exercise etc. it can be difficult to quantify/measure scientifically.  From my point of view, therefore, independent assessment of the benefits for these kinds of things comes about from participating in the activity and assessing whether you feel like the claims are legitimate.  I can report that my experiences with Bikram Yoga are a resounding ‘there is undoubtedly something going on here’).

Let’s Set the Question of Physical Benefits Aside

But, I want to set aside the question of the physical benefits from something like Bikram Yoga for a moment and delve into the question of potential side benefits.  The creator of this brand of yoga, Bikram Choudhury, a former yoga champion from India who studied for years with some of the great early yoga gurus, while not without controversy, refers to his 105+ degree yoga studios as ‘Bikram’s Torture Studio’.  Now, I want to think about this statement strictly from its merits—meaning let’s talk about this with the assumption that he knows something we don’t in creating his system the way he did and parse what he might have meant by such a reference.

Confidence Post Difficulty

Back when it was a watchable show, years ago, I remember watching a season of ‘The Apprentice’ and being particularly impressed by one candidate.  For those not familiar with it, The Apprentice is a program that follows several job candidates through an extended interview process for a job that pays $250,000 a year with Donald Trump.  The candidate I am referring to was a West Point Military Academy graduate and he held himself with particular poise, maintaining his composure through difficult situations and most impressively, he clearly had a certain measure of confidence.

Close analysis of the kind of experience West Point provides shows that it includes both tactical and strategic study of military theory along with college type subjects such as algebra and physics.  But it also includes a punishing training/survival program including one particular stretch called “hell week”.

Could there be a correlation between going thru a fairly hellish situation, making it thru to the other side,  and subsequent degree of increased confidence?  Could it be that the creator of Bikram Yoga intentionally created a torture chamber of sorts, pushing the participant to their absolute maximum, beyond anything they thought they might be capable of, specifically so that they might make it to the other side only to find newfound confidence? And, does practicing this process on a regular basis add to one’s internal ‘mass’ of confidence?

(Interestingly, I have universally observed, in an easily repeatable experiment, that although during the class itself the looks on the participants faces—including, without question, my own– is one of pure suffering, once in the locker room after the class, the comments consistently are “wow, that was great”, “man that was good!”.  Notably expressions of relief—“thank goodness it’s over”–are absent.  Rather, participants are commenting on how great it was).

Intelligent Design

At the end of the day I don’t know if Bikram was really so plugged in to the human psyche that in addition to designing a yoga system that has physical benefits, he designed it such so as to reshape the confidence of the participant.  My gut tells me that after years of study with some of the top gurus of India and careful, thoughtful development of his system, describing his yoga studios as ‘torture studios’ was intentional and laden with meaning beyond the vernacular use of the term.

If that is in fact so, and the assumptions we’ve made in this post that getting thru a seemingly impossible experience or set of experiences correlates with increased confidence, the implications are that while one would not ordinarily seek out near impossible life experiences to overcome in order to build confidence because, amongst other reasons it is too risky to do so in ‘real life’ situations such as work and family life, Bikram Yoga offers an opportunity for one to pursue increased confidence and to do so in a low-to-no risk environment.

(I should add that this is not me ‘selling’ Bikram Yoga—I myself remain unsure if I will continue to pursue it–I am merely following our train of thought to its logical conclusion).

Either way, pondering whether getting thru near impossible situations successfully correlates with increased confidence is an interesting exercise and I welcome your comments on the matter below.

The benefits of being an Understater are that when they talk, people listen.  This might be best understood by examining the converse: why people don’t listen when Overstaters talk.

The Brain Shuts Down When Exposed to Overstating

I’d argue that there is an involuntary listening shutdown reflex that kicks in, no different than the one triggered when the doctor whacks your knee with his little hammer, when people overstate.  People hear the “incrediblys”, “unbelievablys”, and “exceedinglys” and a “I’M BEING SOLD” alarm goes off in our heads that closes the brain down and prevents the Overstaters argument from being evaluated on its merits.

Importantly, whether or not the Overstater’s argument has merit is often not relevant to the discussion.  The merit of the argument is often lost in the overstatement of the delivery.  Left uncorrected (as it usually is) the snowball rolls down hill and before long, the Overstater becomes known in the organization as an Overstater and people’s brains shut down from the moment they come in contact with him/her before he/she has even opened their mouth.

Contrast that with the Understater.  The Understater stays away from red alert language, letting the merit of his argument stand on its own, allowing it to permeate the listeners brain, allowing the ‘swaying to his side’ process to occur organically.  By understating his argument he keeps the door to the listeners brain open, giving his argument the best possible chance of getting through.

Becoming an Understater

Hopefully, by now the benefits of being an Understater rather than Overstater are clear. For some people, becoming an Understater will come pretty naturally once they develop awareness of how they speak.  For others, (but never this author *cough*), it is more involved and is a matter of working to change a reflex.

Yet, I wasn’t quite ready to let go, knowing that exercise is really important to her well-being—seemingly even more so that most people.  For some reason, a regular schedule of exercise helps her to maintain her equilibrium in the hectic challenges of modern life.  So I suggested a new way of looking at it: that exercise, for her, was her ‘system’.  That is, in the same way people have different physical appearances, and different personality types, they also have different ‘systems’ that require regular care and attention to help them to maintain their equilibrium. Yes, there are things that apply to most or all such as diet etc but there is often one primary thing that the individual must do regularly to maintain optimal state.   For example, some may require 30 minutes of decompression TV every night or others may require more sleep than most etc.

But, I’d suggest that while identification of one’s ‘system’ is the critical first step towards maintaining equilibrium, there’s more to it than that.  If we really are successful in identifying our system and we really do understand that it is our system, we understand that fighting that reality is pretty anti our own well-being.  If we insist that our car’s ‘system’ does not require the addition of oil to run smoothly, in short order, on the side of the road we will find out that we have tried to fight reality and lost.

Likewise, I proposed to my wife, look at the need to exercise regularly as your own ‘system’, and bend over backwards to build it into your schedule to do so, so as to acknowledge rather than resist your system and thus maintain good health and well-being.

Find your system.  Then accommodate, rather than resist it.

Several months passed and my Amazon purchase frequency probably increased slightly.  But it was one Sunday afternoon when things mentally came together and my families purchase habits changed such that we now make most of our purchases—both those formerly made offline and on—with Amazon.

I had just finished paying the bills and realized we were out of both stamps and envelopes.  Ordinarily, that would be two separate stops for my busy wife during the week (she runs most of the errands in our family with me out of the house a lot between work and the commute).  Then, I realized that what would have previously prevented us from mentally justifying making such a small purchase online versus physically in a store—the shipping costs—were no more.  We made the purchases quickly and easily on Amazon and celebrated the time and hassle we had managed to slice out of her upcoming week.

Now, events like this have become regular in our household.  Smallish purchases that would otherwise have been made in a brick and mortar store because we did not want to pay the extra shipping are now made on Amazon without a second thought.   While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it life changing, it certainly has saved us both time and hassle.  For Amazon, they have earned far more of our business and created positive associations with their brand.

Missed Opportunity

But here’s the thing that Amazon is missing out on.  I sort of stumbled into buying Prime because I finally decided it was fiscally irresponsible to continue to pay the shipping costs when technically the math worked out to more without Prime.  That’s a mathematics choice, and while it may have been the fiscally responsible one, it’s a bad motivator to compel consumers to make a purchase (just ask any insurance salesman).

It took actually having the service and the light bulb going off to make the connection to how significant a lifestyle change Prime was.  I found it by accident.  I might be really dense but I suspect that there are plenty of others out there that might come across Prime and not make that same connection between purchasing Prime and a positive lifestyle change (a highly scientific and rigorous research study of work colleagues at the lunch table the other day suggests this is the case).

So Amazon has this lifestyle-changer in Prime, but they are not doing enough to communicate it to consumers.  In fact, they are currently devoting far more front page real estate to pushing an Amazon credit card than they are to Prime that, once purchased, could turn the buyer into a consumer who turns to Amazon for virtually all their shopping needs.

And, notice how they simply ‘state the facts’ about the Prime service on this landing page rather than communicating how it could be a positive life-style changer:

If we were to speculate about why Amazon is not doing more to flood consumers with messaging about how Prime could be a lifestyle changer (and admittedly, it is speculation) perhaps their Marketing people are suffering from a case of groupthink, where being in the situation they clearly make the mental connection between ‘Free Two Day Shipping’ and ‘lifestyle change’ and therefore assume that everyone else does easily makes the same mental connection.

Nothing Less Than Consumer’s Future Buying Habits at Stake

Why does any of this matter?  Because there’s a tremendous amount at stake, more and more with each quarter that goes by.  Comscore puts e-commerce spending at $41B ($49B during last year’s holiday season) 33% more than only a few short years ago in 2007 (and, this does not take into account the $’s that would arguably shift from households’ brick and mortar purchases to Amazon once they acquire Prime).

Given what’s at stake and how powerful a change removal of the shipping costs barrier would be for many households’ shipping habits, this is an area of focus that requires substantial mindshare for any retailer jockeying for position in the online shopping space.

As such and given that the lifestyle change Prime would bring is a concept better explained in a medium more expressive than a small square on their home page, Amazon should create television advertisements that message this to consumers, showing how Prime is about more than just saving on shipping for what you currently order, establishing the mental link for consumers between purchasing Prime and a positive lifestyle change.  Similar messaging (much more than the current miniscule ‘Join Prime’ directive on the Amazon logo) should be mixed into current web properties.  (Although in their early years they grew organically via word of mouth, Amazon demonstrated a willingness to invest in television advertisements with their recent Kindle tablet launches.  Arguably, there is more at stake and a higher probability of consumer impact by advertising here rather than in the tablet space).

Amazon’s Loss Could Be Walmart, Targets Gain

If Amazon doesn’t go after the opportunity full bore, Walmart  or Target should jump on it, create their own version of Prime, advertise the crap out of it even while sweetening the pot for consumers by also leveraging their physical locations into the service somehow.  Arguments that they would be cannabilizing profits from their physical locations by also now incurring shipping costs they would otherwise not have for in-store purchases are both short-sighted and moot because if the massive growth in e-commerce chart above of the shows anything it’s that consumer purchasing habits are already moving—no, rushing—online.  And, even a moment of reflection about the convenience online purchasing brings busy modern day consumers and the implications an always-connected smartphone in my pocket will continue to bring to online purchase habits, taken together, these facts point to only one thing: it is happening anyway (commerce moving online), so either retailers act now to make a play at becoming *the* retailer consumer move to or be left to fight over the remaining scraps.  To be sure, it will take serious cojones for a Walmart or Target to make such a leap, but it’s the bold companies that recognize the way industry is changing and have the wherewithal to adapt that are left standing in the wake of major consumer behavioral changes.