Keep your eyes on the desired destination or else
a cautionary tale + comparison/contrast
Today we offer an excerpt from Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change by Shawn Achor, a very good book about the preconditions for a joyful and productive life. Here’s Shawn:
One rough, cloudy morning in Maui, I joined a surfing school. There were very few amateur surfers out that windy day, as the water was choppy, but I had never surfed before and was determined to try it before my lecture that afternoon. If positive psychology researchers have one commonly held character flaw, it’s overconfidence in our ability to master new skills almost instantaneously through the power of our minds. Unfortunately, since I’d grown up in Waco, Texas, my sea legs were about as good as a drunk cow’s with vertigo, so I was at a slight natural disadvantage.
After paddling out with me through the increasingly irritable whitecaps, and just before giving me a helpful push toward the breaking wave, the instructor yelled, “It’s oaky to fall, just don’t hit the rocks.” That’s when I saw that the entire beach seemed to be covered by huge boulders, except for a small sandy spot about fifty yards to the right. “Just look at the sandy beach,” he yelled above the ocean spray. “Where you look, the board will take you.” Then he pushed.
A huge swell of water came behind me, and I gripped the board, then pushed myself up. It is with overwhelming pride that I report that I stood up my very first time on a surfboard. Of course, my moment of pride as soon interrupted by a wall of rocks. I would have been smarter to hop off the board, but I was so impressed with my surfing abilities that I kept going, even though I was on a direct trajectory toward the rocks. I knew the instructor had said to look at the sand, but at that moment it seemed to me that the sand did not need to be looked at, the rocks did.
But my instructor had also said, “Where you look, the waves will take you,” and he was right. The wave pushed me fast and hard right at the boulders. I tumbled, my neck hit the rocks just under the water, and I tried to stand up just as my surfboard, trailing behind me on my wrist cord, hit me right in the chest. I was lucky: I could have broken a limb or been paralyzed, but all that was bruised was my pride. When the instructor saw me sheepishly paddling back out to him, he just shook his head and muttered, “Keep your eyes on the sand.” (In my defense, why in the world was a beginners’ class surfing in front of dangerous rocks?)
In my work with companies, I have seen this pattern over and over again. We spend our working lives trying to avoid the rocks, and as a result, we end up steering right into them. The more we focus on the outcomes we fear—losing the client, the merger falling through, not getting promoted, not getting into the school and so on—the more our brains dwell on and process this information, and we end up on a trajectory aimed straight for our pessimistic assumption. And the more our reality conforms to our worst assumptions, the more time and energy our brains spend fearing the words in future outcomes.
I saw this vicious cycle being lived out by a sixty-year-old investment banker from a prestigious firm in New York. We shared a car after a talk at an investment conference in Phoenix. Ten minutes into the ride, he had told me his net worth and had stated that he still worked eighty hours a week. I think he thought I was a workaholic like him (since I told him I traveled all the time for my research and lectures) because he opened up and told me that when he was growing up, his family hadn’t had much money and that their lack of money had caused a lot of strife and had eventually resulted in his parents’ divorcing. His cash-strapped childhood had been so painful, he told me, that he had vowed to avoid repeating it at all costs when he became a father. That’s why he had gone into banking. Yet his fear became all-consuming. He said he constantly felt very anxious about making money to spare his kids the difficult family life he’d experienced. But the more he worried about making money, the more he worked, and the more he worked, the less time he spent with his family. Pretty soon he went from missing piano recitals and baseball games to missing birthdays and other important life events. In the end, his wife couldn’t take it and filed for divorce. He’d kept his eyes on the rocks, and as a result he’d headed squarely toward them.
What we focus on become our reality, which is why it is so important for our brains to focus on real, meaningful, and positive goals. This is true in just about every realm of life you can think of. A top college basketball coach from California once told me that if a layer is thinking, “Don’t miss this shot,” he is almost certainly doomed to miss that shot. Rather, the player should be focusing his brain on what making the shot looks like. Similarly, Jamie Taylor and David Shaw did an experiment where they had participants visualize either making or missing golf putts. Sure enough, those who had mentally envisioned and mentally experienced missing were more likely to miss than those who had visualized succeeding (their scores were significantly worse). No matter what your goal or challenge is, visualizing what success would look like will help steer you to the beach instead of the rocks.
Our S.B. 6 have their eyes too glued to the rocks:
Test scores they don’t like, necessitating a crackdown on curriculum, which must be “narrowed” and “culled”
Corrupt, Svengali teachers that must be reined in by ever more draconian policies
Dangerous books that must be challenged and likely removed by the cartload
Some parents dictating what everyone else’s kids get to read and what teachers can and can’t say or do in the classroom.
We’d prefer they have their eyes on the prize:
Kids loving their schools, where they experience vibrant learning communities
Emphasis on growth, creativity, diversity of learning, opening up the curriculum to serve the kids’ interests as they change and expand
Teachers brimming with enthusiasm, knowledge, and expertise to guide each and every kid to their highest potential
Libraries bursting with new, wonderful, top-quality books that lead kids into a lifelong love of reading
Parents working in partnership with teachers to create optimal conditions for kids to thrive
Which is the more compelling destination?
Their rocks aren’t even real! Let’s all keep our eyes on the beautiful, vibrant schools our kids deserve.
??? Or would you prefer:
