The Wrong Path To Success

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In articles on pop psychology, motivators so often write that everything is possible, if you want to, try, in spite of … And they give examples of different "millionaires from the slums", "hockey" … In order to become like them, you just need to do some effort, so they made it - and everything worked out. This effort is often vague, indistinct, and sometimes, on the contrary, very clear - like an advertisement on an iPhone about the fact that the most successful "someone" reads so much a day.

In this article, I will argue a bit with such categorical statements.

- Yes, everything is possible, but everything is unlikely. Hocking may set a record in the 100m, but not likely. And he is unlikely to get up from the chair if he really wants it, or someone threateningly tells him "get up and go." A lot of people are trying to become champions, and we only see those who have become - this phenomenon is called the availability heuristic. But the “motivational speaker” in our head (or an inner critic?) Says: you see, anything is possible. Which of course is true, but not everything is equally probable. No matter how much a child with cerebral palsy does not train - a couple of rounds with a born high and strong future champion will not survive.

- But people love to create a story about themselves (narrative) where they explain everything for themselves - "I became like this because I tried so hard", "I recovered because I always believed in healing." But in reality it may just be an explanation, because people need an explanation. Or maybe you just got lucky? And, applying their way of achieving success or healing, we just "bang our heads against the wall."

- Success stories are of little use because of the survivor's mistake. When the surviving planes arrive from the bombing, we look at where the shells hit them and try to enhance these details. But we do not have data on those who died - they did not return. But information about them is very important - it would be better to enhance the details that they hit so that they do not fall. In the same way, we know about those who have achieved success, but no less important is information about the mistakes of those who did not achieve it - what they did wrong. Because "so many" pages a day can be read by "unsuccessful" people, but they do something else that, probably, prevents them from achieving success.

- Motivational articles often teach us “wasted effort". For example, young children are known to cry. People who are not very smart once said that they needed to scream in order for their lungs to develop. And that they themselves must learn to calm down. But they cannot calm down, their frontal lobes are not developed. And no matter how threatening they are not to say "calm down", they will shout further. So for a child to calm down, this is an "empty effort" - to do what he does not understand and does not know how to do. But we often create these empty efforts for ourselves, forcing ourselves to do something, and what exactly is unclear. For example, to think positively, but it does not work out - all the time some kind of stupidity creeps into my head. And very often this leads to problems in our emotional sphere. Because we do not own either our thoughts or our emotions, but we try to control them.

“And my friends will ask me what this song is about, and I will answer mysteriously” (c) - about acceptance - about the fact that something in life cannot be achieved by an effort of will. That everything is possible, but not everything is equally probable, and there is no need to prove yourself that you did not become Bill Gates - you cannot become an artist today, but you can paint a picture today. That there is no need to create empty efforts, that in order to change something, sometimes you have to accept the impossibility of changing it right now, and this will miraculously lead to change.

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