Highly Effective To The End

Ferriss and Covey. They are both bald.

Stephen Covey died July 16th.  I read it first on Facebook. A friend posted the news on my wall. I felt a pang of sadness and Googled the news. A brief article on CNN reported that he'd died, at 79, due to complications following a dreadful bike accident a few months ago. Must have been a difficult few months for him and his family. He died, the report said, surrounded by his wife, children, and grandchildren, as he'd always wanted.

Of course he did, I thought. Of course he managed to die the way he wanted to. He was Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His Habit #2 is Start With the End in Mind. Literally, as I explained in this post. His last moments had to be successful. And they were.

This made me feel good.

I wondered what I could say about him besides, "Thank you for increasing my blog's page hits every time I mention you.  I've enjoyed poking fun at you, but I've also admired your willingness to put principles and values at the center of what you do."

But what else could I say? Then a friend of mine sent me Frank Bruni's article from yesterday's NYTimes. Frank Bruni, I recall, used to be a food critic. Now he's an op-ed pundit, which means that now, instead of food, he critiques whatever he wants. Fine. Bruni responds to an article in the Sunday Travel section about Tim Ferriss and the fancy clothes he takes when he travels, and the way he gets around rules to make life sweeter for him. Tim Ferriss, for those who live under a rock, is a lifestyle guru. His books, the 4-Hour Body and the 4-Hour Work Week, the latter with a subtitle about getting rich, have sold millions.

I am proud to say I've read none of them. However, I have read whatever the New Yorker has written about him, and I did see that Travel spread. As did Frank Bruni. And it pissed him off. Bruni pinpointed for outrage two travel tactics Ferriss adopts. The first: putting a starter pistol in his luggage, if he's going to have to check it, because any kind of gun in a suitcase will attract attention to it--and the airline will never lose it. (Don't do this on international travel or they'll try to lock you up with your suitcase--book possibility: the 4-Hour Interrogation). The second: instead of paying for airport parking, just let your car rack up parking tickets on the street. You'll pay less for the tickets than for the garage.

Okay, I'll admit it. I liked the jacket Ferriss was wearing, and until I realized who the article was about, I thought maybe I could afford one like it. I'll also admit that I thought the starter pistol in the suitcase was an audacious, but kind of funny, idea. Frank Bruni, however, set me straight, fulminating that sure, go ahead and cause concern and mayhem behind the scenes at the airport, as long as it benefits you. He says, "Don’t pay for airport parking, he [Ferriss] advised in The Times, if the accrued tickets from leaving your car on the street won’t be as expensive. Sure, you’re unlawfully hogging a space someone else might make legal use of; maybe you’re thwarting street sweepers, too. Not your problem. A conscience is for chumps." 


Readers, I was chastened. I was sorry I'd been amused. And I agree with Frank Bruni that Ferriss, guru of the year, has made millions off of the principle of getting the most for yourself, damn the consequences to others.

Can you imagine what Stephen Covey would say about him? Upon what are Ferriss's principles centered? Luckily for us, there's an appendix at the back of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to help us. Covey lists about a dozen possible centers for your life--Friends, Spouse, Money, Family, Work--and the way these various centers can skew your values and therefore your behavior and your life.... A quick scan leads me to Self. If your self is your center, then your principles are centered on the need to justify anything that serves your best interest, and are "adapted to need." In other words, they are amorphous, flexible, and are therefore not really principles at all.

Covey's appendix continues with Church and Principles as other possible life centers. All of these possible principle-centers, according to Covey, lead us astray, except one. Principles. So even though he's a member of a church, Church is not the Covey-approved center for life. It's principles. Which is why, really, we can admire Covey, or hate him, but we can't say he's trying to shove his particular church, the Mormon one, into the center of our lives. He's aiming for something universal. This is the polar opposite of what Bruni describes as Ferriss's "epic narcissism."

As for Ferriss, I've already admitted I haven't read his books. I am responding to Frank Bruni's response to an article about him. Maybe Bruni is wrong about Tim. I doubt it, though. I am curious to see if, eventually, Tim Ferriss re-evaluates his life, and finds a principled Principle-center for it. In the meantime, I guess we've got Frank Bruni to help us. And he's not even bald yet. I wonder if he's read Stephen Covey? At least we've still got his book.

Find the Motive, Another Facet of Goal Pursuit

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Do you see yourself as trying to be good or as getting better? Heidi Grant Halvorsen, PhD, wants to know.

Is this a trick question? You bet. If you see yourself pursuing goals to prove you're good--or great--at something, then you get the big red buzzer. You may indeed achieve your goals, but your life will be h-e-double toothpicks. As the polite like to say. Since I'm not that polite, I'll just say it. Wrong. Buzz. You have chosen the wrong motive and your life will be full of misery.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

Perhaps I do not.

Try it. Say, "I want to publish a book so everyone will say how talented I am."

Buzz! Wrong answer.

Say, "OMG! I got an A last test, but only a B+ this time--I must not be that smart. I think I'll develop an anxiety disorder, or perhaps an eating disorder."

Buzz! Wrong answer.

Just in case you didn't get the message in my previous posts, here it is. If you've been buzzed by the big red buzzer (and no, it's not that red Staples buzzer, it's more like the buzzer in Family Feud), then you're headed for trouble. Perhaps this sounds familiar. It is. HGH, PhD, is offering another way of looking at the mindset theory. If you're pursuing some goal to prove you're good enough, you're great enough, and people love you, then you're motivated by a fixed or entity mindset. This mindset's downside is that your self image becomes attached to having achieved --whatever--and therefore the risk of losing it threatens your sense of yourself as worthy.  If your motive is that you're going to show those bastards, then you're going to be too busy shoring up your self image to handle bumps and derailments in your path.

Bumps and derailments being the general rule in life, instead of the exception, it's much better to save those be good goals for straightforward things. I'm having a little trouble thinking of something straightforward. Which is the point. But the be good goal, the fixed mindset, works when you can just plug in numbers and check the math. Otherwise, you want to motivate yourself by the desire to improve. That way, the growth mindset way, also known as the incremental way, you can still feel good when a gigantic tree falls across the road, because you figure out how to deal with it. (Climb over it, go around it, chop it up and haul it away.) As HGH, PhD, says, "Whenever possible, try to turn your goals from being good to getting better....When your emphasis is on what there is to learn rather than what there is to prove, you will be a lot happier and will achieve a lot more."

So file away those SAT scores you remember from 30 years ago and roll up your sleeves. Why? Because people motivated by getting better/growth/incremental thinking

• Don't give up when the going gets tough
• Enjoy themselves more
• Deal with depression and anxiety better

Now I think we've polished every facet of that particular theory to perfection. Look! I can see myself!

What a Tangled Webinar We Weave....*

Sir Walter Scott lived here.
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I'm still mad at myself. One of the bloggers I've been reading for a while recommended a webinar by someone he's been following for a while. Since the webinar was about increasing your blog's readership, I thought, what the hey-ho, I'll give it a try.

Now the business success gurus like Mr. Dale Carnegie came up with this idea that you've got to give something to get something. In retail, this is known as the loss-leader theory of success and it is straightforward. You offer some product free, or at a huge discount, to get people in the door of your shop--or shoppe, if you're sophisticated. Getting them in the door once, even if it means you don't earn top dollar off that customer the first time, builds loyalty, etc, etc, and makes it more likely they'll come back to your business next time they need something you sell, and they'll pay full price for it.

In other types of business this give-to-get theory works more abstractly. Maybe you offer a free class, or take up a philanthropic cause and spend time you could be raking in the dough working on that cause, with a little advertising of your business on the side. Plus you're there, a representative of your business, doing this philanthropic work, and therefore your business becomes linked with charity, honor, and integrity, which might lure more people there. Give-to-get.

The abundance success gurus like Deepak Chopra also subscribe to this give-to-get theory. Waters are murkier here, but the idea is that once you start "giving" then you start "receiving." All of which is explained in metaphysical terms both flowing and vague, so that trying to understand them is like trying to get a clear picture of yourself reflected in the water.

What I mean by that analogy is that getting a clear picture of yourself reflected in water is nearly impossible. Even this stillest ponds have their water striders creating ripples. The image is always a little distorted. Distortion is good business for the mystical-spiritual-abundance theorists (Deepak Chopra, for example), because then things are open for interpretation. Like what exactly they mean by "abundance." Or "giving," or "receiving." Most of us choose to comprehend abundance as quantities of lucre. I'm just being honest. But the abundance gurus squirm out of that definition by saying it's much more--or less--or different--than material gain. It's an internal sense of abundance.

I have no problem with either actual, material abundance, or an internal sense of it. Don't get me wrong here--which I doubt you are, if you know me, or read me regularly.

What I do have a problem with is people who try to shimmy their way around the give-to-get thing by pretending they're actually giving something, when what they're actually doing is getting, getting, getting. There are a lot of people out there trying to succeed in a material way who've absorbed this gotta give to get thing. And they're all on the internet. Many of them have blogs. Lots of these blogs are about how to write, or how to write good blogs, or how to blog, and therefore how to write good blogs. Their blogs start out seeming interesting, but turn into repacking the same old stuff, and then turn into sales pitches for their ebooks, which turn into sales pitches for their talks. Because, let's be honest here, they all want to be rich and ingenious enough to give a TED talk, but have to settle for JrTEDxx. So they decide that they can follow the give-to-get rule of success by GIVING a webinar, and hopefully starting on the road to GETTING a TED talk.

Mostly, I avoid these people. However, readers, I got sucked into one last week. It was about how to develop your blog's readership, and I read about it on a blog by someone who blogs and writes ebooks about how to write.

I'm still mad at myself, because I wasted sixty whole minutes of my afternoon on this webinar. This webinar promised to teach me 7 Foolproof ways to increase my blog's readership. Forty-five minutes into this webinar, created by someone who looks like he could be my son and talks like every salesman you've ever avoided most assiduously, I had one (1) foolproof way to increase my blog's readership. Then I learned what I'd been realizing for the last 30 minutes, that for a certain (undisclosed until the last minute of the webinar) sum, I could sign up for a series of these webinars to learn the other 6 methods.

Now, I'm not saying that one tip was stupid. It was actually kind of interesting. It was an instruction to only present one idea per blog post, along with a graphic illustration of a way to format the blog post. However, it took all of (I'm being generous here) 5 minutes to present both the idea and the format. Meanwhile, it wasn't until that 46th moment that the creator of the webinar mentioned that this webinar and all his information was directed towards businesses and bloggers who want to sell something, and not to writers.

And then--and I have only myself to blame for this--I listened to the last fourteen minutes of this webinar.  Now, I justify this additional waste of fourteen of my life's precious minutes as research. Research into the sheer audacity of this webpreneur in diapers; research into the way many of these self-help success books are applied by up-and-coming would-be successes; research into the expanded sales pitch. Mostly, however, I wanted to know how much this brazen young man planned to charge for the other 6 Foolproof methods.

Perhaps I ought to hold off on revealing his price until my next blog post. After all, I've already given you a couple of tidbits of information. However, since I've already failed to apply the 1 Foolproof method of attracting readers that I learned at this webinar, I might as well give it up right here.

Ready?

He was selling his other 6 points for $500. That's right. Another six hours of filler with a couple of pointers thrown in for $500.

Which just goes to show, there's no such thing as Foolproof. I am here to tell you that.


*"Oh, what a tangled web we weave...., etc" by Sir Walter Scott.

Control Freaks Know How to Do It Better

I don't think of myself as a control freak. I mean, if I were, would that book, If You Don't Know Where You're Going, You'll Probably End Up Somewhere Else, keep popping up behind my eyes--ding!--like the dollar sign in an old-fashioned cash register? This book, by David Campbell, is still available, by the way. As I think I've mentioned before, my fancy prep school in Washington, DC, ran a career seminar for us seniors and gave us each a copy. I've never forgotten it. Apparently. Buy a copy and send it to an artsy, confused high school senior with low self-esteem and see how it helps her in life.

I don't think of myself as a control freak, because if I were, I'd have mastered all the concepts in that book and applied them to my life, which would have gone onward and upward from that moment in a blazing path of accomplishment. Ahem.

I don't think of myself as a control freak, because I know a lot of them, and they tend to accomplish things, whereas I get enmeshed in them. Novels, books, relationships, emotional states. And because they tend to be able to get people to listen to them.

I don't think of myself as a control freak, although I'm practically gnawing my hand off to stop myself from texting the upcoming 9th grader about her toe. Again. That would be the other hand, by the way, because one has already paid the price of my lack of control.

Why the agita over the toe? Long story, moral of which is, MOM WAS RIGHT BUT NO ONE LISTENED. Upshot of which is, 13 year old is away at an intensive ballet program with a hurt big toe and no one to make her ice it, check in with the nurse, or rest it if needed. By intensive I mean 5 weeks of dancing at least 5.5 hours a day, sometimes more, 5 days a week, plus Saturday mornings, just so you know I'm not exaggerating.

Oh yes, I am dying to get into the details of how it is I am so right and also so ignored, but never mind. I must take my victory as it comes: too late. I plan to lord it over the others if a similar situation arises in the future, but of course, as Samuel Johnson said, regret is useful if you can apply the lesson learned from it to the future, but you almost never can. Sigh.

So instead, I will ask myself, and you, readers, why I am not a control freak? Is it because I am unsure. Yes, I think that is it. I am unsure. Usually unsure. I see the virtues of several sides of a situation. I am unsure which path to take in the wood, so I hang around exploring the foliage at the nexxus instead of forging ahead boldly. I get a close up view of the flora that way, which is nice, but I'm not exactly blazing a trail, am I?

But then I must ask the follow-up question. If I were a control freak, would I be any better at getting the 13 year old to check in with the nurse, ice her toe, and exercise good judgement about how much she uses it? The long arm of Mother might reach a little further into her brain; but she is 13, and so are her friends, and she'd be bound to figure out that it really can't control her from New York State when she is in Pennsylvania.

The answer is no.

No, I can't control her. No, I can't control much of anything, in fact. And you know what, even if I did know where the heck I was going twenty (thirty?) years ago, I might've ended up somewhere else anyway.

Perhaps I am a spiritual master after all. That last paragraph, short as it is, contains wisdom, does it not? Perhaps I have trod the path of No-Path, which sounds pretty spiritual-master-ish, don't you think? Perhaps I have known, deep down inside some part of myself that I don't know anything about, that the path of life is uncontrollable and therefore counting the petals on the peonies is the best way to travel it, without aim or goal.

Perhaps this knowledge does exist, deep down in the recesses of myself, so deep down that I don't know it's there, and therefore can't access it. In which case, I might as well not know it--which I don't. Which means that I must struggle to forge and control, however poorly, a path through life. I can watch my control freak friends and try to learn from them.

Meanwhile, I will just finish up this other hand....

If I give you her number, will YOU text her? Just a little ice. 10 minutes. That's all. Just ice.

A Baker's Dozen Rules of Success

Otafuku, Goddess of Mirth

It's summer, or so I've heard, although the current weather in New York State suggests otherwise, and summer is a time to strip down: in clothing--to a single layer; in meals--to light fare; and in blog posts--to an easy-to-read list.

Here are 12 nuggets sifted from the many books I've read in the last few months, plus one extra, in a list.  And, readers, I dreamed it. Isn't that weird? That's only happened to me once before. I dreamed a poem, and then I sort of woke up, so I scribbled it down on a notepad. When I got up for real in the actual morning, it was just a line of gobbledygook, of course. Alas. My life might have taken a totally different course. (Possibly a terrible one--poets are usually obscure and earn very little dinero until they go out in a flame of tragedy, Billy Collins and Maya Angelou excepted. No thank you.)

1. Smile and be strategic. Think what you want to achieve from any transaction. (Dale Carnegie)
2. Build your goals around solid principles. (Stephen Covey)
3. Find people who believe in you to help you believe in yourself. (Noah St. John)
4. Shape your mind to support your goals through positive thinking, affirmations, or intentions. (Norman Vincent Peale and Everyone Else)
5. Focus on the present. (Carnegie and others)
6. Find time to meditate. (Deepak Chopra and others)
7. Make sure you rest. (Carnegie)
8. Develop a growth mindset—believe you have the capacity to change and improve. (Carol Dweck)
9. Choose goals that are difficult but achievable. (Heidi Grant Halvorsen)
10. Find work that is intrinsically rewarding: provides you with autonomy; provokes your desire for mastery; fills you with a sense of purpose because you're doing it to make a difference in the world. (Daniel Pink) 
11. Work that challenges and engages you will help you achieve Flow, which leads to   the feeling of satisfaction, happiness and success. (Czikszentmihaly)
12. Practice, practice practice, but practice wisely. Seek out coaches or mentors who can keep you working your edge. (Matthew Seyd and others)
13. Don’t worry about success, find meaningful work and do some good in the world.  (Real actual people I know who are successful)

Not bad. And the only mention of money was my own, in the second paragraph. Just saying....

Success and the Bruised Ego

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I've been thinking hard about this whole fixed/entity or growth/incremental mindset theory, which I've been talking about in my last few posts. It’s got to be one of the most significant theories of succes I’ve read so far. For me, anyway, it’s been a revelation.

Embracing the growth mindset seems to me the only possible way for me to leap off that asymptote of striving to the axis of arriving. Striving to arriving. What a great (accidental) rhyme. Before I began this investigation of success, I felt as if there was this Thing, maybe a gulf, maybe an invisible and unbreakable plexiglass wall, between me and successful people. I felt like they were They. Other. Maybe they had some kind of birthmark that earmarked them for success. Maybe they were born with some innate knowledge of their special specialness. I scoured my body, but only came up with the same kite-shaped birthmark I’ve always had--currently obscured by sun damage, by the way. I scoured my history, hoping to find somewhere some indication that I was Meant to realize my dreams. Alas.

But no, not alas. For here comes Carol Dweck and her protégé Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, and they’re telling me that I can succeed, if I’m motivated, if I believe I can changegrowadaptimprovelearn, and if I persevere. Which means those Theys, those Others, those “real” successes, are just regular people who figured it out before me.

This is really good news, this theory. You can get your growth mindset in place (by buying Carol Dweck's book and doing her helpful exercises--cha-ching) and you can roll. Right? I mean, then anyone can do it. Right? And that’s great and good and fair, right? I mean, we want anyone to be able to succeed, right?

We do. Really, we do. Except, embracing this theory does bruise the ego just a little. The mindset theory is another notch in the belt of the success scientists who have started this whole vogue for the  10,000 hours of practice to become an expert, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. They claim that the right kind of effort matters more than intelligence. 

Which really does hurt just a little. Ouch. I mean, hello, I’ve already admitted that I spent part of my twenties trying to prove to myself that I was smart. Was that all wasted time?

Uh, yeah. Apparently.

And what about those marvelous extensions of ourselves, our children? What about their successes in school? That score in the top quadrant of the 99th percentile of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test?   Do these things not mean glory for us? Does not our child’s intelligence, demonstrated by report cards and awards, confer glory upon us by default?

Does Carol Dweck wish to deprive us off this stuff? Does Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, like kicking us when we're down?

Are we only allowed to kvell over our children’s ability to work hard and persevere? Yes, as any good parenting book will tell you. Now Carol Dweck comes along with Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, to prove it. Are we not allowed to take their grades and awards as proof of our own worth as well as of theirs?  No?

No.

How the hell are we supposed to rank ourselves and others if everything comes down to who can hang in there the longest? Who's the hardest worker is just much less sexy than who is effortlessly brilliant.

Okay, breathe.

Despite the efforts of the success scientists, no one is saying there's no such thing as native intelligence (or talent).  Dweck and Halvorson skirt this issue, but they don’t totally ignore it. They point out that yes, intelligence has a genetic component. However, environment plays a huge role. An enriched environment will produce an enriched child. Regardless of environment, however, a child who’s not encouraged to work hard will eventually fall behind the kid who is praised not only for being smart, but for effort, and who is taught how to analyse mistakes and improve her performance. Does this sound familiar? Tiger mom-ish? Indeed, HGH Ph.D and Carol Dweck posit that it’s mindset that accounts for the so-called superiority of Asian students. That joke in “Glee” about an A-minus equaling an “Asian F?” That’s because the emphasis is on improving improving improving. And the only way to improve is to face your problem areas and hone them.

Yet I find it significant that both Carol Dweck and Heidi Grant Halvorsen “confess” to possessing very fixed (entity) mindsets all the way until they were in graduate school. Coincidence? I do not think so. Consider for a moment that the fixed mindset is the perfect mindset to drive you to achieve good grades. With the fixed mindset, every A, every improvement, every award is yet another proof of your worth. And of course that sort of work, getting As and winning awards is just the thing you need to compete for those spots in top colleges and graduate programs. Sadly, traditional education is not about taking risks, so the downside of that mindset doesn’t become apparent until later on, after getting As gets you into the college and grad school of your choice. Then, out in the real world, you need a more flexible, creative, motivation-based approach to make a real difference in the world. Innovation requires risk, and the fixed mindset is risk-averse.

Let me also mention that in Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success, Matthew Seyd argues that practice and the right kind of coaching are more important than talent in reaching the top in athletics. Howevs, he glosses over one eensy fact in writing about his own experience becoming a world champion table tennis player. He casually mentions that every year, the coach in his school had everyone who had any interest in table tennis try out, and he picked the ones he wanted to work with.

Do you think he picked them because they were so bad that he thought he could make a real difference in their playing? Neither do I.

So let’s not throw out all those awards just yet. The fact is, there is some sort of inborn talent factor that does set you on a course towards achievement. The fact is, there is a strong correlation between IQ and academic achievement. I can’t remember which scientist guy said so, becuz apparently my IQ isn’t that high, but trust me, he did say so. And there is also a strong correlation between academic achievement and income level. (Okay you professors, don’t laugh ironically and say, yeah, the more degrees you get, the less you get paid. That’s only true in academia.)  So IQ does predict some kinds of success. What it most definitely does not predict, is whether you’ll feel successful or happy or content or peaceful, whether you’ll create a masterpiece of art, whether you’ll have successful personal relationships, or any of the most important things in life. 


Those things require the growth mindset. 

How Much Control Over Your Goals Do You Have?

Warning: Control freaks may find contents of this blog post upsetting. 

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So, now that we've established that setting a good goal requires certain conscious parameters, such as the use of mental contrasting, which is shorthand for saying you need to make sure that goal-setting combines both positive thinking about attaining success AND practical consideration of potential obstacles to attainment and how to overcome those, let me let you in on a little secret.

According to Heidi Grant Halvorsen, much to do with goals is unconscious. That's right, readers-- not in our consciousness. We have unconscious attitudes about what we can achieve. We have unconscious desires. We have unconscious restrictions. We have unconscious routines. We even have unconscious goals.  She gives the example of pulling into the garage after driving home from work and having no recollection of the ride. Sound familiar?  That's right. Our unconscious is running the show most of the time. Basically, we are not aware of a lot of shit.

There are three types of shit we're not aware of, as a rule:

Our mindset about various aspects of ourselves.  Remember Carol Dweck? Remember her idea that people tend to be of either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? Fixed mindset people believe they have a set amount of intelligence, or a set personality. Growth mindset people believe they can build on what they're born with and improve themselves through effort. The people with the growth mindset tend to be happier and more successful in life. Natch, Heidi Grant Halvorsen, Carol Dweck's former student, has her own terms for the very same thing. She calls them entity (fixed) or incremental (growth) beliefs.  Like Dweck, HGH says that the entity belief (fixed growth mindset) is wrong-olla. Yes, you might be born with a higher level of intelligence than someone else, and yes, if your parents are very intelligent, this will come down to you in the genes; but you can always improve your intelligence. It is not a fixed entity. It's something that changes and grows incrementally through effort. What does this have to do with goal setting? Well, if you're of a fixed mindset, you're going to avoid a lot of challenges because you will feel you don't have what it takes to win; but if you're of a growth mindset, you'll be willing to exert yourself towards your goal.

Goal contagion. This is a shorthand way of saying, for example, that if you have a really fit friend you admire who is always exercising, you'll be likely to form your own intention to get in shape whenever you spend time with her.

Triggers. These are things in your environment that evoke a response. Maybe you want to learn French, so every time you pass McDonalds you think of french fries and, you're suddenly spouting all the French phrases you know, mon dieu.  Or perhaps you have an unconscious goal to ingest as much sugar as possible, so a picture of an ice cream cone, a song about, say, "the Candy Man," or a picture of Sammy Davis, Jr., for that matter, can lead you to the register at CVS with a package of M&Ms in hand that you have no awareness of picking up off the shelf. Pretty much anything can be a trigger, as long as it's related somehow to a goal. And the other thing is, you have your personal triggers, and I have mine. Maybe you hate Sammy Davis, Jr., and maybe I love him, so hearing "Candy Man" will help you avoid unnecessary sugar, while I'll be mainlining it.

Are you worried, control freaks? Does the world seem like something you can't control? Do you soothe yourself about this truth--because it is, sadly, true--with your lists, your matching socks and undies, your germophobia, or your obsessive worrying (yes, anxiety is a way of trying to control the uncontrollable--but that's a blog post in itself, isn't it?) Do you comfort yourself with the thought that if you can't control the world, then you can at least control yourself? Sorry. Apparently, you can't.

Here's some good news, though. Remember that you can change your mindset to an incremental (or growth) one from an entity (or fixed) one and that will help you roll up your sleeves and work for your dreams.

Here's more good news. While you can be unconsciously triggered to do something, you'll never be triggered to do something that you don't want to do. Like murder your upstairs neighbor for skateboarding over the bare floor after 11p.m. Heidi Grant Halvorsen says you won't do it, as much as you might like to. "Nothing can trigger a goal that you feel is wrong to pursue, no matter how desirable it seems" she says. Right on p.48.

Here's a final bit of good news. You can plant your own triggers to motivate you. That means you can hang up that old poster of the kitten on the knotted rope and the slogan, "When you reach the end of your rope, make a knot and hang on," to inspire you to finish that novel. In fact, studies show that consciously planted triggers are just as effective as unconscious ones. See, that feels better already, doesn't it?

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Now, were you noticing the same thing I was, readers? That consciously planting a trigger sounds not unlike planting a seed of intentionality (Buddhists), or saying affirmations (Wisdom Traditionalists.)

It looks like Heidi Grant Halvorsen joins the ranks of success folk who believe in the power of positive thinking or affirmations. She stands alongside the likes of Mr. Dale Carnegie, Napolean Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Deepak Chopra, Noah St. John, and our old friend Stephen Covey.

So get out your meditation cushion, hang your inspirational posters, listen to motivational speakers, write down your dreams, whisper your affirmations to yourself at bedtime, and do what you can to control the uncontrollable. You just might succeed.