It’s a Confidence Class Thing…
We looked at a book called Smart Luck recently to look at the life histories of some entrepreneurs. It was notable that a lot of them were near the top or the bottom of what we would call our class hierarchy and our class culture (if we had one!).
In the book, there is the example given of Simon Woodruff who launched a chain of sushi bars in London. He said something really interesting in an interview. The journalist described how he hade launched his business, been in the press a lot, and had written a book called the “Story of Yo!” about his very limited business career to date. Then they asked “but then you stopped, why did you stop?”
(Just as a reminder, it’s a bad thing if he stops. It doesn’t create any wealth. If he stops, someone else gets the wealth.)
So what did he say?
He said, “It was a confidence thing. I lost my confidence”.
He was afraid that it wouldn’t last that it couldn’t last. He simply had no experience with success. No peer group with victory assumptions to strengthen him.
So one of the important things is that it’s not about being upper class or middle class; to be a success at being an entrepreneur (or anything else) is really a confidence class thing. That’s what we need to do – give people the confidence to do more and be more; give each other confidence. Understand that there is a world outside your mind that will bring you answers, comfort, and a full night’s sleep. Even where involvement with it will challenge your ideas and your life-style, it will reward you more than it will cost.
When you shed the debilitating myths that hold you back; defeat the internal voices telling you that “you’re no good” or “others know more than you”, a most inspiring transformation takes place. You grow in confidence and self-awareness, and the people around you grow also. But something else, something quite extraordinary, starts to happen: you start to achieve more than you thought you ever could. You do ‘better than your best’. That sounds like a contradiction, but it actually happens. Musicians, for example, will say to themselves, when they hear a recording of their finest work, “Is that really me? It cannot be; I am not good enough to play that!”
Try believing the way that the singer, India Arie does, “When I look in the mirror the only one there is me, Every freckle on my face is where it’s supposed to be, And I know our creator didn’t make no mistakes on me, My feet, my thighs, my lips, my eyes I’m lovin’ what I see”
Provided we avoid the temptations of vanity we can keep on unshrinking. Our limits are unknowable, so the saddest thing is when we never seek to explore them and discover truly what we can do. This is not just for work and careers; it is for child-rearing, for relationships, for our interests; for our life.
The best leaders encourage us to view a failure as a temporary setback, not a symptom of a character flaw. The bully does the opposite, telling us ‘Of course you failed; what did you expect?’. Our argument is that the damaging beliefs that we have identified encourage good people to become bullies.
The idea that each great man or woman must have a great, and awful, fault that will lead ultimately to his demise is false. It is also permission for each man or woman who aspires to greatness to let his or her weaknesses loose, rampant upon the world that will justify and accept such flaws as part of the territory of genius. The fatal flaw is not our fate! We have weaknesses but we have the means to overcome them.
Some bully because they grew up in a violent environment; some because they were encouraged to get their own way; but others bully because their management training or the culture of their industry or sport has taught them, very, very, subtly, that junior people are stupid and that demeaning them improves results. This we shall discuss more in chapter 3.
Let’s look at some of the forces that can contribute to us being less than we could be. First up is, fatalism. The acceptance of things the way they are and you the way you are because it’s just the way it is or just the way that some force or other wills it to be. The idea that you cannot alter your world or yourself is the most wasteful, tragic idea. It prevents each of being more and it prevents the world from reinventing itself.
Fatalism is a contributor to apathy and inactions. It is also an enemy to freedom of thought. It prevents us getting out of the dead ends in our heads, and seeing the big picture for the way that it really is. It encourages us to accept limitations, including those handed out in the form of discrimination, racism, and prejudice.
Consider Marilyn Monroe who speaking of her childhood said, “I was never used to being happy, so that wasn’t something I ever took for granted. You see, I was brought up differently from the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy”. As a little girl she was told that she, “was a mistake” but never that she “was pretty”. As a result, Marilyn simply did not expect to be happy and she carried this shrunken, reduced expectation of life into adulthood.
She made an immense effort to find herself in a Hollywood system that “only cared about money” where, “you’re judged by how you look, not by what you are”. She said of herself that, “to put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.” After all the money, the marriages, and the movies she concluded that, “I’m trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that’s not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do”.
Compare her with a doctor in a desperately poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua. Her surgery is a run-down single storey building in a battered terrace of houses, a couple of blocks from a huge waste tip where dozens of families scavenge items amid swarming vultures. She pulls up in her rickety, battered car. She is young, animated and intelligent, with eyes that dart about and glow with enthusiasm. She talks about her work tending to some very poor families, where basic nutrition is as much a medical need as anything else. She talks about the difficulties of obtaining medicines on a basic budget, of having enough time to see people. It is difficult to refer patients to hospitals as they are full of people wounded from the war. She describes her weekly clinic with the children of the neighbourhood, commenting at the end that it is challenging. But then, completely unprompted, just at the point where one expects a weary sigh, her eyes light up into a glow. She cannot help it. A smile breaks out on her face as she adds “Pero es lindo trabajo con los niños!” (It is lovely work with the children!) with passion, joyously prolonging the word “l-i-i-ndo’ in the way that happy Latin Americans do. There is no one in the world more fulfilled in her work.
We do not wish to idealise her challenges, nor excuse the poverty. The point is to expose the myth that the key to one’s fulfilment lies entirely outside oneself, in fate or in the environment. She is unshrunk in the ghetto, and Marilyn Monroe was shrunken in Hollywood. People caught up in a genuine tragedy, such as destitution or a civil war, often spend little time bemoaning their luck. Some of them cross oceans, start a new life and end up running a successful business. Or they tend to the sick, bring up a family and preserve some joy and hope for the next generation[i].
Human potential is NOT fixed. Over time it may well be infinite. And even over the limited period of a single human lifetime it is considerable.
Even your brain cells are capable of regeneration, depending on how much they are used[ii]. The neurons, hippocampus, branches, cerebral cortex, and synapses that contain your memories and your ability to process information, innovate, dream, and experience can all be enhanced, and repaired. Depression, stress, guilt, and poor self-image all reduce your brain’s performance while caring, working, loving, relaxing, playing, meditating all increase it.
You can start smart and end dumb, or start dumb and end smart. Up to a 60 per cent difference each year depending on what you choose to do with your potential. What an idea! Given the right kinds of effort (mental, emotional, and physical[iii]) you can unshrink your brain – think of the possibilities and by time you finish reading this, you may actually be more intelligent.
(This excerpt is from Unshrink by Max Mckeown and Philip Whiteley)
