If you want to learn how to banish negativity from your life, there are two approaches you can take:
You can buy and study books on positive psychology, stoicism, mindfulness, and various related topics. You can read motivational books by Covey, Taleb, Holiday, and others. You can digest scientific papers on stress, post-traumatic growth, empathy and gratitude, sleep, diet and exercise.
Or you can simply read this excellent and engaging book by Anthony Iannarino. He has done all the reading, applied the lessons, and added his own compelling life experiences to produce what I consider to be an encyclopedia of positivity.
There is something in The Negativity Fast for everyone. Just like an encyclopedia, you don’t need to read every single chapter; you can sample those that better fit your current circumstances or personal preferences. For me, the chapters on changing your beliefs, reframing negative events, and focusing on helping others, particularly resonated. Others may benefit from suggestions on how to live with political divisiveness or practice mindfulness.
I consider myself a positive person, and I’ve read extensively in the literature, but I learned (or was reminded of) far more than I expected. Read it for yourself, or give a copy to someone who needs it, and I’m positive you will be pleased.
Some books you just have to be ready to read. I first read George Leonard’s, book, Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment thirty years ago, soon after it first came out. I found it useful, but it is only now that I chanced upon it on my bookshelves and re-read it, that it has deeply affected my thinking. I feel like I am ready because for the past ten months I have taken up the challenge of learning how to draw.
What about you? Have you ever had ambitions of mastering a skill or activity, only to abandon it soon after the initial enthusiasm? Or do you find yourself stuck in a rut, needing a new challenge to occupy your attention and fire your enthusiasm? I’ve been in both situations—repeatedly—and I know how difficult and rare it is to master a new skill, especially later in life.
If so, it helps to have a mentor to place you on the proper path and guide you along it. Leonard died in 2010, but his short and insightful book can provide the wisdom and instruction that can improve your chances of success.
The key insight, for me, is that mastery is not a goal. It is a never-ending path. Once you step on the path, you will never reach your destination, but you can go far. How far you go depends on what you do while on the path, and how long you stay on it.
Your progress will vary; you will probably make quick progress at first, and then you will inevitably hit a patch where you don’t see any improvement at all and may even regress. That’s when it’s so easy and common to get frustrated and quit, or impatiently double down on your efforts and possibly get even worse.
Many people never get past this first plateau, but those that stick with it are generally rewarded with another burst of improvement, and on it goes. Leonard’s key point is that the real improvements are actually occurring during these plateaus, as your brain and body gradually figure out how to turn the required behaviors into unconscious habits. The bursts of improvements are merely the markers of that progress.
You will spend most of your time on the path on one of these plateaus. Plateaus are good. Mastery, therefore, comes from embracing those plateaus. For me, this is the most important point: learn to love the practice for its own sake. Practice, according to Leonard, is not a verb but a noun: you have a practice—an approach or a process—that is worth following for its own sake. Masters love to practice.
This idea resonates with a concept I’ve written about before:
There are two general types of goals that people set for themselves, performance goals and learning goals. Performance goals are about reaching a set target, which is frequently related to how you compare to others. Learning goals focus on learning, getting better and comparing yourself to yourself.
The idea may seem to counter results-oriented business activities. But even in sales, one study has shown that salespeople who pursue learning goals outperform those who chase performance goals.
What is success? Is it the reaching of a difficult and meaningful goal, or the enjoyment and fulfillment that comes from being dedicated to the pursuit? The beauty of following Leonard’s advice is that you will not only enjoy the journey, but you will be more likely to reach a worthwhile destination.
As for drawing, I have no expectation of ever mastering the skill. But after ten months I am no longer terrible at it, and next month I’ll be better, and the month after that. Most importantly, I am so enjoying the effort—and that in itself means I’ve already succeeded. Mastery is not the destination, but the path.
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. It’s one of the oldest clichés in the book. The problem with clichés is that we hear them so often that we tune them out, which is sometimes a pity because there’s usually a reason they became clichés in the first place. They contain a deep and clear truth—if we just take the time to dip below the surface.
2020 has produced a bumper crop of lemons for most of us, so what better time than now to dive into the philosophy of that old adage?
But it helps when you have an experienced guide to show you the way. Tom Morris has a singular ability to start with a simple truth, examine it carefully for 275 pages, and produce something that’s wise, highly readable, and especially useful at this time.
The point in Plato’s Lemonade Stand is to show you explicitly how to deal with change. How do you explain the recipe without resorting to yet more shallow clichés and easy advice? You start a conversation with the great minds in history. Plato doesn’t actually appear too much in the book, but his name is a proxy for a long litany of thinkers throughout history whose wisdom Morris taps for this book including Plato’s teacher Socrates and student Aristotle, continuing with the New Testament, and ending up with Harry Potter. As change books go, Plato’s Lemonade Stand is orders of magnitude more fulfilling than, say, Who Moved My Cheese?
Life is full of change, and it’s not always positive. We want strawberries or peaches, but we get lemons instead. Grit and resilience will help us deal with the sour taste, but we can also add sweetener in the form of perspective, self-control and positive action. These are covered extensively in the first two-thirds of the book. If the book ended here, it would be well worth the price for the help it can give anyone struggling to deal with the current crisis, or any other adverse circumstances they face.
But there’s more to the story than that. There are two forms of change: that which happens to us, and that which happens because of us. The second section of the book is about the latter.
It’s one thing to change when you don’t have much choice in the matter; you have to play defense. But sometimes it may be harder to play offense—to initiate change when things are going well. In one of the more compelling metaphors in the book, Morris teaches that when you finally reach a peak that you’ve aspired to climb for a long time, you will inevitably spot a higher peak in the distance. But here’s the rub: you can’t start climbing the second peak without first going downhill from the first. It definitely won’t be easy, and it can be tempting to just decide that the hill you’re on is good enough.
But if you decide to embark on the effort, you need to accept being a beginner, struggling with the unfamiliar, being scared and tested all over again, which is why G.K. Chesterton said, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
If I have a quibble with the book, it’s that I would have liked to see more about self-initiated change. To be fair, Morris covers a lot of that ground well in some of his previous books, especially True Success. And maybe he’s saving for a sequel. He hints at that on the next to last page, with one last surprising truth—which I won’t spoil in this review.
If you’ve read anything by Tom Morris before, you will encounter some familiar ideas, particularly his 7 Cs of Success. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because anything worth knowing is worth repeating and refreshing from time to time. If you haven’t read anything by Tom Morris before, do yourself a big favor, starting with Plato’s Lemonade Stand.
I like Malcolm Gladwell and you probably do too; I’ve always been a fan of a certain type of success book, one that is based on science and solid research, and Gladwell did as much as anyone to launch the current genre. But I have to say I don’t like what he has done for social science writing. To be fair, it’s not his fault—it’s the fault of his followers who have tried too hard to copy his success formula.
I’m referring to the “Gladwellization” of science writing, and I think I reached my personal tipping point just a few minutes ago, having just completed Chapter 5 of Eric Barker’s new book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree.
What is Gladwellization? It’s the practice of finding a quirky and fascinating story to anchor each chapter, and then using that story to illustrate the points you’re trying to make. On the face of it, that’s not a bad practice. Stories get our interest, and they can make it easier to absorb and retain their lessons. But there are two problems with this approach:
The first is that all too often the story seems to become the main attraction rather than the vehicle for the lesson. Unless you’re writing fiction for entertainment, the story should have a point—it should not be the point. I enjoyed the story about Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, who lived in San Francisco in the 19th century, but even just a few minutes after having read the chapter, I can’t for the life of me tell you what the point of the story was. In the long run, what’s more important to remember, the story or the lesson?
The second problem is that when you set out to write a book that will get attention in a crowded market, you have to engage in an arms race of stories. If Gladwell or Pink or the Heaths have used the story, you need to find a better one, usually about an even more quirky or extreme character. But that makes it difficult for the average person to identify with the person, either as a positive or negative role model. As Barker says early in the book, achievement depends to a great extent on the stories we tell ourselves. For this to work, though, we have to believe that we’re capable of acting in accordance with those stories.
We know networking is important, but none of us would ever strive to be like Paul Erdos, a brilliant mathematician whose achievements were exceed only by his bizarre character. We know that it’s important to have a good work-life balance, but we’re unlikely to be swayed by reading about the obsessive and even obscene work habits of the great baseball player Ted Williams, because we simply can’t imagine that happening to us.
When I read a social science book that purports to teach lessons about success, I apply two tests to it. The first is faster and more superficial: did I like reading it, and did it feel like I got good insights? The second test is more rigorous: after I read every chapter I record the lessons I gleaned and my ideas of how I might apply those to practical effect. Often both measures correlate, but sometimes I find that my first intuition was misleading, because the readability of the material obscured the fact that there just was not that much practical, actionable meat.
I’ve long harped on it: Content Is King. Stories are great, but the first rule of communication is to have something worthwhile to say, and then use those stories to make it stick.
