How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (26 page)

And soreness is like a penalty for exercising. Humans aren’t that different from dogs: If you give me a penalty every time I do something, eventually I’ll find a reason to stop doing it. And that reason will be something along the lines of “too busy.”

What you want is for your daily exercise to give you a reward every time. Light exercise does just that; it reduces your stress and boosts your energy. Over time, as you become fitter, you will naturally increase your exercise level, but by then your body will be equipped to handle it.

If you want to make a habit of something, the worst thing you can do is pick and choose which days of the week you do it and which ones you don’t. Exercise becomes a habit when you do it every day without fail. Taking rest days between exercise days breaks up the pattern that creates habits. It also makes it too easy to say today is one of your nonexercise days, and maybe tomorrow too.

I find it important to reward myself after exercise with a healthy snack that I enjoy, some downtime that involves reading interesting articles on my phone, or a nice cup of coffee. By putting those pleasures at the immediate end of my exercise, I develop a strong association between the exercise and the good feelings. It forms a habit.

As I’ve mentioned, but it is worth repeating, a big part of my exercise motivation is coffee. Coffee boosts athletic performance,
¹
but more important, it makes you willing to put in the effort. If you’re not exercising every day and you don’t drink coffee, maybe you should give it a try. I can’t tell you how many times I ruled out exercise because I was too tired, only to completely change my mind after a cup of coffee.

I also find that ibuprofen (found in Advil and other brands) is a huge help in reducing my soreness on those days I overdo it. If I take the ibuprofen on the day I’m stiff, I have a good chance of being willing to exercise the next day. Without the ibuprofen I feel like the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
and all I want is my oilcan. I can’t recommend ibuprofen for you because I’m not a doctor and it comes with some risks if you overdo it. Ask your doctor.

So how do you exercise on those days when all you want to do is sit on the couch, eat ice cream, and feel bad? Can you jump-start your body when one part of your brain knows that exercise is a good idea but another part of your brain is using its veto power?

The trick I have found to work best takes advantage of certain cues in your life, or “keys” as hypnotists like to call them. For example, if you were bitten by a German shepherd as a child, every time you see that type of dog you might get a little burst of fear. That’s a cue, or a key. Your life is full of these little cues and keys that can control your attitude. The trick is manipulating your own cues in a way that programs your mind.

Here’s what I do when I know I should exercise but I feel too tired and droopy to imagine doing a vigorous workout. Instead of doing what I feel I can’t do, I do what I
can
do—which is put on my exercise clothes and lace my sneakers. (You might call them tennis shoes or running shoes where you live.) Central to my method is that I grant myself 100 percent permission to
not
exercise, even after getting suited up for it. This is important because I know I won’t take the first
step of donning my exercise clothes if I feel it will commit me to something that just seems impossible in my current frame of mind.

But once the sneakers and shorts are on, a funny thing happens, and it happens quickly. The physical feeling I get from my exercise clothes triggers the going-to-the-gym subroutine in my brain, and my energy kicks up a notch. It’s like Pavlov’s salivating dogs. The exercise clothes cause me to think positive things about exercising, and that boosts my energy.

Suddenly the idea of exercising seems possible, if not desirable. There’s one more step, and this too requires granting myself permission to back out at any time. I drive to my local gym, walk in, look around, and see how I feel. About 95 percent of the time this set of cues will put me in a sufficiently energetic mood to go ahead and exercise, and that in turn boosts my mood. But sometimes—and this happened perhaps five times this year, which is typical—I get to the gym, look around, turn, and leave. As I drive home I am not thinking I failed. In fact, I feel exactly the opposite. Failure is for people who have goals. If my goal is to exercise, leaving the gym without breaking a sweat looks and feels like failure. But what I have is not a goal; it is a system. And the system allows leakage. It is designed that way. As I drive home from the gym, a seemingly wasted trip, I never feel defeated. Instead, I feel I am using a system that I know works overall. I win if I exercise, and I win (albeit less) if I use my system and decide not to. Either way, my attitude improves. And at least I get out of the house and clear my head. It’s all good.

Don’t be concerned about how much or how little you exercised on a given day. All that matters in the long run is that you made exercise a daily habit. Studies indicate that moderate levels of exercise are actually the best for longevity.
²

Over time you’ll naturally gravitate toward adding the variety and challenge that your body can handle.

In 2011 the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, made headlines by saying too many women were skipping exercise because of hair-related issues. In her view this qualified as an important health issue. The
New York Times
quoted Benjamin as saying, “Often times
you get women saying, ‘I can’t exercise today because I don’t want to sweat my hair back or get my hair wet.’ When you’re starting to exercise, you look for reasons not to, and sometimes the hair is one of those reasons.”
³

Dr. Benjamin’s observations match my own, and yours too, I would imagine. I don’t think I need to explain why putting your hair above your health is a loser strategy in the long run.

If you’re a woman caught in the hair-care death spiral, nothing I’ve said in this book will be much help unless you escape. Allow me to offer a possible solution.

I’m going to start with the assumption that there are three main reasons women want great-looking hair: (1) to attract sexual partners, (2) to improve career potential, and (3) to feel good about themselves. Everyone is different, but those three causes probably cover 85 percent of the reasons.

The first two reasons (sexual partners and career options) are about influencing how others view you. And I would argue that feeling good about yourself has meaning only because you know you are influencing others to feel the same way. So really, hair care is about influencing how other people feel about you. We’re all social animals, so there’s nothing wrong with that. The world works only when we care how other people think.

On the topic of women’s hair I can speak only from a heterosexual man’s perspective. I encourage you to check with the men in your life for confirmation. My best guess is that what I say next is as near a universal opinion as men can have:

I’ve never known a man who would prefer an unhealthy-looking woman with movie-star hair over a fit woman with a ponytail. And if I ever do meet that guy, I’ll try to avoid him because he sounds like a creep.

A hiring manager will always have a subconscious bias for the healthier-looking applicant, male or female. Humans evolved to have favorable opinions about anyone who looks healthy because it’s a marker for good reproductive odds. That’s why society needs laws that limit discrimination against the differently abled. If your main
reason for spending time on your hair is to feel good about yourself, a healthy body will always trump a good hairdo.

I won’t pretend to understand the minds of women when it comes to hair. And every woman is different. Some women are three different people before lunchtime. But I can tell you with certainty that men prefer you to be in good health, even if it means we miss the best of your hair potential.

I would imagine it is very hard to break a hair-care routine that has been part of your life for years. But it might help to think of things in a different way. If you skip exercise because of your hair, remind yourself during those many hours of brushing, curling, straightening, and drying that the long-term payoff for your efforts is to become less attractive, less employable, and less healthy. When you change how you think, it eventually changes how you behave.

Having great hair is a short-term goal. Fitness is a system. Systems are for winners.

Three years had
passed since I lost my voice. It was getting hard to imagine it could ever be fixed. Outwardly my life looked to be on track.
Dilbert
was running in over two thousand newspapers in sixty-five countries. I’d married Shelly and we’d started building a home. Externally things were great, but on the inside I was badly damaged. My optimism was getting its ass kicked twenty-four hours a day, but somehow it still had a pulse.

The simplest things in life were a terror. Every time the phone rang, my heart sank. Every time someone asked a question, I died a little on the inside. Emotionally it was confusing. Half of my life was great, while half was darkly broken. I continued doing my affirmation, “I, Scott, will speak perfectly,” but I was running out of potential remedies to try. My future looked bleak.

One day a Google Alert showed up in my e-mail in-box that looked promising. A doctor in Japan was reporting success treating spasmodic dysphonia with a surgical procedure on the neck. I was willing to fly to Japan if necessary. I would have swum there if I had to. By now I had experienced so many disappointments in my search for a cure that Shelly couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for my new long-shot hope. I know she didn’t enjoy seeing me get my hopes up, and hers as well, just to be thrown against the rocks time and time again.

Following protocol, I took the news of this new operation to my regular doctor, Dr. Smith, who referred me to my ear-nose-throat doctor, Dr. Cornelius Jansen III. Dr. Jansen hadn’t yet heard of this
new surgery, and he was concerned that the reports of success might be exaggerated. He explained that some reports of medical breakthroughs are more credible than others and I shouldn’t assume that this report was accurate. I wasn’t surprised. Realistically, how likely is it that you can fix a brain abnormality by rigging up some sort of work-around in the neck? It sounded iffy even to me.

But in the interest of exploring every option, Dr. Jansen recommended I speak to one of the top professionals in the field, Dr. Edward Damrose of the otolaryngology department of the Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. Damrose was familiar with the reports coming from Japan, but he suggested I contact a doctor closer to home who was pioneering a different type of surgery for spasmodic dysphonia. He referred me to Dr. Gerald Berke at the UCLA Medical Center.

I got off the phone with Dr. Damrose feeling puzzled. How could there be a surgical fix for this condition that I hadn’t heard about until now? How could this be true if there was no mention of it on the Internet on the sites that are dedicated specifically to this question? The only explanation I could imagine was that this would be another false lead and another dead end. But my system was to follow all leads, no matter how ridiculous or unlikely.

I made an appointment with Dr. Berke for an initial visit and flew from my home near San Francisco to Los Angeles to meet with him. Dr. Berke is an interesting character: brilliant, confident, and a little bit mysterious. A small herd of doctors from other practices followed him from room to room to learn his ways. Dr. Berke and his tagalong doctors examined me and confirmed the diagnosis of spasmodic dysphonia. Then he explained that he had been perfecting a surgery for this condition over the past several years, with about an 85 percent success rate, which in this context meant the patient had a better voice after surgery than before—not a perfect voice but substantially improved. Unfortunately, some people got worse after surgery, losing what little was left of their voices. But Dr. Berke had a good idea why some patients were less successful, and he was refining his technique to account for it.

But here’s the interesting part. Dr. Berke’s surgery involved opening the front of the neck, cutting the nerves that lead from the brain to the vocal cords, and building a new path using nerves borrowed from elsewhere in the neck. Once the rewiring was done, the patient waited three and a half months until the new nerve pathways regenerated
and the voice came back. Until then, the brain and the vocal cords wouldn’t be connected. There were no follow-up visits to the doctor. It either worked or it didn’t.

Does that sound like the way you fix a brain abnormality? It didn’t sound like a logical solution to me. So I asked for a list of past patients as references. I was hopeful but skeptical. The operation didn’t make sense to me, and I was still scratching my head as to why none of this had appeared on the Internet yet.

I e-mailed some of Dr. Berke’s patients and set up times to speak with them—if you can call it that—by phone. This was the one group of folks I could speak to confidently on the phone because they were skilled at deciphering my broken, raspy attempts at words, and they also understood that the call was mostly about their doing the talking.

And talk they did. Perfectly. Not one of them had a hitch or a hesitation in their words. There was no hoarseness or clipped syllables. Each described the recovery from the operation as unpleasant because they choked nearly every time they tried to eat or drink for quite some time, but they were unanimous in saying it was worth it.

Obviously I was talking only to the lucky people who’d had the best results, but I was feeling good about this possibility. Still, I needed to satisfy my curiosity about one thing: I asked Dr. Berke how he’d figured out that nerve surgery in the neck could fix a brain abnormality. What evidence had he seen that others had not?

His answer fascinated me. I suppose it explains why doctors follow him around. I’m paraphrasing, but Dr. Berke explained that it was an inspiration that somehow emerged from the sum of his knowledge about necks and throats and voices and nerves and all the rest. He didn’t call it genius, but if this surgery worked, no other description would fit quite as well.

If I decided to do the surgery, there was something on the order of a 15 percent chance my voice would not improve, and in that scenario the surgery itself might eliminate the chance that I could benefit from some future treatment. It was a one-way trip to a destination unknown.

I scheduled the surgery.