How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (28 page)

I know from
experience that readers of this book will be disproportionally interested in my stories about affirmations. I’m sure I will be proclaimed a witch or a moron or both. So let me answer those inevitable objections in advance.

When I speak of affirmations these days, I try to say as clearly as possible that they
appear
to have a beneficial value. The reality is that if affirmations somehow steered the universe like magic, science probably would have discovered that force by now. I don’t foresee the day when affirmations get scientific backing, at least not in the sense of testing for the existence of magic or psychic powers.

I think we can all agree that affirmations are a phenomenon of the mind and belong in the domain of psychology and perception. Viewed in that light, one can imagine that doing affirmations might have a predictable impact on the brain, perhaps in terms of focus or motivation or any number of chemical reactions. Those reactions would, one assumes, be either beneficial or harmful to the pursuit of success. So in one sense, affirmations are no more special than any form of positive thinking, prayers, visualization, chanting, or the like.

That said, I can tell you that in my case affirmations
appear
to have more power than one might expect from positive thinking. The illusion is that the world itself is changing to satisfy the affirmations. Allow me to offer some explanations of why affirmations
appear
to be influencing more than just the person doing them.

The
most obvious explanation for the apparent power of affirmations is
selective memory
. There is plenty of science to support the idea that we humans tend to remember the things we want to remember and forget the things we’d rather forget. With affirmations, one might expect to remember the coincidental good luck and forget the bad luck. The result of that selective remembering gives us the incorrect impression that affirmations work more often than you might reasonably expect from chance alone.

Another perfectly good explanation of the apparent power of affirmations is that people who report success with it are
liars
, with no more credibility than the people who report being abducted by aliens. In my case, I know I didn’t lie about my experiences, but you have no way to be sure I’m telling the truth.

False memory
is another possible explanation for why affirmations appear to work. Perhaps we remember victories that weren’t so amazing in reality, or we remember normal events as being huge coincidences. False memories are so common that you’ve certainly experienced them. For example, you might remember a childhood event in some detail and learn later that it happened to your sibling, not you. Humans form false memories quite easily, so that has to be one potential explanation of why affirmations appear to work.

Another possible reason that affirmations appear to work is that
optimists tend to notice opportunities
that pessimists miss.
¹
A person who diligently writes affirmations day after day is the very definition of an optimist, even if only by actions. Any form of positive thinking, prayer, or the like, would presumably put a person in a more optimistic mind-set. And because optimists have been shown in studies to notice more opportunities than pessimists, the result can look like luck.

Studies show that you need not be a natural-born optimist to get the benefits of better perception.
²
You can train yourself to act like an optimist—and writing affirmations is probably good training—so that you get the same benefits as natural optimists when it comes to noticing opportunities.

Whether you are a born optimist or you become one through affirmations, prayer, or positive thinking, you end up with several advantages that make it easier for luck to find you. Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them.

Another
explanation for the apparent power of affirmations might be that we have the causation wrong. Perhaps only the people who know, deep down, that they have the right stuff to succeed will even bother doing affirmations. In my case it means that somewhere in my mind, before I had written my first book, my subconscious somehow knew I had the talent to write a proper book despite having no relevant writing experience or training. That explanation sounds reasonable to me, but it still means affirmations are useful, just in a different way than you might imagine. Under this explanation of the power of affirmations, they act as a sort of message from your subconscious to your rational mind telling you that you have the right stuff, even if your common sense argues otherwise. This would be useful for people who have real talent but don’t believe in it; surely there are a lot of people in that camp.

Another possible explanation for the apparent power of affirmations is that our tiny human brains have not evolved to the point where they can give us an accurate impression of our reality. Instead, our little brains create illusions that have survival benefits and some sort of internal consistency, nothing more.

We know the brain creates illusions because there are so many competing religions in the world. Assuming you picked the right religion, all of those other poor souls are living in a deep illusion. Your neighbor might think he remembers his previous life, while you think you saw God during your heart bypass surgery. You can’t both be right. But you could both be wrong, and both of you might be experiencing delusions of reality that somehow don’t kill you.

The point is that affirmations
might
have a perfectly sensible scientific explanation that involves anything from multiple universes to quantum strangeness or anything else that baffles our tiny brains and causes us to invent delusions to compensate for our feelings of uncertainty. To put it in simpler terms, affirmations might work for perfectly logical reasons our brains aren’t equipped to understand.

If you’ve read my blog, you know I’m fascinated by the possibility that we humans are nothing but holograms living in a computer simulation. It sounds ludicrous when you first hear the idea, but the math is oddly compelling. Consider what we humans would do a thousand years from now if we knew an asteroid was heading our way and there was no escape. I think we’d upload our personalities to computers, perhaps with our DNA information as part of the code, and
launch the computers into space so our culture, memories, and minds could live forever. Now for the math: If you pick any point in time, there will be infinitely more time transpiring
after
that time than before, assuming the big bang marks the start of time. So if you believe humans will someday be on the brink of extinction for any reason, there is a vastly greater chance we are already the simulations left behind.

Some have argued that the universe is too young for the hologram scenario to have played out. But if we are holograms, the age of the universe as we perceive it is nothing but a variable from the programmer. The real age could be trillions of years.

It’s a fun thought experiment, but I know you don’t buy into it. I only include it for completeness. If we are indeed nothing but computer-generated entities, affirmations could be nothing more than an unremarkable bit of programming code.

I’ll reiterate that I have no objective information to suggest that affirmations worked for me or that they might work for you. And please don’t e-mail me to ask for the detailed instructions on affirmations so you can do it “right.” I’ve gotten hundreds of those e-mails already, and I always say some version of “I dunno.” But for what it is worth, I don’t think affirmations are sensitive to exactly how many times you write them, whether you use a keyboard or a pen, whether you throw away the paper you wrote on, how many weeks you do them for, or any other detail. I can’t imagine the process of affirmations—if it works at all—is sensitive to the little details. I think a deep and consistent focus on what you want is all that is required. But that’s just my gut feeling.

You might see an inconsistency between affirmations and the theme of this book, specifically the parts where I say goals are for losers and systems are for winners. Affirmations look a lot like focusing on goals. But I would argue that doing affirmations is a system that helps you focus, boosts your optimism and energy, and perhaps validates the talent and drive that your subconscious always knew you had. If you plan to try affirmations, I recommend keeping your objectives broad enough to allow some luck. It’s probably better to affirm future wealth than to try to win a specific lottery.

Humans will always think in terms of goals. Our brains are wired that way. But goals make sense only if you also have a system that moves you in the right direction.

So
what do I believe about affirmations?

I believe I tried affirmations on a number of occasions and the results that I remember—or think I remember—appear to be borderline miraculous. To me, affirmations are an ongoing mystery. All I know for sure is that I’ve never heard of anyone being harmed, emotionally or otherwise, by affirmations. I tried affirmations out of curiosity, and because they were free. I didn’t need a better reason.

Now you know what I know.

I’ve covered a
lot of topics in this book, and I thought it would be helpful to provide a summary to wrap it all up. Keep in mind that if you skipped to the end of the book to read this section, it will seem extraordinarily unpersuasive out of context.

The model for success I described here looks roughly like this: Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to
want
to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.

Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you. Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life. Unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule. Get your health right first, acquire
resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.

Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right—and almost anyone can—you will be hard to stop.

It might help some of you to think of yourself as moist robots and not skin bags full of magic and mystery. If you control the inputs, you can determine the outcomes, give or take some luck. Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, and stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise to any component of success. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns, and use yourself as a laboratory to see if the patterns hold for you.

Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them. I’ve laid out some systems in this book that seem to work for me. Your experience will differ, but it always helps to be thinking in terms of systems and not goals.

And always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system.

The End

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