The Curious Schemer

I think of Chris Gardner in his Pursuit of Happyness. Because nothing, absolutely none of the WORST things I’ve ever experienced in my entire life is even within an AU of the things that this amazing man had to go through. And if you think that what you saw in the movie version (starring Will Smith) was bad… the actual, real-life version was WORSE. In the movie he had to stay in jail for one night. In real life he had to stay for ten. For parking tickets!

From now on, whenever I see somebody is being nasty, sullen, or angry, I’m going to be more understanding. I never know what’s really happening in his or her life.

From now on, whenever I think I’m having it tough, I know that no matter what that is, it is not worse than something that Chris Gardner has gone through. And if Chris Gardner can rise above his industrial-strength, high-grade, class A problems, heck, I can rise above my small-scale, low-grade, class-C problems and smash them to bits.

From now on, I will always keep in mind that no matter how low, dejected, miserable a person may seem to be now, I may be looking at Greatness in the eye. It’s a reminder of how everyone has the potential to greatness within them.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about why some people rise like meteors to the top, and others are stuck doing the same thing over and over again, toiling day after day from their 20s until they die. It’s amazing, when you see a group of people from similar background, how far some of them can go, leaving the rest of the group in the dust.

What makes them successful? There are many factors, of course, but what I found is that they all ask these three questions, after they’ve finished a work, a project, or anything of significance, really:

1. What went well?
2. What went not so well?
3. How can I make it (even) better next time?

The ones who keep staying in the same spot year after year after year after year don’t ask themselves questions like these, unless it went REALLY wrong. Of course most people are not that bad to get it really wrong all the time, so probably they’re doing OK, which means nobody will fault them–after all they are doing their job “just fine”. But most probably that also means nobody will promote them either.

Those who keep asking these questions, especially the 3rd one, are the ones who get better all the time you meet them. It’s fun meeting them once in a while just to give yourself a “whip” to do better yourself. Those 3 questions are hard questions. They force us to think. But to me, they’re really worth the trouble. I’d really be depressed if one year from now, I find that I haven’t improved at the things I’m doing. It’s like wasting one year of my life, really.

I always cringe when positive thinking gurus go around telling people, “There are no limits! You are only limited by your own thoughts! You can do anything and achieve anything as long as you think you can!”

Because I, the skeptics, and the negative thinkers know, that the world doesn’t work that way.

For instance, I know that no matter how hard I train, how many techniques I practice and drill to perfection, how determined and positive I am, I’ll never be able to beat Mike Tyson at his peak (heck, or Mike Tyson NOW) at boxing. My talent, my muscularity, my reaction time to evade and time punches, and so on, are simply not there. If I have to beat Iron Mike in something, I’ll choose writing software. Somehow I’m quite confident I’m better than him in that one.

Similarly, no matter how correct their diet, how spotless their routines, how flawless their lifting techniques, 99.9999% of the guys out there will never have biceps as big as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Their genes simply don’t permit that. Whereas the ones with the right genes go on to become the next Ronnie Coleman or Dorian Yates.

Have you ever tried so hard at something, only to see a “natural” breeze through all your obstacles in a tenth of the time you needed to get through them? Of course you have. It’s annoying, I know. But that’s also a fact of life. I think an important part of growing up is finding out that you WILL find a ceiling, and be OK with that and accept that. But an even more important thing is to really find out whether the ceiling you are seeing and hitting against is your true ceiling, your true limitations, or a false, fake, self-imposed ones.

That, is the truth of positive thinking. To find out your true ceiling. It is NOT true that there are no limits. That’s bullcrap. Everybody has limitations. But you’d better be damn sure that you’ve developed yourself to your own full potential, instead of hitting a ceiling that is put there by your insecurity, your fear, your laziness, your negative thinking, or whatever.

This can be quite disheartening at first. Because if you’re like most people, as you grow up, you get to witness your (perhaps unrealistic) childhood dreams being shattered one by one. And in the process, it’s easy to fall into the so-what’s-the-point-I-might-as-well-stop-improving-right-now thinking pattern.

Why do you think parents are so often charged guilty of telling their children to be “realistic” and to “forget their big dreams”? Because 99.9999% of the parents have gone through this before. Only 0.0001% have continued to develop themselves and find that their limits are higher than everyone else in the world–they become Olympian gold medalist, world-class musicians, Tiger Woods, Warren Buffett, and so on.

In fact, before I figured this out, I used to be quite negative about this whole thing. I used to think: what’s the point of even trying when the best I could ever do, to my full potential, is most probably only mediocre?

And now I think I have the answer.

• Cos until you’ve tried it and do it to the best of your ability, you won’t know. In all probability your true ceiling might be the highest in the world. You might be world-class at something, you just don’t know it yet. Say, can you memorize the first 21 digits of Pi? Then you’re already world-class.

• You keep doing it because you like it, even when you’ve found that you’re far from world-class level. I love programming, and it’s something that I’ll still do when I’m 60. Even if I’ll probably will never be the world’s best programmer. But I don’t care. I like it.

(Or probably I am the world’s best programmer. Since I’m so humble.)

So what the heck are those positive thinking, supposedly self-improving gurus are for? The good ones help to find out your true capacity. Because I suspect we never really get to know how high the true ceiling of our potential really is. It’s not limitless, surely. But it may also be much higher than we’ve ever dreamed of. And we need the gurus to lie to us and keep telling us there’s no limit so we won’t stop until we’ve hit our real limit. And that probably means that we shouldn’t stop, ever.