March 1, 2010

Taking Success Advice from Successful People Is Not a Good Idea

I was recently watching the last The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, in which he said goodbye to NBC and his fans. His memorable last words were: “If you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you: amazing things will happen”.

I’m sure Conan O’Brien is a cool guy and I think he has some great achievements, but if working hard and being kind were the only two ingredients for amazing things to happen in one’s life (aka being successful), we would have a lot more successful people, living amazing lives.

I believe that sometimes, successful people can give powerful success advice. I personally know some who do. However, I believe this is rather the exception than the rule, and in most cases, taking success advice from successful people is not such a good idea.

The main reason is the fact there is a huge difference between being successful and being able to understand success and teach it to others. Here are some phenomena which often happen with successful people:

  • They’re naturals. They do things in a certain way out of instinct, and this gives them results. But they don’t really know what exactly they’re doing which gets them success, even if they think they do. So they will often give advice like: “Just be yourself. Act naturally.” Ha?
  • They may consciously try certain things which give them the results they want, but they try multiple things at once and they’re not able understand which one of them exactly works and is the true source of their success.
  • They discover things which help them get results, in their context, and they wrongly believe these things apply to everyone, in every context. They generalize quickly, ignoring the specifics of each human being and each situation.
  • They lack the skills to present and explain their ideas for success in a very clear and meaningful way, which would make the advice truly useful.

I know that successful people are given a lot of credibility in offering advice for success, and sometimes for personal development. People think that someone who has success is the best to teach it. Considering the points above, you can see why this is faulty logic.

Successful people need a lot more than success to also provide solid success advice. They need a high degree of awareness, analytical skills, scientific, critical thinking, communication and people skills. Only then, you can rely on them to give powerful success advice.

Beyond successful people, I believe there is one other category of people which is usually much better at giving success advice. I call them modelers. They’re the people who observe, study and model successful people, extracting the patterns of success.

Why are they better at giving success advice? For one, because they generally have a lot more of the skills presented above, which are required to understand and teach success. And also, because they don’t stop at modeling just one successful person.

It’s great that you’re looking to understand success and use this understanding in your personal development. In this journey, remember that choosing the proper sources for success advice can be just as important.

Filed Under: Psychology, Success Tagged With: , , , , , , 13 Comments
February 24, 2010

Debunking Subliminal Tapes

For a lot of the people who know me or read my stuff, I have a sort of reputation as a debunker. A big part of my activity involves discovering and promoting some ideas for personal development and improving people skills, another big part involves showing the flaws in other ideas, to facilitate effective growth.

I believe there are a tone of people skills and personal development ideas out there, most of which only generate marginal improvements, and this is why I think debunking some can be as important as supporting others.

Today, my focus is on debunking subliminal tapes. And I’m going to use for this an excerpt from the book “Psychological Foundations of Success” by Dr. Stephen Kraus, a Harvard-trained scientist and a business consultant. I think his words do the debunking better than mine ever could.

Let’s consider an example of success snake oil: subliminal self-help tapes. These tapes are a multi-million dollar business, and it is easy to see why. Their promise of easy, effortless change is a marketer’s dream. Simply listen to the tapes, we are told, and although the subliminal messages in them can’t be heard audibly, they tap the power of the subconscious mind to bring about massive change and success. If you want to lose weight, for example, there’s no need for the inconvenience of exercise or the sacrifices involved with healthy eating – simply listen to the tapes and pounds will melt away. And losing weight is just one example – other tapes promise to boost self-esteem, improve memory, increase worker productivity, and even aid in the recovery from sexual abuse. There’s only one problem: they don’t work.3 If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is – and effortless change via subliminal tapes is indeed too good to be true. Every independent scientific study has reached the same conclusion – these tapes are a waste of money. […]

Despite numerous studies demonstrating that subliminal tapes are worthless, people continue buying them in large numbers. The problem is that manufacturers of these products have become experts at deceptive marketing, and they conveniently ignore the carefully-conducted studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the tapes. As Anthony Pratkanis put it, “Tape company representatives are likely to provide you with a rather lengthy list of ‘studies’ demonstrating their claims. Don’t be fooled. The studies on these lists fall into two camps – those done by the tape companies and for which full write-ups are often not available, and those that have titles that sound as if they apply to subliminal influence, but really don’t.”

These deceptive marketers often point to one study in particular, known to many as the “Eat Popcorn/Drink Coke” study. Conducted in the late 1950s, this study flashed the messages “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” briefly on a movie screen. Thousands of moviegoers were supposedly exposed to these messages over the course of six weeks, and the result was reportedly an increase in Coke sales of 18% and in popcorn sales of nearly 58%. Reports of the study fueled international outrage – several countries outlawed subliminal advertising, and the Federal Communications Commission threatened to strip the broadcast license of anyone using subliminal advertising. Amidst this well-publicized furor, a much quieter development was unfolding. Researchers throughout the world were trying – and failing – to replicate the dramatic findings of the Eat Popcorn/Drink Coke study. A Canadian television show, for example, flashed the subliminal message “Phone Now” during its regular airing. Not only was there no increase in phone calls, but when viewers were asked to guess what the message had been, none of the 500 who guessed did so correctly (interestingly, nearly half reported feeling hungry or thirsty, demonstrating not the power of subliminal persuasion, but rather the power of suggestion – those familiar with the Eat Popcorn/Drink Coke study experienced what they expected to experience). This and other failures to replicate the original never got the widespread publicity of the initial study. The media sells stories, and the story that marketers are manipulating our unconscious minds sells well, whereas a story of carefully-conducted research failing to confirm the initial results is decidedly less sexy.

Here’s another fact that didn’t get much publicity: James Vicary, the author of the initial study, admitted in 1962 that he had simply made up the results to attract customers for his failing marketing business. Regardless, this “study” and others like it, fueled by a growing distrust of advertisers, became ingrained in American popular culture. By the early 1980s, more than four-in-five Americans had heard of subliminal advertising, and of those, two-in-three believed it could be effective in selling products. By the 1990s, $50 million a year or more were being spent annually on subliminal success products, despite a total lack of compelling evidence that they work.

How’s this for real personal development science?

Filed Under: Psychology, Success Tagged With: , , 7 Comments
February 7, 2010

Asshole – Book Recommendation

Yes, the book is actually called “Asshole: How I Got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a @!?* About You”, and it’s written by Martin Kihn. I’ve listened to the audio version the past few days, and it quickly made the list of my favorite books.

You can find other valuable info and reviews for the book on Amazon, and you can listen to a free audio sample on LoDingo.

Just turning 40, Martin realizes that his life and his career are not what he dreamed of, and being too nice is the main cause for this. This is how he describes himself in the book:

If you asked me to do you a favor, even the kind of favor that required me to go so far out of my way I needed a map, a translator and an oxygen tank, even if I didn’t know you that well, I might hesitate a second, hoping you’d think of someone else to irritate, but I’d always say yes.

So in order to get what he wants, Martin decides to get rid of his people pleasing persona and turn himself into an asshole. The book is the entertaining and at the same time inspirational story of this real journey and its results, a journey which involves among other things, taking life coaching, acting classes and boxing lessons.

As a personal development passionate, what I liked most about “Asshole” is that it’s a real life experiment, conducted by a real person and then put into words. Some of the ideas Martin implemented you might find a bit too out-there and not want to try, but there are definitely a lot of people skills and personal development ideas you will want to put into practice if you find yourself being very nice, all the time. If you’re wondering: “What’s wrong with being very nice, all the time?” then you definitely need to get this book.

One such idea I found useful is interrupting people. I don’t think it’s a good thing to do this constantly and make it your way of communicating with others, but I do think every once in a while, it has its place in communication. Yet a lot of people I’ve worked with (me included) have or used to have problems in this area and simply could not interrupt people, even if they may have gotten interrupted all the time.

Besides the practical and inspirational side, “Asshole” is written in a very humorous way, using witty language and describing some out of the box experiences one would naturally encounter when deciding to become an asshole. I laughed through the entire audio-book. I recommend you buy the audio version of the book, as all the voice acting only enhances the humor and makes the book even more entertaining.

As for the lessons of the book: is being nice bad? Is becoming an asshole an actual way to improve your people skills? What did Martin decide after his experiment? Well, you’ll just have to go though the book, get the facts and reach your own conclusions.

Filed Under: Career, People Skills, Success Tagged With: , , 10 Comments
January 31, 2010

The Law of Attraction vs. Science

I like to think that people are becoming more intelligent in their approach to personal development, getting a better, deeper, more realistic understanding on human psychology and life. Then I see the exploding popularity of ideas such as the Law of Attraction, and it makes me wonder.

In case you’re not familiar with it, the Law of Attraction is a concept promoted by New Thought writers, widely spread through the release in 2006 of a film called “The Secret”, followed by a book with the same name. It states that you attract in your life what you think about, not just through motivation, but also through other means. In other words: thoughts become things.

So if you think about what you want and really focus on it, you will make it manifest in your life. On the other hand, if you think about what you don’t want, what you’re running way from, like a lot of people do, you will attract more of that in your life.

I think that if the formulation of this so called ‘law’ of attraction would have stopped at the first part, saying that your thoughts affect your motivation and thus your results, it would have been just fine. And this is something I can agree with whole-heartedly. What you think about has a great influence over your emotions, which has a great influence over your behaviors, which has a great influence over your results.

But nooooo, the Law of Attraction takes one giant leap further by stating that your thoughts directly alter the very fabric of reality. Thoughts are sending out magnetic signals which rearrange the reality and attract what you’re thinking about back to you. The supporters of the Law of Attraction say it is science and it is supported by what is now known in the field of quantum physics.

Well, let’s look at what science truly has to say about this and more specifically, let’s look at this through the thorough eyes of the Scientific American, one of the most credible science magazines:

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain’s magnetic field of 10x15 tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10x5 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

In other words, as much as you would like to think, you’re thoughts are not powerful enough to directly change reality. If you want change, you actually have to get your butt off the couch and do something about it.

It doesn’t stop here. Supporters of the Law of Attraction also state that your thoughts can have radical influences over your own body. Here is one quote relating to this from the book called “The Secret”, by Rhonda Byrne:

The most common thought that people hold, and I held it too, is that food was responsible for my weight gain. That is a belief that does not serve you, and in my mind now it is complete balderdash! Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight. Remember, thoughts are primary cause of everything, and the rest is effects from those thoughts. Think perfect thoughts and the result must be perfect weight.

Are you fucking kidding me? Any person with some decent knowledge of human physiology and psychology can tell you that it doesn’t work that way. This idea borderlines on insane: even if you can consciously influence some activities in your body through your thinking, you can’t directly control the process of gaining weight this way, just like you can’t directly control some of the muscles in your face.

I find it amusing that the Law of Attraction is even labeled as a law. Because when I think of a law, I think of something which has been tested and confirmed through serious scientific research, using scientific methods. In this case, it simply does not apply. The Law of Attraction is over-simplified and pumped-up personal development, made out to sound like science.

Nevertheless,  a lot of folks buy into it. I sometimes meet people who are eager to improve their lives with just one big self-improvement idea, and they talk to me about the realism of the law of attraction like it’s plain as day: “It’s been proven! Haven you seen ‘The Secret?” I did. But when I want stand-up comedy, I still prefer George Carlin.

Focusing on your goals is an important piece of the puzzle called getting the life you want; but it is still just one piece. Effective planning, action, perseverance and adaptation are also important pieces. Take these into account as well in your personal development, and then you’re talking.

Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development, Psychology, Success Tagged With: , , , 49 Comments