The Achievement Habit

Bernard Roth

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062356123
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The co-founder of the Stanford d.School introduces the power of design thinking to help you achieve goals you never thought possible.

Achievement can be learned. It's a muscle, and once you learn how to flex it, you'll be able to meet life's challenges and fulfill your goals, Bernard Roth, Academic Director at the Stanford d.school contends.

In The Achievement Habit, Roth applies the remarkable insights that stem from design thinking—previously used to solve large scale projects—to help us realize the power for positive change we all have within us. Roth leads us through a series of discussions, stories, recommendations, and exercises designed to help us create a different experience in our lives. He shares invaluable insights we can use to gain confidence to do what we've always wanted and overcome obstacles that hamper us from reaching our potential, including:

• Don't try—DO;
• Excuses are self-defeating;
• Believe you are a doer and achiever and you'll become one;
• Build resiliency by reinforcing what you do rather than what you accomplish;
• Learn to ignore distractions that prevent you from achieving your goals;
• Become open to learning from your own experience and from those around you;
• And more.

The brain is complex and is always working with our egos to sabotage our best intentions. But we can be mindful; we can create habits that make our lives better. Thoughtful and powerful The Achievement Habit shows you how.

CHAPTER 1

How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

—E. M. Forster

Your life has no meaning.

I’m not telling you this to make you think about jumping off the nearest bridge; instead I mean it in a much more contemplative way. Let’s first acknowledge that the meaning we find in people, objects, and our own circumstances is subjective. These things have no inherent meaning. Functional and dysfunctional behavior both result from choices people make based on meanings they create. This also means that we have the power to alter our perceptions, revising perceptions that bring us down and enhancing those that help us. Your outlook on life is deeply entwined in your propensity for success. Miserable blowhards can achieve, however they still wind up miserable. That’s not success. Success is doing what you love and being happy about it.

To learn how to get a better handle on your perceptions, emotions, and behavior, it is useful to look at how you think.

YOU GIVE EVERYTHING ITS MEANING

Mike, a graduate student in my class at Stanford University, planned to design a musical instrument for that summer’s Burning Man festival as his project. The festival is held each year the week before Labor Day in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; among the main attractions at Burning Man are massive art pieces, machines, and structures created by the participants. Mike got the idea of doing his project in my class because we both attend the festival. Mike wanted to construct a wearable pipe organ powered in a most unusual way: it would contain a small fire-powered boiler that would then provide steam that could be directed through different pipes to produce music.

The project seemed overly ambitious to me, yet I did not discourage Mike because he appeared highly motivated. Our agreement was that he would come to see me once a week and report on his progress.

Things didn’t go according to plan. At first he visited me sporadically with excuses and little progress to show, and I soon tired of wasting time for both of us on these meetings. I told Mike to forget about the meetings unless he needed me for some reason; I would wait to see the final result.

When the festival arrived, I went at a prearranged time to Mike’s campsite at Burning Man. I brought along Adrian and Steve, two very capable engineers who were part of my Burning Man group and who had a keen interest in seeing the final product. Mike’s presentation was a disaster. Clearly he had not finished, and during his demonstration the instrument worked badly or not at all. Mike was embarrassed, I was embarrassed, and Adrian and Steve were embarrassed for him. Had I been asked to evaluate Mike for a job at that moment I would not have been able to recommend him in good conscience.

Fast-forward three years. I was again at Burning Man with Adrian and Steve, watching a dance performance by a group called the Flaming Lotus Girls, done in conjunction with an amazing animated sculpture called Serpent Mother, a 168-foot-long metallic sculpture of a skeletal serpent coiled around her egg. Propane fire ran down her spine from forty-one flamethrowers that erupted from the top of her vertebrae and shot flames twenty feet in the air. Her head and jaws were hydraulically operated. The three of us stood there transfixed, as did thousands of other participants. Everyone agreed it was by far the most impressive project at the festival. We watched for a while and then wandered off.

A few hours later I returned by myself. By this time the dancers were gone, and the crowd had thinned. I was able to get up close to look at the details of Serpent Mother’s construction. The mechanical engineer in me became curious about the joints connecting the movable head, and I asked one of the attendants about its structure. He told me he didn’t know, but “that guy over there holding the controller knows everything.” I looked up, and there was Mike. I walked over to him, and without hesitation we hugged and started to talk.

It turned out he was very active in the Flaming Lotus Girls organization and their mission to bring more women into the maker culture that stands at the intersection of sculpture, kinetics, robotics, pyrotechnics, and electronic technology; they use a collaborative process that empowers participants to learn new skills and become active artists. Obviously I was very impressed by what he had accomplished.

On my eight-hour drive home after the festival I had plenty of time to think about my experience. I remembered how embarrassed I had felt for Mike about his class project, and thought of how proud I was now of his new endeavor. Based on my previous experience, I did not have a high opinion of his abilities; yet, if anyone asked me now, I would not hesitate to give him a strong recommendation. Clearly Mike was not who I had thought he was, and his story certainly was much more nuanced and complex than I’d imagined.

“Did I redeem myself?” he wrote to me afterward, and I had to laugh. Yes, he did.

Getting to know someone can take somewhere around forever. People are always changing and evolving for both good and bad, and we are all capable of reinvention. I don’t know what Mike had going on in his life during my class. My guess is that he was just a typical student who procrastinated and didn’t place enough value on his schoolwork. At the time, that’s all he was to me: I had written him off as a slacker based on that single impression. That was the meaning I had assigned him. I had not stopped to consider that there might be greatness in him.

The lesson to me was clear: Nothing is what you think it is. You give everything its meaning.

MY DAUGHTER HAS NO MEANING

In my class, I do an exercise in which I go around the room and ask participants to single out something in their lives—anything. Then I tell them to say that this thing has no meaning. I’m showing them that meaning isn’t inherent in an object or person. So, for example, during my turn, I might say my job has no meaning, and the next person might say that his wife has no meaning. This might be followed by others saying the d.school has no meaning, their shoes have no meaning, their shirt has no meaning, their hair has no meaning, their weight has no meaning, their bike has no meaning, their math ability has no meaning. From minutiae to things that seem of obvious high importance, they’re all lumped into the same category: things that have no intrinsic meaning.

After that the entire group starts mentioning items all at once so that no one is listening to one particular person and everyone is talking at the same time, each creating her own list of stuff that has no meaning in her life. It’s a lot of noise and a lot of fun. The cacophony and pandemonium free people, so they don’t feel as awkward saying out loud that things they otherwise hold dear have no meaning.

If you are alone you can still do this exercise. Saying things aloud, even to yourself, can be very freeing.

YOUR TURN

Take a few deep breaths. Close your eyes for a few minutes. Then open them and move your attention around the room from one object to another. Each time you notice an object, say it has no meaning (as in, “The chair has no meaning”). Then think of people in your family and in your life and things you hold dear, such as your biggest accomplishments and most prized possessions. Name each, saying it has no meaning. When you are finished, sit quietly for a few minutes and then reflect on your experience.

My colleague Sheri found it difficult to say that her daughter had no meaning. Of course her daughter has meaning, however, the meaning Sheri gives her daughter is not preordained. Some mothers abandon their daughters. Some mothers murder their daughters. Some disdain and deride them, and others cherish and support them. The variety of possible mother-daughter relationships and the meanings mothers attach to these relationships are endless.

The point of the exercise is not to get the participants to change any of their relationships. Rather, it is to empower them with the realization that they have chosen the meanings they give to all of their relationships. As a result, participants often become more aware of how important a person or item is to them (as in the case of Sheri, who cherished her relationship with her daughter even more after this exercise), and they realize that they have the ability to change the meaning something has to them.

For example, experiencing failure in an endeavor may initially be painful, but it is rarely catastrophic unless you give it that meaning. My colleague Georges was devastated when his son committed suicide after being jilted. The young lover took events that would probably be forgotten in short order and magnified them into literal life-and-death matters. It is easy to see the tragedy, both in the event itself and in the lack of perspective. Yet many of us lack this perspective, usually on a smaller scale, and it’s hard to step back and see this in ourselves.

Once you understand that you can choose what meaning and importance to place on something, you can also understand that it is you, not external circumstances, who determines the quality of your life.

THERE IS NO PERMANENT RECORD

As is likely true for most people, there have been many incidents in my life about which I can now laugh, even though they seemed terrible at the time. The earliest I can remember was the day I came home for lunch in tears from my fourth-grade class. I had been making noise in the stairwell and a teacher, hearing me, told me that the offense would go on my “permanent record card.” I was devastated, believing that this record would follow me forever. My mother attempted to soothe me, telling me it was nothing to be concerned about, but I couldn’t be convinced. Of course, years later I figured out that there was no such thing as a permanent record card. And the bigger question is, even if there had been, would it have really made a difference in my life?

A similar incident happened in graduate school. I was much older and should have been much wiser—alas, I wasn’t. I was studying for my PhD and took an advanced course, “Mathematical Methods in Physics,” from a young Nobel Prize winner. The final examination relied heavily on some things well known to physics majors that I had not heard of and that had never been mentioned in the class. I got an F. When I talked to the professor about it, he told me, “Well, you are an engineer. If I took a music course, I would expect to fail too.”

I didn’t cry to my mother, otherwise the situation played out almost exactly as my fourth-grade trauma had. I was miserable and went to see my thesis professor. He assured me that it was nothing to be concerned about. Still, it bothered me for a long time. Eventually, of course, I discovered that no one cared about the F grade on my transcript. Even if they did, would it really have made a meaningful difference in my life? Nope. I did take the next course in the sequence, with another professor, and earned an A+. And guess what? No one noticed that either.

In life, typically, the only one keeping a scorecard of your successes and failures is you, and there are ample opportunities to learn the lessons you need to learn, even if you didn’t get it right the first—or fifth—time.

LEARNING FROM BETRAYAL

During a workshop I ran in Bulgaria during the Cold War, I showed a videotape of some student robotics projects to the group. We broke for lunch, and when I asked for my tape back, I was told it had been locked away for safekeeping and that they were tracking down the person who had mistakenly left with the key.

The story seemed a little odd to me. Later in the afternoon I mentioned this to one of my friends who was also in the workshop. He told me in confidence that the delay was because a professor and his assistants—people I knew as friends—had taken my tape elsewhere to have it copied. Eventually my tape was returned, and they stuck with their original story about the reason for the delay. What nerve! I was hurt and angry that they had betrayed me and violated our friendship.

When I gave my second talk at the workshop, I spoke about scientific interchanges fostering friendship and trust. While doing this, I looked pointedly at the perpetrators. I was sure they understood that I knew what they had done and was slyly reprimanding them—still I wasn’t satisfied. Upset, I went off into the woods to sulk by myself, thinking I would show them how wrong they were. I would leave early, skipping the gala closing banquet.

As I walked in the woods, I kept festering. Eventually, my “nothing has any meaning” exercise came to mind. I ran through the events of the day in my head, listing off each item and repeating that it had no meaning. When I got to “This tape has no meaning,” a light bulb came on in my head. It could not have been truer. There was absolutely nothing on that tape of any special value to me or to them. What were they planning to do with it? I still don’t know. Give it to their intelligence agency? Show it to their students? Watch to get ideas for projects? I had already shown the tape; there was nothing private or groundbreaking on it. If they had asked, I would gladly have let them copy it, so what was the big deal? I had given the tape a meaning it did not really possess.

They should have asked, and they didn’t. Big deal. Why was I about to let this ruin my night? Once I cleared my head, I returned to the hotel and ended up having a wonderful time at the banquet that evening.

This incident was a vivid reminder that while I cannot control what the outside world does, I can determine my own experience. Once you accept that you give everything in your life its meaning, you feel like the master of your life, not a powerless victim of circumstance and chance.

MODIFIED RADICAL

When my friend Ann got breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, she wrote “Modified Radical,” a lengthy poem about her experience that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and later incorporated into a booklet she titled Modified Radical and Other Cancer Poems. The American Cancer Society distributed the booklet as a patient education tool, and it became a source of comfort and inspiration for many people. Ann received letters from readers telling her how much her poem had helped them. One very moving letter came from a surgeon t...