How to quit smoking is a huge topic. I’ll answer in a couple of seconds, in the hopes I can at least point you to some good resources. If I were going to quit smoking, based on everything I’ve been exposed to, here are the tools I’d use. I don’t know if this will work—I’ve never smoked—but this is what I do whenever I’m trying to change a physical habit.

I’ve used these techniques around eating, when I discovered that my diet as a 19-year-old somehow didn’t look or feel as good once I was past adolescence. I also use these techniques to overcome my resistance to exercise and pushing myself at the gym.

There are three areas I concentrated on: dealing with the physical sensations, dealing with my beliefs and mental habits, and dealing with the actual behavioral triggers to eating.

Physical sensations. I would eat until I felt stuffed, instead of eating until I stopped feeling hungry. I used self-hypnosis and gave myself a lot of suggestions like, “as soon as my body is no longer hungry, let me feel full.” And “with every bite I take once I’m no longer hungry, let me feel fuller and fuller.” For the gym, I used hypnosis so sore muscles now feel good to me and immediately make me think of how studly I’m becoming. *grunt*

For smoking, I would pay close attention to the physical sensations of wanting a cigarette and use hypnosis to make those same sensations triggers for feeling like taking a deep breath, or feeling good about how I was quitting smoking.

Beliefs that trigger me. When contemplating going to the gym, my first thought would be, “that’s so much work!! It will be so unpleasant!” I would also think, “I just don’t have the genetics to be able to get a really good-looking body.”

The most effective thing I’ve found to identify and deal with beliefs that trigger or get in the way of physical behaviors is The Work of Byron Katie. You can buy her book, Loving What Is, or download the entire important pieces of the book for free at http://www.thework.com.

Though Katie markets The Work as self-help, I even use it for very concrete things like physical preparation for singing. I used to have trouble hitting certain high notes and noticed that right before I sang the note, I thought, “This is a high note. I’ll have to reach for it,” and that thought triggered the tension in my throat. I did The Work on that thought and suddenly became calm and clear in my singing.

For smoking, I would write down every belief I could find about smoking and do The Work on them. For example, “I look cool when I smoke,” “I need to smoke to calm down,” “Smoking feels good,” “Smoking will help me feel better,” etc.

Behavioral triggers. When you start to do an unwanted behavior, you can change the very action of the behavior into a reminder to do something else. For example, if I give in to my desire for Oreo ice cream cake, I arrange for the sight of it approaching my mouth to trigger a reminder that looking like a stud-muffin is way more important to me than eating a second piece of Oreo ice cream cake.

For behavior triggers, I use the “swish pattern” from NLP (neurolinguistic-programming), as discussed in the book Using Your Brain—For a Change by Richard Bandler.

For smoking, I would use the swish pattern to shift from the image of my hand approaching my mouth with a cigarette or lighter to a reminder of how great I’ll look, feel, and smell(!) when I no longer want or need cigarettes.

I hope this helps.

Think of your age 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc. and write down all the things you appreciate about the younger “you.” Spend some time pondering what’s been constant, what’s changed, and how that younger “you” contributed to who you are now. This is an exercise I’m designing for a speech on Living Your Life for younger people. If you’re willing to share, please chime in. What did you like about younger-you?  What’s been constant? What’s changed? (What, that you thought would be constant at the time, changed?)

It’s not his fault his results are trite, however. As discussed at great length in The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig, when you interview someone after-the-fact about why something was successful or a failure, you always get the same answers.

That means, sadly, that such answers are meaningless. If you ask someone who’s a known success how they got that way, they’ll say it was vision, passion, hard work, etc. If you ask their friends, the friends will say vision, passion, hard work, etc. If you ask someone who’s a failure how they got that way, you’ll also get the same stories over and over. Humans seem to have built-in explanations for such things.

Among what’s missing is any interview with people who had vision, passion, and worked hard, and failed. Why? Because those people can’t afford the absurdly high price tag to attend TED, so Richard didn’t interview them. It may be that for every 100 people who have vision, passion, and work hard, 99 of them end up burned out, divorced, and miserable, and only one goes on to be successful. But by selecting only the successful ones to interview, it’s easy to conclude that those traits correlate with success.

A simpler example: every one of the successful TED attendees drank either mother’s milk or formula as a baby. Does that mean that drinking mother’s milk or formula leads to success? Not at all. It just means that pretty much everyone drinks those things as babies.

I know some very rich finance people. Their vision? Nil. Really Nil. Like, no imagination whatsoever. Their passion? To show off and impress the neighbors. Their hard work? Signing checks. It’s tough if it’s not special 24-bond paper made for smooth writing. And then all that waiting and waiting! Years of playing golf, waiting while thousands of people work their butts off so the providers of capital can walk off with the profits (that’s what “capitalism” means–providers of capital get the rewards). In short, I know many example of people who don’t have all those nice, feel-good attributes, and are even more successful than many who do.

Since Richard St. John is giving his talks to high school students, he is in the perfect position to do a real experiment to find out what leads to success. Have half of the students he talks to do the things he recommends. Have them work hard, have vision, and so on. The other half? Have them slack off and meander through life. In twenty year’s we’ll be able to see whether or not there’s a real correlation between his recommendations and subsequent success.

• Never help out a colleague too much, because they’re just competition for the top spot.
• Always help your colleagues, because when we work together, we accomplish more than when we work alone.
• Our competitors will never be able to produce a product as good as ours.
• Management is stupid and doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I will be using these in my book. By submitting them here, you give me permission to do so. I would like to list everyone who contributes in the acknowledgements section. If you wish to be acknowledged, just sign your comment with your desired name (first name, full name, etc.).

Thanks!

Despite frequent moves and attending six schools between elementary school and college, science was in the air. I got a firm grounding in how to think critically, how to use data, and how to observe the physical world around me in pursuit of Doing Great Things. Whether my school was in a failing Pennsylvania steel town or in a full-on major city, science was present.

Science has given us great things. And therein lies the problem.

We’ve had it so good that we’ve been able to forget how we got here to begin with. In the convenience of indoor plumbing, central heating, and home-delivered groceries, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that the world naturally exists to make our lives easy, and it must be our inherent worthiness—not the hard work of millions of scientists, engineers, manufacturers, distributors—that has given us our standard of living.

In business, we have created a huge industry for business intelligence based on data. Hard data is used by successful businesses the world around to design, produce, and market products. That’s one of the cool things about business: when profits are down, people are sometimes willing to look at data to figure out what to do. Amazing how putting people’s year-end-bonus in jeopardy can bring them to appreciate the outside world, rather than the fantasy world they’ve made up.

(Equally puzzling are the many companies who collect data that could point the way and then never look at it or discard it when it doesn’t fit the CEO’s pre-determined course of action.)

In daily life, however, data, science, math, and engineer have become almost the subjects of contempt. It may be hip to be an engineer, but only if it’s going to lead you to a billion-dollar payday (look at the numbers: despite the hype, most entrepreneurs never make more than a modest living. It’s precisely because it’s a near-miracle that we hear about billion-dollar Facebook boy or the Google geeks). It’s the money we’ve come to admire, not the achievements, thinking, and science that got us there.

So now, we’re seeing that in America, almost half of our populous doesn’t believe in evolution, and half of those who do, don’t believe in natural selection, despite it being one of the most solid theories in science. Of course, most don’t know the difference between a scientific theory and an opinion (yes, Virginia, there is a difference), so even having the discussion is a losing battle.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less whether people believe in evolution, so-called “intelligent design,” or the flying spaghetti monster. But I care a great deal whether people know how to look at the physical world, monitor data, and—most importantly!—change their beliefs when the data shows they’re wrong. And even then, who cares if people live in fantasy land, except for matters of collective life and death.

For example: war. Peak oil and resource usage. Agribusiness and food production. Pollution. Nuclear energy. Global warming.

I’ve been feeling apocalyptic today and reading up on many of those issue. Amazingly, the American media has proven worthless in exploring any of those topics. Journalists no longer seem to research issues, but rather just present people of differing opinions and let them slug it out. Journalists overlook the fact that one person might be a recognized leader in their field with two hundred peer-reviewed papers, and the other a lobbyist for a special-interest group with a vested interest in suppressing the science. It’s bizarre(*).

Michael Crichton, the fiction writer (that means, ladies and gentlemen, that he writes lies. That’s what fiction is: lies designed to tell a dramatic story) seems to be carrying as much weight in climate debate as scores of scientists. He wrote a fiction book, State of Fear, whose untrue-but-engaging lie states that climate change isn’t happening. What’s amazing is that people hold him up as an important player in the non-existent-in-the-scientific-community “debate” about global warming, even while the very people he quotes in his book, have publicly said he distorted and cherry-picked his data to reach the conclusion he wanted. Yet people consider him more credible than the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

It’s weird. We have a huge problem imagining things we’ve never gone through before. So the idea that some of our big problems could destroy our way of life permanently (and if not within our own lifetimes, within our children’s) is literally inconceivable. But the numbers point that way more and more. Hubbard’s Peak, the prediction of the end of cheap oil, has been written about for years both oil geologists and investment bankers who have made billions understanding the science and numbers behind oil. Yet other than a rise in per-gallon gas prices, the general populace seems unconcerned. (The fact that our crop productivity relies on petroleum-based fertilizers seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Oil declines, and food might, too. Isn’t that a fun thought?)

So for whatever it’s worth, if you want to have a planet to live on in your old age, and if you want your children to have lives that aren’t spent dealing with crisis, look at data. Demand research. Learn to separate fact from fiction and wishful thinking. Understand the difference between expert opinion and shrill emotional manipulation.

And please, indulge in flights of fancy, wishful thinking, and imagination for creating your dreams and aspirations(2), but ground yourself firmly in fact when deciding how to get there.

(1) As Pat M points out below, I make a huge sweeping generalization without support, here. Pat is right, I was wrong. See my reply to Pat below, which gives links to some actual follow-up that’s much more accurate than my opinion. back

(2) Recommended aspirations: enough food for everyone, a stable climate, preventative actions taken to mitigate long-term problems in energy supply and global warming, and just maybe, a halt to nuclear proliferation.

In that moment, it struck me: we all live in a world of our own making. Oh, I don’t mean literally, though fans of The Secret may disagree. But our experience of the world is so deeply tied to our interpretations that what most of us call “truth” is nothing more than our own made up stories.

I look at the world today and see more than 6 billion people surviving. Many don’t have enough water or health care, but they’re surviving. It fact population continues to rise. That doesn’t sound like a dangerous world to me; that sounds like a world that’s provided us pretty much everything we need to thrive. Heck, we’ve even exterminated or controlled all of our natural predators.

To the extent we live in a “dangerous” world, that danger comes from other humans. For example, investment bankers and financial managers who deal in collateralized debt obligations. And yes, the occasional human being kills others. Sometimes it’s in war, or for political reasons, or whatever. And the media focuses on those events precisely because the violent, dangerous events are the exception, rather than the rule.

Most Americans have never suffered pain worse than a stubbed toe. We’re surrounded on the east and west by oceans so broad that no one can cross them without ample warning. We have Mexico and Canada to the south and north. The greatest danger there comes from having too much cheap labor and better ice hockey teams, respectively. As for the rest of the world, we have more intercontinental warheads than everyone else put together and then some.

In short, we’re the most dangerous thing in the world, and in the absolute scale of things, even we aren’t doing much damage. (Except unintentionally, to the environment, but that’s not what Chris Matthews was talking about.)

So Chris lives in a dangerous world because he finds the danger and then calls the world dangerous. He could also look at all the good things and call the world safe, secure, and happy. His choice.

And what is your choice? Which world do you live in?

If you want to bring this into a business context, since this is a business BLOG, let me ask you: when you look at your competition, your industry, and your trends, what stories do you tell? How do you explain the actions of others? The actions of markets? Do you tell a story of luck? Of skill? Of timing? Are you a victim of the market (“the failure of our initiative was because of a bad economy”) or are you a driver of the market (“we did everything we could think of and found the combination that let us become market leader in a mature market”)?

Examine your stories. They’re only stories, and they dictate your every perception, your every decision, and your every action. Choose your stories well.

The original question:

My reply

I haven’t read “The Power of Nice,” though I’m amused that we’ve created a culture where we believe we have to make a case for treating each other nicely.It can certainly be better business to screw people. Prof. Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School did a study about that years ago. He concluded that being unethical did, indeed, pay, but it produces a world we don’t want to live in, so we tell stories like, “Being ethical is good business.”

In my life, I find when I’m centered and calm and at my best, I naturally want to be nice to people, and it feels darned good. And yeah, there’s more and more research supporting that position.

Clarification added 1 hour ago:

I notice many of the respondants are personal and executive coaches. So take us with a grain of salt. Perhaps the I-bankers and Swim-with-the-Shark types can give us their perspective? Too bad Leona Helmsley is no longer with us–she could argue the other side.

The author wrote back

Are you saying there are times when the best thing to do is “screw people”?

My reply

The “best thing to do” depends on your value system. In business, if you value profits over people, you can sometimes maximize profits by screwing people. Nicotine-enhanced cigarette, anyone? Unethical behavior is common in business. The Conference Board did a study showing 60% of all people interviewed over a wide range of companies and industries routinely were asked to do unethical or illegal things. That makes it the majority way of doing business. That says to me that unethical behavior is more normal in the workforce than being female. (Copy of the study is available in PDF form here. See page 22.)

Personally, I value people over profits. I would love to live in a world where, if a business can legally, but unethically, make a profit, it would go out of business regardless of profitability. I used to stand up in meetings and point out when we were doing something unethical. Now I’m self-employed; honest self-examination isn’t a survival trait in corporate America. What *was* a survival trait, however, was the willingness to help everyone convince themselves that the profit-maximizing choice was also the ethically and morally “right” choice.

My own life has been a continual effort to deepen my integrity and building a life that aligns with my values. It disturbs me to see people damage their own integrity through self-denial.

That’s why I quoted Prof. Stevenson’s research. There’s this very comforting, but empirically false story that we can somehow maximize our business fortunes and our ethical/moral fortunes in one happy bundle. When we adopt the story, we get to have it all. When we face tough choices with very real tradeoffs between being a “good businessperson” and being a “good human being,” we relieve ourselves of having to confront the real choice, since our little story lets us maximize people OR profits, and claim that in the long run, our decision was magically best for both.

So back to your original question… I’ve had a very happy, satisfying, successful life on many levels, and have forgone chances to get a lot richer, legally, in ways that would have compromised my personal sense of integrity.

You may be different. If you prefer profits to people, then yeah, the best thing for you may be to screw people. I suspect if you do that, you’ll find yourself at life’s end surrounded by people you don’t like very much, with fewer happy memories than you might like. But that could simply be MY wishful thinking. I’m sure there are people who’ve been total jerks their whole life, accumulated huge fortunes, and died quite happy and quite oblivious to any suffering or harm they cause to others.

The good news is that you get to choose who you’ll be.

All the best,

Stever

Shell Oil says: When Mother Nature doesn’t back down, we have experts up to her challenge.

Think about that framing! Shudder. That’s the framing of extinction. Mother Nature, dear Shell Oil, is what gives us life. Food. Clothes. Even *gasp* oil.

Maybe we are, indeed, at war with Mother Nature. If so, it’s a war we can only lose. She’ll win. Can you say “Global warming?” Species extinction? Honey Bees?

The engineers aren’t up to those challenges, just yet. Especially in a country where Gallup reported today that 68% of Repubs and 40% of Dems/Indeps don’t believe in evolution, I don’t have high hopes that we’ll be leading innovation into solving world problems 20 years from now. Though we might still be drilling oil.

But this is just darned hard to do! It’s not natural to sit around analyzing yourself to figure out what your beliefs are, so you can think outside them. And reading stuff written by people with vastly different beliefs isn’t likely to help you think outside your box unless you can suspend your beliefs pretty deeply. (I know, I was just reading a newspaper editorial, gritting my teeth the whole way through. “I can consider this with an open mind,” I futilely told myself.)

So instead of identifying beliefs by challenging them, let’s take another approach. Here are a bunch of beliefs I’ve encountered in clients and friends that hold people back from doing the things they most need to do. Notice that some of these beliefs are polar opposites. Indeed, the same belief can limit one person while freeing another. It depends on each person’s situation and their other beliefs as well.

Ponder this list. If any of them seem familiar, stop a moment and do a thought experiment. Ask yourself, “what would I be doing, who would I be, how would I act if I didn’t believe this?” Then imagine that different-You going through a typical day. The goal here isn’t to change your beliefs, just to step outside and test the waters.

Beliefs about yourself

• I’m successful.
• I’m a failure.
• I deserve what I’m getting.
• I don’t deserve what I’m getting.
• I can do anything I put my mind to.
• I don’t have the degrees/certifications/recognition to do it.

Beliefs about customers

• Customers buy the lowest-priced product.
• Customers buy the highest-quality product.
• We must give all customers great service.
• Our customers are [insert your demographic here]

Beliefs about competitors

• We have no competitors.
• We have lots of competitors.
• Company X is our competitor. (Are Google and Microsoft competitors? Why? or Why not? Are they even in the same business?)
• We are better than competitor X.
• We are cheaper than competitor X.
• Competitor X is a threat.
• Competitor X is not a threat.

Beliefs about who we are and what we’re capable of doing.

• We can accomplish goal G with resources R. (Often manifests after a layoff, as workforce is reduced but goals aren’t.)
• We have the capability to do H.
• We have the best programmers/manufacturers/documentors/operators/logistics in the world.

Beliefs about the future

I’ve chosen some of the hot topics that tend to be argued strongly from belief. Amusingly, most of the below beliefs have measurements and research available, but virtually none of us know about it (except as it is selectively cited by our favorite already-believes-with-us pundit):

• We’ll have plenty of oil for the coming decades.
• We’ll run out of oil in X years.
• Economic health will lead to happier lives for us all.
• Political party Z will win the next election.
• We can pollute without having any really bad effects on the world.
• If we spend more on schools, we’ll have better-educated kids.
• Fixing education isn’t just a matter of money.

Beliefs about the world

• Everything is politics. People are motivated by pure self-interest. I have to manipulate them to get what I want.
• Everything is family. People are motivated by altruism. I can do good and appeal to their better nature to get what I want.
• We have to see what the trends are, then act.
• If we act first, we can shape the trends.
• Life is a meritocracy. Rewards come to those who work hard.
• Life is all about luck. Rewards have very little to do with working hard.
• Taxes are bad. Period.
• Taxes are the contribution we make to live in a country that provides common services.
• Social problems should be solved by government.
• Social problems should be solved by markets.

So why does it matter, anyway?

Your beliefs control what you do and don’t attempt in the world. If you believe you’re a bad negotiator, you’ll never put yourself in situations where you have to do difficult negotiations, so you’ll never go up the learning curve. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Your beliefs also determine the options you generate when you want to try something new. If you truly believe that Wal-mart is an invincible competitor, for example, you won’t even consider business options that would pit you head-to-head against Wal-mart.

And lastly, your beliefs determine what you pay attention to. They determine what you measure. If you believe customers are out to cheat you, you’ll invent things like software activation(1). If you believe customers are honest, you’ll likely create a tighter relationship with your customers because you’ll naturally engage in trust-building activities.

So now that you’ve tried on a few different beliefs. Here’s a final question to ponder: what could you measure or pay attention to that would let you know if the new belief you tried is better, worse, or as effective as your current belief?

Just a thought…

—–
(1) Software activation is a potential disaster for customers, but software companies don’t care.

The Zombie March is just what it sounds like. A couple of hundred people dressed up as zombies and shambled a couple of miles across the city of Cambridge.

I heard about it at the last minute and decided to go. My only vaguely Zombie-looking make-up was a Body Shop exfolient. I applied it liberally, giving a perfectly undead pallor. Add in a couple of bloodshot eyes from a cheap Halloween costume, tossed on a ragged army jacket and torn jeans, and voila – instant Zombie.

We shambled along, to the gawking of onlookers. We must have been photographed by a dozen TV cameras and thousands of cell phone cameras. Being Zombies, we cared nothing for notoriety. The policy tracked our progress, keeping the order by yelling “Zombies, back on the sidewalk” when one of our number would wander too far out into traffic. Tourists loved us, and halfway through our march, a confused housewife with a midwestern accent wandered up and asked, “Why exactly are you doing this?”

Why, indeed. There really wasn’t a good reason, just spontaneous creativity. Remember childhood? We did this a dozen times a day as kids. As adults, we’re this creative maybe once a decade.

As bizarre as this was, the weirdest part was realizing how rarely I move even remotely outside my comfort zone. TV shows? Familiar. Conversations? With familiar people about familiar topics. In short, as much as I preach thinking outside the box, my own boxes are as captivating as anyone’s.

Maybe, you’re thinking, the Zombie March would spark some great new idea about business. Maybe. Or maybe not. Even the question itself presupposes that the Zombie March had to have some purpose, or that you should only do something if it has a purpose.

What if we’re wrong? What if there’s value to being creative simply for the sake of being creative? Maybe the more you stretch your limits, the more you’ll have great ideas on the job and wacky ones off the job. Maybe life is about having a great range of experience, rather than just having a productive range of experience.

My challenge for the day: open up the paper and find some event or gathering that sounds totally silly. Something that you would never do. Then go do it and just enjoy the experience. Find out what happens. Maybe just outside your comfort zone is your Next Big Thing waiting to happen.

P.S. When the Zombie march was over, I washed off the Body Shop exfolient and discovered my skin clean and smooth like it hasn’t been for years. Sometimes taking a turn as a Zombie has unexpected benefits!