The Western cult of happiness

“The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.”

Source

Eagle vs. Wolf

Are your challenges really so challenging? Are your trials and tribulations so taxing? Or have you become soft and weak, coddled by the trappings of society and bound up by infantile ego demands?

Could you survive on the steppe? Could you reach down inside yourself and draw out a calmness, a focus, a hardness, that make the trumped-up stresses of modern life seem as nothing?

Could you find peace as the eagle… or the wolf?

The Sadness of Phil Collins

Exasperated, Croesus demands that Solon explain to him why he has not deigned to put him, great king, owner of unimaginable riches, even on the same level as these ordinary folk.

Solon replies that human life is so unpredictable, we are so at the mercy of fate, that until we are safely dead, no one can say whether we are happy or fortunate as we do not know what calamities might befall us from one day to the next. No one can truly be called happy until they are dead.

— Herodotus The Histories (1.29-.33) and (1.85-.89) trans Aubrey de Selincourt

According to Rolling Stone, Phil Collins was the second biggest pop star of the 1980s (after Michael Jackson).

Many of his hits — most powerfully “In the Air Tonight” — defined the decade. The man sold 150 million records. His songs endure.

You’d think that’s a pretty good life legacy — a decent roll of the dice, as it were.

But twenty years later, a bitter and melancholy Phil Collins has asked that people start calling him “Phillip.” He hates what the old Phil has become.

Via Rolling Stone:

The Eighties ended and the Nineties began in a whole different mood, with Nirvana and other punk-influenced bands establishing grunge as the dominant musical force. In many ways, grunge’s threadbare, garage-rock sound was a direct reaction to the overblown, synth-heavy bombast of the previous decade — and no one typified those excesses more than Collins. In the summer of 1994, reports began circulating that Collins had informed his (second) wife that he wanted a divorce — via fax. He denied it vehemently, and the fax itself was never produced, but no matter: Suddenly it was open season on the guy. Oasis’ Noel Gallagher started hammering on him any time he could, to uproarious effect. Among his choicest bon mots: “You don’t have to be great to be successful. Look at Phil Collins” and “People hate fucking cunts like Phil Collins, and if they don’t, they fucking should.” And so it’s gone, especially on the internet, where I Hate Phil Collins sites have flourished. He gets criticized for everything. For his hair, for his height, for his shirts (tucks them in), for being a “shameless, smirking show hog.”

“I don’t understand it,” he says, looking pained. “I’ve become a target for no apparent reason. I only make the records once; it’s the radio that plays them all the time. I mean, the Antichrist? But it’s too late. The die is cast as to what I am.”

Now we see the downside of being a pop superstar. Had Collins’ songs not been popular enough to get regular rotation on soft rock radio stations to this day, he never would have become a target for point-scoring assholes like Noel Gallagher. The proliferation of “I Hate Phil Collins” sentiment is a hipster-grunge reaction to Collins’ extreme outlier of commercial success — and in its own way, further validation of the outsized impact he has had.

And yet, for the man himself to say “The die is cast as to who I am” is just sad — a form of tragicomedy. Fate does not decide who a person is, much less the snarking of random trolls on the internet. Except in this case, Collins the man has chosen to let his detractors define him… and thus made it so.

Collins is wealthy but not healthy. The hearing in his left ear is gone. A vertebrae injury in his neck has oddly affected his ability to grip things: He is unable to hold drumsticks, or even write his own name with a pen.

Moderate physical ailments are hardly an impediment to a happy life. What haunts Collins, cruelly, is his inability to let go of a caricature that others have crudely drawn:

He pauses, and then he goes on. “I have had suicidal thoughts. I wouldn’t blow my head off. I’d overdose or do something that didn’t hurt. But I wouldn’t do that to the children. A comedian who committed suicide in the Sixties left a note saying, “Too many things went wrong too often.” I often think about that.”

His manner when he says these things is straightforward. He betrays no emotion. The second-biggest pop star of the Eighties (after Michael Jackson) just sits there, seeming like he maybe wished he could blink it all away.

“Everything has added up to a load that I’m getting tired of carrying,” he continues. “It’s gotten so complicated. It’s the three failed marriages, and having kids that grew up without me, and it’s the personal criticism, of being Mr. Nice Guy, or of divorcing my wife by fax, all that stuff, the journalism, some of which I find insulting. I wouldn’t say that I have suicidal tendencies over my career or bad press. They’re just another chink in the wall. It’s cumulative. You can say, ‘Grow up, man, everybody gets criticism.’ I know that. And I’ve philosophically adjusted to it. But does that make it any more pleasurable? No.” And that’s the trouble with wishing you were somebody else. As much as you may want it, you know it’ll never happen, at least not in this lifetime.

Wishing you were someone else? You are fucking Phil Collins, man! Those were (and are) some GREAT fucking songs!

And here we cycle back around to “Solon’s Wisdom,” as referenced in the opening quote.

The gist of Solon’s wisdom — as referenced by Croesus as a prisoner on a pyre — is that you don’t know how life will turn out, and thus until it is over, you cannot speak with finality of another man’s happiness or another man’s full life.

Modern culture treats pop stars like royalty, and assumes a glorious inner life to match the outer one.  Yet we know how Michael Jackson turned out, and now we see the self-imposed burden Collins must bear.

Do we really want to envy these people? Do we really want to envy anyone?

Fame, money, accolades, recognition from one’s peers… these things have their place, but in and of themselves they guarantee nothing. Sometimes (often times?) they are more pain than pleasure — more trouble than they are worth.

The point here, though, is not to have sympathy for poor Phil Collins. In many ways the man is trapped in a prison of his own making. Nor is the point to take comfort in one’s lack of fame. Saying “wow, I’m glad I’m not famous” is just smug self-rationalization — another version of “my situation is better than so and so’s.”

Instead, the point (at least for yours truly) is to recognize that the conventional wisdom as to what makes us happy — and as to WHO is happy — is all too often laughably, utterly wrong.

So is it better to be a pop star or a postal clerk? Not so easy to answer now eh?

Whose life is filled with laughter and love and great sex and fulfilling moments and personal epiphanies from end to end — the famously successful person envied (and hated) by so many, or the quietly content individual who outwardly displays no grandiose signs? Maybe it’s one, maybe the other. Maybe neither, maybe both. From the outside, can you really know?

And if conventional trappings aren’t the answer… if all the popular delusions are merely airbrushed lies… if incredibly wonderful, fulfilling and experience-enriched lives are open to anyone (including pop stars), wholly independent of who or what they achieve in the jaded eyes of the world… then what excuse does that leave for you, for me, for all of us?

“A man must constantly exceed his level”

Bruce Lee was truly a master practitioner of metaprocess.

He may have never heard the term, but he didn’t need it. He lived it, as the below anecdote shows.

Attribution uknown:

Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a-half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.”

He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” –and we’re still running– “if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.”

It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.“

Evey Reborn

Lao Tzu: If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you are not afraid of dying, there is nothing you cannot achieve.

~

Degrees of Freedom

The cartoon below (via XKCD) is humorous on the surface, but harbors some rather profound implications underneath.

It reminds Jack of a favorite F.N. quote:

Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

On Mental Toughness

“To play ball, you need three things. Heart. Mind. Balls. If you have two, you can play, but you will never be great. To be great, all three.”

– Frank Curiel

“You become a champion by fighting one more round. When things are tough, you fight one more round.”

– “Gentleman Jim” Corbett

The late Earl Woods famously told his son: “Tiger, I promise you – you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in you entire life.”

Well… with all due respect to the deceased, a few folks might quibble with that.

Like professional cyclist Tyler Hamilton, for instance. There is tough, and then there is tough, as Hamilton’s 2003 Tour de France experience illustrates. From the book “Lance Armstrong’s War” by Daniel Coyle:

Hamilton carried high hopes for the Tour, all of which literally crumpled on a narrow curve near the finish [of the first stage], when the usual thing happened (one rider twitched, another put a foot down), sparking a hideous splintery pileup that flipped Hamilton nearly over his handlebars at 40 mph.

“That hurt a lot,” Hamilton said.

Two doctors X-rayed him, shaking their heads. The right collarbone was fractured, a clean crack in the shape of a V. The Tour’s official newspaper was notified, headlines were written: “Hamilton Out.” Then a third doctor examined it, and noted that while the bone was broken, it was not displaced. In a Hamiltonian stroke of luck, the fracture had occurred near the spot where he’d broken his collarbone the previous year — a mass of fresh bone growth had helped prevent the fracture from spreading. “C’est possible,” the doctor said.

Hamilton, pale and bandaged, wobbled out for stage 2. Space was cleared in the team car; his suitcase was packed and brought to the first feed zone in anticipation of his dropping out. Haven, having driven overnight from Girona, pondered how she’d console him. But he finished the 205-kilometer stage in the lead group, and the Tour was never the same.

“On a pain scale of one to ten,” Hamilton said, “that was ten.”

“It is the finest example of courage that I’ve come across,” decreed veteran Tour doctor Gerard Porte, adding that your average person would have taken three weeks off work. Historians rooted eagerly through the Tour’s ample cupboard of noble wounded — Pascal Simon’s broken shoulderblade in 1983, Honore Bartheleny’s broken shoulder, dislocated wrist, and partial blindness in 1920; Eddy Merckx’s 1975 finish with a broken jaw — and watched as Hamilton steadily surpassed them all. The squad of camera operators featuring Hamilton as centerpiece of a 2005 IMAX movie (tentatively called Brain Power) kept filming, scarcely believing that God could script so perfectly. Back in the States, his brother, Geoff, stayed up late to police the Web page, deleting some of the more heated offers left by teenage girls who make up a high percentage of Hamilton’s fans. Inevitably, it went so far as to tip the other way: a rival team director accused Hamilton and CSC of faking the fracture, precipitating the rarely seen spectacle of a team parading X-rays to prove one of their riders is injured.

Barred by antidoping regulations from taking any actually useful painkillers, Hamilton turned to less conventional methods: physiotherapy and scads of Tylenol. His handlebars were swathed in padded tape and his tires deflated a notch to provide a small measure of cushion. Each night CSC’s lanky Danish healer, Ole Kare Foli, worked while Hamilton tried to sleep, applying acupressure and “channeling energy.”

It seemed to work. On the steeps of Alpe d’Huez a few days later, Hamilton not only rode in the lead group, but attacked four times. It was great, authentically heroic stuff, and soon everybody was going crazy, and the crazier they got the humbler and nicer Hamilton became (radiating that friendly glow, saying “thank you” a hundred times a day, asking other people how they were feeling), which, of course, only made everybody crazier.

Then things suddenly got worse. Favoring the injury, Hamilton compressed a nerve in his lower back, triggering a new pain that dwarfed the ache in his collarbone. The night after stage 10, Hamilton lay on his bed, his torso twisted in rictus, his breathing restricted. Foli tried to massage him, to loosen him up for the needed spinal adjustment, but the pain was too great.

“That really, really hurt a lot,” Hamilton said. “At least what I remember of it.”

Haven’s recollections were clearer. “Ty was lying there in the dark, he couldn’t move,” she said. “Then he says, ‘Just do it, do the adjustment now.’ Ole went to straighten him out and Tyler’s screaming and Ole is crying and I’m crying, wondering what could be worth all this.”

Eight days later, Hamilton provided a succinct answer with his performance on stage 16, a day in which he was nearly dropped early on, ridden back to the pack by his teammates, then broke away and rode alone through the mists up one of the Tour’s steepest climbs, his eyes reduced to slits, his cheeks, according to one breathless account, streaked with tears. (“I don’t think I was actually crying,” he said later. “But it did hurt a lot.”) He outrode the superior power of the chasing pack for one hundred kilometers and won his first-ever Tour de France stage, giving television commentators plenty of time to let their voices dissolve with emotion as they declared it one of the longest and most courageous solo breakaways in Tour history. “That felt really good, because I did it not just for me but for everybody else,” he said.

Hamilton knows a thing or two about mental toughness, yes?

A favorite movie scene:

Is it possible, as far as it goes, to be the mental toughness equivalent of a bare-knuckle boxing champion? To be “harder than a coffin nail,” cognitively if not physically?

Yes. It’s really just a matter of conditioning.

Extend the fingers of your hand straight out, flexed and rigid, as if to form a sort of flat spear. Now jab the nearest flat surface. If you do it hard enough, it will hurt a little.

After loosening up a bit, consider that serious martial artists develop hand strength by slamming their fingertips into wooden boards and densely packed sacks of rice, over and over again. This ruthless repetition adds up. A sensai can spear his hand through a heavy punching bag as if it were made of tissue paper and cotton candy.

That kind of ability – the stuff that causes eyes to open wide when displayed – is cultivated through dedicated training and relentless focus. Like the muscles of the body, the muscles of the mind respond vigorously to targeted efforts.

So why go after it? Why pursue mental toughness?

Because, when properly developed, mental toughness is not just a trait you possess. It is a trait that possesses you. It becomes part of your being, like a quietly commanding physical presence. And it’s always there — a self-replenishing resource, to be drawn on in times of stress. This facilitates two most excellent life-enhancing qualities: peace of mind and the will to execute, in all manner of challenging environments.

Metaphorically speaking, mental toughness can make you harder than the ground you walk on. As such, it can also make long roads short and heavy burdens light.

An aim of Metaprocess is to deliberately cultivate mental toughness through the three main channels — Zen, Arete, Kaizen.

Zen allows you to detach at will — to bear any burden, accept any circumstance, remove the hindrance of ego from any situation. But Zen on its own is all coolness, all tranquility… and coolness and tranquility are only part of the equation.

In contrast with Zen, Arete gives you the inner fire to excel… to sustain and maintain in the face of a challenge. You may find peace and tranquility (i.e. detached enlightenment) with Zen alone. But if you seek to become a champion, you cannot do it without some form of Arete (whether it is known as that or something other).

And then there is Kaizen, the discipline of relentless improvement. Adding to knowledge, tinkering, making small incremental adjustments. Getting stronger, faster, leaner and, most importantly, wiser with each new experience.

As you may have noticed by now (if you’ve been following along), Metaprocess is not “chicken soup for the soul” or “calgon take me away.” It is not a hand-holding means for the timid to nurse their cares and troubles.

No, Metaprocess is more akin to a recipe for greatness and a life fulfilled in pursuit of such — not greatness as defined and recognized by others, per se, but greatness as measured by internal benchmarks and wholly inspired from within.

Because, while true that nothing matters in the end, the absence of a prime directive is arguably as much impetus to go for the gusto  — to live as fully and deeply and brightly as one can — as it is to despair or withdraw or take a cowardly stance to life.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” Henry Ford said. Mental toughness is knowing, at the very deepest levels, that you can.

On the Importance of Snow Days

On Wednesday – after making some early-morning arrangements – Jack played hooky from the markets to go snowboarding with his girl.

The conditions at Alpine Meadows (pictured above) were ideal. The powder was fresh, the sky blue, and the lift lines nonexistent. (Smart locals rarely hit the slopes on weekends.)

It’s important, Jack believes, to not just work hard but play hard. The two have a sort of yin-yang relationship. It sounds like an oxymoron, but there is something to be said for taking relaxation seriously.

This idea is expressed well by a mentor-from-afar, Paul Tudor Jones, in respect to the global macro trading game:

To do the job right requires such an enormous amount of concentration that… it’s physically and emotionally mandatory that you’ve got to find some time to relax. And you’ve got to be able to turn it off like that…

“Physically and emotionally mandatory” is the operative phrase. It is possible to tackle one’s work so enthusiastically and dynamically, day in and day out, as to use up all available reserves.

This type of push – when one gets the mix right, going full redline but not burning out – can lead to regular bursts of euphoric contentment more normally associated with aggressive physical milestones, like crossing the finish line in a grueling marathon.

And then, after the natural endorphin high that stems from maxing out one’s capabilities, comes the need to decompress.

The beauty of the “snow day” dynamic is that work and play effectively compliment and reinforce each other in a sustainable virtuous circle. Working hard gives the body and mind full, unconditional permission to relax and play. Meanwhile, rejuvenating play (and full mental rest) keeps work engaging and fresh, even creating a natural hunger to “get back in gear” after the appropriate chill-out interval has passed.

Work, play, work, play… there is a sort of rhythmic back and forth, like deep carving left and right on an exhilarating black diamond run. From a mental if not physical perspective, the best relaxation is total relaxation. The best immersion is total immersion. To switch metaphors, there is nothing quite like turning the mind loose onto open pastures after running at full gallop for days on end.

Cultivating Hyperflow

Wikipedia describes “flow” like this:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.

Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the zone, in the groove, or keeping your head in the game.

Long a fan of flow, Jack has lately been experimenting with what he calls “hyperflow.” The idea is taking flow to ever higher levels: turning up the volume,  increasing sustainability and frequency, experiencing flow yet more intensely for ever longer periods of time.

The experience of hyperflow is a sort of aggressive transcendence. To a significant degree self-awareness is minimized, the sense of individual existence minimized, so that only the full-immersion activity, the one-to-one correspondence between right thought and right action remains.

To sustain a hyperflow level of concentration and focus absolutely demands regular decompression intervals. The snow days become “mandatory” in the manner PTJ describes.

Metaprocess further assists in this work / play balance by assuring that worries and anxieties do not creep in when work has been set aside. To live in the moment, to have fulfilling personal goals, and to recognize that all activities have intrinsic worth and enjoyment aspects today, as opposed to merely bearing utility in respect to some future goal, allows for ultimate release of one’s fears. When today fills your focus, when the now is what matters, tomorrow is of no pressing concern.

And so whether one calls it flow, hyperflow, kicking ass, or just plain old working hard, regular intervals of total relaxation and immersive play — i.e. “snow days” — are vital if one wishes to maintain a champion’s pace.

The Fun Race

Why does it have to be “the rat race?” Why can’t it be the fun race instead?

Idea being: What if, instead of seeking to impress the most people, accumulate the biggest pile, or score the most guilt-driven brownie points etcetera, one’s life goal was to simply have as much fun as possible (over the full spread of a life well lived)?

When you think about it, a lot of people’s supposedly sober and respectable goals are downright idiotic trivial. Beyond a certain threshold of comfort, does making lots of money really have any more merit than, say, trying to accumulate the greatest number of Facebook friends? (And don’t even get Jack started on how pathetic it is for people to live out their entire lives in thrall to the judgments and opinions of others they don’t even like!)

Admittedly, to make life a pursuit of pleasure (i.e. “fun”) could be considered a selfish thing. And in that respect, Jack is glad that many think differently. He observes with gratitude that plenty of  others are willing — eager, even — to prostrate themselves at great personal cost before the feet of their fellow men. In pure economic terms,  light-hearted selfishness is all too rare a commodity. Pious sacrifice is in no short supply.

Does living to have fun mean wasting one’s life then? Not necessarily. And even if it did, what of it? In matters of ultimate meaning, Jack is inspired by the great Diogenes of Sinope:

When asked how he wished to be buried, [Diogenes] left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on his body. When asked if he minded this, he said, “Not at all, as long as you provide me with a stick to chase the creatures away!” When asked how he could use the stick since he would lack awareness, he replied “If I lack awareness, then why should I care what happens to me when I am dead?”

One might object that living for fun means destroying one’s body with drugs, drink and the like. But if such temptations do not strike you as fun, then why indulge in them? Some people’s idea of fun might be solving complex mathematical equations, translating philosophical texts from the original Greek, or tracking the mating habits of Himalayan blue sheep.The point is to find and embrace what floats your own boat, not someone else’s boat.

But to pursue fun as a sole objective is not rational, still others might object. Well why the hell not? In fact, what could be more rational in the face of ultimate futility? Consider this cheery bit from Bertrand Russell:

“…All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins…”

Oh, how deeply depressing — for the poor silly sod who shoulders the heavy burden of purpose that is. It is all rather amusing to Jack.

And speaking of “rationality” as juxtaposed with “fun” — can a sufficiently motivated individual not apply rational means to even the happy task of having a damn good time?

A maximally lived life is one that embraces a diverse mix of pursuits (i.e. not all steak, not all chocolate cake). Figuring out the right mix requires discipline, concentration, creativity and forethought.

We are used to casting aspersions on those who make fun their life goal because such individuals are typically loosely disciplined at best and bad at life management on the whole. But the chips need not fall this way. The sufficiently enlightened individual can recognize that sacrifice and planning are required over the course of a well balanced life — even in pursuit of fun.

From the vantage point of respectable society, Jack intuits a knee-jerk aversion to this idea. Why might this be? To hazard a guess, because society wants something from you. Society wants your allegiance… your obeisance… your submissive acceptance of the established ways. The great herds of sheep do not like the contrarian-minded fellow who dares wander off on his own. They squint in suspicion and suspect him a wolf. Self-righteousness and unhappiness, insecurity and suspicion — these things go hand in hand.

You mean to say I can chuck all that societally imposed bullshit and just… live life the way I want to?

Well, Jack would argue, it depends on what you genuinely believe. If you firmly believe the answer is no, then you are correct — the answer is no. Self-imposed limitation equals self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s practically axiomatic.

But if you believe the answer is yes — that yes, you can be free — then once again the truth becomes what you make it. No one and nothing beyond or outside ourselves has the power to dictate who and what we live for… unless we hand that power over, by accident or on purpose.

Creative Analysis and “Failure of Imagination”

Jack recently read (or rather inhaled) Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief by Bill Mason.  What an amazing story.

Mason is a fascinating character in so many ways. From both a success and failure standpoint, his “risk management” efforts make for compelling reading. He sees a big score as “a complicated puzzle to be solved,” always thinking first about the risk — not unlike prospecting for, and executing on, a major trading or investing opportunity.

The below paragraphs in particular caught Jack’s attention. “Failure of Imagination” is a deliciously apt way to describe both catastrophic lapses in risk management (i.e. Bill Miller at Legg Mason, for those familiar with the fund management world) and the routine pitfalls of conventional wisdom in market analysis (i.e. mundane, plain vanilla, “status quo” type assertions that cover the same tired ground and fail to account for key dynamics or critical hidden variables).

In terms of practical application, Mason has inspired Jack to more actively and deliberately “use his imagination” when trying to anticipate how and where things could go wrong; how various theme-driven scenarios might unfold both in markets and in life; and to be more conscientious on the whole in regard to seeing with fresh eyes.

Here’s the text (from Chapter 18):

Former astronaut and Eastern Airlines CEO Frank Borman coined an incredibly apt phrase in 1967. Testifying before a House committee investigating the deaths of three astronauts during a ground test, Borman attributed the disaster to a “failure of imagination.” He said that the engineering team had been unable to envision such an occurrence in the first place, and therefore were completely unprepared to prevent it or deal with it when it actually happened.

Similarly, I eventually came to realize that when a detective or security expert used a flattering phrase like “superhuman” in connection with one of my scores, what he was really doing was covering up his own failure of imagination. If he couldn’t figure out how I’d pulled off the heist, he retreated behind the excuse that the thief must have been “a human fly” or “the best there ever was.” What other explanation could there possibly be, other than that the detective wasn’t clever enough to figure it out, which is not something a law enforcement professional is anxious to admit.

In the context of metaprocess (and best life principles), one can further ponder the “failure of imagination” diagnosis as it applies to envious dismissals and unfortunate missed chances in life. When a person accomplishes something extraodinary, there seem to be two general types of public response — the more common revolving around “He was just lucky” or “He was born with superhuman talent” (i.e. the luck diagnosis once removed).

The second, more enabling response is “How can I do that too” — or perhaps, more firmly, “I know I can do that too” — the big difference between the two mindsets being a matter of quiet self confidence and the mystery of the “how.” The more common response (superhuman / just lucky) declares the “how” to be impossible sans any true effort to crack the nut, thus giving in to failed imagination (and conveniently letting mere mortals off the hook).