Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
Hip-hop mogul, master entrepreneur, and best-selling author Russell Simmons stopped by Google recently to discuss his newest book, Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple. I had no idea he was into meditation - maybe he can bring a different demographic into the world of meditation, which is disturbingly white in this country.
Master entrepreneur, original hip-hop mogul, and New York Times bestselling author Russell Simmons shares the most fundamental key to success—meditation—and guides readers to use stillness as a powerful tool to access their potential. In the New York Times bestseller Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All, Russell Simmons proved that to be rich is more than just having money in the bank—wealth is about balance, joy, and conscientious living. In Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple, Simmons shows the connection between inner peace and outward success through interviews with other successful leaders in various industries, and how learning to be still has been instrumental in his own career. Simmons attributes his meditation practice with changing his life for the better and says that there is no "bad" way to meditate, only different forms for different people. In this new book, Russell Simmons guides readers into finding greater clarity and focus, and explains how to be healthier in both mind and body. Simmons breaks down what he's learned from masters of meditation into a guide that is accessible to those unfamiliar with the practice.
Published on Apr 30, 2013 Adam Grant stops by the Googleplex to discuss his latest work, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. From the publicist: Give and Take changes our fundamental ideas about how to succeed—at work and in life. For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today's dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. Give and Take illuminates what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common. Using his own groundbreaking research as the youngest tenured professor at Wharton, Grant examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. In professional interactions, it turns out that most people operate as either takers, matchers, or givers. Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return. These styles have a dramatic impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries. Combining cutting-edge evidence with captivating stories, this landmark book shows how one of America's best networkers developed his connections, why the creative genius behind one of the most popular shows in television history toiled for years in anonymity, how a basketball executive responsible for multiple draft busts transformed his franchise into a winner, and how we could have anticipated Enron's demise four years before the company collapsed—without ever looking at a single number.
For better or worse, Alain de Botton is the face of pop philosophy. He has advocated “religion for atheists” in a book of the same name (to the deep consternation of some atheists and the eloquent interest of others); he has distilled selected philosophical nuggets into self-help in his The Consolations of Philosophy; and most recently, he’s tackled a subject close to everybody’s heart (to put it charitably) in How to Think More About Sex. As a corollary to his intellectual interests in human betterment, de Botton also oversees The School of Life, a “cultural enterprise offering good ideas for everyday life” with a base in Central London and a colorful online presence. Many critics disdain de Botton’s shotgun approach to philosophy, but it gets people reading (not just his own books), and gets them talking, rather than just shouting at each other. In addition to his publishing, de Botton is an accomplished and engaging speaker. Although himself a committed secularist, in his TED talks, he has posed some formidable challenges to the smug certainties of liberal secularism and the often brutal certainties of libertarian meritocracy. Apropos of the latter, in the talk above, de Botton takes on what he calls “job snobbery,” the dominant form of snobbery today, he says, and a global phenomenon. Certainly, we can all remember any number of times when the question “What do you do?” has either made us exhale with pride or feel like we might shrivel up and blow away. De Botton takes this common experience and draws from it some interesting inferences: for example, against the idea that we (one assumes he means Westerners) live in a materialistic society, de Botton posits that we primarily use material goods and career status not as ends in themselves but as the means to receive emotional rewards from those who choose how much love or respect to “spend” on us based on where we land in any social hierarchy. Accordingly, de Botton asks us to see someone in a Ferrari not as greedy but as “incredibly vulnerable and in need of love” (he does not address other possible compensations of middle-aged men in overly-expensive cars). For de Botton, modern society turns the whole world into a school, where equals compete with each other relentlessly. But the problem with the analogy is that in the wider world, the admirable spirit of equality runs up against the realities of increasingly entrenched inequities. Our inability to see this is nurturned, de Botton points out, by an industry that sells us all the fiction that, with just enough know-how and gumption, anyone can become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. But if this were true, of course, there would be hundreds of thousands of Zuckerbergs and Jobs. For de Botton, when we believe that those who make it to the top do so only on merit, we also, in a callous way, believe those at the bottom deserve their place and should stay there—a belief that takes no account of the accidents of birth and the enormity of factors outside anyone’s control. This shift in thinking, he says—especially in the United States—gets reflected in a shift in language. Where in former times someone in tough circumstances might be called “unfortunate” or “down on their luck,” they are now more likely to be called “a loser,” a social condition that exacerbates feelings of personal failure and increases the numbers of suicides. The rest of de Botton’s richly observed talk lays out his philosophical and psychological alternatives to the irrational reasoning that makes everyone responsible for everything that happens to them. As a consequence of softening the harsh binary logic of success/failure, de Botton concludes, we can find greater meaning and happiness in the work we choose to do—because we love it, not because it buys us love. Related Content:
David Cronenberg has a new film out (released August 19th in the U.S., earlier in Europe) called Cosmopolis - starring Robert Pattinson (don't let this put you off - Cronenberg gets great performances from mediocre actors). It also features Juliette Binoche, and that is always a good thing - as well as the talented Paul Giamatti. The film is based on a novel by Don Delillo.
Eric Packer (played by Robert Pattison) — reigning master of the universe of unencumbered digital financial trading — spends most of his disastrous day in the back of a limo determined to make it across New York City in the midst of traffic chaos caused by a presidential motorcade, to get a haircut, but not, as we will discover, any haircut.
Impeccably dressed, physically perfect, emotionally smooth, and despite a series of sexual encounters during this single day with beautiful female subordinates — Packer’s world, until today, is nothing but data.
At the beginning of the film, we see massive data flows zipping around a small computer screen operated by a hacker employee, and we understand that his world of unfailing predictions based on this data has been disrupted by an error that threatens him with massive financial losses. But Packer, despite the seeming practicality of the bad day he is facing, is more interested in his existential situation. He’s having a crisis of meaning and of feeling.
As he and his driver make their way through NYC’s jammed streets, various courtiers slip into his limo to talk about some aspect of his business situation only to be peppered by stark questions that tilt away from business and lean towards meaning. And yet, his quasi-philosophical inquiries are all oriented towards calculation as opposed to insight (and how many of our singularitarian friends would acknowledge that a distinction exists). Packer is in the vanguard of his generations’ and our culture’s reorientation from lived to statistical experience.
The film hinges on two particular events. Event one: Packer’s previously unfailing prediction machine has failed to predict a crisis in the yuan. Event two: Packer’s daily medical examination turns up a peculiar (and contextually funny) problem that I won’t spoil for you… but both problems revolve around the incursion of irregularity into his smooth world.
Here we have the Quantified Life at its apotheosis. Even in the midst of sexual encounters, there are conversations that seek information about the nature of the business and sexual relationships and — during the peak of one sex scene — his female partner reports on her successful jogging routine and provides a statistical particular about her fat-to-muscle ratio.
In mixed reviews, much has been made of Cronenberg taking on Wall Street capitalism (and let’s remember that all this is based on the critically underrated DeLillo 2003 novel of the same name) in a biting satire that’s not at all a comedy. There is that. But the critics miss the larger undercurrent, which should have clarified for them during the last scene (and I will spare you any further spoilers). Several shocking scenes (yes, this is Cronenberg), including the finale, bring home for us that Packer is seeking some experience — any experience — that is not quantifiable. Whether he finds it or not, I’ll leave for you to sort out.
Oscar Wilde famously said of his countrymen, “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” But he was thinking of craggy old industrialists who actually traded in things. For Packer, price and value are both de-prioritized by the ersatz bliss of those baptized in dataflow. It’s a cold but pleasurably high, until something unsmooth, like a poor person or a bodily peculiarity, makes an unpredicted intervention.
The first thing you notice is that the limo isn’t moving. At the beginning of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, the luxury vehicle bearing Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire financial manager of some sort, is stuck in traffic. He’s on his way to get a haircut on the other side of Manhattan, a trip he insists on taking despite warnings from his bodyguard Torval (Kevin Durand) that it will be nightmarish.
Even though the car does transport Eric to a series of stops, interior shots deny the audience a sense of true forward motion. When the limo pushes forward, the images of the city we see through the windows look fake, and familiar New York background noise falls silent: no honking horns, no engine vibrations, hardly any sound at all, except the voices of Eric and whoever hitches a ride with him along the way.
This lack of sound exists whether the windows are open or closed—as Eric does when he has sex with his longtime mistress Didi (Juliette Binoche). It underscores a sense of fakeness for much of the film, as well as the metaphorical allusion of the drive: Eric is going nowhere. The world comes to him in his limo-shaped box: business, sex, even regular prostate exams from his doctor.
Cosmopolis never breaks from Eric’s point of view (Pattinson is in every scene), following him as exits the vehicle, as when he takes meals with his wife Elise (Sarah Gadon). They might be described as “estranged” if they ever looked to be more than cordial strangers in the first place. They speak to each other, as most of the characters in the movie do, in dialogue that is by turns witty, elusive, and theatrical. The writerly quality reminds us that Cronenberg’s screenplay adapts a Don DeLillo novel, making some narrative tweaks while maintaining much of the original dialogue.
The elevated patter, combined with the financial-world setting, at first seems to signal that Cosmopolis is a departure for the director, both from his creepy sci-fi horror days and his recent collaborations with Viggo Mortensen. But as the movie presses on, it feels more of a piece with Cronenberg’s oeuvre, unnerving and darkly funny. Eric’s semi-mobile fortress is tricked out with a number of touch-screens, their numbers constantly scrolling through his peripheral vision, and his various business associates talk in elevated, obtuse terms—Vija (Samantha Morton) drops by the car to talk about “cyber-capital”—that give the film an eerie science fiction-like quality.
From these otherworldly touches and a constructed New York City that only vaguely resembles the real thing, Cosmopolis builds surprising tension from what is essentially a 24-to-36-hour car ride (time is hard to measure here, another subtle source of anxiety). It is by no means a traditional thriller, but Cronenberg evokes a sense of dread, exacerbated by occasional, unpredictable bursts of violence. By the movie’s final stretch, Eric finds himself drawing a gun and walking down an icky greenish brown hallway that’s more recognizably Cronenbergian than his antiseptic white limo.
As usual, Cronenberg shows masterful control, starting with Pattinson. He uses the actor’s morose flatness to great effect. Playing a hollow, amoral human being, Pattinson is more hauntingly vampiric here than in any of his Twilight ventures, an impression emphasized by his occasional stumbles over DeLillo’s words.
Some audience members will stumble there, too. An hour and 48 minutes is a long time to listen to actors, however talented, speak in more or less the same narcotizing tones, dotted with zingy turns of phrase and stagy variations on phrases like “This is true” and “I know this.” The artifice can seem showboaty, an odd fit with Cronenberg’s precise, repetitive framing. But the film is premised on contrasts, especially between such verbal gobbledygook and the social unrest just outside Eric’s bunker on wheels; he’s bedeviled by an ongoing anti-capitalism protest, whose participants use dead rats as mascots, a backdrop drawn from DeLillo’s 2003 text that here feels vague and unnecessarily allusive.
But, just when the movie threatens to find a dead end in so much metaphor, Paul Giamatti turns up to bring it home. Playing Benno Levin, an unhinged man with a connection to Packer, he dominates the movie’s final stretch, which moves further from the limo’s comforts, down that greenish Cronenberg hallway. The car’s literal forward momentum stops, but the film’s keeps crawling toward an ending both poetic and inevitable—and, yeah, a little theatrical, too. Cronenberg and DeLillo’s clinical remove gives way to showmanship after all.
Intentionally or not, movies in the past year or so have set about tackling the questions of Occupy Wall Street and/or our general economic gloom. The Dark Knight Rises pitted Batman's Have against Bane's Have-Not, the conclusion of which was... well, no one's quite sure about that. Margin Call dramatized a day in the lives of investment bankers who talk like Wall Street Journal op-eds. Spike Lee, to no one's particular surprise, has sketched the effects of our growing economic inequality on a Brooklyn neighborhood in Red Hook Summer. And in next month's Arbitrage, Richard Gere, in the grand tradition of actors giving moral complexity to assholes, will play a hedge-funder who's basically Bernie Madoff. They all take a cue from Wall Street, the movie that made wariness of investment bankers a social norm and now looks all the more naive for it.
Thankfully, then, there is David Cronenberg. From Videodrome to Crash to A History of Violence, the director has never felt the need to seriously address the real-world concerns of the day, or even adhere to conventional narrative logic. (Holly Hunter wrecks her car, then masturbates? Why not?) His new movie, Cosmopolis, is a great send-up of our economic anxiety. It's true that the characters talk endlessly, as they do in Don DeLillo's 2003 book, but none of it amounts to much. It's empty banter, a parody of boardroom jargon. Robert Pattinson as an even less likable Bud Fox type named Eric Packer (the actor's flat, charmless American accent has never been better suited to a role) asks his employees inane questions they can't possibly hope to answer, like "Why are airports called airports?" They refuse to respond out of fear they'll lose his respect.
All the talk avoids the real subject, which for Cronenberg is never far from death. As Pattinson's Eric loses his personal fortune over the course of a day, his life becomes a series of escalating body-horror gags. There are two security threats against him, one of which turns out to be a literal pie in the face. The best joke, though, is a scene in which he receives a prostate exam while discussing the yuan. (For Cronenberg, that's "sexual tension.") By the end, Eric has become so disillusioned with himself that he sees violence as a way out. He shoots a hole through his hand just so that he can "feel something."
Movies are very bad at explaining our national problems to us (see: any film by Michael Moore). At their best, they can only make those problems more vivid. Cosmopolis takes an unremarkable proposal, that our economic system is hurtling toward chaos, to its logical conclusion. (The opening shot of a Pollock-style drip painting in the making is a sign of what's to come.) It's effective for all the reasons, as propaganda, it's not: It's messy and goofy and unsettling. It has no clear answers, not even in the brilliant final scene, a confrontation between Pattinson's Eric and a disgruntled former employee played by Paul Giamatti, the central question of which seems to be, Why do some people accumulate massive amounts of wealth, while others are left to go broke and die? The scene ends, instead, with a loaded gun.
Our own Wall Street becomes more absurd with every day's headlines. It's unclear if anyone really understands it, including the Wall Streeters themselves, though a lot of producers seem to want to try very hard. Cronenberg's outright refusal to negotiate with realism, his fervent imagination, may be the more appropriate impulse. To get to the heart of a spectacle, sometimes, requires more spectacle.
Excellent article from Zen Habits - There are a lot of articles on how to change, but very few people ever consider why they are stuck. And being stuck is the root of the problem. This is a guest post for Habits from Seth Godin, author of the new book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. Personally, I had no idea who Seth Godin is, but I see his name from time to time on web, so I looked around. He seems to be a prolific and popular dude, so that's cool.
Ship as in get it out the door. Ship as in make a difference at work. Ship as in contribute your art and vision and expertise and passion to the project you’re working on.
Regular readers of this blog (and of Leo’s life-changing book) have seen first hand what happens when you force the distractions out of your life and focus on what needs to be completed instead. What he has taught us is that when you focus your efforts and energies on things that matter and cut out the stalling and distractions, amazing things happen. It’s absolutely astonishing how much we can accomplish (and insanely disappointing how few people do).
What separates the few who ship from the masses who stumble, stall and ultimately surrender?
The resistance.
Steven Pressfield first wrote about the resistance a few years ago. The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head, the one that tells you that it will never work, the one that insists you check your email one last time, the one that worries that people will laugh at you.
The resistance loves committees and it hates a mission. The resistance creates fear and uncertainty, and it will do almost anything to keep you from being noticed. There’s a biological underpinning to the resistance–your amygdala. The amygdala is the pre-historic portion of your brain, located near the brain stem. It’s responsible for fear and anger and revenge and sex and survival. When the amygdala is aroused, when it feels threatened, when there’s a sense that people might actually laugh at you, it takes over. It rises up in rage and fear and shuts you down.
And so the resistance kicks in. The resistance goes to meetings and plays devil’s advocate (I didn’t know the devil needed an advocate.)
The resistance finds excuses, it makes tasks needlessly complex (or oversimplifies so much that you fail). The resistance uses phrases like, “see, I told you it would never work.” The resistance demands that you study the issue more, or grab a Diet Coke, or go visit those friends who are in from out of town and you won’t be able to see them unless you go right now. The resistance invented yak shaving. The resistance is also responsible for giving you an even better idea just before you finish this one… in fact, the resistance will do anything it can to prevent you from shipping.
Why do little companies get so much more out the door than big ones? Because big companies have committees, groups of people designed to protect the status quo, to prevent failure, to avoid catastrophe. The committee is made up of humans, each of whom is battling her own version of the resistance. “If this ships, my boss will see it, and I might get fired.” “If this ships, a kid might use it, cut of his finger and I might get in trouble.” “If this ships, people are going to think it was my idea, and there’s a chance, just a chance, they might hate it.” Most of all, “if this ships, people might laugh at me.” And so the committee shoots for the lowest common denominator of safety, a product or service or idea that arouses no one’s lizard brain. Which means mediocre. Or late. Or both.
The iPod came from two people, Steve and Jonathan. The Zune came from 250. Which product would you rather own?
The resistance sabotaged my work for years. It pushed me to focus on average topics, delivered in a blameless way, because that felt safer.
So, when others were starting search engines or revolutionizing the online world, I was busy creating sort of ordinary books for sort of ordinary editors who were looking for the next small thing. And no one scolded me for doing this. No one looked at my sort of average work and called me out on it, because they were fighting the very same resistance as I was. It’s surprisingly easy to get through life and make a career out of being average… the resistance would prefer it if you did.
The resistance is powerful, so powerful that all the shortcuts, time savers and focusing tools are powerless in its path. Now you know its name. Now you know how it sneaks in under the radar and sounds quite sensible as it undermines your work and compromises your vision. When the resistance appears, you must call it out. Call it by name. Recognize it for what it is and then defeat it. You will defeat it not by rationalization or even a calm discussion. You will defeat it with single-minded effort, effort so deep and dedicated that it might exhaust you.
Unfortunately, the web is filled with tips and tricks and lists that appear to help you in your quest to shut up the lizard, to defeat the resistance. I say unfortunately because these lists are calm, practical and ultimately ineffective. They are polite in the face of a nefarious enemy, they are rational in the face of screaming insecurity. None of them are working for you because you may not be serious about actually defeating the resistance. It’s fun to procrastinate and comforting to dissemble, because not shipping doesn’t arouse the lizard brain. It’s safe.
The challenge then, the missing link in the Zen Habits is this: you must quiet the lizard brain. You must defeat the resistance. You must find something SO IMPORTANT that it is worth enraging your prehistoric fears, SO IMPORTANT that you can’t sleep until it ships, SO IMPORTANT that yes, you are willing to go through all the hoops Leo lays out for you in order to ship.
Either that, or you could be mediocre instead.
Seth Godin is the author of a new book called Linchpin. It’s about recognizing, defeating and ultimately destroying the resistance on the path to doing work that matters. Read more about the book.
Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.
In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.
At the outset of their study, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleagues had screened 2,408 children via parental questionnaire, and they were now focusing on the 25 percent rated highest by their parents in externalizing behaviors. Lab observations had confirmed these parental ratings.
Bakermans-Kranenburg meant to change the kids’ behavior. In an intervention her lab had developed, she or another researcher visited each of 120 families six times over eight months; filmed the mother and child in everyday activities, including some requiring obedience or cooperation; and then edited the film into teachable moments to show to the mothers. A similar group of high-externalizing children received no intervention.
Video: Watch an interview with Stephen Suomi, one of the researchers featured in this story
To the researchers’ delight, the intervention worked. The moms, watching the videos, learned to spot cues they’d missed before, or to respond differently to cues they’d seen but had reacted to poorly. Quite a few mothers, for instance, had agreed only reluctantly to read picture books to their fidgety, difficult kids, saying they wouldn’t sit still for it. But according to Bakermans-Kranenburg, when these mothers viewed the playback they were “surprised to see how much pleasure it was for the child—and for them.” Most mothers began reading to their children regularly, producing what Bakermans-Kranenburg describes as “a peaceful time that they had dismissed as impossible.”
And the bad behaviors dropped. A year after the intervention ended, the toddlers who’d received it had reduced their externalizing scores by more than 16 percent, while a nonintervention control group improved only about 10 percent (as expected, due to modest gains in self-control with age). And the mothers’ responses to their children became more positive and constructive.
Few programs change parent-child dynamics so successfully. But gauging the efficacy of the intervention wasn’t the Leiden team’s only goal, or even its main one. The team was also testing a radical new hypothesis about how genes shape behavior—a hypothesis that stands to revise our view of not only mental illness and behavioral dysfunction but also human evolution.
Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.
This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.
Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.
The evidence for this view is mounting. Much of it has existed for years, in fact, but the focus on dysfunction in behavioral genetics has led most researchers to overlook it. This tunnel vision is easy to explain, according to Jay Belsky, a child-development psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London. “Most work in behavioral genetics has been done by mental-illness researchers who focus on vulnerability,” he told me recently. “They don’t see the upside, because they don’t look for it. It’s like dropping a dollar bill beneath a table. You look under the table, you see the dollar bill, and you grab it. But you completely miss the five that’s just beyond your feet.”
Though this hypothesis is new to modern biological psychiatry, it can be found in folk wisdom, as the University of Arizona developmental psychologist Bruce Ellis and the University of British Columbia developmental pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce pointed out last year in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.
At first glance, this idea, which I’ll call the orchid hypothesis, may seem a simple amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis. It merely adds that environment and experience can steer a person up instead of down. Yet it’s actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.
In this view, having both dandelion and orchid kids greatly raises a family’s (and a species’) chance of succeeding, over time and in any given environment. The behavioral diversity provided by these two different types of temperament also supplies precisely what a smart, strong species needs if it is to spread across and dominate a changing world. The many dandelions in a population provide an underlying stability. The less-numerous orchids, meanwhile, may falter in some environments but can excel in those that suit them. And even when they lead troubled early lives, some of the resulting heightened responses to adversity that can be problematic in everyday life—increased novelty-seeking, restlessness of attention, elevated risk-taking, or aggression—can prove advantageous in certain challenging situations: wars, tribal or modern; social strife of many kinds; and migrations to new environments. Together, the steady dandelions and the mercurial orchids offer an adaptive flexibility that neither can provide alone. Together, they open a path to otherwise unreachable individual and collective achievements.
This orchid hypothesis also answers a fundamental evolutionary question that the vulnerability hypothesis cannot. If variants of certain genes create mainly dysfunction and trouble, how have they survived natural selection? Genes so maladaptive should have been selected out. Yet about a quarter of all human beings carry the best-documented gene variant for depression, while more than a fifth carry the variant that Bakermans-Kranenburg studied, which is associated with externalizing, antisocial, and violent behaviors, as well as ADHD, anxiety, and depression. The vulnerability hypothesis can’t account for this. The orchid hypothesis can.
This is a transformative, even startling view of human frailty and strength. For more than a decade, proponents of the vulnerability hypothesis have argued that certain gene variants underlie some of humankind’s most grievous problems: despair, alienation, cruelties both petty and epic. The orchid hypothesis accepts that proposition. But it adds, tantalizingly, that these same troublesome genes play a critical role in our species’ astounding success.
The orchid hypothesis—sometimes called the plasticity hypothesis, the sensitivity hypothesis, or the differential-susceptibility hypothesis—is too new to have been tested widely. Many researchers, even those in behavioral science, know little or nothing of the idea. A few—chiefly those with broad reservations about ever tying specific genes to specific behaviors—express concerns. But as more supporting evidence emerges, the most common reaction to the idea among researchers and clinicians is excitement. A growing number of psychologists, psychiatrists, child-development experts, geneticists, ethologists, and others are beginning to believe that, as Karlen Lyons-Ruth, a developmental psychologist at Harvard Medical School, puts it, “It’s time to take this seriously.”
With the data gathered in the video intervention, the Leiden team began to test the orchid hypothesis. Could it be, they wondered, that the children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones? To find out, Bakermans-Kranenburg and her colleague Marinus van Ijzendoorn began to study the genetic makeup of the children in their experiment. Specifically, they focused on one particular “risk allele” associated with ADHD and externalizing behavior. (An allele is any of the variants of a gene that takes more than one form; such genes are known as polymorphisms. A risk allele, then, is simply a gene variant that increases your likelihood of developing a problem.)
Bakermans-Kranenburg and van Ijzendoorn wanted to see whether kids with a risk allele for ADHD and externalizing behaviors (a variant of a dopamine-processing gene known as DRD4) would respond as much to positive environments as to negative. A third of the kids in the study had this risk allele; the other two-thirds had a version considered a “protective allele,” meaning it made them less vulnerable to bad environments. The control group, who did not receive the intervention, had a similar distribution.
Both the vulnerability hypothesis and the orchid hypothesis predict that in the control group the kids with a risk allele should do worse than those with a protective one. And so they did—though only slightly. Over the course of 18 months, the genetically “protected” kids reduced their externalizing scores by 11 percent, while the “at-risk” kids cut theirs by 7 percent. Both gains were modest ones that the researchers expected would come with increasing age. Although statistically significant, the difference between the two groups was probably unnoticeable otherwise.
The real test, of course, came in the group that got the intervention. How would the kids with the risk allele respond? According to the vulnerability model, they should improve less than their counterparts with the protective allele; the modest upgrade that the video intervention created in their environment wouldn’t offset their general vulnerability.
As it turned out, the toddlers with the risk allele blew right by their counterparts. They cut their externalizing scores by almost 27 percent, while the protective-allele kids cut theirs by just 12 percent (improving only slightly on the 11 percent managed by the protective-allele population in the control group). The upside effect in the intervention group, in other words, was far larger than the downside effect in the control group. Risk alleles, the Leiden team concluded, really can create not just risk but possibility.
Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers. “Are there any enduring human frailties that don’t have this other, redemptive side to them?”
As I researched this story, I thought about such questions a lot, including how they pertained to my own temperament and genetic makeup. Having felt the black dog’s teeth a few times over the years, I’d considered many times having one of my own genes assayed—specifically, the serotonin-transporter gene, also called the SERT gene, or 5-HTTLPR. This gene helps regulate the processing of serotonin, a chemical messenger crucial to mood, among other things. The two shorter, less efficient versions of the gene’s three forms, known as short/short and short/long (or S/S and S/L), greatly magnify your risk of serious depression—if you hit enough rough road. The gene’s long/long form, on the other hand, appears to be protective.
In the end, I’d always backed away from having my SERT gene assayed. Who wants to know his risk of collapsing under pressure? Given my family and personal history, I figured I probably carried the short/long allele, which would make me at least moderately depression-prone. If I had it tested I might get the encouraging news that I had the long/long allele. Then again, I might find I had the dreaded, riskier short/short allele. This was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.
But as I looked into the orchid hypothesis and began to think in terms of plasticity rather than risk, I decided maybe I did want to find out. So I called a researcher I know in New York who does depression research involving the serotonin-transporter gene. The next day, FedEx left a package on my front porch containing a specimen cup. I spat into it, examined what I’d produced, and spat again. Then I screwed the cap tight, slid the vial into its little shipping tube, and put it back on the porch. An hour later, the FedEx guy took it away.
Of all the evidence supporting the orchid-gene hypothesis, perhaps the most compelling comes from the work of Stephen Suomi, a rhesus-monkey researcher who heads a sprawling complex of labs and monkey habitats in the Maryland countryside—the National Institutes of Health’s Laboratory of Comparative Ethology. For 41 years, first at the University of Wisconsin and then, beginning in 1983, in the Maryland lab the NIH built specifically for him, Suomi has been studying the roots of temperament and behavior in rhesus monkeys—which share about 95 percent of our DNA, a number exceeded only in apes. Rhesus monkeys differ from humans in obvious and fundamental ways. But their close resemblance to us in crucial social and genetic respects reveals much about the roots of our own behavior—and has helped give rise to the orchid hypothesis.
Many personal development gurus posit that you can and should have it all, that every area of your life can be perfected without any need for compromise. Consider this quotation from personal development guru James Arthur Ray’s website:
“You really can enjoy total abundance financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually…” ~James Arthur Ray, Master of Hyperbole
The total abundance James Arthur Ray is really enjoying is an abundance of total bullshit. Not surprisingly, Ray’s tagline is “As seen on Oprah, Larry King, and The Secret,” sources not exactly known for their journalistic integrity.
Nothing real exists in “total abundance.” Not atoms in the Universe (approximately 1080), not the amount of money in circulation, and not even “abundance mentality”–which is sometimes present and sometimes not, no matter how often or intensely you visualize your goals. Perhaps Ray is referring to mathematical abstractions? “You really can enjoy counting a total abundance of integers. The possibilities of multiplication are unlimited!”
The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies in Personal Development
The personal development world is full of such lies, exaggerations, and hype–what is remarkable is that we haven’t gotten angry about it, and that folks like James Arthur Ray continue to stay in business. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of “the ubiquitous matrix of lies” our consumerist culture exists within, as Charles Eisenstein eloquently called it. But the difference between “Coors rocks Harrisburg” and “You really can enjoy total abundance financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually…” is that nobody believes the first is true. The Coors slogan is an “obvious and unremarkable lie, beneath the threshold of most people’s awareness,” but we want to and often do believe gurus like James Arthur Ray. We want to believe that we can indeed have a perfect life, free from pain and suffering, and full of wealth “in all areas of your life”–especially financially.
“Isn’t it remarkable that lies are still effective even when no one believes them?” says Eisenstein, and it is worth considering here. Even when we don’t believe the lies of the personal development gurus, we still spend more than $8.5 billion dollars (as of 2004) every year in the U.S. alone on “self-improvement books, CDs, audiocassettes, infomercials, motivational speakers, videos, multi-media packages, public seminars, workshops, holistic institutes, personal coaching, and more.” We clearly believe we can improve our lives dramatically–and perhaps even totally–or else why would we be spending so much on these products and services?
The Ultimate Aim of Life: Getting Stuff?
James Ray says that you can have it all, and this is a good thing. In other words, the ultimate aim of life is to have everything you want–including all the money and stuff you want.
This is a very different view from the current positive psychology paradigm. In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky claims that getting what you want externally in life has little to no effect on happiness, and that indeed even our happiness–the ultimate aim of life in her view–is only 40% in our control.
Which is it? It can’t be both. Either external circumstances affect happiness or they don’t. I’m more likely to believe the research than the master of hyperbole on this one. So if getting everything that you want in life is not a critical factor at all with regards to happiness, then Ray and his followers value getting what you want more than happiness! In terms of classical economics, this pursuit would be defined as irrational, and indeed the pursuit of what we want despite our happiness is all too common in personal development culture.
Another good article from Jonah Lehrer, this one from the Boston Globe. How we deal with hardship and obstacles determines how successful we will be. "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts," Winston Churchill.
The truth about grit
Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success
It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.
There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall - it took Newton to explain why.
Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.”
Although biographers have long celebrated Newton’s intellect - he also pioneered calculus - it’s clear that his achievements aren’t solely a byproduct of his piercing intelligence. Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles, to stick with the same stubborn mystery - why did the apple fall, but the moon remain in the sky? - until he found the answer.
In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. Although the idea itself isn’t new - “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked - the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.
While stories of grit have long been associated with self-help manuals and life coaches - Samuel Smiles, the author of the influential Victorian text “Self-Help” preached the virtue of perseverance - these new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they’re able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. Although this field of study is only a few years old, it’s already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit. Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.
“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”
The hope among scientists is that a better understanding of grit will allow educators to teach the skill in schools and lead to a generation of grittier children. Parents, of course, have a big role to play as well, since there’s evidence that even offhand comments - such as how a child is praised - can significantly influence the manner in which kids respond to challenges. And it’s not just educators and parents who are interested in grit: the United States Army has supported much of the research, as it searches for new methods of identifying who is best suited for the stress of the battlefield.
The new focus on grit is part of a larger scientific attempt to study the personality traits that best predict achievement in the real world. While researchers have long focused on measurements of intelligence, such as the IQ test, as the crucial marker of future success, these scientists point out that most of the variation in individual achievement - what makes one person successful, while another might struggle - has nothing to do with being smart. Instead, it largely depends on personality traits such as grit and conscientiousness. It’s not that intelligence isn’t really important - Newton was clearly a genius - but that having a high IQ is not nearly enough.
Consider, for instance, a recent study led by Duckworth that measured the grittiness of cadets at West Point, the elite military academy. Although West Point is highly selective, approximately 5 percent of cadets drop out after the first summer of training, which is known as “Beast Barracks.” The Army has long searched for the variables that best predict whether or not cadets will graduate, using everything from SAT scores to physical fitness. But none of those variables were particularly useful. In fact, it wasn’t until Duckworth tested the cadets of the 2008 West Point class using a questionnaire - the test consists of statements such as “Setbacks don’t discourage me” - that the Army found a measurement that actually worked. Duckworth has since repeated the survey with subsequent West Point classes, and the result is always the same : the cadets that remain are those with grit.
In 1869, Francis Galton published “Hereditary Genius,” his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement. Galton’s method was straightforward: he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with “very high reputations,” including poets, politicians, and scientists. That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising: success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent. Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when “ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.”
Many personal development gurus posit that you can and should have it all, that every area of your life can be perfected without any need for compromise. Consider this quotation from personal development guru 