Success depends on emotion management
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
I worry greatly, about how young people today are thought, that's the world is stacked against them and especially for minorities and women. Its true that the world is a very unfair place, but to change it we need encouragement, not horror stories.
Telling young people that the world is ruled by a clique of powerful old white men who conspire to keep them oppressed must be crushing, especially if done incessantly.
A cynical part of me says: see, sowing and cultivating frustration is precisely what some politicians need to reap power. They might not gain as much power if their voters had more self-esteem.
If you're a young white man with a fighting chance of becoming one of the next generation of powerful old white men, I can understand where you might find that unnecessarily demoralizing.
But for everybody else, it's the bitter truth they nevertheless need to know. And the only way to change this is at the systemic, political level.
Is this really the only situation where you think this is demoralizing?
Not for women or minorities who are told they will never have a chance of making it anywhere because they're not white men? Personally I think that's pretty discouraging.
Would there be an Israel today if Jewish people convinced themselves that the world is forever going to hate and subjugate them and that they are powerless to change it?
They could have done so, after all, the Holocaust was an unspeakable evil. But they chose the path of constructive defiance.
No, it's really not. If what you were saying was true, everyone who wanted to be a financially successful artist would be. The truth is there are such things as supply, demand, process, practice, mastery and logistics. To over-anthropomorphize these things based on "determination" is naive and hyperbolic. The truth is that consistency matters a lot more.
I stopped listening to people like you who think there's anything wrong with thinking the world is stacked against me, and especially for minorities and women. I stopped listening to people like you, who think we need encouragement, not horror stories. I used to listen to folks like you, but then I stopped. Instead, I listened to those horror stories. Shrank not away from them, held space for them and held fidelity to reality first and foremost.
And once I focused on the realism, I began to see things clearly. A lot more clearly than you. That's when my career began to take off and I began to make better art. Isn't that odd?
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The problem is that to you, the youth are vehicle for your own hopes and aspirations. You don't stop and consider what they think from behind their own two eyes, you project your own parochial assumptions unto them. You forget that once upon a time, you were their age, and you would have found it patronizing to be treated with kid gloves. You don't treat them as equals. You treat them like a pet dog. I think that's wrong. Young people these days are a lot more capable than you think. And they face a really challenging world. It's immensely disrespectful to not treat them as equals, to presume they need "encouragement" -- let me ask you this, have you asked them what they need? Maybe you would be surprised.
I don't treat any of my friends or colleagues with kid gloves, certainly not the ones younger than me. They tell me about the state of the world and how unfair it is, and I listen. I ask them what /they/ need. Some of them need encouragement, but that's rarer than you'd think. Most of them want information. They want experience. Strategies. They want to be challenged, motivated, given interesting threads to explore and follow, collaborated with. They want to know what I did when I was in their shoes and went through the same pains, even if it's not exactly the same thing. Sometimes they want to work together on something cool so they can see how I operate. Maybe they just want an ear to listen to.
But they don't want to be condescended to, or patronizingly told that their problem is that they think the world is stacked against them when they need to think happy thoughts. And of course they wouldn't want that -- because to be told that is something that serves the person doing the telling, not the person who is listening.
So if you're saying anything like this to young people, I think you need to take a long hard look in the mirror. You are out of touch.
You got it wrong. Determination does not at all equal success. It equals the possibility of success. If you dont decide to try to be an artist, you wont be an artist, garanteed. If you give up because you think its hard, then your attitude have made you fail, not some external force.
I'm not treating anyone with kids gloves, I'm sayng: Quit focusing on how the world is unfair, and try to make the changes you want to make. I am, and so have the people who made the world the way it is.
Not only are you wrong, but you're completely ignoring the experience I just told you about. Why would you do that, unless you cared more about feeling that you're right than actually seeing what reality is? The experience I just stated is pretty common with all of my musician friends, which proves my point -- not only are you tonedeaf, patronizing, and treating people with kids gloves on, but you're just plain wrong, and you don't even care that you're wrong.
As I told you, I actually decided that I no longer wanted to try and be an artist. I gave up. And it's precisely when I gave up that something deep inside me began to form. Over time, some deep, subconscious force began to build, to push out of me an extraordinary compulsion to create. I didn't even want it to; I felt that I didn't have the determination to do it and so I wouldn't be an artist -- and that was "guaranteed" as you (and much of society) seem to imply -- but that's BS.
It turns out that what made me an artist had absolutely nothing to do with determination, and everything to do with my journey as a dynamic, evolving human being. Someone who goes through setbacks, someone who gives up, someone who is imperfect, someone who struggles. But fundamentally, someone is honest about reality, who doesn't varnish it -- not to themselves, not to others.
Paradoxically, by giving up and yielding, I gave my internal narrative and creative mental ground the time and space to lay fallow and become fertile to create actually great art. This is what you miss in your rush to focus on determination. You miss the exact mechanism by which artists are formed. You oversimplify it into an extremely facile sense of cause and effect, and in doing so, you completely miss the forest for the trees.
You have proved my point.
I discovered that my colleagues notice me far more than I notice myself. I was reminded of this when I came back from a meeting with one platform team that has treated us with notable hostility; they frequently would backtrack statements and commitments that weren't recorded or logged, they would make up requirements on the spot after requirements had already been agreed on, etc... That's the flavor of team these folks were - everyone at the company knows it too. I was not able to get them to budge and it was more expedient and better for our users at this point if we just did what they wanted rather than the full vision. My peers asked what happened, I smiled, and said, "Well, I wasn't able to convince them to do everything, but we'll make do and continue to plan for the future as long as it benefits our users." In a one-on-one is when I was made aware of how my peers observe me, most of them remarked on my stoicism and the fact that it didn't deter me. The fact is that it does, I don't like disorganization that becomes nearly undecipherable from gas lighting, I don't like having goal posts moved, and I don't like organizations that are supposed to be constantly in pursuit of making users lives better thinking stagnation is a strategy. Having projects cancelled affects my promotion prospects, it wastes time/money/energy, etc... I feel some type of way about all of these things.
From my sample size of self, I think the article is right but more in a way that perception matters and you're either the type of person that has to:
- git clone self --depth 1
- tell yourself fanciful stories
But it does seem that many are not aware that perseverance is such a large part of anything. Before you get to perseverance even, there is the desire to try. A lot of projects are dismissed before they are even started as being too difficult or impractical.
One tendency that I have, which I assume other people have also, is that in certain areas that I am invested in, I am happy to keep working on a project despite many small or large setbacks. I generally don't consider them to be a big deal. But other areas, such as cooking or promotion, I put a minimal amount of effort in and find it difficult to find motivation to continue when I have a setback or poor result.
Part of it is my expectation for how hard things are. Some things that I am not particularly familiar with, I kind of expect to be fairly straightforward. But I am starting to think that almost every type of task is going to have setbacks and require perseverance to get good results. Which is good news, because it gives me hope that if I can be persistent when approaching those types of problems, I can be just as successful as I am with programming (when I don't give up).
Managing your attitude, emotions, and the stories you tell yourself will help a lot.
If you do it badly, it will increase your chances of failure.
Doing it well will not determine your success. That’s just magical thinking. It will predispose you for success if the other conditions are right for it, but nothing more.
Presumably the clicks are why such pointless articles continue to be written.
It is very comforting for people who are high on the social ladder to believe in a meritocracy: it lets one their successes are due to their superior character, and those who are on the bottom of the ladder are there due to a failure of character.
Again, if it helps go right ahead.
Interpreted as a literal propositional statement, it's saying "if you have a good attitude, then you will have success". Therefore if you do not have success, it must be because you did not have a good attitude, which is your fault. It's the contrapositive, right?
If success is determined by positive thinking that seems like it strongly implies that success is a necessary and sufficient condition.
Which implies that a lack of success is a failure of attitude.
Admittedly, this is mostly a semantics game of what specifically "determines" means, but to me it strongly implies both necessary and sufficient.
It's true that your attitude and behaviors matter. Competence is usually rewarded, and you should act in accordance with that truth. But it's not absolute. Life is not a meritocracy (whatever that really means).
Or as an old space pirate once put it "never tell me to odds!"
It's not really a caveat, though, is it? It's an entirely false premise, that intent & direction & purpose are irrelevant. That the primary factor that matters is attitude & self-belief. As commenter Zepto rightly pointed out, this article is proposing magical thinking: the conceit that what you want or what you think is the thing that shapes reality all about.
Besides being delusional, it also has all the other obviously bad impact that it's twin the Prosperity Gospel brings: those without riches & success have all failed to be worthy, are all faulty. No matter how hard you work, how good you try to be, judging in Attitude or Belief as the only/primary/core determiner of success doesn't allow for misfortune, or for it to be the world that was wrong. Often, the world _is_ wrong, and only those rebels that hold up their flame & let their light shine are what it takes, what makes humankind & the human spirit so great... but so often those folks are crushed, too. And not for a failure of attitude or belief, nor often strategy nor execution either. Hard things, sometimes, ought be tried & embarked upon, but to internalize success as the judgement of whether the hard thing was right or wrong? That is petty, small, and insufficient. It diminishes the light of the world to require & judge only by success.
financial, intellectual achievements over time?
I think living happy, healthily, in simplicity is success
In that case, I'd agree with the title
To boss, you have an attitude. To friends, you have an attitude. To your serious project, you have an attitude. And many more.
Trolling.
Anyway your title is wrong. You forgot the word "not".
So to imply any kind of causal link stronger than a weak one between attitude and success is self-help nonsense. Having a workable attitude is a necessary but not sufficient condition. It does nothing to help you service the actual hard work and growth necessary to reach success.
EDIT: My, how this once mighty forum has fallen to the internet marketers, huh? Downvote away. I am happy to burn my internet points criticizing this dreck.
Anyway yeah people get offended when you question their beliefs, no matter how silly. Belief is tied to identity, and they feel insulted when you point out their beliefs' absurdities. So you get downvoted.