Habits and Strategies

Entropy is a term from physics that describes the tendency for matter to move from order into disorder. Life can be seen as a process that is deliberately working against entropy.

If you ever watched the old Get Smart TV show, or the more recent movie, the good guys were called “Control,” and the bad guys were “Chaos.” For living creatures like us, that pretty well describes the situation. Chaos is where entropy draws everything naturally; control is the conscious ordering, the structure that we have to impose on ourselves and our environment in order to survive and flourish.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of a lot of the necessary ordering which life requires; finding food, mating, sleep cycles, protective behavior, etc. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in his book, “What is Life,” proposed a molecule that directed these processes to counter entropy with “negative entropy,” and his hypothesis became an inspiration for Watson and Crick’s search for and discovery of DNA.

But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.

With our minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. The habits that we practice daily, weekly, monthly; they are all based on neural pathways that we have established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines. These habits – if they are good ones – help us to resist entropy and have a sense of meaning, purpose and direction.

…and research is beginning to show the effects of our habits on genetic expression – which means that through our conscious choices and actions, we may actually be able to influence, to some degree, how our own DNA will direct us in the future.

The trouble is, many of the habits we develop are habits that we acquired by default – the routines that our family valued and practiced, or that our schools valued and practiced, or that any other influential people in our history have valued and practiced.

Or the habits that we ourselves developed in response to our environment growing up; the things we did that seemed to work then.

This can be wonderful if the people we learned from all had really good habits, great values, and were able to help us learn and practice the habits that would serve us the best; or if we happened to stumble along good habits while we wrestled with life’s challenges growing up.

It can be awful if the habits that we learned or developed are awful habits – whether we learn these directly through mimicking them, if we developed them in reaction to bad or hurtful events, or if we made and continued in bad choices along the way.

But even in the best of circumstances – a loving family, a supportive community, great opportunities for learning, responsibility, and growth – the habits that come easily to us may not be the best ones for our developing lives.

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Have you ever watched the downhill skiers in the Winter Olympics before a race, visualizing the run, moving and swaying their bodies as though they’re on the run itself? They all do this now, because the visualization is a powerfully effective strategy for bringing out their best.

But they aren’t picturing themselves with the gold medal and the national anthem playing. They’re crouched down in a skiing stance, imagining how they’ll negotiate the challenges of the run, practicing the specific skills that will get them to that gold medal.

Much is made these days of having a compelling future vision. Picturing yourself on the winner’s block, or with that book published, or that wonderful relationship; imagining a future that you can step into… The pop psychology literature is chock full of advice for seeing yourself having accomplished your goals.

But the pop psychology literature on this is wrong.

When we imagine having already achieved our goals, part of what happens is we feel like we’ve already achieved our goals; and because we feel the reward of the accomplishment already, our motivation to do the inevitable hard work required for any meaningful goal fades.

Dreams that matter are not easy; they take time and considerable effort.

Imagine you have a big goal that means a lot to you, you’re willing and expect to work very hard for it. Let’s imagine for fun that it’s a mountain that you want to summit. You’ve trained, you’ve prepared, and you’ve struggled physically and mentally to finally make it to the top.

Hooray! You’ve done it!

Now, how would you feel if having felt this amazing achievement, you suddenly discover you’ve only just started the climb, and you still have a very long ways to go?

I think most of us would feel disheartened, disappointed, let down. We also would have a hard time gathering up the same intensity of desire and focus that we initially had. We may still get there, but it would be more of a hard slog at that point, and less of an invigorating triumph.

This is exactly what we do to ourselves psychologically when we spend time just imagining what it will be like when we’ve already reached our goals. It saps our energy, and undermines our motivation.

But it is relaxing and comforting in the moment; which is why we do it… and why all those pop psychology authors have advised it.

When Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at New York University and The University of Hamburg, and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking first discovered this, she was disappointed. She had hoped that dreaming about success could help people who were struggling to more easily reach their goals. Finding that it did the opposite made it hard for her to continue to study such fantasies.

Then she asked the interesting question:

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If you know that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all changeable and accessible to your own intervention and effort—What Carol Dweck, author of Mindset calls a “growth” mindset—your assessment of yourself will also tend to be very accurate.

In contrast, if you believe that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all fixed and unchangeable—a “fixed-trait” mindset—you will then believe that you are at the mercy of forces outside of yourself, and your assessment of yourself will be predictably and dramatically inaccurate.

In order to make accurate assessments, we have to have accurate data. If we are faced with a poor assessment, and our belief is that we are powerless to change, then the only way to salvage any emotional hope is to skew the data, to trick ourselves into discounting it. In this case, the necessary self-reflection will feel threatening to us, containing blows to our self-concept, rather than feeling like useful information. This can lead to incredible suffering and bad results, and can lead us to avoid challenges or difficult feedback—the very things we need in order to grow.

Here’s the challenge:

Notice how you respond to feedback. Do you tend to reject negative feedback, become defensive, change the subject? Or do you hear it, feel the predictable emotions (nobody likes negative feedback; I wouldn’t expect you to feel happy about it), and then look for what there is to learn from it?

If you tend to reject it, chances are you are operating, in that particular area at least, within a fixed-trait mindset. If you can identify this, that’s very good news… because you can change it! By understanding that this is a fixed-trait mindset, you can choose to change it toward a growth mindset. Look for your assumptions about yourself that are fixed and immoveable, and dispute them. Sometimes this is all it takes; sometimes it’s more complicated and it’s important to get some help with it.

Now for an even trickier challenge: Pay attention to how you give yourself feedback, and how you take it.

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