The Rawness

Last year, I went to see Rocky Balboa in the theaters. I’ve always loved Rocky movies, especially the first one, and I thought it was a great ending to the franchise. But as I sat there in the theater, it reminded me of how different it is to watch a Rocky movie with a crowd as opposed to watching it at home on TV. The energy from a Rocky crowd is both intense and infectious, almost like watching a real sporting event.

Stallone is very underrated as a writer and an actor. His ability to suck in a crowd emotionally and make them root for his character is incredible. You really get sucked into the movie and forget it’s fiction for a while. You really want all those assholes that put Rocky down and constantly ridicule him or try to crush his dreams to get their well-deserved comeuppance. You see Rocky struggling uphill against impossible odds and being shitted on by arrogant, petty jerks every step of the way and it reminds you of all the dreams you had or currently had that people shitted on. You see those arrogant assholes on the screen and get reminded of all those real-life pricks from your own experiences that just player hated from the sidelines of life and got great enjoyment watching your struggles and failures and twisted the knife and rubbed it in whenever they could.

But I started to wonder: does anyone watch Rocky and sympathize with the pricks? Same with those 80s movies where some obnoxious athlete bully, yuppie or preppy is ridiculing the underdog hero and trying to crush his dreams…does anyone watch those movies and identify with or even root for those guys over the underdog hero? Did anybody in the theater cheer when Johnny swept the leg in Karate Kid?

These types of bullies, peanut gallery picks and dream crushers must exist in some shape or form in the real world, or else these movies wouldn’t be so powerful in evoking emotion and recognition from us. And these movies are so popular and widely seen that it’s highly doubtful that jerks just avoid those movies, they have to be in the theater crowd or among the ones watching at home. Yet no one who watches these movies seems to ever think of themselves as the prick or bully. They all see themselves in the protagonist hero role, and that’s who they end up identifying with.

These movies appeal to our basic narcissism. We get to watch these movies and imagine ourselves as the hard-working dreamer. We get to imagine ourselves as the type of good, positive person who would chase a dream like Rocky against all odds, or at least be supportive of a Rocky and be on his side as he chases his dreams. But we conveniently forget all the times in real life that we were the criticizing, smug assholes, all the times we helped crush dreams. Those moments don’t support our positive fantasy image of ourselves, so we don’t pay much attention to those and play them down. We can go to a Rocky movie and think of Rocky as representing “us” and the sneering, condescending dream-crushing bad guys as representing “them,” but we can go to a restaurant that same night and crack jokes about the waiter and scoff at how stupid he is to actually think he’s going to make it as an actor along with the millions of other dreamers in town and ever be more than just a glorified grunt. The irony of these moments eludes us. A lot of times, the arrogant jerk is you.

See, the Rocky fallacy is simply this: it’s easy to root for an underdog when you already know beforehand that he’s going to win. This doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t give you moral superiority. It doesn’t mean you have faith in people (faith is belief in something, even when you have no proof or guarantees that your belief is warranted or will be rewarded). It doesn’t make you Rocky. It just makes you like the typical person. Those pompous jerk characters in the Rocky movie? They don’t know they’re in an inspirational feel-good movie called Rocky and that Rocky is the star of the whole thing. If they did they’d support Rocky from the very beginning just like the audience does.

When you watch The Pursuit of Happyness, it’s easy to have that sense of moral superiority by siding with Will Smith’s character…because you already know his risks are going to pay off. You feel good at the end because you feel your faith was rewarded and in some ways you feel your own urges to dream have somehow been validated, but truth be told you knew your belief in the character was going to be rewarded before even watching the movie. But in real life, you and your friends would probably badmouth and look down on someone in that situation at the bottom of his rope hoping against all odds to conquer the world of stocks.

Think about all those people who supported the Rocky character when watching the movies. How many of them scoffed at Stallone the actor when he had a string of flops and it seemed his career was washed up? How many of them laughed at him when he announced he was making a Rocky sequel, just like people laughed at Rocky when he tried to enter the big time after an unremarkable career as a washed up local boxer? That’s because unlike with the Rocky character, we had no guarantee Stallone would succeed in his comeback, and being supportive is always harder without guarantees.

I think this is why so many people hated Rocky V. It’s not the best in the franchise, that’s for sure. But when I saw it, I never thought it was as horrible as everyone claimed it was. It was as well-acted and well-written as any of the other installments. But now I realize why it received such backlash: because Rocky ended as a loser because he had no money or glory, despite winning the street fight. The faith the audience had was conditional: “we believe in you against all odds Rocky, and fuck any haters that say otherwise…unless you actually lose. Then we’ll turn on you too.”

Stallone made a fatal miscalculation with Rocky V: he overestimated the public and thought they “got” what he was trying to say all along. That the winning and the glory isn’t what matters, it’s never giving up the fight in the face of all adversity and being able to hold your head up at the end of the day knowing that you tried your hardest, regardless of the outcome. He had too much faith in his audience, not realizing that they never got that message. So he had to make a slight correction in Rocky Balboa and made Rocky a successful entrepreneur and gave him back some ring glory, and the fans all came back, once again buying into the myth that they were the kind of good guys that would never turn on someone for trying hard and ending up a loser.

Another great example of this is Eli Manning. Tons of people in New York made him a whipping boy for years. They laughed at how inferior he was to his brother Peyton. As he improved and stayed resolute and improved toward the end of the season, people gave a cautious optimism, but still scoffed at him to be safe. Even as the game progressed and he played almost flawlessly and the Giants were within striking distance to win the Superbowl, people I watched with kept saying “Oh man, he’s gonna choke. He’s a loser. Kiss this game goodbye. They’re gonna lose this, I know it was too good to be true.” And after that final play where Eli killed it and won the game, those people were jumping up and cheering the loudest. And I’ll never forget what one of those guys said: “WE WOOONNN!!!!! Whoooo!!!”

Think about that for a second. “They’re gonna lose.” “He’s a loser.” “He’s gonna choke.” But after he wins? “WE won!” Where was the “we” when the outcome was still in doubt? Why is it suddenly first person plural now? You can bet this guy is one of the people who watches Rocky and identifies with the underdog supporter and not the haters and jerks in the movie. And he’s wrong, because back in the real world if Eli starts off bad next season he’ll be the first badmouthing him again and calling his Superbowl win a fluke.

It takes a lot of character to support someone against all odds. It takes even more character to not be outcome-driven and still support them for trying hard even after they lose. Rocky movies provide us the risk-free comfort of fooling ourselves into believing we have that level of character and empathy and courage.

In reality though, that image of ourselves is often the most fictional part of the whole moviegoing experience.

I’ll do part 2 of the stereotyping post on Monday. I felt like tackling something else today instead because it was a timelier issue, and by next week the topic will be a little stale.

This blog is fairly new, but I had another blog before so I know a lot of the cliches that come up on a regular basis. One of them is the mandatory New Year’s Resolutions posts that pop up all over the blogosphere on January 1, and this year was no different. I pretty much can’t stand that stuff. I forgive women for making those posts, because symbolic rebirths and brand new personal declarations provide them with some sort of emotional release, and to women experiencing emotions is more addictive than a cocaine and heroin speedball and even therapeutic. I’m cool with that and respect it. But I really don’t like seeing guys overdoing the whole New Year’s resolution thing. It just doesn’t feel right to me. It bothers me almost as much as meeting a man who hates Fight Club, which of course means I can’t befriend them. (This is not a joke, by the way. I literally do not trust men who hate Fight Club and avoid interacting with them at all costs if possible.)

As VK said:

The next time I post will be in 08 when I?m done with a little side project. Just do me a favor and DONT post your gay new years resolutions. Seriously nobody but God and your grandmother care and I even doubt God gives a shit. Especially if your going to ?stop smoking? or ?start exercising more?. You really waited to a calendar date to do something that can improve and lengthen your life?

Or as Roissy put it:

Fuck resolutions. They are for people who couldn?t get their shit together the previous 365 days.

Pithy, but on point.

The main problem I have with New Year’s resolutions is that since it’s tied into a specific day to start, and it’s only considered a success if you can keep it up all year long, the moment you fall off the wagon, you’ve blown it for that year and just give up until next January 1.  If a bad habit can be started on any day of the year, the same rule should apply to good habits.

But if you are serious about changing something about yourself, whether or not it’s in the form of a New Year’s resolution or not, I want to give you a piece of advice. Don’t attack it as a whole laundry list of specific problems that need solving.   Because once you do that, you end up with a huge daunting list of things to tackle at once and you end up getting intimidated by enormity of the task, which just makes it easier to fall off the wagon.

I don’t care how many problems you think you have, you actually only have two at most: vision and/or discipline. That’s it. Every problem you have is just a symptom of your lack of those two things.

Can’t stop smoking? A symptom that you lack discipline. Alcoholic? Symptom that you lack discipline. Studying hard but can’t get good grades? You lack vision and need to work smarter instead of harder. Bad credit? Possibly a lack of vision and discipline. Take dating for example. Do you approach the opposite sex with ease, date people often but still can’t find a mate? Then you have the discipline to put yourself out there, but it’s your vision that sucks. You need to grow some better game. Or maybe you have decent social skills but don’t put yourself out there enough socially? Then your vision is fine, but your discipline needs work. I repeat, what you have is not a bunch of problems that you need fixing, what you have is a bunch of symptoms of one or two larger problems called vision and discipline.

You can look at all types of people and group them into four categories: people with both vision and discipline, people with vision but no discipline, people with discipline but no vision and people with neither vision nor discipline. In sports, Michael Jordan had both. The baseball book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game has plenty of examples of athletes with only one or the other. Billy Beane for example was an incredible natural talent, but he didn’t have the correct discipline and never was able to become the best player he could be. Lenny Dykstra, his teammate, had nowhere near the same amount of natural talent as Billy, but he had an incredible discipline and desire to be nothing else on earth but a baseball player. He wouldn’t even read for leisure for fear of damaging his eyes for baseball. Phil Jackson is another example of someone who as an athlete was considered more of a hard worker (discipline) than a natural talent (vision).

Now sometimes someone can have such a surplus of one trait that it makes the deficit in the other trait hard to notice. Some students are so naturally bright that they can score high grades without having to study hard. They have lousy discipline but it flies underneath the radar and goes unnoticed because he’s still getting the results. Their vision compensates for their lack of discipline.

Another example is in the gym. I see some guys with horrible form, no rhyme or reason to their workout, no set exercises or routines to follow, totally playing it by ear, yet they’ll have great bodies. And the reason is that despite their lack of vision, they have incredible discipline when it comes to working out. They are there every day, no matter what the weather, they stay for two hours or more a day and they throw up big weight and do the cardio.  So the inefficiency caused by their lack of vision is compensated for by their work ethic.

The only danger with these guys who get by with only one trait or the other is that when they hit a wall and can’t improve any more with what they’ve been doing thus far, they’re suddenly screwed because they neglected the other trait for so long they have no idea how to develop it now. So that guy who never studied suddenly reaches a level of schooling where natural talent won’t cut it anymore and now he’s screwed because he’s neglected to build up good study habits over the years. And those guys who only use hard work and no planning to exercise reach a point where they can’t get any more gains just from spending hours in the gym, yet they have no idea how to make their workout smarter either.

So if you have a ton of shortcomings that need fixing, realize that the real problem is either vision, discipline or both, and work on how to improve them. Usually when we have bad discipline in one area, we have it across the board in many areas. The same goes for bad vision. People who have made bad choices in the past tend to continue to make bad choices in the future and in all types of situations. Some people say lack of vision and/or discipline and not injustice and capitalist exploitation is the real reason why the poor stay poor and the rich get richer. You might hate to hear that, but consider this: why do so many lottery winners go broke and often end up in even worse financial straits than before? Because they went from bad vision and/or discipline with no money to bad vision and/or discipline with a millionaire’s bank account.

My point is don’t just make a list of a bunch stuff you don’t like about yourself and think the job is done. Try to figure out what the list is telling you about yourself. Is your discipline bad, is your vision bad, or is it both? Then just attack those two things. Once you get those two things down, everything else will fall into place. And remember, you don’t have to wait until January 1 to start.

Recommended Reading:

• Moneyball and The Blind Side by Michael Lewis are true stories about athletes, in baseball and football respectively, and both books, especially Moneyball, give great examples of the role vision and discipline play in helping an athlete reach his full potential.
• Fight Club movie and book: Self-explanatory, masterpiece, needs no introduction. Not really that important to this article, but fuck it, everyone should read and watch it.

From talking to a lot of my friends who are in their 20s and 30s, I’ve seen a common thread in all of us: the collector’s mentality, the need to accumulate experiences and things. The need to travel to as many places as possible. To need to collect hobbies.

Everyone has annual checklists of new resolutions. Learn a new language. Or two. Or three. Skydive. Change jobs. Go back to school and change careers altogether. Learn to play an instrument. We decide to write novels in our free time or take up a new sport. We spend hours in the gym trying to get our body fat percentage into the single digits. We have the time and means and education to pursue careers and hobbies and personal achievement goals that our parents and their parents before them could never have even dreamed of. Isn’t this the American Dream? Isn’t that why many of our ancestors traveled here to begin with? To give us choices and financial security that they themselves never had growing up?

Yet we’re a notoriously unfulfilled generation. Many of us are neurotic, directionless, struggling with feelings of inadequacy, still rebelling against our parents, still trying to find ourselves, constantly struggling with existential angst…why?

Why do we have so much already with still many opportunities to accumulate more, yet find ourselves somehow less personally fulfilled than our parents were at our ages? My parents had a fraction of the education I had. Where they lived felt so hopeless they actually felt like they had to switch whole countries and come to America, a place where they barely knew the language. They had less skills and education and had to take whatever jobs they could get while struggling to raise kids. They constantly had to do without to get by. They stayed with their respective employers until retirement. Sure they had some regrets, but they were nowhere near as consuming as those of many of the young (and some would argue spoiled and self-indulgent) people of my generation, who are already complaining about quarterlife crises. Why are our parents and grandparents so much happier and less regretful, even though they grew up with so much more responsiblity so many less toys?

Two speeches from the TED Conferences may shed some light. Before going any further, what exactly is TED? TED is an international conference that brings together a wide range of thinkers every year to talk about a variety of topics. Here’s a description of the TED Conference from their own website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. Almost 150 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Our mission: Spreading ideas.

You can go to their website or check their video collection on Youtube and see more speeches.  I want to focus on two speeches in particular, which I think fit together well to provide the answers we’re looking for in this case. One speech is by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and the other is by Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness.

Dan Gilbert’s speech is called “Why Are We Happy? Why Aren’t We Happy” and it’s described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel real, enduring happiness, he says, even when things don’t go as planned. He calls this kind of happiness “synthetic happiness,” and he says it’s “every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.”

What “synthetic happiness” means is that when we don’t get what we want and we resign ourselves to the fact that we won’t get what we want, our mind adapts and we end up being as happy with the unwanted result as we would have been with the originally desired result. What’s important to realize is that these people aren’t simply lying to themselves to make themselves feel better about the disappointing development. These people actually become as happy with the unwanted result as they would have been with the result they originally wanted. But the problem is, this synthetic happiness only works if you’re trapped and have no other choices.

Barry Schwartz’s speech “The Paradox of Choice” touches on the same issues, and is described on the TED website as follows:

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

Think of it like Ramen Cup O’ Noodles in college when you’re broke. When you’re in college, you loved the shit out some Ramen noodles. And it wasn’t a case of you knowing you were eating shitty food but pretending to like it. You weren’t lying to yourself. You actually believed in your heart and mind that you loved that salty, chewy mess. Because you were broke and had absolutely no other choices, your mind actually made you love those noodles. You would sit in class craving that shit and daydreaming about those stale styrofoam noodles and stinky powdered broth and you never thought for once that you were settling for junk. It was gloriously uncomplicated.

Once you graduated from school and got your first good job and had serious food choices, though, your mind suddenly realized how shitty Ramen noodles are, even though they taste the same as they did back when you were in college. Same goes for the cafeteria food and the greasy spoon ghetto diners you loved back then too.

Choices fuck you up. Now instead of eating Ramen noodles every night and loving them, you’re a young professional with a real income and an active social life and are surrounded by tons of exotic restaurant choices and a recent Zagat’s guide plus the entire internet to help you sift through them and each place has a million affordable entries on its menu to choose from. Now you’re sampling different gourmet cuisines mutiple nights a week and you’re nitpicking them to death, whereas before when you could only afford one shitty food consistently, you really believed you loved it.

And not only do choices fuck you up and make you miserable, but now we’re programmed to gravitate towards them. We choose neighborhoods based on how many different restaurants and bars are around us. And how culturally and financially diverse are social circles will be in those neighborhoods. And how many different clothing stores and supermarkets we’ll have to choose from. And among those restaurants we’ll have a dozen different ethnic cuisines available to us, and each will have a large menu selection. The bars will have 10 different vodkas and 30 different scotches and 40 microbrews to choose from. And the supermarket with have 24 different types of flavored gourmet mayo to choose. And we’ll feel pressured to have our social circles look as diverse as a Benetton ad in order to make sure we’re living an open-minded, full unbigoted life. And our disposable income and leisure time makes us feel pressured to cram hobbies into our lives as well. We not only actively seek choice, the dilemma that causes us our existential angst, but we actually expect it to solve our existential angst, leading to an incredibly vicious circle.

So now it becomes harder to feel fulfilled because now no matter what we choose, we’re convinced there’s something better out there that we’re missing out on. As soon as we get our ideal apartment, we hear about a better complex that’s going up in a better hipper neighborhood. Soon as we order Thai, we think maybe we should have went with the new Italian place with the celebrity chef we read about in New York Magazine last week. We can go to our usual lounge to chill, but it was just okay last time. Let’s try this hot new lounge instead. But once we get there and it’s utterly wack, suddenly we imagine how good a time we’d probably be having if we went with our original plan instead. Of if we tried that other new lounge we heard about. Even when we’re content with our decisions we find ourselves daydreaming about trading up.

Even TV is a big dilemma now. Growing up we only had three major networks and a few cable channels that sucked ass. You chose something from those big networks, went to school or the water cooler, and everyone discussed the same shows because we all watched the same shit. We had no choice.

And that’s why we’re doomed to be less happy than our parents. They had a gloriously uncomplicated life, similar to those long gone Ramen noodle days of our college days, but they chose to upgrade us to the overstimulating and cluttered life of Zagat’s guides, gourmet supergroceries and megamalls thinking they were doing us a favor. Ironically, while having no choices isn’t always a picnic, having a nonstop of glut of them is turning out to be worse.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m no communist. I’m not against competition. I don’t believe striving for upward mobility is anything to feel guilty about. I think rewarding yourself materially now and again is a great thing. I think wanting more for yourself is what drives progress, which is the very engine of capitalism. But do we really need a bar with 200 fucking types of scotch to choose from?!?!

The full speeches are here if you’re curious:

Daniel Gilbert:

Barry Schwartz:

I meet a lot of guys who complain about women claiming to like “nice guys” but actually preferring jerks. It’s a reassuring fiction that shields their egos, but it’s really not that simple.

Many self-proclaimed “nice guys” are rarely actually nice guys. Genuinely nice people are nice to everyone unless the person gives them a reason not to be. But with self-proclaimed “nice guys,” the only people they seem to be consistently nice to are extremely hot girls they want to bang. It’s not like these guys are running around doing nice things for fat or gruesome chicks. In fact, they’re often rude and cruel to them. Being truly nice means treating everyone well, regardless of whether they have something you want, and it means doing good things for people without expecting anything in return. For example these “nice guys” will be nice to hot women they meet at bars while rudely ignoring the hot girl’s homelier friends. Self-proclaimed “nice guys” only behave that way because they expect to be rewarded with sex or a relationship in return for their niceness (or at the very least get tossed some drunken pity pussy). It’s a transparent, passive-aggressive form of seduction and women can see right through that. Nigga, please.

But I’m not here to talk about the psychology of so-called “nice guys.” That’ll be another post. What I want to talk about is another part of the nice guy equation: why women don’t just say what they want. Why do they say they want nice guys but go with jerks? Are women just liars? Truth be told, I don’t think it’s a malicious lie so much as a natural two-part human response that people have when asked a question: (1) they want to give the answer that gives the most flattering impression of them and (2) they also go as far as to delude themselves into believing at some level that this flattering fiction is actually true. Not everyone is emotionally and psychologically strong enough to reveal unflattering truths about themselves, especially to themselves. Self-deception is a very important coping mechanism among human beings.

Regarding self-deception, consider the “illusion of invulnerability” effect found in studies conducted by Robert Levine in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (this is going to seem like an irrelevant tangent at first, but be patient, I’ll bring it back around soon enough):

• 50% of college students said they were less naive than the average student their age and gender, only 22% said they were more naive
• 43% claimed to be less gullible than average, only 25% said they were more gullible than average.
• 46% believed themselves to be less conforming than average, only 16% said more conforming than average.
• 74% claimed to be more independent than average, only 7% said less independent.
• 77% said they had better than average awareness of how groups manipulate people; only % said they were below average

And so one and so on. The book gives plenty of other examples. Smokers think they’re less likely than other smokers to get lung cancer, which keeps them smoking. Sexually active women polled believe themselves less likely to get pregnant than other sexually active girls their age. People believe they’re 32% less likely to get fired from a job than their peers.

In fact, pessimists and depressed people may actually be the most realistic of us all. One study had clinically depressed people and psychologically normal people rate themselves and try to figure out how others viewed them. The depressed people were able to much more accurately gauge how others viewed them than the normal people. The normal group consistently overestimated the impression they made on others and had an inflated image of themselves. Another study had depressed and normal people participate in secretly rigged games where the results were fixed. The normal people routinely overestimated the degree to which personal skill contributed to the outcome when they won the rigged game, and routinely blamed outside factors when they lost. Depressed people were able to assess both situations much more realistically. Studies also show that the on average people with eating disorders actually have more accurate perceptions about strangers view their body than normal people do.

Contrary to popular belief, for the clinically depressed and those with eating disorders, their problems often stem not from irrational beliefs but from an overdose of reality and an inability to deceive themselves. Self-deception apparently keeps us sane. Take it away and give people unflinching reality and the average person’s mind will not be able to take it and their mental health will suffer.

So what does this have to do with the chick who says she wants a sensitive earnest nice guys like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything but actually goes for Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides? You know, the woman who says she wants a sensitive softie who puts her up on a pedestal, but goes for the challenging, aloof macho guy or occasionally the outright jerk? She may not be consciously lying. Chances are, she’s deluded herself into believing that’s what she wants because it’s a reassuring fiction that feeds the self-image she desires. She may actually believe her own bullshit. Like the people in the studies I mentioned, she wants to view herself as being smarter, more resistant to manipulation and more resistant to assholdery than the average chick. She’s suffering from that illusion of invulnerability.

Now the other problem is that even when people do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves and aren’t suffering from self-deception, if you put them on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. In the 1990s for example, KFC did focus groups and surveys in their stores where they asked regular customers whether they’d try a low-calorie, low-fat, nonfried skinless chicken if it was offered. The response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. Execs took this info back to HQ and launched a healthy chicken line that was sure to be insanely popular. Only it wasn’t. It bombed horribly. What went wrong? The people didn’t tell the truth (“I’m a fat, greasy bastard that loves me some fat greasy chicken”), they instead said what they thought was the right answer (“Yes, I would eat healthy chicken if it was offered.”). The funny thing is, a little common sense and observation of the people’s actions rather than their words would have saved them a lot of grief; basically, if these people cared so much about eating healthy, why would they be regular KFC customers to begin with?

Another example of self-serving lies to total strangers is the average Nielsen family. It’s said that Nielsen families often feel self-conscious about admitting what they really like to watch because they don’t want to look bad. So they suddenly claim to watch a whole lot of PBS and documentaries and hard news when they may really be overdosing on Tila Tequila marathons and watching I Love NY 2. They didn’t want to tell the truth and be judged, as shown in this article from today’s NY Times:

I recently completed a week as a Nielsen family, an experience that only multiplied my doubts about ratings science. My sample is biased — three friends and myself — and perhaps my circle is inordinately deceitful, but everyone I know or have met who has ever responded to a Nielsen survey has told flagrant lies about his or her viewing habits. I don’t mean small lies, such as claiming never to have seen an episode of “Three’s Company.” I mean outrageous, wholesale, novelistic fictions, which, if there were enough people in America as untrustworthy as the people I know, could skew the numbers beyond reckoning…

My friend and I stayed up late one night to fill out the pamphlet. Seldom at home long enough to watch anything, she still felt obliged to support a few names that she had heard were worthwhile — Phil Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer, Jacques Cousteau; and, together, we pretended to have seen nearly every nature documentary and news analysis show on the air.

Having told a few stretchers, we found it easy to fabricate more elaborate untruths. We decided to be married. She inked in two well-behaved children who never saw anything but “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers.” (I know another volunteer who conceived two instant children, named after her cats. They loved anything that had a fish theme.) Rather than gorging myself on sports, as is my wont, I was put on a samurai businessman’s diet of “Face the Nation” and “Wall Street Week.” The entire family lived graciously in her studio apartment, which we expanded to five rooms with a sharp $100,000 increase in my annual income…

According to my diary, I lead an ascetic life these days, estranged from wife and children. During the third week in May, the pages indicate that I watched nothing except “Bookmark,” Lewis Lapham’s high-toned book-chat show on public television. I seem to have enjoyed the program so much, I even caught a repeat broadcast and taped it on my VCR.

In fact, my week as a Nielsen volunteer coincided with the basketball playoffs, and the television was roaring for at least three hours the night or afternoon of every game. I never saw “Bookmark” that week; and I don’t know how to record on my VCR.

All the factors I describe above also apply to women when they say they want nice, sensitive sappy guys. They are either deluding themselves about what they want because that’s the kind of person they want to believe they are or they know exactly the kind of person they are but are saying what they think is the right thing to say to look like a good person or most likely a combination of the two. This is why you have to follow what Machiavelli calls the “effective truth”: judge people by the things they do, not the self-serving things they say. Robert Greene, author of 48 Laws of Power and other books, covers this extremely well in his blog:

Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. Machiavelli calls this “the effective truth,” and it is his most brilliant concept, in my opinion. It works like this: people will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way we can judge people and cut away all of this crap is by looking at their actions, the results of their actions. That is their effective truth. Take the Pope, for instance. He will sermonize forever about the poor, about morality, about peace, but in the meantime he presides over the most powerful organization in the world (in Machiavelli’s time). And his actions are basically concerned with increasing this power. The effective truth is that the Pope is a political animal, and that his decisions inevitably involve maintaining the Catholic Church’s preeminent place in the world. The religious verbiage is simply a part of his political gamesmanhip, serving as a distracting device.

In other words, don’t be the whiner that complains when people’s actions don’t measure up to their words. Words, as you can see, are unreliable for a variety of reasons. People will lead you wrong with their words, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally. But actions will always show you the truth, and it’s up to you to pay more attention to people’s actions and react accordingly. And that’s real talk.

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I’ve been working over a theory in my head. I call it the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox. (I’m generally not good at giving short, catchy names to things, so if you can come up with a pithier name for it, please let me know). It basically states that when people are faced with a mystery, which is an initial challenge they dream of mastering but have no idea how, they will be motivated by a sincere love for it. But once they actually do conquer the challenge and get so good at it that they achieve mastery, they will no longer love it because they have deciphered it, realized it wasn’t as interesting, alluring or mysterious as they originally thought, and then begin to actively disdain it because it becomes utterly predictable to them. It’s basically the main reason why once we conquer that impossible challenge that at one point consumed and mystified us, we are rarely as satisfied as we expected to be. It’s the reason why happiness constantly eludes us, even after we get what we thought we wanted. We are driven to conquer things, but destined to get bored with them once we master them, leading us to want new things to conquer, causing the cycle to repeat.

Before I get in-depth with it, let’s start off with a quote (with emphasis added by me) from Neil Strauss’s book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Strauss, a former chump with women, gets himself mentored by the world’s greatest pickup artists, reads a ton of books, compares notes with other pickup artists in training and field tests techniques until he reaches the point that he can not only pick up a woman using a prewritten scripts and stock techniques, but they got it down to such a science that they were able to reduce it all to a teachable routine that even a social misfit could memorize, practice and get results from almost immediately:

On our last day with Papa, we went to a club called Guvernment. I pushed him into sets and watched him repeat, like a robot, the openers, outines, and negs Mystery and I had taught him. And women were responding to him now. It was amazing how effective just a few simple lines could be?and it was also a little depressing. The first thing aspiring standup comics do is develop a tight five-minute routine that can win over any audience. But after seeing hundreds of rooms fill with laughter on cue at he exact same points, they begin to lose respect for their audience for being so easily manipulated. Being a successful pickup artist meant risking the same side effect.

Think about this for a sec. That comedian, the one that you admire so much for being able to make you and everyone else in the room laugh, the one you feel a special connection to, has done this time and time before and in his mind probably finds your reaction predictable and banal. The same probably goes for directors like Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock who mastered pushing audiences’ different emotion buttons at will with the same tricks repeatedly. They learned how to make an audience cheer, cry or hang on the edge of its seat on cue, and once they got their craft down audiences weren’t even a challenge for them to manipulate anymore. And like the comedian, once they mastered their particular audience, they lost respect for them. Sure they enjoy the quick ego boost gained by the public adulation and easy successes they achieve, but the lack of challenge also makes them discontent to a degree.

That’s why successful people have to reframe challenges in order to stay interested and motivated. Once they realize that making people laugh is now easy, they switch to the challenge of trying to get more money and fame than their rival comedians. Or maybe they compete to be funnier than their top competitors. Or for the movie director that’s mastered crowd pleasing, he may turn his attention to the still-unconquered challenge of winning the love and respect of his peers by getting an Academy Award. Similarly, in The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, for Strauss and his fellow pickup artists the hookups and sex start becoming almost mundane in comparison to competing with other pickup artists to be the best and innovate the most techniques.

Yet all these people at one point were in absolute awe of the very thing they are now bored by. The stand up comedian, at the point he was just starting out and unsure of himself, probably believed that just figuring out how to make people laugh consistently would be his ultimate dream. He basically put audiences on a pedestal and craved their approval.  Likewise, the film director probably got a rush the first time he screened a movie for an audience and managed to push the right emotional buttons with one of his films and get the reactions he wanted, even if that audience was just his film school class or his family. Similarly in The Game, when Neil Strauss was totally clueless about women he was craving their approval and making them into mysterious goddesses in his mind. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox is what drove Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

And the Michael Jordan example is fitting because it leads into another aspect of the love paradox: as unchallenging and boring as mastery of something is, the easy rewards and ego boosts that come from mastery can make you become too comfortable to give it up and try something new. So even though the mystery is gone and you don’t have the same fire for the former challenge as you once did, it’s become an easily accessible source of instant validation and ego boost, and that’s hard to give up. That’s why people get comfortable in jobs that don’t challenge them. They may crave a challenge and may no longer love and respect the area they mastered, but the thought of risking the comfort and security they have to chase another challenge that they might fail at scares them into staying where they are.

I think this is probably what made Michael Jordan come back to basketball eventually. He mastered the game. He mastered the money aspect of the NBA. He beat all his competitors and easily outshone them. He mastered winning championships and All-Star Games. He was probably bored stiff and wanted that rush of conquering something else, of mastering another mystery. But when his new challenge wasn’t going the way he planned, he went back to the safe bet: basketball.

The Mystery/Mastery Love Paradox applies to human relationships too. When someone we date is new and mysterious to us, we have dopamine and a bunch of other hormones flooding our brains, the attraction is peak, we’re trying to unravel who the other person is; they are mysterious, new and exciting to us and we’re turned on like crazy. When someone or something is mysterious to us, it allows us to fill in the blanks by projecting our fantasies and desires onto them. Our grasp on them is tenuous and we fear that we may lose them at any moment if we do anything wrong. They’re too new to take for granted. Yet the more intimately we get to know them, the more the mystery wears off and those former blanks that we filled with wild, exciting fantasies get replaced by mundane, disappointing realities, and eventually people get taken for granted. Some people look for new mysteries to unravel and master, while some are happier with the comfort and security of their current situation, even if the mystery is now gone.

I was telling a friend about this theory to get some feedback on it, and he asked a good question: “I see what you’re saying and there’s some truth to it. But at the end of the day, is it a good thing or a bad thing?” Strangely enough, that question actually never crossed my mind. I never considered if it was a good or bad thing, and I’m not even sure I entirely care. It’s just human nature. It just is what it is, and it’s up to us to deal with it.

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