This makes sense in the context of what we just learned about visualization and motivation. Meeting a weight-loss goal can feel like a major achievement. And it is. But the goal is never really fully accomplished, because maintaining an ideal weight requires sustained effort. Preserving a healthy credit rating requires routine monitoring of bills and finances. Keeping a steady beat requires routine practice at the drums, which is why I sounded as unsteady as the snores coming from the guy just on the verge of falling asleep next to you on the plane: sporadic, and maddeningly so.
The three-step process of materializing can sustain progress, even after initial success. Researchers from the University of Zurich looked at weight gain on an ongoing, week-by-week basis. They found that dieters who met their mark one week felt like they had earned a treat or could, in a sense, ease off the pressure during the next week. And when they did that, they gained back the weight they had lost the week before.
Not everyone saw their progress slip away. Some dieters reported engaging in the three-step process of materializing. They took time to consider how they’d met their goal, what they’d overcome to lose the weight, and how they’d mastered those challenges. And those people generally kept the pounds off the week after they lost them.
Chocks Away
Before takeoff, British airmen during World War II would check that the compass and altimeter were set, flaps up, bomb door closed, oil pressure at the right level, intercom working, radio functioning, bombs unfused, windows clean, and all instruments functioning, among a few dozen other things. Anything missed could mean disaster. But when all checks were complete and everything was in order, a pilot could run the engines up and then signal to the ground crew “chocks away.” The crew would remove the blocks around the wheels before the pilot taxied to the runway.
Many of the goals we set require steps that are likely not a matter of life or death, as the procedures were for the wartime pilots before they set off. But they may still be just as important to our health, happiness, and well-being. Before we take off on our own adventures in goal pursuit, it’s clearly advantageous to run through our own checks to ensure we’ve set ourselves up for success.
Foreshadowing failure comes pretty naturally to me. When I’m working on big projects or planning something major in my life, I chronically think about the ways things could go wrong. I end up spending more time than I’d like to admit preparing for these worst-case scenarios. Applying this talent, if you could call it that, to figuring out what aspects of my practice regimen might complicate my progress was easy. My work responsibilities would surely curtail my practice time. Mattie’s need for naps—some of the only “me time” I could count on—meant that I would not be able to practice when my hands were, literally, free. Nearby neighbors on the other side of thin walls were—at best—uninterested in monitoring my progress.
Simultaneous with my issues of finding the time and soundproof space to practice, Pete and I were also trying to troubleshoot a few other predicaments. All of our ears needed a break from the construction noise and sirens in Manhattan, and we wanted Mattie to be able to sniff the flowers without meeting one of New York City’s resident rats eye-to-eye. They seemed to be just as frequent visitors to our nearest playground as were we. In addition, on one previous visit out to the country, we had talked to Mattie about what farmers can plant in a garden. “Cheese,” he emphatically insisted, time and time again upon inquiry, which only reconfirmed our belief that all of us needed to get back to the land.
The solution we conjured killed all these proverbial birds with one rural stone. We had access to a family home in Connecticut, and so we doubled down on our regular sojourns. We jumped on a train out of New York on Friday evenings and came back to the city Sunday nights. On each whirlwind visit to the country, we spent time finding cows on the nearby farms, and trying to explain the origin of milk and its creative potential. And for a couple of hours over the course of each weekend, while Pete had Mattie out and about, I was able to get in a practice session or two without neighbors banging on the walls for silence.
To the best of my ability, I had materialized the goal I was aspiring to achieve. The invitations in the mail and now taped to my fridge door were a pestering reminder of the goal I had set. And I had concretely mapped out my route for getting there. I had considered the obstacles that could come my way—chief among them the problem of finding time and space to practice—and designed a plan for circumventing them. Chocks away!
Becoming Your Own Accountant
One night, Pete put a surprise date on the calendar for us. For such evenings, he usually gave me a time to show up, a location to meet at, and the type of shoes to wear. That night, it was the Blue Note jazz club around the corner from our apartment, to hear McCoy Tyner with his combo. It was one of the first times we left Mattie with a babysitter he didn’t know. The taste of freedom for those few hours was delicious. The club was packed, but we still got a table right behind the grand piano with a perfect view of Tyner’s hands as they filled the club with those complex and luscious chords. But as legendary as those sounds were, it was the drummer who caught our ear that night.
Francisco Mela was behind the kit. He was forty-nine years old, and with his fedora cocked just off to the side of his head, he looked like the baby of the group. But his appearance was irrelevant just as soon as he laid down the beat. His drive electrified the room. His hands moved so fast that all we could see were blurred sticks and the shimmer of quivering cymbals. His energy was addictive. This drummer knew what to do.
After the set, Pete and I found Mela backstage. That’s not hard to do. “Backstage” is really just a space off the restrooms for club patrons. I asked what had kept him interested in practicing when he was just getting started. He told me, “Ah yes, yes. To leave Cuba. Only the best got out. I had to be the best. I had to.”
Mela was born in Bayamo. And a quick look at history would tell you that growing up there at that time was rough. In Cuba, the ration book for 1968, the year of his birth, for example, allowed each person to buy two shirts and two pairs of shoes a year, three pounds of rice and twenty cans of evaporated milk a month, three-quarters of a pound of meat and three ounces of coffee a week, and a liter of fresh milk a day for each child. Chicken was scarce on the island. The wait, if you wanted to buy new tires for your car, had been as long as a year, and spare parts were available only through the black market.
The embargoes led by the United States hit musicians hard too. As a form of retaliation, Castro seized control of Cuban recording studios that were owned by American companies. RCA, for one, then refused to pay Cuban musicians for their performances, or to turn over the royalties they deserved for their published work. Musicians who defected from the country were dubbed gusanos (worms), and the Castro government banned their music or any rising musician’s formal study of it. This was the Cuba that Francisco Mela grew up in.