In other instances, drawing attention to wins rather than losses provides an inaccurate understanding of where we really stand, and discourages continued progress. There are times when we can find strength and purpose in knowing not just when we have succeeded but also when we’ve come up short. Materializing our progress, by tracking our choices and noting both our triumphs and our tribulations, fosters an honesty with ourselves that our psychological immune system might otherwise have killed off, and that can propel us forward toward our goals. Materializing can make us accountable for our missteps, but it also provides a forum for celebrating our victories perhaps more than we would otherwise. When we make a concrete and clear visual image of where we would like to be in the future, and couple this with a concrete plan of action, we set a goal in a responsible way. We can track our progress toward a definitive end with a clarity that we usually lack. Materializing rids us of biased memories that may lead us to believe we’ve made choices that better align with our goals than our actual choices do—as when my survey respondents honestly believed they had donated their time, talent, or treasury to a charity when they had not.
* * *
—
No one, at least no one I’ve met in my life, likes the symptoms that accompany the common cold. Sweating from a fever means more dirty laundry to clean. Drippy noses require repeat trips to the store to replenish the tissue supply. Coughs make you a challenging companion at the movies or the opera. We try to mask these symptoms with potions and lotions of all sorts. But all these physical ailments that we avoid when possible are markers of the recovery process.
In just the same way, our psychological immune system remedies the effects of choices or decisions that would otherwise make us feel bad. We have ways of overcoming the guilt of a caloric indulgence when dieting, or the stress of spending over our budget. But despite the discomfort of such negative reactions, if we allow ourselves to feel them they can have a motivating effect on our actions. Rather than trying to forget lapses in judgment we perhaps regret, remembering them can push us to do better in the future.
The wide bracket is a strategy that can help us do just that. Zooming out and capturing a broader swatch of our lived experience can better position us to find patterns in our behavior. When we see our choices for what they really are, rather than what we want them to be, we can piece together the puzzle of our lives in more optimal ways. We can find the triggers that consistently elicit the same choices, be they productive or disadvantageous. We can better see how our choices today affect tomorrow’s outcomes, which reduces the temptation to make a decision that benefits us in the moment but that we’ll regret later on.
Moreover, a wide bracket opens us up to the plentitude of options for how to get the job done. Knowing there are many rather than few paths that lead to a desired end offers a sense of possibility. It propels us off the starting block, but it also lessens the blow if and when the time comes for redirection and reinvention. A wide bracket offers a lens through which we can see other paths forward at points in time when having more options would be energizing.
* * *
—
When my song ended, I kept the lights dimmed and the disco ball spinning. I didn’t want to induce vertigo in my fans, but if they left feeling a little worse for the wear, I wanted them to attribute it to the ambience and not the headlining act.
Eventually, the crowd started to thin. I noticed that some of the CD cases were gone, for what reason I have no idea, since no one listens to music off discs anymore. Lou took a poster but left it in our house on his way out the door. Several T-shirts had been taken, perhaps thanks in part to the five-dollar bills I had clipped to the sleeves.
I was proud of myself and what I had accomplished. It took far longer than I’d thought it would. I waxed and waned in my interest. I felt despondent periodically—until the practice paid off and the sound of myself grew less painful. On occasion, the annoyance I felt for taking on this challenge bubbled up. I wanted to be cool, sure. But the self-induced stress I incurred by choosing to work a full-time job, raise a baby (who was by now a toddler with all the usual charms and challenges), learn to play drums, and write a book about it was overwhelming at times.
But I didn’t quit. I applied the tactics I’ve advised here to my own adventures in motivating myself, and found them effective. To be sure, what worked one day might have seemed less effective the next. There was no quick fix for the problems that stymied my progress, nor a simple one-shot solution. But that’s the reality of life. Often, the things that bring us the greatest joy require real work.
At the end of all this, I accomplished my goal. I’ve got an act in my back pocket now that I can pull out should I find myself backstage with any Outfield cover band about to perform just one particular song at the very moment they realize their drummer isn’t showing up. And next time I go hear Pete play with his band and someone in the crowd next to me realizes I’m his wife (probably because I’m wearing a shirt with his face on it—I made one of him, too) and asks what I do, I can now officially say I play drums too.
To Pete and Mattie, obviously
Acknowledgments
As I think about it now in hindsight, it’s perfectly clear to me, as the idiom implies, that there are many people who hold great responsibility for this book and for whom my gratitude overflows. My agent, Richard Pine, and his team at Inkwell Management, took my fledgling idea for a book and gave it wings, patiently seeing through those awkward adolescent years of its development until it flew the coop. Marnie Cochran curated my collection of anecdotes with an editorial style sharper than a Japanese chef’s knife and an emotional intelligence for how to deliver the feedback that tests at genius levels. She produced the voice I am glad to have found in this work. Thank you, also, to the team at Ballantine Books, particularly Lawrence Krauser, who made me sound clearer, brought the finish closer sooner, and made it all better than it would have been otherwise.
But before there was the way, there was the will. The nudge to write a book in the first place came from my friends. My colleague Adam Alter convinced me—in between his first and second books, when I presume he forgot what the stress of trying to meet publishing deadlines does to your sleep—that this journey would be fun. On most days he was right. He kindly shared his knowledge, experience, and support every time I blindly stumbled into the next phase of this project. Fellow social psychologist Liz Dunn still offers surfing lessons despite my ineptitude at the sport, and advice on how to maximize happiness in writing and elsewhere.
As a scientist, I was trained to discover the causes of individuals’ experienced lives. But despite the ace education I received, I chalk up so much of my own to sheer happenstance and luck in finding generous mentors. My PhD adviser, David Dunning, matched my excitement cheer for cheer when we together found the first evidence for the mind’s influence on visual experience. My undergraduate adviser, Rick Miller, showed me early that there are opportunities for creativity and intellectual freedom in our profession that I wouldn’t have known otherwise until much later. David Nabb, who chose Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew as the soundtrack to his children’s upbringing, taught me that music and parenting are more fun when done by breaking convention. My first PhD students and forever friends, Shana Cole and Yael Granot, were the yin to my yang as I cut my chops as a new professor. The 2016 TEDx New York team, including Thu-Huong Ha, Adam Kroopnick, and David Webber, were the first to help me find my public voice.