This matters because, in many cases, our mental states have a bigger impact than our physical ones on our ability to persevere past obstacles. We don’t realize it, but when we assess our own stamina and take stock of our strength and pep, our judgments affect our performance even more than the actual energy our bodies have available to do the job. If we think we’ve worked hard and believe we have drained our mental energies, we aren’t as effective later on. That’s regardless of whether we’re actually beat or well rested.
To evaluate the importance of self-assessments relative to the physical states of our bodies, students from Indiana University agreed to do some pretty boring but depleting things. Everyone started the study by crossing out every letter e that appeared in a page of text. Boring, I agree, but simple enough to do, which is why it didn’t take too much out of individuals who were asked to cross out e’s on the next page as the second part of the study. However, it was precisely because of how easy the task was that when the rules changed for another group of participants, it took a lot more out of them than it had the first time around. This group, for their second task, was also told to cross out every e in the text—except when another vowel followed the e in the same word (as in “read”) or when a vowel was one letter removed from the e in either direction (as in “vowel”). It’s tiring just trying to figure out what these new rules were.
The experimenters didn’t leave it at that, though. They made up false claims about the effects of colored paper on human energy levels. They told participants that the source of their physical state might originate from the color of paper in front of them. Regardless of whether they did the easy or the taxing assignment, half were told that yellow paper exhausts people’s attention and ability to think carefully. The others were told that yellow paper energizes, replenishes attention, and encourages careful thought. Then the researchers measured everyone’s concentration and perseverance in a final test of analytical thinking.
Though they were just a ruse, the claims about the impact of paper color had real power. The people who were told that the yellow paper contributed to exhaustion gave up faster and made more mistakes when trying to solve anagrams. They were much slower to recognize that a pattern they were searching for had appeared. And they were unable to distinguish between poorly written and well-supported arguments they read later on.
It didn’t matter whether they had just completed something challenging or finished a pretty easy job; their belief about whether they had more or no more to give affected how well they performed on the next activity. Personal assessments of the availability of mental resources, independent of the actual energy they had, impacted their performance. Interestingly, they weren’t less motivated. The goal was still important to them, even when they felt like they had just exerted a great deal of effort (even if they hadn’t really), but their ability to succeed at the goal was impaired. Their mental state mattered more than their physical one.
So, when we think about taking on some of our biggest challenges and approaching them using strategies that we think will help but that really require a lot of effort, we’re likely to fail. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s not that we aren’t trying hard enough. We’re using the wrong tools for the job.
Searching for a Strategy
In my middle-of-the-night search for techniques that would better assist me with meeting tough challenges, I found the backstory of Dale Chihuly, an American glassblower and sculpture revolutionary. His brilliantly ribbed figures of shells and braided bulbous grasses defy the laws of balance. His Rotunda Chandelier hangs in the lobby of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. President Bill Clinton presented Chihuly’s work to Queen Elizabeth II and French president François Mitterrand. Robin Williams bought his work. Elton John, Mick Jagger, and Bill Gates did too. More than twelve million visitors have seen his art in ninety-seven exhibitions in seven countries over the past decade alone. His popularity has grown every year since 1976, when contemporary art curator Henry Geldzahler first acquired three Chihuly glass baskets for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That’s the same year that Chihuly flew through a windshield in a head-on car accident on a rainy night in England. Glass ravaged his face with gashes that required 256 stiches to repair. It blinded his left eye, leaving him unable to perceive visual depth. Three years later, he dislocated his right shoulder in a bodysurfing accident. After that, he couldn’t hold the weight of the blowpipe when it became piled with molten glass.
But these shattering experiences marked the start of his sharp change in direction. Chihuly had to redesign his approach to art and adapt his technique to accommodate his ability to see with only one eye. As he explained, “I think it’s probably made me see things differently.” Precisely. His artistic acclaim and entrepreneurial success came only after he took a step back and saw his work from a different perspective.
And that’s what needs to happen with our goals. We need to find a new way to approach them. We need a different tack when trying to meet them. We need to see our approach differently.
I started with no plan or manifest for the course of my musical journey. But I headed off, nonetheless, first to uncover the capacities and liabilities of my mind, my will, and my resolve. I took Chihuly’s comment perhaps more literally than he intended it, and focused on my eyes. I wanted to see a new way to success.
Finding the Right Kind of Challenge
If I was really going to become a drummer, I had to pick my first song. I asked Pete for help. He’s actually been playing drums for forty years on the same set he built up by saving money from the corner-store job he had as a teenager. Tunes he spent months mastering in high school came back to him decades later after working through them only a few times. When we stopped by a musical instrument showroom on a trip to visit my sister up in Canada, Pete sat down at a floor model and cranked out some of Neil Peart’s lines in “La Villa Strangiato,” which brought a ruddy-faced salesman running over in awe. Pete’s good. Really good. So asking him to help me get started seemed like a natural choice.
He suggested I take a week to choose what I wanted to learn. He advised listening to it on a loop in order to nail down what I heard in the drum part (rather than just practicing singing the lyrics like I was readying myself to jump in as a backup singer—a position I’d be equally unlikely to rock). I’d been bingeing on U2 lately and chose “Bullet the Blue Sky” off the Joshua Tree album. Seemed pretty repetitive. Kind of like Ravel’s “Boléro.” I put that tune on repeat and let it sink in. After a week, I reported back that I was ready. Not a good choice, he advised. Surprised, I asked why. He said the beauty of that song is how complex it actually is, and the sheer number of subskills a drummer has to master and coordinate. Specifically, sticking the sixteenth-note snare drum pickup into the fourth beat requires you to move off the hi-hat, whack the snare, and get back on the hi-hat fast. Even harder, you have a fourth of a beat to get your left stick off the snare and up to the hi-hat; and another fourth of a beat to slide back down to the snare. And you do it over and over and over again. Sticking it each time. That makes it tough. Way, way too tough for a first-time performer. He wasn’t wrong.