What Shapes And Controls Experience
In an essay titled “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin traces this hatred back to being forced to read the supposedly great writer in grade school. “I was a victim,” Baldwin writes, “of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare.” Many years later, he gave Shakespeare another chance, and in plays like Julius Caesar and Hamlet, he would find line after line that gave him language to better understand things about himself—experiences, impressions, certain patterns of thinking and behaving. “Both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw,” Baldwin writes. “And what I began to see is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience.”
Language shaping and controlling experience—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Other Half of You
Often, in conversation, I privately notice that what I’m saying is word-for-word or the gist of something I once read, watched, or heard. Wow, I’ll sometimes think, if not for reading that book or watching that movie or listening to that interview, this conversation could not be happening as it is. Which then always makes me think of something Emerson wrote: “all of us stand in need of expression.” We consume art—books, movies, songs, shows, et cetera—“to come into possession” of “adequate expression…for man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.”
This Story Is A Choice
In the late 70s, Seth Godin was miserable. “I had a narrative in my head,” he said, “that things weren’t working and every time something didn’t work, I would go, ‘ah, see, there it goes again.’” The world had it out for him. At least, that’s what the voice in his head kept telling him. Around this time, he drove from Boston to North Carolina to visit his sister. He did a ride-share, and the person that rode with him was depressed. For some eleven hours, the two unhappy copilots talked. When they finally made it to North Carolina, Seth was exhausted—mentally, physically, emotionally. His sister got him settled in then left him to go hang out with her friends. Seth went for a walk around Duke, where his sister was a student. In the middle of campus, there was a used book sale. There, for $2, he bought The Book of EST. “On every single page of this book,” he said, “without a doubt, there is nonsense. The theories—nonsense. The approaches—manipulative. I am not standing behind 96% of the things that are in this book.” The other 4%—they changed Seth’s life. Indeed, he considers The Book of Est the first of his three all-time most formative books. “I am not exaggerating—my life changed that day.” He said the book did the only thing a good ‘self-help’ book can do: it opened the door. It didn’t fix him. It turned on the lights. It showed him how to fix himself. It made him realize, “You know what, your problem isn’t the outside world. Your problem is the story you’re telling yourself about the outside world. And that story is a choice. If you’re not happy with the story, tell yourself another story. Period. It’s that simple.”
In The Way You Craft Your Narrative…
In “Becoming Michael Lewis,” Walter Isaacson wrote, “Michael is one of the happiest people I know.” Lewis was later asked about that claim—is it nature or nurture? A little bit of both, Lewis said. He first realized that he’s a naturally happy person in middle school. He was sent to the headmaster’s office for insulting his English teacher, and the headmaster began: “you’re one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.” “I liked that self-definition,” Lewis said, “so I sought to preserve it.” Then in his mid-twenties, Lewis began to notice the effect the stories we tell ourselves have on ourselves. “If you listen to people, if you just sit around and listen, you’ll find there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves.” Some people are always the victim. Some people are always getting unlucky. Some people are always in the middle of some impossible project. Some people are always having the worst day. Some people are always dealing with some annoying idiot. Some people are always having to do things that are a pointless, inconvenient, boring waste of time. “There are lots of versions of this,” Lewis said, “and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become your reality. You are—in the way you craft your narrative—crafting your character.” And so, Lewis says, “I did at some point decide: I am going to consciously adopt as my narrative that I’m the happiest person that anybody knows. And it’s amazing how happy-inducing it is.”
A World Of Many Opinions
The Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger has a son, Johnny, who was born with athetoid cerebral palsy. Johnny struggled to talk, dress himself, hold a fork, or use a spoon. The first doctor Eger took him to told her that Johnny might not make it to high school, and that he definitely needed to be in a school for special needs children. Suspecting that this doctor’s unique experiences were shaping his grim, definitive diagnosis, and that other doctors might see and say things differently, Eger said, “I asked, ‘Where do I get a second opinion?’” She flew to Baltimore, where at Johns Hopkins she met a neurologist named Dr. Clark. Johnny stayed with him for a week, and after that week, Eger writes in The Choice: Embrace the Possible: Dr. Clark told her, “Your son will be whatever you make of him. John’s going to do everything everyone else does, but it’s going to take him longer to get there. You can push him too hard, and that will backfire, but it will also be a mistake not to push him hard enough. You need to push him to the level of his potential.” Eger dropped out of graduate school and devoted herself to getting Johnny the care he needed—everyday, she took him to speech therapy, occupational therapy, and every specialist she could find that might help in some way. By the age of 10, Johnny was physically and academically stable. In 1978, he graduated from the University of Texas, top ten in his class. “This is a country of second opinions,” Eger said. This is a world where, if you don’t like the language of the first story you hear, you can seek out others.
The Power Broker In Your Life
In his work with hundreds of world-class performers, the performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr spent many years listening to the stories people tell themselves. He would even have athletes wear microphones and articulate out loud everything that they said to themselves during competition. “And I began to realize that what really matters, in a really significant way, is the tone and the content of the voice in your head,” he said. “The power broker in your life is the voice that no one ever hears. How well you revisit the tone and content of that voice in your head is what determines the quality of your life. It is the master storyteller, and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality.”