A Reign Of Error
On a Wednesday in 1932, a rumor spread that Last National Bank was failing. It wasn’t true—Last National was thriving. But the false rumor triggered a panic: thousands rushed to withdraw their money. Word of the anxious crowd spread, and thousands more frantically lined up to pull their funds too. The withdrawals drained the bank’s resources, and by Thursday, Last National collapsed. Writing a few decades after the Great Depression, the sociologist Robert Merton invented the Last National Bank story—a fictional composite of the many real-life panic-driven bank failures of the era—to illustrate what he famously called a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” A self-fulfilling prophecy, he wrote, is a situation where “a false definition, in the beginning…evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” The anxious depositors began with a false belief in the bank’s failure, evoking actions and behaviors, which made the bank fail. “This specious [“superficially plausible, but actually wrong”] validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy,” Merton writes, “perpetuates a reign of error,” for the prophet will overlook “the actual course of events,” and mistakenly say “that he was right from the very beginning.”
The specious validity of attributing a final outcome not to a course of actions and behaviors, but to an initial belief, assumption, or conception—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Good And Bad Air
Quincy Jones once said about why he liked being around his friend Ray Charles: “It was just good air.” I’m thinking of someone (nope, not telling) who is just bad air. As far as I can tell, this bad-air person’s base assumption is that the world is fundamentally a negative place. Before doing anything or going anywhere, their initial conception is always somehow negative—everyone’s going to be an annoying idiot, everything’s going to be a pointless inconvenience, everywhere’s going to be a boring waste of time. And these initial negative expectations evoke actions and behaviors which confirm them, perpetuating a reign of bad air. Convinced a task sounds miserable, they drag, grumble, and curse their way through it—until the task is, in fact, miserable. Expecting a meeting to be a bad use of their time, they don’t prepare, barely listen, and contribute nothing—ensuring it to be a bad use of their time. Certain they won’t enjoy the event, they show up late, keep to themselves, and leave early—having not enjoyed the event. All the while, the bad-air prophet never seems to notice that “their consequent behaviors,” as Merton puts it, is the only common denominator of “the consequences of those behaviors.”
This Is A Country Of Second 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 saw told her Johnny might not make it to high school and should be placed in a special needs school. Refusing to let one doctor’s prophecy create the conditions for its fulfillment, 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. Through this course of action, 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. A world of second prophecies, where a different opinion, in the beginning, can evoke a different course of events, unfolding toward a different outcome.
Where Most People Run Out Of Luck
On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes. “I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen writes, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.” “I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing, so I’ve got nothing to lose…If nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’” Because he shaped the conversation in that way, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked into the audition feeling confident. He performed his song, It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen signed a ten-album deal and would go on to record with Hammond and Columbia Records for the next fifty years. But of course, it wasn’t a moment of mental jiu-jitsu that led to Springsteen’s success. It was the course of actions—that he’d been playing and studying guitar obsessively since he was a kid, slowing down records to learn every note from the greats, spending hours watching bar-band guitarists up close, honing his sound in near-empty clubs—leading up to the moment of mental jiu-jitsu. “It’s like anything else: you have to take your mind where you want your ass to follow,” he said. “You’ve got to imagine the person you want to be before you can be them. But then you need to acquire the skills to actually become that person. Now, that’s where most people run out of luck: they don’t do the work to acquire the skills…I’d studied, honed, worked and sweated to acquire a set of skills that when put into action made me the person I wanted to be.”
That Down And Discouraged Mindset Will Win
After being fired from the pilot of Frasier, Lisa Kudrow was at a low point in her career. The role was supposed to be Kudrow’s big break, but instead, it was a setback that left her questioning her future in acting. For a while, approaching auditions with a shaken sense of her abilities, she struggled to get work. Then, she was offered a small, nameless role as a waitress on Mad About You. It was a minor part with no lines, and her agents advised her to pass on it, considering it beneath her and unlikely to advance her career. “I’m not in a position to say no,” Kudrow told her agents, so she accepted the part. By the end of the week, Mad About You producer Danny Jacobson was so impressed with her performance that he offered a recurring role as a quirky waitress named Ursula Buffay. The part would eventually lead to her iconic portrayal of Phoebe Buffay on Friends, as the character of Ursula was carried over into the Friends universe as Phoebe’s twin sister. Looking back on the challenging period that eventually led to her breakout roles, Kudrow said, “It’s okay to be discouraged. But then you’ve got to pull yourself back up. You can’t stay down. That can’t be your mindset for too long, or otherwise, it won’t work out. That down and discouraged mindset will win.” It will evoke actions and behaviors—self-sabotage, second-guessing, bracing for rejection, saying no to things—that perpetuates a reign of things not working out.
Be Very Careful About The Way You Craft Your Narrative
“Notice,” Michael Lewis suggests, “the effect the stories people tell about themselves have on their lives. 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 in the stories they tell. Some people are always the person in the middle of some impossible project. 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 says, “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.” You are—in the way you craft your initial beliefs, assumptions, or conceptions—crafting the consequent actions and behaviors that craft the consequences of those actions and behaviors.