The Burden Of Passively-Chosen Thoughts
After hearing someone say that most people think many of the same thoughts day after day, the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan said, “I’ve been trying to change some of the thoughts that I think moment to moment. And I’ve realized that the group of thoughts that have become who I think I am—most of those had been passively chosen. You know, ‘this is what you think when you’re stuck in traffic, this is what you think when you find out someone stole money from you, this is what you think when someone beautiful stands in front of you’—those thoughts. You can choose to think new thoughts. You can. You have to be aware because autopilot happens instantaneously…And so I’ve been trying—for the last six weeks or so—to concentrate on my thoughts.” And those six weeks, he said, have “been a wonderful respite from this burden of passive thoughts.”
The burden of passively-chosen thoughts, behaviors, and voices—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The One Who Saw Beautifully
When he was in art school, the great early 20th-century painter Robert Henri overheard a teacher describe another student as “one who saw color beautifully.” “I was very much impressed by this,” Henri writes. Because he had never before thought about the fact that we are “agents of construction” in the act of seeing, that we each see things differently, “that there is no one way of seeing a thing no matter how simple that thing may be. Its planes, values, colors, all its characteristics are, as it were, constructed by each new-comer in different ways at different times.” Given our different backgrounds, interests, experiences, preferences, and points of reference, Henri points out, the exact same thing is in front of you not exactly as it is in front of me. And so it goes with those thoughts: when we are in traffic or in front of someone who stole from us or someone beautiful or someone we admire or feel inferior to, we construct different thoughts to think. And we can choose to construct new thoughts to think.
This Candidate Does Not Know Why This Candidate Bowed, sir
While a student at Stanford, Yul Kwon got a random invitation in the mail to join the Marine Corps. He decided to enlist, and throughout the opening weeks of boot camp, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the other recruits were treating him like an inferior. Maybe, Yul thought, they resented that he was going to a prestigious college, while most of them had only finished high school. Maybe it was because he was one of the only Asian-Americans. Or maybe they just assumed he lacked discipline and wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t sure—until, Yul said, “there was this one incident that actually helped me figure it out.” One night while on sentry duty—standing guard as part of a rotating security post—the base commander walked by. When a superior walks by, you’re supposed to stand tall, stick out your chest, and salute. But a little tired, stressed, and intimidated, Yul bowed. The commander stopped, squared up to him, and said, “Candidate, did you just bow to me?” Yul admitted he had. The commander shouted, “Why the hell did you do that?” Yul admitted, “This candidate does not know why this candidate bowed, sir.” The commander ordered Yul to drop down and do 100 pushups. “So I’m doing these pushups,” Yul said, “I’m yelling, ‘one, two, three,’ but in my head, I’m thinking, ‘What just happened? No one here ever taught me to bow to a superior officer.’” Around pushup number 40, he said, “This light bulb goes off in my head: I was raised in a very different environment. I grew up in a very traditional Asian family, and in Korean culture, if you’re talking to a superior—your father, for example—the proper posture is one of deference: you lower your head, you bow your shoulders, you speak in a very soft voice. What I realized was that I’d been raised with this set of cultural norms all of my life, and under conditions of stress or discomfort, I automatically resorted to those instinctual behaviors.” Then another light bulb went off: it wasn’t his education, ethnicity, or apparent lack of discipline that made it seem like the other recruits were treating him differently. In fact, it wasn’t even that they were treating him differently—it was that he was behaving differently. He was carrying a posture of deference in an environment that demanded he be assertive, firm, confident, decisive, direct. “So I realized,” Yul said, “‘Hey, you know what? I have to change my behavior. I have to learn the right mode of interacting here. I have to overcome these natural instincts that I have.’” From that point on, “I started being assertive, mimicked the behaviors of the people around me, and learned to project myself. I started becoming more aware of the way that people perceive me, and of the mannerisms that would often cause people to jump to conclusions about who I was and what kind of person I was. And that itself was such a valuable insight, because it made me learn how to change and adapt myself to be successful across different environments.” Yul would go on to, so far, earn a law degree from Yale, teach courses at the FBI’s training center, host television shows on PBS and CNN, start a frozen yogurt chain, hold high-level jobs at Facebook and Google, and even win Season 13 of the TV show Survivor. (File next to: The ability to adapt to the conditions of your present circumstances)
I’ve Internalized The Rant Until It Doesn’t Just Feel Like My Own, It is My Own
When Andre Agassi was 6, his father bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Las Vegas. That’s where he could afford a house on enough land to build a backyard tennis court. He installed a machine that could fire a tennis ball 110 miles an hour. Andre named it “the dragon,” and every day, he had to hit 2,500 tennis balls back to the dragon. Mr. Agassi would yell at his son, “Hit earlier!” “Hit harder!” “Faster!” “Now backhands. Work your backhand!” “No lazy drop shots!” “No unforced errors!” “Not into the net! Never hit the ball into the net! The net is your biggest enemy!” By the age of 7, Andre was appearing on national television being called a prodigy. By 8, he was winning tournaments around the United States. When he was 9, he lost a match for the first time. He’d never forget it, not because he lost, but because for the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid of his father. “No matter how angry he is with me,” Agassi writes, “I’m angrier. I’m furious.” He was furious with his performance: He was late on shots. His backhand was awful. He hit a bunch of lazy drop shots. He made tons of unforced errors. And he hit the ball into the net twice. “After years of hearing my father rant,” he wrote, “[I’ve] taken up his rant. I’ve internalized my father until his voice doesn’t just feel like my own, it is my own. I no longer need my father to torture me. From this day on, I can do it all by myself.” At 13, he was sent to an elite tennis academy. He dropped out at 16, turned pro, and by 18, he was the number three ranked tennis player in the world. And he hated every second of it. “Hated it with all my heart,” Andre writes. “Hated it with a dark and secret passion.” He hated that his militant father forced him to play. He hated the feeling of being caged-in on a court. And he hated the mostly angry, mean, hyper-critical thoughts he’d think while playing. At a low point—still without a title in the major tournaments he was once expected to dominate, tumbling in the rankings, and turning to drugs and alcohol as an escape—Agassi’s brother suggested he go see an unconventional pastor at a nondenominational church, “or a kind of church, in an office complex on the west side of Vegas,” not far from their home. “He drags me to the church,” Agassi writes, “and I have to admit, he’s right, the pastor, John Parenti, is different. He wears jeans, a T-Shirt, and he has long, sandy-brown hair…Parenti is so casual, he doesn’t want to be called Pastor Parenti. He insists we call him J.P.” Agassi starts attending J.P.’s service every week. One night, driving around Vegas to clear his head after another tournament loss, he ends up at the church. It’s late, but a light is on. Through the window, he sees a woman doing paperwork. He knocks, says he needs to speak with J.P., and she dials J.P. before handing Agassi the phone. After a brief exchange, Agassi drives to pick up J.P., and the two spend a few hours driving all over Vegas. “I tell him my story,” Agassi writes. “What makes it perverse, I tell him, is that it all revolves around tennis, and I hate tennis.” He tells J.P. about the angry, mean, hyper-critical thoughts—“the yelling, the pressure, the rage.” “You do realize, don’t you,” J.P. says to Agassi, “that voice you hear all the time, that angry voice?…That’s still your father.” Agassi writes, “I turn to him: Do me a favor? Say that again. He does. Word for word. Say it once more. He does. I thank him.” Agassi started trying to unburden himself from the passively-chosen thoughts that had been torturing him for much of his life. He asked J.P. to start traveling with him to tournaments. He moved out of his parents house. He hired a new coach, Brad Gilbert, a former pro who, despite limited natural ability, had a great career because “he understands the mental part of tennis better than anyone I have ever met,” as Agassi would later say. But, trying to rewire a lifetime of passively-chosen thoughts isn’t easy. As Agassi worked to habituate new thoughts, he went on an “epic losing streak” and slid out of the world rankings entirely. At the 1994 U.S. Open, for the first time in his pro career, Agassi was unseeded. He reached the final, where he faced Michael Stich, recent Wimbledon Champion and the fourth-ranked player in the world. Throughout the final, Agassi writes that he could hear voices similar to those of J.P. and Brad, “but now it’s coming from inside, not outside. I’ve internalized it, the way I once did my father’s voice.” After Agassi beat Stich in straight sets, “I fall to my knees. My eyes fill with tears.” The first unseeded player in 28 years to win the U.S. Open, Agassi would go on to win the Australian Open, and after winning back-to-back Grand Slams, he claimed the No. 1 ranking in the world.
Oh, I Completely Forgot To Be In A Panic Attack
Usually, Judd Apatow dreads going to the Oscars. “Usually I’m really nervous,” he said. “I get a lot of anxiety because it’s so many people and I’m awkward in conversations and I’m very bad with names. So it’s a night full of worrying, ‘do I tell them that I don’t know who they are?’ And I’m also afraid that I’m going to drink a little too much, be a little obnoxious, or try a little too hard to be funny and then feel stupid the next day. And so the whole night is scary for me.” A few weeks before the 2023 Oscars, Judd was watching an interview where one person suggested that they close their eyes for a few seconds and set the intention to be fully present for the duration of the conversation. “I’m going to try that before the Oscars,” Judd thought. Before the Oscars, he set the intention “to think, ‘I’m so lucky I get to talk to these people and that there’s a night where they’re all together.’ Instead of making it all about me and whether or not people are going to like me or think I’m funny, I made it about my appreciation for them and what they do.” Actively choosing a new group of thoughts, he said, “actually worked. It really worked. It really affected me the whole night. As the night was almost ending, I thought, ‘Oh, I completely forgot to be in a panic attack tonight.’ It was the least anxious I’ve been at an event like that.”
Every Free—As Opposed To Rote—Human Response
In her 1964 essay on the way of thinking and seeing “that goes by the cult name of ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag wrote, “These are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions…They allow that taste plays a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.” There is taste in what you think when you’re stuck in traffic, what you think when you find out someone stole money from you, what you think when someone beautiful stands in front of you, what you think when the other recruits seem to be treating you differently, what you think when you lose a tennis match, what you think when you go to the Oscars, what you think when you think about thinking new thoughts. Nothing is more decisive.