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Posts Tagged ‘Dale Carnegie’

Positive Thinkers and I

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Dale Carnegie, hypocrisy, life coaches, motivational speakers, Norman Vincent Peale, optimism, Personal, positive thinking, The Secret, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2011| 4 Comments »

In print, I can rant with the best of them. In person, though, I am usually a broadly tolerant fellow to the point of mildness. My friends range from a Catholic cleric through various ministers to agnostics, and from neo-conservatives to anarchists and Marxist Leninists. My taste in books, music, movies, food, and art covers almost every genre you have heard about (and probably a few that you haven’t). When someone expresses an enthusiasm for the mediocre, I am polite and, if cornered into giving an opinion, I am diplomatic in my expression.

But there is one thing that leaves me feeling like my teeth have slid off tin-foil: the airhead optimism and superficiality of those who believe that all that anyone needs to achieve their goals is to think positively – the attitude, in short, that is peddled by pop-psychologists, psychics, and life coaches, borrowed from people like Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, and promulgated in bits of New Age philosophy such as The Secret.

Why does this feel-good optimism annoy me so much? At first, you might expect it wouldn’t, because I’m a biological optimist, so wired to be upbeat that even trauma can’t keep me down for long. It probably doesn’t hurt, either, that daily heavy exercise keeps me pumped up with adrenalin and endorphins.

However, it is a sign of just how deeply such things irritate me that they can make me react so much against my natural inclinations.

I suppose that part of what irritates me is the methodology, which often seems to revolve around slogans and aphorisms intended to inspire you and reinforce the right attitudes. Being practical, I prefer to receive useful information rather than inspiration, and, as a lifelong student of Orwell, I am immediately suspicious at what looks like the techniques of mind-control – even if it is mind-control done with consent, or even self-inflicted.

But what irritates me most about the slogans is that, when they are based on quotes, they are frequently used out of context or inappropriately.

For instance, when Einstein said that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, he was not expressing a belief in a personal deity who influenced events, but a conviction that there was some principle beyond indeterminacy in subatomic theory – and, so far as we know today, he was wrong.

Similarly, when someone notes that Noah’s ark was built by an amateur and The Titanic by professionals, I can’t help thinking that as a carpenter Noah was a professional, too, and that The Titanic was sunk due to bad luck, not negligence on the part of the builders. I won’t even go into the fact that being mythical limits Noah’s usefulness as role model. But the point is that if you are going to quote or allude when an English major like me is around, you better do so appropriately.

Another reason I dislike this cant is that it is annoyingly over-simple. Yes, having a positive attitude can sometimes help you – but not always. Being cheerful and upbeat is not going to save you from your internal organs failing one day. If you get mugged, you are not going to hurt any less because you are optimistic.

It always seems to me that the positive speakers have either never had any serious trauma in their lives, or else have repressed the memory of any events that were painful or beyond their control. Furthermore, such an attitude is only possible if you are a middle-class member of a modern industrial society who has led a relatively uneventful life. It is the attitude of prolonged adolescence, not of experience, and requires more denial than I can muster or ever hope to maintain. Often, it seems dangerously close to solipsism. At best, it preaches a demonstrably false view of the world that can only leave believers less able to cope.

But the strongest reason why I despise this empty optimism is the hypocrisy behind it. Those who preach it cannot possibly feel it all the time, and there must be occasions when they long for a good mope. But melancholy or depression does not fit with the public image that they have worked so hard to establish, so they must falsify their feeling at least part of the time. Nor, having invested so much in their brand of optimism, can they honestly discuss it. Faced with such doubts, they can only be even more enthusiastically upbeat than before.

The result is that I can rarely relax among the positive thinkers, because it is impossible to be sure when they are genuine or when they are not. When they agree with me, do I really have a meeting of minds, or are they just being positive? I can never be sure.

Too often, everything they do seems exaggerated and false. Their smiles are too broad and last a little too long, and their enthusiasm always seems greater than the situation would justify. If they have any genuine reaction, it is well-hidden.

The uncertainty is greatest when I try to decide whether I have made a genuine connection or not. When they proclaim that they love everyone five minutes after meeting them, and applaude every suggestion as “fabulous,” what vocabulary is left for true enthusiasm? In one case, I thought for years that one of these airhead optimists thought of me as a special friend, only to find that they were simply being insincere.

Long ago, I learned that the people you can actually trust for help are not necessarily those with the strongest protests of friendship and understanding. In fact, one or two of the most supportive people I have known would be dismissed as uncaring and shallow rednecks if you judged them by their casual conversation. By contrast, I have known several positive thinkers whose actions never matched their words in a crisis.

With all this against the positive thinkers, no wonder that I sometimes feel like Don Marquis’ archy, the poet turned cockroach faced with the cheerful cricket – I want to tell them to groan just once before I throw a brick.

Of course, I never do, but the impulse is there. Usually, I simply leave them to their fantasy and walk away as quickly as possible, shaking my head, not at the power of positive thinking, but at the power of self-delusion.

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Motivational speakers and I

Posted in Bruce Byfield, closed belief, Dale Carnegie, debunking, half-truths, motivational industry, motivational speakers, Norman Vincent Peale, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I don’t believe in motivational speakers – those who claim that they can help you find love, or make you happier, healthier, or richer if only you take control of your life and pay them. But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by them. The motivational industry is such a hodge podge of airheaded optimism, pseudo-science, and half-truths that it reveals like nothing else the lengths to which people will go to find a shortcut to their goals.

At first, you might think that these New Age entrepreneurs have nothing in common. After all, they are all offer advice in different fields. Yet even when you look at them, the resemblance to each other is amazing.

Often, they even physically resemble each other. All too often, their clothes and the houses they are fond of filming themselves in have the bland taste of the aspiring middle class. The women among them have shoulder-length hair, often of that ash-blond color that you never see in nature, while the men sport mildly unruly surfer dude haircuts that suggest that they might have had an athletic past. Both sexes are tanned and seem to have had one face lift too many, leaving them with smiles that last a little too long, and show an alarming amount of gum. Both, too, have the unctuous manner of funeral directors – the types of postures and gestures that are never quite in sync with their body language.

Personally, their politeness always tempts me (purely in the interests of scientific research, I assure you), to see how long I can insult them until their facade collapses. I never do, but I am uncomfortable around most of them because they are so determined to project a Stepford Wife-like niceness that they are social hypocrites, and you can never be quite sure what they are thinking.

Yet even those who escape the physical stereotypes generally pitch a philosophy that resembles Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking or Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

This philosophy can be summarized as the belief that, if you feel good about yourself and project an air of confidence, you will succeed in whatever you are trying to do. To help you develop faith in yourself, the philosophy offers inspiring quotes (often ripped wildly out of context), and suggests that followers practice various forms of affirmation (repeated statements of their goals and general worthiness ranging from prayers and mantras to repeatedly speaking or writing declarations of it), The variations and the jargon are as endless as the speakers themselves, but the underlying similarity rarely changes; the perennial best-seller The Secret is a typical example of the belief system.

The trouble is, the only studies that suggest that any form affirmation leads to success either show a weak correlation or else are poorly designed, which makes their conclusions questionable. In fact, the result of teaching self-esteem in school for the last few decades are starting to seem like adults who expect to be rewarded simply for trying, and who become easily discouraged.

Such results fit well with my personal experience as a long-distance runner, when I found that being confident going into a race slid easily into over-confidence and losing. Pessimism and fear were actually more useful, because they encouraged me to think of tactics and stay alert.

When faced with contrary scientific evidence, motivational speakers and their disciples rarely respond by modifying their views. If anything, they are apt to ignore such results. If cornered, they are apt to launch into a condemnation of science and its narrow mindedness.

Yet, strangely, at the same time, the motivational industry is always eager to evoke science to create an air of respectability. Usually, however, their science is painfully outdated and simplistic, like the Myers-Briggs personality indicators. More often, it is not real science in the least, but pseudo-science – fringe beliefs like crystal healing that offer the appearance of science, down to the specialized terminology, but that lacks the rigor and testing procedures of true science.

Not that such limitations bother the speakers and their listeners – the appearance of science only needs to be superficial, since the point is to borrow the credibility of science, not to adopt its actual practices or criteria for truth. What the motivational industry is really concerned about is creating a closed belief system that can never be questioned or debunked, because no real standards apply.

I suspect that the reason that the motivational industry is structured this way is that the truth is very simple. Except in cases of glandular disorders and other medical conditions, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and find a balance between these two necessities that helps you to keep the weight off. Similarly, any real effort to teach people to successful would have to acknowledge that what is involved is acquiring skills, careful planning, and some luck – and that having money and connections doesn’t hurt, either.

But such answers are not very satisfactory for people looking for quick answers and minimal effort. Nor are they nearly as simple as affirmations. They are more qualified, and carry no guarantees, and who is going to pay for something that complicated?

In the end, all the motivational industry can supply (other than a way to spend money with very little to show for it), is a series of half-truths. Yes, a visible lack of confidence can work against you, but that does not mean that confidence is all you need. Yes, prayer might help you focus your mind on what is about to happen, but it the focus that is likely to prove useful, not the magic of divine intervention on your behalf. And, yes, science makes mistakes, and scientists can be as petty as anyone – but that doesn’t mean that science isn’t usually a more reliable way of interacting with the world than cultivating your self-esteem.

If anything, the motivational industry is constantly threatening to descend into either irrelevancy or farce. I know of one alleged relationship expert (with troubled relationships of their own) who preaches that the way to find a happy marriage is to settle for someone who is agreeable, a suggestion that is not going to be very satisfactory to those who want a particular person, or is dreaming of passion and true love. Still another suggests – with every sign of sincerity – that redecorating your bedroom is a key to finding a glamorous new lifestyle. In other words, in the case of the motivational industry, there is continual reason to believe that the emperor is not only buck-naked, but doing a lap dance.

What fascinates, frustrates, and frightens me is that, despite the ease with which the motivational industry can be debunked, millions continue to believe in it. Apparently, the desire for simple answers is so strong that nobody notices that the motivational speakers themselves are as flaky as phyllo.

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Dale Carnegie and other irritations

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, employment, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The local real estate agent has always seemed a decent sort when I’ve talked to him. However, he has one annoying habit: he persists in filling my mail box with notepads and calendars that I will never use, because I don’t think the little things in my life should be converted into advertising. Today, he left a flier that included a quote that contained all the elements that I detest in Dale Carnegie and similar business gurus.

The quote was: “Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see a bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.”

Like much of what Carnegie had to say, the banality alone is enough to drive me screaming down the hall, banging my head against the walls in the hopes of driving the quote from my mind (perhaps I exaggerate). But such a quote passes for wisdom because it is short and makes a general statement, the way that aphorisms are expected to do. I suppose you could say that the quote is a triumph of style over substance; people sense the aphorism-like structure, then assume the profundity they expect, even though it isn’t there.

However, what really gets up my nostril about the quote (to use a wonderful Scots or Aussie expression I picked up from a live Eric Bogle album) is how sweepingly and utterly wrong it is on every possible level.

For the record, I have lived with four parrots for over two decades and I have seen my share of horses, considering that I’m a city-dweller. So I am in a position to confound Carnegie by saying that, yes, I have seen unhappy birds and horses. Many times.

I have also seen them trying to impress potential mates, sexual rivals, and the humans in their lives. They are social animals, and all social animals that I am aware of learn to do these things early. Many continue the attempts until their last moments.

Anybody who can assert that birds and horses are not unhappy and never try to impress simply hasn’t been paying attention. Both have enough sense of self that they have no trouble being unhappy (most often because they are being mistreated by humans) or worrying what others think of them. Moreover,they are in no way shy about revealing their feelings. It speaks volumes – if not flashdrives full of ASCII text – that Carnegie never noticed, and, this blindness alone disqualifies him from making any general statements about existence. I would sooner trust someone who had never noticed gravity, or was unable to judge an oncoming car’s speed well enough to cross the road safely.

Carnegie further reveals the shallowness of his own perceptions (or perhaps how sheltered a life he lived) in his implication that all unhappiness stems from the wish to impress. Hunger, poverty, violence, envy, unrequited love – you can’t begin to list all the causes of unhappiness without sounding banal yourself. But the point is: how could he have missed the falseness in what he said? Did he simply not care about the truth of what he said, so long as it sounded clever? Or was he so obsessed himself with impressing others that he was trying to elevate his own personality to the status of a universal truth? Either way, he reveals himself as an untrustworthy guide to any part of life, and unfit to dispense advice of any kind.

Personally, I work too hard to evolve a mental map of the complexities around me to accept over-siimplistic and inaccurate observations simply because their structure leads me to expect wisdom. Yet that describes every line of Carnegie that I have ever read. Next to him, Ayn Rand is a towering genius of literature; her prose may be tortured, and her world view is that of a failure dreaming of the esteem they would like to believe is their due, but at least her thoughts have some complexity and a relation – however distant – to observable truth. By contrast, Carnegie has only a superficial glibness that cannot hide his inability to say anything that is accurate, let alone profound. It says a lot about the business world (none of it good) that such a shallow thinker continues to be read and admired.

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