I’ve got a guest post up on IttyBiz about the meaning of life.

It was originally titled “Planning For The End Of Your Ittybiz,” but it’s really not specific to business at all. It’s about what you’ll do once you no longer have to do anything.

Stop by and get some life advice from the Dalai Lama, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Pavlina, Tim Ferriss, Neo, and Ferris Bueller.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a classic book by Betty Edwards about learning how to draw. It was first published in 1979, then revised in 1989 and 1999 (the latest edition being called The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). It has a reputation for being phenomenally effective at teaching people how to draw better than they ever thought they could.

I first heard about it in Paul Scheele’s PhotoReading course. One day he was mulling over the problem of how to look at the words on a page without using his conscious mind, but at the same time without de-focusing his eyes.

He found his answer through this book, saying “I read an article about an art teacher named Betty Edwards. In her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, she said, ‘If you want to draw my thumb, don’t draw my thumb,’ because you will use the left brain–the analytical, non-artistic side of the brain. She said, ‘To draw my thumb, draw the space around my thumb.’ That strategy uses the right brain–the creative side of the brain.”

As a teacher, Betty couldn’t understand why so many of her students had a hard time drawing something that was right in front of them. She could see that they were trying, but her suggestion of “Just look at it” was always met with a frustrated “I am looking at it!”

She developed her techniques after realizing what the real problem was. Most people don’t draw what they see – they draw what they think they see.

As kids we learned a particular way to draw a sun. Maybe it’s in the corner of the page or maybe not, but surely it has lines coming out of it. And yet, whenever I’ve looked up at the sky, not once have I ever seen lines coming out of the sun.

We learned a certain way to draw a house, a dog, a car, and a person, and these methods stuck with us. Now when we think we’re drawing what we see, we’re actually just loading our mental clip art, and drawing what we think we see.

One of the main techniques in this book is drawing things upside down. The idea is that if you can’t recognize what you’re drawing, your left brain can’t load its mental clip art and tell you what the object should look like. Instead, the right brain kicks in, and you draw what you actually see.

Here we see that Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is a fantastic title, having double meanings for both drawing (sketching, as well as utilizing) and right (the opposite of left, as well as the correct side of the brain to use for drawing).

People often forge signatures upside down so they can focus on the details they see, instead of making a T the way they learned to make a T. It makes sense in a way. In 10th grade English when we could look for our vocabulary words in the newspaper for extra credit, I read the paper backwards so I could focus on each individual word and not get caught up in the story (though that may not have been the teacher’s intent).

But could this really work? Wouldn’t a signature drawn upside down be all messed up after you turned it right side up? Anyway, I gave it a try, drawing these signatures upside down:

You can’t really tell if they’ll look right when you turn the paper around, but I was pleased with the results:

For comparison, here’s what I got when I drew them right side up:

Other than MLK’s signature (which is really hard to do upside down!), the two versions don’t look all that different. (BTW, is anyone else surprised that Leonardo da Vinci’s signature looks like that?)

OK, so drawing upside down works well enough for signatures (although my right side up signatures were still better). But what about when you’re drawing a real picture? Surely a sufficiently complicated subject would have so many intricacies that you couldn’t possibly get it right upside down. But let’s find out.

Before the book explains anything, one of the first exercises it gives you is drawing your self-portrait. Fortunately, you’re not asked to draw someone while hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Instead, you’re just sitting in front of a mirror and drawing your reflection. Here’s what I drew:

Yeah, it’s really awful. But what specifically is wrong with it? The main problem is that I wasn’t really drawing what I saw. Nobody’s eyes are that big, outside of a Disney cartoon. The proportions are all wrong, none of the features look right, and I couldn’t pick myself out of a lineup.

And I made what’s called “the chopped-off skull error.” If you look in a mirror, you’ll notice that your eyes are halfway between the top and bottom of your head. It’s obvious, but nobody wants to acknowledge it. We subconsciously think foreheads aren’t as important as the main features, so we put the eyes closer to the top, chopping off the skull. It’s an extremely common mistake. Even van Gogh did it in his early years.

If you draw upside down, will all these mistakes go away? In theory they should. If you don’t know what you’re drawing, you can’t bring any preconceived notions to the table. But I couldn’t help thinking that I’d make other mistakes that would have been obvious if I could see what I was doing.

Anyway, the day after drawing my self-portrait, I attempted a rather intimidating feat. The subject was a knight on a horse, with no shortage of fine detail. I was going to draw it upside down. And for an added challenge, I was going to use my non-dominant hand (though Betty doesn’t say to do this). I drew this:

I couldn’t believe what I saw when I turned the paper right side up! The biggest mistake was in the lance, where my inability to draw straight lines with my right hand forced me to draw the lines thicker as a cover-up. But overall, I was thrilled with it.

Of course, you don’t have to keep drawing upside down forever. Once you get in the habit of really looking at things, you’ll be able to draw right side up without being biased by your assumptions about what things look like.

The main thing is to just get started. How many beautiful drawings never see the light of day because people assume they don’t have enough talent? If I can draw this knight on a horse, upside down, in ink, with my weak hand, after one day of instruction, I’m sure you’d be surprised by what you can do.

But as for Betty’s theory about why her methods work, I’m pretty sure she’s wrong. We’ve all heard a lot about the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy, but almost everything we’ve heard is wrong (though the details are far beyond the scope of this post). She came under heavy attack for drawing half-brained conclusions (pun very much intended) based on this pop psychology.

However, she did the right thing in response. Instead of backing away entirely from the left-brain and right-brain distinctions, she just started using the terms L-mode (analytical) and R-mode (creative). There are very important differences between these ways of thinking, even if they aren’t neatly packaged into separate hemispheres of the brain.

But the bigger problem is that things still seem backwards. Why would looking at something upside down make you switch from L-mode to R-mode? Wouldn’t recognizing the subject and loading the associated mental clip art fall into the R-mode category? And when your recognition of the whole is disrupted and you’re forced to look at the details out of context, wouldn’t that be an L-mode activity?

Anyway, this is not to take away from the simple truth that her methods work wonders by changing your way of seeing, which determines so much. Learning about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator forever changed the way I look at personalities. Now I can’t meet someone without trying to figure out their type. In the same way, learning the basics of drawing is changing the way I look at all objects. I can’t look at something without thinking about how to draw it, or whether it really looks the way I think it does.

Even if you don’t think you like drawing, you might be surprised by what you get out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (although you might want to skip the exercises that require equipment you won’t have). Once you learn to see, the world will never look the same again.

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. Many people say it’s great, and it is.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.

Paul Atreides knew words could kill, and harnessed their power to save the planet Dune. But some people aren’t so noble.

In Dune, the 1984 movie adaptation of the classic sci-fi book, Paul Atreides knows the power that words have. In the movie (but not the book), his people use devices called Weirding Modules to literally turn words into weapons.

By speaking certain words into the device, people can generate a devastating sonic blast. Most words are innocuous. Maybe they just don’t carry enough emotional intensity. Actually, very few words are known to trigger the device, but they discover others when training the Fremen people to use it.

One soldier makes the innocent mistake of calling Paul by his self-chosen Fremen name, Muad’Dib, while holding a Weirding Module. Paul is as surprised as anyone else when his own name triggers the device, collapsing part of the ceiling. “My name,” Paul thinks to himself, “is a killing word.”

Can words have the same kind of power in reality? After all, we’re told that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But can’t words do a little more than sticks and stones?

The harmful effect of words might start off small. Someone is told that they’re stupid, or ugly, or they can’t do anything right, and maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But when they hear it enough, they start to believe it.

And when people believe that something is wrong with them, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they’re having a bad day and something goes wrong, they think it’s because there’s some truth in what the other person said. They think they deserve it, so they feel worse about themselves. And they pass this feeling on to other people.

It’s not even necessarily the words themselves that do the damage, so much as the way they’re said. When someone takes a word with no inherent negative connotations (such as the name of a religious or ethnic group) and uses it in a negative way, people hear the hate.

Other words are specifically meant to do harm. Several groups, including the Special Olympics, have started campaigns to ban the R-word, as it’s now being called.

Can words kill? Absolutely. 11 year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself after classmates repeatedly called him “gay” in a derogatory way. It’s unclear whether he actually was gay, or whether he was even old enough to know.

13 year old Megan Meier hanged herself after several people created a fake MySpace account, pretending to be a 16 year-old boy who told Megan “The world would be a better place without you.”

In middle school and high school, Seung-Hui Cho was teased for his social anxiety and speaking disorder. People told him to “Go back to China” (he was Korean). As one classmate said, “There were just some people who were really cruel to him, and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn’t speak English really well, and they would really make fun of him.” Cho went on to kill 32 people plus himself in the Virginia Tech massacre.

Words have more power than you think. Is it really so hard to use them to help rather than harm? For some ideas, watch this:

In Stephen King’s Kindle-only novella UR, a college English teacher buys an Amazon Kindle in order to spite his ex-girlfriend by appearing tech-savvy. Horror ensues.

Yeah, I know, you probably don’t have a Kindle. But this isn’t about that book. This is about ditching technology as we age. They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe you can, but often the dog doesn’t want to learn them.

A few years ago I took an online test that tells you what generation you belong to. (Here’s one generation test, though not the same one.)

The one I took had me right at the border of Gen X and Gen Y. It all came down to whether I had a Facebook account or not. I didn’t, so I was classified as Gen X. Now I have one, but I don’t use it. Does that make me Gen Y?

It’s not that I can’t use Facebook, I just don’t want to. I say it’s because it’s a waste of time, but does that make me the same as the people who won’t learn how to use email?

Why do we stop trying new things as we get older?

Is it because we have less time to play around?
Is it because we lose our energy and curiosity with age?
Is it because we’ve had enough time to settle into our patterns?
Is it because we think we’ve done enough by then?

Is this a problem?

Someone gave me a bottle of this Japanese soft drink called Ramune. I didn’t know what it tasted like, and looking at the bottle didn’t offer any clues. It had pictures of a pig, a pumpkin, a watermelon, a fan, a flower, a life preserver, and a UFO.

But the weirdest part didn’t come until I tried to open it. I tore off the wrap around the top, removed this green plastic piece, and tried twisting the top. But it just wasn’t twisting off.

I read the label to see if it said anything about opening it, and it did:

WARNING

• DO NOT SWALLOW THE PLUNGER. Throw it away immediately after opening.
• Adults should open the bottle for small children and supervise drinking.
• Do not try to remove the marble from the bottle to avoid injury.
• Do not freeze the bottle or store it in direct sunlight.
• Do not consume if the marble is broken, missing, or descended before opening.

Plunger? Oh, that must be that green plastic piece. Good thing I hadn’t thrown it away. After breaking the connectors that attached the inside to the outside, the green thing became a plunger that you could press your thumb on to apply the force to a smaller area.

Marble? The bottle looked like it had a marble stuck in it, but I thought that was part of the top. But no, there really was a marble stuck in it, and to open the bottle you have to push the marble inside.

So I put the plunger on top, and pushed with my thumb. The marble wasn’t going down, and my thumb was getting bent out of shape. Was I doing it wrong?

I checked online, and found that opening a bottle of Ramune is something of a rite of passage. At least for some people, who use everything from hammers to headbutts to get the darn thing open. Then there are others who say it’s not that big a deal, you just push with your thumb. I fell into the former category.

After wearing my thumb out with no luck, I tried using the heel of my hand. Although I wouldn’t be able to push as deep this way, I could exert much more force, and it would hurt a lot less. But after a few failed attempts, I had dug a deep ring into my hand, and drawn a trickle of blood.

Was this supposed to be another Kobayashi Maru?

I decided to bring out the big guns. My hammer was packed away, but my screwdriver was easy to get to and would work just as well. I put the bottle on the counter (so it would absorb the full impact instead of being pushed away), on top of a cork oven pad (so the counter wouldn’t get scratched).

Then I pounded the bottle several times with the base of the screwdriver, well aware that I was just as likely to break the bottle as I was to push the marble in.

The marble looked like it had moved some, so I went back to pushing my thumb on the plunger, and the marble went it, stopping a couple inches down where the bottle narrows.

The bottle then adds insult to injury because even after opening it, the marble blocks the flow when you try to drink it. But with the right angle, I finally enjoyed the pig/pumpkin/UFO-flavored drink known as Ramune. (It actually tastes something like Sprite).

Just yesterday, I was reading something about attacking problems from a non-obvious direction after reaching a mental dead end. This comes from Whole Brain Thinking: Working from Both Sides of the Brain to Achieve Peak Job Performance:

“Visualize the extreme opposite of the situation. Example: If you are trying to invent a gadget to open bottles, pretend you are trying to bond the bottle cap permanently to make it impenetrable. It will thus be easier to discover the weaknesses inherent in the current bottle caps and a way to get the substances that are inside, out–without resorting to the typical removable cap. You might invent a syringelike contraption that extracts the contents rather than beheading the package.”

I have to wonder if the authors wrote this after an encounter with Ramune. (By the way, this is an example of lateral thinking, just one of many crucial concepts covered in Marelisa Fabrega’s ebook How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists).

Any usability engineer would go into conniptions about the bottle design. Yet the challenge of opening it is what gives Ramune its mystique and its fan base. I want to get another bottle, not so much to drink it, but just so I can try opening it again (hopefully doing a better job next time).

If a soft drink can teach patience, persistence, and lateral thinking, then what other learning experiences might be hiding in plain sight, disguised as problems?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Got hurt feelings, but don’t know what to do about them?

Wonder no more. Just fill out this Hurt Feelings Report (link from Breanne Potter’s MBTI blog). It appears to be a form used by the Army “to assist whiners in documenting hurt feelings.”

To complete the form, you answer questions such as “which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?” and “did you require a tissue for your tears?”

Most people will find it funny, while some will find it insensitive. What do you think about it?

To be sure, filling out a form to report hurt feelings is absurd. Not because it’s not a valid concern, but because you won’t fix the problem by reporting it.

What I find funny is that many people will laugh at how ridiculous it is to report hurt feelings, but then they’ll fill out a form to complain that they were overcharged by $1 (yes, I know someone who did this). Somehow, incidents are only supposed to matter when you can put a dollar amount on them.

But whatever the problem, whether feelings or dollars or something else, maybe it’s best to either ignore it or face it head on, instead of filling out forms.

You may have heard of blogger and life coach Alex Fayle, also known as the “Someday Syndrome” guy. Someday Syndrome is the affliction that people suffer from when they know their life isn’t what they want, and they stare off into space thinking “someday my ship will come in.”

What Alex does is help people uncover hidden patterns so they can break their procrastination habit and start living the life they desire. He’s certainly done that in his own life, overcoming his procrastination to move to Spain and follow his dreams such as becoming a fiction author. In his new ebook Someday My Ship Will Come In: A Practical Guide to Finding Your Dreams, he shows you how to do the same.

I had a chance to read a draft of this ebook. When Alex asked me specifically what I thought it would do for people, I said the lessons and exercises would help them get clear about their dreams now versus never thinking about them and leaving them to chance. Because the biggest reason that people fail to achieve their dreams isn’t so much that they try and fail, but they put them off to a “someday” that never arrives.

Whatever your dreams are, you can’t just wait for them to come to you. You have to identify them, focus on them, take the first few steps, and get the ball rolling. That’s what it takes to cure your Someday Syndrome. Let Alex show you how in Someday My Ship Will Come In.

One of the books I’m reading now is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just reading a little bit here and there, but I’ll definitely be reviewing it when I’m done.

So far, it’s about how success is less dependent on talent and hard work than we think. Yes, it still takes a lot of hard work (according to the 10,000 hour rule) and a good amount of talent. However, one critical factor is often ignored – the environment that made you who you are. It turns out that random factors such as your birth date can be hugely important.

But my review will come later. For now, I just want to talk about what success means.

In What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers,’ Glen Allsopp says that while he’s a huge fan of Outliers, he has one problem with it. Namely, that Gladwell tends to define success as a large bank balance or some form of status. Glen says:

“While Bill Gates spent years behind a computer screen, people his age where going to parties, sunning on the beach, meeting new people and making the most of life…yet he has made it.

While kids were playing the violin for hours every week, their friends were playing in the park, running through fields and making the most of their childhood. Yet now the violinists are professional or well known…they’ve made it.”

I agree, people who are considered successful have paid an enormous price to get there. If you’re willing to accept being “average” or “good” instead of “off the charts,” you can free up massive amounts of time for other things.

Someone who’s OK with being a little overweight might be a lot happier than a gym rat who works out several hours a day. Someone who’s OK with being a little uninformed might be a lot happier than a Jeopardy champion. It’s much, much easier to be average than an outlier.

Still, the book is about success, not happiness. To learn about success, it makes sense to study Bill Gates and world class violinists. On the other hand, we don’t need to read a book to learn how to go to parties and play in the park. If you want to do those things, you’re free to just do them.

Which brings me to this question: Is success important?

That may sound like a strange question, but it has to do with how you think of success. A lot of people think success is the ultimate measure of your life. Either you’re successful and you’ve had a good life, or you’re unsuccessful and you’ve had a bad life.

I don’t see it that way. To me, success simply means what the traditional definition says. For now, let’s just use this dictionary definition: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

Is there more to life than the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence? Of course! I’ve written about a lot of things that are important to me, but which have absolutely nothing to do with wealth, favor, or eminence.

Some people want to be successful. Some people want to be happy. Some people want to be in good shape. Some people want to travel. Some people want to learn. Some people want lots of friends. These are all different things, none of which is the be all, end all of life. We all value different things.

And guess what? It’s OK if you don’t want to be successful!

But wait, if you’re not successful, does that make you unsuccessful, a failure, a bad person? Not at all. I can’t play the violin, but I wouldn’t consider myself a failed violinist. The violin just isn’t important to me, so it’s not how I judge myself.

Likewise, I wouldn’t consider Barack Obama a failed dentist, or Mohandas Gandhi a failed football player. Maybe they’re not good at those particular things, but they have different objectives.

When you walk past a homeless person, your first thought probably isn’t “Wow, look how successful he is!” Because face it, success, as defined by society, means money. After all, money is what society invented as a store of value. On the other hand, no one needs to feel threatened by this, because you don’t need to make money a priority if you don’t want to.

If you want to live the life of the Mexican fisherman, fine. But don’t redefine “success” to mean “happiness” just because it’s much easier to achieve, and you have this false idea that all good people are required to be successful. It’s perfectly fine to decide that success – or if you prefer, “traditional success” – isn’t important to you.

Some people are meant to chase success, but most aren’t. Not everyone can be in the richest 1%, or the healthiest 1%, or the most educated 1%, or the happiest 1%, or the friendliest 1%, and so on. We have to decide on our priorities.

I once met a homeless woman who was doing exactly what she wanted with her life: enjoying the weather, scenery, and tourists outside the White House while protesting nuclear weapons. No sane person would consider her successful, and she wouldn’t be the subject of a book like Outliers, but she was doing what she wanted to do.

And in the end, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?

Oh, regarding the post title – is success for suckers? Yes, but only if you spend your life chasing it at the cost of things that are more important to you. However, if success is important to you, then we have something in common. There’s room for both types.

Photo by aloshbennett

Randy Pausch‘s autographed photo of Captain Kirk, on which William Shatner wrote “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that puts you up against a no-win scenario.

In this simulation, a civilian ship named the Kobayashi Maru has been disabled by a gravitic mine and is losing life support. If you don’t intervene, the Kobayashi’s 400 passengers will die.

Unfortunately, the Kobayashi lies in the Klingon Neutral Zone. If you attempt a rescue, you’ll be in violation of the treaty, which will cause the Klingons to take hostile action.

If you try to save the Kobayashi, three Klingon ships move in on you. They refuse to communicate, and they start firing. You’re outnumbered, and the computer is allowed to cheat, so there is no option but to lose.

The point of the test is not to win, but to behave well in the face of certain destruction.

How do you face a situation that you know you can’t win?

There’s a psychological concept known as “learned helplessness.” It refers to when a person or an animal learns that it’s helpless, so it stops trying, even after the situation changes.

In a 1960s experiment that I hope to God would be illegal today, learned helplessness was observed in dogs by subjecting them to electric shocks.

Two dogs were kept in separate rooms, but wired to the same electrical circuit. When the electricity was turned on, the first dog was able to press a lever that would turn it off for both dogs. The second dog didn’t have access to the lever, and from his perspective the shocks just stopped at a random time (since he didn’t know the first dog controlled it).

Although both dogs experienced the exact same electrical shocks, the first dog learned that he had the power to stop them, while the second dog learned that he was helpless. The dog in control quickly recovered, while the helpless dog become chronically depressed. In further experiments, the dogs that had learned helplessness were subjected to shocks that they were free to run away from, but they didn’t try.

But wait, it gets worse. It’s somewhat understandable for the dogs to think that because they couldn’t stop the shocks in the first experiment, they couldn’t stop them in the second. But in another set of experiments, dogs were temporarily paralyzed with a drug before being shocked. Obviously, they couldn’t even try to escape the shocks. By the time they regained their mobility, they had learned they were helpless. They didn’t try to escape the shocks, even though they had never tried before.

Here’s the silver lining: not all dogs acted this way. A third of them, the optimistic ones, did not become helpless. They still tried to escape the shocks and did, despite having failed before.

I’m not sure how the Star Trek cadets were supposed to behave in the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but I guess it was along the lines of staying focused and trying everything possible. And some cadets tried some unexpected solutions, with varying degrees of success.

- On his third attempt, James T. Kirk cheated by reprogramming the simulator to make it possible to rescue the Kobayashi, saying he didn’t believe in the no-win scenario. (In one movie he was awarded a commendation for original thinking, but in another he was put on trial for cheating.)

- Chekov evacuated his ship before crashing it into the three Klingon ships. (However, this meant that the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Sulu realized it was a trap, and didn’t cross into the Neutral Zone. (Again, this meant the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Scotty used a bunch of crazy tactics that let him bypass the Klingon shields and beam destructive items to them. While this worked at first, the simulator kept adding more and more Klingon ships, finally beating Scotty with 15 ships. (Because Scotty knew that his techniques would work in the simulator but not the real world, he was judged unsuitable for command track and reassigned to engineering.)

- Piper used a bunch of unorthodox commands that tricked the computer into fighting itself, which ended up crashing the simulator. (Her instructors acknowledged that it might have worked in the real world.)

- Peter David made the bizarre move of destroying the Kobayashi, figuring that (1) a rescue attempt could not succeed, (2) destroying the Kobayashi was more humane than letting the crew be captured and tortured, and (3) the Kobayashi may actually have been a setup planted by the enemy.

- Peter Kirk (James’ nephew) faced a different version of the simulation, in which the enemies were the Romulans instead of the Klingons. He invoked an obscure Romulan law that allowed him to challenge the Romulan commander to a one-on-one fight to the death, during which all ships must cease fire. Before beaming over for the duel, he told his people to beam aboard the Kobayashi survivors and escape, leaving him to die. (The instructor stopped the simulation at this point, but Peter was credited with a nearly perfect outcome, sacrificing himself but saving the Kobayashi and his own ship. The simulator was reprogrammed to prevent this solution from being used again.)

Every now and then, you may face a situation that seems unwinnable. And maybe it is. But don’t give more power to it than you have to. Don’t be too quick to declare it as unwinnable, when there may be a solution you haven’t thought of yet.

And if you really can’t win, doing your best anyway will keep you away from the trap of learned helplessness for the future. Besides, you can always change your definition of “winning.”