One Pilot, Many Auto Pilots

The book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, has completely changed how I imagine the daily life of a person with great willpower and discipline.  I used to picture someone who willed themselves to get up early when they didn't want to, to floss, to workout at the gym, to eat right, to work hard, and to resist temptations.  All day long they force themselves to act against their impulses.  Everything they do is a carefully chosen task aimed at a goal.

That's not the case.  According to this book, whose research I find totally compelling, a person with terrific discipline is typically pushing themselves in ONE or TWO areas of their lives, trying to form ONE or TWO new habits that require willpower, that require them to push themselves to do something they don't want to do or to stop doing something that they crave.  The rest of their good behaviours are habits. 

This is what I mean by "One Pilot, Many Auto-Pilots".  They are developing just one or two new habits at a time. The new habit does require what we normally think of as willpower.  It is something they DON'T want to do or a bad habit they want to stop.  The "Pilot" is needed; they must consciously change their behavior.  Maybe all this energy is going into flossing every morning.  Eventually, flossing becomes a habit.  It switches to robotic "Auto-Pilot".  There is no willpower required.  No thought.  You wake up, brush your teeth, and floss because that's what you do every day.  You don't even think about it.  Then you work on your next habit:  going to the gym before work.  Or whatever other good behavior you want to cultivate.  Eventually, you've got all these good habits in your life and it really isn't that hard for you.  It's automatic.  At any one time, there is just one "Pilot" that is a struggle and lots of "Auto-pilots" that come without effort or thought.  But to an outsider you look like Mr. or Mrs. Discipline.

Tomato String Theory

I've had decades of failure with home-grown tomatos.  My main problem has been difficulty supporting the tomato plants.  They'd break, drag on the ground, get bushy, and produce almost no tomatos.  The tomato supports I find at Home Depot or Lowes are too expensive when you have 20 plants or more, they get in the way of pruning and harvesting, and they aren't tall enough.

Last year, I tried cheap alternative method to support tomatos that I read about in a gardeniing magazine.  It led to our first every successful harvest.  We're repeating the method this year.  It involves stringing the tomatos, as farmers often do, but it's incredibly simple and cheap.  For each row of tomato plants, all you need is string, two pieces of pressure treated pine ( 2"x2" by 8 feet), and one piece of 8 foot rebar.

1. Cut the pine so that you can hammer it into the soil without even digging a hole.
   
2. Pound in the two pine posts about 6 feet apart with a mallet.
   
3. Use two nails and tie wraps to hold the each end of the rebar on top of a post.
   
4. Tie a string to each tomato plant,twist around the main stem a few times, and then tie the string to the rebar.
   
   
   
   
5. As plant grows during the summer, continue to twist it gently around the string, until the plants are 6 feet tall with tomatos the size of watermelons.

Rose Colored Glasses

A little too much Oprah.  Too many Gratitude Journal entries.  Too much "positive psychology".  Count your blessings, look at the bright side, the glass is half full.

These are all good things.  This is real wisdom.  Optimism is better for health, better for success in life, better for happiness.  But sometimes I think I've been overtrained.  I can see the world through rose colored glasses, focusing so much on what is going well that I don't even acknowledge the things that are making me mad or sad.

I had quite a few days last week with vague feelings of "not quite right".  Discontent and frustration without being clear why.  Foggy discontent.

After a while, I realized I needed to "count my complaints" as well as my "blessings".  I definitely want to emphasize the positive.  I don't remember the ratios, but there are some magic things that happen when the ratio of positive comments versus negative comments in a relationship exceeds 2 to 1 or 3 to 1, or when positive thoughts outnumber negative thoughts by some magic number.  It's pretty clear that we're better off writing "Gratitude Journals" than we are writing "Complaint Journals".  But sometimes it helps to list those complaints. 

This morning, I brainstormed a bunch of things that were bugging me.  At home, at work, as a volunteer, with relatives, with my health, with the health of loved ones.  Things that feel unfinished, out of my control, things that seem to never seem to get much better.  And listing these things made it easier to understand some of the discontent I've been feeling in the last few days.  It was easier to shift my mood.  Ironically, listing my complaints made it easier to return to gratitude.

Perpendicular Parking

For the last few monhts, I've been teaching my 16 year old how to drive.  Tomorrow he'll start a 4 hours per day, 6 day AAA Driving School course.  I realized I'd neglected to give him any lessons in parallel parking.  It was time to start.

We found the perfect setup.  A short dead end street with two trucks nicely spaced apart at the university campus on a Sunday.  Nobody likely to use the trucks until Monday.  My son could practice over and over without the pressure of traffic behind him or any risk that someone owning one of the trucks would ask us what the _____ we were doing.

My son was doing OK, but he just wasn't turning the steering wheel enough to get close to the curb.  I told him, "Turn it all the way to the right so you get close enough, then turn it to the left."

Bad advice.  I laughed until I cried.

What's my next pitch?

I've always wondered why baseball pitchers don't just make up their own minds what to throw next.  Why do they need to have the catcher suggest a curve ball or a fast ball?  Doesn't the pitcher know what his best pitches are, how tired he is, and what the batter's weaknesses are?  Why does he need suggestions from his catcher?

I've got a new guess about why the pitcher wants his catcher to call the next pitch and why the quarterback wants the coach to call the next play.  The book "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" describes how we each have limited willpower.  It fatigues from uninterrupted exertion.  A baseball pitcher needs to push himself to extreme levels to throw 100 pitches in a game at speeds often exceeding 90 miles per hour and to do so with accuracy, variety, and deception.  Every pitch is draining.  And decisions about what to pitch to throw next are also draining.  I suspect that all baseball teams learned over time to take some of the burden off the pitcher.  You can't spare him the strain of throwing the ball.  But you can let someone else decide what to throw next.

"Keep your distance, and watch out for idiots and maniacs"

"Keep your distance, and watch out for idiots and maniacs".  What father gives this advice to his 16 year old son?  I do.

I'm teaching my 16 year old son how to drive.  A couple of months ago, we were driving to Chicago to visit colleges.  Traffic got very light on I-65 between Indianapolis and Chicago.  I decided this would be a great chance to give my son his first experience driving on a highway.

But I wondered what coaching to give him before I'd let him hurtle down the highway at 65 mph.  I'd been reading in the book "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength" by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney that it is exhausting to make lots of conscious decisions.  Once you get exhausted, you start to make mistakes.  I knew that my son has not yet had time to develop good driving habits.  He doesn't yet do anything on "auto-pilot".  How could I simplify his decision making so that we'd make it to Chicago alive?

First, I told him to be antisocial.  "Keep your distance from all the other cars.  Drive for space.  If someone keeps driving right next to you, speed up or slow down until you have space around you."

Next, I passed on the wisdom of the late, great comedian George Carlin who is pictured above.  In his classic "Idiots and Maniacs" routine, George said, "Have you ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an IDIOT!  And everyone driving faster than you is a M-A-N-I-A-C!!!!!"  See this clip on You Tube:  Idiots and Maniacs.

I told my son, "Keep your distance, and watch out for idiots and maniacs.  When the maniacs come racing up behind, look for a chance to let them pass you.  And when an idiot in front of you makes you slow down to a crawl, look for a chance to pass them."

A simple enough strategy, but I waited until I knew he could tell the difference between an idiot and a maniac before I pulled into a Rest Area and handed him the car keys.

Decision Free Driving

I just finished driving for 2 and 1/2 hours on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  And the only reason I have the energy to write in this blog right now is because I practiced "Decision Free Driving".

Whenever possible, I drove in the "Decision Free Lane".  That's the middle one.  In the left lane, I have to keep deciding whether to change lanes to let the guy behind me pass by.  In the right lane, I have to decide whether to speed up or slow down to let someone merge.

I drove at "Decision Free Speed".  I went with the flow of the traffic in the center lane most of the time.  I didn't need to constantly judge whether I was risking a speeding ticket.  Plenty of "police bait" kept passing me on my left.

When traffic got very light, I couldn't "go with the flow of traffic".  There was no flow.  Just my car in long stretches.  So what speed should I drive?  I let "cruise control" take over.  Speed limit plus 5 so that, again, I didn't have to think about speeding.

I listened to "Decision Free Radio".  Pandora.  Commercial free music so that I wouldn't feel compelled to switch from one station to another.

The older I get, the more I realize that saving 5-10 minutes per hour by pushing my speed, changing lanes, watching for cops with my foot hovering over the brakes in case I see one is exhausting.  The book on willpower that has been the subject of my last few posts has made it clear that all these little driving decisions sap energy and willpower.  On a long drive alone at night, I'd rather conserve my energy by keeping things simple.