7 Tricks for Turning Mega-Threats into Micro-Triumphs

I recently raved about a day of “micro-triumphs.” The brief re-cap is this: After dreading an afternoon and evening of anxiety and disappointment—laden with potential perils from missed buses and overfilled ferries—I instead had an unexpectedly rewarding little adventure with my 12-year-old son—brightened by just-caught buses and earlier-than-expected ferries, and ending in a pleasant sunset, sipping wine and gazing out on a panoramic vista of sea and mountains.

My non-horrible day was a surprise, but it wasn’t just random fortune. As Ben Hogan said about golf: “Golf is a game of luck, the more I practice, the luckier I get.” So in what follows, I will offer 7 suggestions about how to set the stage for micro-triumphs—in battles against life challenges that are often a lot more critical than missing a bus. My hope is that, when it comes to the all-important game of everyday life, maybe we can all improve our swing if we practice a few basic rules.

From pot-shot chumps to under-par champs: 7 rules

Rule number 1: You can’t have micro-triumphs unless you are willing to confront possible failures. As my friend Mark Schaller pointed out, minor successes feel better to the extent that there is a chance of things going wrong. When I told Mark my story about narrowly caught buses and trains, he responded with his own tale:

After arriving in Cotignac, I would drive alone to Marseilles on Sunday to return our rental car, and then return myself home by train and bus. Train from Marseilles to Brignoles, I figured, and then the bus from Brignoles to Cotignac. Should be home sometime Sunday afternoon, I thought. But I thought wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Not only was I not home Sunday afternoon, I wasn't even home by Sunday evening. And instead of spending Sunday night relaxing with my family as we settled in for our second night in our new home in Cotignac, I instead spend an almost completely sleepness Sunday night alone in Aix-en-Provence, tossing and turning in a strange and costly bed, lamenting my lack of serviceable language skills, obsessively revisiting the false assumptions and wrong turns that had characterized this unexpectedly challenging day, paranoiaically imagining another surreal series of obstructions that might surely strand me again tomorrow, and flipping through the pages of my phrase book in rueful preparation for these possible privations. I felt sure I might need to know how to say, in French, "You mean there is no service on Monday either?" and "I've lost my contact lenses and cannot see," and "Please stop the bus because the coffee I drank this morning has affected my bowels in a way I had not anticipated," and – of course – "I am humiliated."

In the light of the morning, though, Mark figured it all out, and experienced a delightful sense of accomplishment when he boarded the bus to Cotignac. Sure, any marginally functional French teenager could have pulled it off without a hitch, but when you’re a stranger in a strange land, lost sans translation, the possible nightmare scenarios help make everyday tasks daunting, and hence everyday successes become especially rewarding triumphs.

You don’t want the potential for failure to be too high, though. Hence my next suggestion:

Rule number 2: You should try to match your goals to your abilities.

Here are some bad goals:

• Someone of my advanced age, with my bungling lack of athletic ability, sets the goal of winning a Heisman trophy.
• Someone with my distinctly sub-Sinatran singing voice sets a goal of winning next year’s Grammy award for best album.
• Someone with my absolute ignorance of Farsi, Pashto, or Dari and American passport tries to pull off the Scotsman Rory Stewart’s (2005) amazing and dangerous solo hike across Afghanistan.

Although those sound like silly examples, it never fails to amaze me how frequently people with, for example, no experience playing golf or tennis or basketball expect to begin at a level of ability approaching Phil Michelson, Rafeal Nadal, or Michael Jordan.

Instead of expecting yourself to accomplish the impossible, you generally want to choose a challenge that is about the right size for your abilities. Too big and you’re feeling helpless. Of course, sometimes you do want to accomplish big things, and not just topple little teeny obstacles like catching a bus or a train. That’s where the third rule can help:

Rule number 3: You should break overwhelming big fat problems into underwhelming bite-size challenges. When I was a student, the field of psychology was being revolutionized by B.F. Skinner and his merry band of Radical Behaviorists. Although Behaviorism might seem rather passé now, dismissed for its failure to be sufficiently cognitive or evolutionary, Skinner and his gang brought us some of the most practically useful ideas ever to emerge from the field of psychology. Indeed, I would argue that Behaviorists still win most of the lifetime Academy awards in the “useful ideas from psychology” category. One of the most useful Skinnerian ideas is the concept of shaping, sometimes called the “method of successive approximations.”

Here’s the idea: Let’s say you want your pet pigeon to peck out “Mary had a Little Lamb” on a toy piano. If you sat around waiting for her to spontaneously emit the complete sequence of pecks, you’d get old and gray before you could administer your first reward pellet. Instead, you might start by giving her a reward every time she turned in the direction of the toy piano. After a few rewarding treats, she would be turning that way more frequently, so you would up the ante. Now you would only reward her when she turned to the piano and pecked. That’s only another small step, but after she mastered that you would add yet another small increment, only popping her a pigeon pellet when she correctly pecked at the first key in the sequence, and so on. Although you probably could never get her to play Moonlight Sonata, you could use shaping to get her to peck a few particular notes in the right sequence. Now let’s say you’re trying to teach your own big-brained self to peck out Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, for which task you have a leg up on a pigeon (or ten fingers up, which matters more in this example). Assuming you don’t already have classical piano training, you’d do best to set your first goal as “play the first 4 notes of Moonlight Sonata,” and then gradually add on from there. I don’t really know how to read music, but by starting out deciphering a few notes, then moving up to a few bars, I was able to learn a few easy pieces by Beethoven, enough to make my friends think I could actually play the piano (and I guess that meant I could, sorta). The bottom line is this: If you want your pet pigeon, or yourself, to perform a complex and difficult behavior, break it down into bite-size approximations, and reward successively closer and closer small steps toward the goal. If you expect perfection to emerge spontaneously, you’re in for a long wait.

Once you think about shaping, it sounds obvious, but it amazes me how many people, including myself, give up at something because they expect to begin “naturally” playing at a very high level. The first time I took my son Liam to a driving range, it was at the University of British Columbia, and there were two college-aged guys next to us. They looked like members of the university golf team: tall and athletic with perfectly smooth swings, each of which led the little white projectile to fly up over 100 yards—straight out into the distance. As a 10-year-old, Liam was able to hit the ball straight out in front of him, which was a real accomplishment. But he kept comparing himself to the professional level golfers next to us, and wouldn’t give himself any credit. Instead, he insisted on quitting before we’d half exhausted our bucket of practice balls. His miserable experience brought to mind my first time at a driving range with my friends Ed Sadalla and Rich Keefe, both of whom had been hitting golf balls for years. I myself could not hit a single ball either straight ahead or up into the air. Instead I either missed completely, or sent the ball skittering off at a 45 degree angle, with a maximum lift-off about 2 feet above the ground. I was convinced I would never be able to play the game, and just wanted to quit. But Ed Sadalla, who is an exceptional athlete and whose father was a coach, later convinced me to try again, breaking the game down into much much smaller goals. First, Ed had me simply swing the club in the proper arc, tai chi style, without even trying to hit a golf ball. On some swings, merely keeping my head down was the only goal. Then it was: keep my head down and don’t torque my lower body. Next Ed encouraged me to try a few easy swings at golf ball sized whiffle balls, using a 9 iron (which is the easiest club to hit a ball with). Then he brought me back to the driving range, before we ever went out and tried to play a real game of golf. Still later, Rich Keefe brought me along to a very easy 9-hole course, and encouraged me to swing nice and easy rather than try to blast the ball 100 yards. I am not a natural athlete, but a few years later, I played with Sadalla and Keefe on a real 18 hole course, and actually hit a few beautiful straight drives, leading both of them to shake their heads in awe, as they remembered my absolutely terrible first attempts.

I am still quite capable of sending golf balls skittering off at a 45 degree angle, but I can enjoy the game now, and appreciate the occasional small win. Most of us don’t ever hope to become professional athletes or musicians, but there’s a lesson here that applies to our real vocations, as well. In my business, as an academic researcher, success is measured by publications. Within the university, the publications that win the most prestige are theoretical treatises in journals such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences or Psychological Review. Outside the university, an academic can win a different kind of prestige by writing a well-received popular science book, such as Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate or my friend Bob Cialdini’s Influence. Cialdini and Pinker are role models for my graduate students, who hope for a career doing research in evolutionary social psychology. But to get there, they need to start out by setting their sites much lower—writing not a major treatise, but a short and readable research report on one small topic—something with a chance of getting published in an empirical journal. Such a paper is about the length of an undergraduate term paper, but even so, it needs to be approached in many small steps. First step is to come up with an idea that your colleagues think is interesting. Next step is to collect some data. Next step is to analyze those data. Next is to figure out why the results may not have matched your initial hypothesis, and to follow with a slightly more complex and maybe more interesting study. There’s a lot of wild swinging and shanked shots at these early stages, but the trick is to keep your head down and continue practicing your form. When you finally score some sensible findings, you need to break down your hopeful publication into sub-tasks again—a) an introduction that doesn’t try to say too much (I suggest they follow the rough rule of saying only 3 things in an introduction), b) a methods section that clearly says what you did, c) a results section that puts the interesting results front and center, and then d) a discussion that again doesn't try to say everything that pops into your mind (trying to say only 3 main things is a good rule of thumb here as well).

Anne Lamott wrote a lovely book called “Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life.” She opens with a story about her ten-year-old brother being immobilized by a school assignment. He needed to finish a report on birds, due at school the very next day. Surrounded by a pile of bird books and random notes, he was paralyzed, with no idea where to start. Lamott’s father put his arm around his son, though, and gave the following advice: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Rule number 4: Pace yourself. Even a small task can seem ominous when you are up against a tight deadline.

During my recent day of micro-triumphs, I was faced with the prospect of picking up my son from his summer camp, then catching 3 buses and a ferry. Google maps told me the whole journey would take about 3 hours, but that assumed I’d catch each bus and ferry on time, and didn’t take into account that the buses heading out of the city on a summer Friday afternoon might be full, or that we might get stuck in rush-hour traffic. So instead of sweating all that, I left much earlier than I needed to, allowing a couple of extra hours for possible mishaps. It ended up taking only about 3 hours after all, but we had a couple of near misses that could have turned it into 5 or 6 hours.

Although pacing yourself sounds obvious, I can’t tell you how many times I have started for an appointment without anticipating the inevitable traffic jam, or begun a paper or grant proposal a few days before it would have been overdue. Deadline driving is almost always a miserable experience, because things always come up. When I’m being smart, I aim to have a big paper finished a month before it is due, and I aim to leave myself an extra hour to make an appointment on time. I’m not always smart, though, so I am often late, and trade a micro-triumph for a micro-defeat.

Rule number 5: Welcome setbacks as learning opportunities. In an earlier post I talked about what I called Zen and the art of embracing rejection. As a younger man, I used to consider quitting my academic career every time I got a letter of rejection from a scientific journal (after laboriously completing all those steps I just mentioned, they were sorry to say they found my paper simply unacceptable!). I was simultaneously shocked and relieved when I overheard two of the most successful and productive researchers in my field swapping stories about their own numerous experiences getting their papers rejected. In the top journals, in fact, about 90 percent of papers are rejected, and even the ones that get accepted are usually only published after a round or two of barely encouraging “revise and resubmit” letters. The prolific rejections of scientific papers are justified on the reasoning that only the most rigorous findings deserve to be shared with the public, but even famous novelists brag about having a pile of rejections before their first letter of acceptance. J.K. Rowling, who authored the massively successful Harry Potter series, is one of those who experienced a lot of early rejection. At least in scientific fields the reviewers carefully explain what they find unconvincing about your paper, and you get a chance to conduct additional studies and mount stronger logical arguments to make a stronger case. The smart money seeks lots of critical feedback before even sending a product out for acceptance or rejection, and then fixes the parts that aren’t being well-received.

Rule number 6: Control your mind

In my previous blog where I introduced the idea of micro-triumphs, I talked about some classic research by Maddi and Kobasa, who found that hardy executives were likely to label problems as “challenges” instead of “threats.” Donald Meichenbaum is the author of a classic book on cognitive behavior modification, and if I recall correctly, one of his techniques is to teach yourself to say “Stop” when you start berating or undermining yourself. Instead, pat yourself on the back for trying. Think of yourself as a zen master.

Managing your cognitions involves not only controlling your interpretations, but also your attention and memory. You can control your self-defeating thoughts by shifting your attention to something more pleasant (noticing the interesting characters in the bus terminal you would have missed if you’d caught the early bus), or by recalling experiences in which you or someone you admire successfully overcame challenges. It’s easy to imagine worse things than missing a bus, not hard to think of things worse than getting a rejection letter, and even possible to imagine worse things than losing a limb.

There’s a sub-rule 6a here: Control your mouth, especially when it comes to things that are tiny and irrelevant. When you’re working or traveling with other people, keep your concerns and your complaints to yourself, unless of course there’s a real emergency. If there is a giant ocean-liner heading straight for your rowboat, speak up. But if everyone else in your party is enjoying a pleasant and relaxing pre-dinner conversation in a laid-back restaurant, don’t start complaining about the slow service. Then everyone else gets nervous and/or embarrassed, and the food doesn’t taste as good when it finally does arrive. The best way to control your mouth, of course, is to go back to controlling your mind: Every situation has positive and negative aspects, every life opportunity involves trade-offs. Chronically obsessing about the down side is a waste of energy (again, unless it’s really an emergency or an easily fixable problem—like the waitress forgot to bring one of the table settings).

Rule number 7: Don’t forget to reward yourself. Especially if you are working on a big project, there is a tendency to brush past the mini-triumphs as you speed on to the next sub-task. My story the other day was about my son and I catching a bus to catch a ferry to catch another bus to arrive at our destination. If all we thought about was the final destination, and hadn’t been a little worried about missing each bus, we might have missed the opportunity to pat ourselves on the back when each small step went well. For the future, he and I resolved to try to savor micro-triumphs even when we’re not facing a cold and lonely night stranded on a ferry dock.

When I was in graduate school, I faced a really really big task—writing what we call a “comps”—a comprehensive review paper in which you suggest a new twist on a whole area of scientific literature. The task is much more onerous than the usual term paper, or even the usual publishable empirical paper. It’s not just answering one small question, but trying to think about the big picture. Students in our graduate program at Arizona State, all of whom are top flight intellects who have made it through college earning A grades on their term papers, and some of whom have already published papers in the leading empirical journals, typically get paralyzed by the very thought of writing the dreaded comps. I try to explain to them that although I was no smarter or more efficient than they are, I actually enjoyed the experience, and pulled it off in a few months instead of a few years. Why? Partly because, as a grad student just about to start my own comps, I heard an inspiring talk by Michael Mahoney. Mike was then a professor at Penn State, but during the 1960s, he had been an undergraduate student at ASU, when it was called Fort Skinner in the Desert (the nickname endowed because a group of ASU clinical faculty were applying the principles of operant conditioning to help people change bad habits). Ten years later, Mahoney published a book called “Self-control: Power to the person.” His idea was that you could apply the same principles not just to a pigeon in a Skinner box, your pet dog, or a clinical patient suffering from a phobia; you could in fact use those same operant principles on your very own self.

The practical payoff for me was to treat my comps as a personal shaping experiment, in which I would reward successive approximations toward the daunting final project. I set a small daily goal—to write only 5 pages. Actually, in those ancient days I actually wrote out words onto a yellow legal pad with a pencil, so converted into modern pages typed into a word processor, the goal was really more like writing 2 or 3 pages a day. The key, though, was having a reward every day, and a strict contingency for obtaining that reward. As someone addicted to chocolate desserts for most of my life, I made a hard and fast rule that I would get no dessert after dinner unless and until I finished writing out my 5th page. I stuck to it, and the resulting paper was published in one of the top journals in my field (Kenrick & Cialdini, 1977). More importantly, the experience helped me realize that I could indeed write bigger picture theoretical review papers, and those have led to citations by other researchers, helping a basically lazy disorganized person become a tenured full professor and later the author of several books. One of the nicer payoffs for all that has been invitations to speak at universities and conferences around the world, where my hosts have often treated me to elaborate chocolate desserts in fancy gourmet restaurants. Not bad for few appropriately invested M&Ms.

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Douglas Kenrick is author of The Rational Animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think and Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature.

Related blogs:

Micro-triumphs: How to conquer a potentially terrible horrible no good very bad day.

The Zen of embracing rejection: What's so good about negative feedback

10 gems of wisdom for life on earth: How to survive as a hominid.

Does anxiety help you survive in the modern world? Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!

Seven good things about feeling bad: The bright sides of sadness

Go take a hike: Underestimating the joys of nature.

NOTE:

*During my bus and ferry adventure with my son Liam, he and I were calling them “mini-triumphs.” When I described our adventure to my friend Mark Schaller I accidentally called them “micro-triumphs.” Mark is great with words, and when I asked him which term he liked better, he wisely pointed out that “micro” sounded scientific, whereas “mini” just sounded tiny and trivial. After patting myself on the back for being so clever, and writing up my first blog using the very clever term “micro-triumphs,” I went online to see if anyone else had ever used the term. Alas, my search resulted in 467 results! I recently read a book that I described as “the most inspiring book I’ve read”—about the geniuses who created the digital revolution. One of the results of that revolution is that there are now over 3 billion people using the internet (as I just learned in a few milliseconds by typing in a query). There are lots of benefits to that, but having the whole world as your library means you can rapidly discover that you’re not the only clever person out there. Should I regard that as a “micro-disappointment?” (I just made another term up, no? Alas, 255 results when I just typed in “micro-disappointment”). But wait, if I divide that by 3 thousand million, the result is .000000085. To a mathematician, that might be a real number, but to a psychologist, who is used to treating p < .05 as significant, and p < .01 as even significanter, p = .000000085 is functionally zero. So I can still reward myself with another M&M for being, if not absolutely clever, at least micro-clever).

References:

Kenrick, D. T., & Cialdini, R. B. (1977). Romantic attraction: Misattribution versus reinforcement explanations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(6), 381-391.

Mahoney, M. J. (1974). Self-control: Power to the person. Brooks/Cole Pub. Co.

Meichenbaum, D. (1979). Cognitive-Behavior modification: An integrative approach: New York: Plenum Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Simon and Schuster, 1953.

Stewart, R. (2005). The places in between. New York: Houghton Mifflin.