Chapter 12 Managing Your Attitude
Your brain is wired to continuously analyze your environment, your thoughts, and your health, then to use that information to generate a sensation you call your attitude. You know from experience that you do better work and enjoy life more when your attitude is good. If you could control your attitude directly as opposed to letting the environment dictate how you feel on any given day, it would be like a minor superpower. It turns out you do have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and even your environment.
Your attitude affects everything you do in your quest for success and happiness. The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness—if you understand the user interface. For starters, pay attention to the attitudes of people who have recently exercised. You'll discover they are almost always happy and upbeat. Now also look at the attitudes of people who have recently eaten versus people who are hungry. You'll see a big difference. Tired people are grumpy; rested people are less so. Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you're trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy. But what if you're doing everything right on the physical health front yet are still not enjoying life as much as you think you should?
A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. If your life doesn't provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future. Don't worry that your daydreams are unlikely to come true. The power of daydreaming is like the power of well-made movies that can make you laugh or cry. Your body and your mind will respond automatically to whatever images it spends the most time pondering. If you imagine winning a Nobel Prize, buying your own private island, or playing in the NBA, don't worry that those things are unlikely. Putting yourself in that imagination-fueled frame of mind will pep you up. Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.
This is the same reason why you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type—and why it's a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers. Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood, and I'll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment. The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.
Realistically, the last advice you want to hear when you are in a terrible mood is "Think of something happy." If you're experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover. The daydreaming strategy is more of an everyday practice. It won't get you out of a deep slump. For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are the smart buttons to push. Once you get back to your baseline level of happiness, you'll be in a better position to get the benefits of daydreaming.
A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, or making a billion dollars (or all three). I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.
As I write this, I'm shopping for money partners to launch an idea that has the potential to be transformative to the entire economy of the world, assuming it works as planned. Will it succeed? Probably not. But the idea of it excites me and raises my energy today. That's my system.
By the time you read this book, a lot will have transpired with those efforts. Any new business is risky. But for the past several months, my attitude and energy have been sky-high because of the potential my project has for making the world a better place. My imagined future acts as a cue to keep my mood elevated today.
You might be thinking this is all well and good for famous authors and cartoonists, but ordinary people don't have many chances to change the world. I disagree. Ideas change the world routinely, and most of those ideas originate from ordinary people. You might have a patent idea, a product idea, or a process idea that could change the world. Before my cartoon career, I had plenty of big ideas that didn't work out. When one idea failed, I usually had two more to take its place. And every one of my ideas had real-world potential even if the odds were bad.
Don't worry if your idea is a long shot. That's not what matters right now. Today, you want to daydream of your idea being a huge success so you can enjoy the feeling. Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy will help you get there.
Another benefit of having a big, world-changing project is that you almost always end up learning something valuable in the process of failing. And fail you will most of the time, so long as you are dreaming big. But remember, goals are for losers anyway. It's smarter to see your big idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you're a winner every time you wake up.
When I consider taking on a new, big project, I first ask myself who I know that would be helpful and who might want to partner, invest, or just give advice. In my universe of contacts, which is fairly huge at this point in my career, I would say I met half of those folks in the process of failing at one thing or another. And if I ask myself what skills and knowledge I need for my next big idea, invariably that means drawing on knowledge I gained while circling the drain in some doomed project of yore.
Let's say you wake up tomorrow full of energy for your exciting new project. Over the course of the day, you learn a few things in the process of doing your research, and you meet some new people along the way. If you accomplish that and nothing more, you're succeeding—no matter what happens with your project.
The Power of Smiling
Smiling makes you feel better, even if your smile is fake. This is the clearest example of how your brain has a user interface. When you're in a bad mood, the physical act of forcing a smile may trigger the feel-good chemistry in your brain that is associated with happiness. 1,2
The smiling-makes-you-happy quirk is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking-it-until-you-make-it. You'll see this two-way causation in a wide variety of human activities. Later, I'll tell you that putting on exercise clothes will make you feel like working out. I've also discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love. High testosterone can help you win a competition, but winning a competition can also sometimes raise your testosterone.3-7 Being tired makes you want to lie down, but lying down when you are rested can put you in the mood for a nap. Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry.
Understanding this two-way causation is highly useful for boosting your personal energy. To take advantage of it, I find it useful to imagine my mind as a conversation between two individuals. It feels that way because I think in sentences, as if talking to another entity that is also me. One of me tends to be rational and reasonable while the other me is a bit more emotional and instinctual. When the rational me wants to perk up the emotional me—the part of me that controls my energy—the rational me has to act as a programmer and push the right buttons.
The next time you're in a gloomy mood, try smiling at a stranger you pass on the street. You'll be surprised how many people reflexively return the smile, and if you smile often enough, eventually that cue will boot up the happiness subroutine in your brain and release the feel-good chemicals you desire.