Nice Guys

We have a preoccupation with success and what’s responsible for it.  Malcolm Galdwell’s latest book, Outliers, is an attempt to dispel some common myths about what makes people successful, and in a recent column, David Brooks makes the case that genius is more about practice than IQ. But increasingly I’m becoming convinced that success in the business world is about being nice.

It’s always interesting to work with smart people and marvel at how quickly their minds process information, and it’s a treat to experience the really talented.  But if I think back to people I’ve known that are consistently and enduringly successful, the common denominator is that they’re quite likable.  I suspect that this is the case because it’s one thing to come up with a smart business idea, but it’s quite another to implement it and build a business around it, because that involves working through people.

Cognitive scientists believe that our oversized brains evolved to enable us to manage social relations.  All of the rest of what we need to do is easy, but dealing with people is complicated by how complicated they are.  They can say one thing and do another, they can change from moment to moment, and they can even be consciously unaware of what they’re doing.  While designing a sophisticated new chip has its own set of challenges, at least it doesn’t have a mind of its own that is constantly changing.

Likable people are successful because other people want to help them be successful. Maybe it’s our mirror neurons mimicking their mental state, but in their presence we too want to be likable, so we’re eager to do what they want us to do.  Or maybe it’s just as simple as wanting to repay their kindness with our own.

The idea that success is about being nice is appealing because in contrast to IQ or specialized talent, it’s an ability we all share.  To be likable, we simply have to behave the way those we find likable behave.  The only challenge is to resist being so caught up in ourselves that we don’t focus enough on others.  This means having the discipline to consistently direct our attention outward.  If we do it enough, we strengthen the neural networks responsible for it. Perhaps being nice really is a talent, but like other talents, it’s a product of practice, not genius.

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In Data We Trust

So much of what we’re learning from neuroscience can’t help but strike us as utterly fantastic, like the fact that the world we experience exists only in our heads, or that reason has little or nothing to do with how we make decisions.  At the same time, those that are trying to draw practical applications from the research often end up sounding like self-help books.  When we are advised to think positive thoughts, or win friends by stepping into the shoes of others, it sure sounds like Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carneige.

This makes it difficult to see the latest research as offering anything of value, or at least anything that’s new.  In truth, most of what we’re learning and the advice it generates can be found in Plato’s writings.  But there is a major difference: we now have hard scientific data to back up the claims.  It’s one thing to accept on faith that being clear on our values will enable us to lead a good life.  It’s quite another thing to know that high level ideas embedded in neural networks will chemically key the firing of lower level thinking and behavior aligned with them.

Because regardless of questions about its role in decision-making, our conscious reasoning can direct our attention.  If we’re logically convinced that big ideas are important, we’ll spend more time attending to them.  When we know that there are mirror neurons that enable us to empathize, and that they’re missing from people suffering from autism, we’ll be a little more willing to direct our attention to what those neurons can teach us.

While the more we learn about the brain, the more we recognize how little conscious control we have over it, we can direct our attention and we can improve our ability to focus.  Meditation has been shown to help children with ADD, and Eric Kandel’s work has demonstrated that the more we use a neural network, the stronger it becomes.  With practice, we become better at any skill, physical or mental.

While Napoleon Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich may have oversimplified the path to success, our thinking can change the way we see the world, the way we act, and the way others see us.  While it takes discipline to focus our minds on positive outcomes, at least now we have reasons to give it a try.

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What's Your Story?

There is nothing new about seeing our lives as stories.  In Macbeth, Shakespeare defines life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  but as Jonah Lehrer notes in his post “Confabulations,” cognitive neuroscience suggests that stories are how we define ourselves.  This idea has an interesting practical application for the management of conflict.

We struggle to keep our view of the world consistent, and we unconsciously employ a number of techniques to reduce any cognitive dissonance.  When we argue with people, we often think that the force of our reason, or by reason of our force, we can convince them to see things our way.  But that’s not what happens.  Whatever we say is instead ignored or rationalized so that the story they are telling remains intact.

We can get huffy with righteous indignation as we see ourselves as the moral ones, but those we are in conflict with are doing the same.  Ultimately, our emotional outrage gets us nowhere, but the cortisol released, as Ellen Weber explains, does slow our brains down and makes us a bit more idiotic.  We would do better if we looked at the situation strategically.

If we use the self-reinforcing story as a frame to view those we’re arguing with, we get a much better understanding of what we’re up against.  Taking in both how they behave and what they say, we can get a pretty good idea of the story they’re telling, because it would be the same story we would tell in their shoes.  We can bet the main character’s behavior will be blameless.

With their story in mind, we can anticipate their responses to our words and deeds.  We can then determine what approach we need to take to sway them to our point of view, because it will be the same approach it would take to sway us if we were in their shoes. While it will vary from situation to situation, we can count on being more successful if we position what we need others to do as bolstering their self-esteem.

The feeling of righteous indignation is almost as enjoyable as forcefully conveying our righteous indignation to those we think at fault. Yet neither is as enjoyable as successfully resolving a conflict to our benefit.

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