Lessons from — What Doesn’t Kill Us & The Wim Hoff Method

I read this book because I’m very interested in the Wim Hoff method. The book is but a little longer than it should be. But hey, no problem as we can always skip the parts we don’t need and so I did.
I summarized and quoted the most existing lessons, here they are.

Humans evolved with environmental stressors, it is good to have them

Modern humans live in an environment so perfectly fine-tuned for our comfort, our bodies rarely ever get exposed to stress anymore. In our distant past, the climate was one of the main stressors our ancestors endured. Cold, harsh temperatures.

It turns out that no environmental extreme induces as many changes in human physiology as the cold does.

So, how did our ancestors survive? The answer is, their bodies were perfectly adapted to meet the challenges. And those genes still exist in our genetic pool, they are just turned off for the most part.

There’s an entire hidden physiology in our bodies that operates on evolutionary programming most of us make no attempt to unlock.

Three types of nervous systems

First, it is important to understand the three types of muscle control that emerge from our nervous system. There are the muscles we can control voluntarily, this part is called the somantic nervous system. Then there are the muscles that we have almost no control over, like the heart, the motion of the vascular system, speed of digestion, and dilation of our pupils. All these for part of the autonomic nervous system.

And then there is the third one, this group is shared between the autonomic and somatic systems. Breathing for instance. Blinking of our eyes. We can perform those actions consciously, but as soon as we focus elsewhere, our autonomic nervous system takes over. This third group is the one very interesting to us because it can act as an interface to train the automatic nervous system voluntarily.

The Wedge

We are able to withstand certain urges consciously. For instance, trying to delay a snooze. Standing in the snow. Taking a cold shower. All those acts demand certain willpower, which enables us to override our natural urges to act.

It seems like a small thing, but it’s a window into the root of a human power, and a place that, if exercised, can help unlock the body’s hidden biology. Freedivers who descend hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean on a single breath sometimes call it the “master switch”: It’s the point where the body meets the mind.
Any preprogrammed physical response is potentially susceptible to the wedge as long as it has three key characteristics. First there needs to be a clearly identifiable external stimulus. Second, that stimulus must trigger a predictable automatic biological response or reflex. Third, that physical response must elicit a feeling or sensation you can visualize or imagine independently of the external trigger. If the reflex has these characteristics, then using the wedge is as simple as setting up an environmental stimulus and then resisting the sensation that it triggers. Over time it becomes easier to maintain the tension between reflex and mental control.
So training starts with one of the most fundamental human reflexes: the urge to breathe. When the Buddha first taught meditation to his followers, he recommended that they start by watching their breath move in and out of their body. Breathwork is a staple of every yoga class, as students move their bodies in sync with their lungs. The Wim Hof Method tasks students to hold their breath until they can’t take it anymore. And then hold it just a little longer. This is the quickest and probably safest way to build your own wedge.
The urge to gasp for air is not directly linked to the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream. That’s because, for some reason that has been lost in the convoluted process of evolution, the body cannot sense oxygen, only its byproduct. Breathing is a two-part process — inhaling to bring oxygen to the lungs and exhaling to expel carbon dioxide (CO2). When the brain senses too much CO2 in the bloodstream, the chest tightens, vision blurs, and just about every muscle from the abdomen to the forehead clenches down hard. When we talk about this sensation we usually say that we need to take a breath. However, on a physiological level your body wants to expel CO2. It sounds counterintuitive but it’s easy enough to test. Take a deep breath in and hold it until you feel the urge to breathe. Then release a little bit of air. With less CO2 in your lungs you will feel like you can hold your breath a little bit longer. That’s because you’ve removed a potentially poisonous waste product from your body and your nervous system has turned off the alarm bells.
This basic gas exchange creates an opportunity to trick your nervous system into extending the amount of time that you can hold your breath, thus leading to the very first training technique to crack into your nervous system.

Training the Wedge

First, let’s establish your baseline. Take a deep breath and stopwatch yourself to see how long you can hold it. Write down your baseline. Now it is time to train. Start by sitting or lying down, take 30 deep breaths. Breathe in deeply, but don’t exhale all the way down, just let go. Don’t force the exhale. Then breath in again. Do it 30 times. Pretty soon, especially if you are doing this the first time, you will feel a little dizzy, or tingling sensations. This is completely normal. After 30 breaths your blood will be saturated with oxygen and you will have cleared out most of the CO2 in your system. Now stop breathing and with a full chest hold on and time yourself to see how long it takes you to reach the point where you feel an urge to gasp. Once you reach the point where you feel an urge, or reflex to breath, when you can’t stand it anymore, let the air out of your lungs. It will give you a little more time without having to breathe in.
Most people will have a dramatic improvement in how long they can hold their breath after a few of these cycles.

One remarkable account of the application of the Wim Hoff method

Of course, anecdotes don’t serve as hard evidence. But as new things are explored, anecdotes are usually the first signs to emerge. Here is my favorite one from this book.

Kasper van der Meulen was running a race when six skittish-looking horses trotted in a pack as they passed him. One of them bucked and kicked its back leg into his body. He doesn’t remember the actual strike, nor did he hear the bone in his arm snap. The first thing he can actually remember was the sound of his heart pumping loudly in his ears. When he looked down, he saw a bulge under his forearm, a clear indication that something was seriously wrong. At the very least the arm was broken. Strangely, in the moment, at least, it didn’t actually hurt. Enough endorphins rushed through his system that he felt pretty, well, normal. But when the woman who had been riding the horse came to him in hysterics asking if he’d broken something, he knew that he would have to get to the hospital. “I’m not a doctor, but . . .” he started saying while dangling the awkward and crooked limb for her to ogle. She filled in the rest of the sentence herself.
With his good hand he fished his mobile phone from his marathon vest (it was somewhere mixed in with a pair of peanut butter sandwiches he’d packed for the race) and called his wife to pick him up. He sounded calm on the phone. So calm that she knew something was terribly wrong, and she broke into tears before he even mentioned the horse. She jumped in the car and sped toward him. Knowing that she was a few miles away, van der Meulen meanwhile started focusing on his breathing. He wanted to be ahead of the pain when it finally did set in.
Van der Meulen graduated with one of the very first groups of instructors Hof certified to teach his method. Where Hof can sometimes get lost in his own subject matter and often talks himself through endless tangents about winning the war on bacteria or the importance of universal love, van der Meulen has the advantage of seeing the underlying principles of a subject and putting them into plain Dutch (and English). It helps that his first job out of college was as a science teacher. This occupation required him to break down complex ideas into bite-size chunks for middle school students to digest. Before that, however, van der Meulen spent most of his teen years smoking marijuana and playing video games at home. His dietary habits were terrible, and he ate whatever was both available and fast. By the age of 24 he was so grossly out of shape that he could barely run the length of a city block, let alone a mile. His heart beat irregularly and his blood pressure was seemingly always too high. Worse than that, the 240 pounds he packed on his 6-foot-1 frame made him look a little like Humpty Dumpty ready to fall off a wall. Van der Meulen didn’t feel well and figured that he was just depressed. When a therapist suggested that he might benefit from a little exercise, he was horrified. It was the first time that anyone had told him he was out of shape. But his therapist persisted, saying, “You know, sound body, sound mind.”
So he started making incremental changes to his lifestyle. First with short, breathless runs around the block. Then around the park. He started eating just two large meals a day while fasting the rest of the time. This, he’d read, would help stabilize his insulin production and more closely fit with the patterns that humans evolved with. He also hit the gym. Within 3 years he’d lost 80 pounds. By then he’s wasn’t just running in the neighborhood but covering 60 miles a week on country roads. Conquering new challenges became a way of life. “I found that as soon as I started doing difficult things that everything else in life got easier,” he says. Eventually he found Hof and everything just clicked. The method fit his new persona perfectly, and he geeked out on the biology and budding scientific literature.
He began running marathons and obstacle course races to test himself even more, and it was on one such 20.5-mile trail run that he came across the six-pack of skittish horses. Less than a mile from the finish line and one painful flash of a hoof strike later he was bleeding on the ground and holding his crooked forearm. Eventually the surge of adrenaline began to subside and he could feel fingers of pain creep across his arm and chest. He redoubled his breathing and the rider who was still with him looked terrified.
“You’re hyperventilating,” she said, no doubt thinking she would need to put a brown paper bag over his mouth to stop him from passing out. Van der Meulen shook his head and asked her to let him concentrate. It took 15 minutes for them to walk to the aid station, and from there his wife brought him to the hospital. By the time he was ready for discharge he was actually kind of cheerful.
An X-ray confirmed what van der Meulen already knew. The ulna — the bone opposite the thumb that connects the hand to the elbow — had fractured cleanly into two pieces. He would need surgery, complete with screws. The doctor told him it would be a long recovery. Furthermore, a large purple horseshoe-shaped bruise stretched over his kidney. A nurse offered him an opium-based pain medication while he waited for surgery, but he turned it down. For him, the broken bone was an opportunity for him to practice pain control. The nurse was shocked. She’d never had anyone in his position refuse morphine, but he did. So, long after adrenaline had blunted his pain, van der Meulen breathed consciously for hours and visualized light moving from his lungs to his arm in lieu of a much easier path to painlessness.
The doctors fitted him with a temporary cast and scheduled a surgery for 4 days later. He spent the evening meditating on his injuries, and when he came in for a follow-up appointment the next day the bruises on his ribs and kidneys were gone. The nurse wondered why van der Meulen wasn’t healing like a normal person.
When he finally was admitted to the operating room a few days later, he turned down the drugs again. Doctors gave him only a local anesthetic as they opened up his flesh to set the bone. A few hours later, when he emerged from surgery, a yellowish incision spanned from his wrist halfway to his elbow with broad, inelegant sutures. A nurse told him that he would have to wait for 2 weeks before they could be removed, but asked him to come back the next day so the doctors could have a look at how the surgery took.
Van der Meulen spent the next 4 hours breathing and focusing on his arm. When he tells me this story, I have trouble wrapping my mind around the amount of concentration it must have taken. The effort was constant, but he tells me that it seemed to pay off. When he finally grew tired and went to bed that night, all that was left were the stitches; the resultant swelling from the surgery had markedly subsided. He shows me pictures to prove it. The next day the nurse was shocked.
“Well that went quickly,” he remembers her saying. “In about two weeks the sutures should start to itch, and then you can come back and we’ll take them out.”
Van der Meulen didn’t have to wait quite that long. Three days later the sutures began to itch, but when he called the hospital they said it was far too early to remove them. So his wife took them out herself using a pair of kitchen scissors. When he finally came back to the hospital for his scheduled appointment, the nurse examined both of his arms but the injured limb had healed so neatly that she couldn’t tell which one had been through surgery without asking van der Meulen. When the doctor looked for himself he shrugged. “You are certainly a medical anomaly,” he told his patient.
Yet for van der Meulen, his experience of healing is not so different from those of other people who have studied the method. Nonetheless, his is a go-to story in all of Hof’s instructor sessions. At one lecture, as Hof sat in the audience evaluating his disciples, van der Meulen explained how he dropped everything in his life for a few weeks and just breathed and willed his arm to get better. It was exhausting and all encompassing, but the results were real and specific. Hof was almost in tears at the end of the lecture. Not only had he found someone who could help with the growing burden of teaching people the method, he had found someone who understood how the process worked in his own body. It was the same technique that Hof had used when he self-treated his frostbitten feet. “That is exactly how it works!” he said to van der Meulen when the talk was over.

The study that changed Textbooks

Now let’s dive into some real science. This study is what really directed my attention to the Wim Hof method.

In 2011, Hof met with Dutch immunologists Peter Pickkers and Matthijs Kox at Radboud University after making the outrageous claim that he could consciously subdue or ramp up his immune system at will. It was a claim that was, by definition, impossible. The prevailing medical logic at the time held that there was a firewall between the autonomic and somatic nervous systems. The immune system wasn’t even supposed to be connected to the brain at all. Nonetheless, Kox and Pickkers were curious, and if anyone could test Hof’s claims it was them. Until this point much of Pickker’s career had been devoted to developing tests that evaluated the effectiveness of immunosuppressive drugs. While turning off the immune system is not usually a great idea, in some cases — such as when someone gets a kidney transplant and their body might reject the donor organ, or in the face of an aggressive autoimmune disease — there is no other way for a person to survive. In 2011 Kox was Pickker’s graduate student looking to finish his PhD and distinguish himself in the medical community. The test that they devised aimed to trick a person’s immune system into believing that it was infected with a deadly strain of E. coli. Under normal circumstances, once the immune system detects E. coli it starts to produce antibodies and mounts an aggressive fever response to stop the infection before it spreads. People whose immune systems are already compromised, such as by a drug or sickness, continue on as if nothing happened. So the test he devised for Hof was simple: He’d inject him with the dead bacteria and see how he responded.
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, when the team injected the solution into Hof’s bloodstream he showed almost no reaction at all — a result that astounded the scientists and helped earn Kox an award for his PhD dissertation on anti-inflammatory pathways. If the results held up to scrutiny, there would be enormous implications for anyone suffering from an autoimmune disease. However, the scientific community was far from willing to admit to a medical breakthrough or start rewriting medical textbooks. The first and most prevalent criticism of the Pickkers and Kox study was that perhaps Hof was a genetic anomaly. Sure, maybe Hof could affect his immune system, but he was probably just an exception to the rule — some sort of freak of nature, not a miracle worker. So in 2012 Pickkers and Kox designed a second experiment. This time they wouldn’t test Hof. Instead they would tell him to teach other people his technique and see if those students achieved similar results.
At first blush you would think that locating 30 people to volunteer for a bacterial injection that makes 99 percent of people feel terrible would be an uphill battle. But when the Dutch researchers announced the impending study at the university campus and told students that they would have a chance to study with Wim Hof, they fielded more applications than they knew how to handle. The study split volunteers into two groups. Twelve people in the control group would go about their normal lives in Holland, while the second group of 18 would travel to Poland to study Hof’s techniques of ice baths and breathing for 10 days. Predictably, no one wanted to be in the control group, so Hof volunteered to teach his methods to the people in the control group (those who wouldn’t go to Poland) after the test was over.
One week after I left Poland after summiting Mount Snezka, three instructors flew to the farmhouse and Hof taught the active group three basic techniques: cold exposure in the snow, focused third-eye meditation, and sequential muscle retention after hyperventilation. They climbed up the same mountain that I did and baked in the same sauna. When they returned from their trip the volunteers continued to practice on their own for 5 days before showing up to Pickkers and Kox’s lab for supervised injections. The results were astonishing.
Even after such a short training program the active group showed positive levels of epinephrine as well as an increased amount of anti-inflammatory molecules in their blood. They had fewer fever-like symptoms than the control group experienced, and their cortisol levels returned to normal much quicker. To quote the subsequent journal article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Hitherto, both the autonomic nervous system and innate immune system were regarded as systems that cannot be voluntarily influenced. The present study demonstrates that, through practicing techniques learned in a short-term training program, the sympathetic nervous systems and immune system can indeed be voluntarily influenced.” This short declarative statement forced the scientific community to completely reevaluate their understanding of the immune system. The article earned a mention on the journal Nature’s website and caught fire across the internet, lending scientific credibility to Wim Hof’s program. If the finding continues to hold up to scientific scrutiny, then it would seem to have potential implications for a huge variety of illnesses — from autoimmune conditions to diabetes to bacterial infections to food allergies to, well, anything. If not an actual cure for any of these, environmental stimulation adds an important dynamic to the overall picture for treating human illness.

If you like this book, you can get it here.

Lessons from — What Doesn’t Kill Us & The Wim Hoff Method was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone is a genius in a bull market

Do you remember the crypto hype a while back? All of a sudden everyone seemed to be an expert in investing and crypto. Therein lies the lesson, in a bull market everyone is a genius. The same applies in Business which is why you have to practice to be brutally honest with yourself. It might just be that your business is in a very profitable place not because it creates more value compared to other similar business, but because it is riding a success tide.
But those waves don’t last forever. And as Warren Buffet says, when the tide goes out you see who’s swimming naked. Make sure you are offering the best possible value!

Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles

Often as entrepreneurs, we are tempted to tackle new things, take new business directions. But that could be a big mistake as Mark points out, taking on new challenges will only dilute your ability to win the wars you are in and increase the risk of injuring your primary business or core competencies. Win the battles you are in first, then worry about expansion internationally or into new businesses.

Don’t drown in opportunity

Entrepreneurs like to go crazy with ideas, especially if they encounter some rough patch or challenge. But you shouldn’t fall prey to the temptation to take new directions. Instead, you should know what your business’s core competencies are and make sure that your company focuses on being the absolute best on them.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Three business lessons from Billionaire Mark Cuban was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is almost common knowledge by now but I still am surprised at how easy it is to try to be fake just to impress people or being accepted. But it is foolish. Most perceive if we aren’t authentic and they don’t like it. I feel like being more myself is another key element of the long list of benefits I get from meditation.

You also got to Understand the difference between who you are vs who you wish you were. You can’t really start building yourself If you constantly bullshit yourself. Self-awareness is key in the success game. Start doing a little introspection, maybe even mindfulness meditation.

Learn
to do you, and watch the world come to you.

I
hugely recommend this
video from Gary for some lessons that will bring you on the path
to progress.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Learn from the best but be yourself was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

El problema es que cuando pensamos que no podemos lograr algo por alguna razón, por ejemplo “que no es realístico”, dejamos de prepararnos y automáticamente creamos una profecía autocumplida porque si no hacemos aunque sea lo básico para poder aprovechar las oportunidades que podrían surgir, no podremos aprovecharlos o peor, ni siquiera vamos a verlas cuando vienen.

I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.

La frase de arriba resume muy bien a esta idea. Al final lo más importante que puedes hacer por más que tal vez no tendrás la oportunidad que buscas, es estar preparado. Desde que leí la biografía de Arnold me quedó grabada lo que dijo en una parte, “From now on if I lost, I would be able to walk away with a big smile because I had done everything I could to prepare.” Aunque fallemos a veces en algo muy importante para nosotros, podemos sentirnos bien con la certeza de que dimos lo mejor que pudimos en su momento.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Prepárate como si fuera que lo vas a lograr was originally published in Karlbooklover Español on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But Learned Helplessness is not any self-help book. This book is based on proven principles of psychology. The author takes you through the entire process of how he discovered that people can learn to be helpless, and thus can learn to stop being helpless. The first experiments were done on animals but later many have been done on people and groups of people. Here are some lessons from this book.

Self-esteem is a meter of how well you do, not an end in itself

In the 1960s the self-esteem movement started in California. The idea of California's legislature was that self-esteem should be taught in every classroom as a “vaccine” against the social ills of the depression. This is the movement that has made competition a dirty word. But is self-esteem a worthwhile goal?

I am not against self-esteem, but I believe that self-esteem is just a meter that reads out the state of the system. It is not an end in itself. When you are doing well in school or work, when you are doing well with the people you love, when you are doing well in play, the meter will register high. When you are doing badly, it will register low.

The author explains that there is nothing in the literature that shows that self-esteem itself causes an improvement in performance. It is just a symptom or correlate of how well a person is doing. More on self-esteem here.

If boosting self-esteem is no solution for the epidemics of depression and violence among young people then what can be done? Learned Optimism to the rescue. The idea is, take people in risk of depression and teach them learned optimism, thereby preventing depressive and anxiety disorders.

The effect of Learned Optimism

The benefits of learned optimism grow over time. As an experiment in which pre-puberty children were taught the skills of learned optimism showed. Children in the control group went through puberty, got their first sexual rejections, and moved from top dog in middle school to the bottom of the heap in high school.

At twenty-four months forty-four percent of them had moderate to severe depressive symptoms, whereas only twenty-two percent of the optimism group had moderate or severe symptoms.

Hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. Experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and across basically the entire life. Read The Happiness Advantage for more on this.

Helplessness, the root cause of pessimism

Helplessness is a state in which you think that nothing you do affects what happens to you. It lies at the core of pessimism.

Our life begins in utter helplessness, we depend on others to rise up. Gradually we gain more personal control growing up. Personal control is the opposite of helplessness. Still, many things In life are outside of our control. But it is how we think about this realm of life that enhances or diminishes the control we have over it.

Thoughts are not merely reactions, they change what ensues. The very thought that nothing we do matters will prevent us from acting!

And so we cede control to our peers or circumstances. When we overestimate our helplessness other forces take control and shape our future.

Who never gives up

Some people give up easily, others don’t. People who give up easily usually think something like “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.”

Others, those who resist giving in to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and besides, there’s much more in life.”

Explanatory style

We don’t just feel a certain way when events occur. Those feelings are a result of our thinking, and how we explain the events of our lives to ourselves. It is the great modulator of learned helplessness. An optimistic explanatory style stops learned helplessness and a pessimistic one spreads helplessness.

How an optimistic explanatory style can change a persons outlook on life

Learned helplessness can be cured by teaching people to think differently about what caused them to fail. The subject learns that her actions do make a difference. The earlier in life such mastery is owned, the more effective the immunization against helplessness as studies showed.

Drugs relieve depression but don’t solve the underlying issue, cognitive therapy, a therapy designed to teach people how to change their thinking, unlike drugs, solve the root of the problem and thus have the potential to cure depression over the long term.

There is so much more I want to share from this book but I have to stop somewhere. In summary, this book will teach you clinically proven methods to change how you think about and consequently react to events which will dramatically improve the path your life takes over the years.

If you want a copy of the book you can get it here.

Cheers, I hope you give it a try. I benefited greatly from this book

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Learned Optimism was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Training with
weights was once a big part of my life which I neglected for years. I
followed advice from someone on YouTube, a principle I learned from a
book and my own intuition and bought some equipment which now gives
me the freedom to train at home whenever I want.

If there is
something I learned through experience in 2018 is that consistency
pays of eventually. You gotta thrust in the process resulting from
the work you put in. There was something very valuable I had to
sacrifice though, reading time. Yes that is correct, I had to
sacrifice time from one of the activities I most love, in order to be
able to meditate for about two hours a day which was my goal.

That’s what I’m
going to change this year, I’m going to free up time to read.
What’s not going to change is that I’ll invest time in myself,
actually it is going to change because I will MASSIVELY ramp-up
investment in myself.

What is my why? It’s
starting to become fun and I noticed that my personal success is
proportional to the positive impact I can make in the world.

This blog is a way
for me to share things that helped me, so that more people may
benefit from them.

I’m so grateful
for all of you, especially if my content has helped you in any way.
I’m so looking forward to publish on a regular basis again this
year!

Big cheers to you
all!

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

2019 goals — INVESTMENT was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Michael became one of the best basketball players not because he was talented — he wasn’t, he actually got kicked out of his college basketball team — but because he was confident in the hard work he put in. He was confident in that if he’d put in the work, and listen to his coach, he could become one of the best.

Tai’s mentor Allan
Nation said “Ignore 99% of people but if you find that one that
truly knows what they’re talking about, listen to them!” I found
this to be so true for me. I’ve read many books of people but it
wasn’t until I found truly wise people like Charlie Munger and
Warren Buffett, that I started absorbing everything, every book,
every interview I could find about them.

So I’m sorry if I offend people who think they can just sit on their ass all day thinking that they can magically attract good outcomes, you will have to place that faith on the work you put in to achieve your goal, whether that is becoming happier, wealthier or whatever else. At least that’s the only reliable way I’ve learned so far through experience, observation and reading many books.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Confidence, delusion, faith and your progress was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Explanatory Style
Across Frontiers

IN 1983 I WENT to
Munich to attend the Congress of the International Society for the
Study of Behavioral Development, and on the second day I fell into
conversation with an intense young German graduate student who
introduced herself simply as Ele. “Let me tell you the idea I
had when you were talking this morning about the CAVE technique,”
she said. “But first let me ask a question. Do you think that
the benefits of optimism and the dangers of pessimism and
helplessness and passivity reflect universal laws of human nature, or
do they hold true only in our kind of societyWesternized, I mean,
like America and West Germany?” That was a good question. I told
her I sometimes wondered myself whether or not our concern with
control and with optimism was conditioned by advertising on the one
hand and the Puritan ethic on the other. Depression, I said, doesn’t
seem to occur in non-Western cultures at anything like the epidemic
rate it does in Westernized ones. Perhaps cultures that aren’t
obsessed with achievement don’t suffer the effects of helplessness
and pessimism the way we do. Perhaps, I suggested, lessons from the
animal kingdom were relevant. It isn’t just Westernized men and women
who show the signs of depression when they experience loss and
helplessness. Both in nature and in the laboratory, animals respond
to helplessness with symptoms amazingly parallel to those of
Westernized human beings. Chimpanzees reacting to the death of other
chimpanzees; rats reacting to inescapable shock; goldfish, dogs, even
cockroaches act very much like we do when we fail. I suspect, I said,
that when human cultures don’t respond to loss and helplessness with
depression, it’s because the punishment of endless poverty, of
thousands of years of having two out of three children die young, has
beaten the natural response of depression out of the culture. “I
don’t believe that Westernized human beings have been propagandized
into depression, brainwashed into the ethic of control,” I said.
“But to say that the desire for control and the devastating
response to helplessness are natural is not to say that optimism
works universally.” Consider success at work and in politics,
for example, I said. Optimism works well for American life-insurance
salesmen and for candidates who want to be president of the United
States. But it’s hard to imagine the understated Englishman reacting
well to the never-give-up salesman. Or the dour Swedish voter
electing an Eisenhower. Or the Japanese taking kindly to someone who
always blames others for his failures. I said I thought the
learned-optimism approach probably would, in fact, provide relief
from the torment of depression in these cultures but that optimism
would have to be adapted to other styles in the workplace or in
politics. The trouble was, though, that not much work had been done
yet on examining how optimism works from one culture to the next.
“But tell me,” I asked, “what was that idea you had
while I was lecturing on the CAVE technique?” “I think I
have found a way,” said Ele, “to discover how much hope and
despair there is across cultures and across history. For instance, is
there such a thing as a national explanatory style, one that predicts
how a nation or a people will behave in crisis? Does one particular
form of government engender more hope than another?” Ele’s
questions were great, I replied, but almost unanswerable. Let’s say
we learned, by “CA VEing” things they wrote or said or
sang, that Bulgarians have a better explanatory style than Navajos
do. That result would be uninterpretable.-It might be more macho to
say optimistic things in one culture than in the other. The peoples
experience different weather, have different histories and gene
pools, live on different continents. Any difference in explanatory
style between Bulgarians and Navajos could be explained in a thousand
ways other than a difference in the underlying amount of hope or
despair. “If you do the wrong sort of comparison,” Ele
said, “yes. But I wasn’t thinking of Navajos and Bulgarians. I
was thinking of a much more similar pair of cultures-East and West
Berlin. They are in the same place, they have the same weather, they
speak the same dialect, emotional words and gestures mean the same
thing, they have the same history up until 1945. They differ only in
political system since then. They are like identical twins reared
apart for forty years. They seem a perfect way of asking if despair
is different across political systems-with everything else held
constant.” The next day at the congress, I told a professor from
Zurich about this creative graduate student I’d met the day before.
After I described her and mentioned that she called herself Ele, he
told me she was the Princess Gabriele zu Oettingen-Oettingen und
Oettingen-Spielberg, one of Bavaria’s most promising young
scientists. My conversation with Gabriele continued the next day over
tea. I said I agreed that East versus West Berlin differences in
explanatory style-if found-could be meaningfully interpreted as
stemming only from communism versus capitalism. But how, I asked,
could she actually get the material to compare? She couldn’t just
cross the Wall and hand out optimism questionnaires to a random
sample of East Berliners. “Not in the present political
climate,” she agreed. (Andropov was then premier of the Soviet
Union.) “But all I need is writings from both cities, writings
that are exactly comparable. They have to be about the same events,
occurring at the same time. And they should be neutral eventsnot
politics or economics or mental health. And I’ve thought of just the
thing,” she said. “In about four months, the winter
Olympics will take place in Yugoslavia. They will be reported in
great detail in both East and West Berlin newspapers. Like most
sports reporting, they will be filled with causal statements from
athletes and reporters, about victories and about defeats. I want to
CA VE them in their entirety and see which culture is more
pessimistic. This will be a demonstration that the quantity of hope
can be compared across cultures.” I asked what her predictions
were. She expected that East German explanatory style, at least in
the sports pages, would be more optimistic. The East Germans, after
all, were an outstanding Olympic nation, and the newspapers were
emphatically organs of the state. Part of their job was to keep
morale up. This wasn’t my prediction, but I kept my silence. Over the
next three months I had several trans-Atlantic phone conversations
with Gabriele and received a number of letters from her. She was
worried about the mechanics of getting the newspapers from East
Berlin, since it was sometimes difficult to take written material
across the Wall. She had arranged to have a mechanic friend in East
Berlin send her worthless kitchen objects, broken cups and bent
forks, by mail-wrapped in newspaper, the sports pages of course. But
this proved to be unnecessary. During the Olympics, she was able to
walk through the Berlin checkpoints unchallenged, carrying as many
East Berlin newspapers as she wanted. Next came the labor, combing
through the three West Berlin and three East Berlin newspapers for
the entire duration of the Olympics, extracting and rating the
event-explanation quotes. Gabriele found 381 quotes. Here are some of
the athletes’ and reporters’ optimistic explanations. An ice racer
could not stand the pace because “on this day there was

no morning sun to cover the ice with a mirror-like ice film” Negative event (4); a skier fell because “an avalanche of snow from nearby trees covered the visor of her helmet” Negative event (4); athletes were not afraid because “we just know that we will be stronger than our competitors” Positive event (16). These were among the pessimistic explanations: A disaster came because “she is in such bad shape” Negative event (17); “He had to hold back tears. His hope for a medal had gone” Negative event (17); an athlete succeeded because “our competitors had been drinking all night before” Positive event (3). But who made the optimistic statements and who made the pessimistic ones? The answers were a complete surprise to Gabriele. The East German statements were much more pessimistic than the West German ones. What made this finding even more remarkable was how well the East Germans did in the games. The East Germans won twenty-four medals and the West Germans only four. So the East Berlin papers had many more good events to report: Indeed, 61 percent of the East’s explanations were about good events for the East and only 47 percent of the West’s were about good events for the West. Nevertheless, the tone of East Berlin’s reportage was much bleaker than that of West Berlin’s. “I’m astonished by my results,” Gabriele told me. “As strong as they are, I’m not going to believe them until I find some other way to see if East Berliners are more pessimistic and depressed than West Berliners. I’ve tried getting accurate suicide and hospital statistics from East Berlin to compare to West Berlin, but of course, I can’t get them.” Gabriele’s Ph.D. was not in psychology but in human ethology, a branch of biology that deals with observing people in the natural environment and noting in great detail what they do. It started with Konrad Lorenz’s observations of ducklings that had “imprinted” on him and then followed him around-they had formed the conviction that he was their mother. His careful observations of nature soon branched out to systematic peoplewatching. Gabriele had earned her degree under the two leading successors of Lorenz. I knew Gabriele had done a lot of minute observations in classrooms full of kids, but I was apprehensive when she told me what she was going to do in the bars of East and West Berlin. “The only way I can think of to get converging support for my CA VE findings,” she wrote, “is to go to East Berlin and rigorously count the signs of despair and then compare them to the same settings in West Berlin. I don’t want to arouse police suspicions, so I’m going to do it in bars.” This is exactly what she did. In the winter of IC)85, she went to thirtyone bars in industrial areas. She chose fourteen in West Berlin and seventeen in East Berlin. These bars, called Kneipen, are where workmen go to drink after work. They were located near each other, separated only by the Wall. She did all the observations in the five weekdays of one week. She would enter a bar and take a seat in a far comer, as inconspicuously as she could. She then focused on groups of patrons and counted what they were doing in five-minute blocks. She counted everything observable that the literature considers related to depression: smiles, laughs, posture, vigorous hand movements, small movements like biting one’s nails. Measured this way, the East Berliners were once again much more depressed than the West Berliners. Sixty-nine percent of West Berliners smiled, but only 23 percent of East Berliners. Fifty percent of West Berliners sat or stood upright, but only 4 percent (!) of East Berliners. Eighty percent of West Berlin workmen had their bodies in an open posture turned toward others-but only 7 percent (!) of the East Berliners did. West Berliners laughed two and a half times as often as East Berliners. These large effects show that East Berliners display much more despair as measured both by words and by body language-than West Berliners do. The findings do not show, however, exactly what causes this difference. Clearly, since the two cultures were one until 1945, the findings say something about the amount of hope engendered by two different political systems. But they do not isolate which aspect of the two systems is responsible for increased or decreased hope. It could be the difference in standard of living, or the difference in freedom of expression or of travel. It could even be the difference in books, music, or food. These findings also fail to tell us whether East Berliners became less hopeful with the advent of the Communist regime and the building of the Wall, or West Berliners have become more hopeful since 1945. All we know is that there is now a difference, with the East showing more despair than the West. But we are working on “CA VEing” the newspaper reporting of every winter Olympics since World War II. That will tell us how hope in East and West Berlin has changed over time.· These findings also show us something else: that there exists a new method for measuring the quantity of hope and despair across cultures. This method allowed Gabriele Oettingen to compare what other scientists thought were incomparable .

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Political systems can instill Hope or Despair in a population was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Casually I stumbled upon the book “Dreaming of Stanford” on YouTube and — what a coincidence — I always wanted to go to Stanford and I was about to go to California State University. I have to say that this book surprised me. The authors although young, show a surprisingly mature and deep insight.

Here I’ll share some Notes I made.

Many people chase externally-defined notions of success

The authors share a short story about Nikhil who received a call from a family friend who wanted to enter Stanford but didn’t exactly know why when questioned.

Much like the kid on the phone, many of us strive to enter the “elite universities” but why exactly? Most likely because we heard that entering those Universities gets associated with success in our society, and naturally, we want to be successful. But is it a good idea to try entering if we don’t really have a passion which for a very specific reason would be a good reason to enter one of those Universities?

Stanford was a nice place, but in no way was it the be-all, end-all of academic life.

Don’t let other people drive you into a career that doesn’t excite you!

Have the courage to use your own understanding

… Have the courage to use your own understanding! — that is the motto of enlightenment. — Immanuel Kant

This quote struck me deeply in a positive way because it’s the eloquent version of what I’ve been feeling for a long time. You are the one who determines the choices to make which will lead you to a future with vastly different possible outcomes. If you are a student, your life until now has been determined mostly by other people. But that is about to change, you have to learn to make your own decisions! Unlearn all those conditioned authority figures and frameworks, you won’t be happy following something other than your own hearth.

Freedom is to do what you want

It’s not about having the freedom to do whatever you want, but having the freedom to do what you want.

Being a rebel without a cause might seem cool to you, but it is likely just the alarm bell that shows something is off between your true desires and your current situation.

To get closer to a place you want to be in, you have to take focused action, get organized! Being a rebel will only evaporate your effort, you will be like an excited particle bouncing around but with no particular direction.

You can’t know what you want to be without knowing what you want to do

What do you want to be if when you grow up? Many people as myself, don’t liked this typical question kids get asked. How are we supposed to know what we want to be? We don’t even know 1% of the options we have.

If you have a passion, the answer is much easier but still a question like “What’s your passion” can make people uncomfortable. We might like something we do, but it’s not like that “passion” everyone talks about. We might become discouraged from continuing to do something because we feel like it’s not our passion. But a passion often needs to be developed over time, and we won’t get there without giving something time.

Research shows that for most people, passion comes after they try somthing, discover they like it and develop mastery.

So try different things, take the “Scattershot Approach” to trying out things and give each activity some time to see if it might be something you’d like to give more time.

Cut out bullshit activities to free up time

You might think and convince yourself that you can’t possibly try out new activities because you don’t have time. But that is often a convenience lie we tell ourselves to feel better. The truth is, most of us do a lot of things — like those externally defined notions of success — that can be categorized as BS activities. Cut those out to free up time for your new activities.

Define your life philosophy

Finding and developing your passion is one thing, but you still have to have a grand vision of where you want to be in 5–20 years. It is here where you have to define your mission or life philosophy. Jim Ron’s book My philosophy for successful living comes to my mind while writing this. A book which helped me a lot to get on track a while back. The point is, you have to define the worthwhile things that you want to live by.

“I already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon I learned from Carl [Sagan] the kind of person I wanted to become.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson

College is not the answer

So should you go to college? The authors think that a smart and driven individual will sustain herself with or without a college degree.

College can be a great opportunity, but it also is a big opportunity cost. In those 4 years you could accomplish big things if you weren’t pursuing half-heartily a college degree just because “it is the right thing to do.”

You must decide whether college is a productive step to help you achieve your overarching mission.

To find out whether you college is the way to go, talk to parties that don’t have a stake in the matter as well as parties that do.

Fundamentals are important, learn the fundamentals

If your interest is very specific it is tempting to just jump deep into that particular topic. But you will likely have problems understanding it if you don’t know the fundamentals. A good way to learn fundamentals is to apply the Feynman learning method. You should also study books like A mind for numbers which show how we can become more effective learnershttps://www.karlbooklover.com/a-mind-for-numbers-summary/.

Do things just for fun

Do some things just for shits, with the full knowledge that you are doing it just for shits and it will never be useful to you in any way, shape, or form.

If you are interested in the book, you can get it here.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Lessons from Dreaming of Stanford was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Charlie Munger, the Billionaire who is known for his wisdom about decision making and rationality, has called himself a “cheerful pessimist.” I’d like to adopt his style and here is why. When someone asked Martin Seligman — the father of positive psychology — about helping him to change the top executives of his company to become optimists, he was reluctant. The reason is that he was worried about the harm he might do if those executive corps might need a healthy dose of pessimism. Someone needs to put breaks on the overly optimistic executives after all.

There is considerable evidence that depressed people are wiser as an experiment from Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson showed. Test subjects were given three different degrees of control over the lighting of a light. One group had perfect control, the second group had no control whatsoever. The people in both groups then were asked to judge how much control they had. Depressed people were very accurate both when they had control and when they didn’t. But the nondepressed people judged that they had a great deal of control even if they didn’t!

The investigators then wondered if switching lights might not important enough to people, so they added monetary rewards. If the light went on the subjects won money, if it didn’t they lost money. Under one condition all the people had some control, but the task was rigged so that everyone lost money. In this situation, the nondepressed people said they had less control than they actually had. When the task was rigged so that they won money, they said they had more control than they actually had. Depressed people, on the other hand, were rock solid and accurate whether they won or lost.

Now I understand why the best Investors like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have such a cheerful dose of pessimism! Reading the book Learned Optimism was the first time I read about actual experiments showing the use of practical pessimism. Other experiments showed that pessimistic people are much more accurate when they asses their own skills. Depressed people also are more accurate when they recall memories of the past. In short, lopsidedness among nondepressives and evenhandedness among depressives seems to be the norm.

It is important to notice however that these findings don’t make pessimism superior to optimism. It is still the optimists who have more success in life. They have what it takes to take action, while the pessimists become lethargic. Evolution has preserved certain pessimism because it serves us in some situations. But do we have to become pessimists just to get the benefits of seeing things more clearly? I don’t think so. I think we can train ourselves to become more prudent and realistic while preserving optimism for the end goal.

Perhaps
the best blend is to become cheerful pessimists like Charlie Munger.

Originally published at Karlbooklover.

Cheerful Pessimism was originally published in Booklover on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.