The Game of Life

1
1. Introduction
2
I
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
Acknowledgments 2
Introduction 3
1. Survival 9
1a. The illusion of control 10
1b. Self-fulfilling prophecies 34
1c. A range of behaviours 50
1d. Into the myths 68
2. The Game of Life 91
2a. Setting up a game 92
2b. Meaning in symbiosis 106
3. Mastery & Creatorship 137
3a. Self-awareness 138
3b. Effectiveness 158
3c. Growth 185
3d. Creatorship 206
Goal sheet 219
About the authors 222
References 225
1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants”
Isaac Newton
We’d like to dedicate this book to our first few clients. They
gave Stillwater Consulting the opportunity to work with them –
they had to bear with our mistakes as we learned our trade, and
yet were forgiving enough to provide the references that helped
build our practice:
Anupama Mohan and Sujatha Sudheendran of Aditya Birla and the

wonderful team at Gyanodaya learning centre; Sameer Bhakri, and Vishit
Trivedi of CRISIL; Leena Nair, Anuradha Razdan, Sonal Jain & of course
Amit Mehta of Unilever; Shaheen Mistri of Teach for India and Vandana
Goyal of Akanksha; Vandana Scolt and Abhik B of Godrej; Nidhi Reddy of
the Indian School of Business and Kirti Sharda of the Indian Institute of
Management (Ahmedabad); Deepa Nailwal and Laveena Verma of
Hindustan Times
Also, a special thanks to the mentors who taught us:
Govind Rajan, Marcus Marsden, Mark Hemstedt, Ken Ito,

Chris Gentry, Jim Cook, Beth Hollahan Gene Dunway,
Gordon Sutton, Peggy O’ Neal, Cheong Meoh Ching, Julio Olalla, Terrie
Lupberger, Graham Poston and Amelia Rosenberg.
And of course the people who read this book and gave us honest
feedback:
Shivani Smith, Asha Kini, Taylor Jacobson and Ashok Gupta.
Last, but definitely not least, our parents whom we love more
than we can express in words.
This one’s for all of you.
Thank you.
INTRODUCTION
“A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep”
Lao Tzu
As executive coaches and specialists in the field of management

education, we’ve had the privilege of working with many
exceptional leaders across the world, and observed that they
often needed to answer some seemingly straightforward
questions before they could move to the next level of
effectiveness. Questions like:
• What do I want to happen?

• What’s actually happening?
• What do I need to do to make what I want to achieve
actually happen?
However we’ve also noticed that, in the course of jumping down

these rabbit holes, they often found that they needed to answer
harder and more fundamental questions before they could
emerge with clarity on the other side. Questions such as:
• What prices do I need to pay to achieve my goals?

• Am I willing to pay them?
• What are the priorities of my life? What should they be?
• What is a meaningful existence and how can I live one?
In accompanying our clients on these adventures, we looked

around and found that others have travelled these paths before
us, and we realized that there’s a gap that needs to be bridged.
On the one side lies the timeless wisdom that can be found at the
core of the major teachings from around the world, recently
supplemented by research done by bright, tenacious and
passionate social scientists, philosophers and academicians on
perhaps the most important subject of all – how to live a great
life. On the other side lie the people who would use it if it were
made accessible to them – everyone on the planet.
But secular philosophy can often seem dry and irrelevant, and
religious doctrine seems to have achieved its reach at the cost of
dumbing down its core messages to dogmatic and, at times,
seemingly arbitrary rules of morality and rituals.
We need a philosophy for the 21st Century that incorporates the

wisdom of our ancestors, cuts out the empty superstition born
out of ignorance, and replaces it with logic based and research
proven strategies for effective living. The aim of this book is to
present our idea of what that grand unified philosophy for living
might be.
We realize this is an ambitious goal, and perhaps even a reckless

one. No one philosophy will appeal in its entirety to everyone.
Our hope is that the book can at the very least serve as a thought
provoking read that will help you in clarifying and crystallizing
your own philosophy of living, even if it’s through taking the
opposing view on every single idea we present here.
The movement towards constructing a fresh and contemporary
philosophy achieved a breakthrough in the 1950s in America. In
the relative peace and prosperity that followed the Great
depression of the 1930s and the Second World War in the
1940s, Americans were able to refocus on education. Colleges
and academia steeped in western rationalism were increasingly
exposed to Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist and Zen philosophies
of India, the Middle East, China and Japan. At the same time,
European scientists, writers and psychologists, who had come to
the States to escape the devastation and persecution in their
homelands, collaborated with their American counterparts to
add their contributions to this dialogue. It was from this heady
melting pot of conversations that the ‘Human Potential
Movement’ emerged to explore the questions – What are
humans capable of? What does an actualized person look like?
What does a fulfilled life look like?
The exciting developments in psychology, in particular, have

continued in the last few decades. For too long psychology had
been synonymous with psychotherapy. The focus had been on
‘fixing’ a very small sample of people with serious problems.
Thankfully we are finally seeing the emergence of respected
academicians such as Martin Seligman, Tal Ben-Shahar, Philip
Zimbardo, Jonathan Haidt, Howard Gardner, Mihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi, etc. writing popular books on positive
psychology – research on what it takes to live a great life, a
subject relevant to a much wider population. Their conclusions
are better supported empirically and therefore, in our way of
looking at the world at any rate, more grounded than the legion
of mainstream popular self-help books or the well intentioned
but idiosyncratic advice from parents, teachers, friends,
advertisers, politicians, religious leaders, etc.
It may be a while before fulfilment/ life skills/ emotional

intelligence/ self-awareness is taught effectively in schools,
colleges or even as part of a corporate training curriculum. Until
then we will have to rely on popular non-fiction writers to
bridge the gap between this knowledge and the general public.
This book is our contribution in support of this endeavour.
The reason we have titled the book ‘a philosophy of living in the

21st century’ and not ‘a philosophy of living’ is because we
believe that the philosophy of an age is determined by the crisis
of that age. The relevant crises might have been ‘survival’ for
Stone Age man, ‘stability and order’ for the first city
civilizations, ‘heaven and hell’ for the medieval age,
‘superstition’ for the scientists of the Enlightenment and
‘productivity’ for the industrial era. We believe that the crisis of
our age of material abundance is the crisis of ‘meaning’ and,
potentially linked to this, as we look out at the people who don’t
share in this world of abundance, the crisis of ‘inequality’.
Based on the above we’ve concluded that any school of

philosophy will have a shelf life after which it may become
increasingly less relevant. Given the rate of change we see
today, our philosophy for the 21st century may well be
superseded in a few decades. The next crisis may well be linked
to ‘ecological sustainability’ and more imaginatively, maybe in
some distant day, we will need to ask ourselves tough questions
on interspecies ethics as we colonize space and come face to
face with extra-terrestrials!
But those discussions are for another time. The logic for the
structure of this book is based around a core message that runs
through the various chapters:
Our distant ancestors lived in a world of
scarcity, where survival was tenuous. In
today’s world of comparative safety and
abundance, the same fear based and
competitive strategies that were appropriate in
the past often get in the way of us enjoying life
to the fullest extent possible.
This book is divided into three parts
1. Survival
In this section we look at how our evolutionary survival
instincts have been codified into societal belief systems that
individuals internalize through an osmotic process. These
beliefs determine what we think and feel, the actions we
take, the quality of our relationships, and the content of our
lives.
Most of these beliefs simplify our lives but many are

irrational and create results and experiences that we would
never have consciously chosen. However we are so
habituated to them, that they have effectively become
transparent to us. As a result, we can’t change them, and we
continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
The hardest beliefs to change are the ones related to our own
self-image, ego and sense of identity. We will look at how
the results we produce further reinforce the beliefs about
ourselves that generated those results in the first place -
creating vicious cycles in which we can get trapped.
2. The Game of Life
In the second part of the book, we consider what the
alternative is to Survival. We’ve been programmed to
believe that being ‘successful’ or being ‘nice’ will make us
happy but, in many cases, it doesn’t. The actual path to deep
and lasting happiness, in our opinion, requires us to set up
and master, what we call, a ‘Game’.
A ‘Game’, as per our definition, consists of meaningful life

goals of self-expression and contribution, living according to
our own principles (which may or may not match societal
should’s), and prioritizing the important relationships in our
life.
3. Mastery & Creatorship

In the final part of the book we consider how we can move
from Survival to the Game of Life. We look at how we can
build on the foundation of self-awareness so that we make
effective choices, consistent with what’s truly important to
us.
Changing the way we play the game requires us to revise our

beliefs so we devote a chapter on our best practice
methodology in changing beliefs and habits.
In the process of mastering this self-chosen ‘Game of Life’

we develop our ability to handle the uncertainty and
challenges of life. When we can trust ourselves to handle
whatever life throws at us on our own terms, we stop
worrying and living defensively. We start enjoying the
present moment to the fullest and we term this zest and
sense of freedom -‘Creatorship’.
1. Survival
9
THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
“Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac”
Dr. Claire Lewicki, Days of Thunder
Q: Why do we sabotage ourselves?

Q: What are beliefs? Why are they important?
Q: How do we form beliefs?
Q: What are the advantages and disadvantages of beliefs?
Q: Why do we keep irrational beliefs?
Sustainable happiness is the end point of our journey. Our

starting point however, is understanding the mind-set of
Survival - how and why we form distorting beliefs, why we
keep them even when they are ineffective, and the impact
this can have on our lives.
Picture the following scene: You have just eased out of the
showroom with your brand new Porsche open top. The only
thing wider than your grin is the shining chrome grille. But
as you pull into traffic you notice something a little
worrying. When you twist the wheel to the right there is a
long delay before the car responds. You decide to slow
down but the brakes don’t seem to be working.
Understandably losing your calm a little bit, you beep on
your horn to warn people to get out of the way and after
checking your rear view mirror you yank on the handbrake.
It comes off in your hand! Suddenly the car accelerates,
takes a sharp left on two wheels and topples over onto its
side. As the airbag inflates in your face you wonder
whether you should have bought a Volvo instead.
10
The illusion of control
In a situation like the one above there would be a pretty

extensive post mortem to figure out what had gone wrong
with the car before you would be convinced to take the
wheel again. However in life, when we lose control, we
rarely conduct debriefs. We get up, dust ourselves off, and
get back in the car. And so we make the same avoidable
mistakes again and again. Sometimes it feels like we don’t
have complete control over our actions or the direction they
take us.
• Leon wanted to file his tax returns on time but there

was a delay between when he decided to do it and when
he actually got around to doing it - four months after
the deadline.
• Lee wants to spend more time at home with the family
but feels himself unable to do so because of the
workload at office
• Maria wants to develop her team and motivate them but
finds herself getting frustrated and angry with them.
She knows they bitch about her and wishes the
relationships weren’t so stressful but can’t see any
alternative given the amount of work she needs to get
out of them.
• Farhan has been trying to exercise regularly three times
a week and eat healthily but, since he left college, has
completely lost his fitness. Finally his doctor tells him
that his cholesterol levels are off the chart. Not only
that, but his back pain is worse than ever. His body
seems to be coming apart
• At work there is a funny colleague whom Daisy is
finding increasingly attractive. It’s not that she doesn’t
care for her husband but ever since the kids were born it
has been a very pragmatic relationship. She finds
herself spending more and more time with her
colleague. She feels guilty and conflicted about what is
Survival
happening but the relationship seems to be accelerating

all by itself.
• Jasmeet has been depressed for the last six months, ever
since his ex dumped him. He thinks about her all the
time and although he knows on an intellectual level that
he should just get over her, he keeps obsessing. It’s like
the wheels have come off.
Often when circumstances spiral out of control we

instinctively blame externalities, but we know on some
level that the injuries were at least partially self-inflicted,
and this chapter is the beginning of an exploration to
understand how and why this happens.
The Triune Brain

“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working as soon as you wake up and
doesn’t stop till you get into the office”
Robert Frost
The blame for our vices – lust, greed, anger, laziness, etc is
often placed on uncontrollable biological needs or on
emotions that swamp and overpower the logic of our
rational brains.
Our brain is
composed of three
physically
distinguishable
parts – the
neocortical thinking
brain, the limbic
feeling brain and
the reptile brain. Each part appeared at different parts of
our evolution and has a different function.
The oldest part of the brain is the reptile brain, which

evolved around 300 million years ago. It controls breathing,
vision and bodily movement. It also controls some

instinctual survival drives like hunger, lust and aggression.
If you think of reptiles they have little else in terms of
emotions or feelings when compared to mammals.
Around 200 million years ago mammals evolved from a

branch of reptiles and developed a limbic brain in addition
to their reptilian one. The limbic brain deals with feelings,
which serve as signals that allow us to display more
nuanced and varied responses to situations than the
simplistic reptilian ‘fight or flight’. Feelings also enabled
mammals to connect with each other and develop affinity
and partnerships that gave us a better chance of surviving.
If you look in the eyes of a snake you will not see any
recognizable feeling. On the other hand, emotions are
easily discernible in mammals.
Finally, a few hundred thousand years ago we developed

the neo-cortex, the largest and most complex part of our
brain. The size of this part of the brain is the reason our
brains are so much bigger than those of reptiles and dogs. It
is the part of our brain that deals with language, logic and
imagination. We believe it developed because it helped
humans anticipate danger, plan for the future and
coordinate their actions, which gave us the best chance of
staying alive.
As a result of our evolutionary history we have acquired a

number of fundamental survival instincts, including the
following:
Reptilian brain
o Fear of not being respected
We are programmed to be highly sensitive to situations
where we feel we are not being feared because in the
past this might have been an indication that we were
Survival
about to be attacked. In today’s more civilized societies,

this desire to be feared has morphed into a more
socially acceptable need for respect, and we can
overreact if we believe we are not being shown the
respect we deserve. It also shows up today in a need to
prove ourselves right or win arguments, even at the cost
of relationships.
o Dislike of effort
Starvation would result if we spent too much energy
without replenishing it. In a world where food was
scarce there was a clear survival benefit in conserving
energy. Laziness evolved for very good reasons.
Limbic brain
o Fear of not being liked
If we were left out of the herd we would have had a
lower chance of survival against predators or a lower
chance of success in hunting food by ourselves. We are
therefore very sensitive to others’ opinions about us.
We are hardwired to feel like we have to please others.
Neo-cortical brain
o Fear of uncertainty
If we could not have predicted the future there would
have been a lower chance that we could have planned
against it and this would have reduced our survival
ability. The fear of uncertainty persists till today even
though there is little chance that we will die in doing
something slightly different from our normal routines.
All of these instincts are manifestations of our most innate

evolutionary drive towards survival, which is served by our
root fear – the fear of death and our own mortality. Today
we rarely face actual life and death situations on a regular
basis. However, our evolutionary programming, sensibly
(from a survival point of view), errs on the side of safety.
We subconsciously anticipate life or death situations when
any of the mentioned defensive instincts are activated.
Minor or non-existent threats are interpreted in such a way
that we take them personally and assume the consequences
are permanent an all-pervasive.
In that instinctive moment of irrationality:

• Fear of not being respected becomes ‘I am inferior’
• Fear of not being liked becomes ‘I am unlovable’
• Fear of uncertainty becomes ‘I can be certain of
nothing’
• Dislike of effort becomes ‘This is too hard’
Survival
The subjective experience of living as an inferior,

unlovable, helpless person in a capricious and difficult
universe can be so overwhelming that, for some people, it
is literally greater than their fear of death. There are people
who have jumped out of windows after losing jobs or after
finding out that their spouse wants a divorce. Around a
million people every year commit suicide. Suicide is an
extreme case, but for all of us, these deeply wired instincts
impact us regularly in more subtle ways.
This may go some way in explaining the seemingly bizarre

results of a Dale Carnegie survey, which showed that 19%
of people said they feared death, but a full 41% said they
feared public speaking, which was the No. 1 fear. Their
fear of not being liked or respected at the end of a talk was
more tangible and real than the more abstract and distant
threat of actual death.
One critical point is that this compendium of fears and

instinctive drives can pull us in conflicting directions. If the
fears of not being liked, of not being respected, and of
uncertainty can make us overreact, then the dislike of effort
can make us underreact. We find ourselves unwilling and
lethargic about doing the work that is required to pull us
out of a sticky situation.
It is quite possible for us to be driven by our reptilian brain

to eat that chocolate bar (after all, a few hundred million
years ago, if we weren’t wired to take advantage of every
opportunity to eat, we might well have died of hunger). At
the same time our limbic brain might be feeling insecure
that our potential friends may make fun of us for being
overweight and leave us out of the ‘herd’. And our neo-
cortical brain is telling us that the food is not healthy but is
also simultaneously creating the justifications that will
allow us to eat it.
So maybe that’s the explanation for why we make the

seemingly avoidable errors of our lives - our thinking
brains are telling us to do one thing but our limbic and
reptilian brains are pulling us in completely different
directions. Maybe the reason that our conscious willpower
often loses out to our instinctual desires and urges is
because our baser brains have been around for a thousand
times longer than our rational brain and we’re just more
deeply wired into them.
However this logic is undermined by one obvious

contradiction – with the same physiological machinery,
different people are able to control themselves to very
different levels. The cause for the difference in self-control
must therefore be determined by something else.
A bird in hand worth two in the bush?
In the late 1960s Walter Mischel conducted the famous
‘Marshmallow experiment’ where four-year-old children

were given the following choice – they could get one
Survival
marshmallow immediately or, if they waited 20 minutes for

the researcher to return, they could get two. 1
When the researchers followed up with the parents 15

years later they found that the data on whether or not the
child had waited could have been used to predict whether
those kids would do well at studies at school, their SAT
scores (kids who waited got 210 points higher on average),
how well adjusted and dependable they would turn out to
be and their chances of getting into a good University.
Not a bad return for waiting a few minutes to eat a

marshmallow!
Beliefs
"Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!" he cried. "The man
pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him on a
pinnacle in the records of crime."
Sherlock Holmes
It turns out that the individual beliefs we form after our

birth are an even more critical determinant of our behaviour
than our inborn evolutionary programming.
In 1981, Irish republican Bobby Sands died of starvation2

after a political hunger protest that lasted 66 days. This was
no ‘instant suicide’ attempt that can be explained away as a
fatal momentary error of judgment. It was a deliberate long
drawn out process where his body slowly withered away
day by day and every single evolutionary survival instinct
must have screamed out to eat something over that
excruciating time span. He spent his last few days on a
waterbed so that his increasingly fragile bones didn’t break
when he moved. It would appear that we have the ability to
completely override our most primal urges if we choose to.
One might be tempted to say that only the rare person

possesses such superhuman willpower, but over the next
few days another nine IRA prisoners in the same prison
followed his example and starved themselves to death. This
indicates that the ability to consciously overrule our
reptilian and limbic brains through cognitive processes is
likely to be accessible to all of us.
If the prisoners were being tortured or being kept alive in

excruciatingly painful living conditions, then maybe their
stand would have been more comprehensible but all they
were asking for was to be treated as political prisoners
rather than as common criminals. Their demands were:
1. The right not to wear prison clothes

2. The right not to do prison work
3. The right of free association with other prisoners
4. The right to organize their own educational and
recreational facilities
5. The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel
every week
Our belief systems drive our lives today and not our
evolutionary programming. The prisoners believed that
starving to death was preferable to a life where they had to
wear prison clothes. Many priests and nuns have
voluntarily sworn themselves to chastity. Our belief
systems can override the most basic and ancient of
evolutionary fundamentals – the desire to live and the
desire to reproduce.
So it may be the reptilian brain that makes us reach for yet

another piece of chocolate but ultimately it is our belief
system (‘one more won’t hurt’) that allows us to stuff it
down our gullet.
Survival
Our belief systems determine our personalities and dictate

what we think and feel, what we say and do, whom we love
and whom we hate, what we enjoy and what we resist.
They generate our decisions, and decide how happy, rich,
healthy and fulfilled we are in life. So we should probably
pay a little more attention than we currently do to where
our beliefs come from, how they operate and the effect they
have on us.
Formation of beliefs
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong”
Bertrand Russell
Herbert Simon, a political scientist, studied cognitive

decision-making and decided that the best way of
understanding the process was to simulate it using
computers. He became one of the pioneers in the field of
artificial intelligence and later won a Nobel Prize for
applying some of his ideas in the field of Economics.
Simon believed that it was impossible for people making a

decision to know every single factor relevant to that
particular decision3. This limits the extent to which we can
make a fully rational decision in the time available to us.
Instead we have evolved to apply ‘bounded rationality’ -
we fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the current situation
with instinctive guesses based on our previous experiences
to determine the best course of action.
These belief system heuristics clearly would have had huge

evolutionary advantages. Animals could learn to respond to
new threats not faced by ancestors. If a baby monkey
survived the first attack by on a monkey by an eagle, it
would form the belief ‘if I see a dark shadow approaching
I should jump immediately from my branch’. Post the attack
it would jump instinctively and unthinkingly to safety the
next time a similar situation arose. It might mean that the

monkey jumped a few times on false alarms but there
would be a far better chance of survival than if it waited to
see if the shadow was an eagle or a swallow.
Pigeon religion
Despite the huge evolutionary advantages of using belief

systems based on past experience to determine the best
response in the current situation – there are some
significant downsides.
BF Skinner, a behavioural scientist placed a series of

hungry pigeons into a cage attached to an automatic
mechanism that delivered food to the cage at regular
intervals with no relation whatsoever to what the pigeons
were doing.
What he discovered was that the pigeons associated the

delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they
were performing when the food was delivered and
continued repeating that action in a vain attempt to
replicate the earlier result where they had received food4.
The pigeons had become ‘superstitious’ and had developed
their own ‘pigeon religion’.
Here we would have to pause for a moment and consider

whether experiments such as the one referred to above
performed on ‘dumb’ animals such as rats and pigeons or
even dogs and babies are valid for grown up humans who
would surely be able to identify cause and effect
relationships with much greater discernment and therefore
generate much more accurate belief systems.
Survival
However the ‘Cargo cult’ phenomenon5 is one of many

examples that clearly demonstrate that adult humans can be
just as prone to miscalculations caused by erroneous
beliefs. During the Second World War, tribal societies in
the South Pacific came into contact with the
technologically advanced cultures of America and Japan.
They saw how the foreigners constructed airfields and
made signals and gestures to help planes land with cargos
of food and supplies. When the armies left, the tribes
continued to mimic the gestures of military personnel and
created fake landing strips and statues of radio equipment
as a form of appeasement to the Gods in the vain hope that
they would receive planes with supplies and foods as well.
In fact, in the context of their respective environments, it

turns out that the evolutionary instincts of animals are often
far more effective than the acquired belief systems of
human beings in navigating through the requirements their
respective worlds make of them. We do not see bulimic
elephants or genocidal cows or alligators with drug
addiction. Yes, we can confuse them in laboratory tests in
unfamiliar conditions. But those aren’t the conditions they
face back in their natural habitats. We, on the other hand,
operate in far more complex and dynamic social
environments where our relatively static belief systems can,
and often do, get in our way.
Beliefs are static and incomplete generalizations or rules of

thumb, based on our past experiences that help us simplify
and make decisions quickly in an infinitely complex and
dynamic universe. Shades of grey are often ignored
because they create ambiguity and slow our decision
making process. Belief statements therefore often feature
‘black or white’ words and phrases like ‘should’,
‘shouldn’t’ ‘must’, ‘mustn’t’, ‘have to’, ‘don’t have to’,
‘can’, ‘cannot’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘if/then’,

never, ‘always’ etc.
However, often the current situation we face may be

fundamentally different from the one we’ve encountered in
the past, even though on the surface they look very similar.
In these cases, relying on our belief system heuristics can
lead to suboptimal or even dysfunctional decisions.
We can fearfully overreact, if through the lens of a

distorting belief we interpret an incident as more dangerous
than it actually is. We can also lethargically underreact in
an unconscious attempt to avoid the effort required to
respond to the situation.
The ideal response is what we refer to as the ‘Stillwater

response’, named after the Zen proverb that refers to the
way still water responds to a pebble thrown in it – it
splashes just the right amount – neither too much, nor too
little.
The Stillwater response is displayed in the absence of

distorting beliefs, and through it we are able to achieve
what we originally set out to create.
Survival
We will discuss in later chapters the mind-sets and

axiomatic beliefs that, when internalized, can consistently
lead to the Stillwater response. However in this section on
Survival we will continue to focus on the formation and
fixation of distorting beliefs that get in our way.
There are effectively four mechanisms through which

beliefs are formed6:
1. Conditioning - through our own direct experience

2. Vicarious learning – through watching others
3. Information provisions – through being told
something
4. Rational thought
But each mechanism can generate beliefs that are

inaccurate and that generate counterproductive habits.
Conditioning7
Our belief systems are created from our past experiences. A
corollary of this is that since all of us have a unique set of
past experiences we all have unique belief systems. A child
repeatedly scolded overly for making a fuss, for example,
might grow up believing that any demonstration of emotion
is immature, which would have consequences for his or her
adult relationships. An overindulged child on the other
hand might form the belief that tantrums are an effective
way of getting what he or she wants.
Pavlov’s doggies
An experiment performed by Ivan Pavlov a Russian

physiologist in 1890 helped us understand how beliefs are
formed. Pavlov was studying digestion in dogs and the

research involved measuring the changes in the chemical
composition of saliva.
What he expected was that the dogs would start salivating

when they saw the food but found to his surprise that they
were already salivating as he entered the room to give it to
them. He realized that the dogs must have heard the sound
of his footsteps before he entered the room and, since they
had come to expect that he would give them food, had
automatically started salivating.
Pavlov found this even more interesting than the original

experiment. In further experiments he showed that if he
rang a bell before giving the dog’s food then the dogs
associated the sound of the bell with food. If Pavlov then
rang the bell, at any time, the dogs would automatically
start salivating, whether or not he gave them food.
Vicarious learning
The second pathway of forming beliefs is through watching
others.
Where there’s smoke…
In Latane and Darley’s well known study of social

influences, students in a room gradually filling up with
smoke tended to react to the situation based on the non-
verbal cues of the other people in the room8.
If the other people in the room (confederates of the

Survival
experimenters) shrugged and got on with work the students

would also remain unconcerned. If the others gave the
impression of being edgy, the students also got
correspondingly nervous.
The tragic murder of Kitty Genovese shows the extent to

which we conform to the actions of the people around us.
Reporters pieced together this narrative9:
A man grabbed Kitty near her home as she

returned from work and as she screamed
several lights were switched on in the flats of
the building she lived in. She screamed again
“Oh my God! He stabbed me! Please help
me! Please help me”. Somebody from an
upper floor yelled out “Leave that girl
alone”. The attacker looked up, shrugged
and walked away. Nobody came down to help
Kitty. As she struggled to walk to her flat, the
lights went off.
The attacker came back and attacked her

again. Once more he stabbed her “I’m
dying!” she shrieked. “I’m dying”. Again
windows were opened and lights were
switched on. The assailant got into his car
and left. Again the lights went off and nobody
came to see what had happened to Kitty.
At 3:35am he returned and found her

slumped next to the stairs where she had
been trying to climb up. He stabbed her
fatally this time and left.
Nobody called the police till 3:50am. There

were 38 witnesses.
Although this was held by many as a shocking proof of the

callousness of the New York public, psychologists believe
that actually the fact that there were so many witnesses
actually made her situation more dangerous because people
look to see what other people are doing. If nobody else is
doing anything people will mimic that behaviour, which
means it’s even more unlikely that anybody else will do
anything. This is known as the ‘bystander effect’. Ironically
if there had been just one or two witnesses, Kitty might
have had a higher chance of surviving.
The incident illustrates just how strongly we base our

behaviour on the reactions of those around us well into
adulthood. In our early childhood the extent to which we
regulate our behaviours based on our parents is many
orders of magnitude higher because they are pretty much
our only source of reference at the time.
We take in and internalize cultural, religious, familial and

in particular parental norms and beliefs almost in an
osmotic fashion without consciously questioning them.
This is also why mass media plays such a big role in

shaping our likes and dislikes - by infiltrating our mind
under the radar. Most of our beliefs aren’t conclusions we
have come to based on deep introspection. They are taken
directly and without filtering from our cultural beliefs. We
think that when we buy jeans we are making a conscious
autonomous decision but of course the truth is that if we
had been born in a tribal village we would have purchased
(or even made) completely different attire.
Survival
Information provision
The third pathway of belief formation is through being told
something.
Most of the information we receive when we are young is

from our parents. “You’re a bad boy”, “Good girls don’t sit
like that”, “You’re very special to me”, etc. are accepted as
truth, again without any filtering. When we grow up we’re
able to counter rationally or sceptically or defensively, but
at a young age we’re much more likely to simply
incorporate these statements into our belief system since it
comes from the most credible source we know.
Although most beliefs that we form are accurate and

helpful, what is also clear is that we can get inaccurate
beliefs from any pathway – direct experience, watching
others or through information provision.
Rational thought
The fourth and final pathway of belief formation is
reasoning. But this too could lead to false beliefs since our
logic may not always be valid and the foundational
premises for our logical arguments may be based on flawed
beliefs formed from the other three pathways.
Belief fixation
Vader: “I am your father”
Luke: “No. No. That’s not true! It’s impossible!”
The fact that we formed a whole bunch of unhelpful beliefs

when we were too young to filter them rationally wouldn’t
be such a problem if we discarded them when we grew up,
but we appear to have a problematic tendency to ignore
data that contradicts our existing beliefs.
I’ll see it if I believe it
Among the first to rigorously explore the ‘confirmation

bias’ phenomenon was Peter Cathcart Watson. He
presented various three number sequences to participants
and asked them to figure out a rule that might have been
used to generate them10.
1, 4, 9 1, 2, 3 4, 9, 16
The actual rule might simply have been ‘three random

numbers in ascending order’ but most people were coming
up with complex answers that did not fit all the sequences
like ‘squares of consecutive numbers’. Although the first
and third sequences do follow this rule, clearly the second
doesn’t. It was apparent that what was happening was that
the participants were ignoring ‘inconvenient’ data that did
not fit their ‘rule’ and only focusing on the data that did fit
it.
We might not be surprised that people would hold onto

their beliefs to a certain extent but research shows that
when people are exposed to data that confirms their
existing beliefs and a similar amount of data that
contradicts them... their existing beliefs aren’t just
maintained but actually strengthened even more!
Dead right!
In 1979 a remarkable experiment was conducted on

‘attitude polarization’11. The researchers selected two
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groups of people; one group was strongly in favour of the

death penalty, the other group, strongly opposed.
Both groups were given information from two (fictional)

studies on the effectiveness of the death penalty in
reducing crime. One of the studies claimed that it was
effective and the other claimed it wasn’t. Both teams felt
the studies that contradicted their beliefs were full of holes
and became even more certain about the correctness of
their initial beliefs.
Debate doesn’t necessarily make us more open to other

viewpoints. It actually usually drives us to become even
more rigid and definite about our own views. As a result as
we grow into adulthood and beyond our beliefs become
more and more set.
All of us experience ‘cognitive dissonance’ when presented

data that contradicts our beliefs - this leads to negative
emotions such as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger,
embarrassment, stress, etc. We avoid these emotions by
rationalising or resisting the data. A good example is
smoking – smokers tend to experience cognitive dissonance
because it is widely accepted that cigarettes cause lung
cancer, yet virtually everyone claims they want to live a
long and healthy life. The negative emotions created by the
dissonant tension of these contradictory ideas can be
reduced by quitting smoking, denying the evidence of the
link to lung cancer or justifying one's smoking by
attributing it to low levels of self-control. Because it is
often easier to make excuses than it is to change behaviour,
humans are often rationalizing, rather than rational, beings.
I honestly loved it!!!
In an experiment on our ‘rationalizing ability’ conducted

by Festinger and Carlsmith, participants were asked to do
extremely repetitive and boring tasks12.
They were then asked to convince other people to do the

Survival
same task by telling them it was really interesting. Half

the participants were given $1 to convince the others that
the task was enjoyable and the other half weren’t.
At the end, the people who were given $1 to convince

others that they had enjoyed the task consistently claimed
they had enjoyed the task more than the ones who weren’t
given the money.
The explanation for this is clear given the cognitive

dissonance theory. The group paid $1 potentially had data
that conflicted with their existing beliefs about themselves.
On the one hand they had told someone that they had
enjoyed something that they hadn’t. On the other hand
they had beliefs about themselves as being the sort of
people who wouldn’t lie simply because someone paid
them to. In order to reduce the discomfort they simply
‘convinced’ themselves that they ‘really had enjoyed
themselves’ and so they ‘hadn’t really lied’.
We sometimes prefer to lie to ourselves, sometimes going

as far as distorting our recollection of events, so that the
truth does not conflict with our most deeply held beliefs
about the world, about others and especially about
ourselves.
We resist changing even unhelpful beliefs once they are

formed but, what makes it even harder to challenge these
beliefs is that they often turn out to be self-fulfilling
prophecies. This makes us even more certain that our
prejudices are accurate maps of reality. How and why this
happens is the subject of our next chapter.
Q: Which are your most significant beliefs? Which

incidents, people, circumstances, books, movies, songs or
poems generated them?
Q: Where in your life have you sabotaged yourself?
Q: Which of your beliefs have you changed? Why?

SELF FULFILLING PROPHECIES
Child: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Only try to realize the
truth.
Neo: What truth?
Child: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Child: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Q: Is it possible that simply by thinking something, we make it

more likely to happen?
In 2006 a self-help movie called ‘The Secret’ was released

which, partially in tribute to its success, became highly
controversial. People either thought it was brilliant or complete
gibberish. The ‘Secret’ was the ‘law of attraction’ – what you
think about comes true. If you believe good things are going to
happen, good things will be attracted to you. If you believe bad
things are going to happen, bad things will be attracted to you.
Since no mechanism was given as to why this would occur,
many dismissed this as pseudo-science. In this chapter we will
look at what mechanisms might plausibly convert beliefs into
reality.
Let’s start with a hypothetical example. Alicia has formed a

belief that men are untrustworthy in romantic relationships.
What are the different mechanisms through which this might
impact her relationship with her new boyfriend Alonso?
34
Self-fulfilling prophecies
What you see is what you get

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are”
Anais Nin
The first mechanism is one we’ve already looked at - the

‘confirmation bias.’ This bias creates a filter where we only
notice things that fit with our existing beliefs and ignore
evidence that seems to challenge or contradict them. This, by
itself, is likely to present a pretty strong barrier to a successful
relationship. If Alicia walks into a party and sees Alonso talking
to a pretty girl, she is likely to interpret it as him flirting behind
her back. If he sees her and walks over to her smiling, given her
belief system, the thoughts she is likely to experience are
“Thank god I got here just in time. No knowing what would
have happened if I hadn’t decided to come tonight”. It’s almost
irrelevant what Alonso does, she would interpret his actions in a
way that serves to reinforce her existing belief system.
If Alicia has had a losing streak with men, she is likely to have
lost a certain amount of confidence. This makes it more likely
that she will fall prey to illogical thinking that will affect her
relationship.
Confidence trick
Research shows that when people lose confidence, their ability

to think clearly deteriorates dramatically. They make bizarre
conclusions and terrible decisions.
One particular study, on how negative, fear based expectations

affect cognitive abilities, was done on the ‘stereotype threat’.
Black students did far worse on a test when they were told
explicitly that the test was being used to measure their
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intelligence (as opposed to when they weren’t) 13. When they

were asked to tick their race on the test form they did even
worse. The reason for this was that they had internalized
societal beliefs that blacks were not as bright as whites. When
they were asked to state their race and told that the test would
be used to measure their intelligence, these fears were
activated resulting in scrambled thinking which significantly
impacted their scores.
The same effect was seen by in a series of organization

simulation exercises given to group of managers. If the
managers were given misleading feedback that they had
performed badly, their confidence dipped and their analytical
thinking was more erratic in the following simulation exercises
resulting in poorer performance14.
‘Emotional reasoning’ is a very common cognitive trap and one

we all fall into regularly. The thinking goes – ‘I feel this way
therefore there must be a reason for me to feel this way”. Alicia
reasons that since she feels insecure, there must genuinely be
something to be insecure about, which is a remarkably circular
argument from a logical standpoint.
One of the other cognitive traps that Alicia is likely to fall into,
given her beliefs, is ‘black & white thinking’. Alonso is either
completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy. There are
no shades of grey. If Alonso tells her he’ll pick up eggs on the
way to her house and forgets she can easily magnify the
significance of this trivial incident and conclude irrationally ‘If I
can’t trust him to do something so simple, how can I trust him to
remain faithful’? As a result of all these thoughts, it will be just
a matter of time before Alicia interprets an incident in such a
way that it confirms all her fears.
Win-lose
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering”
Yoda
In the example we just covered, Alonso was not actually

untrustworthy. Alicia just assumed he was. However there are
other mechanisms through which the relationship will actually
sour due to Alicia’s behaviour. This is because when we operate
from fear, we activate a win-lose mind-set (if he wins, I will
lose). This mind-set generates negative emotions like anger,
blame, guilt, sadness, panic, shock, etc. Not only do we become
less resourceful and more subject to faulty thinking, but we
infect those around us with negative emotions as well, which is
Survival
likely to increase the chances of the feared outcome

materialising.
Even if Alicia doesn’t break up with Alonso, the chances are

that her constant suspiciousness will elicit a negative reaction
from him. He is likely to get defensive and feel resentful,
misunderstood and hurt. After all now his self-image is under
threat – if his girlfriend thinks he’s untrustworthy, what does
that say about him? He may be the one in fact, who initiates a
break up. It takes a lot of resolve and vision for someone to
continue to see a situation as a win-win scenario when the
person he or she is dealing with views it as a win-lose.
We see this same dynamic in outbreaks of war – if one country

feels threatened by another and perceives a win-lose scenario it
takes steps to strengthen itself. This threatens the other country,
which takes similar precautions generating a vicious cycle of
mistrust and armament till one day one of the parties overreacts
and the situation spirals out of control and into the war that both
parties ‘knew’ would happen.
World War I started under exactly these circumstances. France

and Russia were threatened by an increasingly powerful
Germany and made pacts to help each other if attacked by
Germany. Germany felt encircled by France and Russia and
made pacts with the Austro Hungarian Empire, which had
border disputes with Russia. England was also threatened by
Germany and so sided with Russia/France. All parties were
wary of being attacked and so increased their military
capability, which exacerbated the ‘win-lose’ vibe till a relatively
peripheral assassination of an Austro – Hungarian archduke by a
Serb terrorist sucked everyone into a catastrophic global war.
Counterproductive avoidance attempts

“What you resist persists”
Carl Jung
Paradoxically, the actions we take to avoid a situation

materializing can often actually precipitate it. Even if Alonso
and Alicia don’t break up, Alonso is still likely to feel
misunderstood. In fact, when he bumps into another girl who
sympathises with his plight and seems to ‘get him’, he might
conclude that he would be better off with her instead of Alicia –
“At least she doesn’t think I’m untrustworthy”. Through her
reactive behaviour – Alicia would have become instrumental in
creating the very situation she was trying to circumvent.
The Second World War also started as a result of actions taken

to prevent it from happening. After the first war, the allies
wanted to ensure that Germany would never be able to be
powerful enough to defeat them again and so they enforced
extremely punitive reparations. These were so harsh that
Germans felt aggrieved and Hitler was able to rouse them into
initiating World War II, something that may never have
happened if England and France in particular hadn’t tried so
hard to cripple Germany in an attempt to prevent future wars.
This phenomenon of producing the very result you fear and are
trying to avoid often shows up clearly in sports. In a football
game, for example, if a team is worried about losing they may
keep all their men in defence and lose all chances to score a goal
themselves. This gives the opposition the chance to launch wave
after wave of attacks with little danger of being over extended in
defence. Ultimately the team pinned in their own half is likely to
crack under the pressure, concede goals and lose. On the other
hand if the team employs a defensive strategy but truly believes
they can win, they are less likely to wilt under pressure. They
are more likely to find the opportunity to counter attack, with
Survival
conviction, an opponent that has over reached in attack and left

itself spread too thin in defence.
When people have positive expectations and operate from trust

rather than from fear then they are likely to have positive
emotions and infect others with them as well. When people are
happy, they are more creative, collaborative and resourceful and
therefore more likely to achieve their objectives.
So whether we are optimistic or pessimistic about something,

we end up acting in ways that bizarrely confirm our
expectations, even if we are actually trying to prevent our
negative expectations from being actualized. In fact we might
go as far as to say – especially if we are trying to prevent them
from being actualized.
Self efficacy beliefs 15
“If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I
believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the
beginning”
Mahatma Gandhi
If we believe we can do something, it’s much more likely that

we will. This is because we invest time and effort in things
based on our perceptions on the probability of likely success. In
the face of obstacles people will give up unless they strongly
believe they have the power to determine the outcome.
Icy fingers
In one experiment, people were asked to put their hands in a

bucket of freezing ice water to see how long they could stand
the pain. Afterwards people were randomly told (irrespective of
their actual performance) either that they were better at
withstanding pain than 90% of the people tested, or that 63% of

people tested had been better at withstanding pain than they
had been. Then they were asked to repeat the test.
The people who were told they were good at withstanding pain
were able to keep their hand in the bucket for considerably
longer the next time and those who were told they were poor
were unable to bear the pain for as long as they had in their
previous attempt16.
If Alicia is worried that Alonso is going to cheat on her it

indicates that she lacks belief in her ability to build a strong
relationship. As a result she will not invest as much of herself
into it and is likely to give up at the first sign that things aren’t
going according to plan. She is not willing to ‘keep her hand in
freezing ice water’ of the relationship for as long as it is
required because, at some level, she just doesn’t believe that she
can make it work.
Mind control
“You weak minded fool! He’s using an old Jedi mind trick”
Jabba Desilijic
How about this for a new age idea? – Simply by thinking that
someone will behave in a certain way you ‘cause’ him or her to
behave in that way. Alicia ‘causes’ Alonso to cheat simply by
suspecting he will. This may sound far fetched so let us take you
on a slight diversion before we start to justify the statement.
At the beginning of the 20th century a horse known as ‘Clever

Hans’17 was attracting a great deal of attention in Germany. He
was famous for being able to solve maths problems and answer
various questions by tapping his foot.
Survival
Due to the amount of public interest the board of education

formed the ‘Hans commission’ to investigate the claims. The
commission contained 13 members including a veterinarian, a
circus trainer, a cavalry officer, several teachers and the Director
of Berlin zoo. They concluded that there were no tricks.
Oskar Pfungst, a psychologist took over the investigation from

them. He suspected that the trainer was giving cues to Hans but
even when the trainer was not in the room, and other people
asked the questions, Hans was able to answer them. Oskar
finally figured it out when he saw that if the questioner didn’t
know the answer to a question Hans was unable to give the
correct response. Oskar realized that Hans had learned to react
to inadvertent non-verbal cues given by the questioners.
So for example if the question was ‘what is 2+2’, after Hans had
tapped his foot four times, everybody would lean forward, their
eyes would open a little, they would stop breathing and wait
expectantly to see what would happen next. Hans would pick up
on the change in mood and stop tapping giving everyone the
impression that he had known the answer.
Talk is cheap
Humans are very sensitive to non-verbal cues as well. Albert

Mehrabian is famous for a study where he showed that in
communication the actual words used only account for 7% of us
liking the speaker18. Verbal tone accounts for 38% and body
language accounts for a full 55%. Although we can usually
consciously control our words to convey a message that we
don’t actually believe, it is harder to control our tone and body
language.
Even if Alicia is saying the words “Of course I trust you baby”
the non-verbal message that she is transmitting all the time with
her tone and her body language is likely to be conveying what
she really believes. Alonso is of course picking up most of these
signals subconsciously.
Others’ beliefs about us affect our own beliefs about ourselves.

If everybody says that you’re a terrible singer, over a period of
time, you’re likely to believe it too. And so what happens is that,
without realizing it, Alonso reacting to the non-verbal messages
he is receiving, starts internalizing the belief that he is not
trustworthy, a process known as projective identification.19
As Alonso’s efficacy beliefs about his ability to stay faithful

diminish, he is more likely to give in to temptation. In a bizarre
way Alicia’s beliefs have implanted themselves in his mind and
he is now more likely to behave in the way she was afraid he
would.
This phenomenon is known as the Pygmalion effect after the

play by George Bernard Shaw (later made into the movie ‘My
Fair Lady’) where Eliza Doolittle states that she learned more
about becoming a lady from Colonel Pikering than she did from
Higgin’s English lessons.
“I should never have known how ladies and gentlemen really behaved, if it hadn't
been for Colonel Pickering. He always showed what he thought and felt about me as
if I were something better than a common flower girl. You see, Mrs. Higgins, apart
from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not
how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a common flower girl to
Professor Higgins, because he always treats me like a common flower girl, and
always will. But I know that I shall always be a lady to Colonel Pickering, because he
always treats me like a lady, and always will.”
Eliza Doolittle
Survival
Picture perfect
In a fascinating study that illustrates the Pygmalion principle,

51 women were told they would be participating in a
communications study and were requested to speak to certain
men over the phone as part of the experiment20. The men in the
study had been given a photograph of a woman and were told
that they would be speaking to the woman in the picture
(although they were given a picture of a woman, it was not of
the one they would be speaking to).
After the phone call the men were asked to fill out an
impression formation questionnaire. Perhaps unsurprisingly
men who had been given pictures of beautiful women felt that
the women they had spoken to on the phone were funny, friendly
and poised and men who had been given pictures of
unattractive women assessed their conversational partners as
awkward, serious and unsociable.
However what was surprising was that when a team of 11

psychologists were given taped recordings of the calls with only
the snippets where the women were speaking and given the
same impression formation questionnaire to fill, their
assessments of the women had a high correlation with the
assessments of the men in the study.
What this indicates is that when women were speaking to men

who expected them to be friendly, funny and poised - they
actually started behaving that way. And when they were
speaking to men who expected them to be dull and socially inept
- they were.
Potential intelligence (PQ)
The Pygmalion effect was studied in the classroom by Rosenthal

and Jacobson. At the beginning of the year they gave an
intelligence test to all of the students at an elementary. Then,
they randomly selected 20% of the students - without any
relation to their test results - and reported to the teachers that
these 20% of students were showing "unusual potential for
intellectual growth" and could be expected to "bloom" in their
academic performance by the end of the year.
Eight months later, at the end of the academic year, they came
back and re-tested all the students. Those labelled as
‘intelligent’ children showed significantly greater increase in
their scores in these new tests than the children who were not
singled out for the teachers' attention. This means that the
change in the teacher’s expectations regarding the intellectual
performance of these allegedly 'special' children had led to an
actual change in the intellectual performance of these randomly
selected children21.
Going home
‘Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to go back to’
John Ed Pearce
In the scenarios so far, we have assumed that Alonso started off

as trustworthy. However, there is yet another mechanism
through which expectations are translated into reality. What if
Alicia consistently chooses boyfriends who were already
tending towards being untrustworthy? Why would she do that?
In the introduction of his book ‘They f*** you up’, Oliver

James, a child psychologist highlights some very instructive
events from the life of actress Mia Farrow. She was the 5th out
Survival
of 8 children and at age 19 expressed regret about this, telling a

reporter “A child needs more love than you can get in a large
family”. However, eventually she had twelve natural and
adopted children and she stated “The benefits of large families
are enormous. I want to create my childhood environment”.
James felt this was an illustration of our tendency to

unconsciously recreate environments and situations from our
childhood even if they seemed unpleasant at the time. There are
many hypotheses for why people behave in this way but the two
main ones are familiarity and mastery:
Familiarity
We seek out situations that are familiar to us because at some
level we have become comfortable with them – better the devil
you know. Psychologically, new situations feel riskier and more
uncertain and so we subconsciously avoid them.
If Alicia’s beliefs about men were formed by early childhood

experiences of her own father’s behaviour with her mother, she
may have formed the irrational subconscious beliefs:
• Daddy cheats on mummy

• Daddy loves me
• Therefore cheating men will love me
These beliefs and the familiarity with the situations created by

men who cheat would draw her unknowingly towards that sort
of man.
Personal growth
There is another, even more speculative theory – we seek out
situations that caused us problems in our childhood so we can
master them as adults and grow spiritually as a result.
Alicia doesn’t go out with nice guys because they bore her. It’s
too easy. At some level she felt helpless to prevent her father
leaving her mother. Twenty years later she wants to win a
rematch and finds herself drawn to ‘exciting’ womanizers in
order to domesticate them. It may be possible but in order to do
so she would have need to have developed a considerably higher
level of emotional intelligence.
This can explain why it seems like sometimes we constantly

invite situations in our life that seem designed to help us grow.
We breeze through situations that we can already handle on
autopilot and so barely notice them. We are snapped back to
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attention when we encounter a situation we don’t yet have the

maturity to handle so these scenarios end up occupying a
disproportionate share of mind.
A perfect mirror
“Thoughts become things”
The Secret
In general we can see that Alicia’s limiting beliefs operate in a

variety of different ways to sabotage her relationship with
Alonso and prove her right about her beliefs about the
untrustworthiness of men. If you ask her what she wants, she
will swear that she desperately wants the relationship to work.
And at a conscious level this is true. However her behaviours
are not consistent with this stated aim because they are driven
by her subconscious beliefs.
In most cases our subconscious beliefs are empowering (e.g. – ‘I

am good at relationships’) and they enable us to achieve our
stated objectives. However in some cases they are limiting (e.g.
– ‘Men are generally untrustworthy’) and can slow us down or
even pull us in the opposite direction to where we would
consciously like to go.
It’s almost as if we get a subconscious payoff from being right

about our beliefs, even the ones that limit us. And so over a
period of time our lives become a perfect mirror of what we
believe is possible, what we believe we are capable of, and what
we believe we deserve.
Just as we could look at a barren landscape with sand,

weathered rocks, cacti, lizards and be able to conclude a great
deal about the rainfall and temperature of the climate, all we
need to do is take a look at the lives we have created for
ourselves and our beliefs will be revealed.
In the next chapter we will look at the context in which these

beliefs about ourselves are formed.
Q: Which of your beliefs are becoming self-fulfilling

prophecies?
Q: What situations that you are currently facing seem like

childhood challenges being recreated? How do you need to
grow so that you can handle them this time around?
Q: As you look at your life what are you learning about your
beliefs?
A RANGE OF BEHAVIOURS
“All you need is love, love. Love is all you need”
The Beatles
Q: How do our personalities form?
Q: How are our strengths and weaknesses linked to our past

experiences?
Q: Who are you?
The Second World War produced a sharp rise in the number of

orphaned infants raised in hospitals and nursing homes. A large
number of these babies started displaying disturbing symptoms -
they physically shrivelled and became mentally retarded. The
symptoms were in many ways similar to another wasting disease
called Marasmus, caused by severe under-nourishment which is
usually only seen in conditions of extreme poverty like war torn
regions of sub-Saharan Africa. However the babies in question
were well fed and lived in relatively congenial environments.
The doctors and nurses ensured that the rooms were absolutely
germ free and, as per the medical norms of the time, took extra
care not to touch or handle the babies to avoid any chance of
infection. The medical community was stumped.
A clue as to the cause of Hospitalism, as this disease was

named, was in the fact that infants in poorer hospitals were less
subject to this disease. In 1945 Rene Spitz22, a child
development psychiatrist, started investigating this lead and
realised that the babies who were dying were the ones in
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A range of behaviours
hospitals which used expensive infant incubators to regulate the

temperature, oxygen levels, etc. Poorer hospitals could not
afford these machines and so the nurses had to hold and comfort
the babies from time to time. Based on his observations over an
extended period of time, Spitz came to the conclusion that
babies actually needed to be held and cuddled as much as they
needed other ‘necessities’ like food. In attempting to create a
germ free environment by avoiding holding babies, the medical
establishment was actually unwittingly depriving the babies of
this essential requirement for survival.
Spitz recorded his research on film and in 1952 released

‘Psychogenic disease in infancy’. It’s a heart rending video that
looks at how babies who were separated from their mothers in
their first year showed increasing signs of distress and finally
wasted away and died. One of the most tragic scenes shows a
nurse trying to show her affection for a baby by poking it gently
with a pen but not actually daring to touch it with her hands.
The disturbing film contributed to changing the way people
thought about raising babies. It is now clear that babies need
more than just food, water and air to survive. They actually need
to be physically touched and handled as well.
Monkey business
Harry Harlow built on this understanding with a series of

classic experiments between 1957 and 1963 in which baby
rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers and offered a
choice of two substitute mothers – one of which was a soft towel
wrapped object and the other was a wire mesh mother with an
attached bottle of milk23.
The researchers found that the young monkeys clung to the

towel wrapped mother whether or not it had an attached bottle
Survival
of milk whereas they only went to the wire mesh mother for
milk. The monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble
digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhoea more frequently.
Harlow's interpretation of this behaviour, which is still widely
accepted, was that lack of contact comfort was psychologically
stressful to the monkeys.
Babies have an evolutionarily hard wired need for attention. If

they don’t get it they will literally die. As babies grow, the need
for physical attention that Spitz discovered slowly transforms
into a need for emotional contact comfort caused by physical
presence.
As the child matures into an adult, the need for contact comfort
finally turns into a need for emotional connection and
psychological recognition from others, which never fully goes
away. One significant point to note is that the attention doesn’t
have to be positive. If a child is not getting acknowledged for
being good then he or she may well act out to get the desired
attention, a habit that can continue into adulthood.
Tough love
B Levine showed that in the case of baby rats it didn’t make a

difference whether you fondled them or gave them painful
electric shocks – in both cases physical, mental and emotional
development as well as biochemistry of the brain and even
resistance to leukaemia was improved by pretty much the same
amount. On the other hand, if you didn’t provide them any
social interaction their health was dramatically affected in an
adverse manner leading to the rat version of Hospitalism.
The range model

‘A theory is the more impressive the greater is the simplicity of its premises, the more
different are the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its
applicability’
Albert Einstein
We can now combine this understanding with our findings from

our exploration on belief formation and fixation research in the
previous chapter to see clearly how our personalities come
about.
The most important thing for a young child is to keep his

parent’s attention. For them to ignore him or be upset with him
is the scariest and emotionally most painful thing in the world,
Survival
the psychological equivalent of starvation. He quickly forms

beliefs through direct conditioning, vicarious learning and
information provision on which behaviours work and which
ones don’t in this regard.
As a hypothetical example let’s consider a boy, Ravi, whose

father gruffly tells him “Only sissies cry”. Two messages are
received by Ravi – one is about who he is (a sissy) and the other
is about what he should be (not a sissy). If the message is
repeated consistently the impressionable child will
automatically internalize beliefs without filtering them through a
rational analysis, which he is incapable of performing at that age
- ‘Daddy will only love and respect me if I’m a tough boy and
don’t show my emotions’.
At the same time Ravi also forms beliefs about people in

general. Because he can only display ‘bounded rationality’ in
his assessment of people, he subconsciously fills in the gaps in
his knowledge with his guesses based on his experience of his
parents. The fixed belief he forms is ‘I must be a tough and
unemotional man to be worthy of love and respect from people’
Any time Ravi starts feeling emotional about something, his

fixed beliefs about the inappropriateness of emotionality in a
man will generate feelings of shame and guilt. As he represses
his feelings he will experience relief that he managed to push
these unpleasant emotions down. This relief further reinforces
his subconscious belief that emotions are terrible – after all, his
distorted logic goes, why else would he feel relief by avoiding
experiencing his emotions? He soon becomes trapped in a
limited range of predictable, rigid and automatic behaviours.
Ravi has an evolutionarily programmed desire to be loved and

respected. But it is his father and other significant early
relationships that link these instincts to specific beliefs on what
behaviours ‘should’ be regarded as good or bad and what level

of achievements ‘should’ be defined as successes or failures.
As we grow up we develop a split personality – two voices

speak inside our heads. One is the critical voice of the corrective
parent. The other is voice of the child that craves unconditional
love – submissive or sullen or rebellious. Virtually all our
internal conflicts come from the arguments between these two
voices. Suffering exists in the gap between who we fear we are
and who we think we ought to be.
In this way, our early relationships with our parents can define
our subconscious beliefs about ourselves, our expectations of
others and set the tone for our habitual relationship behaviour
patterns for the rest of our life.
It may sound like we are being overly harsh on the parents’ role
in this but that is not our intention. Most parents are only doing
what they believe is in the best interests of their children. Ravi’s
father believed that being tough would help his son in his future,
given his own experiences or based on what his own father
might have taught him.
In order to keep their children safe and ensure their future

happiness, parents put limitations on them of some sort or
another. The phrase ‘bad boy’ was created to stop a loved tot
putting his fingers in an electrical socket at a time when a
detailed explanation of the dangers of electricity might have
been dangerously ineffective communication.
But the rules that we required as children to keep us safe are less
relevant when we become adults and develop the capacity to
make our own intelligent decisions. In light of the additional
discernment we have attained at this stage, many of those rules
and limiting beliefs can be safely discarded, and we can feel free
to explore the full range of actions and behaviours accessible to
Survival
our natural spontaneous selves. As we grow in maturity, a third

voice, our natural adult voice, emerges and eventually mediates,
or subordinates where required, the internalized parent and child
voices.
In our leadership development workshops we use the ‘Range

model’ to help participants visualize these patterns more
concretely by asking them to identify their major Light, Burn,
Shade and Shadow.
Light
Each fundamental belief about oneself generates a clearly
evident natural strength, which we refer to as a person’s ‘Light’.
Ravi, for example, might turn out to be extremely resilient and
tough under pressure. Our light is our principal way of self-
expression and the most powerful way we can contribute to
others.
Burn
The same behaviours when taken too far or when applied
indiscriminately can become ineffective in certain situation.
Ravi may come across as unsympathetic, uncaring and
inexpressive. This could become a significant problem in some
of his relationships. Ravi’s father may have wanted him to be
tough and unemotional. His wife however might not appreciate
the downsides that come along with these personality traits.
Shade
This is the undeveloped latent strength for the person. It is the
opposite of the Burn. For Ravi it would be becoming empathetic
of others’ emotions and easily expressing his own where
appropriate.
It is common is for a person to display behaviours that fluctuate

within his Light and Burn. We would expect Ravi to be tough
but unsympathetic. However the ideal situation is obviously for
a person to consistently display the range of behaviours that fall

within his Light and Shade. Ravi would want to grow personally
and become someone who can be resilient and tough under
pressure and empathetic and expressive at the same time.
Shadow
What prevents people from primarily acting from their Light
and Shade ranges simultaneously is their deep revulsion of
operating in their Shadow region. Ravi is likely to have resigned
himself to being seen as uncaring but, given his ingrained
limiting beliefs, he would be deeply ashamed if anyone
considered him a sissy. He therefore overcompensates and
misses out the opportunity of practicing his Shade behaviours.
In fact he may not even be able to distinguish between his Shade
and Shadow. He confuses being empathetic and expressive with
being a sissy.
The reason why certain things in our life don’t go in the

direction we want them to is because of our ‘Burn’ driven
responses to situations and unwillingness to step into our
‘Shade’ because of the fear that we’ll go too far and end up in
our ‘Shadow’ range.
Survival
The only way out is to accept our shadow self. In order for Ravi
to learn how to be empathetic, he has got to practice behaviour
that will feel to him like he’s being a sissy (though which would
probably be considered completely normal by most people). He
must be willing to step out of his comfort zone if he is to
develop empathy and even be willing to take the risk that he
might go too far in his attempts - on some occasions he may end
up mollycoddling someone when he could have been more
effective and helpful simply by being his usual tough self.
However over a period of time as he practices these behaviours

and learns from his mistakes he will slowly learn to discriminate
between empathy and ‘mollycoddling’ and as he does he will
acquire a skilful command over a greater range of behaviour
than was available to him before. In most situations he will
continue to be his usual tough self. However he will be able to
shift to empathy effortlessly when it is required of him. And
when he is able to do this without conscious effort, he will
finally be free of his limiting beliefs.
As an analogy, our natural ‘Light’ is like an accelerator. Our

consciously developed ‘Shade’ is like a brake. The thing is - you
can drive a car with a brake faster than you can a car without a
brake because you have better control over the speed. Similarly
when we consciously develop our Shade strengths to
complement our natural Light strengths we can actually express
our Light to a much greater degree because we can control it
and prevent it from spilling over into the Burn region. Our Light
will be the primary form of contribution but it can be fully
unleashed only when modulated by our Shade. Power is nothing
without control.
Note - On certain ranges for you, the shade and light will be reversed as will the burn
and shadow
Our natural self

“When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices,
when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but
heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices
consisted of one word: Om – perfection”
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Each of us has a unique set of past experiences and therefore a

unique set of beliefs and perspectives on life. Our beliefs
determine the actions we take and they in turn create the results
we achieve. When we are being our natural selves this process
occurs without any disruption, we enjoy ourselves and get the
results that we want in our own unique style.
Let’s illustrate this with an example. There are two individuals -

one is naturally self-sufficient (Raja) and one is naturally
relationship oriented (Rani). These are their respective ‘Lights’.
In the same situations they will react differently based on their
Survival
unique personalities. Let’s say that they both get an invitation to

go to a party. Raja may decide to go by himself and finds the
location on a map before he sets off. Rani may ask some friends
to pick her up because she has no clue where the place is.
They're both comfortable with their choices and they both reach
on time so they achieved the result they set out to achieve. They
were both 'being themselves’ in their own unique way.
When we are acting from our natural selves, we have the

flexibility to pick from the full range of behaviours if required.
If Raja gets lost then his natural response would be to step into
his Shade (interdependence) and simply call a friend and ask for
help. If Rani’s friends cancel on her and she is comfortable with
stepping into her Shade (self-sufficiency), then her natural
response would be to simply call a cab and get there by herself.
In both cases they made slight adjustments and as a
consequence were still able to achieve the results that they
wanted (getting to the party).
But when we are ruled by the beliefs that keep us pinned in our
comfort zone of Light/Burn then we are unable to respond
flexibly because, in effect, we say 'this is who I am'. We do not
venture out of our comfort zone into the Shade because we tell
ourselves ‘I wish I was that but I’m not’ and of course we don’t
try very hard because we’re afraid of wandering into our
Shadow, about which we try to convince ourselves and
everyone who will listen ‘that is someone who I’m not and hope
I never will be’.
Of course the truth is that as infinitely complex human beings

we are actually all of those things and much more. Ravi is
habitually tough under pressure but there are some occasions
when he crumbles under severe challenges; he’s often
unsympathetic and inexpressive and at other times sometimes
he’s actually extremely sensitive and willing to share his deepest
feelings.
Our beliefs about who we are and who we are not and who we
should be and who we should not be are abstract constructs of
the mind. They are just maps that help us to get some handle on
our own nebulous vastness. It is tempting to describe ourselves
using adjectives – it gives us the comforting feeling that we
know and understand ourselves. However in defining ourselves
by who we are and who we aren’t, we also end up inadvertently
limiting ourselves.
Survival
If Raja gets lost and is acting from his Burn (lone warrior) then
he becomes unwilling to call a friend to ask for direction since
he feels dependent or embarrassed in doing so. Instead he
decides to go to roughly where the neighbourhood is and ask
around. He gets there but nobody knows the place. So he
wanders around and gets to the party late. He makes an excuse
about some work that had cropped up which delayed him or
maybe blames the traffic but feels stupid inside - Here his fear
of his Shadow (dependence) has got in the way of him stepping
into the Shade and being effective. His fear has stopped him
from expressing the full range of behaviours available to him.
Rani might respond in a completely different way. If her friends

cancel at the last minute she might decide not to go by herself.
She really wanted to go and feels disappointed that she can't and
also a little resentful of her friends who cancelled at the last
minute. Once again her beliefs, about the sort of person she is
and about the sort of person she is not, have gotten in the way of
her accessing the full range of options open to her.
In these cases Raja and Rani didn’t achieve their desired results
and they experienced some negative emotions. Raja feels stupid
and Rani feels resentful. This combination of negative emotions,
ineffective actions and unwanted results indicates that we’ve
lost control and our limiting beliefs have taken over.
The problem is that it is highly possible that even after

introspecting, Raja and Rani would not have been able to
identify the alternative options that they could have taken. This
is because their introspection would be employing their existing
belief systems, which didn’t allow them to see those options as
viable in the first place. If pushed Raja might acknowledge that
he ‘could in theory’ have asked someone but he would probably
immediately justify his behaviour by saying ‘but that’s just not
me’. And Rani might have argued forcefully that she’d rather
not take the safety risk of getting lost in a strange
neighbourhood after dark. It’s easier to find reasons to justify

our habits than it is to change them.
But at some level we know that some of our behaviours are not
working for us. We want to change them, but our sense of
identity is so tied up to our habits that we don’t believe we have
the power to change them. We’ve concluded ‘these behaviours
are who I am… I can’t change who I am’.
Since we can’t see any alternative course of actions we could

have taken with the belief systems we currently have about who
we are, we end up blaming circumstances, others, or our own
limitations. And, in not being able to see the possibility of
making different choices, we are condemned to repeat the same
mistakes over and over again. Unless… we question one of our
most fundamental assumptions and ask ourselves the deep
question…
Who am I?
“Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing yourself is enlightenment”
Lao Tsu
A rigorous look at our typical answers to this question reveals a

lot about how we see the world.
I am Kanishka: That is not who I am. That is just my

name. If I changed my name to Girish I
would say ‘I am Girish’ and the name
might change but the ‘I’ would still
remain unchanged
I am an Indian: That is not who I am. That states my

nationality. If I changed my nationality
the ‘I’ would still remain unchanged
Survival
I am a trainer: That is not who I am. That is my job. If I

changed my job ‘I’ would still remain
unchanged.
I am a wife: That is not who I am. It is one of my

roles. Before I was married ‘I’ was still
myself.
I am my body: I have a body but I am not my body. The

cells in my body change every seven
years so in effect I have a completely
different body from the one I started with
but there is a sense of continuity with the
person I was then.
I am my beliefs: I have beliefs but I am not my beliefs. I

have changed my beliefs several times in
my life but I am still the same person.
Sometimes when people challenge my
beliefs, it feels like they are attacking me
but of course they aren’t because I am not
my beliefs.
I am my thoughts: I am not my thoughts. My thoughts are

forever changing yet the person who is
having the thoughts remains constant.
Sometimes I get confused and think that I
am my thoughts. I get upset when
someone tells me that they disagree with
my thoughts because I think what they are
saying is that ‘I’ am ‘wrong’ in some
way. It takes me a while to remember that
what he actually means is that he thinks
my thoughts are inaccurate.
I am my feelings: I am not my feelings. My feelings are

constantly changing but the person who is
experiencing the feelings remains
constant. Sometimes I get confused with
the way we use the English language. I
say ‘I am sad’ instead of ‘I am
experiencing the feeling of sadness’. This
is why I resist certain feelings so much –
because I’m afraid they define who I am
when actually they are just temporary
experiences that arise and dissipate.
I am my actions: I take actions but I am not my actions. I

have taken many actions in my life. Some
of them have worked and some of them
haven’t. Some of them have been labelled
good, funny, smart and considerate and
others have been labelled bad, boring,
dumb and selfish but I am the same
person who has taken both types of
actions.
I am my personality: My personality is composed of various

behaviours or patterns I display
consistently. But these personality traits
are merely habits, which can change. I
have a personality, which can change. But
the ‘I’ that has a personality remains
unchanged.
I am my results: I have results. Some of them are results

that I wanted to achieve and others are
results I did not consciously set out to
achieve but I am the same person.
Sometimes I get confused and take my
results so personally that I think they
Survival
define who I am but of course they are

just my results and not me.
When we try to define ourselves in these conventional ways we

end up limiting ourselves. Even seemingly empowering self-
definitions like ‘I am a giving person’ can be limiting because
we might get upset if someone implies that we have been selfish
(even if we have been), or we might feel the pressure to live up
to our self-image and feel too guilty to say no to any request,
leaving us open to being taken advantage of.
The ancient Hindu sages and Buddhist monks looked at the

nature of ‘self’ with great rigour. Their logic was that since ‘I’
can be aware of my thoughts, feelings and sensations, ‘I’ can’t
be any of those things. In fact it was such a difficult question
that the Hindus decided that ‘I am everything’ – God and all
creation. Some Buddhists in the Zen tradition would describe
this realization through the words ‘I’ do not exist at all! Clearly
it’s not as simple a question as we might have initially assumed.
If we don’t share their conclusion that ‘I’ am the Universe, we

might still feel that the one unchanging thing that ‘I’ can
represent is consciousness itself. When all the other things
change the one thing that remains constant is the consciousness
that perceives them. Maybe we could say ‘I am self aware
consciousness’ but it’s debatable if we are always self aware or
fully conscious. Also, if all I am is consciousness and the same
is true for everyone else, then wherein lies my patently manifest
individuality?
Words cannot capture who we are because we are infinitely

complex beings. Maybe the only accurate statement we can in
answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ is simply ‘I am’.
When we see the illegitimacy of statements of misidentification
such as ‘I am good’ or ‘I am bad’ or ‘I am a success’ or ‘I am a
failure’ or ‘I am attractive’ or ‘I am ugly’ or ‘I am smart’ or ‘I
am dumb’, etc… we can become free from the pointless, never

ending and ultimately impossible endeavour of self-definition
and of trying to live up to societal expectations.
In the next and final chapter on Survival we will look at the four
dominant systems of societal programming that most of us have
unconsciously internalized and try to find a route out of the
maze they have built around us.
Q: What were the behaviours that were positively or negatively

reinforced by your parents? How has this contributed to your
beliefs about the sort of person you need to be to be liked and
respected?
Q: What are your Light, Burn, Shadow and Shade? (several

ranges may be applicable).
Q: If you moved your range from Light/Burn to Light/Shade…

what would be possible? (think about all areas of your life)
INTO THE MYTHS
“Superstition is the mad daughter of the wise mother. These daughters have too long
dominated the earth”
Voltaire
Q: What have we been programmed to think will make us

happy?
Q: Why don’t these things make us happy?
Q: What is the meaning of life?
We will end the ‘Survival’ section of the book by understanding

and deconstructing the four dominant philosophies currently
operating in the world. In the process of addressing their
shortcomings we will start the process of exploring an
alternative, more contemporary philosophy for living in the 21st
Century.
We refer to the four current dominant systems as myths because

they are motivational stories told to us, passed down for
generations, but when we check them out – there is little
evidence to suggest that they are actually true.
1. The Myth of Success states that if I am successful I will be

worthy of respect and that will lead to happiness. This myth
has evolved as a response to our fear of not being respected
.
68
Into the myths
2. The Myth of Goodness states that if I am ‘nice’ I will be

liked and so I will be happy. This myth has evolved as a
response to our fear of not being liked.
3. The Myth of Certainty states that if I can be certain then I

will be happy. This myth could almost be divided into two
sub myths – the Myth of Knowledge and the Myth of Safety
(avoiding risks). These myths have evolved as a response to
our fear of uncertainty.
4. The Myth of Entitlement operates under the assumption that

the world should give me what I want and be the way I want
without major exertion on my part. We could call this the
Myth of Instant gratification. This myth has evolved as a
response to our dislike of effort.
Survival
The Myth of Success

“There is a strange race of people described as spending their lives doing things they
detest, to make money they don’t want, to buy things they don’t need, to impress
people they don’t like”
Emile Henry Gauvrea
Buddha’s great insight was that since our desires are unlimited,
not all of them can be fulfilled. Not only that but, since nothing
lasts forever, we eventually lose the desires that were fulfilled.
As a result, according to Buddha, the world is full of suffering.
It’s a lottery
Modern researchers have shown the situation is even worse

than Buddha stated. The happiness of 22 lottery winners, each
of whom had won more than $50,000 (and 7 of whom had won
more than $1m), was compared to a control group and the
research showed that after the initial high died down, there was
no difference in terms of happiness24.
Even if we get what we desire and don’t lose it we soon become

used to it and stop taking pleasure in it!
So why do we keep chasing the pot at the end of the rainbow

when we can see, at least intellectually, that it doesn’t exist?
Although fulfilment of superficial desires may not bring us

happiness, it does bring things into our lives that serve as body
armour to protect us, albeit temporarily, from experiencing our
fear of not being respected. Fame, an expensive house, a racy
car, an attractive partner, a bulging bank balance – these are the
symbols of success we use to bolster our self-image.
Into the myths
One way this shows up in our life choices is that people

sacrifice family, health and leisure and put that time into
acquiring money, power and prestige. However this is not
making us any happier. The percentage of people who describe
themselves as ‘very happy’ has been flat25 or declining26 in the
US for over 50 years now even though real incomes have more
than doubled. Similar trends have been seen in Britain, mainland
Europe and Japan.
There is some research indicates that after countries achieve a

threshold average income of around $8,000, there is little
correlation between average national income and average
national happiness. This indicates that beyond a point the level
of absolute wealth does not impact our happiness.
However within individual countries, wealth levels are highly

correlated with happiness because we can see the wealth levels
of people around us and we benchmark ourselves against them.
This act of comparing does impact our happiness. Societal
pressures were always there but in today’s hyper-connected
global village, instead of comparing themselves to the richest
person on their street, people increasingly compare themselves
with Bill Gates. No matter how fast we run in the rat race, we’re
always miles from where we think we should be.
When we compare ourselves to rich people in the world, we

think we will be unable to be happy unless we are as rich as
them. The problem with our Survival mind-set is that we
unnecessarily interpret many situations as ‘win-lose’ scenarios.
This may have made sense when there wasn’t enough food to go
around. In those instances, if someone else got ‘more’ it meant
that they had a better chance of living and that we had a higher
chance of dying. This mentality doesn’t make as much sense in
today’s world of relative abundance, where there is enough to
go around for everyone. If you can eat enough to fill your
Survival
stomach, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference, in theory,

whether somebody else eats ten bananas or a thousand.
The problem for most of us reading this book is not scarcity. It’s
comparison.
Food for thought
Daniel Gilbert, a Professor of psychology at Harvard, is best

known for his studies that show people are very bad at
estimating what will make them happy.
In one of his experiments he asked two groups of volunteers to

estimate how happy they thought they would feel if they ate
some potato chips27. In the corner of the room was another,
unobtrusively placed and unmentioned, but clearly visible food
item – for one group it was a delicious looking chocolate bar
and for the other group it was a tasteless looking can of
sardines. The group that glimpsed the chocolate bar out of the
corner of their eyes felt that they would not enjoy the potato
chips. However the group that spotted the sardines felt that they
would enjoy the potato chips.
In both cases it was the comparisons to what they could have

been eating that were driving their assessment of whether they
would be happy or not, rather than the actual snack itself.
Perhaps an even more interesting finding of the research was

what happened when people actually ate the potato chips in
time with the regular ticks of a metronome (it forced them to eat
a little faster than normal and so they had to focus conscious
attention to the act of eating). Both groups enjoyed the chips
equally. This was because when they actually immersed
Into the myths
themselves in the activity, they stopped comparing and were

therefore able to enjoy themselves.
When groups were asked to eat the chips extremely slowly, the
group that had seen the chocolate bars once again got
dissatisfied with their chips compared to the group that had
seen the sardines. Once again they had time to think about the
‘better’ snack they were missing out on.
The constant bombardments of ads create lives of constant

comparison and dissatisfaction, which in turn leads us to
competing to get ahead of others in the rat race.
Subliminal programming
An experiment that illustrates how subconscious messages

affect our behaviour was set up as follows: Participants were
asked to solve a series of puzzles in which they had to create a
four-word sentence from five jumbled words and tell the
experimenter when they had finished28. The experimenter would
deliberately ignore the participant by chatting to someone else.
Participants who were exposed to words related to ‘rudeness’
would interrupt almost immediately however participants who
were given puzzles with words relating to ‘politeness’ would
wait patiently for ten minutes.
Similarly, exposure to words related to the elderly makes us

walk slower and words related to professors make us smarter at
quiz games. And in fact this happens even if the words are
flashed on screen for a few hundredths of a second – so fast that
it’s not possible to consciously even read the words.
Survival
And of course, it’s not just wealth that people compare. We

compare our own looks to those of film stars and our wives to
lingerie models, our intelligence with that of the smartest guy in
college, our charisma and poise against the self-assurance of
international stand-up comedians and motivational speakers, and
our family to the Brady bunch. This does not work. According
to research by psychologist Tim Kasser29, individuals who say
that goals for money, image, and popularity are relatively
important to them also report less satisfaction in life, fewer
experiences of pleasant emotions, and more depression and
anxiety. The Germans have a specific word for the world-
weariness that comes from this constant comparing of reality
with an unobtainable ideal – weltschmerz.
The Myth of Success creates a grasping existence. The success

of countries is now measured by GDP growth rates, which can
be interpreted as a measure of the increase in the rate at which
we turn our planet into garbage. If we reduce the rate at which
we convert our natural resources into trash, it is called a
downturn.
The Myth of Success can’t be a workable solution to the human

condition.
The Myth of Goodness

‘Lord. Save us from good people!’
The Myth of Goodness focuses, not on our fame or possessions

but on our behaviour. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ is a
typical guidance statement from this philosophy. The value, in
this phrase, is placed on meekness; it is assumed that the results
will follow (if not in this life then in heaven or in a future
reincarnation as the case may be).
However by ‘outlawing’ certain actions in its codes of conduct,

the Myth of Goodness immediately comes into collision with
Into the myths
our powerful desires for instant gratification (ex: celibacy vs.

pre-marital sex) and security (ex: charity vs. accumulation of
wealth).
Focus on success is, under this operating framework, often

considered a sin (envy, greed, pride) as is focus on short term
physical or emotional gratification (sloth, wrath, lust, gluttony).
The Myth of Goodness creates guilt or shame if I break the
moral code. It serves as the basis for anger, revenge and
punishment if someone else breaks it. And it creates points of
difference, potential conflict and estrangement if someone else’s
moral code is different from mine. These points of difference
arise on a regular basis because what is considered good varies
across time, across cultures, from individual to individual and
from philosopher to philosopher.
Good and evil may be abstractions created by the human mind

rather than weaved into the fabric of nature. We don’t see
‘good’ being favoured over ‘evil’ in nature (described vividly by
Tennyson as ‘red in tooth and claw’). As a thought experiment,
we can imagine a world with just three species – lions, antelopes
and grass. If the lions stop ‘murdering’ the antelopes out of
‘goodness’, first the lions will die. In the absence of predators
the population of antelopes will rise exponentially and the grass
will be eaten to extinction. This will be followed by the
starvation and death of all the antelopes. If, on the other hand,
the antelopes stop eating grass out of ‘goodness’ to the grass,
then the antelopes will die. This will be followed shortly by the
starvation and death of the lions. And then as the grass covers
the planet, all the carbon dioxide will be replaced by oxygen
since there will be no animals to remove oxygen from the
atmosphere with their breathing. The grasses will then suffocate
to death in oxygen since they need carbon dioxide for
photosynthesis. In a way therefore the lions killing the antelopes
and the antelopes killing the grass keep all the species in balance
and alive over generations in a web of interactions that defy
Survival
conventional ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. (Note: in a

more realistic scenario, carbon dioxide released from the oceans
and volcanoes would probably keep plants alive till a new stable
equilibrium emerged)
Philosophers have been trying to understand the laws that

underpin ethics and morality down the ages but most attempts
have simply raised more questions than they have answered.
Until Socrates posed the Eurythpro paradox, it had been
assumed by many, that things were good that were approved by
the Gods. According to Plato, Socrates once asked a gentleman
called Eurythpro whether moral actions were good because the
Gods liked them or if the Gods liked moral actions because they
were good. In the conversation Eurythpro was led to the
realization that if the Gods liked certain actions because they
were good then it implied that goodness was independent of the
Gods and deities were simply irrelevant to morality. On the
other hand if certain actions were good simply because the Gods
liked them, then it meant that morality was arbitrary.
Since then there have been three major schools of thought on

ethics. One school is ‘consequentialism’, the idea that actions
are good if they produce good results. The most famous
philosopher under this tradition was Jeremy Bentham, the
founder of utilitarianism. He believed that actions were good if
they produced the greatest happiness for the greatest number of
people. So for example if a teacher educates 100 people on how
to read and the education helps them become happier, then his
actions were good because he raised the happiness of so many
people. There are however many implications of this philosophy
that do not match with our intuition on what would be
considered a good action. For example, if you knew that by
falsely implicating and executing an innocent man the entire
world would get happier then, according to utilitarianism, the
right thing to do would be to frame and kill the man for the
Into the myths
greater good. This would, however, strike many people as being

clearly unfair.
The second major school of ethical thought is deontology. This
school posits that there are certain actions that are always right
and certain actions that are always wrong, regardless of
consequences. The most famous exponent of this school was
Immanuel Kant who felt that a moral act was one that would be
acceptable if everyone did it on every occasion. One example
was telling the truth. If everyone told the truth then the world
would be a better place but if everyone told lies then nobody
would be able to trust anyone and the social structure would
collapse. Therefore telling the truth was, as Kant referred to it, a
‘categorical imperative’. Kant would go so far as to say that
even if a terrorist came and asked you where your son was
hiding, the right thing would be to tell him, even if you knew he
was going to kill your son. The sin would belong to the terrorist
alone and you would be blameless because all you had done was
tell the truth. Again, this level of adherence to a system of rules
would strike most of us as unreasonable. We can always think
of situations where even the most sensible categorical
imperative would seem so suboptimal from a consequences
point of view that no balanced person would apply it.
The third major school of ethics, credited by many to Aristotle,

is virtue ethics. In virtue ethics, neither means nor ends are
primary by themselves. Instead, the ‘virtuous’ man would make
decisions that were appropriate for the specific context based on
his acquired wisdom and intuition. Although this system of
ethics is more flexible than consequentialism or deontology, it
leaves us with little practical guidance as to what decisions
would be made by a man who was virtuous. Goodness and
wisdom become very subjective indeed.
Since none of these ethical schools of thought appears

comprehensive by itself, many breakdowns in the application of
societal ethics can occur. The biggest breakdown, under the
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Myth of Goodness, occurs when individual freedom and

happiness is unnecessarily suppressed in the name of ‘the
greater good’. Religions are the biggest exponent of the Myth of
Goodness but as a footnote – atheist communism, for a short
period, was also a credible alternative mechanism of applying
this myth. These systems are susceptible to exploitation by the
high priests of the movements for their own personal ‘good’.
There is also little evidence that ‘good’ people are any happier
or more successful than ‘bad’ people, which requires the writing
of logically tortured philosophical essays and books like ‘Why
bad things happen to good people’ and the invention of
supernatural post life rewards and punishments tailored to your
religious affiliation - heaven/hell, 72 vestal virgins, karma in
your next life, etc.
These issues were ‘handle-able’ while religion provided a

credible framework for the question of meaning. The purpose of
life was to carry out God’s will on Earth as laid down by holy
scriptures and doctrines as interpreted by the priests, rabbis,
mullahs and pandits. Religion, in the absence of a better
alternative, addressed our most fundamental fears. Following
the laws laid down by the scriptures addressed our fear of not
being worthy of love or respect. Creation legends that explained
the existence of the universe and various rituals and prayers that
were supposed to help control our environment addressed our
fear of uncertainty. And the root fear of our own mortality was
addressed by the existence of a hereafter – life beyond death.
But as Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and scientific theories in

general challenged certain religious tenets, and started winning,
a new paradigm was born: life had come about through a
random mutation of replicating molecular machines and evolved
without design or intention through the mechanism of natural
selection on a minor planet of a small star on the periphery of
one of countless galaxies in an unfathomable cosmos.
Into the myths
As religious texts were shown conclusively, time and time

again, to be hopelessly inaccurate on these, and other, scientific
matters, their infallibility on matters of spiritual and moral
guidance also increasingly came into question.
Logically, the eternal battle to end evil and replace it with good
is a never ending one because you can’t have one without the
other – it would be like trying to have ‘tall’ in the world without
Survival
having ‘short’. In a world where 5 feet is the average height,

there would be a certain definition of tall and a certain definition
of short. When the average height goes up to 6 feet, the
definitions of tall and short would change. Trying to end ‘evil’
is therefore like trying to reach the horizon. No matter how far
you travel, you’re always as far from the goal as you always
were.
The concept of short would only disappear if everyone and

everything was exactly the same height. In this case the concept
of tall would also be redundant. Similarly you could only have a
world without bad if it was a world without good. In a world in
which both good and bad exist, the only way you could call
yourself a good person would be if you could find other people
you could contrast yourself against and call bad. The other
alternative is that you could regard other people as good and
label yourself as damaged goods.
Neither option works.
The concepts of good and bad, at least as far as they have been
conventionally used, are now out of date. We need to replace
them in the 21st Century with fresher ways of thinking about
how to live harmoniously with others.
The Myth of Certainty

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is absurd”
Voltaire
We have been searching a long time for a set of physical laws to

explain the tangible universe and perhaps even longer for a set
of universal spiritual laws to guide us in our search for meaning
and fulfilment. But the search may have no end for the cosmos
may truly be unfathomable.
Into the myths
Even if we just try to pin down objective physical reality, we

can only experience a fraction of it through our limited senses
and scientific instruments. To get a sense of how little we
perceive of what is going on, imagine that in every cubic
millimetre of space that you can see in front of you just now,
energy is dancing in patterns representing pictures and
conversations from thousands of miles away, and that this
happens all the time, whether you are awake or asleep. This is
actually true, it’s just that you can only see these patterns when
you use a TV antenna or phone SIM card to catch and process
them.
There are tastes, smells, electrical impulses, gravitational and

other forces, electromagnetic radiations, sounds, possibly spatial
dimensions that fall out of the range of our senses, instruments,
and perhaps even our ability to imagine.
There are an infinite number of conceptual models that could be

used to explain where it all came from and why and how it all
works but even if we find one or two plausible theories, and
even if we actually discovered the ‘ultimate truth’, we could
never be sure that our understanding was actually
comprehensive and correct.
Theoretically there could always be more undiscovered things

out there that our current model doesn’t explain. And there
could always be equally satisfactory, or perhaps even better,
explanatory models out there that nobody has thought about yet.
When we try to represent reality, which is infinite, dynamic,

complex and alive through concepts, models and theories, which
are limited, static, simple and lifeless, we cannot help but create
maps with internal contradictions. Neils Bohr, the legendary
quantum physicist, after devoting his lifetime to understanding
the nature of reality, came to the paradoxical conclusion:
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‘There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly
false. The opposite of a great truth is also true’.
Reality, as great sages throughout the ages have realized, can’t

be explained through models or theories or numbers or words.
As the Chinese sage Lao Tse said:
‘The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao’
In the Hindu text of Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, Yajnavalkya

described ultimate reality through negation as ‘Neti, neti’ – ‘it is
not this and it is not that’.
And in Europe, Socrates was considered by many of his

contemporaries to be the wisest man in the world, perhaps
precisely because he maintained:
“The only real wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing”
This is why our beliefs cause us so many problems when we

treat them as ‘true’. We mistake the map for reality. We mistake
the ‘spoken’ or the ‘written’ for the inexpressible. Any
philosophical, religious or even scientific ideologies that attempt
to take the position of ‘complete knowledge’ are likely to run
into problems of contradictions that will undermine their
credibility in the long run.
Those operating under the Myth of Certainty however, hate

having their beliefs challenged as this brings them face to face
with their fear of uncertainty. There are people who would
rather sacrifice relationships than be wrong. There are those
who would drive themselves and their companies into
bankruptcy than admit that their strategies are not working.
There are those in fact who would rather kill others and/or
themselves in their determination to ‘be right’ about their beliefs
and their knowledge. This is the downside of the Myth of
Certainty.
Into the myths
But wisdom lies in the dark blue waters, always beyond the ever
expanding shores of our knowledge. It lies in the understanding
that total certainty is an illusion, albeit a comforting one.
Another manifestation of the Myth of Certainty is our tendency

to treat uncertainty, ambiguity, risk and the unknown as
something to be feared and avoided at all costs. We do not
advocate a life of reckless abandon, but we do believe that
people currently err on the side of caution as a result of our
evolutionary survival based decision heuristics which bias us
disproportionately heavily towards being safe rather than being
sorry. As cavemen, if we took a risk that didn’t pay off, we
Survival
could end up dead. The risks we avoid taking today are not
likely to lead to such catastrophic results. But our internalized
fear based programming prevents us from taking even relatively
minor risks that could have huge payoffs.
This is why skilful entrepreneurs are among the richest people

on the planet. They appreciate that the risks of failure are not as
catastrophic as other people think and the rewards far outweigh
those risks. We believe the same principle is relevant in most
areas of our life. We do not make minor changes to our lives for
fear of what might befall us when just beyond that barrier lies a
potential long term increase in happiness disproportionately
greater than the short term risk we need to take to achieve it. It
may be scarier in the short run, but it’s far more uncomfortable
in the longer term to let fear dominate you rather than the other
way around.
We need an alternative, more empowering way of looking at

certainty, knowledge and risk. We need to embed this new way
of thinking into our culture if we are to learn to be happy.
The Myth of Entitlement

“Wishful thinking… is the opposite of idealism”
Thomas Sowell
The final dominant myth is the Myth of Entitlement. The

underlying wishful expectation is that the world should be and
should work the way we would like it to – it ‘should’ give us
what we want without any significant effort on our part.
The problem is that the universe has no obligation to live up to

our expectations of it. It was here first.
No doubt, there have been Cinderella like fairy tales since the
dawn of time that aim to give us comfort – no matter how bad
your life is, some external event will remove your shackles and
Into the myths
marry you off to a loving, rich and handsome prince. But in

earlier days success took time and effort to achieve and the link
between effort and rewards was more clearly seen. In our world,
of instant successes and teenage millionaires and 30 year old
billionaires, the Myth of Entitlement is becoming more deeply
ingrained.
We are fed this myth by advertisers keen to sell instant

gratification. Buy a particular suit and you’ll become a
successful executive, buy a particular brand of cereal for your
kids and they’ll love you, buy a certain brand of diamond ring
for your girlfriend and you’ll be happily married for ever, buy a
certain brand of sports shoe and you’ll be a great tennis player.
Sweat is not stylish.
This sense of entitlement is why we get frustrated when we’re

stuck in traffic jams and why husbands are annoyed when their
wives tear them away from the big game and why young
mothers get angry at their crying babies. All the frustration,
resistance, annoyance, resignation, etc. comes from an often
unarticulated but deep belief that life ‘should’ be easier. Reality
should be different and maybe if I resist it hard enough it’ll
change.
But in a fight between our wishful thinking and reality, there

will only be one winner.
The hope is that if we believe in the Myth of Entitlement deeply

enough we will get what we want without needing to exert
ourselves. The focus here is on current experience and instant
gratification to the exclusion of everything else. Thrill seeking
activities like adventure sports, gambling, sex, drugs, alcohol,
shopping parties, television, fitness, are all potentially gratifying
activities if indulged in sensibly – but when 60% of Americans
are classified as obese or overweight it’s a strong indication that
Survival
people are eating, for reasons other than subsistence or even

enjoyment. Just as we can take success, goodness and certainty
too far - hedonism, when stretched, can become addictive
escapist medication for a life bereft of deeper meaning.
We need a philosophy that makes sweat meaningful and sexy

once again without making us obsessed workaholics on the rat
race of success or martyrs to the cult of goodness.
Delusion
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can't handle the truth! Son we live in a world that has walls. … You
don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at
parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
A Few Good Men
It is clear that there are downsides of the current dominant

myths if accepted unquestioningly. However the dangers of
rejecting conventional rules wholesale can be even greater. We
risk the danger of living a life without any grounding in reality
as others perceive it – a life of personal delusion.
Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to realize the full

traumatic significance that the waning of religious credibility,
with no coherent meaning generating ideology to replace it, was
to have on the world psyche. He could see that there would be a
period of utter bewilderment as people realised that in a
purposeless, Godless universe, life was inherently meaningless.
Nietzsche wrote:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort
ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that
the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood
off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement,
what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great
for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Into the myths
Existential philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre, etc. all

concluded that the only person who could authoritatively answer
the question ‘what is the meaning of my life’ was the questioner
himself. A more productive question – one that could have a
chance of being answered was therefore ‘what do I want the
meaning of my life to be?’
“What do I want the meaning of my life to be?” is an extremely

challenging question to answer because we have been so
flooded with societal messages based on ‘Survival’ throughout
our lives. Our image is so committed to self-preservation that it
is hard to see beyond it to the life we would choose if it was
completely up to us.
The other problem is that if we can arbitrarily decide what the

rules are, then any life purpose is equally meaningful or
meaningless. Murder, rape, genocide are, logically speaking, as
valid as activities like farming, praying or running. Existential
angst30 is a term that is generally held to be the experience of our
freedom and responsibility. Since we are not held back by any
external rules and nothing we do has any meaning - we can do
absolutely anything. This level of freedom actually scares us.
The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing
on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads
the possibility of throwing oneself off.31 As Sartre said, ‘we are
condemned to be free’
Nietzsche was one of the most tragic victims of this. He

struggled under the weight of knowing that nothing he did had
any inherent meaning and finally he buckled under the pressure.
One of the finest minds on the planet… slowly went insane, and
he ultimately died in a mental institution. It’s interesting to
compare Nietzsche’s story to the best-selling philosophy based
book by Robert Persig - ‘Zen and the art of motorcycle
maintenance’ in which the philosopher Phaedrus, in his
intellectual search for the ultimate truth found ‘reason’ to be
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emotionally hollow, aesthetically meaningless and spiritually

empty. But he had no place to flee; and, without an alternative
to reason, he simply went mad.
Without the convenient moral compass of religion or the passive

social acceptance of consumerism, it is possible to find meaning
in strange places. Heidegger, who wrote one of the most
important philosophical books in the history of mankind, ‘Being
and time’, might not have gone insane like Nietzsche, but he did
become a prominent Nazi.
Sartre, another existentialist, believed that every man should

make his own rules. He had multiple simultaneous lovers, had
no compunctions about lying and even controversially supported
terrorism on occasion because he felt that the oppressed had a
right to use the only tool available to them (even if it meant
killing innocent people). But he was never able to reconcile
inalienable personal freedom with societal harmony. If everyone
has his or her own individual ideas of what is right and wrong,
then how can people get along peacefully. His famous
exclamation, “hell is other people”, reflected his frustration
with this problem.
The Aghora sect that lies some way outside mainstream

Hinduism believes that the rules and regulations of the external
world are Maya (an illusion) pulled over our eyes. They create
their own rules to help them keep this understanding
internalised. They allegedly eat faeces and dig up and make love
to decaying bodies – the logic being that if you can do that,
you’re unlikely to worry about things like whether your
neighbour’s garden looks better than yours. Some people regard
them as enlightened mystics with great power and other people
look at their acts in pure horror. Where does individuality turn
into eccentricity and where does eccentricity turn into craziness
(or enlightenment?).
Into the myths
And this may be the reason that we accept suffering in our lives.
This could be the reason we’re so willing to submit to societal,
religious, parental and corporate authority that tells us what to
do. It’s probably why we’re so resistant to anything that might
shake our belief systems. It explains why some people prefer to
commit suicide rather than reappraise their lives and why others
are willing to kill without questioning their orders.
It’s because just about anything is easier to face than exploring

the question and potentially coming face to face with the mind-
bending possibility that there is no inherent meaning to our
lives. That life is just a terminal illness from which we will all
eventually die and there really is no point to it all. Every action
and thought and decision of ours is completely futile. If we fully
grasp this, our minds can walk right off the map. And so we
prefer to stay within the limited version of ourselves that is our
self-image and within the confines of our limiting rules set
down by society’s dominant myths.
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It’s all around us, even in this very
room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you
turn on your television. You can feel it when you go out to work,
when you pay your taxes. The Matrix is a world that has been
pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into
bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or
touch. A prison… for your mind.
The Matrix
But even as we choose to stay within the enclosures of our

societal rules, we sense that there’s something missing in our
lives. We’re plagued with the nagging feeling as we trudge on
with our Survival mind-set, that there’s something we’re
forgetting.
Survival
The nagging feeling is often thought to be ‘there must be more

to life than this’ but actually it may be the much scarier
suspicion ‘there is no point to life!’.
It’s time to create a new paradigm.
Q: How do the myths play out in your life?

• Myth of Success
• Myth of Goodness
• Myth of Certainty
• Myth of Entitlement
2. The Game of Life
91
SETTING UP A GAME
“Just play, have fun, enjoy the game.”
Michael Jordan
Q: What do we need in order to be happy?
Clearly accepting conventional rules unquestioningly doesn’t

make sense, but rejecting them wholesale doesn’t seem to work
either. There must be elements in each system – Success,
Goodness, Certainty and Entitlement, that work or nobody
would follow them.
The problem is that each conventional system of rules is, by

itself limited - Success focuses only on producing results
(ignoring issues of character, burnout and emptiness), Goodness
focuses only on the actions (suppressing many of our basic
desires and feelings), Certainty focuses on the acquisition of
knowledge and avoidance of risk (to the detriment of openness,
exploration, curiosity, learning and fun), and Entitlement
focuses only on current experience (ignoring long term
consequences and development of character).
Let us assume, for the sake of intellectual exploration and

speculation, that there exist a set of unknown, potentially
unknowable, universal spiritual laws - and that following them
would make us happy. There have been a long line of seekers
who have looked for these laws: Zeno, the ancient Greek stoic
philosopher, called it Logos, Lao Tse called it the Tao and the
Vedic traditions called it Dharma.
92
Setting up a game
As a species, we have tried to pin these laws down to the extent

we can in our conventional rules. Some of them work because
they must be aligned with the universal laws while others don’t
because they aren’t.
Similarly, all of us have some personal principles we follow.

Some of them may overlap with conventional rules and some
may differ. In addition some of our personal principles work
because they are aligned with the universal laws while others
don’t because they aren’t.
The wisdom set
In the diagram above we have referred to ‘Insight’ as the

personal principles that are aligned to the Universal laws even
though they are not part of the conventional rules of the time.
For example a century ago a man who did not beat his slaves
might be considered good by the conventional rules of the day,
but a person with Insight might have intuited that there was
something inherently ‘wrong’ about slavery itself.
‘Delusion’ as per the diagram refers to personal delusion -

something we believe that has no basis in reality and that is
The Game of Life
clearly at odds with the conventional system of beliefs. A cult

leader who sets fire to himself and his followers would probably
have a whole bunch of delusional beliefs.
‘Myths’ are the dominant philosophies, believed by the majority

of the people, which are flawed in some way. We have covered
them already in the last chapter of the previous section.
Sometimes we believe certain elements of the mythology

ourselves and those elements fall into our ‘Blind spot’. The
warning bell that lets us know we may have wandered into this
region is we are producing results we didn’t consciously want
to, or if we’re not feeling happy, or if our relationships are
strained. This is what happens when a distorting belief is
operating that we haven’t picked up on yet.
Areas of ‘Potential maturity’ are those things that are regarded

conventionally as ‘sensible’ that we have rebelled against and
are unwilling to do even though they actually work. For
example, giving up smoking, for a current smoker, might be an
area of potential maturity.
The most intriguing region on this hypothetical construction is

the ‘Unknown’ region. If we knew the entire set of universal
laws and could align our personal principles with them
completely then effectively there would be only three regions in
our Venn diagram – a region of Insight (that contradicted
conventional rules), a region of Wisdom (that accorded with
conventional rules) and a region of Myths (that the majority of
society believed in but we recognized as flawed). But how can
we tell which is which?
Setting up a game
Out of the myths

“Ignorant men ask questions that wise men
answered a thousand years ago.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Without any inherent meaning in the universe, the default

decisions we would make are the ones our evolutionary
programming would push us towards. We, as one of the
surviving species, are programmed to want to stay alive and
avoid pain and discomfort. If we weren’t we would have died
out. When we are hungry we eat, when we are thirsty we drink,
when we are chased we run and when we are tired we sleep. The
default life would be the life of a cow.
We have, for better or worse, developed an intelligence and

imagination that gets bored of ‘cow life’. We are therefore
presented with the following choices:
• boredom
• embracing cow life (ridding yourself of all desires save
the desire to simply stay alive)
• believing the myths (fully immersing yourself in the
drama heavy dominant societal systems that convince
you that things are more threatening to your survival
than they actually are)
The Game of Life
• delusion (internalizing a make believe world that is more

palatable to us than the one we actually live in)
• suicide
• picking goals to achieve that would be more interesting
than watching grass grow.
We cannot make this choice without a set of principles to guide

our decision making process and this is something that does not
exist in an inherently meaningless universe. This is known as
the ‘is ought problem’ of philosophy and it was made famous by
David Hume. He found that people would start off by describing
the world as it ‘is’ and then move on to suggesting how the
world ‘ought’ to be but there was always a missing linkage
between the two. This dramatic cleavage of the world into the
‘is’ realm and the ‘ought’ realm is known as ‘Hume’s
guillotine’.
But the choice of how we choose to spend our lives is a choice

we have to make nonetheless and so, from among the equally
legitimate options (from a clinically logical standpoint), we
must pick the one that ‘feels’ best. This is likely to be the one
that feels most comfortable to us as a result of our evolutionary
past. For example, since we have survived by having a survival
instinct, for most of us the natural instinct is to cling to life
rather than simply give it up.
The choice that ‘feels’ right to us is the last one: giving

ourselves something to do by choosing goals for ourselves to
achieve. Our intuition seems to be driven by the following
preferences and we recognize that some may legitimately not
agree with them:
• Life over death

• Engagement over boredom or detachment
• Interpretive world views consistent with objective reality
over delusion and myths
Setting up a game
These choices are the axiomatic foundation of creating the

‘Game of Life’. We need to create a game for ourselves. We
need to sit down and program the princess to rescue, the ninja
guards we have to defeat to get to her, the weapons we will use
on the path and the complexity of the various levels.
Since we can choose our own goals, we may choose to play

unconventional games (ascetism for example), or the games that
society has given us – becoming the CEO of a major company
for example or becoming a charity worker. The difference is that
this time we aren’t being run by subconscious beliefs. This time
we’re choosing to play that game of our own volition, rejecting
the myths and applying our declarations of Insight to the mix of
conventional Wisdom. We’re doing it because we think it’ll be
fun and not because we’re spending our lives trying to avoid
facing our fear not being respected!
Myth of • If you are able to acquire the things you

Success should have you are a success and worthy
of respect. If you are unable to acquire
them you are a failure and not worthy of
respect
Wisdom • If you have enough money to take care of
your basic needs, life will be more
comfortable.
• Financial security provides you with more
choices than if you are broke or in debt.
Insight • The point of having goals is that they give
me something to do and make life
interesting
• I am the only one who can decide what I
want in my life. I declare that the goals I
choose to pursue in my life are…
• I may succeed at achieving some of my
goals and fail at others but I don’t waste
my time labelling myself and others as
The Game of Life
successes or failures. That conversation

creates a feeling of superiority or
inferiority. Both feelings create separation.
Setting up a game
One of the flawed assumptions that many of us subscribe to is

that if we could get everything we wanted, we’d be happy. To
get a sense of why this is completely wrong – wiggle your little
finger.
You derive little pleasure from wiggling your little finger

because it’s something you have full control over. You get far
more joy from sinking a basketball into a hoop precisely
because there was a higher probability of failure. We derive
happiness from increasing mastery over handling uncertainty
and the problems in our lives. Problems aren’t unwelcome
distractions from playing the game. The obstacles are the game!
Just as the mythical King Midas regarded his ability to turn

everything he touched into gold as a curse, we would ultimately
come to see a universe in which everything occurred exactly as
per our wishes as a meaningless, joyless one. It would be closer
to hell than heaven.
Uncertainty is not therefore something to be feared and avoided.

It’s something we need to understand, appreciate and enjoy.
Myth of Certainty • If you acquire knowledge and avoid

risks you will be safe.
Wisdom • Knowledge is powerful. It gives you
more options and increases your
chances of achieving the results you
want.
• If you take risks there is greater
uncertainty in the outcomes compared
to sticking to the beaten path.
Insight • Wisdom lies in the dark blue waters just
beyond the expanding shores of our
knowledge. Wisdom lies in knowing
that certainty is an illusion.
• Life without uncertainty would become
The Game of Life
boring, stale and stagnant. If this is

happening I need to take on tougher
challenges.
• Guiding principles can help me make
decisions in the face of uncertainty.
They may not work every time and may
be uncomfortable in the short term but I
believe that they will be effective in the
long term.
• My personal principles are not fixed in
stone. They are just hypothesis about
what works in the long term. I will
revise or replace them if, despite
following them, I am not generating the
things in my life that I want.
As we become more skilful, the level of uncertainty in achieving

our targets becomes less and less and we start becoming bored.
So we need to pick the next level of challenge to keep things
fun.
However if we consistently pick challenges that have a high

chance of failure our innate fear of uncertainty and of not being
respected kicks in and we are likely to start feeling anxious. If
this happens then we have to remember that the entire point of
choosing the Game of Life was that it would be preferable to
any of the other options (myths, delusion, suicide, cow life, etc).
The whole point was that this should be enjoyable. We need to
change the game, reduce the level of challenge or just plain
relax and have fun regardless of the result. If we are unwilling to
do this it means that we are likely to have fallen back into the
clutches of one of the myths.
A Game is something we choose to play. Work is something we

have to do. We can learn how to live life from children in this
respect. Adults work when they have energy and recover when
Setting up a game
they’re tired. Children on the other hand play when they have
energy and relax when they feel like resting.
In our experience, only a very small minority of people are able

to make this distinction nowadays. In the words of Bertrand
Russell:
“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at
present few people have reached this level”
When we are constantly in work related stress mode, we lose the

ability to ‘switch off’ which has a huge toll on our immune
system over an extended period of time32. A simple check is that
you’re exercising three times a week, getting a decent night’s
sleep and eating a balanced diet. If any one of these is missing
there’s a chance you’ve got your priorities muddled and you’re
missing the point of it all. You may have forgotten who the
ultimate consumer of your life actually is.
Myth of • Life should be easier

Entitlement
Wisdom • The point of life is to have fun! If I’m
not having fun then I’m missing the
point.
Insight • Reality is what reality is. Wishing it
were different or easier is a waste of
time.
• I don’t expend energy because I have
to. I expend energy because I choose
to. The things I choose to expend
energy on reflect my priorities in life.
If I internalize this understanding then
I can enjoy hard ‘work’.
• I need to exert myself in order to
achieve goals that are important to me
but I am under no compulsion to be
The Game of Life
incessantly productive – I am the

ultimate consumer of my life.
As we start playing more difficult and complex games, we

realize that in order to achieve in these more challenging goals
we sometimes need the help of other people. They in turn need
our help to achieve their goals and so we need to create
alignment on how we can work together.
Myth of • You should follow certain prescribed

Goodness ways of behaving. If you do then you
are a good person and worthy of love. If
you are unable to follow the prescribed
behaviours you are a bad person.
Setting up a game
• If you live as you should you will be

rewarded in this life or in heaven or in
your next life.
Wisdom • Considerate, collaborative and altruistic
behaviours are more likely to generate
trust and goodwill from others.
• Certain behaviours deepen my
relationships and relationships can be a
source of great happiness
Insight • There is no ‘good’ and ‘bad’. These are
simply labels that can make me feel
superior or inferior to others. Neither is
helpful.
• This life is all I can be sure of. I don’t
need any external validation for living
life according to my own principles.
When we separate the wisdom from the myths and add our own
insights, we see that the emergent philosophy looks, in our eyes
at any rate, very much like a team game. A game has the
following elements:
A Game The Game of Life

Results Definition of A set of challenging
winning/losing goals to achieve
Principles A strategy that A set of principles you
you think will have chosen to guide
give you the best your actions because
chance of you believe they would
winning the give you the best
game. chance, in the long term,
of getting what you want
out of life.
Experience The whole point The whole point of
of playing a living is to have fun and
The Game of Life
game is to have enjoy yourself

fun.
Relationships Team mates who People you have
win or lose with collaborative
you relationships with
Rules The rules of the The rules of reality
game are out of apply. There will be
your control. events and people you
They are there to have no control over.
make the game They are there to make
challenging the game challenging.
Opponents The other team Our own defensive
intentions.
The opponents we have to overcome in life are of course

internal – our own distorting beliefs, fears and resistances. The
external challenges are simply manifestations of the opportunity
to make the fundamental choice of life – living or surviving,
creating or defending, dreaming or fearing.
Heidegger, once again has an interesting perspective for us to

consider here. He felt that this sense of pre-analytic engagement
and connection with the world was the most fundamental aspect
of ‘being’ a human being. The term he used to describe this
quality was ‘caring’. Life is a game of self-mastery where we
learn to make choices consistent with the things that we have
decided we truly care about.
Setting up a game
Q: What are the results you want to create in your life?
Q: Which are the 5 relationships that mean the most to you?

Are you investing as much in them as you would like?
Q: What are the principles that you believe will serve you in
life? Where are you currently applying them? Where are you
not?
Q: What is the experience you would like to have of life? In

what situations do you get that experience? In what situations
do you not?
MEANING IN SYMBIOSIS
Sym-bi-o-sis (noun) - interaction between two different organisms living in close
physical association, to the advantage of both
Q: What is a meaningful life?
In Survival, life has almost infinite value. We’ve survived as a

species because we’ve got deeply ingrained survival instincts.
However, when we’re self-conscious enough to ask ourselves
‘what is the point of life?’ we realise that life has no inherent
value. It is similar to money in that nobody wants money for its
own sake. Money is a means to some other end – enjoyment,
respect, security, etc. Similarly if you had life without anything
you could use it for – if you were in a comatose vegetative state
and could have no thoughts or experiences… life would have
little or no value for you.
So we construct a game for ourselves and the first step is to

decide what goals we should pick. But so far in our exploration,
we haven’t found any reason to suggest that any one goal is any
better than any other goal. So we are still in a troubling place
where clinical logic counter-intuitively implies that recreational
genocide is as valid a goal as healing or teaching or farming.
It feels wrong. It implies a life in which all goals or actions are

inherently still equally meaningless. If we think of life as a
video game, the equivalent of a situation where there are no
moves that are qualitatively better than any other ends up
looking like an infinite excel sheet. You can move the cursor up
or down or left or right – it doesn’t make one iota of a difference
106
Meaning in symbiosis
and the game is pointless and therefore incredibly boring. It

appears that it is difficult to be sustainably happy without
meaning.
If you ask someone whether they would choose to be hooked up

to a machine that would have them constantly feeling happy in a
make believe artificial reality or whether they would prefer to
live their real lives, warts and all, most people would pick the
latter. Similarly if you asked someone if they would choose to
be happy for the rest of their lives knowing that their nearest and
dearest would be unhappy for the rest of their lives, most people
would probably reject the offer, even if they were guaranteed
they would immediately forget their decision for ever and so
never experience any guilt.
It appears that, for most of us, our ‘happiness’ is not, when the
word is used as a synonym for ‘pleasure’, the ultimate measure
of a good life. ‘Fulfilment’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘eudemonia’ as
the Greeks referred to it, requires the condition of ‘reality’ to be
met and involves consideration for others as well. Otherwise it
feels meaningless. It appears that we need some sort of context
for our goals if we are to be truly happy. We have evolved to
become meaning seeking beings in an inherently meaningless
universe. We are therefore absurdly stymied in our pursuit of
happiness.
Kierkegaard, a religious existential philosopher, felt that the

solution was a non-rational but necessary belief in something
meaningful, even if that something was intangible and non-
provable. He coined the famous term ‘a leap of faith’ to
illustrate what he meant. Albert Camus, another absurdist
philosopher, regarded this solution as ‘philosophical suicide’
and felt the rational man would have to bravely accept the
reality of meaninglessness and the indifference of the universe
to our endeavours.
The Game of Life
In the Game of Life we take a seemingly self-contradictory

position in between these two logically mutually exclusive
points of view. We believe that we need to ‘believe’ in a
meaningful ideology while ‘knowing’ that it is quite possibly
completely arbitrary.
An analogy that might help make sense of the paradox is the

playing of a videogame. Every time you play a computer game,
you chuck yourself into the make believe world. You’re
completely absorbed. Your eyes are glued in concentration to
the screen. But when your character finally falls down a hole
and dies, beyond muttering a ‘Shucks. Not again!’ it doesn’t
affect you at all. You’re willing to act as if it was important, but
know at some level that the result is not such a big deal. At the
same time, if you didn’t play the game ‘as if’ the result were
important, then the game would be boring and meaningless. At
the other end, if you played the game in a way that the only
objective was for you to keep your character alive then you
simply not move your character forwards into the game world.
That would be pretty boring and meaningless too.
There is another reason that meaning is important – it helps us

get a grip on our own fear of mortality. Even, if we create a
Game for ourselves, mortality is still the worst possible thing we
can imagine because death ends the Game. However, when we
infuse our lives with meaning, we are effectively taking the
position that our lives are simply a ‘means’ to achieving a
purpose that is bigger than simply surviving. Taken to an
extreme, it means that there’s something we would be willing to
risk our lives for. And in taking this position we lose our fear of
death to a certain extent. People are willing to die for equality,
democracy, family, honesty, etc. But of course the point is not
that you have something to die for. That is a rare and extreme
case. The point is that there is something you have to live for.
When we commit ourselves to something bigger than ourselves,
something that will outlast us, meaning overcomes our deepest,
most ingrained fear – of our own mortality. Indeed, meaning

becomes instead, a potential gateway to immortality.
Since it is our fears that get in the way of living our life to the
fullest, when we find something meaningful to live for, we
forget our fears to a certain extent and we start learning to live.
This is why almost all spiritual traditions and pathways to
liberation attempt engineering the death of the individual ego.
The problem is that, in the process, often individuality itself is
killed off and, we believe this is a loss. The question arises – can
we find a framework we could adopt that would provide us
meaning and at the same time preserve our individuality?
The RBC perspective

“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
Pablo Picasso
No doubt everyone will have their own preferences, influenced

by religious, cultural and personal backgrounds, on their context
for creating meaning. Our own personal ‘leap of faith’,
primarily for reasons of aesthetics, is in choosing to believe that
the RBC perspective, as we call it, is as grounded a basis as any,
for constructing a framework for personal meaning.
We can imagine that if a red blood cell (RBC) were asked the
purpose of its existence it would have no idea – it would
probably be completely unaware of the larger role it played and
that it was part of a much larger living organism. However, if
we take the liberty of anthropomorphizing, the purpose of blood
cells, from an external perspective like ours, would appear to be
to transport oxygen to the other cells in the body so that they can
thrive in an atmosphere of self-reciprocity by contributing to the
overall health of each other and of the person the various cells
existed within.
Brain cells, nerve cells, bone cells, muscle tissue cells, etc. -
they all have a role based on what they are good at. The
The Game of Life
symbiotic relationship is both a source of self-expression and

contribution. Contribution, in this context, also happens to be
enlightened self-interest.
Similarly if we were looking for the meaning of our lives as

human beings after realizing that we were just a human ‘cell’,
just a small part of an unbelievably intricate network of other
cells and relationships, then the most obvious life goal would
have been to look after the health of the Earth and the other
‘cells’ that live on it in enlightened self-interest, since the health
of the whole also promotes the health of the parts.
The relation between a human and the Earth, if we are willing to

adopt this way of looking at our planet, would be similar to the
relationship between a red blood cell and a human. We are just
one cell contributing to the whole in a system of self-
enlightened reciprocity. If we make the leap of faith that we
would live more fulfilled lives if we got over ourselves and
committed our lives to something bigger than ourselves then we
might find that things become far clearer.
The Gaia theory

“Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the Earth,
its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and
valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us.”
John Berry
The Gaia theory33 proposes that the Earth is actually a living

organism. Not a planet with life on it but actually itself a living
organism. This may seem a pretty bizarre statement and since
we’re claiming that this viewpoint may hold a clue as to how we
can live meaningful lives in an inherently meaningless universe,
we need to make a digression to discuss the theory in greater
detail for a while so that the logic for the statement becomes a
little clearer. What follows are a few paragraphs that might be
considered heavy reading so, if you find yourself getting
impatient, I would recommend that you skip to the next section

on ‘meaningful work’.
It is difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by the word

‘living’. There are viruses that can be frozen for centuries but
still replicate when defrosted. At the microscopic level (ex
DNA, chromosomes, etc.) it becomes very hard to differentiate
whether molecules can be defined as living or non-living. There
are humans who can’t reproduce but who are obviously still
alive. There are non-living cars that require fuel just as animals
and plants require food. There are plants that can actually grow
near undersea geothermal vents and don’t require any food or
light.
One of the better technical definitions, formulated by the life

scientist Humberto Maturana34, is that something is ‘alive’ if it:
1. exists as a system clearly demarcated from its

environment
2. absorbs energy from its environment in some manner
3. uses the energy to respond to external stimuli
4. responds in a way that perpetuates its existence.
It seems a little long winded but applying this definition usually

gives us the same result that our natural common sense does in
establishing whether something is living or non-living in most
cases.
So is the Earth alive? Well it is clearly demarcated from its

environment. Where the atmosphere ends, vacuum begins and
so the Earth is isolated from other systems.
The Earth does absorb energy from its surrounding. The energy
that the Earth receives from the Sun is trapped by plants through
photosynthesis and transmitted through the food chain to other
species.
The Game of Life
A fundamental quality of life is the concept of homeostasis – the

self-regulatory mechanism that allows organisms to maintain
themselves in a state of dynamic balance with their variables
fluctuating within tolerable limits. An example of this is how
humans maintain a steady body temperature. When it becomes
hot we start sweating and when the sweat evaporates, by
absorbing heat from the body, it makes us feel cooler. When we
feel cold, the hairs on our skin stand up and trap a thin layer of
air. This functions as an insulator preventing our body heat from
escaping. In this way our body works to preserve steady state
and keep us alive. This is part of the reason why making
changes in our habits is so tough – our bodies assume that any
change in the steady state is potentially dangerous and so resist
it.
The entire eco-system of the Earth works collectively in a

similar manner to achieve this aim of homeostasis. A computer
model of the Earth, called ‘Daisy chain Earth’, showed this
phenomenon extremely well.
Imagine there are only two types of daisies in the

world, black daisies and white daisies. The
simulation considers what would happen if the
sun slowly gets hotter.
Initially when the sun is cold and temperatures

on Earth are freezing, only black daisies can
grow on the equator because they can absorb the
light better than white daisies, which reflect more
of the light back. Since the Earth is partially
covered by black daisies, which absorb heat, it is
warmer than it would have been otherwise.
As the sun heats up in the model the black

daisies can grow at the poles, which are no
longer freezing but at the equator it becomes too
hot for them. White daisies on the other hand can

grow on the equator because they reflect a lot of
the light and heat.
As the sun becomes even hotter the black daisies

can’t grow even on the poles but the white
daisies, with their heat reflecting properties, can
and so the entire planet is covered with white
daisies instead of black daisies.
The point is that when the Sun is cool the Earth

doesn’t freeze because the black daisies absorb
the heat and when the Sun heats up the Earth
doesn’t boil because the white daisies reflect the
heat. The Earth therefore has a pretty constant
temperature despite the changes in the
environment (in real life the sun has become
around 25-30% hotter since life on Earth started
however the Earth’s temperature has remained
roughly constant).
This simple computer modelled ecosystem demonstrated a

homeostatic quality that is regarded as a fundamental quality of
living things. What is more, according to the model, the more
complicated the ecosystem is, the more effective and stabilising
the homeostatic processes are.
The homeostatic influence is all the more important because a

living organism exists in a state far from its stable equilibrium
state. If you leave a dead animal outside it will ultimately
decompose into certain compounds because they are more stable
in that state. Life is a miracle partly because the organism
maintains a non-stable state for so long. Similarly the
atmosphere of the Earth is not at a long-term stable equilibrium.
If there was no life on Earth, atmospheric gases like Nitrogen,
Oxygen, Carbon dioxide and water vapour would ultimately
The Game of Life
decompose into more stable compounds methane, ammonia, etc.

as is the case on other ‘non living planets’. However the
atmosphere and temperature of the Earth have been fairly
constant now for over 3 billion years even though this is not the
most stable configuration. How?
The answer is that the levels of Oxygen, Carbon dioxide, the

temperature, etc are all regulated through massive Gaian
homeostatic cycles35. For example Carbon dioxide has been
spewing out of volcanoes for millions of years. Since it is a
greenhouse gas, this would cause the earth to heat up if it
weren’t removed from the atmosphere somehow. Plants recycle
some of the gas but the biggest source of removal is from rain,
which combines with the Carbon dioxide and then reacts with
rocks to form carbonates. Soil bacteria increase the rate of soil
weathering and acts as a catalyst in this process. The carbonates
are then swept down to the sea where tiny algae use them to
form shells of chalk (they also take Carbon dioxide straight
from the air). The shells ultimately sink down to the ocean floor
where they form massive sediments of limestone that sink into
the mantle of the earth and melt. This may even cause shifts in
tectonic plates. From these shifts volcanoes start and the whole
cycle starts again.
Any external change that would ordinarily increase the level of

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is counteracted by changes in
cycle that, to a certain extent will attempt to negate its effect.
For example industrialization produces Carbon dioxide which
causes global warming. The resulting increase in evaporation of
sea water would cause more rain that would remove part (but
not all) of the excess gas from the atmosphere.
This is just one of the many great Gaian homeostatic cycles

(other examples are the Oxygen cycle, the Nitrogen cycle, the
water cycle, etc). These planetary homeostatic feedback cyles
link plants and rocks, animals, atmospheric gasses, temperature,
salinity of the oceans, etc. The entire planet is effectively

working as one single organism – both the parts that are usually
thought of as living (plants and animals) and the inorganic parts
that are usually regarded as non-living (mantle, rainwater, etc).
In fact it is not completely inappropriate to make the analogy to

a human body where regenerative cycles of cell replacement
occur and where living cells interact with inorganic materials
such as bone matrix, cartilage, minerals, etc. to maintain
homeostasis. If a human can be regarded as a living organism
when it is made up of so many individual living cells and
systems that work together it seems only fair to regard the planet
Earth, which is similarly composed of individual living
organisms (including human beings) and ecosystems, as being
alive.
It may not be that Earth has a consciousness similar to ours – it

may be easier to see the similarity to the consciousness of a
plant. Plants are also composed of many separate living and
dead cells that work together to preserve its form without
necessarily orchestrating that coherence through a central
processing unit responsible for cognitive thought. But if we
label plants as ‘alive’ there is an argument for labelling Earth
‘alive’ by the same logic.
One day the Earth might even ‘reproduce. It is possible that in a

hundred years time man will start colonising the moon and Mars
or a moon of Jupiter or Saturn. He may well find a way of
recreating a homeostatic eco-system and atmosphere similar to
the one on Earth. It won’t be identical to its parent but then
again which child is? The colonising rocket would effectively
have a role similar to what a sperm cell performs for a human.
The Game of Life
Meaningful work
“Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune. But I say to
you that when you work, you fulfil a part of Earth’s furthest dream. Assigned to you
when that dream was born. And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth
loving life. And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.”
Kahlil Gibran
Just as the purpose of the blood cell would be to transport

oxygen because that’s what it can do best and the purpose of the
brain cell would be to think because that’s what it can do best,
and the purpose of the heart cell would be to pump blood,
because that’s what it can do best, the purpose of a human being
might be to contribute to others by doing what he or she could
do best.
Interestingly this sounds a lot like the Hindu concept of Dharma

– translated by some to mean ‘the duty or code of conduct
related to the position one is born into’. The word Dharma
comes from the root ‘Dhri’ which means to uphold or support
from within (according to Hinduism - what is being supported is
the whole world and creation). In a way this is almost a
definition of ‘self-expression – doing what you were born to do.
But in the context of this sort of symbiotic relationship, there is

no distinction between self-expression and unselfish
contribution and enlightened self-interest. The part contributes
to the whole and to itself by giving of itself to the whole. The
whole contributes to the part and itself by giving of itself to the
part. Under this paradigm giving is not ‘sacrifice’, nor is
receiving ‘selfishness’.
Combining these ideas with Kasser’s research that people who

spend time on the things they enjoy doing are happier than
people who are materially affluent, we can conclude that, to live
a fulfilled life, you need to be doing work where you do what
you enjoy, where you can contribute the most to others and
where you can do what you do best.
And this is an interesting logical conclusion to land on because

it seems to tie in with the views that many famous thought
leaders have independently come to.
• Steven Covey in his book ‘The 8th habit’ talks about
finding your ‘voice’ or calling and he says you can find
it by finding the intersection of your passions (what you
enjoy), talent (what you do best) and need (how you can
contribute to others).
• Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar in his book ‘Happier’
says you can find the right work in the intersection of
The Game of Life
meaning (how you can contribute to others), pleasure

(what you enjoy) and strengths (what you do best).
• Research by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
of Gallup36 also tells us that the most productive and
engaged employees are those who focus on leveraging
their strengths to contribute at work.
The importance of contributing to others is something that our

traditional religions have been postulating for ages. In fact it is
perhaps the biggest common denominator that the major faiths
of the world have. This may indicate that the RBC perspective
of meaning may therefore have a basis in a ‘reality beyond
conventional beliefs’. It may be one of the ‘Universal laws’ we
were looking for in the previous chapter.
• The Christians have their golden rule – ‘Do unto others

as you would have them do to you’
• The Hindus and Buddhists have maintained all along
that we are all part of one unity and it is only ‘Maya’ or
illusion that makes us believe we are separate.
• Sikhs have the concept of ‘Seva’ or service (in the most
extreme form - we should be grateful to others for giving
us the opportunity to help them)
• The fourth pillar of Islam is ‘Sadaqa’ - voluntary
charitable giving. This may take the form of financial
assistance, public service or even a smile to someone
who needs it37.
• The Arab Sufi Saint Abu Ben Adhem38 was made
famous in the west by James Hunt’s poem illustrating
once again the primacy of contributing to others.
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace
And saw, within the moonlight of his room
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom
An angel writing in a book of gold
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold

And to the presence in the room he said, 'What writest thou?'
The vision raised its head and with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered 'The names of those who love the Lord’
And is mine one?' said Abou. 'Nay, not so,' replied the angel
Abou spoke more low, but cheerly still; and said
'I pray thee then write me as one that loves his fellow men’.
'The angel wrote, and vanished.

The next night it came again with a great wakening light
And showed the names who love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
However when we live wholly materialistic lives driven by

purely superficial or hedonistic motivations, we are less like the
blood cell and more like a cancer cell that competes for
resources without contributing anything itself. When we live
wholly moralistic lives on the other hand, we can end up
needlessly sacrifice ourselves and our happiness for the greater
good. And, we experience guilt and shame when we don’t live
up to that exacting standard.
Maybe this is why we struggle to live a fulfilled life. We have

been brought up programmed to believe that we have to
compete with others in a win-lose game if we are to survive or
that we have to sacrifice ourselves in a lose-win game for the
good of others. Whereas it’s possible that the truth, which is
hinted at by our conventional wisdom and by science, is that we
may have a higher chance of living happy, meaningful and fun
filled lives if we learn to collaborate with others in symbiotic
win-win games of self-expression and contribution.
Collaborative win-win games lead to emotions like joy,

laughter, peace, and love whereas competitive win-lose or
sacrificial lose-win games lead to emotions such as fear, anger,
jealousy, hatred, guilt, shame, resentment and pain.
The Game of Life
Meaningful relationships
“If you were going to die soon and you had only one phone call left who would you
call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”
Stephen Levine
Apart from our work, another place where we can express

ourselves and contribute to others is in our relationships.
In geometry, a point doesn’t exist by itself. It comes into being

only when defined in terms of its relationship to other points,
lines or axes. Similarly, we don’t exist as separate entities.
Every quality we possess can only be expressed in the context of
something external to us. The inertia we feel as we raise our
arms is because of the cumulative gravitational pull of every
single atom in the universe on it. Our intelligence only exists in
the context of a problem to solve. Our breath only exists
because of the presence of the air surrounding us. We can’t exist
in isolation. We need a matrix of relationships to provide a
canvas on which we can express ourselves. Without
relationships, words like honest, kind, trusting, helpful, etc. have
no meaning. Living a life with no relationships is like writing a
book with no words.
The quality of our relationships has a huge bearing on our

happiness. It is self-evident but also borne out by countless
different academic studies. It is clear from the data that any
Game we create for ourselves will have a much higher chance of
making us happy if we make sure that our life goals include as
many close relationships as we can.
Till death do us part
Research shows that 43% of married people are likely to say

that they are ‘very happy’ whereas the corresponding number
is only 24% for unmarried people39. In addition of course

even for married couples, the quality of the relationship has a
significant impact on happiness. The negative impact of
separation was found to be more damaging to happiness than
losing a job or a suffering a severe decrease in subjective
health.
The Game of Life
Only the lonely
In another research supervised by Martin Seligman, one of the

founding fathers of the positive psychology movement, the
happiness of 222 college students was measured using six
different scales. What the researchers found was that the
happiest 10% differed from the others in only one really
significant way– they spent the least time alone40. They were
rated highest on good relationships by themselves and their
friends and only one of the 22 did not have a romantic partner
at the time.
I get by with a little help from my friends
Professor Oswald compared the linkage between happiness

and income and between happiness and friendships and he
found that a person with poor quality of friendships would
have to earn £50,000 more to be as happy as a person with
good quality of friendships.
In another study by Richard Tunney the report found that those

with five friends or fewer had a 40% chance of being happy41.
People with between five and ten friends have a 50% chance of
being happy. But for people with more than ten friends, the
likelihood of being happy varies between 55 and 56% (there
was little additional happiness after 10 friends). On average,
respondents who reported themselves 'extremely satisfied' with
their lives had twice the number of friends compared to those
who were 'extremely dissatisfied' but the study concluded that
it was quality as well as quantity that counted. Having long-
term friendships for more than ten per cent of one's life — for a
40-year-old this would be four years — makes happiness more

likely.
Symbiotic ethics
“Two things awe me most: The starry skies above me and the moral law within me”
Immanuel Kant
In the previous chapter we considered how the route to

happiness was to set up a Game for ourselves in which we
decided our own goals. In this chapter so far, we have explored
the possibility of a hypothetical but aesthetically attractive
meaning generating ideology that could be used to guide us in
setting those life goals.
If we adopted this model as an improvement to the existing

conventional systems of living - the logic implies that we should
set goals that incorporate our work and relationships in such a
way that we use them as canvasses on which we can express
who we are (doing what we are good at and what we enjoy) and
through which we can contribute to others. But this raises the
question – what does it mean to contribute to someone?
Contribution, under this philosophy, would be defined as

anything that would help move people out of Survival and into
the Game of Life. Derivative ‘symbiotic ethics’ that would
emerge from this principle would include:
Survival Game of Life – Symbiotic ethics

Fear of not • Treating everyone with respect i.e. not
being respected using people as means to our own ends
and Myth of by dominating, manipulating or
Success deceiving them
• Helping people achieve their goals
The Game of Life
• Making sure that in the pursuit of our

goals we do not compromise the
ecological sustainability of the planet
Fear of not • Practicing love, compassion,
being liked and understanding, acceptance and
Myth of inclusiveness as opposed to hate,
Goodness judgement, vengeance and exclusion
Fear of • Participating in the quest for knowledge
uncertainty and and promoting free speech, the
Myth of dissemination of ideas and education.
Certainty • Ensuring that people’s basic needs are
taken care of by society, especially those
of the most vulnerable.
Dislike of effort • Creating opportunities for fun,
and Myth of enjoyment and relaxation
Entitlement • Helping people figure out what’s
important to them, since exertion is most
taxing in the absence of meaning
We need to stop here for just a second to differentiate symbiotic

ethics from the Myth of Goodness.
There is no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in symbiotic ethics. There are

however different levels of skill. If we asked the question
“which is better – a one year old child or a ten year old child?”
the answer would be “neither is better, but the ten year old
knows more”. The ten year old is less likely to trip and hurt
himself. Similarly if someone is disrespectful we would not call
him a ‘bad’ person. We would however say that he is less skilful
in relationships and more likely to get hurt. Love, compassion,
understanding, accepting and inclusiveness are all elements of
symbiotic ethics and under this paradigm we assume that
everyone does the best they know how to.
Now that we have set out some broad guidelines for what
‘contribution’ means we need to ask ourselves the next question
-‘how much contribution’ is appropriate? The big breakdown in
the Myth of Goodness was that individual freedoms were

compromised to serve the ‘greater good’. People who did not
‘voluntarily’ give could be forced or manipulated into doing so
by being made to feel selfish and guilty.
Guiltless selfishness
In one experiment participants were divided into three groups

and each group was given some money. The first group was told
to spend the money on others, the second was given the choice
on whether to spend it on others or themselves and the third
was instructed to spend it on themselves42.
The studies showed that the people who were happiest were the
people who were told to spend the money on themselves. This
allowed them to enjoy themselves without feeling guilty.
Human & Heroic

“Freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth.
Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is
responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness
unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend the Statue of
Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West
Coast.”
Victor Frankl
If we define freedom as the ability to pursue our own goals then

we need to consider Sartre’s dilemma on how to reconcile
personal freedom with societal harmony. How do we resolve the
conflicts that may arise if, in pursuing my goals, I impinge on
someone else’s freedom or vice versa?
Let us consider a scenario where there are only two individuals
on Earth – A & B. The amount of resources available to A, in
the form of wealth, energy, time, etc. is measured along the y-
axis and the amount of resources available to B is measured
The Game of Life
along the x-axis. The possible combinations can therefore be

mapped on an x-y chart (see diagram on next page) and, given
that resources are limited, these are bound by a ‘limit of
feasibility’.
In the chart A0 indicates the amount of resources that A would

have if B were not alive to share the planet. On B’s arrival, A
could, by dominating B and limiting the freedom available to B,
significantly increase the resources available to himself to
pursue his own goals (through slavery for example). This
roughly corresponds to the vertical grey shaded part of the chart.
Limit of feasibility
A
WL WW
Ao
As LL LW
Bs Bo B
If A stopped dominating B in this way, the maximum amount of
resources that A could enjoy might diminish while the
maximum amount of resources available to B would increase.
This corresponds to the unshaded part of the chart where the
limit of feasibility tapers from top left to bottom right.
The chart assumes that the symmetric converse is also possible

– B could disproportionately increase his own use of limited
resources by limiting the resources available to A. This
corresponds roughly to the horizontal grey shaded part of the
chart.
If we imagine that we start in the situation that A has a freedom

of A0 and B has a freedom of B0 then we can see that there are
four different ways A & B could interact at (B0, A0):
1. WL: Win-Lose
Some people consider a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality as
a natural consequence of our evolutionary past. Individuals
compete for resources and the fittest win. This is the law of
the jungle. A could interact with B in a win-lose manner and
thereby increase the amount of resources available to
himself at the cost of B. Ways by which A could achieve
this would be by dominating by force (physical or
economic), by manipulating, or by deceiving B.
The question of fairness comes up and there are different

views on what is fair. According to Nietzsche, there are two
different types of morality – master morality and slave
morality. Master morality was the old morality (and
according to Nietzsche, the purer form of morality). Power
and strength were considered the ultimate virtues and
synonymous with good. He felt that slaves ultimately tricked
their masters into believing in a morality that served their
purposes – i.e. the meek were good, the weak should be
protected, charity to the underprivileged was a sign of good
character, etc. What was regarded as ‘weakness’ under the
master morality was relabelled ‘goodness’ under slave
morality according to Nietzsche.
But, in addition to our aggressive and competitive instincts,

evolution has also given us (and other animals) altruistic,
The Game of Life
helpful and collaborative instincts too. If the competitive

instincts were codified by Nietzsche in his master morality,
a more contemporary philosopher – John Rawls, explored an
alternative structure that formalized our need for fairness in
his magnum opus – ‘A theory of Justice’. In it he carried out
a famous thought experiment called ‘the original position’ –
if all of us, before our birth, were to decide on the fairest and
most ethical system, and we did not know the social, gender,
race, etc. that we would be born into, what would we
decide? He felt that from behind this ‘veil of ignorance’,
people would not allow for certain systems like slavery –
they might be born as masters but then again they might be
born as slaves. Instead he felt they would plump for two key
principles.
o Equal opportunity
o No decision should make the lot of the worst off in
society worse than it already was
We relate far more with this theory of ‘fairness’ than

Nietzsche’s master morality. We believe that in an
increasingly interconnected and abundant world, working
creatively and synergistically with each other is likely to
lead to the best outcomes for the planet and indeed most
individuals if not all of them. A more competitive morality
may have been appropriate in a less connected time where
resources were not as adequate to meet everybody’s needs.
We recognize that some (generally the ‘haves’), may validly
argue, from a purely logical point of view, that in the
absence of a proven ‘absolute morality’, Nietzche’s ‘winner
takes all’ master morality is a legitimate alternative.
Win-Lose interactions, where A gains at the expense of B,

would in general be considered unethical, under the system
of symbiotic ethics. We may compassionately understand
that the reason A would dominate, manipulate or deceive B
is because he is still operating in Survival but that doesn’t

mean we would allow ourselves or others be exploited in
such a way, if we subscribed to the system of symbiotic
ethics.
From a point of enlightened self-interest, this is not

necessarily a great situation for A either in the long term,
because in this situation, as we can see in the chart, B would
actually be better off if A were eliminated. This creates the
incentive for B to revolt. A has to be constantly anxiously
vigilant. As King Louis XVI discovered, to his horror during
the French Revolution, the snap back can be particularly
violent and unforgiving.
Win-lose interactions can work within an agreed upon

framework that disallows physical force, manipulation and
deceit (for example: competition for jobs in a free market
economy or between tennis players on the opposite side of a
net). In fact as we have discovered in economic experiments
with Socialism, if we try to completely remove inequity in
distribution of resources, the incentive to work can weaken,
and this can make everyone worse off from a resource
allocation point of view. It also appears fair that those who
contribute the most to others or who have achieved success
through their vision, taking risks and their hard work, are
rewarded in commensurate amount to their input. For the
majority to deny them this would be, as philosopher John
Stuart Mill referred to it, a ‘tyranny of the masses’.
However win-lose interactions would not be ethical, under

the framework of symbiotic principles, if one of the parties
were to be pushed into a place where basic survival
freedoms are threatened (i.e. in the grey areas of the chart:
below As for A and to the left of Bs for B).
The Game of Life
We live in a world where it costs around $200-$4,000 by

various estimates to save a life in a developing nation (for
example by the donation of mosquito nets that would reduce
malarial infections). On the other hand paintings like ‘The
card players’ by Cezanne can fetch $250m. At some level,
under the dominant Myth of Success, one painting for a rich
collector has the same value as one million lives in a poor
country. This is a suboptimal way of allocating resources
with respect to the overall health of the planet. Going back
to our analogy of human beings being like cells in a human
body – allocating the energy disproportionately to one organ
at the cost of the overall health would be, by definition,
unhealthy.
We therefore believe that legislatively enforced wealth

transfer by a democratically elected government, from the
haves to the have-nots through taxes would be ethical. This
is especially true of inheritance taxes that prevent dynastic
wealth accruing to heirs who have done nothing to deserve
it. Multibillionaire heirs co-existing with penniless crippled
children with no state resources to take support of, would be
something that nobody would agree to, from behind the ‘veil
of ignorance’ that John Rawls imagined.
Given the relative abundance we have on the planet, the

‘survival’ threshold should probably be defined to include
basic freedoms such as right to education, freedom of
speech, etc. as laid out in the ‘Universal declaration of
fundamental human rights’.
If survival is threatened, then we are no longer in the Game

of Life but in Survival and symbiotic ethics do not apply in
cases of self-preservation. We don’t believe it’s possible to
practically suggest any scheme of ethics in this scenario or
condemn anyone for any action if their survival or the
survival of someone important to them is put in the balance.
If we do not have this transfer from privileged to

underprivileged, we build up the chances that the deprived
will try to seize the resources of the rich by force and we
will descend into a competitive ‘might is right’ world with
lower freedom for everyone.
2. LL: Lose-Lose
In a ‘might is right’ world, we have to constantly assert
ourselves in order to send out the message that we are not to
be trifled with. Punishments for transgressions have to be
punitive for the same reason. These two forces create cycles
of ever increasing retribution.
We see this dynamic in long standing military conflicts or

failing marriages. Everyone suffers and we reach a
dysfunctionally suboptimal solution. In his book
‘Leviathan’, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described
life in this sort of environment as ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
He felt that man’s nature was sufficiently flawed such that
this would be the logical outcome of a land without a
powerful body to maintain order. His conclusion was that
people should give up their individual freedoms to an extent
and subordinate the responsibility of maintaining them to a
ruling body. Hobbes was a monarchist, but most people
today would consider a democratically elected institution far
more likely to serve in the best interests of the people.
It is interesting to consider what principles we might choose

to adopt if there were areas that the law was not sufficiently
able to reach in to prevent win-lose interactions, and we had
to guard against them ourselves. Robert Axelrod, a political
scientist and expert in the field of game theory, ran a
tournament in which computer programmers could submit
various algorithms that would compete/ collaborate in a
The Game of Life
virtual simulation. Axelrod found that the most successful

strategies were:
• Nice: They did not attack other algorithms first

• Retaliatory: If attacked, they were willing to fight
back
• Forgiving: If their opponent stopped fighting, they
would also cease hostilities immediately
• Non envious: They did not try to score more than
competitors
However he also concluded from further tournaments, that

this kind of strategy would not work in environments where
the other algorithms were really nasty and aggressive. When
the world descends into a ‘might is right’ equilibrium where
survival really is at stake, trusting can be suicidal.
A democratically elected body of some sort would provide

some resistance to a descent into this sort of world. Some
guidelines that it would enforce to contain conflicts would
include:
- Pre-emptive strikes would be considered unethical
except in highly extenuating circumstances where it
was known to a very high level of certainty that a
crippling attack was imminent.
- A unilateral escalation of hostilities would also be
unethical.
And of course these would be valuable principles for us to

adopt in relationships and business when things get heated.
3. WW: Win-Win
A more positive outcome could be: that by collaborating in a
win-win interaction, A & B could both simultaneously
increase the resources available to them. This is pure
symbiosis.
If A were to gain more than B in this interaction, the

movement would be more ‘vertical upwards’ than
‘horizontal rightwards’ and the opposite would be true if B
were to gain more than A. However they would both benefit
by the interaction and would have more resources to pursue
their objectives than they could generate by themselves.
Unequal gains of this type, based on relative bargaining

power, are ‘symbiotically ethical’ and have in the past
provided legitimacy to ‘trickle down economics’ where rich
people are allowed to get much richer because it was
believed that poor people would get slightly richer as well at
the same time.
Whether the ‘trickle-down effect’ actually exists is of course

still under debate. Some people believe that the rich get
richer at the cost of the poor. If this were the case, then
Economic policies that raise the possibility of this happening
would be ‘unethical’ under this system of symbiotic
principles since they would increase the number of Win-
Lose interactions.
4. LW: Lose-Win
The final option is that A could deliberately choose to
interact with B in a lose-win manner and thereby voluntarily
decrease the resources available to himself to the benefit of
B.
This would only be according to symbiotic ethics if A did

this without the ‘this makes me better than others’ mind-set
that often exists in the Myth of Goodness. The gift would
need to be without any emotional strings attached.
In our eyes, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet donating billions

of dollars to charitable objectives without expectation of
financial return are examples of this sort of giving. We don’t
The Game of Life
believe they give to prove to themselves or others how

‘good’ they are. Nor does it probably feel like a major
sacrifice to them. They give because they don’t feel they
‘need’ those surplus resources. They’ve simply transcended
Survival.
And of course, this sort of a voluntary ‘lose-win’ act is not

just available to the billionaires. Any voluntary gift of a
limited resource such as time, or effort to help others, or to
stand up for the oppressed, or for the protection of freedoms,
or the propagation of symbiotic principles in the world
would fall in the same category.
Although A reduces the resources available to himself he

does not limit his freedom to pursue his objectives because
his objective was to help others. It may be a ‘lose-win’ act
from a resource allocation point of view but it is a ‘win-win’
act from a happiness point of view, if it is voluntary gift.
These acts are what are known in philosophy as

supererogatory – beyond the call of duty. We can praise
people for engaging in them but we can’t censure those who
don’t. This is because most of us possess more than we need
for our survival, whilst knowing that there are millions right
on the edge. We cannot, without hypocrisy, criticize anyone
else who chooses not to donate what we might label as their
‘excess’ resources. Nor does it make sense to censure
ourselves for not giving away all our resources to the
underprivileged. This is because there are a very large
number of them out there and an individual could give
everything away and join them without making a significant
difference to the average. A solitary drop in the desert
evaporates.
We don’t therefore advocate the guilt inducing ‘give till it

hurts’ obligation ethic that is a feature of the Myth of
Goodness. That is not to say that people who sacrifice high

levels of material comfort to be of service to others are not
to be admired. But that can’t be the exacting standard that
we judge ourselves and others against in order for us not to
live with the guilt of being a ‘bad’ person.
Under the Myth of Goodness if you are good you will be

rewarded by being happy, if not now then later or in a future
life or in heaven. Under symbiotic ethics, the understanding
is reversed. What we have noticed is that people who have
moved from Survival to the Game of Life often experience a
sense of abundance from which they give spontaneously and
willingly, beyond the call of duty, without feeling a sense of
loss or sacrifice. They are happy and that makes them
altruistic as opposed to the other way around. The people
who would be called ‘selfish’ under the Myth of Goodness
are still operating from deeply ingrained fears that they don’t
have enough. This is a very human instinct.
The old judgemental division of ‘Bad’ and ‘Good’ from the

Myth of Goodness can therefore be replaced with the more
compassionate symbiotic concepts of ‘Human’ and ‘Heroic’.
Character is the ability to consistently transcend our deeply

human fears and resistances under pressure. In the next section
we will start looking at how the development of character
occurs by committing to the Game we have chosen and why this
increases our ability to be sustainably happy.
The Game of Life
Q: What are your strengths? How do you use them to contribute

at work?
Q: How does your work contribute to humanity?
Q: How do you use your strengths to contribute to the people in

your life? (i.e. what do people appreciate most about you)
3. Mastery &
Creatorship
137
SELF-AWARENESS
“We don’t receive wisdom. We must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no
one take for us or spare us”
Marcel Proust
Q: What does it mean to be self-aware?
Q: Why do people disagree?
Q: What is the purpose of emotions and how can we use them?
In 1956 a Professor called Joseph Campbell started teaching a

subject called ‘Mythology’ in America because he felt he had to
share something he had learned with the general public. He had
been reading thousands of myths and legendary stories from all
around the world from different ages and had found to his
surprise that all the stories had the same overall storyline
running through them.
The heroes - Buddha or Muhammad or Christ or Ulysses or

Rama had all gone on a difficult and stretching journey. At
some point, in the face of external obstacles and dangers, they
all doubted themselves and thought about turning back to the
life of safety and certainty they were leaving, but those same
incidents forced them to look deep within and call forth the
noblest parts of themselves under pressure. In doing so they
emerged from the journey with extraordinary character admired
by all those around them. Even more importantly, the wisdom
they acquired through their experiences on their journey gave
138
Self-awareness
them, what Campbell called, ‘the freedom to live’ - a life

without regret, guilt or fear.
Campbell felt that the reason that the myths from around the
world were so similar was because they reflected common
experiences shared by all human beings. We are all, in a way, on
a character-building journey of self-discovery and that is why
these stories resonate with us. Many modern films and books in
fact have been written using the ‘monomyth’ storyline that
Campbell uncovered – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry
Potter, etc. The elements of the ‘hero’s journey’ appear to be
timeless.
The ancient alchemists never found a way to transform ordinary

metal into pure gold but we believe a method does exist for the
transformation of human beings – committing ourselves to the
Game we have chosen for ourselves. Our definition of character
is the ability to do this on a consistent basis by overcoming our
fear of not being respected, our fear of not being liked, our fear
of uncertainty, and our dislike of effort. This is the process of
personal growth. We are more than just human beings. We are
also human ‘becomings’.
It is hard to work on our character directly. For example, a

person who is ‘working on his confidence’ can paradoxically
reinforce his current image of himself as diffident, because only
a person lacking in confidence would need to ‘work’ on it. Also,
confidence as an end in itself, without a context of contribution
to a goal or relationship is meaningless. You could work on
your confidence by punching a lion on the nose – but it’s
unlikely to be referred to as confidence unless it’s being done
for some larger goal.
On the other hand a mother may display spontaneous heroic

courage in running into a burning building to save her baby. She
doesn’t do it because her aim was to be more courageous; her
Mastery & Creatorship
courage was a by-product of her commitment to one of the

relationships/ principles she has chosen to live by – ‘putting the
care and welfare of my baby above all else’.
If you have no external challenges or if there is nothing you are

committed to then there is no context for such a thing as
character. The dragons and demons and ogres of lore are of
course merely the external manifestations of the real obstacles
that lie within. And so, in a way, are the challenges we face in
our work and relationships. Both the knight in shining armour
and our heroic manager or parent or spouse will have to get past
their own excuses, fears and limiting beliefs to triumph. But we
need a path to traverse. In a world without real witches and
goblins and monsters our work and our relationships are actually
our equivalent of the spiritual odyssey through which we can
find, express and in fact create our essential selves – by
pursuing what is truly important to us.
Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson and Katherine Dahlsgaard

performed a rigorous study of over 200 classic books that relate
to character – Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, The Bible
and the Talmud, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tze, the Samurai
code, the Koran and the Upanishads, etc. One of their findings
was that people across the world valued character traits as
meaningful ends in themselves. If a mother looks at her baby
daughter and says, “I pray that she will turn out brave, loving
and wise” it’s not necessarily because these qualities will enable
her to acquire money, fame or any other superficial symbols. So
why do we value character so much?
We believe it is because our character allows us to overcome

our fears and areas of discomfort and this allows us to
consistently make decisions that may be uncomfortable in the
short term, but which work for us in the long term. Goals aren’t
important because in achieving them we become successes.
Principles aren’t important because in adhering to them we
Self-awareness
become good. They are important because if we have not

created a Game for ourselves, then we will be unable to practice
the commitment that will develop our character. Without the
character required to handle life’s uncertainties and challenges
we cannot be sustainably happy.
The starting point of this journey towards sustainable happiness

starts with a nudge that awakens us from our slumber and has us
become conscious of our programming and the impact it is
having on our lives. In this chapter we discuss a theoretical
framework for the various elements of self-awareness.
Awakening
“There are three mysteries in the Universe: The sky to the bird, the water to the fish
and man to himself”
Ancient Hindu proverb
It’s very difficult to identify our own beliefs because we are so

immersed in them that they have practically become transparent
to us. Contact lenses are a good analogy. We can’t actually see
them when we’re wearing them but everything we perceive is
through them so any defect distorts the way we view the world.
Our beliefs are formed by our past - experiences we’ve had,

books we’ve read, people we’ve met, things we’ve seen, etc.
Our beliefs, modulated by the state we’re in at the time, produce
our interpretation of an event. ‘State’ refers to our physical
levels of energy or tiredness, emotional mood and recent train of
thoughts.
It is our interpretations that determine our experience of the

situation, which in turn influences the actions we take and
conversations we have. These actions and conversations
ultimately create the results and relationships in our lives.
However, as we have seen in previous chapters, the results and

relationships we generate with a certain set of beliefs usually
end up reinforcing those beliefs. Empowering beliefs therefore
generate virtuous spirals of effectiveness and growth whereas
distorting beliefs generate vicious circles that trap us in
behaviours where we keep repeating the same mistakes again
and again.
The first step out of this trap is to become aware of the nature of
this cycle, its various elements, and how they apply to our own
lives. This is what we define as self-awareness. Once we
understand this, then, when we experience an emotion that
indicates we may be about to overreact or underreact to a
situation, we can choose a different interpretation that is more
likely to lead to the results we would like to create. The benefit
of self-awareness is that instead of running on automatic pilot
we acquire the power of ‘choice’.
Self-awareness
Reality - Interpretation
“There are two sides to every story”
Protagoras
Objective reality, as we define it here1, refers to the things that

can be objectively tested and agreed upon irrespective of our
belief systems. For example the assertion ‘the temperature today
is 30C and the relative humidity is 85%’ is a statement about
reality. It can be conclusively verified as being true or false.
Beliefs on the other hand are not necessarily assertions of fact.

They are often simply static and incomplete generalizations or
rules of thumb that help us simplify and make decisions in an
infinitely complex and dynamic universe. They often feature
words and phrases like ‘should’, ‘shouldn’t’ ‘must’, ‘mustn’t’,
‘have to’, ‘don’t have to’, ‘can’, ‘cannot’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’,
‘wrong’, ‘if/then’, never, ‘always’ etc.
Beliefs are like maps that help us navigating reality but

problems arise if we don’t realize that the map is not actually
the terrain. If we had a map, but found that we kept getting lost
or bumping into buildings that didn’t show up on it, we would
update the map. Similarly if we find that in certain areas of our
lives we are consistently having unpleasant experiences, taking
1
’Objective’ reality, as discussed here, is different from ‘ultimate’ reality
that we have touched on earlier in the book. Objective reality refers to
’knowable’ things we can agree on irrespective of our belief systems.
Ultimate reality refers to the unknowable infinitely complex universe that is
the source of objective reality, our subjective experience and everything else
that exists including the things we have no knowledge or awareness of.
According to Plato’s theory of forms, wisdom comes from our ability to
sense the form of things beyond the superficial objective reality. According
to Immanuel Kant however, there is a ‘veil of perception’ that prevents us
from knowing ‘ultimate reality’ – we can only perceive objective physical
reality through our sense organs. This is known as the ‘subject-object
problem’
ineffective actions and generating unwanted results or

unfulfilling relationships, then we would need to revise our
beliefs about what works and what doesn’t in order to be
effective.
How we react to a situation is also influenced by the state we’re

in at the time. If we’ve been listening to energetic music we may
respond favourably to a request to do some housework. If we’re
feeling lethargic after a big dinner we may find the same request
annoying. Over a period of time our subconscious internalized
beliefs get ‘embodied’ in our state. For example a person with
low confidence may slouch and speak softly. But for short
periods of time we can consciously change our state to a more
effective one - say by standing up straight or speaking loudly or
even by reading a stimulating book.
Interpretations are subjective declarations about things that are

generated largely by our own unique belief systems. Someone
from London might declare that a ‘30C relative humidity 75%’
day is ‘hot and sticky’ whereas someone from Mumbai might
describe it as ‘normal’. Interpretations are not passive
descriptive statements of objective reality like assertions. In fact
‘interpretations’ are highly generative because they generate our
subjective experience and determine the actions we will take
and the tone of the conversations we will have. For example
someone who interprets the day is ‘hot and sticky’ is less likely
to enjoy the weather, more likely to make a conscious effort to
wear light loose clothing and more likely to have conversations
in an irritable and complaining tone when compared to someone
who interprets the day is ‘normal’.
Interpretations do not fall into the realm of statements that can

be shown to be objectively true or false. If someone says that the
day is ‘hot and sticky’ it would be inaccurate from an
intellectually rigorous point of view to say ‘you’re right’ or
‘you’re wrong’ (although you could respond with those
Self-awareness
statements if they said that the day was 30C). All you could say
accurately would be ‘I personally don’t experience it as such’.
Both interpretations would be legitimate and complementary.
Taken together they would give a more comprehensive but
never complete understanding of reality (never complete
because there are always an infinite number of possible
subjective interpretations)
By understanding these distinctions we can better interrogate

situations where we are not being effective by extracting the
unambiguous assertions of objective reality from our narrative
and comparing them with our subjective interpretation of what
happened. By doing so we can deduce what our beliefs really
are since it is our beliefs that create the difference between the
two.
Reality (objective)
• Supriya’s boss called her into his office and said he
needed her to work over the weekend to complete an
important project
Supriya’s belief:
• People usually try to take advantage of others
Supriya’s interpretation (subjective):

• The project isn’t that important
• My boss knows how important my weekend is to me
• My boss won’t be working over the weekend
• My boss doesn’t respect my time or me
• He’s a jerk
These interpretations are likely to lead to a highly negative

experience about the situation and Supriya’s actions and
conversations are going to be generated from a state of
resentment and disengagement with consequent poor results on
the project. Her boss is likely to form a negative assessment of
her capabilities and her motivation levels and as a result lose

confidence in her. He will most likely start monitoring her
actions more closely and be sharper in his communication with
her - all of which will further reinforce Supriya’s belief that
people usually try to take advantage of others.
Based on assertions of what happened, there could be a number

of equally plausible interpretations, that would be generated
with alternative beliefs, and that would be still consistent with
reality.
Reality (objective)
• Sonal’s boss called her into his office and said he needed
her to work over the weekend to complete an important
projec
Sonal’s belief
• People can usually be taken at face value
Sonal’s interpretation (subjective):

• The project is very important and the work is urgent
• My boss needs my help
• My boss thinks I’m dependable and hardworking
• My boss may not realise how important the weekends
are to me and so I need to communicate this to him
This set of alternative interpretations is more likely to lead to

positive experiences, motivated and effective actions and
superior results that could improve her relationship with her
boss and create a virtuous cycle.
The self-aware individual understands that since

‘interpretations’ are not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, she has the freedom
to choose the interpretation, consistent with objective reality,
which is most effective in producing the results she wants. She
also understands that since beliefs are not statements of
Self-awareness
‘ultimate reality’, they can be continuously revised, consistent

with objective reality, till they consistently generate helpful
rather than unhelpful interpretations.
Of course, beliefs that are effective in some circumstances can

be ineffective in other circumstances because they are, by
definition, generalizations. Sonal’s belief that people can usually
be taken at face value could lead to her being taken advantage of
if she actually gets a manipulative boss whereas Supriya might
be faster at identifying such a person.
Interpretation - Experience
"I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It’s fun to see what
they’ll say it is."
Erykah Badu
Our interpretations generate experiences that consist of:

1. Thoughts
2. Feelings
3. Sensations
All three are usually consistent with each other. If Supriya’s

instinctive interpretation is that her boss is a jerk then the
emotion that might be generated is anger, the thought might be
‘who the hell does he think he is?’ and the body might stiffen
with a flushing of the face.
Paying attention to our experience is absolutely critical in

developing our capacity for self-awareness. Our experience is
the only things we can be 100% sure of. Everything else is
deduced from our experience. In fact when Descartes was
thinking about whether there was in fact any thing one could be
certain about, he realized that the one thing he was positive
about was that ‘thinking’ existed because it was happening at
that very moment. The second thing he realized he could be
certain about was that someone must be doing the thinking. His
famous quote ‘I think therefore I am’ came from this insight.
Self-awareness
Our interpretations generate an experience – (emotions,

thoughts, bodily sensations). These temporary states are
automatic predispositions to taking certain types of actions in
reaction to our interpretation of the situation.
Experience – Actions & conversations

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a
pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy
them, and to dominate them.”
Oscar Wilde
Pleasurable states (joy, excitement, anticipation, etc) are

generated when we don’t interpret a situation as dangerous.
However fear based states generate automatic, unthinking
reactions that can be useful in truly dangerous situations, but
which are usually less relevant today than they used to be in our
distant past.
If we are conscious of what we are experiencing and aware of

the automatic reactions arising within us, then we can check
ourselves, step back and incorporate the message our emotions
are giving us into a revised interpretation of the situation that is
neither one that fills us fear, nor one that generates an
unrealistically rosy picture of the situation.
According to some western interpretations, the Chinese symbol

for crisis has two characters, one representing opportunity and
the other representing danger. Although this may be an overly
romantic translation, we find it a useful way to think about
difficult situations. A crisis is a moment of change and in any
change there will be some gainers and some losers. Those who
view the crisis as an opportunity are more likely to respond
creatively and gain and those who view the crisis as a threat are
more likely to respond defensively and lose.
Chinese symbol for Crisis: Opportunity + Danger
We believe that by revising our fearful interpretations to a more

neutral or even an interpretation that sees the possibility of an
‘opportunity’, without straying into delusion, we have a higher
chance of figuring out the best way to respond to the situation.
One thing to note is that no emotions are ‘bad’. Emotions are

like compasses – their function is to point us in the right
direction. If a compass needle always pointed towards the North
no matter which direction we were facing, it would be useless.
Similarly if we tell ourselves we are happy all the time no
matter what is going on in our life, we are probably in denial
and a serious breakdown is likely to be around the corner. When
you fight reality, even if you can delay it for a while, eventually
reality always wins.
If we listen to the message that our ‘negative’ emotions are

giving us and revise our interpretations to more neutral ones and
take action based on them, then they have done their job and the
emotions will subside by themselves.
However certain emotions are warning signs if they recur on a

regular and consistent basis, or if we experience them too
intensely at inappropriate times because it means that we are not
listening to, and acting on the messages they are giving us. The
underlying problem that is generating the warning emotions is
not being handled and so it either remains or gets bigger over
time.
Self-awareness
The reason we are willing to get stuck in these unpleasant

emotions is because although they are not effective in the long
term, in the short term they have the subconscious payoff of
reducing the impact of one or more of our fundamental barriers
(fear of not being respected, fear of not being liked, fear of
uncertainty and dislike of effort)
Let’s look at an illustrative list of some of these ‘negative’

emotional states:
Anxiety, nervousness and mistrust

Function: Nervousness might be a useful warning emotion for a
girl in a dark alley being followed by a leering thug – it tells her
to take the action of getting the hell out of there or to call for
help. But in many cases we are anxious about a number of
things that have low probability of happening or things that will
not seriously impact the quality of our lives.
Payoff for getting stuck: “Ironically a generalized anxiety

reduces fear of uncertainty: If I stop fearing things in general
then that might lead to complacency and that in turn might lead
to truly horrible things happening. I’d rather be slightly anxious
all the time than risk that happening”.
Neutral interpretation: “I sense there is a danger to something

that is important to me. Now I need to figure out what the
danger is, what it’s a danger to and what I can and will do about
it”.
Shock
Function: Shock is a derivative of fear in which an animal
freezes and stops all action, an instinctive reaction that cuts off
movement that a predator might notice.
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of uncertainty: “If I don’t

do anything then things will not get any worse than they are
hopefully”.
Neutral interpretation: “This was not what I expected. I need to

stop and figure things out calmly before responding”.
Panic
Function: Panic is another derivative of fear and occurs when an
animal is so threatened that it is willing to try every single
possible action, no matter how crazy it seems, in the hope that
one of them might just work. Panic gets a lot of bad press but in
situations where there is no time to think it can be better than
doing nothing (think of how difficult it is for a farmer to catch a
wildly scrambling chicken – he doesn’t know what the chicken
is going to do because the chicken itself doesn’t know. Panic
has the evolutionary advantage of making us unpredictable to
predators).
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of uncertainty about who

I think I am – “I believe I don’t think clearly under pressure and
so if I start thinking clearly it means that my beliefs about
myself would be wrong”.
Neutral interpretation: “I’m not thinking clearly. I need to

focus”.
Anger, revenge, rebelliousness, sarcasm and hate

Function: Anger is a predisposition to attacking and hurting
someone who has done something that has violated our
boundaries. By responding in this way we stopped people and
other animals from taking advantage of us (attacking us, taking
our food, stealing our mate, etc). Punishment, revenge,
rebelliousness, sarcasm, hate, the need for justice are all
associated emotions.
Self-awareness
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of being inferior. “If I get
angry other people fear and respect me”.
Neutral interpretation: “This is not acceptable to me. I need to

stop this from happening”.
Disappointment, frustration and pessimism

Function: Disappointment probably evolved to signal to us that
we had tried to achieve something that we were not capable of
achieving and had wasted valuable energy as a result (for
example: trying to catch a healthy gazelle). The natural response
to this emotion is to give up doing those things and concentrate
on activities that give us a better chance of success (trying to
catch a baby pig instead).
Disappointment has strong links to feelings of frustration,

pessimism, hopelessness and low self-esteem – all of which
therefore were useful emotions at a time when it was crucial to
expend energy optimally by not taking on overambitious goals.
In today’s world however most significant achievements require
overcoming repeated failures and so pulling back too quickly
after experiencing a disappointment is counterproductive in this
context.
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of uncertainty. “By not

trying I can at least be certain that I won’t get it”.
Neutral interpretation: “I did not get something that was

important to me. What can I learn from this so I am more likely
to succeed next time in a similar situation?”
Sadness
Function: Sadness is an extreme form of disappointment. It was
possibly an emotion linked to loss of something precious that
might significantly affect the daily activities of the individual to
the extent that he might be disoriented and it might be
Self-awareness
dangerous for him or her to go out (predators, etc). This emotion

reduced the chance of that happening by strongly reducing the
energy levels and thereby the inclination to undertake risky
activities. It probably also served as a signal to others in the
group that the individual needed support and sympathy
(loneliness could therefore be a derivative of sadness).
Later as our cognitive abilities improved it might have had the

additional benefit of creating a withdrawal from action and into
introspection, maybe to figure out how to avoid that loss again.
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of uncertainty that would

result from acknowledging the reality that nothing lasts forever.
I also have an excuse for not doing anything else in my life that
might activate a fundamental fear.
Neutral interpretation: “I lost something precious to me. I need

to take time to grieve and come to terms with the change”.
Guilt and shame

Function: Guilt served as a warning signal to ourselves that we
had done something against the societal norms and if someone
found out or if we repeated our actions we might be excluded
from the group or the group might seek retribution.
Shame was a public limbic communication to others that we had

done something that we recognized broke societal norms.
Guilt and shame evolved to promote group cohesion, which had

survival benefits.
Payoff for getting stuck: Reduces fear of not being liked. “I did
a bad thing but because I feel so awful about it I must be a good
person”.
Neutral interpretation: “I did something that is inconsistent with

my principles. If possible, I will fix my mistake. If not, I’ll learn
from it”.
Actions & conversations –

Results & relationships
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.”
Albert Einstein
There are theoretically almost an infinite number of paths we

could take to produce the results and relationships we want in
our lives. If we fail to do so then, by identifying actions that we
were unwilling to take or conversations we were unwilling to
have, and looking at the reasons for our unwillingness, we can
get an insight into the clutter of distorting beliefs we’ve
acquired that weigh us down.
For example if Raja, who in an earlier chapter got lost trying to

get to a party, sees that he could have called a friend to ask for
help but didn’t because that would seem dependent then he can
deduce that he has the belief, learned most probably during
childhood, that ‘I should not ask for help’ and the image he is
trying to maintain is of a strong independent person who never
needs any help. Similarly Rani might be able to deduce that she
didn’t go to the party by herself when her friends couldn’t come
to pick her up because during her childhood she got affection
when she was ‘daddy’s little girl’ and formed the belief that
good girls are angelic dainty things who need to be looked after.
The first step in discarding the rules we no longer need is to

become aware of them and their impact on our lives. But self-
awareness by itself is just an intellectual booby prize for those
who don’t build on it to achieve effectiveness. In the next
chapter we start to look at the mind-sets that distinguish people
Self-awareness
who are effective in generating the results and relationships they

want from those who aren’t.
Q: Scan your body. What sensations are you aware of now that
you weren’t a minute ago?
Q: What emotion are you feeling right now? What is the

interpretation that generated it?
Q: Scientists believe we have around 50,000 thoughts every

day. How many of the approximately 2,000 thoughts you’ve had
over the last hour can you recall? These thoughts are
predispositions to actions... what are the actions that your
thoughts are making more likely? What is the future reality
you’re creating as a result?
EFFECTIVENESS
“Efficiency is doing things right, Effectiveness is doing the right things”
Peter Drucker
Q: What are the key mind-sets that differentiate people who

achieve their goals from those who don’t?
We define effectiveness as the ability to create the results,

relationships and experiences we want in life and we believe
there are five critical principles that are required for
effectiveness - Clarity, Honesty, Ownership, Commitment and
Win-Win.
Clarity, Honesty and Ownership are required to make an

effective interpretation of reality and generate a positive
experience of life. Commitment and Win-Win mind-sets are
required to move from an effective interpretation to taking
effective actions and having effective conversations to create the
results and relationships we want.
158
Effectiveness
Clarity
“We cannot see our reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can
see”
Ancient Zen proverb
There are three elements of Clarity as we are defining it here:

1. Clarity on what you want
2. Clarity on the prices you need to pay
3. Clarity on why you want it
.
When we have just an intellectual level of clarity we have a

lower level of commitment and we don’t do the things that we
know makes sense. A linguistic alarm bell should start ringing if
we find ourselves using the phrase ‘I should’.
‘I should exercise’, ‘I should be nice to my mother in law’, ‘I

should eat healthy’ – all these statements are unlikely to be
actioned because we are coming from the conservative ‘I
should’ rather than the decisive ‘I will’. When we don’t do
things that we think we ‘should’ have, we experience guilt.
Sometimes the stakes are too high and the consequences too
concrete and short term to ignore and we use the phrase ‘I have
to’. After someone has a heart attack, he may stop saying ‘I
should eat healthy foods’ and move to ‘I have to eat healthy
foods’. He may know intellectually what he wants (to be
healthy) and he has an internalized level of clarity on the prices
he needs to pay in order to be healthy because he is actually
paying them (eating healthily). However when we use the
phrase ‘I have to’ it implies compulsion and this creates a
negative experience of the situation.
‘I have to travel in rush hour’, ‘I have to wake up in the night to

put the crying baby to sleep’, ‘I have to deal with that jerk of a
customer’. The ‘I have to’ phrase comes from the Myth of
Entitlement. We get stuck in resentment because a part of us
still believes that we should get what we want without exerting
any effort to make it happen.
We need to remember why we want what we want - ‘health so I

can enjoy life to the fullest’, ‘a happy baby’, ‘income for my
family so they can live comfortably’, etc. Having this
internalized clarity on why we want what we want helps us
break through the barrier of Entitlement and move from ‘I have
to’ to ‘I will’.
If one cognitive error lies in believing that we shouldn’t have to

pay any prices, at the other extreme we sometimes assume that
we have to pay prices that we don’t actually need to. For
example we may feel that if we want results from our
subordinates we have to be tough with them and lose our
friendship with them. It’s a false choice… we see it as ‘I want to
get results from my team but I also want to get on well with
them’. Another way to express it is ‘I want to get results from
my team and I want to get on well with them’. Having clarity
means knowing what prices you are willing to pay but also
Effectiveness
knowing what prices you actually need to pay. Living in a world

of false choices can severely limit our freedom to enjoy it fully.
Another possibility is that we are very clear on why we want

something but are not clear on the prices we need to pay to
make it happen. For example we may want to leave work at
6:00pm so that we can spend time with our children but don’t
know how to handle our workload. In this scenario we use the
phrase ‘I can’t’ to describe our relation to the problem. The
reason that we don’t see the solution is because it will require us
to do things that we are uncomfortable doing like having a direct
conversation with the boss or delegating a higher level of
responsibility to our subordinates. We need to go through our
fear barrier to move from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I will’.
In addition to having clarity on why we want to do something

and the prices we need to pay, we also need to have clarity on
exactly what we want. Vagueness can be a huge barrier to
clarity because we can’t identify the prices we need to pay.
Saying ‘I want to be a better manager’ is too nebulous to grip.
The more specific statement ‘I want to be comfortable holding
individuals in my team accountable to the commitments they
have made’ is far more likely to lead to action because we can
identify the prices we need to be willing to take (possible short
term unpopularity) if we are to achieve our goal (an accountable
and committed team).
The biggest impediment to clarity is the dislike of effort. Clarity

requires introspection and asking questions and it is often easier
simply to drift along with what others are doing or what we
have been doing. However when we are willing to put in the
work required to get to clarity on what we want, why we want it
and the prices we need to pay, then we can make a decision – ‘I
will’ or ‘I won’t’. This level of clarity creates decisiveness and
resilience to setbacks and it moves us forward.
Honesty
“When you stretch the truth, watch for the snapback”
Bill Copeland
When we speak of Honesty here it refers to looking at a

situation in an unbiased manner - being honest with ourselves as
opposed to with others. ‘Honesty’ is non-judgementally saying
of an event ‘this is happening’ instead of resisting it (‘this
shouldn’t be happening’) or denying it (‘this isn’t happening’).
Honesty, at its core is an acknowledgement of ‘what is’ and of
‘what isn’t’.
Honesty allows us to move to the next step: ‘given that this is

happening, what do I want to do about it?’ Denial or resistance
pulls us towards the much less productive thinking patterns
related to ‘these are all the reasons why it is unfair that this is
happening’ or ‘these are the people who are to blame’
A mountain climber who has grazed his knee and drawn blood
on a sharp rock outcrop can curse or cry or kick or scream but
the mountain will remain completely unmoved. In a tussle
between the mountain climber and reality, reality will always
win. So the best thing our mountaineer can do is accept the
shape and hardness of the mountain as it is and work with it to
get to the top. He will use the outcrop as toeholds and rely on its
very hardness for his stability. He does not have to battle against
it. Honesty is important from the point of view of effectiveness
because we cannot make an informed effective interpretation
unless we base it on the solid foundation of what is. Only then
can we work with it.
But our internal barriers can short-circuit us and undermine our

effectiveness. Since at some level we associate discomfort with
approaching death and comfort with safety, we mistakenly
equate reduced discomfort with reduced danger. And so we
employ strategies that make us comfortable in the short term
Effectiveness
through denial/resistance instead of honestly looking at what’s

happening, identifying what’s generating the problem, and
finding a long-term solution.
For example someone experiencing sadness might tell himself

that ‘everything’s fine’ because if he honestly acknowledges his
experience, then he might, through the lens of his distorting
belief ‘successful people are always happy’, come up with the
interpretation ‘I am a failure’. The fear of being inferior is so
scary that he would rather lie to himself and convince himself he
doesn’t feel sad. A more productive approach would be to start
down the road ‘The message my sadness is giving me is that I
have lost something important to me. What is it and what do I
need to do about it?’
When acknowledging reality challenges our beliefs about the

sort of person we think we are or our beliefs about the way the
world works, it feels threatening and we tend to subconsciously
distort what we see so that it is more palatable to our existing
belief systems.
There are three ways we typically approach the barriers that get
in the way of honesty. In increasing order of effectiveness they
are:
1. Denial and resistance
2. Mature defence mechanisms
3. Creatorship
1. Denial and resistance

The least effective way of handling our fears is through
resistance (‘this shouldn’t be happening’) or complete
denial43 (‘this is not happening’). This can be effective in
certain rare cases – when we are just not psychologically
ready to handle our fears because of some truly traumatic
incidences we have encountered. However in most cases the
lack of honesty is highly ineffective. Some common defence

mechanisms44 include:
Blindness
Refusing to see reality. Ex: after a stress related heart attack,
the investment banker laughs it off and keeps up his working
schedule of 80 hour weeks.
Fantasy
Escape from reality. Ex: A salesman who has been stuck in
the same job without promotion for 5 years daydreams
excessively about how he would run the company if he was
the CEO.
Projection
Believing that one’s unacceptable thoughts, feelings, beliefs
and motivations are actually experienced by someone else.
Ex: “She is sooo bitchy!”
Hypochondriasis
The transformation of negative feelings towards others into
pain and illness. Ex: Instead of having a heart to heart
conversation with her children, an elderly mother punishes
them for not spending time with her by making them feel
guilty – she ‘feigns’ inability to take care of her own health
is therefore constantly bed ridden. This is not done
consciously of course.
Passive aggression
Anger towards others expressed indirectly. Ex: After being
scolded a child gets back at his mother by refusing to eat the
dinner she’s prepared, claiming that he’s not hungry.
Repression
Direct expression of an unconscious, ‘unacceptable’ desire.
Ex: The ‘sweet innocent’ girl who flirts coquettishly with a
Effectiveness
guy and then expresses dismay and surprise when he makes

a sexual advance.
Acting out
Being a ‘bad boy’ or ‘bad girl’ in order to get negative
attention when positive attention is missing. Ex: a daughter
of a busy working couple starts taking drugs and shoplifting.
Displacement
Transfer of intense emotion towards someone or something
that is less threatening in order to avoid dealing with what is
really threatening. Ex: after a bad day at the office the
husband may yell at his kids.
Intellectualization
Avoiding threatening emotions and memories by focusing
on intellectual aspects. Ex: “I think we were incompatible.
She was an ESFJ personality type and I was an INTP. The
break up was inevitable”
Reaction formation
Taking the opposite belief because the true unconscious
belief causes anxiety. Ex: The fundamentalist who has been
taught that only bad people have sexual urges. In order to
define himself as a good person he vigorously condemns
signs of ‘loose moral behaviour’ in others.
Regression
Behaving childishly rather than handling unacceptable
impulses in a more adult way. Ex: The accounting firm
partner who fights against a mid-life crisis by flirting
boorishly with the younger female employees in his firm.
Justification
The person makes excuses for his actions. Ex: “You can’t
hold that against me baby. I was drunk at the time”
Rationalization
The person convinces himself that nothing bad really
happened using highly intellectual arguments. Ex: “Our son
was stillborn but it’s not for us to question God’s will.
Everything he does is for a reason even if we can’t always
see it”
Numbing emotions
The person stops feeling negative emotions. The problem is
that since he stops listening to the warning messages that
warn him to change direction he will continue doing things
that don’t bring him real happiness and over a period of time
he will stop experiencing positive emotions as well.
There is a pretty tight parallel between emotions and

physical sensations. If an arctic explorer gets numb, he may
not feel the pain due to the cold but this is a very bad sign.
Obviously he will lose the ability to feel the soft touch of a
rose petal, a price he may be willing to pay at the time but
the bigger danger is that he will get gangrene and lose a leg
due to the rot. He should therefore try to warm his leg even
though he will experience severe pain as the numbness goes
away.
2. Mature defence mechanisms

The second route of mitigating the fears that get in the way
of honesty is through using ‘mature’ defence mechanisms.
These defence mechanisms reduce the experience of fear by
diverting them, without necessarily handling the originating
situation in the most effective manner. It’s a mixture of
acknowledgement and resistance.
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Typical mature defences45 include:
Suppression
Consciously putting disturbing thoughts and feelings out of
mind
Sublimation
Finding a creative outlet for fears like writing a blog on the
challenges of starting your own business rather than getting
overwhelmed with negative thoughts.
Anticipation
Spreading out anxiety over time and using it to positive
effect by planning and taking preventative measures to
ensure that what we fear happens then we are ready for it.
Humour
Expressing aggression or anxiety in a socially acceptable
form through jokes or wit
‘This is life’
Experiencing the emotions without letting them overwhelm
you. Accepting them as a natural part of life.
3. Creatorship
When people start believing that they are not helpless pawns
tossed by the vagaries of externalities but are instead active
creators of their life, they experience what we call
‘Creatorship’. Creators are comfortable in their own skin
and don’t see feedback as a threat to their self-image. They
see it as neutral information on the effectiveness of their
actions in achieving their goals. The more deeply this
understanding is internalized, the easier it becomes to look
at things honestly.
Honesty involves seeing our interpretations as subjective

interpretations rather than mistaking them for objective reality.
It involves acknowledging what is motivating us – both our
creative intention (what we want to create) and our defensive
intention (avoiding our fears or avoiding effort). It involves
acknowledging what we are really feeling, the feedback that
people are giving us about the effectiveness of our actions and
the results and relationships we are actually producing without
exaggerating or diminishing.
When someone criticizes us, we can look at the feedback and

honestly say ‘this is how this person feels’ rather than ‘how dare
they feel that way?’ When we fail in hitting a target we can
honestly say ‘I missed my target’ rather than looking for
excuses.
Through Honesty we can become self-aware. We can see how

our past has shaped our beliefs and seeing how those beliefs
coupled with external factors outside our control are creating the
content of our lives. Being able to distinguish these elements
allows us to take ownership.
Ownership
“With great power comes great responsibility”
Spiderman
Clarity means that we know what we want to happen. Honesty

means that we acknowledge what is actually happening.
However if things aren’t happening as we wanted them to, we
usually attribute reasons for this gap to external circumstances
or blame other people or our own limitations. We focus on the
factors outside our control and in doing so we effectively
declare our helplessness to achieve the results, relationships and
experience of life that we want. According to Epictetus, an
ancient Greek stoic philosopher – suffering comes from
Effectiveness
ignoring things that are within our control and from trying to
control things that are not within our control.
In order to generate an effective interpretation therefore, we

need another critical element – Ownership - the mind-set of
focusing on the factors within our control and the choices
available to us.
Taking ownership is clearly not about blaming others or

circumstances. But, in the way we define the word here, it also
has nothing to do with blaming ourselves either. Taking
ownership doesn’t imply that factors outside our control had no
input in creating the results. It simply means we focus on we
could do differently or what we could have differently because
we have control over our own actions and interpretations.
Focusing on the factors within our control gives us power.
Saying ‘he never listens to me’ is a less powerful statement than

‘I’m not communicating in a way that is persuasive’ because the
first statement leads us to a dead end whereas the second one
leads to place where we can learn something and try something
different that may be more effective. Both statements are
equally true from the point of objective data. It is not the case
that one way of looking at things is more factually correct. But
if we believe that choices we made were the ultimate
determinant of the result then, by logical extension we can
believe that by making different choices in a similar situation in
the future, we could possibly produce the results we wanted as
per our Creative intention. This makes us feel more in control.
The prices that come with taking ownership is that we may be

blamed by others who are trying to avoid responsibility. By
acknowledging that there are things that we could be doing
differently we implicitly take on the onus of doing those things
that might require hard work and take us out of our comfort
zone.
By acting in accordance with our defensive intention and

blaming others, the situation or our own limitations we can have
excuses that allow us to stay in our comfort zone and avoid hard
work. If people buy our stories we can generate sympathy and
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manipulate people through guilt or fear. We don’t have to

challenge the beliefs that are producing unwanted results and we
can often preserve our fragile self-image. The unintended
consequences that are produced when we act from this mind-set
are that we don’t produce the results we want and we feel
helpless and out of control.
Win-Win
“We can work it out”
Beatles
Taking ownership of a situation is a powerful step but, in most

significant goals, we need the alignment and help of others. In
order for other people to be willing to give us what we want on
an ongoing basis, we must be willing to provide them something
that is of value to them (although that something could be as
small as a ‘thank you’ or even simply giving them an
opportunity to help).
Our fears can however, get in the way of forming effective win-
win relationships. Our fear of not being liked makes us feel like
we need to appease other people and so we adopt a lose-win
mind-set – ‘I’ll give you more than you give me so you’ll like
me’. Our fear of not being respected and therefore being taken
advantage of pushes us to adopt a win-lose competitive mind-set
– ‘I’ll get more from you than I’ll give so I win”.
Quite often we unconsciously use emotions to manipulate others

while playing these mind games. If I let you win and feel sad,
depressed, betrayed, etc then you will feel guilty and ashamed.
In this way I convince myself that I’m a nicer person than you
and more lovable. If I use anger, sarcasm, bullying, then you
will feel fear, embarrassment and weakness and I win. In this
way I feel more powerful and superior.
These emotionally manipulative ways of operating may be

effective in the short term but we believe it leaves a residue of
ill feeling over a period of time and stops people from honestly
liking each other. For long-term effectiveness we need to
employ the belief that ‘everyone (including me) is worthy of
love and respect’. When we internalize this belief, we naturally
look for ways in which we can both get what we want and in
which we can both leave each interaction feeling liked and
respected and more certain of the strength of the relationship.
If we can’t find ways of working together that generate a win

for both parties it is probably better for the relationship, and for
results (in the long term), not to enter into a deal at all.
Finding a win-win solution can be difficult because it often

appears superficially as if we have irreconcilable positions. The
father who tells his daughter that she can’t stay overnight at her
friend’s pyjama party may end up in a battle where both of them
take a stand. But the underlying interests they are taking the
position for are reconcilable. The father is worried about the
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safety of his daughter and the impact of her parties on her

academics. The daughter’s interest is in not missing the
opportunity to have fun with her friends. But given commitment
to finding a win-win solution they may conclude that the
daughter can go to the party if she keeps her mobile on at all
times and promises that her grades will remain above a certain
level.
Some key differences in the different types of mind-set are

listed below46
Lose – Win Win – Lose Win - Win47

Parties are Parties are Parties are problem
friends, at least adversaries solvers
superficially
Make Demand Invent options for mutual
concessions to concessions as a gain
cultivate the condition of the
relationship relationship
Be soft on the Be hard on the Separate the people from
people and the people and the the problem. Be soft on
problem problem the people, hard on the
problem
Change your Dig into your Focus on underlying
positions easily position interests, not superficial
positions
Try to avoid a Try to win a Try to reach a result
contest of will contest of will based on principles,
standards and objective
criteria - independent of
will or pressure
Honesty is also critical for a win-win relationship (here we are

talking about honesty with others rather than honesty with
oneself). If either of the parties looking for a win-win solution
find out that the other party has been lying to them, it can
become much harder for them to disclose information because
they will fear being taken advantage of. And since disclosure of
information is required to figure out the multiple options that
will allow both parties to satisfy their real underlying interests, a
lack of authenticity usually means that we can’t work out a
satisfactory win-win solution. Of course if the other party is
committed to a win-lose strategy then disclosing too much
information too early can handicap your ability to get a decent
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deal for yourself and you will effectively be playing lose-win. In

this case you need to build trust slowly or decide not to work
with the other party.
We can easily fall into the trap of being judgemental of others’

intentions but if we create a neutral interpretation, it enables us
to form effective relationships with them. If the daughter in the
earlier example interprets her father’s behaviour as ‘controlling
and paranoid’ then she is more likely to let her resentment get
communicated to her father, who is also more likely to become
more adamant or defensive (a self-fulling prophecy for the
daughter’s beliefs). However if she interprets it neutrally or
positively as ‘he’s worried about my safety’, it allows clear
thinking unclouded by fears of whether she’s worthy of respect
or not.
The point is that it’s irrelevant whether it’s true or not that her
father is controlling and paranoid. Those are interpretations that
are generated from her unique beliefs on what ‘control’ and
‘paranoia’ look like and interpretations cannot be categorized as
‘true’ or ‘false’. They can only be ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective’ in
producing the results we want. The question that the daughter
needs to be asking herself therefore is ‘what interpretation
would be most effective given that I want to find a win-win
solution with my dad and go to the party’.
There are times when relationships become harder because we
fail to find a neutral or positive interpretation for the other
person’s behaviour. This is usually because the areas we find
hard to accept about them are usually reflections of our own
shadow traits that we refuse to accept. We are afraid that if we
don’t dislike people with those traits, it means that we agree
with their way of thinking and we must have those traits too.
Therefore by putting our finger on the things that irritate us
about others we can often become aware of our own shadow and
the ways that not accepting it can limit us.
For example a boss who gets annoyed with what he labels as the
‘laziness’ of his subordinates because he feels it gets in the way
of office productivity probably refuses to accept what he would
label as ‘lazy’ behaviour in himself (his shadow). He himself
has a range of behaviour consistent of a hard-working,
ambitious guy who never relaxes. He probably pushes himself
and always strives for perfection leading to a high level of
pressure and a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction. This could
lead to negative feelings of stress and certain unwanted results
in his life like a poor marital relationship, high blood pressure,
etc. By accepting the part of himself that needs to just chill out
he would suddenly have new options available to him, like
taking advantage of a long weekend to go somewhere for a
relaxing holiday with his wife. It would also lead to him being
far more empathetic of his subordinate’s priorities, which might,
ironically, go a long way in creating a more engaged and hard-
working team.
Commitment
“There are many ways to skin a cat”
Anonymous
The final element of effectiveness in our model is Commitment,

which we define as ‘doing whatever is required’. It will be
valuable for us to distinguish Commitment, as defined here,
from lower levels of motivation. When we hear ourselves using
the following words or phrases it should alert us to the
possibility that we might not be ‘Committed’:
• ‘I hope’ implies a faith that the results we want to

produce will happen without any additional action on
our part.
• ‘I’ll try’ implies that we will take one or two actions but
no more in order to achieve the results we want. We are
unlikely to achieve difficult to achieve results with this
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mind-set but at least we’ll have the comforting excuse of

‘I tried’.
• ‘I’ll try my best’ implies that we will take all the actions
that we can think of given our instinctive interpretation
of the event. This may still not be enough to achieve the
result we want.
• ‘I’ll ask for help’ is the next level on the Commitment
scale. When our best is not good enough a committed
person will not let his or her ego get in the way of asking
for help. Commitment does not mean ‘a lot of effort’,
nor does it mean ‘doing things myself’.
• ‘I’ll try something different’ is the next level on the
Commitment scale. One thing we might need to do
would be to consciously change our state or choosing a
new interpretation. For example if someone is angrily
trying every logical argument to convince a store clerk to
give him a refund and it not working, then he may
decide to take a deep breath and calm down. In this new
state, new actions might be considered that might not
have been considered in the angry state. The individual
might speak to the clerk more gently and respectfully
and find that that is more effective in this situation.
• ‘I’ll do whatever is required’ is the highest level on the
scale.
Sometimes we encounter situations that are so difficult for us

that we will actually need to go one step higher and revise our
beliefs in order to achieve the results we want. For example if a
risk-averse individual is made redundant in tough economic
times and has to start his own business, he might become worn
out from handling the uncertainty of not having a regular
monthly paycheck. He can consciously try to reinterpret every
single individual threatening event, but in order to be successful
he might need to revise his belief ‘I can’t handle uncertainty’ to
‘I can handle uncertainty’ so that effective interpretations are
produced naturally with minimal conscious effort.
Effectiveness
The biggest obstacle to Commitment to a result that is important

to us is the belief that ‘it’s not possible’. The amount of effort
we are willing to put into pursuing an objective depends on
whether we think it’s achievable or not. There may be some
goals that we literally don’t yet know are possible or not (time
travel or interstellar voyages for example) but the vast majority
of goals we are tempted by are usually clearly possible at least
on a theoretical level. When we dig deeper into what people
mean when they say ‘it’s not possible’ we find that what they’re
actually saying is ‘It may be possible but I don’t think I can do
it’.
Happy Birthday
The factors that determine our level of belief in ourselves can

be pretty arbitrary. In ‘Outliers’, Malcolm Gladwell relates the
story of how a Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley, his wife
Paula and a colleague A. H. Thompson discovered that a
disproportionate number of professional ice hockey players
were born in January, and that February and March were the
next two most frequently occurring birth months.
The reason for this was that the eligibility cut off for age class
hockey is Jan 1st. Anybody born in January would be nearly a
year older than someone born in late December playing in the
same league – a significant difference in physical maturity for a
ten year old. The bigger players would do slightly better,
acquire beliefs about themselves as being capable early in their
careers that would make their motivation less vulnerable to
setbacks later on, This would lead to greater ability and great
results over the course of their careers.
Whether someone ended up as a multi-millionaire sporting

legend or a clerk at a motel could hinge on something as
seemingly minor as whether he was born on December 31st or
one day later
Creatorship – the embodiment of the powerful belief ‘I can’ is

therefore the bedrock of Commitment. Creatorship is more
fundamental than ability or motivation. Ability is derived from
the number of hours that people put into an activity, which is a
function of motivation. But motivation is itself a function of our
belief in our ability to acquire ability. Without Creatorship we
wouldn’t bother putting the work in and sustained motivation
would be impossible.
Even ability that has been acquired can be severely

compromised if you start doubting it. This has been shown
through research experiments48 but it is also very evident in
professional sports at the highest level – the winner is not
necessarily the most naturally talented but the one who retains
self-belief in pressure situations and does whatever is required
to win. On the other hand sportsmen with high levels of ability
can choke and lose matches from seemingly unassailable
positions if they doubt their ability to win.
We can tell ourselves intellectually that we are capable of

producing a result but deeply embodied beliefs are formed not
just through information provision and reasoning but also,
through vicarious learning (to a certain extent) and direct
experience (to a much greater extent). Embodied Creatorship
therefore begins to emerge after we have consistently produced
results that we declared we would – that’s when we truly start
trusting in our ability to manifest our creative intention.
Commitment creates success which increases Creatorship which
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in turn increases our willingness to commit in the future to

tough goals in a virtuous cycle.
Commitment is the opposite of Entitlement. If the Myth of

Entitlement states ‘I’d produce the result if things were easier’,
Commitment takes the view ‘I’ll do whatever is required to
produce the result’. We sometimes refer to Commitment
therefore as the opposite of Entitlement – ‘Title’ment and have
an acronym to flesh out the steps.
T – Think. Plan what you need to do to produce the result

I – Inquire If stuck, ask people, read books, search internet
T – Trust You can’t analyse beyond a point. Take a call.
L – Learn Learn from every result – success or failure
E – Embody Apply your intellectual learning till it’s automatic
Sabotage
“I have never been contained except when I made the prison”
Mary Evans
In our experience, applying the principles of Clarity, Honesty,

Ownership, Win-Win and Commitment help us achieve our
objectives and build our sense of Creatorship.
However we can also summarize four common ways that people

undermine it.
1. Drifting
Many people drift along in the Myth of Success, Myth of
Goodness, Myth of Certainty and Myth of Entitlement. They
continue doing what everyone around them is doing and
don’t take enough time out of their hectic schedules to create
a specific slot where they can think about exploring the
question of what is really meaningful to them, what they
want out of life and what they are willing to take a stand for.
In our experience people with clarity of purpose display a

greater resilience under pressure and seem more fulfilled.
2. Playing safe
People sometimes have a rough idea of what they want but
are afraid to take the risks required to achieve their goals.
When we step out of our comfort zone, we do what we
understand we need to on an intellectual level, even though
our emotions are running wild and our body is tightening up.
If we step through the barrier to the other side, even if we

fail, we often bolster our belief in ourselves. This makes it
easier to do it again in the future. However, if we step back
we reinforce the power our fears have over us and it makes
it even tougher next time. Practice makes perfect so we need
to be careful what we practice.
3. Taking things personally

When we treat unwanted results, difficult relationships and
critical feedback too personally, we can get hurt and shrivel
up. Ironically our self-image seems to become more fragile
the more energy we expend trying to protect it from attack.
We try to impress others and ourselves when we haven’t

spent enough time figuring out what’s actually important to
us.
4. Breaking commitments without taking due care

The goal is not to keep all our commitments. If we kept all
our commitments, it would probably indicate that we were
not setting ourselves big enough goals. However when we
break commitments because we simply haven’t been taking
due care, we lose credibility in the eyes of others and we
become more defensive and uncertain.
Effectiveness
This may seem self-evident to the point of being preachy,

but in our experience very few people are actually aware of
all the ‘small’ commitments they make on a daily basis (I’ll
have that report to you by evening, we’ll start the meeting at
9:30am, we must meet sometime soon, I’ll call you back,
etc). Each broken commitment is like a grain of sand in the
fuel tank of a Ferrari. One by itself may not make a
difference, but cumulatively, over a period of time, broken
commitments clog our ability to produce the results we say
are important to us and the process almost takes place below
our conscious awareness.
Producing results often requires effort – we need to discard our

habitual ineffective interpretations and actions consciously
choose effective ones instead. For us to be effortlessly effective,
we would need to develop new habits. But, as we have
discussed, in many ways, the process of acquiring new habits is
actually the process of acquiring the confidence that we can
execute those targeted behaviours because it is only once we
have this confidence that we would be willing to invest the
effort required to change them.
Creatorship can be deliberately cultivated. This is important

because research shows that self-efficacy beliefs impact almost
every aspect of our lives – health, intelligence, managerial
performance, discipline, athletic abilities, relationships, etc.49 If
we learn the process by which we can acquire enabling beliefs
and habits in the specific areas that are important to us, we are
in effect acquiring the ability to get whatever we want out of
life.
How we can go about internalizing these new, more

empowering beliefs is the subject of the next chapter.
Q: What do you want to achieve? Why? What prices do you

need to, and are willing to, pay? What prices do you not need
to, or are unwilling to, pay?
Q: What are you resisting in your life? (this shouldn’t be

happening) What are you pretending not to notice? (this isn’t
happening)
Q: Who is not listening to you in life? Are you willing to

consider the perspective that they are not listening to you
because they don’t feel you’ve understood their point of view?
Are you willing to consider the perspective that you haven’t
been listening to them?
Q: In what areas of your life are you feigning helplessness?

What would be possible if you took ownership?
Q: When was the last time you were committed to something

enough to change your beliefs?
GROWTH
“Only a person who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can
be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person”
Albert Einstein
It is difficult to be fulfilled if we keep doing a task at the same

level of challenge all our lives because after a while it becomes
too easy. We get bored and find meaningless pursuits and
sources of needless drama for ourselves that sap our life energy
in the long term. The only way to stay fulfilled is to therefore
keep picking bigger challenges. And in order to be able to
master those tougher challenges, we must further develop our
character.
The path of fulfilment therefore turns out to be the path of self-

mastery. It’s a truth expressed elegantly by Eugen Herrigel, the
famous Zen philosopher who wrote the book ‘Zen in the art of
archery’:
“The art of archery is not an athletic ability mastered more or less through primarily
physical exercise, but rather a skill with its origin in mental exercise and with its
object consisting in mentally hitting the mark. Therefore the archer is basically
aiming for himself. Through this perhaps, he will succeed in hitting the target – his
essential self”
Whatever it is that we are mastering in our lives, it is an outward

manifestation of the internal process of self-mastery. In playing
the game we have chosen to play and playing to win, we are
becoming masters of life itself.
In the extremely smart and funny film ‘Groundhog Day’, Bill

Murray finds his way from Survival to mastering the Game of
Life. He starts off as a disenchanted TV weatherman constantly
dissatisfied by his lot and chasing money, fame and sex.
However he gets trapped in a time warp and has to keep reliving
the same day again and again.
185
After he gets over his bewilderment he starts questioning the

meaning of a life in which no matter what he does, the next day
he simply has to start again. He starts getting delusional -
kidnapping a famous groundhog and trying to kill it. He also
tries to medicate himself by eating excessively. Then he tries to
commit suicide but no matter how many times he tries he wakes
up alive and has to relive the same day.
Finally he accepts the meaninglessness of his situation and starts

creating meaning for himself by contributing to others through
his job and relationships, mastering hobbies such as the piano,
and learning to love unselfishly. Only then does he break out of
the time warp and make it to the next day and live the rest of his
life.
Change
“You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you have lost
something”
H.G. Wells
One of the things we are very clear on in our leadership

coaching work is that the point is not to ‘change’ anyone. We
believe that the aim is to support them as they work on gaining
access to a wider range of behaviours than they had before. So if
a manager says that he feels that he pushes his team too hard,
we don’t believe that the he should become a completely
democratic manager and leave all decisions to a team vote. He
will probably lose his effectiveness because this mode of
operation goes completely counter to his natural strengths. It
may be that he simply needs to tweak his style slightly –
perhaps by listening to different opinions before making up his
mind or taking a few minutes to set the context before meetings
with his team so that they better understand where he’s coming
from. However even these minor habit changes can be hard to
incorporate into his way of operating since the beliefs that
generate our behaviours are often deeply ingrained.
Growth
The best practices for supporting clients in shifting behaviours

have come from different schools of psychotherapy -
Psychoanalysis, Humanistic, Existential, Gestalt, Primal,
Cognitive and Behavioural. Most of this work was initially
developed for a small number of people with comparatively
serious problems. However some of tools and processes that
have emerged from these fields are still relevant for anyone who
is committed to becoming more effective. We have incorporated
many of these processes in our ‘Growth model’ that we will
discuss in greater detail later in this chapter. This model is
largely inspired by the research of Prof. Prochaska50 of the
University of Rhode Island.
Before we look at this model, we can take an interesting detour

to run through the salient features of the various schools of
psychotherapy and how they have been incorporated into the
Growth model.
Psychoanalysis & Gestalt therapy

Psychoanalysis was made famous by Freud and Jung. They felt
that dysfunctional behaviour was the result of thought processes
operating below our conscious awareness - in our subconscious
mind. By bringing these thoughts to our conscious mind, we
could understand what was really driving us and be in a better
position to deal with them. Gestalt therapy was developed by
Fritz Perls and the basic premise is that acceptance of
experience in the present moment leads to self-awareness.
Psychoanalysis and Gestalt therapy can be considered

complementary approaches in that the former is predominantly
intellectual and the latter is predominantly experiential but both
are processes aimed at raising our levels of ‘Self-awareness’, i.e.
being aware of how we interpret reality through the lens of our
beliefs and the impact this has on our lives. (‘Self awareness’ is
the second of 9 steps of the Growth model)
The Stillwater Growth model
Logotherapy
Logotherapy (or existential therapy) was developed initially by
Rollo May and Victor Frankl. Their point of view was that the
problems people create for themselves are a result of the context
in which they live their lives. Without meaning or purpose, their
lives would be filled with pain.
Victor Frankl, in particular, was in a pretty strong position to

argue this line. He was tortured in a Nazi concentration camp
for several years and his wife and family were exterminated
there. Despite being taken to the depths of what a human is
capable of withstanding he told himself that there was a reason
for his suffering - to understand what happens to humans under
these sorts of conditions so that when he was free he could
better appreciate what creates happiness. This attribution of
'meaning' to his suffering allowed him to bear it and he realised
that people are unhappy because they are not clear why they are
living. His first question to his patients was often 'why don't you
Growth
commit suicide' to elicit what it was that they were actually

living for.
In the Growth model, ‘Self-awareness’ often generates cognitive

dissonance and ‘Emotional arousal’ when people realize that
some of their current behaviours are not consistent with what is
truly important and meaningful to them. This forces them to re-
evaluate their behaviours in light of these deeper values and
make a fresh ‘Choice’.
Cognitive therapy
Cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck,
maintains the point of view that problems are caused by
dysfunctional thinking and the way to get around this is
therefore through education and logically countering irrational
negative thoughts.
In the ‘Choice’ stage, people identify the dysfunctional fear

based thinking that holds them in ineffective patterns of
behaviour and make a new choice based on rational thinking
that they then ‘Declare’ to themselves and to others who can
support them and challenge them to stick to their change
agenda.
Humanism
Humanism states that man is greater than any 'ism'. Humanity
should triumph over the rigid ideologies of state (fascism,
communism, capitalism, etc) or religion. Relationships,
forgiveness, empathy, reason, and humanity in general, are
considered superior to all other forms of 'guidance'. Carl Rogers
was one of the founding fathers of this branch of psychotherapy
and believed that if the therapist fully accepted the patient, the
patient would finally learn to accept himself and this would get
rid of the problems/neurosis that guilt and non-acceptance of the
shadow lead to.
This has also been incorporated into the Range effectiveness

model in the ‘Declaration’ stage where we recommend that
people share their goals with supportive, non-judgemental
friends and request those friends to follow up with them and
provide them external feedback on their progress during the
‘Practice’ stage.
Since people will have to step out their comfort zone during the
Practice stage in order to generate new habits, they will come up
against their fear barrier. This can be neutralized through the
Growth
humanistic foundational empowering declaration that states

‘everyone, including myself, is worthy of love and respect’.
Behavioural therapy
Finally behavioural therapy, developed by B.F. Skinner and
Joseph Wolpe among others, takes the view that it is not
necessary to understand the mind, subconscious, meaning,
cognitive interpretations, etc to deal with an issue. Problems can
be treated as behaviours without hypothesizing extensively on
the underlying causes. If you want to stop certain behaviours,
create a physical environment that supports the change and add
rewards and punishments. For example if you want to stop
drinking coke, don't have coke in your fridge and if you do
drink it, ‘punish’ yourself by not watching a movie for a month.
Bonuses, grades, etc are examples where behavioural logic is
used to influence behaviour.
This is most relevant in the ‘Planning’ and ‘Practice’ stages

where people can figure out the system of rewards and self
inflicted ‘punishments’ they will use to ‘reprogram’ themselves.
The Stillwater Growth model

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change we seek”
Barack Obama
We believe that there are nine steps to acquiring new beliefs and
therefore new habits. If any of the steps are missed out, the
habits may not be acquired, or if they are acquired, then they
may not be sustainable:
1. Intellectual understanding
2. Self awareness
3. Emotional arousal
4. Choice
5. Declaration
6. Planning
7. Practice
8. Maintenance
9. Completion
1. Intellectual understanding
Although intellectual clarity is a good foundation
to build on, it only comprises the first of the nine
steps and is of limited use by itself.
We all know that we should exercise regularly,

sleep 7-8 hours a day and stick to a balanced and nutritious diet.
However despite ‘knowing’ all these things very few of us
actually do it and this indicates that intellectual understanding is
by itself is not enough to change habits.
2. Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the step after intellectual
understanding. It’s about applying our intellectual
understanding to our own lives.
Companies try to create higher levels of self-

awareness in their managers through the
mechanism of 360 degree feedback. This is an
extremely useful tool for those who are open to
feedback but in many cases people can use three justifications to
effectively ignore the data:
1. I don’t do that
2. I do do that, but I have to in order to be effective
3. I do do that and I know it’s not effective but I can’t help
myself. It’s just who I am.
Self-awareness comes from looking at our experience, actions

and results with complete honesty. Only then can we see clearly
how our beliefs habitually interpret reality and how our
Growth
interpretations determine our experience, actions and ultimately

the results in our lives.
3. Emotional arousal
One way to create emotional engagement with
the goals is through ‘appreciative inquiry’ –
asking people to focus on their strengths, their
achievements and their highest aspirations. This
feels people with confidence and hope.
An equally powerful way to generate emotional arousal involves

looking at the areas that are ‘not working’. This creates
cognitive dissonance as we realize that there are some things
that do not match our ideas of who or where we should be in
life. Cognitive dissonance creates ‘negative emotions’ like guilt,
anger, embarrassment, etc. but they are highly useful in this
context. The word ‘emotion’ is derived from the Latin
‘emovere’ and literally means ‘that which moves us’ or ‘that
which puts us in motion’.
Al Gore gives us a great example of this in his documentary on

global warming - ‘An inconvenient truth’. He describes how his
family used to grow tobacco and would intellectually rationalize
away the links between cigarettes and cancer. However when
his sister died from smoking they stopped. It was not because
they were presented with any new convincing scientific
evidence. They just ‘got it’ on an emotional level this time.
4. Choice
The first step in building belief in your
ability to architect your future is to make
the decision to put your past in your past.
Many people assume that the future will be
an extrapolation of their past and therefore
see no possibility in terms of creating a new
tomorrow. But this is not necessarily true.
For example self-belief on one’s ability to give up smoking is a

better predictor of who gives up smoking than factors like
length of smoking history, number of past attempts to break the
smoking habit, length of prior abstinence and even degree of
physical dependence on nicotine51. And evidence that the
number of past attempts to quit smoking is unrelated to
perceived efficacy indicates that efficacy beliefs do not simply
reflect past coping experiences52. Once we put our past in our
past, then our future becomes an empty canvas again that we
can start painting on anew.
The choice stage, synonymous with ‘self re-evaluation’ of

logotherapy, is where we look at what is meaningful for us, the
prices we will need to pay in order to make those things part of
our lives and make a decision on whether it’s worth it. For
most of us, in order to get things that are really meaningful, it is
likely that we will need to be willing to risk going into our
shadow zone and facing our fears. Following our dreams or
facing our fears… strangely enough, both those paths often
lead to the same destination.
• What do you need to accept about your life to come to peace

at this moment?
• What in your life is working that you can build on? What are
your blessings?
• When you die what would you like people to say about you
and the way you lived your life? Write your own eulogy
• Which words best describe you at your most fearless? What
would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
• What are your core values/principles
• What are you good at?
• Who are the 10 most important people in your life? In an
ideal world what would each relationship look like? What do
you need to start doing to create that?
Growth
• Describe your perfect day – 20 years from now, 5 years

from now, 1 year from now, tomorrow, the rest of today.
• What are the things that you would like to dedicate your life
to mastering?
• What are the five things you most enjoy doing and provide
most meaning to you? How could you architect your life so
that you spend almost all your time focusing on the things
that really matter to you?
5. Declaration
Once we are clear on what we want and the
prices we are willing to pay in order to
achieve them, then we need to declare our
commitment to our goals. Making the
commitment before the previous steps have
been completed is usually a waste of time
because you will probably fail and then be
left with the self-reinforcing belief that you have no 'discipline'.
One way of declaring your goals is by writing them down, but

we can also increase our chances of achieving them by
declaring them to our friends, family and colleagues. Research
indicates that people who write their goals down are more
likely to achieve their goals than people who merely think
about them53. The same research indicates that people who tell
their friends as well are even more likely to achieve their goals,
especially if they ask their friends to regularly follow up with
them.
We need to pick goals that are at just the right level of stretch
for the ability we are at. If you pick a goal that is too hard then
you will get stressed, miss the target and lose confidence. If
you pick a goal that is too easy then you will get bored,
perform well below what you are capable of performing, and
this too leads to a loss in confidence over a period of time.
Picking the right level of goals (challenging but achievable)
raises and sustains the level of effort required to be successful54

and success in achieving these goals increases self-
confidence55.
When developing a new skill, initial goals should be kept

modest. A rough rule of thumb is that once you’ve achieved a
target three times in a row then you’ve got enough confidence
to slowly start ratcheting up the challenge levels. The focus
here should be on building confidence rather than moving on
quickly to higher levels. This should also be the philosophy for
goal setting if you have suffered a string of failures related to a
certain goal that have dented your confidence (even if in the
past you have performed at a much greater level of
achievement than the goals you are currently setting for
yourself).
As you build some momentum in hitting your ‘safe’ targets you

can start increasing the stretch. If you have built up a great deal
of confidence, then you can even go for outrageously ambitious
goals once in a while because you know that even if you miss it
will not dent your belief.
This is the principle that videogames follow and the reason that
they are so addictive and fun. It’s because the game is divided
into various levels that correspond to different skill levels. As
you become more skilful you graduate to the next level so you
are always playing the game at a level of difficulty that is
challenging but achievable given enough perseverance. When
you are picking goals you are in effect designing the level at
which you are currently playing the game and you need to pitch
it at just the right level.
This would seem an obvious way to set targets but it is

incredible how many times even global corporations with
management experts get this wrong. Setting ‘realistic’ targets is
Growth
considered a sign of low drive or ambition even if past

evidence shows that the company has been repeatedly missing
its earnings forecasts. It’s also the reason why many people
cannot build new habits – they try to go from 0 to 100 and when
they are unable to manage the transition sustainably first time
they give up and create or reinforce the limiting belief that they
don’t have the required discipline. By starting on level 1 and
playing through the various stages they might have a better
chance of reaching the goal.
We should clarify that we are not suggesting that you need to

compromise on what you would like to achieve. Instead we
should understand that progress towards a goal is rarely linear.
The fastest way to achieve the goal is to start slow and
accelerate. Simply flooring the accelerator is likely to lead to a
stalled start.
Goals should ideally be measurable and time bound. This

allows you to see if you’re actually on track or not. Simply
adopting a goal without knowing how one is doing has no
lasting motivational impact56. Nor does knowing accurately
how one is doing in the absence of a specific goal to compare
performance against.
The well-known acronym SMART is extremely useful in

setting goals. There are several versions of what SMART
stands for, but a good one is:
SMART = Stretching + Measurable, + Achievable +

Rewarding + Time bound
Having measurable and time bound goals allows one to set

clear intermediate goals that are also measurable and time
bound. Research shows that distant goals are less motivational
than distant goals with intermediate milestones that provide
continuous feedback along the way57. And of course achieving

these milestones further builds confidence.
One of the hallmarks of a goal that can be measured is that it

needs to be specific. Specificity provides clarity and is also a
spur for action. For example a long term goal might be ‘I want
to improve my relationship with my mother’ but that may need
to be made more specific ‘I will improve my relationship with
my mother by calling her up once a week, showing interest in
what’s important to her by listening intently and in addition I
will visit her for one day every quarter’. The goal is so concrete
that it almost points to the actions required to fulfil it and it is
far less ambiguous whether you are actually achieving your
goal or not. A specific concrete goal is also easier to visualize
than a vague or abstract one. Visualizing a goal has been
shown to improve performance in many studies58 and almost all
elite athletes practice visualization before an event in order to
reach peak achievement59.
However visualizing faulty performance actually impairs

performance60. And it’s therefore probably important to keep
the language of the goal focused on what you want to achieve
rather than what you want to avoid. For example ‘I will not get
angry at my wife, no mater what the provocation’ maybe a
desirable behavioural goal but even as the husband attempts to
control himself, his attention is being directed at the various
‘provocations’ being ‘inflicted on him’ and it will be a struggle
for him to keep his composure. A goal with the alternative
wording ‘I will find opportunities to show my love and
appreciation for my wife’ directs his attention in far more
productive and creative channels where the best-case scenarios
are more rewarding than simply ‘not blowing my top’
Growth
.
6. Planning
Those who choose to pursue a course of action
only after fully considering the hardships are
far more likely to persevere when they come
across them61. However around 80% of people
jump straight into action when trying to change
behaviour without adequate planning62. They
are therefore taken by surprise when they find
it a lot tougher than they expected and often give up if this
happens.
Chronic drinkers, for example, understand that reducing their

intake contributes to health, self-respect, improved functioning
and a better future. But they also believe that giving it up
results in loneliness because they become distant from drinking
buddies, reduces expressiveness and outgoingness, increases
boredom and frustration due to withdrawal symptoms63. In
short – it’s not easy!
Of course alcohol addiction is an extreme example but

homeostasis is one of the most powerful instinctual human
drives. Changing any deeply ingrained habit is hard work and
does require prices to be paid.
Important questions to look at include:
• What are the sorts of situations that can derail me and how
can I avoid them or if I can’t how do I want to respond in
those situations?
• What are my habitual excuses that I’m not going to use?’
• What are the prices I’m going to have to be willing to pay to
achieve this?
• What systems and processes am I going to use to track my
progress and make adjustments?
• What rewards am I going to set for myself for meeting
intermediate goals?
Growth
• Who are the people who can help me during this process by
providing feedback or ideas or guidance?
We should add a caveat. When examining all the obstacles that

may come in the way of achieving a challenging goal it can be
easy to entertain self-doubts and feel overwhelmed. However
research shows that it is far more effective to break down the
challenge into smaller intermediate steps and focus on the task
solution rather than to dwell on ones own deficiencies64. There
is a distinction between ‘these are all the things that could
come in the way and this is how I am going to handle them’
and ‘these are all the reasons why I will not be able to do this’
and we should be very sensitive to when we’re drifting towards
the latter.
One of the most important factors to take into account in our

planning is our subconscious tendency to sabotage our efforts
so we can be right about our existing beliefs. Behaviour change
at the most fundamental level is a process of changing the
beliefs that generate the behaviour. If we are unwilling to be
wrong about our existing beliefs then we cannot sustainably
change our behaviours. For example if someone wants more
time for his personal life but believes he can’t because of the
unavoidable pressure of office work load, then he has got to
explicitly list this as one of the beliefs that is going to get in his
way and come up with an alternative belief that would be more
empowering. The new belief might be for example ‘I can create
balance in my life when I manage my time effectively, develop
my team and delegate to them and make decisions based on my
consciously chosen priorities’. He may not believe the new
belief yet at a subconscious level, but at a conscious level he
must understand that it’s only when he’s internalized the new
belief that he will be able to create balance in his life.
How do you go about deliberately internalizing new beliefs?

Well we go back to how beliefs are formed in general – direct
experience, vicarious learning and information provision.

However we now consciously look for information that
confirms our ‘targeted empowering beliefs’ and observe role
models for our ‘targeted behaviours’ from whom we can learn
from vicariously.
One way to raise your motivation levels is to look around for

people who have already achieved what you would like to. This
can bolster your belief that you can do it because others have
been able to do it too. Whether it is by reading an
autobiography of an entrepreneur or watching an interview
with a CEO or chatting regularly with a friend who has the
perfect marriage. Looking for role models who you believe are
similar to you (and who faced similar obstacles as you are
likely to) will build more belief than picking role models who
you believe had significant advantages that you don’t have
access to. Gathering as much information in the initial stages
around the subject you’re interested in helps you set a
benchmark or role model for what you would like to create. It
also provides a best practice template for what you need to do
to create it but of course you will probably need to keep testing
and tweaking the template till it works for you.
The most powerful way of creating new beliefs is of course

through direct experience. We need to consciously create direct
experiences that disconfirm our existing beliefs and confirm
our targeted beliefs. Effectively we have to fake it till we make
it.
Planning also requires consciously setting fixed time aside to

concentrate on your priorities and not letting urgent but less
meaningful demands distract you from them. Putting this time
into your diary and treating it as sacrosanct as you would an
appointment with your CEO is the sort of commitment that is
required. You wouldn’t cancel your meeting with the CEO if
some operational issue came up so why would you postpone
Growth
your commitment to your children to take them out for a

movie?
There is a funny joke about the difference between

involvement and commitment. It goes ‘in a ham and egg
breakfast the chicken is involved but the pig is committed’.
Schedule your most important priorities in your diary and
commit to them.
7. Practice
It is easy to just focus on progress on
tangible results but occasionally
reflecting on how far one has moved
from the old beliefs to incorporating the
new ones can help to remind oneself that
the root cause of the results are the
existing beliefs and that beliefs are just
beliefs and not facts.
Keeping a personal success diary of positive results, feedback

and experiences acknowledges them and makes them explicit.
This is an important step in helping the subconscious link the
new results to the new beliefs and validating their
effectiveness. Over a period of time as the new beliefs prove
their effectiveness they are internalized and replace the old
ones completely and the new behaviour becomes sustainable
and unconscious.
We can improve our chances of sticking to our plans by putting

in a reward/punishment agreement with ourselves, by making
sure that we take the help of our friends and supplementing this
with our reminder mechanisms. Programming an alarm clock
to go off once during a day followed by one minute of
reflection on the progress on our goals ensures that they remain
top of mind and we don’t slip back in to automatic mode when
we get busy.
However, failure to implement behaviours is also a frequent

occurrence. The important thing is to be aware of the tendency
to form the beliefs ‘the goal is too tough’ or ‘I can’t do this’.
You will need to consciously sidestep this trap and try again
with improved systems and/or increased support from others.
Ineffective thought patterns in dealing with failure include

assuming the failure resulted from lack of innate ability rather
than a lack of effective action or insufficient effort. Focusing a
disproportionate amount of focus on the difficult aspects of the
task or the consequences of failure is also counter-productive.
It’s far more effective to think strategically, break the task
down, focus on what you can do and build from there.
8. Maintenance
As our new habits become more
natural we move from the ‘Practice’
stage to the 'Maintenance' stage. Here
we are relatively comfortable with the
new behaviours but under pressure
and stress we can revert to older
ineffective habits. At this stage we need to be wary and
maintain our commitment with the help of supporting
relationships and regular reminders (say by signing up for a
relevant monthly newsletter)
9. Completion
Finally you reach the other side and have fully
ingrained the new behaviours where you can
complete the change process.
In any area of your life you are striving for

Mastery in there are two ways to take yourself
to the next level.
Growth
The first route is to take on a discontinuous jump in the level of

challenge. This should be done only once you’ve got a
foundational belief in yourself that won’t be dented by failure.
Research shows that when you stretch well outside your comfort
zone you boost your belief to handle medium level challenges65.
For example when people recovering from heart attacks are put
on a supervised treadmill exercise routine that is extremely
strenuous, it makes them realize that if they can handle that,
then everyday challenges like climbing steps are well within
their reach. They are able to resume a normal lifestyle much
faster than those who were not put on a stretch regimen.
The second route is simply practice. Most of the growth process

occurs on a plateau with little discernible improvement for long
periods of time66. The virtuoso masters, rather than getting
frustrated with their apparent lack of progress, learn to love the
plateau. Many of the traits that were once regarded as ‘innate
ability’ have now been proved to be simply an outcome of hours
of deliberate practice67.
In either case, sooner or later your abilities will outgrow your

challenges and you will have to create a bigger box if you are to
enjoy playing the game. Once you’ve mastered one level, there
is always the next one to design.
CREATORSHIP
“Enlightenment must come little by little. Otherwise it would overwhelm.”
Idries Shah
There are no hard and fast rules for living a great life. This is
because the clearer a rule is, the less accurate it is and the more
accurate a rule is, the more ambiguous it becomes.
Let’s illustrate this cryptic aphorism with an example: The

statement ‘you can’t trust anyone’ is a very unambiguous
statement but it’s clearly overly simplistic. Anybody who lives
life according to this belief will run into several problems in his
relationships. Maybe our suspicious soul will figure out that
‘you can trust some people but not others’. But even this is not
necessarily accurate. A more precise guideline might be ‘You
can trust some people in most things but not in all things and
there are others who you generally can’t trust in most things but
whom you can in some things’. In fact the situation becomes
even murkier when we realize that whether or not we can trust
someone or not depends also to a great extent on how we choose
to interact with him. An even more accurate statement might
therefore be ‘By displaying certain behaviours you can raise the
probability of being able to trust some people in most things
most of the time but sometimes you may not be able to and there
are some people who are more likely to let you down in a higher
number of instances but you can lower the probability of this
happening to a certain extent through displaying certain
behaviours’. By now the statement has become so general to be
almost useless as a guide to decision making.
Clear statements like ‘you need to trust yourself’ may be more

helpful than vague generalities but they are incomplete because
the contradictory statement ‘you need to question your
assumptions’ is also equally true and equally helpful.
206
Creatorship
We recognize that, based on the above paragraphs, every simple

suggestion or declarative statement that we have made in the
book is incomplete or inaccurate or misleading in many
contexts. Every statement is as ridiculous as it is profound. We
console ourselves by knowing that it is partly because, beyond a
point, you cannot communicate anything of value through
language. This was in fact the realization led to the development
of Zen.
“A special transmission outside the scriptures;

No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to the mind of man;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood”
Bodhidharma
The words themselves, in a strange way, are simply a Rorschach

blot. Some of the words will resonate with your experience and
make sense and those that don’t will not. Nothing of value
therefore can be explained that you don’t already know, at some
level. The words may serve to crystallize elements of your
intuition in a simplified structure but it is your experience that is
always the real teacher.
As we acquire mastery through self-awareness, increasing

effectiveness and personal growth, our judgment starts
becoming sharper and we start taking more effective decisions
more consistently. We process information using both our
logical and intuitive modes. We learn to make choices in the
space between our automatic knee jerk reactions and our
carefully thought out rationalizations. We stop constantly
second-guessing ourselves. At the other end of the scale, we
also discontinue our unreflective blind repetitions of unhelpful
behaviours. We learn that we can trust ourselves to make the
right choices.
There is a famous apocryphal story about an undergraduate

student (at Oxford, Stanford, University of Miami, etc.
depending on which version you hear). He had to write an essay

answering the question ‘What is courage?’ in his final exam. He
wrote ‘This is’ on his paper and handed it in. He got an ‘A’. The
story makes us smile but we think it illustrates perfectly how,
when you’re present and willing to trust your ability to handle
any outcome, you will usually pick the risk that pays off.
But, being present is not something that we believe can be

achieved consistently without hard work. We don’t believe there
are ‘get happy now’ cures that work sustainably. We can know
intellectually what we need to do and think to be happy but that
doesn’t mean we have developed the self-regulation to be able
to do it or think it. By defining a stretching Game for ourselves
and committing to it, we can develop this capacity. It is our
examined experience that is the foundation for our judgment and
builds confidence in our ability to make appropriate decisions.
Instead of worrying that every step will land us in quicksand, we
can step forward peacefully, trusting that the ground will bear
our weight.
This slowly builds Creatorship – an internalized and embodied

belief that we can create the lives we want and that we can do it
on our own terms. Externally this shows up as an ability to
consistently achieve the results and relationships we want.
Internally the experience of Creatorship is zest and a sense of
freedom.
Let’s look at how Creatorship shows up in a few examples to

illustrate how it can determine our experience of life68:
• When you encounter uncertainty and you look at it

through the mind-set of helplessness, you feel fear.
When you encounter uncertainty and you look at it
through the lens of Creatorship you can feel adventurous
and excited.
Creatorship
• When you have not produced a desired result and you

look at it through the mind-set of helplessness, you feel
frustrated and give up. When you have not produced a
desired a result, and you look at it through the mind-set
of Creatorship, you feel you can learn from it and try
something different.
• When someone is able to produce the results that you
haven’t produced yet, and you look at it from the mind-
set of helplessness, you become jealous. When someone
is able to produce the results that you have not produced
yet, and you look at it through the mind-set of
Creatorship you can get inspired
The experience of life The experience of life

without a sense of Creatorship with a sense of Creatorship
Fun
“I never did a day’s work in all my life. It was all fun”
Thomas Alva Edison
One branch of Buddhism states that happiness is caused by our

attachment to things. Since nothing lasts we inevitably lose
these things and feel pain. The solution it offers is that we
should systematically, and through sheer force of will and
austerity, become detached from our desires.
Another branch of Buddhism believes that it’s absurd to

deliberately try to rid yourself of desires because the desire to
rid yourself of desires is itself a desire! The Zen way is to
simply be aware of your thoughts and desires, accept them, and
do what feels natural. But Zen itself therefore, is a manifestation
of a desire to be free from the desire not to desire.
Creatorship
At this stage all that is left for us is to weep or at the futility of it

all. The other option is to laugh at the impossibility of trying to
figure it all out. This is the place where Zen tells us that
enlightenment sets in. We realize there is no right answer to
‘who should I be?’ and ‘what should I do?’ This frees us to be
who we are and to do what we are doing.
“Before enlightenment – chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment – chop wood,
carry water”
Ancient Zen saying
The idea being that once you bring your full awareness to the
task and live in the present moment then, although you may be
doing exactly the same things, you stop watching the clock and
wishing you were somewhere else. Your labour is no longer a
burden.
However we believe that you can’t simply decide to start doing

this. Our minds are too easily distracted and need to be trained
so that we can focus our psychic energy. Just as a videogame
harnesses our consciousness for a fixed end, mastering the
Game we have chosen for ourselves teaches us to be focused
and present through our full engagement in it. Through the
process of committing to goals we want to achieve in the future,
we learn, bit by bit, how to learn to live in the now. Through the
process of committing ourselves to achieving the desires we
have chosen for ourselves, we find, slowly, we are no longer
driven by them. Our fear and regret based relationship with the
future and past start to dissolve as we ourselves become a part
of the present moment.
‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance. How can we know the dancer from
the dance?’
W. B. Yeats
It’s not just Buddhist wisdom that speaks about the importance
of being involved in what you’re doing rather than wishing you
were somewhere else. Christianity understands this principle

well.
“Whatever presents itself for you to do, do it with all your might, because there is no
work, planning, knowledge, or skill in the grave where you're going.”
Eccliastes 9:10
And of course one of the central tenets of Hinduism is to focus

on the process rather than getting distracted by questions about
whether the future result will materialize. The Gita states
"Karmanye vaadikaaraste maa phaleshu kadachana” which
means ‘do your Karma (duty) without desire of the fruit’.
The word Islam means ‘submission’ (to the will of God) which
is really all about acceptance. Muslims often use the word
‘Inshallah’ (God willing) and although some people may
interpret that as being fatalistic, we believe it represents a higher
understanding about accepting that certain things are out of your
control and trusting that you can handle whatever happens so
you can enjoy the moment.
The psychologist Csikszentmhalyi brought a modern take to the

concept of bringing your full attention to a task in the present
moment.69 He found that people were happiest when fully
engaged in a task. At this stage they lost sense of time and self-
consciousness. They were also not worried about whether the
result they were focusing on would happen or not. When
athletes, artists, philosophers, workers were in this state they
produced their best performances. He labelled this experience
the state of ‘flow’.
We call this state of active engagement – fun. We don’t

experience emotions during this state. In fact this state is
characterized by an absence of awareness of any emotions and a
lack of self-consciousness. However when we disengage from
the activity for a moment or to take a breath, what we realize is
that what we’ve been doing is having fun.
Creatorship
Enjoyment
“Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying… and every day on
the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like
morning”
Pablo Neruda
There is another benefit to learning how to be present when you

are actively engaged in a task. It is that we can simultaneously
learn to be present when we are not actively engaged in a task.
And the confidence that we can handle the future when it
comes, gives us the freedom to focus on the present.
Most of us lose the habit of being present fairly early in our

lives but babies are supremely in the ‘now’. They seem aware of
every tiny movement, every sound, every temperature change
and even pressure changes as every jetsetter who has shared a
plane with a screaming baby will testify.
A wide eyed baby picked up from under a round table would

first see the underside of the table as a circle which becomes an
oval and then a line as its eyes draw level with it and then back
into an oval. The baby will notice the colour, texture and
hardness of the table. The entire journey has freshness,
aliveness, excitement and uncertainty. However as soon as the
child learns the word ‘table’ it abbreviates the entire experience
of the table into the convenient word/label/concept called table.
And the feeling of freshness, excitement and uncertainty is
replaced with knowing and certainty. This has obvious
advantages but it also creates the comforting illusion of control
and safety. The child becomes an adult.
Our journey into adulthood is often accompanied by the

replacement of freshness, excitement and uncertainty we
experience on a first date or on the first day at work with
feelings of knowing, certainty and safety, in our jobs and
relationships, which may be more comfortable, but which can
also lead to boredom, staleness and being stuck in a rut. But this
moment is not the same as any previous moment we have

encountered before.
“A man cannot step in the same river twice for he’s not the same man and it’s not the
same river. Waters are ever flowing”
Heraclitus
We may find it easier to think we have been in the same

situation before and can make the same decision we made
before since it worked then. But actually we are not the same
and neither is this moment. Time is ever flowing. We are always
passing through new lands and the decisions we made before
may be completely irrelevant in this moment. Every new day at
work is a potential adventure. Every time we meet our wife is a
potential exploration.
The present moment is where joy lives. Enjoying the taste of a

strawberry, playing with your children, relaxing by the beach,
going on a date, etc – they can only be enjoyed if you decide to
live life in the present rather than obsesssing about what might
happen in the future or what happened in the past. Peace,
excitement, laughter, connection and fun are only possible
through this gateway.
Nietzsche had a concept called ‘eternal recurrence’ where he

imagined all of us living the same life again and again. If we
lived a great life then we would live it again for all eternity and
if we lived a life of fear and anxiety then we would be
condemned to repeat it again forever. In this scenario, each
moment acquires a depth and importance not appreciated when
we think of a moment as a fleeting instant. Heaven and Hell are
being created all the time. Given that we have only one life to
live we can still learn from this hypothetical scenario by
adopting the perspective that heaven is created by living this
moment to the fullest.
Creatorship
This may sound superficially like hedonism but the difference is

that this present moment focused joy is to be found on the other
side of self-discipline that arises from active engagement in the
Game of life. It requires a great amount of mental discipline to
prevent thoughts from wandering to worries about the future or
regrets over the past.
Breathe in… breathe out…
The practice specifically designed to train our mind from

wandering and focus on acceptance of the present is
meditation.
Jon Kabat-Zinn measured the happiness of two groups of

office workers through questionnaires and ECG scans of the
brain and ranked them in terms of a ‘happiness score’70. One of
the two groups was put through an 8-week course in
meditation.
Four months after the course the happiness of workers in both

groups was measured again and ranked. The results were
startling – if you imagine 100 workers ranked from happiest to
saddest, workers who had done the meditation course rose, on
average, by 20 places on the listing!
Just as Creatorship allows us to enjoy the present because we

can trust ourselves to handle what the future holds, it also allows
us to not get sucked back into the past in idle moments when we
could be enjoying ourselves. We often look back, regret the
choices we made and berate ourselves for making them.
However we could not have made a better choice at the time
given what we knew – if we could have, we would have.
Regretting our choices is a bit like a man looking at videos of
himself as a baby, learning to walk and cursing himself for
falling down. Just as the baby could not do any better given his
physical capability at the time, we could not have done better
given our understanding at the time of the options available to
us. We are where we are because there was nowhere better we
could have been given where we were and knowing what we
knew.
Creatorship allows us to interpret our past in a way that we can

feel grateful for the places we’ve been and the journey we’re on.
And the end point of the journey is that we come to a place
where we can engage in the world and appreciate all that it has
to offer. In the words of Joseph Campbell – we acquire the
‘freedom to live’
Creatorship
“It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like
I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about
to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it
flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single
moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But
don't worry. You will someday”
Lester Burnham
Play a game.
Play it well.
Have fun.
Don’t forget to rest.

GOAL SHEET
“Goals are dreams with deadlines”
Diana Scharf Hunt
What are your life goals?

(Consider all areas of your life. What is your light? Where can
you express/contribute them)
What are the principles you choose to live your life by?
(Principles can be changed if you realize that they aren’t
making you happy)
What is the experience you’d like to have of life?

(The experience is the ultimate test of whether your goals and
principles are working)
What are the prices you are willing to pay to achieve this? What
are the prices you are not willing to pay?
219
Goal sheet
What are the areas in your life where you are not achieving your
goals, not prioritizing your relationships to the extent you’d like,
not living according to your own principles or experiencing the
experiences you wanted?
What are the distorting beliefs that are getting in the way? What
are the empowering beliefs you need to replace them with?
How will you change your beliefs?

(Think of both ‘one off’ actions and regular practices)
Information provision - Which books, movies, other

sources will you absorb?
Vicarious learning - Who are your role models for these

new beliefs?
Conditioning - What results will you produce that will

change your beliefs? (SMART = Stretching + Measurable, + Achievable +
Rewarding + Time bound)
Goal sheet
What are the systems and processes that you will use to keep
yourself on track?
(Calendars, alarms, posters, etc)
Who are the people who will help you in this?
What could stop you? How can you make sure it doesn’t?
Write a message to yourself here that you will look at if there

are any times you fail in your path to internalizing your targeted
beliefs and behaviours:
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kanishka Sinha
Kanishka is the Head of Research & development at Stillwater.

His other hat is that of a Trainer and Executive Coach, with
experience of coachees from USA, Canada, France, Thailand,
Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, India, etc.
His prior work experience includes time at the

boutique corporate training firm TWP as India
Country Head, in Sales and marketing at
Unilever and in the Business Advisory division
at Arthur Andersen.
Kanishka attended Imperial College (London)

where he majored in Materials Science and
Engineering with Physics. He then obtained his
Chartered Accountancy qualification in London (ICAEW). He
has an MBA specializing in Leadership and Change
Management from the Indian School of Business (ISB) and is an
executive coach graduate of Newfield.
His hobbies include playing the guitar and writing. He has a

beautiful wife, Avantika and a son Kaeyan, named after a Jedi
Knight. In his spare time he also delivers pro bono workshops
for Teach for India and Akanksha, non-profits that operate in the
space of providing education to underprivileged children.
222
About the authors
Girish Manimaran
Girish is the Head of Client relationships at Stillwater. He is

also a trainer and executive coach from the Newfield Institute of
Coaching.
His prior work experience includes

jobs in multiple sectors – FMCG
(Unilever), IT (Hewlett Packard),
Manufacturing (Tata Steel) as well as
in his own family enterprises.
Girish graduated in Commerce from

Loyola College, Chennai and then
obtained his Chartered Accountancy
qualification from the Institute of
Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI).
Girish also has an MBA in Finance and
Marketing from the Indian School of Business (ISB),
Hyderabad.
Girish is an avid runner and passionate about all things related

to learning and self-development. He is married to the lovely
Asha and they have a three year old bundle of irrepressible
energy they call Aditi. Girish’s friends make fun of his constant
use of the word ‘awesome’ but it’s just how he sees the world.
He is also very, very tall and eats a lot!
About the authors
Avantika Sinha
Avantika’s is the Head of Marketing at Stillwater, where she

uses her computer programming and cartooning skills in
promoting the brand and creating interesting educational
materials and videos. In her other role as executive coach, she
draws on her diverse experience in client service (corporate
lawyer), teaching and human resources. She is a graduate of the
Results Coaching System.
Before joining Stillwater, Avantika

worked with the non-profit organization
Akanksha Foundation, initially as a
teacher, and then as the Head of Human
Resources. Before Akanksha, Avantika
worked with the Indian affiliate of the
international law firm ‘Kelly, Drye and
Warren LLP’, where she specialized in
laws relating to telecommunications, real
estate, intellectual property, taxation and corporate compliance.
Avantika has degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi

University and in software programming from the National
Institute of Information Technology (NIIT).
Avantika’s passions are cartooning and her toddler son Kaeyan

who she hopes will be the first Indian World No 1. in tennis.
Unfortunately it looks just as likely that he’ll turn out to be a
professional stand up comedian. If you ever meet Avantika you
must under no circustances mention her nose which is incredibly
tiny.
REFERENCES
With special thanks to the folks at Wikipedia and Google!
1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_experiment
2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_hunger_strike
3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
6
Anxiety (Clinical Psychology, a Modular Course) by S. Rachman
(Paperback - Oct 28, 2004)
7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
8
Darley, J. M. & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in
emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 8, 377-383
9
“Thirty Eight who saw murder didn’t call police” by Martin Gansberg, New
York Times, 3/27/1964
10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_polarization
12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Boring_task_experiment
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
14
Wood & Bandura 1989a
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-efficacy
Litt, M.D. (1988). Self-efficacy and perceived control:
16
cognitive mediators of pain tolerance. Journal of Personality and

Social Psychology, 54, 149-160.
17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
18
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian
19
Undoing perpetual stress by Richard O’ Connor
20
Social cognition edited by David L. Hamilton pg 590-595
21
Rosenthal, Robert & Jacobson, Lenore Pygmalion in the
classroom (1992). Expanded edition. New York: Irvington
22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Spitz
23
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative? –
24
P. Brickman, D. Coates, R. Janoff-Bulman

25
“Happiness. Lessons from a new science” – Richard Layard
26
“Loss of Happiness in market democracies” – Robert E. Lane
225
References
27
“Why People Misimagine the Future: The Problem of Attentional
Collapse.” – Daniel Gilbert
28
Bargh, Chen and Burrows
29
‘The high price of Materialism’, Tim Kasser
30
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
31
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
32
‘Why Zebras don’t get ulcers’ by Robert M Sapolsky
33
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
34
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
35
‘The web of life’ – Fritjof Capra
36
‘Now discover your strengths’ – Marcus Buckingham and Donald O.
Clifton
37
38
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Bin_Adham
39
http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/301/
40
“Authentic Happiness” – Martin E. P. Seligman, PhD.
41
http://www.physorg.com/news144069258.html
42
Self interest without selfishness: The hedonic power of self-imposed
selfishness – J.Z. Berman & D. Small
43
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_defenses
44
Undoing Perpetual Stress by Richard O’ Connor
45
Undoing Perpetual Stress by Richard O’ Connor
46
http://litemind.com/getting-to-yes/
47
‘Getting to Yes’ by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton
48
Journal article in ‘Medicine and science in sports’ - Weinberg, Gould and
Jackson “Expectations and performance – An empirical test of Bandura’s self
efficacy theory”
49
“Self efficacy – The Exercise of Control” – Albert Bandura
50
‘Changing for good’ – Prochaska, Norcross & DeClemente
51
From Self Efficacy by Albert Bandura (original researchers - Barrios,
1985; Haaga, 1989; Killen Maccoby & Taylor, 1984; Shadel & Mermelstein,
1993; Yates & Thain, 1985)
52
Reynolds, Creer, Holroyd & Tobin, 1982
53
‘Written goal study’ by Gail Matthews, Dominican university.
http://cdn.sidsavara.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/researchsummary2.pdf
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‘A theory of goal setting and task performance’ – Locke and Latham
(1990)
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‘Proximal goals’ - Bandura and Schunk, 1981. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology
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‘Self evaluative and self efficacy mechanisms governing the motivational
effects of goal systems’ - Bandura & Cervone, 1983, Journla of Personality
References
and Social Psychology; Becker, 1978; ‘Effect of assigned goal level and
knowledge of results on arithmetic computation’ - Strang, Lawrence &
Fowler, 1978
57
‘Proximal goals’ - Bandura and Schunk, 1981. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology
58
‘Effects of mental practice on motor skill learning and performance: a
meta-analysis’ – Feltz and Landers. Journal of Sport psychology
59
‘Beyond strength’ - Ungerleider and Golding, 1991. McGraw Hill
60
‘Imagery and mental practice’ - Murphy and Jowdy, 1992
61
‘Decision making: A psychological analysis of conflict, choice, and
commitment’ - Janis, I., & Mann, L. (1977).
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‘Changing for good’ – Prochaska, Norcross & DeClemente
63
‘Development of a Scale to measure out come expectancy in alcoholics’ –
Solomon and Annis
64
Bandura & Dweck, 1988
65
Etwart et al., 1983
66
‘Mastery’ – George Leonard
67
‘The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance’ –
K Anders Ericsson, Ralf Crampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer
68
http://ankahi-talaash.livejournal.com/7761.html
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Flow – The psychology of optimal experience – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: The Wisdom of Your Body
and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. Delta.

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1

Anupama Mohan and Sujatha Sudheendran of Aditya Birla and the

Also, a special thanks to the mentors who taught us:

Govind Rajan, Marcus Marsden, Mark Hemstedt, Ken Ito,

Shivani Smith, Asha Kini, Taylor Jacobson and Ashok Gupta.

This one’s for all of you.

As executive coaches and specialists in the field of management

• What do I want to happen?

However we’ve also noticed that, in the course of jumping down

• What prices do I need to pay to achieve my goals?

In accompanying our clients on these adventures, we looked

We need a philosophy for the 21st Century that incorporates the

We realize this is an ambitious goal, and perhaps even a reckless

The exciting developments in psychology, in particular, have

It may be a while before fulfilment/ life skills/ emotional

The reason we have titled the book ‘a philosophy of living in the

Based on the above we’ve concluded that any school of

This book is divided into three parts

Most of these beliefs simplify our lives but many are

A ‘Game’, as per our definition, consists of meaningful life

3. Mastery & Creatorship

Changing the way we play the game requires us to revise our

In the process of mastering this self-chosen ‘Game of Life’

Q: Why do we sabotage ourselves?

Sustainable happiness is the end point of our journey. Our

In a situation like the one above there would be a pretty

• Leon wanted to file his tax returns on time but there

happening but the relationship seems to be accelerating

Often when circumstances spiral out of control we

The Triune Brain

The oldest part of the brain is the reptile brain, which

vision and bodily movement. It also controls some

Around 200 million years ago mammals evolved from a

Finally, a few hundred thousand years ago we developed

As a result of our evolutionary history we have acquired a

about to be attacked. In today’s more civilized societies,

All of these instincts are manifestations of our most innate

In that instinctive moment of irrationality:

The subjective experience of living as an inferior,

This may go some way in explaining the seemingly bizarre

One critical point is that this compendium of fears and

It is quite possible for us to be driven by our reptilian brain

So maybe that’s the explanation for why we make the

However this logic is undermined by one obvious

A bird in hand worth two in the bush?

In the late 1960s Walter Mischel conducted the famous

‘Marshmallow experiment’ where four-year-old children

marshmallow immediately or, if they waited 20 minutes for

When the researchers followed up with the parents 15

Not a bad return for waiting a few minutes to eat a

It turns out that the individual beliefs we form after our

In 1981, Irish republican Bobby Sands died of starvation2

One might be tempted to say that only the rare person

If the prisoners were being tortured or being kept alive in

1. The right not to wear prison clothes

So it may be the reptilian brain that makes us reach for yet

Our belief systems determine our personalities and dictate

Herbert Simon, a political scientist, studied cognitive

Simon believed that it was impossible for people making a