The Power of Forgetting (10 page)

Luckily, now we can turn to science to understand what’s going on from a biochemical standpoint. Roy Baumeister, the author of
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
, wrote about this in an article for
Bloomberg Businessweek
. He explains that the chemicals that enable our brain cells to fire are made from the glucose in our bloodstream and that all manner of self-control—including control of our focus and concentration—draws on the same stock of
energy. When we think hard, calculate through problems, and make decisions, we’re depleting that glucose in our bodies and at the same time eroding our willpower.

This explains why it becomes more difficult to concentrate or resist the temptation of intruding thoughts the longer you’ve been in a focused mode. But what about being able to lengthen the time it takes for your focus and concentration to wane? More important, what if you could naturally have the ability to focus and concentrate all the time without having to tell yourself to do so—and without relying on a steady stream of energy from your bloodstream? If you could have a mind that automatically kept competing thoughts at bay and important thoughts in the forefront, you’d be able to accomplish so much more—and so much more effortlessly!

Certainly that’s what separates the best surgeons, test pilots, and chess players from the rest of us. It’s not so much that they can inherently concentrate better, the way an Olympic sprinter can run faster by virtue of genetics. Much to the contrary, experts in concentration simply know how to get rid of extraneous thoughts and focus on the task at hand, no matter what. They can forget inane, distracting details and mentally disregard information that isn’t helpful or informative. This isn’t rocket science. It’s just having the patience and expending the effort to develop this important skill so it becomes a habit. And that’s exactly what I’m going to help you do in this chapter.

First, however, I want to share one of the more underrated aspects of this skill, which may seem to have nothing to do with focus and concentration. Believe it or not, self-confidence can be one of the most essential ingredients of focus and concentration. Self-confidence and the self-control
vital to focus and concentration go hand in hand. To really get a true understanding of this, we’re going to turn to baseball.

If you ever feel the urge to read a few good stories about talented men who fell to a strange and unexplainable performance bug, then I recommend logging on to the Internet and searching for “Steve Blass Disease.” In 1971 the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Steve Blass was regarded as the best pitcher in Major League Baseball. Two years later, he could not even throw the ball to the catcher. He’d step on top of the mound, TV cameras all on him, and he’d freeze.

Unfortunately, this sudden and inexplicable loss of control after the 1972 season would become Blass’s most famous and enduring legacy. He walked eighty-four batters in eighty-eight innings and struck out only twenty-seven. Blass suffered through the 1973 season, then spent most of 1974 in the minor leagues. He retired from baseball in March 1975 and today enjoys the game as a broadcast announcer for the Pirates.

“Steve Blass Disease” has become a part of the baseball lexicon. The “diagnosis” is applied to talented players who mysteriously and permanently seem to lose their ability to accurately throw a baseball. It’s as if they suffer a serious breakdown of basic mechanics from which they cannot recover.

Worse yet, this incompetence emerges only during actual games. Their pitching is dead on during practice, but then they struggle (or completely fall apart) when it really counts. The fielder’s variant of Steve Blass Disease is sometimes referred to
in baseball terminology as “Steve Sax Syndrome.” Sax’s story is equally head scratching, though it has a better ending.

Steve Sax was a much-celebrated second baseman and right-handed batter for the Los Angeles Dodgers (1981–1988), New York Yankees (1989–1991), Chicago White Sox (1992–1993), and Oakland Athletics (1994). Though never regarded as one of the top-fielding second basemen in the league, Steve Sax became incapable of making routine throws to first base in 1983, committing thirty errors that season. As his accuracy suffered, fans sitting behind the first-base dugout began wearing batting helmets as mock protection. (Teammate Pedro Guerrero, an outfielder pressed into service at third base in 1983, reportedly once stated that his first thought whenever he was on third was “I hope they don’t hit it to me,” while his second thought was “I hope they don’t hit it to Sax.”) Luckily, however, Sax seemed to be completely “cured” by 1989, when he led the American League in both fielding percentage and double plays.

And then we have the story of Chuck Knoblauch, who became victim of a similarly career-ending condition. Knoblauch played all or part of twelve seasons in the majors, from 1991 until 2002, for the Minnesota Twins (1991–1997), New York Yankees (1998–2001), and Kansas City Royals (2002). He played mostly as a second baseman before moving to left field for his last two seasons.

Though he was once considered one of the game’s best fielders (in fact, ESPN personalities nicknamed him “Fundamentally Sound” Chuck Knoblauch), Knoblauch’s play deteriorated shortly into his Yankee career.

In 1999 he began to have difficulty making accurate throws to first base, and the labeling soon started. People
began to refer to him as having “the yips,” Steve Blass Disease, or Steve Sax Syndrome.

By 2000 the problem had grown serious enough that he began seeing more playing time as a designated hitter.

Knoblauch tried various solutions to his problem, but his throwing would not improve. He made an unprecedented number of throwing errors, routinely making abnormal throws out of the reach of the first baseman. During one game, an errant throw sailed into the crowd and hit sportscaster Keith Olbermann’s mother in the face. Stumping commentators, fans, and himself, Knoblauch never fully recovered his throwing accuracy. He was reassigned to left field by manager Joe Torre, never to return to his old position.

I share these stories not just because I love baseball and am well versed in these players’ stories (and trust me, there are more MLB victims that I could talk about, such as Rick Ankiel and Dontrelle Willis, not to mention countless other professionals in other sports) but also because they illustrate a universal experience to the extreme: failing—or in more unrefined terms, “choking”—when you least expect it or when the stakes are unusually high. Not all of us are in the limelight like a professional athlete, celebrity, or public figure is, but all of us have choked at one time or another when it cost us more than we bargained for. Perhaps it was a big test. Maybe it was a job interview or a project that ran aground at work and took us down with it.

Of all the skills you’re going to learn and sharpen in this part of the book, there’s one in particular that needs to be
growing right alongside the others—and that’s confidence. Self-doubt is a big thing. As your confidence wanes, so does your ability to focus and concentrate. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t suffered a mental block or two in life. Take my friend Larry, for instance, who shared with me his own frustrating story. It happened a few years ago while he was interviewing for a coveted job in the tech industry. As a software developer applying for a highly competitive spot in a new firm, he had to undergo a computer test proving his technical skills and programming savvy. He studied long and hard prior to the exam but worried that he’d encounter something unexpected and beyond his expertise. He knew that he was among dozens of candidates vying for the same position and that some of his competitors were better at certain programming techniques. Given the volume of potential skills that could be tested, Larry didn’t know what to expect and hoped for the best.

Minutes before the HR person at the company gave Larry, alongside others sitting in a room filled with computers, the green light to begin, Larry reminded himself of the formulas he’d memorized, running his eyes across his notes, then tucking them away. He felt ready. But he also felt overwhelmingly stressed and under pressure. Looking around, he could sense the tension and anxiety in the room, swirling like an invisible storm. The clock ticked high noon, and the HR rep announced that the candidates could commence. The sound of furious typing on keyboards began.

And then the unthinkable happened. Larry forgot some of the most basic programming rules of all. They had vanished from his brain.

He tried to “see” in his mind the notes that he’d just reviewed a few seconds earlier. But everything was blank—his
mind, the mental picture of his notes, and the pages of the test on the desk before him. Immediately, Larry began to rummage through all the horrific scenarios in his imagination—the biggest of which was failing the test, losing this great opportunity to advance in his career, and disappointing himself and his family.

He took a few deep breaths and tried to relax, but the anxiety continued to mount. The clock ticked.

Eventually, Larry managed to tackle many of the problems on the test, but he used the wrong programming concepts for some of them, which cost him several points. He didn’t fail the test, but suffice it to say it wasn’t a shining moment for him either—he didn’t get the job. Had he not stumbled in those first few minutes—had he not experienced such a profound mental block—Larry could have aced the test and accelerated his career path. But alas, that was not to be on that particular day.

Luckily, things went better for Larry at his next opportunity. Six months later, he interviewed for another job, equally prestigious, and breezed through the qualifying test. When I asked him his secret to success, he said that learning to relax helped him to take the next test in stride and be less stressed out about the end result.

What Larry described so well to me was the same experience I hear about from so many others. People lament that they cannot understand why they can perform so well in everyday work but then fall to pieces when they are put to the test somehow, either literally with an exam or by being asked to present, lead a group, or represent the company at a conference. One of the first things I tell people is that the brain works so much better when it’s not under pressure. This may
seem obvious, but I have to remind people all the time about the value of being comfortable and relaxed when you’re put to the test. I’ve had my own experiences with this simple truism. Back in my trading days, I noticed a pattern in my success. On the days I felt calm and collected, I performed so much better. It took me a long time to learn how to calm myself down and gain the confidence I needed. I won’t sugar-coat the truth: getting comfortable with yourself and your abilities takes time and practice, but it’s arguably one of the most essential and fundamental skills to develop.

Every January 1 my New Year’s resolution was the same: “Mike, don’t be nervous!” It took eight or so years for that to really click, though. I had to eventually let logic take over, stop beating myself up, and say,
I’ll be okay. And if I screw up, I’ll get back on my feet
.

I see people kill themselves (figuratively speaking) over one bad review or one disheartening comment from a colleague or other adult. But if you can tell yourself that you’ll be okay no matter what—even if you falter a few times first—then you’ll pull ahead of the pack and achieve success at some point. Sure, what I call the “law of compounding errors” will always exist, which dictates that a single, huge error tends to be greater than the sum of its individual parts—the little errors that add to one another and build up to that big mistake. But when you try really hard, those errors will become fewer and farther between. The law of compounding errors looms large over people who don’t try to avoid mistakes or who commit “unforced errors” because they lose focus and concentration. But those who genuinely put their best foot forward with resolve and faith in themselves are the ones who leap forward (all the while making it look easy).

I wholeheartedly believe that the only thing that can hurt any of us is not having confidence in ourselves. What often happens is that when we lose confidence, we also lose our logic. As happened with Larry, our minds can sense “danger” or imminent failure and quickly spur catastrophic thoughts (
I’m gonna fail! I’m a loser! I’m never gonna succeed! I’m never gonna be good enough! I’m gonna die!
). How illogical are those statements?!

I’ll admit, I wasn’t perfect at performing shows when I first got started. I wasn’t used to the setting, the format of being on a stage or in front of a large audience and pressured to impress people with my math skills. So I made mistakes, and sometimes my mistakes were big enough to really bother me. Occasionally my wife reminds me that in those very early days, after a show rife with mishaps and errors on my part, she once heard me say something to the effect of “I feel like going home and blowing my brains out—I’m gonna kill myself!” She yanked me aside after the show to tell me that I hadn’t said that statement to just myself—I’d actually
unwittingly shared that out loud with my entire audience of youngsters and their adult supervisors, teachers, and parents.

That experience alone taught me a lot. Granted, it took me time to realize that it was okay to make a mistake. But now I turn my mistakes into some of the most teachable moments in my shows.

When people realize that someone with a brain like mine can falter once in a while, I sense a palpable exhalation from them, because they finally register that there is no such thing as “me” versus “them.” We are all the same. Even when we’re good at something, we can have a bad day. And what separates those who endure those bad days (or bad seasons) from those who never get back up again is confidence. If you lose a job over a poor performance, you just have to tell yourself that you can get another job and have another opportunity. You have to sustain this confidence within yourself because no one else is going to do it for you. By the same token, don’t expect anyone to give you confidence. It must come from within.