success in terms of how I define success...I am testing for how well people are thinking in ways that are likely to promote success according to my definition of success – and that is success in living, not success in power or money and so on. I have made a beginning effort to measure the kind of thinking that promotes success in human terms – self-fulfillment terms. But I think it also has implications for business and prestige. In other words, if you always see the glass as half empty rather than half full, not only is it going to make you unhappy, but it is going to be hard to be successful in a lot of endeavors because you won’t want to take risks if you think you are going to fail.
Certain ways of thinking will influ- ence success in general. One of our scales measures the little superstitions you may have developed. It predicts private superstitions much better than conventional superstitions like Friday the 13th. By private supersti- tions, I mean these little games that people play in their heads. Such as, if something very good happens, it will be balanced by something very bad. Because they are unrealistic, one pays the price for them. But people have this in the background; they don’t even know that it is affecting how they are functioning in the world. Another scale that I have that also gets at how ineffective people’s think- ing can be at the experiential level is the scale that I call “categorical think- ing.” If you did it at the rational level, you’d have a low I.Q., but if people can avoid doing it at the rational level, they make all kinds of fine discrimina- tions in their conscious, rational think- ing. But, in their emotional thinking, they frequently are categorical. For example, they say that there are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now, if you think that way, it is going to affect your behavior with a lot of people. You are going to come to quick decisions. You are going to alienate certain kinds of people. You are go- ing to be too trusting of other kinds.
OPTIMISM: THE KEY TO WINNING IN SALES, DR. CHRISTOPHER CRONER
You have a crude system for making distinctions rather than a more finely- tuned system.
SP: And it doesn’t allow for flexibility in a given situation. DR. EPSTEIN: And it doesn’t allow for learning. Once you have classified people, they’ve had it. It takes a tremendous amount of counter- information to change your biased characterizations. It is simply bad thinking, but it is occurring at a more automatic level when people are hardly aware that they are making such assumptions. Rationally, they may deny it. Or they may completely agree with what I am saying – that it is important to make distinctions. Yet, when they emotionally react to people, it is as if there are only two kinds of people: good people and bad people.
What I am talking about is how well the second mind is functioning. You can look at it in a completely ratio- nal way, as I do, and say that this is a completely lousy way to function and the other way is a more effective way to function. The weirdest thing about it is that we act as if this mind does not exist – even though it is the one that determines how we relate to the world and to other people on a daily basis. That is why the smart business- man who can do everything right in
terms of handling his inventory, doing the right things with his employees, may make a mess of his family life, which he has to handle in more emo- tional ways, and gets more into this other mind.
SP: Is success repeatable? Can you build one success on top of the other? DR. EPSTEIN: You can simply make yourself into the most effective human being you can. That doesn’t guaran- tee anything, but it sure increases the likelihood that things will work well. If you are run over by a car through no fault of your own – or you are driving perfectly reasonably and some person comes down the wrong lane – no matter what your thinking is, you are going to be pretty messed up. There are things in life that we have no control over. We need to learn to discipline the second mind as well as we discipline the rational mind. By “discipline” I don’t mean putting on a strait jacket. You have to respect it, listen to it, provide it with
experiences...it learns through experience mainly. So, if you learn that you are a very suspicious person, it is hard to talk yourself out of it. You can talk yourself into trying to act as if you trust people. But, if you know how the experiential mind works, that it is not going to be consistent until it has real ex-
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