The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant

As British historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee said, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” Your passion to achieve can be triggered in that single defining moment when you realize, Enough of this bullshit. Motivation is no longer a scarce resource after such a momentous event. It comes built in.

Being active is hard. Eating healthy is hard. Conquering addiction is hard. Relationships are hard. Making money and advancing your career is hard. Life is hard, whether you choose to work at improving it or not. A life-changing moment can make everything much less of a challenge. Sometimes, if the epiphany is powerful enough, it makes the changes not just easier but mandatory, because every new step feels as though it was meant to be. The recipient of the epiphany is compelled to walk this new path, perhaps even race down it.

Speaking of racing and things that are hard, recall the words of President John F. Kennedy regarding the space race and putting a man on the moon. He said we choose to do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

You should aspire to do more with your life.

Because it is hard.

Act Now!

 Dream (realistically) big and imagine the new person you want to be.

 Think of an ambitious quest you could undertake.

 Develop a thirst for adventure. Remember the librarian who traded cigarettes for swords.

 Consider not using a notebook, but instead committing ideas to memory for regular rumination to achieve later enlightenment.

 Ponder until you “get stuck.” Then engage in a diversion to let your unconscious continue working at it.

 Endeavor to meet the magic moment partway. Realize you may have to engage in some uninspired work prior to the lightning strike.

 Become attuned for lightning to strike. Ask yourself, “Is this it?”

 Ask if a life-changing moment has happened to you before. Examine if this is something you have experience with—determine if you have a past performance accomplishment—so you can use that knowledge to make it happen again.

 Accept that work is not only necessary but glorious in its ability to inspire passion and transform you. Try to find work that will feel like play.

 Remember the words of JFK and embrace change: because it is hard.

PART ONE

Epiphany and Cognitive Behavior Change

1

THE ANTIDOTE TO DESPAIR: THE EUPHORIA OF THE LIFE-CHANGING MOMENT

There are opportunities even in the most difficult moments.

—WANGARI MAATHAI

On the schoolyard field of battle known as gym class, I made the geeks look good. I was such a klutz, I was always picked last when teams were selected. I often came out of dodgeball with head trauma.

In college, I got the “freshman fifteen”—those pounds one tends to put on during their first year—factored by three. I was twenty-two and felt my life was circling the drain. As mentioned before, my health, finances, and scholastic situations were a mess. There was no fall from grace; my life had always been blah, and it was my fault.

I wasn’t just a bad athlete growing up, but a bad student. I was smart but lazy. I squeaked my way into an easy postsecondary program with half a percentage point to spare, then promptly began failing. I went to the campus pub instead of class. The credit-card companies were calling. Things were bad and looking worse; I was about to be kicked out of school because of my poor grades.

I was in a hole of my own digging; Joan Baez pulled me out.

The folk singer’s words appeared in the school newspaper, and my life changed in a moment.

“Action is the antidote to despair,” the quote read.

I sat in the food court at my alma mater, reading the comedic highlights of the paper’s section referred to as “Three Lines Free.” It’s a place for students to publish quotes and witticisms and proclamations of undying love or temporary lust. Partway through reading, Joan smacked me in the face. It was so simple to realize that, as bad as things seemed, they could be fixed via concerted effort.

In that instant, my life switched tracks.

Because, you see, there was a woman.

Her name was Heidi. I loved her like no other. You know stories of finding “The One”? This is such a story.

She was a straight-A student destined for medical school; I knew flunking out spelled the beginning of the end. I say this not to ever speak ill of her. But you must know that she, an amazing woman, deserved a good man; a man I had yet to become.

I was in a state of despair, and taking action—working hard for something for the first time in my life—was the antidote.

And suddenly I felt so much better. Even though no effort had yet been expended, the anticipation of having these problems and this beer belly no longer weighing on me was euphoric. It’s like when you hear your parole has been approved and you’re getting out of prison but you’re still in prison. I’ve never been to prison. I got some speeding tickets when I was younger, but I paid them. Anyway, euphoria and stuff …

Instead of hitting the pub as I’d planned for a few barley-based beverages to wash down a plate overflowing with fries and gravy, I got up and booked an appointment with the appeals committee to beg my way out of my failing report card, allowing me to continue as a student. It was the first step of many, and it felt right.

When it comes to experiencing a life-changing epiphany, the way things feel is critical. It involves, as mentioned earlier, unleashing one’s inner quadruped.

The concept began with the classical Greek philosopher Plato. In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a “dialogue” titled Phaedrus, which contains an allegory about the charioteer. In it, the driver of the chariot represents a person’s more rational self, the guiding force based on intellect and reason. (Because those guys doing the death race in Ben-Hur were totally reasonable.) Conversely, the horses pulling the chariot represent a person’s emotions; they are what provide the power to move forward. And if they want to run wild, the driver of the chariot can do little to control them.

Let’s ignore the part about Plato’s horses having wings, so as not to confuse the issue.

It is important to note that the horses are not like-minded. According to Plato’s tale, one is more virtuous in its passion; the other has a dark side driven by baser appetites. One wants to train for a marathon; the other wants to down tequila shots then go in search of a chili cheese dog to later throw up.

The goal of the charioteer is to obtain the help of the noble horse to overcome the desires of the troublesome one. Otherwise, you’re blowing your groceries in the gutter. I’ve done that. It’s not fun.

The allegory was adapted some millennia later, in 2006, with the publication of The Happiness Hypothesis by New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who referred to the rational, conscious mind as the “rider” and increased the size of the emotion-driven, unconscious-mind quadrupeds to a solitary elephant. Part of the upgrade involved increasing the intelligence of the beast, asserting elephants are smarter than horses. As we’ll see when we examine the neuroscience of attaining sudden insight, Haidt is right. In most cases, the unconscious driver is the correct one; the conscious needs to learn to listen.

A short time later, the rider-vs.-elephant analogy became a core component of the 2010 book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip is a professor of business at Stanford, and Dan is a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at Duke.

A determined elephant will go where it pleases, regardless of the urgings of a more rational rider. To achieve a desired destination, one must appeal to both rider and elephant.

The elephant is the passion and the drive. Whereas the rider may prevaricate and overanalyze, the elephant is the part of the human spirit that can change directions in a flash, and with powerful determination, because it is driven to get shit done. Rather than needing to ponder, it is compelled to act.

Let’s try an experiment in which you talk to your four-legged friend.

How do you feel about changing?

In the introduction, I asked you to awaken your thirst for adventure. I expect you generated some ideas of songs unsung, mountains unclimbed, finish lines uncrossed. And now you’re faced with the opportunity to sing your way across that finish mountain, or something. Have you got it? It doesn’t have to be concrete. Big picture is fine for now. Is it in your brain? Are you thinking about it?

Good. Now stop.

Stop thinking.

Instead, start feeling.

Don’t rationalize this change. Don’t try to think about all the reasons why you should stop doing a thing (like sitting all day, drinking too much, smoking, being angry, overeating treat foods, doing drugs, staying in a dead-end job or relationship, wasting money on stupid crap) or start doing a thing (going back to school, exercising, eating healthier, being kinder, working at your career, spending more quality time with loved ones).

I want you to stop thinking, because of paralysis via analysis. If these goals you imagine—things to stop and things to start—have been around in your brain for a while, you’ve already thought them to death. And yet here you are. Still struggling. You rationalized your way out of change. Well, crud.

Time for a dramatic change of tack.

Ask yourself: How do I feel about this change? You don’t completely cut thinking, but alter the focus. Instead of thinking about this new path, you’re examining your emotions. It’s not about making a list of reasons why and why not. It’s opening your mind to what your heart is saying, metaphorically. I know the heart doesn’t literally control this. It’s still in the brain, just a different part. Enough semantic blather. Let the feelings flow and listen to what they tell you.

Why are you reading this sentence?

You’re supposed to be examining your feelings. Examine your change! You go feel it now. I’ll wait. I’ll even put an extra space between paragraphs to make it easier to pick up again.

Welcome back. How did it go?

Was there a twinge? Did you have a moment? Was there a positive rush of emotion? Did you gain some special insight or wave of motivation to change because you quested to understand your emotional drivers rather than rational ones?

Was the grizzly released from its cage?

Don’t fret if it didn’t happen. We just began and will work through exercises like this at appropriate times throughout the book. And hopefully lightning will strike.

Hopefully.

There are no guarantees. But the harder you work at these exercises, the more you strive and the more you believe epiphany can happen, the greater the likelihood it will.

It’s like that song by Journey, the one about the mythical place called South Detroit we’ve all heard way too many times: “Don’t stop believin’.”

It’s in your head now, isn’t it? My bad. But take something good from it.

Believe. Believe it’s possible to unleash your beast. In The Eureka Factor, Kounios and Beeman write, “Insights are like cats. They can be coaxed but don’t usually come when called.” You must learn to coax your elephant. Or grizzly. Or a really determined kangaroo, if that’s your thing.

Conscious thought rarely incites life-changing epiphanies. Instead, the snap revelations to change in a moment are based on what is often an overwhelming feeling that it is right, arriving from the unconscious. As Plato and subsequent authors revealed, it is such an emotion that gives epiphany its power. I was in fear of losing a beautiful and brilliant woman who let me see her naked, and I felt quite emotional over the impending loss of love. She was not threatening me in any way, but I knew deep down that such a driven woman (she had a perfect GPA and completed medical school at the top of her class) wouldn’t stay for long with a drunken dropout who was letting his health go to hell.

I got my shit together, and we made babies. Told you she was The One.

Beyond ancient philosophy and its modern interpretations, we have the scientific insights of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. Known as the Father of Behavioral Economics (which we learn more about in coming chapters), Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, is the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. The “fast” way of thinking is the elephant. It happens when an unconscious idea pops into consciousness. It can also be that emotional driver one needs to effortlessly change. Kahneman refers to this as “System 1,” writing that it “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” Conversely, “System 2” is the rider. It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.”

Kahneman explains that System 2 is where we make our rational choices, our conscious decisions. His description is telling: “Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”

You’re damn right it is. System 2 is the supporting character, and an inherently lazy one at that. Kahneman writes that System 2 engages in the “law of least effort.” But that doesn’t mean it’s useless in this regard. Far from it. As the Heath brothers explain in Switch, you have to appeal to both elephant and rider. Kahneman says System 1 constructs the story, and System 2 believes it. System 1 “is the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments.” It is a “mental shotgun” allowing us to answer, in an instant, those tough questions about our lives.

Time for a wee task.

I thought about calling these tasks “Action Items,” but I didn’t want you to have a full MBA Bingo card by the end of the book (being that I have an MBA, the risk is real). Implement these Action Items to proactively synergize an optimized epiphanic paradigm! Just, no.

Give us a kiss. Except all caps: KISS. I’ve interviewed both Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Paul is nice….

Man, my System 2 is all over the place right now. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid. A 2011 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Review looked at “feelings as information.” The study asserts feelings are a “sensible judgment strategy,” but don’t overthink it, especially in terms of the advantages of change. That’s because when you create a comprehensive list of all the benefits of something, the study showed, it becomes less appealing. This is System 2 overanalyzing what System 1 came up with. Your task is to not let that happen.

When System 1, the fast-acting hero of your life, says, “This is it!” the supporting character of System 2 will come up with a couple of confirming rationalizations as to why, yes, we can agree that this is likely the thing. Then STOP! Once you have that confirmation, just go with it. You don’t need to keep drilling down into the benefits, or it actually becomes less compelling. This doesn’t apply to using System 2 for enacting the vision. Being detail oriented in that regard is important.

The Gap between Thinking and Doing

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

William Shakespeare wrote of the stage and players and how life is one big performance in a monologue from As You Like It. But the speech also refers to seven stages of a person’s life.

I only know of this play because it was quoted in the 1981 hit song “Limelight” by my favorite band. Beyond that, I possess mere high school knowledge of Montagues, Capulets, Macbeths, and whatever the last name of that Danish lad was, the one who pondered if he should be or not.

Speaking of Hamlet’s act 3, scene 1, soliloquy, crossing the gap between thinking and doing is making the decision to “take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.”

You may be facing a sea of troubles, but what could your life look like if you took up arms and charged fearlessly ahead, fierce and furious in your determination to take not a single prisoner but emerge victorious?

Hamlet’s oft-quoted scene begins with, “To be, or not to be?” At the darkest period of his life—dad dead due to the dastardly deeds of his dick uncle—the young Danish prince ponders his future actions, struggling with the decision that lay before him. Should he accept his outrageous fortune, or get in its face?

Oh, wait. It’s Shakespeare. Everyone dies. Bad example. Let us move back a space to the moment before the decision to take arms was made. Some centuries after Shakespeare laid down his mighty pen, James Prochaska, a psychology professor and director of the Cancer Prevention Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, developed a different model for the stages a person goes through when experiencing life change.

Along with his colleagues, Professor Prochaska developed the transtheoretical model (TTM) of behavior change, which is one of the most studied lifestyle transformation models ever created. Since its initial development in the 1970s, more than $80 million and 150,000 study participants have contributed to its peer review. It’s no longer used much for designing psychological interventions, but it’s still useful as an examination tool.

There are five stages to TTM:

1 Precontemplation—People in this stage are not even thinking about altering their behaviors, as they do not see their current lifestyles as problematic. This couch is ever so comfy. Never shall I remove my bottom from its padded glory and proximity to the rectangle of glowing time waste.

2 Contemplation—This is when a person is thinking about changing their behavior, but not quite ready to act. Hmmm. Is there such a thing as a “couch sore”? Perhaps if I repositioned a little. Dammit, I emptied the DVR of all the good stuff. Is there anything new on Netflix? I suppose I could go outside….

3 Preparation—In which the person is focused around planning for acting toward behavior change, which is intended to be imminent. Outside it is! I just need to wiggle myself out of this massive ass groove I’ve created in the couch first….

4 Action—When a person is engaged in behavior change. It is a challenging time, when fragile habits are formed. Later, couch! Fresh air, bitches!

5 Maintenance—In which habits from undergoing the action stage are more ingrained and the new behavior becomes sticky as the person gains self-confidence in their abilities. What’s a couch?

Under the TTM model, where is the lightning strike? Where does the critical moment that divides a person’s life into before and after take place? We can see it in the gap between thinking and doing, between stage 2 and stage 3. It happens after contemplation and before preparation. Although the stage that follows is called “Action,” preparation is still a form of doing, a form of action. It is a giant leap forward toward a new life, which happens in an instant. It requires bravery and force to leap this chasm; hence the need to ensure that the emotional grizzly-elephant-horses are shocked into wakefulness and pointed in the right direction. They have taken up arms, roared defiantly, and the sea of troubles trembled at the might of such a battle cry.

Sometimes the movement from contemplation is a mere step, but that’s not what you’re after. What you seek is a giant leap. Because if this moment that prompts the advancement to stage 3 is a powerful one, if it is a true epiphany that enlightens and inspires, you’ll have little fear of relapse.

The new behaviors stick.

The Decisional Balance Sheet

“Reaching a tipping point to move toward action involves a change of focus,” James Prochaska told me. “One goes from the balance favoring the ‘cons’ of adopting a new behavior to giving more weight to the ‘pros.’”

Unfortunately, people tend to slide back into old habits, which is why it is important to ensure the decisional balance sheet is well stacked in favor of acting.

“A person is going to be a lot better prepared to stick with the new behavior if the pros significantly outweigh the cons,” Prochaska said. If the pros only slightly tip the balance when you start down the path to changing your life, you will still be experiencing those cons. If you just barely decide to change—if, exasperated, you throw your hands in the air and say, “Fine! I guess I’ll do it”—you’re going to feel the suck of that change; it can overpower any benefits. The balance teeters around ambivalence; you are more inclined to give up and slide back into old behavior.

In 2010, Jennifer Di Noia, a professor of sociology at William Patterson University in New Jersey, worked with Prochaska on a meta-analysis of twenty-seven different studies of how TTM was used to evaluate decisional balance; they were specifically looking at dietary changes to affect weight loss. Published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, they came to some fascinating conclusions.

During the precontemplation stage, cons rule the synapses, but something interesting happens during contemplation: The balance begins to shift. And it shifts in a way that explains why so many fail in their efforts to change their lives.

In the contemplation stage, the reduction in thinking about cons is small; the balance shifts because the value of the pros increases by a significant margin. The cons are still there, still powerful. The fear of pain or boredom from exercise, the financial worries over pursuing a different career, or “You can peel my wine glass from my cold, dead hand!” remain palpable. And to overshadow such fear, the pros need to “Hulk Smash!” them into insignificance. The ratio revealed in Di Noia and Prochaska’s research of pros to cons is enlightening. They discovered the pros must outweigh the cons by almost a 2 to 1 ratio to be truly effective!

It stresses the importance of the great leap forward achieved via some form of epiphany; it’s not a simple tipping of the balance sheet to 51–49 in favor of the pros. Again, it’s not a small step forward toward successful and sustainable change; it works better if you take a giant leap.

“Pros and cons of decision making is not a conscious, rational, empirical process,” Professor Prochaska said. “It is very emotionally based.”

What can make someone passionate about a new direction? What gives them the drive to charge ahead with an unstoppable “no-prisoners” attitude? Prochaska explained that a dramatic event could cause someone to reevaluate pros and cons.

Such a dramatic event found its initial spark for Chuck Gross in January 2008. He sat in an Irish pub in New Orleans, called Boondock Saint, having a quiet beer or five. The bar was named to pay homage to a cult-action film of a similar name.

“My brothers-in-law are twins. My wife and I took them barhopping on Bourbon Street for their twenty-first birthdays,” Chuck, a computer programmer in Pittsburgh, told me. The Irish-style pub was dark and somewhat gloomy. A mirror advertising Guinness hung on an aging brick wall. Being it was a twenty-first birthday event in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Chuck was in no shape to walk a straight line.

That night, Chuck had a chance meeting that would be the first step on a journey that would change his life.

“Back then I was not a social person, being as fat as I was,” Chuck said. He described two seats at the far end of the bar, and how he ended up sitting next to an average-looking man who practically forced Chuck to speak with him.