We have one more obstacle to overcome before we can start building on your achievements. That is the boxed-in feeling. The feeling that a lid has been nailed down on one's opportunities to grow. By far it is the most mentioned obstacle of those who come to me for assistance, closely followed only by the question, "But what can I do successfully?" One has held the same job for seven years, and can't expect a promotion until his amazingly youthful and healthy superior dies or retires. Another is boxed in by six rivals in his department, all so evenly matched that the last time a promotion came up his boss hired a man from outside rather than break up an efficient combination. A third finds his capacity for growth restricted by the slow-but-sure growth of a century-old firm that prides itself on the .number of watches it hands out every year to those that have served 25 years, usually in the same department. So, in scores of variations, runs the boxed-in theme.
Some years ago I discovered a revealing test that exposes the boxed-in feeling for what it is. It has opened the eyes of so many that I have every reason to believe that-unless you are the one out of a thousand that can solve it-it will help you, too.
The test calls for you to join all nine dots with four straight lines without taking your pencil from the paper. You have three chances, and I urge you to try all three of them, taking all the time you need, before reading further. ?
If you are like the 999 out of a thousand of the thousands who have tried it, you have spent some 15 minutes on the problem to produce nothing but frustration. You have been boxed in.
Now let's see what happened. In the first place, I introduced the test by presenting the enormous odds against your being able to solve it. And when you believe the odds are overwhelmingly against you, you will not try as hard as when you believe you have a 50-50 chance.
This is a dangerous policy, based upon what I call "statistical hypnosis." In this state you find it easy to believe that as long as thousands of others have failed, you are in good company when you join them. You are using statistics to lull yourself when, with a little individual resourcefulness, you might have found the problem made to order for you. To arouse yourself from this state, you need but remember you are not a statistical unit to be told that you will fail because thousands of others did. You are unique. What applies to thousands does not necessarily apply to you. Sometime early in 1960 a child was born who brought the population of the United States to 180,000,000. He became the last zero on a string of seven, according to statistics, but I doubt he will think of himself as zero reduced to the seventh power. Of this, too, I will have more to say later.
In the second place we have been taught so many things that restrict or limit our achievement potential that even in our contemplation of the nine dots we tend to restrict our imaginations instead of turning them loose. Since infancy we have been trained to conform, whether it iswith our playmates, fellow-students, or fellow-workers. In some instances these efforts to conform-to keep up with the crowd-have led to enormous bursts of energy and productivity. Oddly enough, however, most of these bursts of energy were spent, not on getting ahead, but on trying to bring one's lesser attributes up to par, or trying to cut one's superior talents down to par. Today, except in a few enlightened schools, the fate of the gifted child is a lonesome one.
To confuse matters, in certain activities like athletics, dramatics, art, and craftsmanship, an undue stress is placed on excellence. The boy who scores a touchdown at a critical moment is not hailed as a good player but as a football "hero." The girl who sings the lead in the school opera is not just a competent singer but the "star." By the same token, the boy who fumbles the ball and loses the game can crash from "hero" to "bum" in one five-second play. The boy in shop, who gouges a piece of woodwork, though he is the best chemist in his class, has revealed himself as a "clumsy dolt." Scars like that can be of long duration, and even permanent. I know of an actor whose career was nearly ruined in college by the mistake of the leading lady in a dramatic club play. At the high point of the melodrama, with the heroine gazing expectantly at the wrong door, he made his entrance at the opposite side of the stage. Deadly silence, followed by a roar of laughter that broke up the play. It was the girl's mistake, but it was his entrance, and he became the goat. "They laughed at me every time they saw me on the campus after that," he told me miserably. "Why, the next fall, in my first day in class, the professor greeted me with, 'Well, Lawrence, I'm glad to see you managed to find the right door.'"
I was a long time in working with him before he convinced himself that his real achievements in acting had not been ruined by another party's mistake. He returned to the stage and television where he is now enjoying increasing success. Not all are so fortunate. Achievements tend to be minimized; mistakes tend to be amplified, even though they are another's mistakes, and so strong has tradition made this influence that, one girl's mistake ' had nearly caused him to abandon the career of his choice.
If that is true of the career fields based on visible activities like athletics and dramatics, consider how much more insidious it becomes in the intellectual, commercial, industrial, and governmental fields where success is not based necessarily on a starring role or a" grandstand play. The evidence indicates that we attach much greater importance to the things we see, the visible careers, than we do to the intellectual-including memory-activities that are invisible. At the same time, not more than 50,000 people can be considered relatively successful in the fields of dramatics, sports and arts. The rest of us 179,950,000 must find our successes elsewhere. But how are we to find them, if, for the most part, the fields are "invisible"? That is tradition asking the question. In science, industry, and government an entirely new appreciation of these so-called invisible talents has been reached. These bodies know that ideas are the currency of progress. They know that not one wheel can turn until an idea stirs it, that not one board can be nailed to another unless an idea directs the motions, that no world peace can be reached until the ideas have been hatched to base it on. They know, too, that ideas without management skills to keep them organized, without craftsmen's skills to see them realized in finished form, and without operators' skills to make them work are just empty dreams. They need successful men in all these fields if they are to succeed themselves.
Tests
To that end they developed all sorts of tests. Their hope was that the future physicist, rampaging through a technical aptitude test battery, would stand out amongst his rivals as conspicuously as the football star rampaging off to his All-American title. In the same way they hoped to identify the future diplomat, the spaceman, the natural resources conservationist, the heart specialist, and the millions of others needed to be successful in some 30,000 varieties of jobs, changing at the rate of 4% yearly.
But it is one tiling to test for the right man, and another to get the right man to take the test. All too often the job is handed to the one with the highest score, and in too many cases that score can be very low indeed. In those instances both the job and its winner suffer. These tests apply what I referred to earlier as the "capacity myth."
At this point I break not only with tradition but with modern practices, both of which are workingbackward. According to tradition, in analyzing the lives of great men we accept first their greatness, and then search through their pasts for the achievements that made them great. That is easy to do. With Edison we can say he invented the electric lamp, the phonograph, the motion picture, and more than a thousand other items. But what did Edison think about his inventions? Were they real achievements in his own mind, or were they only the by-products of some secret problem that, once conquered, led the way to all his other victories? And what about George Washington at Valley Forge? Did he think of that bitter winter as an achievement in heroic fortitude, as history has it, or did he think of it as a stupid trap into which he never should have fallen? Only the individual can know his own achievements, and only the individual can use them. Otherwise we would be what the Communists call "the masses" instead of a collection of 200,000,000 individuals.
Just as one cannot select certain achievements in the life of a great man and say, "These are what made him feel great," neither can available psychological tests determine who is going to become great in the future, and who is doomed to lasting failure.
Now let's return to the nine-dot test. Did you box yourself in, or did you let your imagination roam beyond the limits of traditional confines? Here's the way it works: The first line is drawn through dots one, four, and seven. Tradition would have you stop there, but nothing in the rules prohibits you from continuing on down the page as long as the line is straight Do so to an imaginary Dot ten, which will be, if your imagination is working right, in line with dots eight and six. Thus your second line will be from Dot ten through dots eight and six. Don't stop. By projecting your imagination, you will also project the line to an imaginary dot even with dots three, two, and one. That becomes your third straight line, after which your fourth can pass only through dots five and nine.
Simple, isn't it? And do not think I tricked you, or that it was, to use a current expression, a rigged show. If you really want to get ahead, you must be willing to work beyond what your eye can see. Your past achievements were not just a pattern of dots adding up to a box on which you pull the lid down on yourself. They contain the clues through which you get to know your best self and solve the problems of success by throwing off the lid on your ambitions.
