This chapter introduces a more in-depth approach to ELFs (Excellences of Limited Function). It’s the result of talking to thousands of people with a genius ability to create disaster in their lives without even wishing/wanting to, and answering the question:
Once again, keep in mind that these recipes represent the unconscious sets of processes that the nervous system is going through. But almost 100 per cent of the time, in 100 per cent of cases, they’re not doing it on purpose. They’re not doing it to cause trouble or seek attention and not even doing it, as some psychologists sometimes suggest, for secondary gains (to get some benefit by doing it). They are running these recipes without even thinking; it took hundreds of hours of discussions with these ELF geniuses to even work out between us what must be going on to produce these results.
Once I’d initially identified some common patterns and themes with a few people experiencing that issue, the next step was to talk to hundreds of other people with the same issue and find out if they were doing the same thing or not. This allowed me to start to identify what was common to everybody with that issue.
So my purpose here is to identify the common factors and see that the issue, like the chocolate cake, has a recipe or blueprint (see The structure of success), then we can work out what to do to change it, to mess it up, so the pattern just can’t run any more.
I worked on documenting the structure of many different core issues, through this process of discussion and research. I am not going to present all of these in this book; instead I am going to work in depth through four of the common ELFs that most easily show you how to apply these ideas to other issues in your life. These are:
Each issue is quite detailed, so ‘low self-esteem’ is covered in the next chapter, but the others are found in the appendices at the back of the book (see Recipe for Unhappiness).
However, the next chapter is a must-read chapter, as it goes through each element of an ELF in even more detail. The other three chapters will then deepen your understanding of ELFs and are essential reading if they concern issues you’re currently experiencing in your life.
If your issue doesn’t quite match any of these, then take the role of a researcher and ask yourself:
Go through the headings listed in the ELF chapters and fill in the details. Consider how you deal with things and, as you’ve probably come across others with similar issues (possibly some who were even better at it than you!), also think about how they must be dealing with the world too, to get the results they got.
If you do have one of the ELFs listed on Resilience, then start to work through it by comparing your experience to the general steps given in the relevant chapter.
In my experience, you should find that most, if not all, of the steps reflect accurately how you think about the world and how your brain operates. If there’s a part of the recipe that you don’t agree with, I’d suggest looking at it a little longer and seeing if it fits with you or not. It is possible that it isn’t how you approach the world due to the fact that, of course, we’re all a bit different. But mostly I find there is a very strong correlation between people having these feelings in their lives and approaching the world in the way described in the recipes.
Notice, naturally, the ELFs will only run in those times when you’re thinking in this way, along the lines of the recipe. Because these ELFs are behaviours, something we dû rather than who we actually are, they are not always present. In those times when you’re not dûing those feelings of unhappiness, you will also notice that those are the times when you’re not running the patterns in the Unhappiness ELF recipe.
Also remember, as with the chocolate cake recipe (see The structure of success), if you change, mess with or miss out any one of the parts of the recipe then you get a completely different result. With the ELFs it’s exactly the same. I’ll be highlighting some elements of the recipe when it’s so clear that changing this step would result in the whole ELF failing to work any more, but it’s actually true of any step in the process.
I’ve written these from the perspective of what you would have to do in order to create brilliant genius levels of the problem. It’s a kind of an upside-down way of looking at it but, by thinking in this way, it makes it easy to really see it as a skill. If you took anyone and asked them to start to approach the world in these very particular ways and they actually did it, it’s pretty obvious they would produce powerful, reproducible, yet disastrous, results.
So if this is what you’ve got in your life, remind yourself that you are a genius and take a good look at what’s been going on inside your brain behind your back; if the results hadn’t been so negative on your life, it would be almost funny to finally see it in this way.
