IN HIS SOPHOMORE YEAR IN high school, Michael Jordan was cut from the basketball team.
Like any kid who wanted to play basketball would be, he was depressed and angry. He wasn’t good enough to play high school basketball? He totally disagreed, but the coach was the coach. However, Michael Jordan also had a habit of thinking things through, of not just walking away like a victim. He finally asked himself an owner’s question: How can I use this? How can I use this?
He wanted to know what he could get from the experience. He did not ask himself how he would get through it.
After thinking it over, he decided to practice harder than he ever had before. He would not be defeated by the thoughts in someone else’s head. In fact, not only would he make the team next year, he decided that he’d take his game to an entirely new level. It wasn’t long before he took his game to a level it never would have gone to had he not been cut. Today, he discusses being cut from his high school team as a defining moment in his life—something that drove him to reinvent who he was as a player—one of the best things that ever happened to him.
In 1980, Candy Lightner’s daughter was killed by a drunk driver in Sacramento, California. The driver was never punished. So, it might have been understandable if Candy had become a lifelong victim of this circumstance. But she decided to channel her outrage into something useful, so she started Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She refused to be the driver’s second victim. She took herself up from get through to get from.
The primary result of the habit of using self-victimizing language, such as “get through,” is fatigue, both mental and physical. A life that you have to get through is by its very nature an ongoing struggle. The air itself becomes a wall of clear, thick Jell-O to get through. You can feel it in your walk—the struggle—the unbearable thickness of being.
The victims’ sense of fatigue eventually leads to low performance and depression. People who are run down soon become accident-prone. Bad things start happening to them. They become incredibly unlucky. Their low state of energy robs them of the strength to get through their challenges. When feeling low, they stop paying attention.
They trip over a rollerblade left on the stairs—they miss half a day’s work. They leave their briefcase on the roof of their car and drive off into rush hour traffic with all their notes and documents flying in the wind like huge sad confetti—it takes a week to get all their important papers and cards duplicated. They wake up late the next morning and take the wrong turn off the freeway, driving into a neighborhood where their life is threatened. They see a doctor to get a prescription to handle the increased stress and depression—soon a nasty addiction sets in.
They start beginning their sentences with the words, “With my luck. . . .” They are victims of their own thinking.
On the other hand, it is a refreshing and energizing life that is begun by trying to get something from everything you do. There’s a shift in energy when the words are shifted.
Sometimes great songwriters and singers go through periods in their lives when they compound their self-victimization by addictions to drugs and alcohol. You can often hear the pain of these life periods in the words of their songs. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” and John Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” illustrate this weariness of the spirit. Both songwriters, later in their careers, reinvented themselves. Their later songs reflect it.
For example, in Mr. Holland’s Opus, Richard Dreyfuss sang the song John Lennon had written to his “beautiful boy.” It was a song of joy. John Lennon lived his last years as an owner of the human spirit, a life in which he could “imagine all the people, living to be free.” He had become, in the strongest sense, a dreamer. He had developed what Colin Wilson calls “the strength to dream.” Lennon sang, “You may call me a dreamer.”
You always have two ways to respond to any difficult circumstance: as an owner or as a victim. When you are confronted with difficulty, stop and think of those two options. Make sure you are paying attention to how you are describing things to yourself. If you’re wondering how you’re going to get through some experience, ask yourself to breathe a little more deeply and translate your language into that of an owner. Just try it on, as if you were trying on a baseball cap that you were thinking of purchasing. Put it on frontwards, then put it on backwards.
Try saying to yourself, perhaps even out loud as you’re getting started, “How can I use this? What can I get from this experience? What is the gift inside of this? What is it here to teach me?”
If you listen carefully enough to your problem, you’ll begin to get things from it. You will no longer want to get through it. Soon it will no longer even be thought of as a “problem.” It will become your teacher.
Problems then become turning points for you. Soon you are using them and loving them (in retrospect) like an architect inventing a city, turning a street here, and a building there. People will notice that you have changed. They may call you a dreamer. But you’re not the only one.