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CHAPTER SEVEN TAKING CONTROL

Okay, we’re at the end of the book so let’s summarize what we’ve talked about.

We’ve talked about how psychopaths are not all serial killers. They are people with a lack of empathy, a strong desire for personal power, a high appetite for risk, and the ability to turn on the charm. And they are out there, about 1–4 percent of the population. Some of them, I believe, end up in management positions of large organizations.

We’ve talked about how organizations are survival machines, out to protect their power and the people inside of the organization, as long as they support the organization’s objectives of maintaining power.

We’ve talked about how psychopaths in management levels of organizations will toxify the culture, making the entire organization, industry, or even the nation psychopathic.

We’ve talked about how psychopaths are aware that there are ninety-nine of us for every one of them, so they need to use all of the tools at their disposal to stop us from taking their power away.

We’ve talked about how psychopaths in power have no incentives to want to push through any dramatic systemic change in their organization or society, because they are prospering under the status quo.

And we’ve talked about how capitalism, when it no longer can manufacture the consent of the people, manufactures new extreme excuses to remove civil rights, including fascism as a final solution.

The question I want to finish this book with is—what can we do about all of this?

It’s the question I’ve been pondering for the last twenty years. What can I do? If you’re not part of the elite and you don’t have the wealth and power to shape society, what can you do?

It’s going to take smarter people than me to work out the answers to that question. But I’ve got a handful of concrete steps I think we, as individuals and as a society, can put into place to protect ourselves from psychopaths and toxic organizational cultures.

IDENTIFY THE PSYCHOPATHIC CULTURES

It seems to me that the most obvious place to start is for us to drive the organizations we work inside of to recognize the real risk of psychopaths ending up in senior management and elected office.

Today this isn’t something that is brought up in polite conversation. It might be water cooler talk, but you won’t hear HR talking about it, nor will you see the media asking questions—outside of extreme cases of high-profile business failure or evidence of political crash-and-burn.384 The only time we hear talk about psychopaths in the boardroom is when they fail massively. What isn’t discussed is the damage they also do when they succeed or how to prevent them from causing chaos along the way.

How do we get organizations to take the threat of psychopaths seriously? Especially when some of the management are probably psychopaths? It’s going to take some clever engineering.

I would start by looking at the culture of the organization and identifying the psychopathic elements. How does the organization treat customers, staff, and the public? How does it treat whistleblowers? How does it treat competitors? Does it have a system of values and an ethics framework that are more than just talking points?

A discussion about potential psychopathic tendencies inside an organization’s culture is a good way of broaching the subject of the existence of psychopaths in management.

Psychopathy tests for senior managers and politicians should become a standard policy to ensure that we aren’t giving too much power to people who have a higher statistical risk of misusing it for personal gain.

I propose that organizations should be employing psychiatrists to have all staff sit the PCL-R test. In the same way that companies today have drug or breathalyzer tests for employees as a safety measure—one estimate is that about 40 percent of U.S. workers are currently subjected to drug tests during the hiring process.385

I don’t mean to suggest that psychopaths shouldn’t be employed or even given responsibility—on the contrary, they have a unique set of capabilities that organizations will still want to leverage—just that organizations should factor in the risks of giving a psychopath power and engineer safeguards, such as supporting a balanced managerial team where at least half the people have a low PCL-R score and implementing checks and balances in the approvals process for any decisions where psychopaths have a hand in the decision-making to ensure the decision doesn’t conflict with the previously agreed-upon ethical guidelines that the company has committed to adhere to.

How we introduce this sort of policy into organizations is where it gets tricky, as we can assume that the psychopaths in senior management won’t want to allow any restrictions on their ability to make decisions. Strangely, they probably won’t be worried about being revealed as a psychopath—they probably don’t really care what other people think about them. They think they are winners. If being a psychopath makes them a winner, they will think, then good for them.

They will only care if they think it might be a threat to their power. And, of course, putting systems into place to prevent their worst impulses will limit their power. That’s the entire point.

Therefore, it will be up to those of us that aren’t psychopaths to force through changes to the corporate culture.

There will be many managers, though, who aren’t psychopaths but are suspicious that managers around them are. There will be board members or people who represent major investors in listed companies that will be suspicious of the managers in organizations they are involved in. It’s mainly up to these people to engineer the new policies out of a sense of moral obligation.

What can the rest of us do? We have a range of options, from building awareness of the dangers of psychopaths in power, to direct agitation—speaking out about concerns at company meetings, strike action, and so forth.

There are risks involved in all of these activities, so I suggest we create movements inside our organizations, making sure we are not alone in the crusade. It’s harder for an organization to eradicate fifty or one hundred people from across the organization than it is to eradicate just one.

MONITOR PSYCHOPATHIC CULTURES

Once we have assessed the organization for a psychopathic culture and know who the psychopaths are, we need to set up systems to monitor their decisions and their actions.

We should push organizations to implement some kind of internal governance body, made up of randomly chosen employees who have passed the PCL-R test and who serve twelve-month terms to monitor executive appointments and decisions for potential psychopathic behavior.

Organizations should issue a public annual report where they rank their company on its ethical health.

Most listed commercial organizations already measure their ongoing activities against a range of metrics in some kind of a “balanced scorecard,” which reports on such things as revenue, profit, expenses, sales, market share, customer satisfaction, and so on.

Over the last fifty years, there has been a push by social and environmental activists for a “triple bottom line” (aka TBL or 3BL). It’s an accounting framework that measures three parts of an organization’s impact: social, environmental (or ecological), and financial, commonly referred to as “corporate social responsibility.”

Organizations measure their impact on “the three P’s”—People, Planet, Profit.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t been able to get much traction and why would it if psychopaths are running the economy?

I think we can all take it upon ourselves to push our organizations to become a TBL company.

According to my friend Tony Kynaston, a very successful professional investor (and co-host on my QAV Investing Podcast386), there are a lot of ethical investment funds out there,387 but they don’t get much media attention outside of investor circles.

And if you don’t hear much about the TBL, what about the QBL, the quadruple bottom line (also known as FBL or fourth bottom line)? The QBL adds another P—purpose, sometimes also called spirituality or compassion. It essentially means asking yourself, “Why am I doing this?” Beyond profit, what value am I bringing to the world by running my organization? What is the social impact of our endeavors? And how do we measure that outcome objectively?

One way of monitoring QBL performance are B Corps—a new certification standard that claims a growing community of more than 1,229 certified B Corps from forty-one countries and 121 industries, who are working together toward the goal of redefining success in business. Each B Corp has signed a term sheet that declares that they will consider all stakeholders. It is a rigorous assessment that explores a company’s governance, transparency, and environmental and social impact.388

Can we push the organizations we work in to become a B Corp?

CLARIFY OUR OWN ETHICS, MORALS, AND VALUES

While it’s easy to point fingers at others, it’s important we all do an audit on our own personal ethics, morals, and values.

Do I have a clear enough idea of where I stand on these things? Would I immediately know when I am being asked to cross a line? I’m not talking about being asked to murder someone or to burn down a village, I’m talking about more subtle issues that are likely to crop up inside a psychopathic culture, like, as we saw in the sections on the finance industry, rip off customers, or treat customers poorly.

If you were asked to write down a list of your ethical principles and why you chose them, how quickly and confidently would you be able to complete the task?

I tried it myself some years ago and found the task extremely challenging. Especially when I asked myself why I believed in certain things. The more I asked myself why I believed in this and not that, the more difficult the process became.

Let’s take a recent, brief example such as same-sex marriage.

I supported it.

But then I ask myself, Why do I support it? What is my core ethical reason for supporting the issue?

And then it gets tricky.

I might start by saying, “Well, I’m very happily married; in fact, my marriage is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, so I want other people to have the same opportunity for happiness, regardless of their sexual preference.”

Then I’d have to ask myself how I know that my opinion on the matter is the right opinion? How do I know what are the best things for society?

I start to falter at this stage.

It turns out this philosophy business can be quite difficult. Who knew!?

I’m sure there are plenty of books, podcasts, and experts I can consult in the future to help me do a better job of helping me clarify my ethics, morals, and values. The point is to make it a priority, so I don’t end up like the boiling frog.

Ethics is the question of right and wrong conduct.

One tool I have found to help with ethical questions is the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.389 Their site also has an Ethical Culture Survey to determine how ethical the organization you work for is. But even these tools will only provide you with a score and compare that score to the general public—they won’t help you determine where your values and morals come from.

Values represent the idea that we can’t have everything in life. There are only twenty-four hours in a day. Each of us has a limited lifespan and a limit to the things we can focus on. Ideally, we should each live our lives, devoting our time and energy toward the things that we value. This might seem like common sense, but it’s amazing how many people are living their lives devoting enormous amounts of time to things they don’t really care about.

For example—watching television. According to one 2016 report, Australians spend an average of 101 hours per month watching television on both in-home TV sets and on their screens.390 That’s an average of three to four hours a day! Imagine what else you could do with that time.

I enjoy great television as much as the next person, but I value achieving progress on my own projects more than I do watching the output of someone else’s projects. That’s why I haven’t owned a television set for over a decade. I have too many books to read and projects to finish.

Values make us choose between things that require our time and energy but which are in conflict with each other. Some might appear on a scale of opposites. Others will appear as conflicting outcomes.

Here are some excellent questions I’ve used to help determine what matters most in life.

  1. Imagine you have the opportunity to attend your own funeral. What would you like the people closest to you—your loved ones, your closest friends—to say about you? If the media is going to write an obituary about your life, what would you like it to contain? Go ahead and write your own obituary. That will help you determine what you value.
  2. Imagine your life ten years from now. Where are you living (e.g., country, city, suburb, etc.)? Who are you living with (e.g., the person of your dreams, a cat, your best friend, etc.)? How are you spending your days (e.g., what kind of work, what kind of leisure activities, etc.)? What kind of skills do you have that you don’t have already (e.g., new languages you can speak, martial arts, cooking, playing guitar, etc.)? What kind of mental and emotional state do you want to be in (e.g., spiritual peace, happiness, etc.)? Map your future self out on paper. Now this might sound like goal setting, and it is—our goals should be in alignment with our values. Our principal goal in life should be to move ourselves closer to living in tune with our values.

BREAK OUT OF THE MONEY TRAP

One of the ways the majority of us get trapped in a system of living out of tune with our values is that we fall into the money trap.

We allow ourselves to get into a financial situation where we can’t afford to say “no” to our employers because our lifestyle requires a reliable income—or two—or three. We saddle ourselves with debts and spend our free cash flow for things we don’t really need but are tricked into wanting by constant advertising and peer pressure: that huge-screen TV, that new car, the holiday, the expensive wedding, the expensive gadgets, the new shoes, the latest fashions, dining out at the latest restaurants, etc. The advertising industry works relentlessly to convince us to spend every dollar we have, in fact, to borrow more money and spend that as well, and that we won’t be happy until we have everything we could ever want. They tell us we deserve those things because we deserve to be happy.

Even though we all know that things don’t make us happy, we still fall for the deception, because we are saturated with the advertising 24/7. Studies suggest that we see, on average, 4500 advertisements every day of our lives on the web, on billboards, on TV, radio, in newspapers and magazines, on the packaging around us, on cars, and on buildings. Our brains get saturated with messages telling us to buy, buy, buy, and that buying will make us happy and fulfilled and successful.

It’s ridiculously hard to fight that kind of mental infiltration. And so most of us give in. We buy the new gadget, it makes us happy for a few weeks, and then the feeling wears off and we need to buy something new. Have you ever wondered why that is? It’s because the happiness we feel when we buy something new is the result of the neurochemical dopamine, aka “the pleasure molecule.” Dopamine is involved in the way our brains have evolved to trick us into doing things that will help us survive, what’s referred to as our “reward system.” Our brains are literally wired to drive us to achieve rewards, so we get a chemical “hit” of dopamine.

During the twentieth century, marketers worked out how to turn dopamine to their advantage. When we get something we desire, we are administered a hit of dopamine, a chemical reward that gets us high. But it doesn’t last, and it isn’t designed to last. It’s designed to reward you for hunting and killing an antelope, so you can feed your family for the next few days. But then you need to go hunt for another antelope, or your family will starve. Our brains crave those dopamine hits. We get them today, not from hunting for our food, but by shopping for stupid shit we don’t need. And by opening up Instagram to see how many likes our latest photo got.391

Instead of saving our money and investing it in our future, we live for today’s dopamine hits and, in doing so, forfeit our future. When we get ourselves into a situation where we can’t afford to quit a job because we don’t have enough savings to last the few months it might take to find a better job, it becomes incredibly hard to put your values ahead of immediate needs, like paying the rent or keeping the electricity on. And betraying your values is a slow process. It’s boiling the frog. It’s a slippery slope. Decision by decision, we give up our values and, as we do, we become part of the system.

While some suggest that modern society has been deliberately engineered to squeeze us into the money trap, it might also just be an evolutionary stable state, or “Nash equilibrium.”

In other words, nobody deliberately set out to create society this way—but they encourage it when it suits them.

It’s really difficult to go on strike for better working conditions or a greater share of the economic pie when your family will be evicted because you can’t pay the rent or the mortgage. People who are working twelve-hour days, taking their work home with them on their laptops, or who work two jobs to pay for their lifestyle, are too tired to organize into political groups or to join labor unions.

Instead they go home, drink a bottle of wine or a few beers or smoke a joint to dull the parts of their brains that nag them about how time is slipping away, then indulge themselves with pure escapism, watching televised sport or reality TV or playing Xbox, and finally fall asleep so they can get up to do it all over again. We find ourselves falling into the money trap and, once you’re in it, it’s very hard to claw your way back out.

How do we avoid the money trap? There are a number of strategies that have been successfully tested by people I know.

THE SAMMARTINO METHOD

Steve Sammartino has been a mate of mine for ten years and he’s a very smart investor. Steve’s investment system is foolproof and doesn’t require you to know anything about shares or companies or the market. He calls it a “set and forget” system. I call it “The Sammartino Method”392 and I think everyone should be taught his method when they leave school.

He just lived as frugally as he could, from his early 20s, and put as much money as possible into an “index fund.” That’s a fund that buys a portfolio containing a parcel of the top 100 stocks on the market. When one stock falls out, it is replaced with another. The great thing about this system, Steve says, is that history shows that the stock market grows, on average, over the long term, by about 11 percent per year, and the index funds tend to keep pace with that. He just kept on sinking his spare cash into a fund until, by age thirty-three, Steve had built up a big-enough share portfolio that he was able to quit his corporate marketing job and live on the dividends. Today he spends his time doing what he loves—he’s a futurist, who writes excellent books and gives speeches about the future.

Steve’s system is so simple and basic that everyone can do it. All it takes, he says, is discipline.

He recommends that we all read these two books: The Intelligent Investor393 and A Random Walk Down Wall Street.394

THE QAV SYSTEM

Tony Kynaston, who I have mentioned before, is another good mate of mine. He pushed me to write this book and helped me patiently over the years to refine the ideas inside it. He’s also a very smart guy and a very successful investor.

Tony has spent decades developing an investing methodology he calls “QAV,” which stands for Quality At Value. It’s based on the way people like Warren Buffett have invested for many decades—working out how to buy shares in good quality companies but at the right price. A year ago I would have thought that kind of investing was way too difficult for me, but early in 2019 we started a podcast where he teaches me the system. The great thing about Tony’s method is that it doesn’t require much in the way of brains. It took a lot of brains to develop it, but understanding it is something that even I can do.

He has developed a checklist into which you plug the financial data that companies publish. The checklist results in a score. If it’s a positive score, the share is a buy. That’s it.

Tony used this method to retire from his job as a corporate executive in his 40s. He calls it a “get rich slowly” method. Unlike the Sammartino Method, Tony’s approach requires a bit more work, but his portfolio has grown, on average, at double the rate of the market, so it’s worth the effort.

You can check out the podcast with Tony at qavpodcast.com.au.

THE OPPOSITE METHOD

I call it the opposite method because it involves doing the opposite of everything you’ve been told your entire life (and it reminds me of Seinfeld). It requires rejecting “common sense” and making your own path through life.

If we accept that the system we live in pushes us down a certain path that leaves most people broke, stressed, and looking for dopamine hits in Reality TV, Facebook, and shopping, it’s a good idea to break out of that system and find a new path.

If you have lots of healthy ways of getting dopamine hits, you won’t be as likely to look for unhealthy options. Fill yourself up on the dopamine equivalent of fresh veggies, and you won’t be hungry for dopamine pizza.

I try to get a lot of healthy dopamine hits by being engaged in doing things every day that make me feel better about myself, which make me feel like I am making a difference in the world and living by my values. When I left my corporate career and started making podcasts, I noticed that my state of mind improved significantly.

If you are doing things that make you feel better about the direction your life is heading in, you are less likely to go searching for a fake dopamine hit.

I was having breakfast recently with Sammartino, and he was talking about the people we know who have made significant life changes in the last decade. They have all gone from working in high-pressure corporate environments to working for themselves.

Sure, they might earn less money, but they have more freedom—freedom over their schedules, freedom to say no to the kind of work they don’t enjoy, freedom to spend more time with their children and spouses during the week, freedom to pursue the activities that are closer to their values and make them feel sincerely joyful about their lives.

Each of us has a limited lifespan. Some of us choose to downscale our lives to trade things for time.

Steve told me that he looked at the things he liked most about his old marketing job, which was presenting ideas to groups of people and said, “What if I could just do that full time?” It was only ten percent of his old job, but it was the ten percent he really enjoyed. So today that’s all he does—write books and give talks (which provides an income on top of his investments from the Sammartino Method).

Similarly, I used to enjoy reading books about history, science, and politics (which had nothing to do with my sales job at Microsoft) and then discussing the ideas I found interesting—and now that’s what I do for a living. I get paid to read books about subjects I’m interested in and then discuss those ideas on podcasts. I feel like I’m making a difference in the lives of the people who listen to my shows (at least that’s what some of them tell me), and that makes me feel more useful. I don’t feel the need to go searching for cheap dopamine hits. I get enough feel-good chemicals every day from doing work that I genuinely love and the knowledge that it’s making a positive difference in the lives of others.

PROGRAM YOUR BRAIN

When I was growing up in the ’70s, there were only two television stations, one radio station, and one newspaper. My media options were pretty limited. We didn’t even have a house phone until I was twelve. And of course, there wasn’t a computer in the house, let alone internet connectivity or an iPad. At some point, probably in the early ’80s, we got a VCR (that’s a Video Cassette Recorder for the Millennials reading this), and that dramatically increased our viewing options. Outside of those channels, my reading involved borrowing books from the town or school library.

Today, of course, we suffer not from a scarcity of media options but a barrage of them. Our media cup runneth over. We have so much choice, it’s hard to know where to begin. And, as a result, many people decide not to decide. They fall back on the media channels they knew growing up—the masthead newspapers, the local radio station, the big television channels and let them continue to program their media for them.

And so, you end up with significant corporations determining what you watch, read, and listen to. What do you think they are going to fill your head with? Are they going to program your brain with information that might run counter to their corporate agenda? Unlikely.

I work hard to make sure I only read, watch, and listen to sources of information that I think are going to make me smarter, wiser, or more productive.

Over the years of doing that, I’ve also learned that the world is a complicated place. Psychopaths lie. It pays to be skeptical about what you hear in the news.

But there’s a fine line between being a skeptic and a conspiracy theorist. The difference, I think, comes down to evidence. As we’ve seen in the preceding pages, the people in power in Western democracies—politicians, business leaders, the media, and religious leaders—have lied to the general public regularly over the last century.

Therefore, it is entirely logical to assume we are being lied to today as well. But at the same time, it’s problematic just to assume that everything is a lie. We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard of evidence before we believe something is a lie. It’s one thing to be open to alternative theories to the official explanation of events. It’s another to believe those alternative theories without having substantial evidence.

For example, if a politician urges you to support her call for war and claims the country she wants to go to war with is currently committing atrocities, I think it’s entirely reasonable to say, “Prove it.” If she says she cannot, due to “national security implications,” then I’m sorry, but you don’t get my support, at least right now.

If the media tells me that someone committed collusion to win an election, I think it’s reasonable to ask for proof before I believe it. Even if I don’t like the guy they are accusing of collusion and would love to see him impeached or arrested, I still want to be careful to see facts before I buy into any narrative. It’s just as possible that the people trying to sell me on the collusion narrative also have a secret agenda.

The problem with taking an evidence-based mind-set is that it’s hard. Often the evidence isn’t made public. Or, if evidence is provided, we don’t have the skillset or training to assess the quality and integrity of it. We, the general public, rely heavily on experts to help us evaluate whether or not the evidence is compelling or not. But where do we find those experts? Often we get them from the media—columnists, opinionists, or talk show hosts who position themselves (and are positioned by their corporate owners) as the people we should listen to. However, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, we have to be careful who we listen to, as these people often have hidden alliances and incentives. They are often connected to corporate or political interests, funded by lobbyists, or other interested parties.

Therefore, it’s challenging for us to make evidence-based decisions on a range of complicated subjects when we aren’t experts—and the experts we are relying on have been corrupted.

The unfortunate reality is that we each need to work hard to find our own trusted sources. We need to take responsibility for our information.

There are still opportunities to find extremely bright, well-informed, and independent individuals who devote vast amounts of their time to assessing what’s going on and then publishing their thoughts on podcasts, medium.com, a reddit forum, Facebook, or a blog. I tend to keep a list of my favorite sources of analysis and refer to them when I’m trying to understand a news story.

Unfortunately, you won’t find many of them working for corporate media companies for the reasons we’ve explored in this book. You’ll need to go searching.

I keep an updated list of sources I like to read at cameronreilly.com/news-sources. Keep in mind, though, that we should never trust any source one hundred percent because we can never really know what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s practically impossible to be able to understand what allegiances each particular source might have, who they are accepting hidden payments or gifts from, and so on.

The best we can do is to look for sources that appear unbiased. On one of my podcasts, I run contemporary news stories through a checklist of questions designed to help me give each one a score for potential reliability.395

Of course, each of us needs to educate ourselves as much as possible on current affairs, developing the best framework we can for reading between the lines of the stories that mean the most to us. None of us are ever going to be experts on everything. But it’s not difficult to pick a news story that piques your interest each week and then spend an hour or two researching it instead of watching TV. Read/watch/listen to a handful of stories from different perspectives (left, right, center). Start with the sources you already trust. If they aren’t covering the story, find new sources but take their analysis with a grain of salt until you’ve done some research on the source themselves and ascertained their quality and independence.

I’m also a big fan of reading. Surveys indicated that most people don’t read books very often. You’re obviously an exception because you’re reading this, so you know what I’m talking about.

Whenever I’m talking to smart people I admire, like Sammartino or Kynaston, I like to ask them, “What’s the best book you’ve read recently?”

Find out what smart people are watching and listening to. I’ve read a bunch of books because Bill Gates recommended them.

When I was eighteen or nineteen, I got one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received. I spent an hour with a millionaire who advised me to invest 10 percent of my income on my brain—for the rest of my life. What did he mean by that? Take ten percent of your earnings and spend it on books or courses that will make you smarter. He said it would be the best investment I would ever make. It may not make you wealthy, but it will make you worldly. Here I am thirty years later, still reading several books a week.

Another way to program your brain is to learn how to think and reason. When I was a young man, I had a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson pasted on my bookshelf:

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

I resolved to dedicate myself to becoming better at thinking. I’m still trying to get better at it. Emerson was right. It’s hard. Of course, we all think—but do we know why we think what we think? Can we articulate our ideas and opinions and be confident that they sit on solid foundations? Are we comfortable having a friendly debate with someone with opposing ideas, unafraid to justify our point of view while also being open and willing and excited to be proven wrong by a better argument? I’ve learned over the years that many people are not comfortable in this situation. If their opinions are challenged, even in a friendly manner, they become tense and even angry. By testing their ideas, you are challenging their very identity. They are firmly rooted in their opinions and have built their lives around them. By examining those opinions, you are threatening everything they know. Or so they think.

A different point of view to take is to consider ourselves tireless searchers for the truth. If I have an opinion about a subject that is incorrect, then I want to know. I don’t want to remain ignorant. Ignorance is not bliss in my book. I want to think like a scientist—test my hypotheses and always be willing to throw out an old theory for a better one. To paraphrase Fox Mulder—the truth is out there.

After we develop that mind-set, the next challenge is to learn how to think and reason. Unless we want to become a logician or philosopher, the tools we need to get started are relatively simple.

First, I recommend The Five Whys, developed by Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries (which later spawned the Toyota Motor Corporation). It’s a technique I learned while working at Microsoft and is similar to the approach I discussed above for determining our morals and values.

For each opinion you have on any subject, ask yourself, Why? Why is that true? Then, when you have your answer, repeat the process. Why is that true? After you’ve repeated five iterations of asking “Why?” you’ll have a much clearer perspective on the validity of that opinion. And if you ever find yourself in a debate with someone coming from a different perspective, you’ll have a much deeper pool of ideas to draw from—and to have the opportunity to improve your thinking, especially if that other person can correct your thinking on the answers you came up with. Remember that the goal is to get to the truth—not to win the argument. There is no long-term or inherent value in winning if you are wrong. Asking “why” is also a useful way of scratching the surface of the thinking of others. “I’m extremely interested in understanding why you believe that to be true?” is a gentle way of having a friendly discussion with someone who you disagree with.

The second tool is to get a handle on some of the most common logical fallacies.396 A logical fallacy is faulty reasoning, an argument that might sound persuasive but, when scrutinized, contains flaws. They get used with disturbing regularity, often deliberately, from dinner table discussions to political debates and corporate boardrooms. It should be our goal to think as clearly as possible and not fall into the fallacy trap. Falling into a fallacy isn’t a sign of low intelligence or a moral failing—it’s more about System 1 vs. System 2 thinking. Fallacies appear to us as shortcuts but sometimes they take us in the wrong direction.

Some of the fallacies to be wary of include:

HAVE A FRAMEWORK FOR LIFE

I think another central aspect of healthy dopamine is to have a framework by which you navigate life’s challenges. By “framework,” I mean a philosophy that guides you and helps you interpret life’s ups and downs in a healthy fashion.

I often talk to people who don’t seem to have spent much time developing their philosophy of life. They may have one they have adopted from their religion or have a mish-mash of things they have picked up from yoga class and motivational Facebook posts, but they don’t have a robust set of rules that help them navigate a healthy path through life’s long and winding road.

The chances are high that life is going to throw you a series of curveballs. At some point, the odds are that you are going to lose jobs, lose loved ones, lose money, and lose your way. You will also find times when everything seems to be going your way, and you can’t do anything wrong. Both of those phases of life present challenges and opportunities. If you don’t have a philosophy to guide you through, you can end up patting yourself on the back way too hard, or beating yourself up with way too much ferocity.

Without a philosophy, you might find that bad times rock you more than they otherwise would, and good times can also lead you astray. Anxiety, pride, guilt, resentment, ego, greed, and selfishness will prevent you from having a healthy state of mind, which in turn can drive us toward unhealthy remedies, and go looking for cheap dopamine hits. It’s easy in these times to fall for the trap of thinking a promotion, a new lover, or a new car is what we need to make us feel good again. We become easy prey for psychopaths looking to manipulate us into one of their schemes.

I was lucky when I was a young adult to get pointed to a life philosophy that has worked ever since to help me deal with the bad times as well as the good times (if you want to know more, visit threeillusions.com).

It’s been my experience that, with a solid philosophy, it is possible to live a life of permanent peace and happiness, regardless of what’s going on around you.

As Rudyard Kipling put it:

…you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same.397

I am fortunate to be crazy in love with my wife, to have three wonderful sons whom I’m proud of and love to bits, and to have work that provides fulfillment and stimulation. But the journey to get here took several missteps. I’ve had jobs I didn’t enjoy and found myself in relationships that didn’t work. Instead of just putting up with them, I’ve always tried to be flexible enough to make the changes I needed to make to set things right and live my life according to my values.

If you’re unhappy, do something about it. Leave the relationship. Quit your job. See a therapist. Make changes. Sure, it will involve some risks and some unknowns, but change is often its own reward. Life is about the journey.

Make a list of all of the things that are the most important to you in your life. The things that you value most highly. Put them in order of value. Then focus on achieving those. It sounds simple, but how many times do we hear of people on their deathbed saying, “I wish I’d spent less time at the office?” Don’t be one of those people.

I often tell people that I have achieved everything on my list except financial success. But I wouldn’t trade that for a single one of the other things on the list. It’s right at the bottom. And I’m still working on it.

One of the exercises I’ve often found useful in times of great upheaval is what I call the “reverse timeline.” I go back through my life’s timeline and think about the earlier situations when I’ve been going through significant changes.

Think about a time when a relationship or a job ended. It was probably scary and stressful. But what I’ve found is that when one door closes, another always opens. Those times of great upheaval have always lead to better opportunities and better relationships.

This hindsight helps me to realize, in current times of stress, that there is probably something better for me down the road, I need to pay attention, let life take me forward and be open to new doors that open. I smile and think, “Okay, Universe, what do you have in store for me this time? I’m ready. Bring it on.”

I’ve always taught my kids that when something bad happens in life, most people get angry or miserable or beat themselves up. A better approach, I think, is to ask yourself these two questions:

  1. What does this enable me to do that I couldn’t do before?
  2. How do I turn this situation to my advantage?

Those questions prepare my mind to be open and positive, to stay alert, and to get creative, instead of dwelling in misery.

So if you don’t have a philosophy for life, please find one. It doesn’t matter right now what it is—you can always find a better one later on. Just start looking for one that helps you make sense of life.