The Other Strength

I think self-help books have it backwards when they talk about how to deal with a crisis by looking for our "inner strength".

I usually agree with him, but even Tony Robbins in his book Awaken the Giant Within, falls into this trap.

Because, I think, the sleeping giant of strength is not "within" at all. It is "without".

This is a kind of important difference if you need to "fall back" on this when times get rough.

It's also pretty important if the lessons here are as relevant for entire nations or religions or cultures falling on hard times, as for individual humans. And I think they are relevant.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that times are getting bad for people, for communities, for work teams, for departments, for companies, for states, and for the whole United States, for example. I'll speak to that since it's where I live and so I have a view from the inside, with all the pluses and minuses that brings to my ability to observe it. (Fish do have difficulty perceiving water, they say.)

Now, we can asssume that all of these groups are not passively sitting by. In fact, it's probably true that many or most of them are making serious efforts to get out of the bind they are in, but those efforts are simply not working.

Well, maybe they are not working because they have the wrong concept of where the problem is. Maybe, they are trying to solve a problem "within" when the problem is "without". If the problem is not in the box, then odds are the solution is not in the box either. We need to look outside the box and see what's there, at least, in case it matters.

Yeah, it matters.

Coming at this from the other side, there are some surprising things that science has discovered recently.

Most of the recent research in Public Health is finding that the more someone is disconnected from society, the worse their physical health seems to be. Of course, this is a loop or death-spiral that feeds on itself, because the worse someone's health is, the more they may find it too much work to be sociable. This is a very solid finding. One of my professors at Hopkins described this as the most robust finding in public health aside from "smoking causes cancer".

And I have heard that solid research shows, for someone 65 years old, making a friend has more beneficial effect on their expected lifetime and health than the combination of stopping smoking, stopping drinking, lowering their cholesterol, and exercising regularly.

So apparently our physical health and psychological strength depend a great deal on how connected we are to society.

Since this well-established fact remains both baffling and surprising to people each time they come across it again, I think we need to revise our mental model of how we think about people, so this is no longer a big surprise, and we automatically take it into account when we plan and end up with more success in coping with a crisis.

So, without getting tangled up in how this could operate, I'll suggest that we get better answers if we think of people as having outside edges that do not have to be the same as where their skin is located. Since we don't know what people are, or life itself is, this is no big loss for a way to think of things.

So, say that the outside boundary of each of us is actually a shape that includes within it all of our close friends. Then it is far more natural to assume that something that happens to a close friend would affect our body or our mind, because that something is now "inside us" where we assume all of "us" is located.

That is, we can salvage the "strength within" approach if we alter the term "within" to include our close friends. We can double check that, yes, now something that happens "within us" can affect our strength and health.

But we have a new capacity if we think of ourselves this way that we did not have before, a new avenue to explore. One thing we can do to get stronger is to increase the strength within the physical skin of ourselves. I'll call this the Rambo approach. It works for a while then it runs out of steam, and that point is where most of us live - on the verge of being out of steam.

The other thing this new concept suggests is that we could also get stronger by expanding our definition of "us" -- by including more people, or more of each person, within that outside boundary of the new "us". We are not limited to having simply one physical body within the outside limits of who we are - we can include other bodies as well.

Again, I have no idea how this might be implemented in biology, but it focuses our attention on the idea that, in a crisis when we need more strength, we should be trying to expand our network of friends, not beating ourselves up because something "inside us" must be broken.

Yes, something is broken, almost certainly -- it's the part of "us" that used to reside in other people out there, letting us all share the same strength.

Unlike the Rambo approach, this approach to body building is "unlimited upwards" -- there is no limit to how strong we can become.

Although this seems like a somewhat unnatural idea, there is an analog in the world of computers. For many years, IBM and Cray and other companies tried to make a supercomputer by making one computer stronger and stronger. That idea ran out of steam.
Then it occurred to someone that maybe they should simply abandon that idea, and look instead at how to take many small computers and hook them up to each other so that they operated as if they were just one biggie-sized computer. That did work, and is what everyone is doing now. I think IBM's last "supercomputer" is actually 64,000 smaller computers working as one, or sort of working as one. Maybe it was 200,000 smaller computers. A lot of them, in any case.

So what is "strength" in terms of getting out of a crisis? One factor is ability to see better what's wrong and what options there are -- that should improve with more people involved. Another factor is ability to simply lift larger objects -- pure muscle power or cash reserves, and again, yes, that should improve or might improve as we add more people.

Another kind of strength that, like Rodney Dagnerfield, "gets no respect" is the capacity to avoid falling into the pit in the first place. And, yes, I can immediately think of several million families that would be in a lot better position today if they had consulted with many people before rushing into a terrible mortgage deal on that new house.

So, having many friends, or more precisely, extending your own identity to include many other people, seems likely to have very positive effects for getting out of a crunch, and for avoiding getting into one in the first place, which is even better. It seems even good insurance has deductibles, and so it's cheaper to not crash at all.

Does this happen on the scale of an entire company? Yep. Look at Southwest Airlines, that has made a profit for the last 69 quarters in a row, while every other airline is going broke. How do they do that?

A rather short-sighted two-page spread in a recent USA Today claimed this was due to Southwest's hedging strategy, where they bought fuel today for the next 5 years, at today's prices -- except they started doing that ten years ago. So now, they are paying basically $1 a gallon for fuel that costs other airlines $4 a gallon.

Well, any idiot can see why they're doing fine. They lucked out.

Oh? Why did none of the other airlines also "luck out"? On digging deeper into this, it seems that in other airlines, various vice president would get outraged if money that could be used for their immediate issues was "spent" on buying next year's fuel. Only in Southwest Airlines could people defer immediate gratification and think long-term.

OK, and keep on going. Why was that true? Or did they just "luck out" there?

No, it turns out Southwest's executives have an astounding approach to life - namely, that they are in it with their employees, all in the same boat, not employees in one and executives in another. The executives have, we might say, an identity that extends out to include the employees.

One sign of this, for example is that, after the World Trade Center disaster of 9/11, when flying was unpopular, all the airlines responded by laying off employees except Southwest, which did not lay off anyone. How did they do that with falling revenue? They cut executive salaries. Was that a clever move? Turns out, yes. Turns out that a company where people thought of each other as friends not competitors has a lot more survival capacity than one where each person is fighting for a larger portion of the pie than their neighbor has. They end up with a much larger pie.

Is this all a coincidence? Did they luck out in doing that? No, we can read corporate literature, or simply look at the company's stock ticker abbreviation: LUV. That says it all.

Do these several million families have the resources so they won't lose their homes? They don't think so, but I do. Suppose each family invited a second family to share their home, and split the mortgage payments -- would that help? You betcha.

So why don't they do that? Aren't they "lucky" enough to think of it?

This is a damned good question, worth an entire other post. Why indeed. What have we done to ourselves that, when faced with a crisis, we would rather sink than turn to each other for help? In fact, in the home-sharing solution I suggest, there is no "charity" or "hand-out" -- just two families meeting their own needs.

Maybe, our congress should use all that money they just decided to spend on this crisis to address the real crisis, that has nothing to do with mortgage terms, and everything to do with why two families can't live together in peace.

They do this in other places, in other countries, so it's not impossible for some genetic reason.

Of course, to accept that possibility would also suggest a possible solution to the crisis hitting the entire national economy -- maybe we should look for a solution that's cooperative instead of competitive, with other countries.

I can hear shrieks and see people running from the room.

We need to seriously consider what mental model we have of strength, both to get out of a crisis, and to avoid getting into a mess in the first place. Would the whole US be in a better position if we were better at listening to advice of our friends? Hmmm...

The answer is right here in front of us, everyone. It doesn't require "an act of Congress" or an act of God to implement it. (Although maybe an Act of Congress declaring that multiple family dwellings were suddenly legal regardless of local zoning would help in some wealthier neighborhoods.)

We would get way, way , way more bang for our buck by addressing that problem, of why we don't work better with the external parts of ourselves. Why do we take "broken apart" as if it was the normal state we could do nothing about?

Good question. Very good question to look at more.