Musician John D. Boswell, known on YouTube as MelodySheep, has a unique and startlingly beautiful way of sharing his love of science: he takes video footage of some of the most brilliant modern scientists talking about the subjects they most love, uses Autotune to transform their speech into singing, composes symphonic pop-electronica pieces around the quotes, and offers the result freely on YouTube and for pay-what-you-please download.

Actually, he doesn’t only do it for science, although his love of science and natural philosophy drives most of the work he has on offer: he has also done pieces starring personalities like Mr. Rogers and Yoda. While I would recommend any of his compositions to you, though, the one strikes the closest to my area of fascination–understanding who we are, why we do what we do, and how to change for the better–is this one, on the human brain.

Today’s article is a guest post from Former Wall Street Journal and Fortune writer Erik Calonius, whose book Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us you’ll hear more about here in the near future. You might also be interested in reading his post on Jonathan Field’s blog, “What Lucky People Do Different,” which I recommended here about a month back. You can find out more about Erik at his Web site, Calonius.com.

I saw a lot of wisdom in Randall Munroe’s XKCD cartoon strip (May 16 post)—the one where Marie Curie is telling Nobel Prize wanna-bes, “You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”

In our instant gratification society, too many people just want to be great. They don’t want to take the long, often-lonely journey to get there. They want to be a movie star, not an actor; an American Idol, not a singer; the next blockbuster novelist (interviewed on Oprah), not a writer.

These frothy ambitions are not restricted to the arts. I recently had dinner with two senior research scientists from Bell Labs. Bell Labs, you may remember, is the research lab that produced the transistor, the laser, the UNIX operating system. Among its many notable scientists, seven of them went on to win Nobel Prizes. So did these senior researchers (that I had lunch with) want to be great, too, with their pictures placed prominently on the walls at Bell Labs? Of course. Who wouldn’t?

People have always wanted to be great (that’s why Alexander wasn’t called Alexander the Mediocre). Truth be told, even Marie Curie wanted to be great. Proof of this: As soon as she discovered radium she reported her findings to the scientific community. She did it the next day. She wanted to be great, too!

Wanting to be great is only human, but it has become a runaway addiction in our modern society. It’s the result of living in a country where there are few ceilings, I suppose, where some people really do go from subsistence to the stratosphere overnight.

So it’s important, as Madame Curie (and cartoonist Randall Munroe) reminds us, “You don’t become great by being great. You become great by wanting to do something. And then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.”

There’s another element to greatness, however. It’s luck. Countless millions of people have worked hard and selflessly at tasks. And yet they have died in obscurity, at least as far as the newspapers and histories are concerned.

Why? Nassim Taleb, in his wonderful book, The Black Swan, explains it well: “The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera, just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.”

So where was Madame Curie’s stroke of luck? In her case it was being turned down by the University of Krakow where she was to study magnetism, and meeting her husband Pierre Curie.  Her luck continued when Pierre showed her a quirky device called an electrometer. Her husband and his brother had invented it 15 years earlier to measure electric current, and had essentially put away in the closet. Curie pulled it out, and using it, discovered that uranium caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity. No one had done that before.

Now you may say that those are circumstances rather than luck. But in many cases they are one and the same.  Orville Wright would not have invented the first workable airplane without Wilbur; Walt Disney would have been penning cartoons in Kansas City if not for his brother Roy, who encourage Walt to come to LA, and then kept Walt from running the business into bankruptcy; Steve Jobs, of course, wouldn’t have been able to start Apple had he not chanced upon Steve Wozniak as a kid.

But luck is more than the creation of dynamic duos. I’ve been working lately on a book about electricity, and what is surprising (dare I say shocking) is that as you look at the work of the pioneers–William Gilbert, Alessandro Volta, Luigi Galvani, Hans Christian Oerstad, Andre Marie Ampere, George Simon Ohm, Michael Faraday, Heinrich Hertz, and on up to the present day, nearly every advance has been a matter of luck. Yes, of course, hard work. But luck, too.

Take the basic element of the electronic world, the transistor. The Bell Labs semiconductor group of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley (all of whom would win Nobel Prizes) thought the key to the transistor was in the extraction of an extremely pure slab of silicon, from which thin slices could be cut.

But it was only after a lab technician incorrectly cut a slab, so that a thin layer of impure silicon spread across the top, that their oscilloscopes leapt with a surge of electrons. Suddenly they got it—Eureka!—they needed this slice of impure silicon to make the rest of it work. Had the technician not made a mistake, they wouldn’t have realized it. Another group of scientists may have created the transistor first. Then that group would have been great. They would have had their pictures posted prominently on the walls—and the team of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley would have been consigned to the dustbins of history.

So luck is the lightning bolt that creates greatness. It’s true of writers as well. Please remember that when Melville finished writing Moby Dick (and talk about sweat equity) he was rewarded in his lifetime with sales of about 3,000 copies. Or how about O. Henry? Went to his grave broke. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald found tepid reviews and no sales for The Great Gatsby. In their cases, they had to be dead before the lightning bolt struck. And, of course, there are countless other authors for whom the lightning bolt never struck at all. If you’ve been working away at a new book lately, this may be a bit of depressing news

But the upside of this is that since greatness is largely out of your control, you can relax. Just get on with your writing, for your writing’s sake. And keep at it, for goodness sake. “What I’ve learned, above all,” says scientist Leonard Mlodinow, “is to keep marching forward—because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.”

Who knows–you may be next on luck’s gravy train. And don’t think you’re not good enough. As Taleb notes, “Luck is far more egalitarian than even intelligence. If people were rewarded strictly according to their abilities, things would still be unfair—people don’t chose their abilities. Randomness has the beneficial effect of reshuffling society’s cards, knocking down the big guy.”  So take heart.

Some self-help materials are worth their weight in gold at the very least, not just for ourselves, but because improving our own lives tends to help people around us (see “How self-help helps everyone else” and “How Other People’s Happiness Affects Our Own“). Self-help is important because most of our behaviors are learned: no one comes into the world understanding how to make the best of what they have, be happy in difficult circumstances, untangle conflicts, follow a healthy path, and otherwise create an ideal life–and I’m skeptical that it’s possible to learn all of these things without at least a little help from resources or mentors.

But while it’s tremendously fortunate that there’s so much help available out there, some of that help is flawed, some is useless, and some is actually harmful (see “Telling Bad Advice from Good Advice“). Here are some things to watch out for in self-help and personal growth books, shows, CD’s, DVD’s, talks, and seminars:

• Common knowledge. When someone says “everyone knows that this is true, and therefore …”, there’s always the danger that the thing that everyone “knows” isn’t actually accurate at all. An example: the “common knowledge” that it takes 21 days (or 28 days, etc.) to form a habit is utterly wrong (see “How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?“).
• Reasoning by analogy. When someone tries to prove something by describing something else, they’re actually not proving anything at all. If I were to start talking about the stomach as a fuel tank and make suggestions about how to eat based on car engines, the information I’d be giving wouldn’t be based on a real understanding of how our bodies work, but on something else that isn’t even directly related. Analogies are often helpful for making a point clearer, but by themselves they don’t prove anything.
• Reasoning by wordplay. Using puns and similar-sounding words can be a good way to help people remember points, but like analogies, wordplay doesn’t prove anything. Watch out for people who try to make their point through clever word usage instead of through facts.
• Where a word comes from is not what it means. It surprises me how many self-help gurus and motivational speakers don’t know the difference between where a word comes from and what it actually means. Meanings of words have to do with how we understand those words today, not with the words and phrases they came from centuries back. The word “company,” for instance, originally meant “a group of friends,” yet that doesn’t mean that anyone employed at a business establishment today is working among buddies. Word derivations like this are also often used to “prove” points in some kinds of self-help material, but they’re just another form of non-factual wordplay.
• Iffy science. It’s easy to make claims or declarations about one study that may later turn out to be flawed, or to misunderstand what is or isn’t really being demonstrated in a scientific study. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to know whether or not someone is misusing scientific research without referring to the original source. The more-reliable sources tend to describe exactly what happened in the studies they’re talking about, while the less-reliable ones more often just say that science has proved one thing or another. And technically, science doesn’t prove anything: it’s just a way of gathering more information. Any conclusions anyone makes from a scientific study are only theories to explain what happened in the study, not unquestionable truths.
• Mountains out of molehills. Even good scientific conclusions can sometimes be misused if they’re magnified inappropriately. For instance, there are many foods and practices that can contribute in a small way to weight loss, but some of these are seized on and described as miracle foods or fat-melting secrets when the real impact they’ll have isn’t even likely to be noticeable.
• Unhealed physicians. If I take advice from someone, ideally I’d like to be taking it from someone who has demonstrated that the advice works. True, it’s possible to pass along useful information without always being able to take full advantage of that information (see “Knowing Isn’t Enough: The 4 Steps Between Knowledge and Action”), but be wary of people who say they are authorities on something without having done it themselves, like people who say they know how to make money but have only ever done so by telling other people how to make money. One example comes to mind of a doctor who gives weight loss, health, and habit change advice while having been noticeably overweight for most of his life.

Despite all of the not-so-helpful self-help “experts” who give advice that may not be helpful to anyone, there are also any number of people out there in the world with real experience and understanding of living a well-directed, meaningful life. The more we seek out and listen to those people and not their flashier, less-informed colleagues, the better off we’ll be.

Photo by virtualreality

In recent weeks I’ve taken to watching the Web (through a convenient Google Alert) for blog posts, pages, and articles on willpower, self-motivation, and self-control, and usually I find at least a couple of new ones (other than my own) to look at every day. Occasionally I’ll see a piece that does a very good job of talking about one or two pieces of the puzzle, and once or twice I’ve read ones that have plenty of good advice (I try to remember to link to those, when possible). Often, though, the person posting seems to have seized on one piece of information and drawn some conclusions that are … well, I’m going to have to say “ridiculous.”

A New York Times blog post suggested trying to strengthen willpower by brushing your teeth on the wrong side, because that takes extra effort and the thinking was that anything that takes extra effort is a good way to build willpower. A Psychology Today blog post proposed eating plenty of chocolate to help quit smoking. A recent article from Reuters suggested making lots of “bad” foods available in your house to improve your eating habits, on the idea that having more chances to resist those foods will always increase willpower.

And the ideas in these articles are usually not coming from journalists gone wild: they’re usually coming from scientists who get very involved with one aspect of willpower and make unscientific assumptions about how those aspects should be applied.

Building willpower is not difficult if you’re willing and you understand all the pieces, but it is complicated, and focusing on one piece of a complex problem to the exclusion of others is a dangerous approach. It’s like setting a house on fire to warm it more efficiently. Willpower, like any complex thing, is a balance.

In the above examples, the confusion seems to stem from not balancing the building of willpower with constructive habits and making good use of the willpower we already have. Yes, the more we use willpower, the stronger it gets. However, it’s also true that we have a limited capacity to exercise willpower, and the more struggles we put ourselves into, the sooner we’re likely to cave and start making bad choices. Fortunately, making good choices not only strengthens our willpower over time, it also gets us in habits that tend to make exercising willpower less of a struggle. Brushing our teeth on the wrong side or strategically placing bags of potato chips around the house does not aid us in making good choices: it’s just an artificial approach that can be used to demonstrate things in laboratories. And making bad food choices in order to make better smoking choices is a dangerous strategy because it is doing as much to erode our willpower and good habits, in a general sense, as it is to promote them.

I’ll cut in for a moment here to say that I surely don’t know every single piece of the puzzle either. For instance, I haven’t yet researched hypnosis, which if you go by the stories one hears can have some impressive effects. And I have a lot to learn about meditation, which has been shown in numerous studies (and in my own experience) to be profoundly supportive of the states of mind needed to exercise willpower or achieve goals. So certainly take everything I say with a grain of salt, too. But my goal on this site is to bring together knowledge about self-motivation from as wide an array of good sources as I possibly can, and having found many of those sources already, I am lucky enough to sometimes see where good studies are spawning bad ideas when other studies shed more light on the situation.

Back to the question of evaluating advice about willpower: fortunately, it seems to come down to a certain amount of common sense. If the advice involves making good choices, improving state of mind, or learning how to handle situations better, it’s probably good. And if it sounds too nutty to be true, it probably is.

Photo by KristopherM