How’s the Water?

Jul 22

WMMM #026 - This week I share an example of the mental toughness required to compete like the best.

Jeff Keplar Newsletter July 22, 2023 9 min read

How’s the Water?

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually, one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

This was the opening for David Foster Wallace’s timeless 2005 commencement address to the graduating class at Kenyon College.

“The Value of the Totally Obvious”

I found the speech in an article on Farnam Street, a website focusing on timeless lessons for work and life by “mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.”

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.

Mr. Wallace challenged the audience to look beyond the knowledge received with a college education. While “teaching us how to think” is the pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, he confesses that it often sounds insulting to suggest that his audience needs to be taught how to think at this point in their lives.

But the cliché turns out not to be insulting because significant education in thinking isn’t really about the capacity to think but rather the choice of what to think about. And this is why Mr. Wallace’s speech that day, “This is Water,” finds a place in my newsletter.

If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious, I ask you to think about fish and water and to bracket your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious for just a few minutes.

A Christian and an Atheist are sitting in a bar…

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that particular intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.

And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost, and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’”

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist, all puzzled. “Well then, you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.”

The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple of Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

Same experience - two entirely different interpretations

It’s easy to run this story through a behavioral psychology-based analysis: the same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and ways of constructing meaning from experience.

Many successful sales professionals recognize the value of seeing the world through the lens of others. They have used tools that help them, with remarkable accuracy, interact differently based on one’s behavioral characteristics.

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our analysis can we claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other’s is false or bad. This is fine, except we never end up talking about where these individual templates and beliefs come from.

However, behavioral science explains how we, as humans, form these personal templates. Some tools train salespeople how and why people see the same thing differently and how to reach them through their lens.

Then, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so confident in dismissing the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, plenty of religious people seem arrogant and sure of their own interpretations, too. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty. This close-mindedness amounts to imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

It may have nothing to do with you.

Mr. Wallace: “The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.

Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.”

“Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on.

Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.”

How do we choose to alter the default setting of seeing the world through the lens of self?

People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted,” which is not an accidental term.

More from that 2005 commencement address:

“By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.

But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping.

And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush.

So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death.

Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littered parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.”

Everyone has done this, and it may be part of your actual life routine, day after week after month after year. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.

“But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.”

“Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.”

You get the idea.

Thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is a natural default setting. It’s an automatic way to experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that we are the center of the world, and that our immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations.

In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in our way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive.

Or that the Hummer that just cut us off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than we are: it is actually we who are in HIS way.

Or we can choose to force ourselves to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as we are, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than we do.

No one expects you to think this way, or to just automatically do it.

Because it’s hard.

It takes will and effort.

And there will be some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

Choose what to think about

To help their sales teams, enlightened sales coaches remind us to be aware enough to give ourselves a choice. We can choose to look differently at the interaction we just had with an enterprise buyer with whom we are working.

He seemed irritated.

He responded abruptly and appeared to want to end our meeting early.

He isn’t usually like this.

What did I say? What did I do?

Maybe he has found another solution he likes better.

Perhaps their salesperson has said something that has created doubt in the buyer’s mind about our company. Maybe he doesn’t trust me any longer?

Sound familiar?

Maybe it was nothing you said.

Perhaps it was nothing you did.

Maybe another salesperson and their solution have nothing to do with this interaction.

Maybe he is merely having a bad day.

Perhaps it’s personal: a situation with his children and school, a disagreement with his spouse, or an elderly parent, ill and living on the other side of the country, at risk.

It may have nothing to do with you.

Mr. Wallace: “...choose to look differently at this … lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends on what you want to consider.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

We get to decide how we’re gonna try to see it.

Real Freedom

The freedom of real education is learning how to be well-adjusted. We get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t consciously. We get to choose what to worship.

Mr. Wallace: “Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.
Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your fear.
Worship your intellect; being seen as intelligent, you will feel stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

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