Tag: psychology

The Simplicity of the Difficult Game of Baseball

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Baseball is an embarrassingly simple game … on paper. Pitcher throws ball, hitter tries to hit it where they ain’t, and fielders try to catch it. If we introduced the concept of the game to aliens from another planet, they wouldn’t understand how such a simple game found its way into the fabric of our world. “You mean to tell me that your national past time, and the game that is one of the most popular games in your world, involves one human being throwing a ball and another hitting it?” this alien might ask. “And humans find it so entertaining that you not only watch it, play it, and read about it, but some of you devote your lives to it? That’s pretty much all we need to know to go ahead with our plans to take over this planet.”

Anyone who has played the game of baseball, or tried to coach it, knows it’s anything but simple. A player doesn’t have to be 6’6” 250 lbs. to play it. Hall of Fame inductee Wee Willie Keeler was 5’4”. He proved that anyone and everyone can do it, but most can’t with regular success. As hard as it is to consistently throw a ball accurately, it’s harder to hit it where they ain’t. Even relatively young hitters learn that they can be heroes one day and zeroes the next. The simple complexity of hitting a ball consistently can prove maddening, demoralizing, and even a little humiliating to a young kid, because it seems so simple. They cannot figure it out for themselves, however, they need coaching, guidance, and as much support as we can offer.

These three ingredients to improved play, and the resultant character development that follows, are essential, but the three most mandatory ingredients to accomplishing anything in life, are time, patience, and repetition. The latter might be the hardest for a child to grasp, as the typical nine-year-old complaint to mind-numbing repetition centers around, “I can hit, catch, and pitch now. Why do we have to keep practicing them so often?” As I’ve written elsewhere, there is little-to-no room for creativity in sports. There are quick-fixes, they’re out there, but my guess is their efficiency numbers pale in comparison to kinesthetic learning, or the knowledge gain by doing it so often that we know what to do when there is no time to think.

Time, patience, and mind-numbing repetition turned an eight-year-old named Isaac into a decent fielder, so the coach put him at shortstop in year one, but he struggled with hitting so much that the coach put him at the bottom of the batting order. He had the typical problems an eight-year-old experiences of looping under the ball. He had so many strikeouts in year one, and he reacted so emotionally to each one, we began to think that baseball probably wasn’t for him.

“Why does he get so upset?” one of his teammates asked. “He shouldn’t get that upset. It’s just baseball. It’s supposed to be fun. No one else gets as upset as he does.”

We wanted Isaac to lighten up and enjoy himself. Baseball is a game, and when we play a game, we’re supposed to have fun. We’re out there with our friends, and we’re supposed to enjoy playing with them. “Don’t get mad, learn,” was a line repeated so often in our backyard that we both got sick of hearing it.

The answer I would now give Isaac’s teammate is that Isaac wanted it more than his teammates. Some might find this a character flaw in need of correction, but in order for Isaac to have fun doing something, he has to be good at it, and he thought he would be good at baseball before he stepped on the field. His first year was supposed to be nothing more than a display of his athletic talent. When that didn’t happen Isaac did not want to do the elementary things he needed to accomplish his goals. What eight-year-old does?

Why can’t I hit the ball? 

Nothing came easy for an eight-year-old Isaac. The core problem for Isaac was that he had a counterproductive image of himself as a good hitter. He thought he should be there before he even picked up a bat, and the evidence he saw to the contrary (in his first full year playing baseball) was demoralizing. Every failure, to him, was an epic denunciation of his ability and his character. The eight-year-old world is dramatic, traumatic, and fatalistic.

Our motto entering year two was keep it simple and overcome adversity. Things happen in baseball. A batter can hit a ball square and a fielder can catch it. A hitter can strike out three times in a game. What happens next defines that batter. How does the batter respond in their next at-bat? “The best batters in the world go 1-3,” I told Isaac, and “baseball is the second hardest game in the world behind golf. What happens after we commit an error in the field?” I asked him, adding, “I’ve committed every error in the field that you have, and I’ve done some that were far worse. I’ve committed errors in front of other people that still keeps me up at night, twenty years later.”

Most of the coaching, consolation, and support I offered Isaac went in one ear and out the other, so I’m not sure if anything I said worked. I think time and repetition had more to do with it. Isaac and I spent time doing an exercise I called 40-40-40. Forty ground balls, forty flyballs, and forty reps doing whatever he wanted, usually forty at bats or forty pitches. We also went to batting cages.

Whatever it was we did clicked. His turnaround, from year one to year two was so 180 that the coach eventually put Isaac in the coveted three hole in his batting lineup. Isaac started the second season in his customary position at the bottom of the order, and he gradually worked his way up to the two hole. This is a summation, as the progression proved painfully gradual, but he was in the two hole by game eight. Before the start of game eleven, Isaac believed he was the best hitter on the team, but instead of putting Isaac in the leadoff spot, the coach put him in the three hole.

“I’m getting on base coach,” Isaac said. “Why are you putting me in the three hole? Why am I not in the leadoff spot?”

“We need your power in the three hole,” the coach said.

I’m going to try to be objective here and say that in year two, the nine-year-old Isaac was one of the three best players on his team throughout the 15-game regular season. He might have had one bad game all year.

Isaac was one of the primary reasons that his team won their divisional playoff game. He went two for two, drove in two runs and scored two, in a 5-2 victory. He also, and more importantly, pitched the final two innings, and he only gave up one run.

He didn’t do too well in the final playoffs, but the rest of the team carried them to victory.

In the championship game, however, Isaac went absolutely nuts. He went 3-3, with 5 RBIs, and one run scored, in a 9-8 game. Isaac accounted for six of his team’s nine runs. He was cracking these hits into the outfield, whereas most of his hits, and his teammates hits, barely clear the infield.

Isaac’s best at bat occurred in what could’ve been his final at bat, and possibly the team’s final at-bat of the season. Before the inning even started, I began counting the batters before him, worrying that Isaac might be the final at-bat. My worst fears came to light as two batters walked and two batters struck out. Isaac stepped up to the plate, down two runs, with two runners on base, and two outs. The score at the time was 6-8, and the opposing pitcher was throwing a surprisingly lively fastball for a nine-year-old.

For two innings, Isaac’s teammates couldn’t come anywhere close to hitting this pitcher. The pitcher was the other team’s ace, brought in to close the game out and secure their championship. Isaac and the pitcher battled to a 3 balls 2 strike full count. Isaac fouled a couple of hits off that told me he might be overmatched. Then, he uncorked at unbelievable hit that ended up tying the game and forcing the opposition to bat in the bottom of the inning.

Isaac pitched the final inning and gave up one unearned run to lose the game.

Earlier in the season, Isaac pitched an almost perfect two innings, striking out 5 of 6. I told him that he would probably never come that close to perfection again. I said that to try to take the pressure off him in his attempts to duplicate that performance. Guess what, he topped it. That final at-bat was so clutch.

We all went nuts on a catch Isaac made in the outfield, earlier in the game, but I told the other parents that that catch was nothing compared to delivering a tying hit in the bottom of the last inning. Isaac’s nickname around the household is either three for three, or Mr. Clutch.

As Isaac walked out of the dugout, his coach stopped him: “I just want to say how enjoyable it’s been watching your development these last two years.”

How does a nine-year-old develop the skills necessary for some sort of progression in athletics? They have to want it, first and foremost. No matter how much comfort, coaching, and support we offer, if they don’t want it, they’re not going to get it. The next ingredient, as I spelled out earlier, is time and repetition, or as one famous basketball player once said, “Practice!” The more time we spend doing anything, the better we will be at doing it. As Malcolm Gladwell suggests, we can master just about anything with 10,000 hours of concentrated practice.

Keep it simple. No tricks. Don’t worry about velocity or location, and don’t think about the future. Someone suggested that Isaac might, one day, play in the majors, and others whispered other, sweet nothings in our ear. If a three-year-old plays with a rocket, we’ll probably hear someone in the room say he might become a rocket scientist. People do this to be nice, and because they probably can’t think of anything else to say. Smile, say that’s nice of you to say, and walk away, then return to the mind-numbing repetition of playing catch, fielding ground balls, and throwing the ball around. They’ll be proud of their progress, and they’ll want to quit when they regress. They’ll learn, and they’ll make tiny adjustments, until some sort of muscle memory develops over time. That might sound simple, but think about all of the mechanics involved in muscle memory. A young baseball player can be coached, taught, advised, and tweaked, but until a kid does it so often that they know it, they’ll never learn it. These principles, and this whole article, are devoted to baseball, but we can just as easily apply the principles discussed here to just about anything in life.

The Trials and Triumphs of Danny MacKinnon

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I heard that Danny MacKinnon used to be a no good kid just like the rest of us, until his dad took his life over. I was sitting next to him in some intro level, required Geography class, when he leaned over and said, “How can you like those losers?” Those were the first words he ever said to me. He said it in reference to the Atlanta Braves jersey I wore, number three, Dale Murphy. “I don’t know how anyone can like them, and “The Murph””, he said with a sarcastic tone, “The Murph can’t even tie Pedro Guererro’s shoes.” Danny was obviously a diehard Los Angeles Dodgers fan who tried to prove their superiority through statistics. The type of statistics he threw at me were those only a true baseball nerd would know. A guy drops competitive hatred lines like those on a fella, and two things will happen. Fellas either throw down or a competitive hatred/friendship is born. For us, it was the latter. We exchanged notes, “The Murph goes three for three with a homer and three RBI’s, and Pedro strikes out twice, 0-4,” was one such note I scooted across the desk. We whisper, talked baseball for the rest of the year, until an unusual friendship, indigenous to young men developed. I wanted to hang out with Danny, outside Geography class but he was always too busy. I began to think Danny MacKinnon might be something of a snob.

“He’s not a snob,” a mutual friend said. “He is busy, too busy. His dad booked his whole life up. There was an incident in high school. No one knows what happened, but there was an incident.”

Danny’s mom won the wars in the MacKinnon household, prior to the incident. She wanted her boy to have fun in life, nothing more, and “He doesn’t like sports as much as you do Tom.” She fought her husband on many issues she considered crucial, and she won those wars. “Life is short,” she said to him in many ways. “He will only have one childhood. He will only go through high school once. Let’s let him enjoy it,” she said. Danny was special. He was their only boy, and she accused her husband of wanting to live vicariously through him.

No one knew what the incident was, but Tom MacKinnon took charge of son’s life after it. We could only guess that the incident was a small and relatively insignificant incident that Tom used to win the wars in the MacKinnon household. Some of us guessed that the incident was one of those bad road incidents. The type of incident where no one gets hurt, and there’s no damage done, but it suggests that a teenager might be headed down the wrong road. We assume that Tom decided the best way to prevent his child from going further down that road was to book his son’s whole life up. He probably thought the best way to prevent Danny from going down a bad road was to prevent him from having free time or leave him so exhausted that he doesn’t have the energy to go out with his friends.

Whatever the incident was, Danny was implicated, and it prompted his dad to stop volunteering to work overtime to engineer his son’s life. Tom MacKinnon became the coach of his son’s basketball teams, his baseball teams, and his flag football teams. In doing so, the man discovered he had a talent for coaching young boys, and he continued to work as an assistant coach for Danny’s high school teams, when time permitted. When his kid wasn’t playing organized sports, or doing homework with his dad, he was practicing, and when he wasn’t practicing he was lifting weights, jogging, and playing pickup games with neighborhood kids in the local park. After high school, Danny’s immediate future was mapped out. He received a division II, college scholarship for basketball, and he was able to choose a school well-known for turning out bright engineers. His whole life was mapped out until another incident happened, before he could take one step into a classroom or a basketball court for the college. The second incident was a freak accident that involved a forklift and sheet metal on a Summer job.

His doctors warned him that his future was grim. “I didn’t even know what the word grim meant,” Danny said, “but I really didn’t have to know. All I had to do was look at my dad’s face and hear my mom’s tears to understand the gist of this word grim.”

“You should’ve lost complete functionality of your legs,” the MacKinnon’s primary physician said with a specialist in his background nodding, and an x-ray of Danny’s legs further back. “You didn’t, and in the grand scheme of things, you should consider yourself lucky.”

“What does lucky mean?” he asked with disdain.

“Well, you’re not going to consider yourself lucky in rehab,” the specialist added. “If you complete the regimen we’re prescribing, you’ll gain more functionality, but that’s a big if. With you being a top-shelf athlete in our state, we give you a better than average chance of completing the rehab, if you show the same grit and determination that you displayed on the court, but that’s still a big if. It’s up to you Danny. We’re not going to sugarcoat this, even if you complete the rehab in a spectacular manner, you’ll experience various levels of pain in your legs for the rest of your life. You’ll also experience moments, with your legs, that will forever alter the life you knew before this accident.”

Even with those warnings, Danny MacKinnon was not what anyone would call a model rehabilitation student in the beginning. He spent some of that time feeling sorry for himself. Who wouldn’t? Prior to the incident, Danny MacKinnon was considered a top-shelf athlete in the state, and no matter how many second opinions they received, Danny was told his plans for an athletic future were over.

“There’s so much damage here,” a second specialist said, “that if you listen to your physical therapists, and you excel in your rehab, you might eventually regain enough functionality to walk without a limp. I’m not going to kid you though, Danny, it will be a test of your resolve to reach that point. Most people don’t.”

That wasn’t enough to get him going either. He was awful to the physical therapists and their assistants, and he made their lives miserable.

“I was a little bitch,” Danny said to characterize his first few weeks. “If I couldn’t play sports, I really didn’t want to do anything else. I went into a full-fledged depression, because I couldn’t accept the idea that everything I spent my whole life doing prior to that awful day in September was dead and gone. The mental rehabilitation was much more grueling than the physical aspects of it, but I eventually reached a point where I buried the old Danny MacKinnon and decided to give birth to a new one. I can’t remember if I came up with that idea on my own, or if one of my physical therapists thought it up, but I eventually shocked my doctors by achieving a level of functionality just short of what fully capable people take for granted. I’ll never have a normal gate pattern, but I can now hide my disability so well that most people who don’t know me, can’t see my limp, or my struggle to appear normal.”

I wanted more details. Everything I heard about the incident was secondhand, and if I was ever going to write about it, I wanted primary source information. I thought Danny MacKinnon’s story needed to be told. I thought his story might prove to be an inspiration to others in similar situations in life, but when I called him to ask him for more details, Danny MacKinnon didn’t have the in-depth answers I was seeking. I initially thought this had something to do with the idea that the horrible accident happened so many years prior to our phone call that he either forgot some of the details, or he wanted to put it all behind him now that he was a successful podiatrist, living a full happy life. I also considered the idea that he wasn’t a reflective person. Throughout the phone calls that followed, in which I asked him questions that I thought up after our first phone call, both of those characteristics played a part in Danny’s answers, but the central driving force of Danny MacKinnon’s inability to define his miraculous recovery lay in the idea that he was just a doer.

“Was it painful?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“The rehab I mean.”

“Yes it was painful,” he said. “Every day, every exercise was a new test of the pain threshold.”

This man of few words said he did what his therapists told him to do. Back then, some therapists used scream therapies. They got in your face and screamed you into more reps. He didn’t like his therapists, and he grew to loathe them, but they helped him achieve what they said would buckle an overwhelming majority of those suffering similar injuries.

Danny MacKinnon eventually became a model student. He used the athlete’s mentality to overcome overwhelming odds, but he didn’t analyze anything he did. Even while immersed in the physical and mental rehabilitation, he apparently didn’t analyze the steps in the process in the manner I would’ve. It’s the difference between doers and analytical and reflective people. Reflective people build narratives to a point where they imagine how a local news network might report on it. Whereas a doer might sum up everything they do with a line such as, “Life deals you some twists and turns, and you have to deal with them when they hit you.” That was how Danny summed up his inability to give me what I wanted.

Danny switched from dreaming about playing college basketball and eventually becoming an engineer, to dreaming about a life as a physical therapist, to dreaming about becoming a podiatrist. He told everyone he knew that he wanted to do for others what the physical therapists did for him, and he thought his story might stoke the fires of any patient who stood precariously over the fault line in the manner he did. When I asked him why he decided to switch to podiatry, he said, “Somewhere along the line, I switched.” He made a couple jokes like, “I think I saw how many hot girls were in podiatry, and I decided that’s for me.” I laughed, but I heard too much about Danny MacKinnon to think he would switch careers over something that silly. It might have been sarcasm too, because I couldn’t think of any female podiatrists, but I’m sure there are some.

Over the course of a couple years, he built a successful practice in a small town, and his friends said he put as much temerity and resolve into building that practice as he put into his athletics. He turned into a substantial, serious man, and that’s when it dawned on me that Danny MacKinnon simply forgot why he switched careers. I don’t know if the Danny I met, after years of separation, was so busy, so happy, or so fun that he didn’t think too much about any of the life-altering decisions he made, but I think he genuinely forgot why he made those decisions. I think he also forgot why he was so driven to rehabilitate himself and the little details of how he drove himself. This may seem improbable to anyone who doesn’t know Danny MacKinnon, but I think he forgot the finer details of his life. He wasn’t particularly humble and nothing he said over the years led me to believe he was an egotistical man. He was just a just-the-facts-ma’am type of guy. These characteristics were such that while I didn’t think he would ever trumpet his accomplishment in an egotistical manner, I didn’t think he would shy away from giving me details either. He just forgot the details of a story that I would’ve told everyone I knew about them so often that they would have tired of hearing them. I might’ve asked that these details be be chiseled into my gravestone if I had to endure them. Danny MacKinnon forgot them.

“You could inspire others, suffering similar incidents,” friends might say if it happened to me. “Your inspirational story of overcoming the odds could appeal to healthy and unhealthy types. People love stories like these.”

If someone suggested that I sell my inspirational story to a Reader’s Digest, I’d have a story like this one typed up, printed, and in the mail the following Monday. I would be so proud of my ability to overcome the odds to walk again that I might even embellish the story to have my “I” character walk onto a court one more time to sink one ceremonious, jump shot in a college basketball game. Danny MacKinnon’s story is not a Rudy tale. His injuries were just too severe. If one were to provide in-depth details of Danny MacKinnon’s incident to a specialist who never heard of him, they might be better able to tell us what a miracle it is that Danny can not only walk without assistance but he helps anyone who suffers similar problems.

The idea that the gist of Danny MacKinnon’s story ended with him becoming one of the most successful podiatrists in his area might be what keeps his story from being After School Special material. How does a screenwriter make a man examining the x-ray of his patients’ feet a dramatic conclusion? It’s not the exclamation point at the end of a story most writers seek. It’s more of a period to those who have never heard skilled specialists inform us that the prospect we’ll ever walk again are grim, “or if you do, it will be excruciatingly painful.” To those of us who know the details of what this teenager had to overcome, and what this man still deals with and will have to deal with for the rest of his life, it is a story we feel compelled to tell anyone who will listen.

As inspirational as Danny’s tale is to those of us who know some of the details, it pales compared to story we think he could’ve told if he remembered more. If he kept a journal of his daily travails, the progressions of his mindset, and the motivational techniques he used to get through the day, we think he could’ve written a motivational best-seller. Danny simply forgot the necessary details he would’ve needed to make his story feel more complete.

“How could you forget?” we asked him.

“I just did,” he said. “I guess I just didn’t consider the details as important as you do.”

When Danny MacKinnon fell out of line with an incident in high school, his dad took control of his life. He drove Danny, like a drill sergeant in the Marines, to be the type of kid who had tunnel vision. He basically took Danny’s identity and image away from him and gave him a new one. That mindset probably drove Danny to become a top-shelf athlete in his state, and that same level of intensity later drove him to overcome the odds and achieve surprising levels of health. If it’s true that Danny MacKinnon was a no-good kid like the rest of us, before I knew him, and he was as directionless as the rest of us, then perhaps the greatest gift his dad unknowingly gave him was a relatively freakish level of tunnel vision that we could all use in our lives.

Everything from Z to A: Who are you? Who Who? Who Who?

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“What would you say if I told you that I see you,” Z said after biting into a chicken sandwich he purchased at the food court, “and I know who you are.”  

“Oooo! Spooky intro,” A said with a laugh. “I’m going to say you don’t know me, because you don’t know the first thing about you.” 

“You’re right, of course, but what would you say if I told you I could find you without ever talking to you? If we put those you know any love through a series of tests, surveys to arrive at assessments based on observational data from a study of a sample size regarding their tendencies, patterns and routines, we might arrive at an evaluation that might surprise you.” 

“I would say that you’re so full of beans you stink!” 

“Want me to take a shot?” Z asked. 

“No, but who’s we?” A asked. “You said we. Who’s we? Wait, let me guess, Psychology major?” 

“Master’s degree.” 

“Of course.” 

“Oooo! That sounds confrontational,” Z said.  

“It is actually,” A responded. “But my confrontational response is a result of psych majors thinking they know the first thing about me. You don’t know squat. You take your textbook knowledge out to the streets to predict how we’re all going to act and react, but you don’t know the first thing about me. Psych majors think they can study tendencies, patterns and routines, and with some variance predict who I am and who I’m going to be. I just think it’s absolutely ridiculous.” 

“I view Psychology as the study of choices,” Z said, “and I’d agree with everything you say about the textbook approaches. I’m not a textbook student of the mind. I’m fascinated with creative approaches to problem solving and study. I try to avoid textbook as often as I can. I, slash, we study the choices people make, why they make them, and the rewards of consequences of them. If you don’t care for the methods we’ve devised for studying human nature, how would you do it?” 

“I wouldn’t,” A said. “I would consider it an utter waste of time. With the world population currently clocking in at just under 8 billion, and the United States at 328 billion, I wouldn’t even pretend to know anything about anyone. There are simply too many people, with too many different backgrounds and experiences in life to know any one person.”  

“Research scientists take a sample of the population, and they factor in a plus minus ratio for margin of error,” Z said. “Now, you can argue the sample size, but with that many people in the world, how can you say you’re immune to their findings?” 

“How can you say I am not immune?” 

“You see that guy over there eating a slice of pizza?” Z asked. “Did that guy sample it first? If he sampled it, was it a decent representation of the rest of the pizza?” 

“I’m not arguing methods of operation,” A said. “I’m arguing about the assumptions psych majors make.”  

“Let’s flip this around then,” Z said. “What do you think of the guy eating that pizza over there?”  

“All right, I’ll play,” A said, agreeing to this exercise after some back and forth. He turned to look at this pizza-eating man in the food court they sat in, and then he flipped completely around to examine the man.

“What are you eating, sir, and what are you eating?” A whispered loud enough for Z to hear. “I love pizza as much as the next fella, but are any of those ingredients real? Does the meat on it even merit a grade? And what are you eating? Are you eating some form of pain you could never digest properly? Did your dad tough love you into a man? Are you eating those times your mother told you that you were too old for hugs and kisses? Are you eating that time you walked up to a girl and she said, “Move along!” A guy that pale should not be wearing a bright, neon yellow T-shirt. The fella needs to contrast his skin with dark colors. Then you have the baggy khaki shorts, and the three-day growth, and you have to assume the man is a divorcee dining with his estranged kid. No wait, the child is an out-of-wedlock birth. That’s my guess, because his father obviously never had a wife influence the appearance he should present to the public. I’m guessing he gave up making discerning choices long ago, and he has issues with self-discipline.” 

“I know you’re trying to be funny here, but you just told me a lot about you,” Z said. “I have no interest in whether you’re right or wrong about the pizza-eater. I have no interest in the pizza-eater at all, except what you say about him, because it tells me something about you. Hold on, hold on, let me finish,” Z said to interrupt A’s grumbling. “This particular pursuit suggests that if I ask you direct questions about you, you’re going to give me idealized answers. You’ll either say what you think I want to hear or what you want to say about yourself. Your analysis of Mr. Pizza-Eater tells me more about you than I could ever achieve through direct Q&As. All analysis is autobiographical.”   

“And you think this is an exact science?” A asked. 

“Of course not, but why did you focus on those characteristics of the pizza guy?” Z asked. “What is he eating, and what is he eating you asked? What are you eating? What assumptions did you make about the man’s plan in life through his diet and his desire to ingest his pain? You assume this man might have a better life if he had a better diet, a wife, and if he shed the yellow shirt and baggy khakis. What does that say about you? It’s not an exact science, but it’s a lot closer to a truth than if I said, tell me about yourself. What makes A tick? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

“I was hired as a consultant some years ago,” Z continued. “I sat in on some interviews they conducted, and they asked me to determine how they could interview prospective candidates better. Most of the interview involved in-house questions, and then they asked the standard what are your greatest strengths and weaknesses question. I suggested that they flip this question around and ask the candidate to name their favorite manager and what made them a great leader? They should then ask the candidate who their least favorite manager was, and I said they should inform the candidate to avoid using names in this case. I said that demanding that the candidate avoid using names would free the candidate up to be as candid as possible in their critique of that manager. They could add a question like, “What did they do right, and what did they do wrong, and how would you do better?” I suggested that might throw the candidate off the trail of the true nature of the question, but the meat of their answer will be can be found in their analysis of their previous managers. All analysis is autobiographical.”

“That’s not exactly groundbreaking, but I’d agree with some of your analysis,” A said. “Only because your preferred form of testing gets closer to the subjects analyzing themselves, even if it’s incidental, but if I were in charge of a research group, I would go one step further. I would study group C, the interviewers, the Human Resources department, or whomever designed these questions. What questions did they design for the interview, why did they choose those questions? I would also interrogate my interviewers before they conducted the interview to see how well they know themselves. How well do any of us know ourselves? Noted psychologist Abraham Maslov suggested that around 2% of the world population practices rigorous self-reflection. In my experience, I think that number is high. Psych majors love to study others, but they’re not so great at studying themselves. How can anyone know anything about anyone else without knowing themselves first?” 

“I know myself,” Z said. “I know myself better than anyone else in the world. Why would I spend time understanding myself better? Isn’t that a little narcissistic?” 

“True reflection goes beyond narcissism,” A said. “You’ve no doubt heard people repeat the ‘You can’t handle the truth’ line? And you’ve heard people say, “They don’t want to ask me questions,” and the ‘they’ in their statement often involves an employer, or someone with some intimate knowledge of their particular brand of honesty. “They don’t want to know what I think, because they know I’m too honest. I am brutally honest.” They usually laugh after saying such things, in some self-congratulatory way, as if to say we all know how brutally honest they are. “Well, you may be brutally honest,” I say, “with others, but are you as brutally honest with yourself? Have you taken the time to sample size of your actions and reactions in the same way you do others?” 

“We all examine ourselves to some degree,” Z said. “We all think about the things we do, and we all examine ourselves.” 

“I’m talking about rigorous examination,” A said. “I’m talking about knowing what’s your fault? You’re not doing well in life, and you’re not happy. How much of that is your fault? You’re not getting along with your parents? How much of that is your fault? How many people fail to recognize their role in something as simple as a family squabble? I’ve witnessed family squabbles where my friends knew, absolutely knew, they were 100% in the right. 

When I was young and stupid, I’d ask them, “How can you not see your role in this matter?” I learned from that, let me tell you, I learned. I learned, first and foremost, never to ask that question again, because it opens a whole can of, “My parents, my Aunt Judy, or my Uncle Biff, are awful people,” they say. “Do you have any idea what they’ve done to me? Do you have any idea what they’ve done to me in the past?” I don’t do ask them this anymore, and I involve myself as little as possible now, because it’s pointless. Because when you’re intimate enough with the situation to know their role in the family squabble, you learn that most people don’t consider the role they play in it. I now know that I was around 50% responsible for just about every family squabble I was in. They don’t see it. Are they lying? No, they’ve just  completely blocked that part of the squabble out.”   

“What good does it do to dwell on our negatives?” Z asked. “Isn’t it better to move past them and forget them?” 

“How do we learn from our mistakes?” A asked. “What happens when the next family squabble arrives, and we’ve learned nothing?”  

“There is that of course,” Z said, “but we’re finding that in the debate between remembering and forgetting that Freud was just wrong. Focusing on our failed moments to the point of obsessing over them, to find some kind of truth about our current state is often more harmful than just putting the whole sordid affair behind us and moving on.”  

“I’d agree with that,” A said,  

“Thank you, Jesus.” 

“If you’re going to analyze me though,” A continued. “I expect you to thoroughly analyze yourself first. If you’re going to pretend like you know me, I ask you if you know yourself as much as you pretend to know me. I will no longer accept analysis from someone who has failed to analyze themselves properly.” 

“That’s a bold statement,” Z said. 

“Well, let me ask you this, what is a psychiatrist, psychologist, or any professional analyst?” A asked. “If we dig down to the nuts and bolts of these professions, what are they? Some of them provide technical, textbook answers, others act as our friends who guide us to therapy, but when we clear all that out, what are they? They’re listeners. The best of the professions just let their clients talk. They’re great listeners in a world where no one else listens. They teach us how to analyze ourselves and they try to teach us how to help ourselves by viewing matters more objectively. If we can learn how to achieve that level of objectivity on our own, when we analyze ourselves, we could nullify the need for analysts. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s quite difficult to achieve objectivity when it comes to examining ourselves. Some say it’s utterly impossible, but I think they’re thinking in absolute terms. Is it possible to be objective in an absolute manner, probably not, but we can make great strides if we want it bad enough. That’s the key, Z.”     

“In one sense,” Z said. “We should all take some compliment from a research scientist’s desire to study us. People want to know who we are. They want to know what makes us tick. They’re curious-” 

“They’re not curious,” A said. “Let’s not get nuts here. I know your goal is to have a civil conversation here, but I gotta tell you that if you want us to go down this road together it will not be hand in hand.”    

“It’s obvious you’ve had some bad experiences,” Z said, “but the idea that you’re insulted by someone analyzing you in a casual way is a bit much.”  

“I’m not insulted by it,” A said. “I just consider it ridiculous. When we sit down in a research clinic and voluntarily subject ourselves to their findings and evaluations, I have no problem with it, but when psych majors think they know who we are after talking to us over our backyard fence for ten minutes, it gets a little silly. I’m talking about the people we meet on the street, in our place of employment, and at family reunions. They have degrees in psychology, and they have their little knowing smiles that suggest they have some insight into who we are.” 

“And you think they’re all wrong?” 

“Of course not,” A said, “but I think they’re wrong almost as often as they’re right, which puts them about two steps above a guess. It’s what we might call an educated guess.”   

“What is an educated guess though,” Z said. “Some are based on anecdotal experience, I will grant you that. The over-the-backyard-fence psychologists making guesses is one thing, but some educated guesses are just packed with a portfolio of data. There’s the educated guess that you’re on the insecure side, and that many of the things you’ve said today support that. That educated guess is worth about as much as the person giving it. There’s also, hold on, hold on, let me finish. There’s also the assessment that a psychologist can make, based on where you were born in your family. Where you the oldest child of your siblings? Were you an only child? If you were the oldest child, you’re more likely to exhibit certain characteristics, if you were a middle child, you often exhibit middle child, Jan Brady characteristics, and if you were the youngest, you’re likely to exhibit other characteristics. Psychologists pack those educated guesses with decades of sample data. There are too many variables to list here, and they all matter, but the characteristics of where a child was born in the family are so consistent that some psychologists suggest that it might define you for the rest of your life. That’s an educated guess based on studying patterns and tendencies that I find fascinating.”  

“It is an interesting idea,” A said, “but it’s still just a theory, and all theories are guesses, some more educated than others, but they’re still just guesses.” 

“And Einstein made some guesses too,” Z said.