The Big Idea:

It's the story of one man's experience in 4 different concentration camps over 3 years. He details the brutal, unimaginable treatment that he endured, the loss of everyone he loved, and how, through all of that, he didn't lose meaning in his life. A practicing psychiatrist both before and after the war, he explains that having meaning, much more than striving for pleasure or power, will help you get through life's challenges and allow you to be happy.

Background:

In 1942, just nine months after his marriage, Frankl and his family were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. His father died there of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Frankl and the surviving members of his family were transported to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother were murdered in the gas chambers. His wife died later of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Frankl spent three years in four concentration camps.

While head of the Neurological Department at the general Polyclinic Hospital, Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning over a nine-day period. The book, originally titled A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp, was released in German in 1946. The English translation of Man's Search for Meaning was published in 1959, and became an international bestseller.

The book is 50% his account of surviving in the camps and 50% his theory of Logotherapy that he believes is a better psychiatric approach to dealing with neuroses like anxiety and depression.

Top 10 Takeaways:

• Meaning can be derived from any situation, even the most miserable one. And it is that meaning that gives us the strength to survive and triumph. Frankl lost everything, his family, his home, his possessions, his freedom, his hair,  and his name, but he wanted to make it so that he could share his story and his observations in hopes of helping others.
• "There is always a choice to make. Everyday. Every hour, offer the opportunity to make a decision whether or not you will be robbed of your inner freedom and become a plaything of circumstance." You can always choose your attitude in any set of circumstances.
• It is a dangerous misconception that man's goal is to live a stress free life and that he must get help to relieve stress and find equilibrium. What man actually needs is the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. "What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled."
• Tragic Optimism: how can you say yes to life after everything you have been through?
  • Turn suffering into a human achievement or accomplishment.
  • Derive from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better.
  • Deriving an incentive to take responsible action.  In short, what can be done about the given situation? "I broke my next; it didn't break me."
• "No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them."
• Logotherapy (Frankl's argument for a new kind of psychotherapy) – rather than look back as most therapy does, it looks forward and says we can discover the meaning of life by:
  • Creating a work or doing a deed
  • Experiencing something or encountering something,
  • By the attitude we take to unavoidable suffering.
• Frankl explains the concept of existential vacuum or inner emptiness. When no instinct tells a person what to do and no tradition tells him what he ought to do. Instead he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish for him to do (totalitarianism). Both are recipes for sadness. And the end result of an existential vacuum is that man is not only unhappy but ashamed of his unhappiness.
• "Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.  Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."
• Developing a sense of humor is key to mastering the art of living.
• Happiness and success cannot be pursued, they must be a biproduct. The more you aim for them, the more they will evade you. They are often the unintended side effects of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself.

Rating:

• Potential life impact: 10
• Fun to read: 10 (I could not put the first half down. The second half dealing with his theory of therapy was harder to get through and had a lot more big words).
• Likely to recommend it to others: 10
• Amazing conversations that it can start: 10
• Total score: 10

Final Thought:

            I am so moved after reading this book that I don't want it to leave my side.  Like I literally want to carry it around in my backpack wherever I go.

            I just never want to forget how I felt reading it. The thoughts of what we as humans a capable of doing to others and at the same time what we are able to survive while maintaining our humanity.

            And I didn't mention it above, but I don't want to forget the story of Dr. J – You can never predict the future actions of a man. People can change in radical ways.

Other quotes I loved:

• "I do not forget any good deed done to me, and I do not carry a grudge for a bad one."
• "Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph."

I set a goal to do the splits this year.

I've never done the splits.  I'm not even close. Here's my laughable starting photo.

And yet the goal doesn't really matter.

What matters is my mental model of how I, Diana, learn to do new things. Sometimes impossible seeming things. And my real goal is to learn the flaws in this model and update it using the splits as my vehicle. 

Goals are nothing more than wishes.

And even if you have a plan for accomplishing your goal, that's not as strong as having a mental model for how you as a person generally achieve goals.

This Goals Achievement Mental Model would include answers to the following questions:

1. Have you set and achieved similar goals in the past? If not, let's start at ground zero of what might be going wrong. If you do have a track record of setting and achieving goals, then what has helped you get to the finish line?  Was it the right methodology? A coach? An accountability buddy? Journaling about your experience? Public pressure? (That last one is my go-to 😂)
2. Have you consistently built new habits to achieve your goals in the past? How much time can you really commit to each day or each week? What does it take for you to create new habits?
3. Have you been able to overcome challenges or setbacks in the past? Have you hit roadblocks in your previous pursuits? (I can't think of a goal I've achieved without – at several points in the process – feeling completely disillusioned and ready to give up.) What do you do in those challenging situations?  What helps you power through?
4. Have you sought out support or guidance when you needed in the past? If you've never done something before, you're likely starting with a terrible game plan on how to get there. What has worked for you in the past to seek out guidance to make progress and get over hurdles?

My goal is not just to achieve new things each year, it's to refine my philosophy about how I achieve things. Tweaking my mental model each year gives me a clear roadmap to follow, making it easier to stay on track and avoid getting sidetracked or discouraged.  And it helps me spend my time better.  I'm dedicating 15 minutes a day to doing the splits.  That's a very big return on a minimal output.

So while the goal itself may be important, your personal methodology of how you accomplish goals or resolutions is a lot more valuable to your long term growth.  If you can upgrade your mental model for achieving goals each year, you'll find that your growth becomes exponential.  

Don't get me wrong, I do want to hear about your New Year's Resolutions! It's fun to go for big things!  It's just that the goal itself doesn't interest me nearly as much as your mental model to get there.

Many of our daily actions are habitual, meaning they are performed automatically and without conscious thought. It's a useful way for us to save mental energy and streamline tasks that are performed frequently.

These automatic actions are often based on our mental models, which are the assumptions, beliefs, and frameworks that we use to make sense of the world around us. They are like little formulas about how we believe things are supposed to work.  

Here's a simple example:

Except this mental model is actually incorrect. Salt doesn't make your water boil any faster (unless your pot is filled with 20% salt).  If you want your water to boil faster, it would be smarter to just start with hot water.

And we have tens of thousands of these theories, big and small, secretly governing many of our actions. Here are just some of the categories they fall into:

• Leadership
  • how to anticipate the future 
  • how to uncover blindspots
  • how to create a learning organization
  • how to create psychological safety
• Decision Making
  • how to have better ideas
  • how to pick between two difficult choices
  • how to identify zombies
• Sales
  • how to get someones attention
  • how to give remarkable gifts
• Marketing
• Presentations 
  • how to create a memorable presentation
  • how to keep from getting nervous before a presentation
• Customers
  • how to get honest feedback
  • how to find opportunities for future growth
• Emotional Intelligence
  • how to check in on people you care about 
• Managing Yourself 
  • how you achieve goals
  • how to react to a failure/setback
• Being a Good Person 
• Success
• Parenting 
• Love
• Health 
• Money

But we haven't spent much time articulating exactly what our philosophies are in these areas. We're just mindlessly acting based on these hidden rules. 

When I was in high school, one of my health mental models (thanks to some brilliant commercials) was that the key to being physically fit was drinking as much milk as possible.  Do you remember those, "Milk, It Does a Body Good" commercials?  They were very effective.

And when I didn't make the team because I was frothing at the mouth during tryouts (this is what happens when you drink nothing but milk for two days and then engage in aerobic activity!), I didn't question the mental model.  I blamed the coaches for having too much running and not enough shooting drills during tryouts. I also declared that I just wasn't a runner.  But I held onto that milk philosophy for a decade until I started proactively learning about health and fitness.

We protect these assumptions by never questioning them. Where did they come from? Are they working for us? Do they need updating?

And yet our mental models determine how strategic we are in our actions.  If our philosophies are accurate and helpful, they can guide us toward big wins. On the other hand, if our mental models are flawed or limited, they can lead us down the wrong path and prevent us from achieving our goals.

Or, in the words of Charlie Munger, "You get further in life by avoiding repeated stupidity than you do by striving for maximum intelligence."

So how do we update our mental models? Here are three methods:

Method 1: Updating our questions

1. When you ask a question that you ask often, reflect on whether you’re getting the kind of response that you’re hoping for.  

Ex: You ask your kid after school how their day was. They say "Fine." You try again. You ask them, "What was the best part?" or "What did they learn?" They don't remember. It feels like a very unsuccessful interrogation. These questions and the mental models that make you think they should be working aren't serving you.

2. Try some other questions instead to see if you get a better response. Ask others about what questions they use to accomplish the same goals.

One question that has worked well for me is: "How was your day on a scale of 1 to 10?"

Method 2. Mental Model reflection

1. Identify an area of your life that you would like to grow or improve. (It's not too late for New Year's resolutions!)

2. Make a list of all the mental models you currently have about that subject and see which ones might need to be updated or might not be serving you.

3. Seek out new perspectives on these philosophies. Consider asking for feedback from others.

4. Update one mental model at a time and come up with a way to test the new approach.

Method 3. Inspiration

1. Find a source of inspiration that regularly challenges your existing mental models. My monthly newsletter attempts to do just that. Ask This Not That is a monthly dose of question makeover – in which I take one common question and offering an alternative that could help you get much better results.

2. Join a group of people who like to talk about this topic. There are strategic thinking groups on both LinkedIn and Facebook.

Whatever method you choose, understand that the quality of your strategic thinking is determined by the life philosophies swimming around in your head. Identifying and upgrading these mental models can help you make better decisions, solve problems faster, and identify big opportunities.

For the past 60 years the financial services industry has been booming. Since 1980, year over year growth rates tripled and large entities flourished as smaller competitors crumbled. With low interest rates and new regulations, banks grew quickly as the rest of the marketplace piggybacked off their success. Savvy and risk-averse business men and women flocked to the industry; a career in financial services seemed like a safe bet.

Such a prolonged period of success is both a blessing and a curse. What made the financial services sector soar has also been responsible for nearly crippling it and taking our economy with it.

Here Comes Trouble

By succeeding for so many years – practically a lifetime in the business world – financial service firms remained virtually untouched while other industries were being disrupted. This made them dangerously comfortable. The strategies that once promoted growth stopped working in the same ways in today’s hyper competitive economy.

Ignoring changing tech and forgoing innovation for “guaranteed profits,” created the ideal environment for disruption.

In stark contrast to large, collateral backed loans, today’s financial innovators focus on small and specialized services like micro-loans, peer to peer lending, and small business lines of credit. The walls that once separated consumers from their finances gave way as startups like Square, Stripe, Coin, and Dwalla eliminate fees while providing new value.

Even business we typically wouldn’t consider part of financial services got into the game and expanded the field of competitors. Home Depot now offers loans for home remodeling projects. Starbucks and Chik-Fil-A created an app to speed-up payments and create financial loyalty. Walmart, Google, Apple Pay, Paypal are now viable forms of currency. The threats are ever increasing, and the financial services industry isn’t prepared to innovate and adapt.

The Expert Trap

While it's not fair to blame success for the impending doom, it is important to address the traps of reaching expert status. Yes, being really good at something, being an expert, can be what stifles innovation.

Enter: The Expert Traps. The silent and unseen killers of creativity and creation. When we feel like experts at what we do, the following traps await us:

Trap #1: We Stop Trying to Learn and Improve

Confidence in your skills is important. We’d all like our bankers, lawyers, and employers to be good at what they do. It’s a valid and honorable trait. However, when confidence grows without limits and exceeds its true skill, we lose the incentive to improve.

And this is what suffocated innovation in the financial industry. Big banks and firms were killing it (as in, they were raking in the profits). They were the best of the best; taking the time to reassess their offering would have only distracted them from continuing to win. Or so they thought.

This dangerous confidence convinces experts that it isn’t necessary to test and question the status quo. Hubris whispers “You know what you’re doing. You’ve got the track record to prove it.” While the beginner or the novice looks for opportunities to improve, the expert believes they will always be the best of the best, even as their stock prices plummet. This is one of the reasons they never saw the 2008 collapse coming.

Trap #2: We Don’t Examine Our Successes

Looking backward is a no-brainer when we lose. We can learn from our mistakes. Being a loser incentivizes us to examine what went wrong. But when we win, the opposite happens. Why look back when the future's so bright? By assuming the win was a result of perfect strategy and execution, you could ignore big opportunities to improve.

Winning is awesome. You will never find me happy with a loss. However, constant improvement and innovation demand we approach both losses and successes as a beginner. And a beginner never stops reflecting. If a beginner receives unexpected praise from a superior, the novice will ask, “What did I do and how can I do it again?”

So hold your head up high. Things are going well! Now turn around and take a hard look at how you got there. Can you repeat it? Was it luck? And most importantly, what could you have done better? Ask the hard questions and live to succeed another day.

Trap #3: We Play it Safe

Ah, to be the best of the best. It feels great to be at the top. So great, in fact, you’d rather not look down. Falling from such heights could be deadly.

For many in the financial industry, reaching the top triggered the instinct to survive. How can we avoid falling? What can we do to stay absolutely still and not compromise our position? Delaying or completely avoiding action feels like the safer option when you’ve fought so hard to get there.
But a beginner has nothing to lose. The beginner defaults to action, to responsible experimentation and seeing what happens. For the beginner, the opportunity to learn something new is more motivating than potentially making a mess. Failure is inevitable for a beginner, so why not try?

This doesn’t mean beginners experiment with reckless abandon, the goal is success after all. Beginners forgo guaranteed success in favor of growing their abilities. Experts hunker down and hold their position, even if it means ignoring an oncoming catastrophe.

 The Systematic Solution

Understanding the traps is a great first step. But it’s not enough. Research on cognitive biases shows that being aware of biases/expert traps doesn't do much to reduce their effects. All of the above traps happen subconsciously. Trying to “watch out” for the traps is just as difficult as “watching out” for how you’re breathing while you sleep.

The only way to control for the traps of success and expertise is to implement guardrails to keep your work on the right path. Here’s what I suggest:

1. Look for Negative Evidence

When you’re making a decision or choosing a strategic direction, assign someone to challenge your bias for a particular direction. The military calls them red teams, some in business call them a devil's advocate, and I call them provocateurs. Either way, find an individual or team of outsiders who have no vested interest in your project. They care enough to help, but not enough that they will be affected by the outcome. These individuals are in the best position to open your eyes to blind spots.

2. Retrospectives to Examine Success and Failure

Schedule a meeting at least once a year to look back at your project or company and examine the processes and results. Retrospectives create a structure for reflection, learning, and planning. No matter how well things are going, A Retrospective shows you how to correct glaring strategic mistakes that are invisible when you’re executing on day-to-day activities. I’ve used this process countless times and if you’re not sure where to start, you can use my 20+ page guide to running a successful Retrospective here.

3. Experiment

The most innovative companies are only so because of constant experiments. Experiments to see if they can improve things that are already working well. Experiment to find solutions to pervasive problems. Experimentation increases the velocity of decision making. It helps kill or change projects that aren’t working and lowers the cost of finding solutions. The best experiments use the scientific method, and if you’re not sure how to set up your next test, check out my template here.

Complacency is the enemy of innovation. The more comfortable you are, the less you work to improve and create new value. And complacency always takes its toll. As the pace picks up, the expert falls behind. Only those focussed on constant growth and improvement, even in good times, will be the ones to achieve sustained success.

Adopt the mindset of a beginner, build your retrospective strategy, and never stop fighting to improve. If you never settle, you will never peak! Let’s make the financial services industry boom for another 60, shall we?