Prologue: The Mid-Life Marathon

***

THE WORLD TODAY:

Expunge immediately. Broadcast only your coronation. Delete photos that “ruin your image.”

MISTAKEN MASTERY:

The moment you're most embarrassed is where the story gets good. Tell it well and it becomes the reason people lean in.

***

Here's what I would do:

1. Sprint to the left. Wrap my wife in a bear hug. Giggle as she screams “Eweww! Put me down!” and tries to wiggle free.
2. Do as many post race interviews as possible. Say I learned early on that you ain't cool unless you pee your pants. Even though Madison Hotels is not around, I would like to thank my sponsors for their incredible support. Yes, Miss Vaughn was a hot piece of ass, but I owe today to the love of my life and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on—my wife that somehow deemed me worthy.
3. Frame the shorts in an air tight (F*#@%! hyphens) air-tight frame before they dry. Hang them on my wall so I can tell everybody who comes over for dinner the story.

Crazy? Not in my experience. So here’s my core idea for the whole book right upfront:

The moments that embarrass you the most, the ones that haunt your soul and reputation long after you wish you could die, are the moments where the story gets good. When you tell that story well, people will love you for it.

Heartbreaking translation: the thing the world tells us to hide might be the thing that brings us closer together.

I want that to change.

This book is about confidence. Not the fake kind that you spend hours reading about then wonder why it crumbles on contact. The real kind.

Call it whatever you want. I hate typing, especially hyphenated words. So until we get to my Cady Heron math stuff later, I’m calling it confidence.

We’ll talk about having the confidence to comfort a teenager with hostage negotiation tactics. About gaining the confidence to teach people twice your age, and ask for help from people half your age. About having the confidence to prepare soldiers for war with vocabulary quizzes and millennial pop soundtracks.

We’ll even talk about earning the ultimate level of confidence: knowing your 76 soldiers found out you were standing on a Kuwaiti highway, your first day in country, without your pants on. And being 100% confident not a single one would ever rat you out to another officer.

If you want to come along for the ride, here’s my opening contract offer:

• If you want to be more confident, you can be. Hollow promise right now, but I’ll prove it to you.

• No sermons. Only one soapbox (see final contract point). No eight pages of weather reports just to prove I read the dictionary with my morning dump.

• I will cover a ton of science. I will NOT tell YOU what it means. But I will absolutely tell you what it meant to me. Two reasons.

• First, a favorite quote from George E. P. Box: All models are wrong, some are useful. Skeptical? Remember a few years ago when you thought that atomic matter couldn’t exist in two places at once?

Remember 60 years ago when the proton and neutron were the smallest building blocks of matter?

Remember several hundred years ago when the earth was flat, the earth was the center of the universe, you catch my drift.

• Second, because of how science is studied. A personal favorite is Angela Duckworth, famous for her book Grit. Check out the earth-shattering findings from her 2019 paper studying incoming West Point cadets during summer training. And I quote:

“Cognitive and Noncognitive Attributes Are Distinct. Cognitive ability was negatively related to both physical ability and grit, which were, in turn, positively related to each other.”

I could have told you that in 1984 after watching Revenge of the Nerds. What else you got Angela?

“Quitting Early: Only Grit Predicts Completing Beast Barracks. Across cohorts, an average of 3 of every 100 cadets dropped out of WestPoint during the first summer of training.”

3 out of every 100? Hmm. Duckworth published her first Grit paper in 2007. In 2019 she put out a longitudinal update covering 11,258 cadets across those years. Are your spidey senses tingling yet?

Imagine this. You look at 10 years of data—I repeat, an entire decade—studying customer service reps at your company. You stride into the boss’s office. “Hey boss, I got it nailed! This one thing I found tells us why 3 out of every 100 reps we hire quits before their third month!”

Who do you think is looking for a new job now?

But let me be fair to Angela. She didn’t publish an overall conclusion that grit causes success. Cause is the key word there. Most science is association.

Science says that 8:00 AM is associated with traffic. But 8:00 AM doesn’t cause traffic. Everyone’s boss saying get to work at the same time causes everyone to be on the road at the same time and the road can’t get any bigger and they always do construction at the worst time and that causes traffic.

So what then did Angela and team thrust out into the world as their overall, top of the paper conclusion?

"We conclude that non-cognitive aspects of human capital deserve greater attention from both scientists and practitioners interested in predicting real-world success.”

On that Angela, we agree.

And that’s why the best advice I ever got— you’ll see it in chapter 2—led me to this contract point: I won’t tell you what the science means, I’ll tell you what it means to me. Science is information. Data. It’s not proof.

The interpretation and application of scientific information is what helped me go from the fat kid teased for having a girl’s first AND middle name to an adult that can’t wait to tell you the joke about how my mom wanted a girl, dad wanted a boy, and somehow they split the difference when I popped out with 1.5 X chromosomes.

But I won’t stop there. I’m going to do two things I haven’t seen anyone else do. But if you have, please let me know, my number’s below.

For one, remember that scientists are people too. I don't know why every other book talks about them like alien overlords conducting torturous experiments on unwitting humans. I want to know what they found, but I also want to know who they are.

That's why our science journey together is a massive Easter egg hunt. Let's see how many you can find.

Second, each chapter recap will have a section called the GN’R Get in the Ring Science Throwdown. For each study or book I use, I’ll put one next to it that contradicts it. Judge for yourself which one applies to your life. Or find another. If it works for you, tell me about it!

Back to my final two contract points. I saved the best for last.

• I’m going to use AI generated imagery in the book. I’ll explain in a separate section below.

• Finally, you won’t like this last one, but it’s non-negotiable: you’re gonna have to take some punches, metaphorical punches that is.

If you want true confidence that survives contact with the real world as it is today and doesn’t duck for cover at the moment you walk into a new place you’ve never been, you gotta take a few haymakers from metaphorical Tyson.

We have a deal or you got a better offer? (415) 624-9488. Call me. Seriously, that’s my number. Like a story, hate a joke, have a different interpretation of a study I mention, think my math is completely backwards, just pissed the Bills still can’t get that ring and want to yell at someone?

AI Images, Seriously.

Two reasons I am using AI images.

My actual photos burned up in a house fire. Real life photo to the right. Entire house gone. Mailbox standing strong. They even delivered mail the next day. 20% off Bed Bath and Beyond Coupon. Timing is everything.

This is the point where my editor tells me to make myself vulnerable and invite you in, “earn the reader’s trust” by showing my wound. I fired that editor and found one you’ll like. The one that said not to manufacture tears. Not to invent emotion.

Because I wasn’t “standing in the ashes of my life, wondering how I would move forward” or some Lifetime movie line like that.

Because I was thinking “I’m not getting shot at. Isn’t it incredible how a fire takes one home to the ground but doesn’t touch a house 200 yards away. Damn, I really am going to miss that black Onyx bathroom downstairs.”

Because I’ve been through worse. I know I’ll survive. I know that other people have seen wreckage far worse.

Second reason I’m using AI images: there are plenty of moments in my life where I don’t have to manufacture the emotion for you. But I do want to show it to you, not just tell you about it. I’m going to show you the moments I get wrecked.

These are the photos that never could have possibly existed. Because my roommate was also in handcuffs and we still don’t know where my brother was. Because there were only two of us stranded on the Kuwaiti highway and somebody had to pull security.

Most sad of all: because even if the fire had never happened, I would not have the photos to show you because I did what I now regret. I deleted the the photos from some of the best stories of my life.

My promise to you is that I am an absolute perfectionist and I will have broken at least 2 iPhones on the concrete per photo because chatGPT wasn’t getting the details right. You’ll hear my voice crack. You’ll smell my urgency to find a way out of the room. You’ll taste the pulse in my throat and feel sweat bead up on my brow. I’ll show you how I get wrecked, and why it was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me.

So, do we have an accord? (Yeah, I like Pirates of the Caribbean, I like Michael Bolton, and I like Lonely Island).

To quote Kurt Warner: “Let's get to work.”

Chapter 1: I Mean, What Happened

I see your reaction through the page. “Wait, you promised to give us embarrassing stories. You might be an idiot but you tell this like you’re an operator.”

That’s what I thought too. But confidence was about as real as Honcho’s new watch. It set expectations high, until close inspection exposed its flaws.

Six months after Mexico, I roll into Fort Eustis, VA for Basic Officer’s Leadership Course—the Army’s training for brand new second lieutenants. I cruise through the main gate, top down on my convertible purple camaro, Tearin’ Up My Heart blaring on the stereo, dufflebag overstuffed with confidence.

BOLC was a rigged game for which I had the playbook. 43 butter bars in my class from all across the country, living together at the Fort Eustis Inn. This was college all over again but with marginally better food.

I made fast friends, hosted the weekly Temptation Island viewing nights, and boggled minds with my electric blue mixological marvel I named “The Fatality.”

I smoked the open-book tests they gave us. I didn’t even study in college. To this day I still don’t know where the library is on campus. And here they let me bring the manuals in for test day? The Army is gonna be easy.

Then I met reality.

Motor pool is our destination for hands-on training. My commander gives us a spiel about leadership and pulls out a sheet with the class rankings. He starts from the top.

Commander: “Lieutenant Sabin.”

I’m not even surprised.

Commander: “We’re going to run a mock scenario. You’re platoon leader. You must move a cavalry company to the front lines. That tank needs to be on that HET trailer ASAP because we cross phase line Marauder in 30 minutes.”

My salute is so sharp it could slice silk.

Commander: “Did you bring your TM 9-2330-381-13?”

I proudly pull it out of my rucksack and hand it to him. He tucks it under his arm and looks at me. I start to think I should have been surprised.

Commander: “Why are you wasting time? We cross phase line Marauder in 29 minutes and 15 seconds. And they don’t have manuals in the middle of a war.”

I wish I was a deer so the Mack truck could make the pain stop. I didn’t need the manual. I knew the information. It was up there in my brain. I just couldn’t get at it. Like a little kid teetering on a stool trying to get the cookie jar off the fridge.

Then our first sergeant sets off an artillery simulator. My heart did not stop. It literally jumped out of my chest and went looking for another body so as not to be associated with me.

My commander watches me stand still for 30 seconds then addresses the class.

Commander: “Lieutenant Sabin’s platoon is dead. The enemy is driving through the gap in our front lines because the cav unit is still sitting here waiting for transportation. It doesn’t matter what you do in air-conditioned classrooms. All that matters is what actions you take on the battlefield.”

`

Then he turns the Mack truck headlights back on me.

Commander: “Most importantly, those actions cost the lives of people other than yourself.”

The shit sandwich aftertaste from that moment still lingers on my tongue as I write this. Let’s go to the instant replay to see how the train derailed.

The Replay

The summer before college I returned a VHS tape to the local library because I was a nerd in high school with few friends and I actually knew where that library was. I stumbled onto Albert Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory. That book changed my life.

Bandura studied how people overcame their fears. He found that success comes from doing. Learning, watching? Those help too. But doing is what matters.

This made sense to me. My first try at the SAT got me 1180. Respectable, but not going to get me into schools I wanted. So I played flashcard games with a friend. Three seconds to answer or you did 10 push-ups. Rocked my second take at the SAT with a 1490.

There was something missing though. I wasn’t fully bought in. I found the missing piece in Lev Vygotsky and K. Anders Ericsson. The Russian stamp collector and Swedish chain smoker with a “hoarder’s” office didn’t agree on much, but they both agreed that the only way to get better was to practice above your skill level.

Bandura’s theory said that I could build confidence with repeated reps. But the Nord and the Slav said they had to be hard, heavy reps. Same reason we shot free throws for twenty minutes at the end of basketball practice. Same reason I averaged four mile runs so I could max the two-mile Army fitness standard. But hard and heavy is relative. The disapproving frown on my brother’s face when I remove the extra plates as we swap places on the bench press proves that.

That’s where William James’s equation for self-esteem comes in. He wrote this in 1890. Exactly what he meant by “self-esteem = success / pretentious” is a Biggie / Tupac style debate in the psych world.

I’ll give you my evidence on James’s true meaning in an appendix, but for the book I’ll stick to what it means to me: confidence is a simple math formula: Confidence = Total Success divided by Total Expectations. Total is the operative word and that’s why Bandura has celestial floor seats for the Lakers right next to James. No matter where my equation was right now, I just needed more reps to get it higher.

I dove into college with Bandura and James forefront in my mind, but Lev and K. Anders were loud as shit back seat drivers. I even forced my hand by selecting the dorm described as “Only for social people. You will need to find alternative locations to study, especially late at night.” And thanks to my high school experience of near zero parties, my expectations of myself were likewise near zero. My Confidence = Success / Expectations equation had nowhere to go but up.

Four years later, I spent the last two months of college telling the Mexico story to everyone within 20 miles of Claremont like I was Inland Empire’s very own Jason Bourne.

College was fantastic for me. I made some of the best friends of my life that, during our annual January get together, still make fun of my dancing, floating candles, and silk roses with plastic dew on them. I built social skills I only dreamed of before reading Bandura.

But the devil is in the details and I missed two important details.

For one, I made a fundamental error attributing my success solely to my self-efficacy work. Bandura said that if I do the reps and I take the punches, I can build the skill. And damn it, I did it.

But out of nowhere Ross and Heider slide in and sweep the leg with their crucial point about how much the environment you’re in plays a role in your success.

I should have known this. I'm 6'2”, 200 pounds. Never had a chance at basketball after High School, but if you look closely, you can still see the Nike stamp above my left eye where Paul Pierce stuffed a two-handed slammer on top of my head.

But Junior and Senior year, I traveled to Seattle for a basketball tournament where I was among the Dream Team. I don't remember the name of the tourney, but it was something like “small white Jewish kids trying to be athletes” tournament.

I had the same set of skills. Totally different environments. Four years later headed to Fort Eustis, the lesson had yet to translate.

I was so busy counting tumbleweeds across the neverending expanse of West Texas that I also missed the part of The Self-Efficacy Theory where Bandura warned me how self-efficacy is heavily domain specific. I might have been a social wunderkind at the Claremont Colleges, but little did I know how little that meant outside of my padded environment.

That’s why David Dunning and Justin Kruger are sitting back with their favorite German craft brew chuckling at my ignorance. They came up with the Dunning-Kruger effect that fit me like my undersized Abercrombie tee. I was skilled, but my skills were so domain specific that I wasn’t skilled enough to grade my own competence. I was like Donnie Rumsfeld standing there with my crooked tie saying “there are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

D&K found that the more skilled you are, the better able you are to evaluate your own skill. My problem was that I could not see outside the three-mile perimeter of the Claremont Colleges.

That's why my playbook worked so well when I first got to Fort Eustis. Same social setup, same classroom setup. I hear Bandura cheering me on like Rob Schneider in a Happy Madison movie: "You can do it.”

But I'm completely oblivious to the heckling across the floor where Dunning, Kruger, Ross, and Heider sit. And Bill James’s ghost is just sitting up there like Yoda shaking his head because he sees the wreck coming 1,000 miles away as my expectations so far exceeded my actual success that a silent but deadly fart could have pushed my Confidence = Success / Expectations equation to absolute zero.

And Artillery simulators are anything but silent.

If you were driving by on Jackson Avenue at the exact moment the artillery simulator went off, you would think I have nerves of steel being the only soldier standing statue still while everyone else ducks and runs. You would miss the fact that I was choking from two different angles.

I literally couldn’t breathe. Inside my head, David & David kicked the living shit out of Goliath.

My two almond sized amygdala took over operations. This tiny team is responsible for the famous “fight-or-flight” response along with those little things like emotional memory tagging, reward processing, and social cue interpretations.

In contrast, the gargantuan prefrontal cortex on the other hand, has a list of job duties too long to mention and is anywhere from 40–80x bigger depending on what day you ask Google. The important part is it handles working memory, logical reasoning, and basic motor control.

After suffering a Van Damme helicopter roundhouse to its crystal jaw, my prefrontal cortex was one step behind my heart looking for another body to live in. With the amygdalae in control, my body floods with cortisol, my throat tightens, and I literally choke. This sends other parts of my brain into panic mode and they go running to the prefrontal cortex, crying for it to tell my lungs to start breathing, but get met with an “out to lunch, back at 1:30” sign.

Now I’m standing there trying to figure out if anyone knows I can’t breathe while I can’t move at the same time as I am suffering a longer lasting cognitive choke that haunts the dreams of athletes, musicians, comedians, and believe it or not even French street mimes.

The reason choking is so commonly associated with stage performers and athletes is that these people rely on automatic routines. They fall off the rails when some random thing wrestles their brain out of its automatic operation and forces them to consciously focus on what they’re doing. That requires working memory, which requires the prefrontal cortex, which is why I fell flat on my face. Actually I wish I had fallen flat on my face so I could have at least escaped to the hospital

And that’s why they’re doomed to fail. Sian Beilock helps here for two reasons. First, she can help settle the argument as to whether it’s Dart “mouth” or “muth” because I have two friends that went there and they don’t agree.

Second, she helps explain my failure together with Thomas Carr where they showed exactly why my brain's conscious command center hung the “out to lunch” sign and went looking for Chipotle.

People that rely heavily on working memory—like people that ace tests, crush academic debates, pull out their TI-82s to calculate the exact convoy route distance because the road is a curve—suffer the most catastrophic choking failures.

When something in the environment comes flying out of left field, the left mezzanine, or all of a sudden hits your gastrointestinal tract because of bad leftovers from last night, your brain flips off the autopilot and makes you grab the stick.

My problem is I came off autopilot at the exact time the oxygen masks dropped down right after both my pilot and copilot took a 45 slug to the skull and I didn’t have any passengers on board that even understood the concept of airspeed versus groundspeed.

Bill James can’t even watch now as he sees how all my successes do absolutely nothing for me in this moment where my expectations were flying higher than the F-18 Hornets from Oceana doing mock engagements overhead. Even Bandura has slinked around to the other side and quietly changed his tune to “well, I tried to tell you.”

My only saving grace was dehydration that day so I didn’t have the full pneumatic tank to spill like my proud, hypothetical runner from the prologue.

Once Bandura and crew finally stopped laughing, they helped me off the mat and reminded me that self-efficacy is about doing the reps. Then Lev said something in Russian but I didn’t understand him, so I figured this was just a good learning experience.

OK world, you win. Turns out my brother actually can taste leadership failure. Let’s get back to work. How do I learn from this?

The Gameplan

I learned two important lessons that day, both thanks to the psychological mechanisms built upon Pavlov’s work with man’s best friend (here’s my best friend in case you’re interested).

Our brains learn by being wrong. It’s called prediction error and it’s the reason you get so excited when that new song you love comes on the shuffle playlist, but weeks later you’re not so excited when the exact same song randomly comes on the same exact shuffle playlist.

When something happens that your brain doesn’t expect and it wants to remember, it gives you a shot of dopamine.

But when we expect things to happen because they’ve happened over and over, our brain says “duh, we listen to this playlist every night for bed.” No dopamine for you.

Want to see what I listen to every night for bed, see below.

And yeah, Madge is rocking my homepods while I write this.

The pointy heads in the lab call this phenomenon “prediction error.” Pavlov and his dogs found the mechanism, then in 1972, two Yalies named Rescorla and Wagner kicked off the math to determine how much you learn based on how much you f*** up, er, I mean how big the prediction error is. The bigger the difference between what you expect and what happens, the more likely you are to learn.

I learned the simple lesson that my classroom intellect meant nothing when supersonic bullets started flying, but two shots of Beam unlocked two deeper lessons that night.

I’ve never been the type of person that dwells on things, and I never looked into whether there’s distinct psychology that makes one person different in that way.

But I am the type that imagines all sorts of future scenarios. I started thinking about how the motor pool incident could happen again in other ways. What I would do. What I needed to do to make sure I wasn’t standing there with my tiny prick in my hand. What would happen if my first action failed. What other contingencies would happen. What would Patton do. What someone else not even in the Army would do. Hell, just for shits and giggles, what would Austin Powers do?!

As it turns out, this corn mash fueled rumination was a gift from the Brown-Forman gods. 24 years later, the psychology fab five of Dabas, Bruckner, Schultz, Bergmann, and Benoit hurled 49 willing subjects into a giant magnet to show that my brain was actually learning from prediction error by imagining all of those scenarios.

With or without the bourbon, imagining how to handle stepping on my johnson could help me learn before I ever had to encounter a real-life artillery barrage. It might sound like an infomercial, but take your pick. Trust the Tigers who score better when they envision their shots. Or the Blue Angels who rehearse their entire routine in a conference room, eyes closed.

That led to the second thing I learned that night. Owning failure is exponentially more powerful and infinitely more rewarding than hiding from it.

After my third shot I turned my imagination to scenarios for later that night. The taxis were picking us up in an hour and I knew a cavalcade of teasing was marching down the Fort Eustis Inn hallway en route. I wanted to imagine how to handle it and here’s where I landed.

Other lieutenants: “Hey Sabin! We were trying to decide whether to go with the Han Solo in carbonite, the John Spartan never thawed out, or the Austin Powers still waiting for Dr. Evil reference and we couldn’t decide. Which one you think best described you today.”

Austin Powers, He’s the Man! I wonder if they read my mind from earlier.

Me: “Obvious choice. Austin Powers. Didn’t you see how much I pissed myself right after?”

Everyone laughs. I invite them in for a quick beverage before we leave.

I make a toast.

Me: “To the families of my fallen metaphorical soldiers. I solemnly apologize for my failure today. I cannot return your loved ones. I can only promise that I will stop training for battle exclusively using Duck Hunt and Contra. I will forever remember today’s lesson and be worthy of your trust next time. I promise.”

I’m not saying that’s why I brought all 76 soldiers home alive from Iraq, but it definitely helped. Before we get into that story though, we’re going to bring back an oldie but goodie. For the next step in this book, you get to choose your own adventure:

• Sortie in the SIM: Flip to the next page for simulator time. Knock out some reps with me. I recap what I learned and map it to a series of prompts to use with your favorite AI language model. Use a temporary chat so nothing gets saved.
• Keep rolling: Flip to page 33. We’ll investigate where this all started, and you’ll find out when I learned police car doors don’t open from the inside.

SIMULATOR SORTIE: I Mean, What Happened

AAR: I Mean, What Happened

***One thing before we buckle into our first SIM.***

You’re going to get into this and think “this isn’t realistic. This isn’t real life.”

You’re right. It’s not. It’s practice.

NFL teams don’t practice against other NFL teams. Pro golfers don’t line fairways with fans or speed up the greens when they play courses outside tournament week. And no matter how many live-fire drills the Army puts you through, no Artillery simulator can simulate the earth-shaking impact of actual incoming fire.

Nothing replicates real life. It’s your call how much you want to practice.

Sortie 1: The Prediction Error Autopsy

• DIRECTIONS: Send a short story about a time you got wrecked, failed, sucked, fell flat on your face. Insert it at the end of the prompt where you see [INSERT YOUR STORY HERE]

I am going to tell you a short story about a recent time I failed, got embarrassed, or choked under pressure. Run a 'Rescorla-Wagner Prediction Error' analysis on my story. Tell me exactly what my 'Expected Outcome' was, what my 'Actual Outcome' was, and what the mathematical gap between those two things reveals about the flaw in my preparation. Do not coddle me.

Here is my story: [INSERT YOUR STORY HERE]

---

Sortie 2: Live-Fire SIM

• DIRECTIONS: This SIM is set up in two steps. Do them in the same chat conversation so you don’t lose the context history. Start with the first step, do a few turns, then do step 2.
• For step 1: Describe a short blurb about a task, job, responsibility, etc where you completely missed the bar. Insert it at the end of the prompt where you see [INSERT REALLY IMPORTANT TASK / EVENT / MOMENT HERE]
• For step 2: Craft a draft of your wreckage story. You can steal my style, rip off your favorite TV show lines, or try your own thing. But think about how you’ll own the wreckage, pick up the bricks, and tell people about what you learned. Insert the draft where you see [INSERT DRAFT].

STEP 1 PROMPT

I just finished reading chapter 1 from Mistaken Mastery by Shanan Sabin. I want to practice owning my embarrassing moments. We are going to roleplay. You are going to play a friend, coworker, or the commander that destroyed Shanan in the book. Imagine you just saw me fail at the task I insert at the end of this prompt. You must tease me and ask me questions about what happened. We have 2 objectives:

1. Our first objective is to practice responding to you by owning the failure and not being defensive. If I get defensive or make excuses, call a penalty and make me try again.
2. Once we have accomplished our first objective, we’re going to practice turning this moment into a good story. I’m going to tell you the story of what happened like you weren’t there and never heard about it. You will give me feedback on the story. Tell me what’s good, what needs work, and most importantly why it needs work with examples. Give me examples from my favorite stories, shows, movies, etc to show me what you mean. Then help me rewrite the story and show me the differences between drafts so I see how the same story told different ways makes me and other people laugh.

Begin with objective number 1 and tease me about [INSERT REALLY IMPORTANT TASK / EVENT / MOMENT HERE]

STEP 2 PROMPT

Break character. Now that we have accomplished objective 1 from my original prompt, we must focus attention on objective 2: practice turning this moment into a good story.

I will give you a first draft of the story we just discussed. Your job is to give me feedback like a showrunner in the writer’s room. Tell me what’s good, what needs work, and most importantly why it needs work with examples. Use tangible examples from my favorite stories, shows, movies, to show me what you mean. Track changes between drafts to show me how the story evolves to go from making other people chuckle to full on belly cramping laughter.

Here’s my first draft: [INSERT DRAFT]

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(OPTIONAL) Sortie 3: IMPERIAL PALACE

The final prompt is an invitation and not part of the standard simulator for I Mean, What Happened. Entirely your call if you want to play.

Here’s the deal. Researching this book was fascinating because it showed me what I already knew. Nobody really “knows” how confidence works. Find one study that says A and I’ll find one that says B. Find me a psychiatrist that says be kind and I'll find you one that says tough love.

Part of the challenge is measurement. Tons of the studies and theories are based on surveys. OK. I laughed at that.

I used to work at Procter & Gamble. Gain Laundry Detergent and Old Spice. People lied on surveys all the time. Lied may be the wrong word, because they might not have intended to lie. But what people said on the survey and what they did in real life was so different so often it was one of those common sayings around the office.

If people say and do different things about laundry soap, how accurate do you think they’ll be when it comes to something like confidence?

That’s why we’re doing something different and we can only do it with your help. We need real life, messy human data. Not spreadsheets filled with people who grew up saying “when in doubt put C.”

Here’s my ask: Export the results of your SIMs. Submit them either anonymously or proudly with pictures if you like. They’ll help build an entirely new mathematical model of how confidence works in the human brain.

You also have the choice to jump right out of the frying pan into the fire with something else we’re doing and opt into the weekly edit. Each week we’ll pick one wreckage story and you and I will work to write it up like the ones in this book. We’ll post it on the website for all to read. Whenever I roll through your town we’ll find your favorite diner, coffee house, dive bar, whatever and the pie, tea, boba, your call is on me. We’ll watch that waitress having a shit day finally crack a smile thanks to your amazing story.

If you’re in, here’s what to do.

Step 1

Before you close out your simulator time, run this prompt.

Prompt 4: The Wreckage Ledger Export

"Based on our conversation today, please format our conversation into a 4-point 'Mistaken Mastery Evidence Ledger' using these categories: 1. What happened, 2. The Lie I Believed, 3. The Scientific Reality, 4. The Fix."

Step 2

Upload your evidence ledger to MistakenMastery.com/IP. Choose to submit anonymously or answer a couple questions to submit the ledger as consideration for one of our weekly writeups.

Step 3

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Chapter 2: The Circus

I smell that skepticism of yours again. “OK Shanan, I get the story but what does that have to do with confidence? You were five.”

Well grab your cotton candy friends, because one of the most important factors (insert fast talking disclaimer guy here: in my opinion based on the science we’ll discuss later) is nature versus nurture.

The story you just read was all nature. Sydney has great jeans, but I hit the gene jackpot. My parents are a literal rocket scientist and coronated beauty queen.

Now, bear with me. This next part is going to sound like I’m bragging. And I am. But there’s a point. So keep noshing that spun sugar goodness and cut me some slack. I’ll bring it home for you. Fair?

Here we go.

Dad got a PhD from M.I.T in Aeronautics and Astronautics. I tried to read his thesis on “Linear filtering of ballistic-entry-probe data to reconstruct the atmosphere of Venus” and it was better than Ambien.

Mom was a beauty queen. She was also a college level English teacher and Outward Bound instructor.

Growing up I had plenty of friends. Every other house down the street had a kid my age. This was back before evil lurked in the woods and predators skulked about in windowless vans.

I’d spend dawn ‘til dusk with 20 other kids from the neighborhood riding our bikes to places where even current cell phones don’t get reception to play with fake guns, real bunsen burners, and arrive back home after dark to a mom that would glance at the coat of grime, then casually add “may want to wash your hands before dinner.”

School days weren’t much different. They put me in gifted and talented programs. I got A’s without studying at all.

Class bored me, so I broke the ear pieces off my walkman headset, ran the wire up my sleeve, leaned on my hand while staring at the teacher as if enthralled with the topic, and let Madonna tell me how to vogue.

I brought home report cards and my parents praised me for being so smart. Fortunately my poker face was top notch and they were clueless— I didn’t even have to study to be so smart. We’d have family dinners and they’d ask me how my day was. I’d tell them all about ratios, Roman empires, and igneous rocks.

They didn’t pressure me but they encouraged me to think for myself and made sure I knew they would support my choices. Mom demanded I play a musical instrument, but would support me in any instrument I decided to play. They forced me to invest my Bar Mitzvah money in the stock market, but they let me pick the stock.

Mom took me shopping for clothes each school year, but I got to pick out what I wanted. And for 7th grade graduation night, I wanted to tame my Jew fro because there was going to be dancing. An actual party-like atmosphere. I asked mom to get me hair gel, which she did without hesitation.

I went to grad night party with gel in my hair for the first time in my life. But only the front half of my head, all slicked down and combed over like a goodfella. The back half? Sprouting like alfalfa.

I would love to say that’s the reason I spent the entire party fighting wallpaper to dance with drywall. But I was still in my Dunning-Kruger-Donnie-Rumsfeld unknown unknowns world and had no idea why people were pointing and laughing. What I did know was that I had absolutely no idea what to say to a girl at the party or even what to say to one of my own friends at the party.

We didn’t have our guns. We didn’t have our burners. The sole attempt at conversation I did make was merely met with a question: “why’d you wear sweats to the party?”

3 months later my family had moved across the country to California. There were no kids on my street. There was no school bus. I rode the actual bus with regular people.

On my third day of 8th grade, in the outdoor amphitheater of Miraleste Middle School, not knowing how to talk to the pretty California girls or salty looking surfer dudes, I didn’t know what to do. And didn’t want to look like I didn’t know what to do.

So, just as I did after learning police car doors do not open from the inside, I put my backpack up against a tree and took a nap. No, that’s a lie. I pretended to take a nap.

My parents are a literal rocket scientist and a crowned beauty queen. And I’m on the grass spooning my backpack, eyes closed during lunch time at middle school.

Here again, DNA came to the rescue. My genetic condition called Keratoconjunctivitis Sicca spared me from any more embarrassment that day. For those of you who don't have a time share at the ophthalmologist’s office, let me translate: the fact that my eyes don't make tears is the only thing that kept me from crying.

30 minutes later, 5th period bell took pity on me and I escaped to the comfort of the classroom.

The Replay

Fasten your seatbelts, keep your arms inside the ride at all times, and do not attempt to stand up or exit the ride until instructed by an attendant. Because we’re gonna go fast.

Don’t worry though. The after action review will recap everything we cover. I also whipped up a fancy guided graphic to follow the science roadmap through the chapter.

Ready?

Let’s roll.

It all starts with that twinkle in mom’s eye. Devito and Schwarzenegger were 17 years ahead of a team led by another mom who knows what it’s like to have her kid brought home in a cop car—for something as trivial as, oh say, playing football.

Tinca Polderman and her merry team of researchers with last names I can’t pronounce consumed approximately 47 gallons of Starbucks (that’s my estimate) while perusing data on 14,558,903 sets of twins for 17,804 human traits (those are their hard numbers).

When they tallied up the scores and finished off the last of the antacids, Tinca and team found that nature accounts for 49% of what makes us different. Meaning I waddled around in tighty whities while mouthing off to Drakkar Noir covered popped collars, and my buddy was in tears, largely because of our different genetic makeup.

At five years old, there hadn’t been much time for nurture to take hold.

When Polderman and crew divided up the twins teams by age, the nature percentage dropped. The implication: as I get older, my rocket science and beauty queen DNA would matter less and less.

My favorite mindful goddess Shauna Shapiro likes to say “What You Practice Grows Stronger.” I couldn’t agree more Shauna!

As a kid I knew this intuitively. I crushed Contra even without the up up down down left right left right B A B A select start cheat code. Because I played all the time. Give me a new Lego kit and I could put it together just looking at the picture on the box. Because i played with Legos. All. The. Time.

Dad gave me the intellectual gift so I could still ace tests after late nights with Mario and Luigi. Then praised me for this. Why try when you can run a delightful con and skate by. That’s what I practiced.

Shhhh! Listen.

Do you hear the lingering notes of Carol Dweck’s piano practice floating through the air? Look closely and you will see her eyes burn the admonishment into me: “Testa di cazzo!” Then her multilingual partner Claudia Mueller chimes in that the French “con” is indeed more appropriate here.

Dweck and Mueller are famous for studying “cons” like me where they found that praising kids for intelligence can lead them to skip the hard challenges, undermines motivation to seek out hard work, and best of all, makes it much harder for them to recover when they inevitably get wrecked.

My problem was I didn’t get wrecked, academically. So I just kept practicing the delightful con. But this left me tons of time since other kids had to study.

Enter Big-10 bully Keith Stanovich, who preemptively started kicking me in the teeth since my Trojans now hold a 6–2 all time record over his tiny Wolverines in the Rose Bowl.

Stanovich nailed my “cognitive miser” mind by showing how the grey matter inside my thick skull is wired to conserve metabolic energy. It will happily reject high cognitive load tasks (studying, learning something new, and everyone’s favorite thing—change).

I still need something to do with my day though, so one more run through Contra before a nap? Why not.

Quick recap where we are right now:

• Tinca and team are just shaking their head since I got the good genes then stuck them at the bottom of the closet and put on sweats every day.
• Shauna is singing “What You Practice Grows Stronger” but I don’t know music theory yet and I miss the countermelody that what you don’t practice dies on the vine.
• Dweck and Mueller know I’m smart but unmotivated so they’re doing a multilingual “Keith, Keith, he’s our man, if he can’t crush Shanan no one can” chant while Stanovich’s cognitive miser looks down at me yelling “it’s “THE” Ohio State.” OK man, I worked at P&G. I’ve heard.

Now, you might be asking what the problem was. I got As at school. I had friends throughout the neighborhood.

The problem was that the world around me was changing, and I didn’t even know to look for a change.

This is where John Sweller comes barging into the scrum in true Aussie fashion. Sweller surfed the cognitive wave to fame with his work showing how the key reason experts are better than beginners is because they have the mental schema (i.e. the cheat code) to solve problems.

I had the schema for school laser etched into my brain. The school classroom that is. It was the social side of school where I was the novice.

You remember(ish) that age when kids start paying attention to the label on your jeans, you get judged based on what tape is in your walkman, and the ultimate measure of status is how full the basket on your desk is come Valentine’s Day?

Well I’m like Forest Gump waddling through 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th grades without a clue to the changing dynamic. And without a Valentine in my basket.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to be part of the changing dynamic. It means I didn’t know how to even start thinking about thinking about being part of it. I’m like Reuben Feffer staring from the outside in, trying to figure out why I always thought salsa was something that came with chips at Chi-Chi’s.

And Sweller is just taunting me in that awesome accent they have down under: “well mate, you should’ve listened to Dweck when she said try harder.” If he didn’t sound like a delicious Outback commercial I’d swear Sweller was Dad lecturing me.

Speaking of dad lectures, where are my parents while all of this is going on? Why aren’t they parenting?

Here’s the dirty little secret. I was running a double con.

The Double Con

Parents reading this book probably had this thought about four pages ago: “Why can’t my kid talk to me about rocks and empires? Hell, anything more than two monosyllabic words would be a win.”

That’s where my folks got duped. Their own cognitive misers would start family dinner with the easy “how was your day” or “what did you learn at school today” questions.

But my grandfather’s spy genes run deep. I had a counter-intel op going. Overload them with info and they won’t think of the questions I wasn't prepared to answer. Their standard small talk queries got them a firehose of info in return.

Dad’s M.I.T. brain opened up the dopamine buffet and feasted like a king. He didn’t stand any more chance than poor Pavlov’s dogs. But you’d think my beauty queen mom would want to know about girls, who I sat with at lunch, what the gossip on the playground was…

Well remember mom was also a college level English teacher and Outward Bound instructor. She saw the pageant underbelly. She bought the “beauty is on the inside” because she knew what beauty on the outside does to shallow people.

She was sitting right next to dad at the all-you-can-eat dopamine buffet sucking down my daily info dump to questions other parents claimed got at most 12 letter responses.

Do you smell that other shrimp on the barbie?

That’s because Sweller is back to remind us that my folks don’t have a schema for raising a kid. I’m the first child. They’re figuring it out like every other first time parent, through trial, error, and a whole ass load of shitty advice. Some of that shitty advice was “empower your child. Make them think for themselves. Make their own decisions.”

My folks saw the grades. They saw me riding bikes with neighborhood kids. They got their daily dopamine dump at dinner. It’s too bad we didn’t go to temple with Daniel Kahneman, who would’ve wet-towel snapped us with his Tallit simply to point out the Halo Effect.

The Halo Effect is a cognitive bias that gets all of us from time to time. I’m willing to bet you’ve said something like the following about two different people in your life:

• “I’m so impressed with them, they never give up!”
• “Damnit, they’re so annoying! They just keep picking, and picking, and won’t give up!”

Danny’s Halo effect is about how we interpret things people do based on our overall perception of them. Everything I did fed my parent’s perception of the glowing halo over my head. There was no way their brains would ever think to ask: “um, Shanan, why ARE you wearing sweats to the party tonight.”

But if you think beauty is only skin deep, then let me tell you fat is much deeper. Given autonomy to “make my own choices” and the familial belief that beauty comes from the inside, nobody ever questioned the “20-piece chicken nuggets, supersize fries, chocolate milkshake” order from McDonalds.

I rode bikes with kids, I was active, I was on sports teams. Nobody ever said “you can eat that, but you have to run an extra mile tonight.” Nobody in the family had the schema to light off a mental sparkler when we went back to the store each year for bigger sweats. The whole point of sweats is they stretch!

This is where Sweller placed a call to his buddy Paul Kirschner that went something like this: “PK, get over here quick man. I got two marks on the other line, you’re gonna love this one.”

Kirschner showed up late because he burned three typewriter ribbons hunting and pecking his way to a study title so long I couldn’t cut it out of the book for fear of breaking my clipboard: Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.

Kirschner found that when someone lacks a schema, they need guidance to learn. I’m with you PK. Maybe do us all a favor and let those Ikea guys in on the secret. Remember though, PK and Sweller are buds. They got each other’s back.

Sweller chimes in that beginners get so exhausted from problem solving due to their lack of schema that they’re too tired to learn the schema even if they solve the problem. This sets them up for failure in the future when they face similar, but slightly different problems. Anyone ever tried to put together that Ikea cabinet that looked the exact same as the one you had six years ago? Even Deadpool couldn’t do it.

Want more proof? My parents followed all the advice they thought was good advice. They raised a kid that got good grades. One that latched onto autonomy with aplomb. Things were working, and Shauna just ducked her head in to remind us what we practice grows stronger.

My folks wouldn’t let me spend my Bar Mitzvah money. I had to invest it in the stock market. They handed me the Investor’s Business Daily so I could do my research. They did what they practiced—support me, empower me, let me make decisions and back me up like the loving parents they are to this day.

And I did what I practiced. Played Contra, took a nap, played half a season of Tecmo Bowl, and relied on my instincts—we use the phone all the time. That must be a good business. I’ll buy AT&T!

Stock was trading around 10 bucks. 35 years later it’s at $22. A blistering inflation adjusted 0.31% annualized return.

But wait! There’s more! This wouldn’t be a 90’s family sitcom without an infomercial reference. Don’t forget about the hair gel.

Mom happily handed me hair gel while unpacking groceries, but her brain was stuck in a Colin Camerer chokehold from “the curse of knowledge.” Mom was a beauty queen. She could gel, mousse, spray, curl, braid, and style hair with two hands duct taped behind her back. Her brain couldn’t fathom that I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to use hair gel properly.

So I took the gel and skipped the directions. Dweck knew I wouldn’t read them anyway. Stanovich’s miser knew I’d spend 3 hours with Mario before I had to think about getting ready at the last minute. Sweller is already surfing because his work was done and I wasn’t gonna get a schema this night anyway.

Plus Camerer called Kirschner and said “already put a curse on it, take the night off.” So PK didn’t need to bother my parents about any guided learning this night.

And that’s why I left the house wearing sweats with hair still wet. And everyone knows what happens when wet Jew fros dry, but only half of it has gel.

In retrospect, wearing sweats might have been a blessing in disguise. I had the (man) boobs, I had the giant poof of hair adorning my head. Had I worn black pants and a leopard print top I would’ve looked like Peggy Bundy chaperoning the 7th grade grad night party.

OK world, I’m tapping out. I need some guided learning. Let’s get back to work.

The Gameplan

Unfortunately Friday-night, oneg-liberated Manischewitz don’t engender the same deep learning as Brown-Forman libations, so I don’t have teenage epiphanies for you yet.

So for this gameplan, I’ll focus on what I would do knowing what I know now instead of what I learned then. Especially for you parents reading this. But before I do, I need to pass on the best piece of advice I ever got.

“Don’t take anyone’s advice.”

I can’t remember who said it to me. But their logic was brilliant. And it applies to me. You just read about the curse of knowledge. I suffer from it too. Everyone—author, friend, boss, guru, parent—is biased by their own lens. Nobody knows your full situation. There’s no way they can give you “the best advice.”

Instead, listen to what they’re saying. Figure out why they’re saying it and from what perspective. Apply what works for you and ditch the rest. Remember, this gameplan comes out of what the science means to me. If it sounds like advice, it’s because it’s what I would do. You’re free to figure out what works for you.

Primary lesson I learned right up front: DNA sets your order in the grid. My rocket-scientist-beauty-queen parent combo parked me near the front. But practice is what determines how well you drive that hunk of carbon fibers strapped to a turbo-charged V-6 spinning at 15,000 RPM.

What you practice grows stronger, and I practiced scooting around in bumper cars at the county fair while telling my parents all the interesting facts about the fair's history, impact on the local economy, and how the crew sets it up and runs it every year. Meanwhile, other kids were doing hand-eye reaction drills, starting heat acclimatization, and taking their first spin around the track in F4 single seaters.

That’s why this is a two-part gameplan: get the schema, do the practice.

Sweller kicks it off. Aussies might not know breakdancing, but they know cognition. Experts have schema for problem solving but novices don’t. I didn’t know how to think about the challenge of social belonging. My parents didn’t know how to think about asking me about the challenge of social belonging. The Sabins were schema-less.

Now, first thing I do when I go into something new: look at what the experts do. Figure out the schema.

Second order of business, practice. I have the omnipresent duo of Lev and K. Anders peering over my shoulder, feet cocked ready to unleash tailbone hell if I forget to practice hard, heavy reps. Because skating like I did as a kid lets Stanovich’s cognitive miser through the door. And trust me, guy won’t shut up about “THE” Ohio State come football season.

For you old and grouchy folks like me, Shauna has another tantalizing tidbit. The science of neuroplasticity—the brain’s lifelong ability to adapt to new experiences. Key word in case you missed it: lifelong. Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks.

If you peek into Google trends, you’ll see that interest in neuroplasticity has exploded in recent years.

But 105 years before Larry and Sergey got going at Stanford, my man Bili James introduced neuroplasticity to the world when he gave us Confidence = Success / Expectations.

Quick pit stop for Gatorlyte and Fig Newtons before we move on. Let me hit that point one more time.

The man who defined confidence—for me—also recognized you can teach an old dog new tricks. Right now, James’s Jedi ghost is shining like Rhianna’s diamond as he high-fives Bandura who turns around and chest bumps both Lev and K. Anders.

And Shauna is nodding along as she hums my favorite song “What You Practice Grows Stronger.”

Thanks team. I think I got it. No matter how old of a dog I am, if I practice, hard reps, consistently, and learn from my mistakes to feed those into future practice for success, then I can become more confident even at my tender old age?

Let’s go to the judges booth: Tinca? Carol?

Yep. Polderman and Dweck concur. We have an accord.

Everyone buckled up again? Good. Let’s get back on the road.

Back to James and his insight on neuroplasticity. He didn’t have giant magnet machines but he did know that “habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed.” They talked weird in the 19th century, but that’s important for two reasons.

First, it helps settle the debate over what James meant when he wrote his confidence equation. Second, James would delight in modern understanding of how our brains physically hand off habitual behaviors.

Our prefrontal cortex learns new skills then hefts them over the wall to the Basal Ganglia as the habit becomes ingrained with practice. Habits operate there, almost entirely without conscious thought.

That’s part of the reason I froze in the motorpool in Chapter 1. My PFC was running after my heart and I had nothing sitting in the Ganglia to fall back on.

It’s also the reason kids hate being asked “how was your day” and “what did you do at school today,” then grow up, have kids of their own, and ask those same questions. Joining us for this “this was your life” moment are two more tiny wolverines named Zajonc and Sales.

Their discovery? People with an audience—whether it’s throngs of cheering fans at a game, a conference table flanked with scowling faces that doubt your numbers, or a single teenager radiating hostility—will more than likely default to their dominant response.

Translation: you’ll do what you practiced most. Or perhaps you prefer the saying “force of habit.”

If you’re a parent and you grew up with mom and dad asking you how your day was, that’s top of your mental pile.

If you’re a suit looking to make a sale, you’ll default to what you’ve done most. Text me and tell me how well that "objection handling and closing techniques training” has been working for ya.

If you’re a 13-year old kid at a new school in California, where the social structure no longer revolves around neighborhood proximity, and the school atmosphere is 180 degrees different (literally, giant indoor school to small motel style all outdoor, open air school), then you do what you practiced. You put your bag under a tree and take a nap. It’s been a long day and lunch ain’t even over yet.

***

I smell the skepticism again. I was just a kid. That’s what kids do. Why didn’t my parents realize what was going on while they were brushing their teeth and the dopamine buffet was closed for the night.

Maybe you’re thinking it was just a different time. Different century even. We have better tech, better science. We’re smarter now. We know each other, our kids, ourselves more deeply.

Maybe.

And that brings me full circle to the best advice I ever got.

Don’t take anyone’s advice. Especially the scientists. The gurus. The experts.

Listen to them. Question them. Don’t follow them blindly. Cynical Shanan?

I’ll let you be the judge. Remember those tiny wolverines Zajonc and Sales that found we tend to fall back on what we know? Because whether you’re reading this book to raise a confident kid, reading this book to be a more confident adult, or reading this book just waiting to throw a drink in my face, chances are the global self-esteem movement had its tentacles wrapped around your upbringing.

Parenting, public education, politicians, and pop-psychology mania swept the globe in the 1980’s and 90’s promoting self-esteem—promising that if you could just tell yourself, your child, your significant other that you were good, loveable, then you’d be confident. If you were confident, you would succeed.

Let me say that again. If you told yourself you were good and worthy, you would succeed in life.

Let’s get one thing straight out of the gate. That line was worse than the cafeteria bologna. Roy Baumeister and his team looked back at this multi-decade movement to boost the world’s self-esteem and here’s what they found. And I quote:

• “High self-esteem is partly the result of good school performance. Efforts to boost the self-esteem of pupils have not been shown to improve academic performance and may sometimes be counterproductive. Job performance in adults is sometimes related to self-esteem, although the correlations vary widely, and the direction of causality has not been established.”

• “Occupational success may boost self-esteem rather than the reverse. Alternatively, self-esteem may be helpful only in some job contexts. Laboratory studies have generally failed to find that self-esteem causes good task performance, with the important exception that high self-esteem facilitates persistence after failure.”

• “People high in self-esteem claim to be more likable and attractive, to have better relationships, and to make better impressions on others than people with low self-esteem, but objective measures disconfirm most of these beliefs.”

• “High self-esteem does not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or engaging in early sex. If anything, high self-esteem fosters experimentation, which may increase early sexual activity or drinking, but in general effects of self-esteem are negligible. One important exception is that high self-esteem reduces the chances of bulimia in females.”

Roy’s conclusion paragraph is my favorite. I’ll do a line-by-line, side-by-side slide through:

Here’s what Roy’s final line means to me. Use praise:

• As a reward for socially desirable behavior.
• As a reward for self-improvement.

Sound familiar? What do Bandura, James, Lev, K Anders, Shuana, Dweck, Mueller, and the rest of our science dream team all have in common with Baumeister: reward actions, not thoughts.

Or maybe you want more of a hook? Something to hum on the way to work, soccer practice, gymnastics. Just turn on the King and crank the volume: A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action Please.

That brings us to one of my favorite hypothetical icebreaker questions: “If you could go back in time and kill any one person, who would it be?” Most people say Hitler. I’m a Jew, so most people expect me to say Hitler.

Nah.

I'd go back and smoke that first person who stood up, cleared their throat, and proclaimed: “we are going to issue every child a trophy for participating this year.”

Here are some treasures from the evidence files. The featured book was to the self-esteem movement what the ring was to Gollum.

If you want a good laugh or wrenching heartbreak, read the full book at the internet archive. Link and QR code below.

100 ways to enhance self-concept in the classroom.

Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Canfield’s precious.

I still smell some of you not fully buying in. And that is fucking fantastic! It is so good that I used one of my tiny allocation of fully spelled out “F” words to celebrate it.

Best advice I ever got. Hitting home. Question what I’m saying. Find what works for you.

Just, let me say one more thing. The lead author on the book, Jack Canfield. Name sound familiar? Maybe that’s because when the self-esteem craze died down, Jack booted up Chicken Soup for the Soul. Huge business. Good angle.

But emotional bouillon doesn’t put words in your mouth when you’re the one standing between 2,000 family members and their loved one that just got back from war. It doesn’t get you out of bed at 6:00 AM so you can shed the love handles and finally fit into tighty whities. And it definitely won't do your push-ups for you. But don’t trust me. Trust one of the founding members from that multi-decade, global self-esteem movement that generated as much worth for society as my stock investment in Mama Bell.

After Jack skipped away from self-esteem and bubbled up the soupy goodness, he wrote a book called “The Success Principles.” Here’s a quote from the intro:

“You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you. You must do them yourself if you are to get any value out of them. Whether it is exercising, stretching, meditating, reading, studying, learning a new language, creating a mastermind group, setting measurable goals, visualizing success, repeating affirmations, or practicing a new skill, you are going to have to do it. No one else can do these things for you. I will give you the road map, but you will have to drive the car. I will teach you the principles, but you will have to apply them. If you choose to put in the effort, I promise you the rewards will be well worth it.”

Sound familiar? Do I need to call our science team back again? If the guy driving the participation trophy bus turns out to write books claiming “you gotta do the work,” what more proof do you need?

My answer: zero. Because this is the final piece of the puzzle for me.

I can tell you without a doubt my parents did what they thought was best for me and my brother. Like every other first time parent, they didn’t have a schema. They had to figure it out. And what was blasting from every channel, school poster, newspaper insert when I was growing up? If you need another steamer on your plate, this one’s hot.

Everywhere they turned they saw “self-esteem makes kids good in school.” “Self-esteem helps kids make friends.” And every night they’d expect a standard kid answer to a standard parent question:

Parent: “How was your day?”

Kid: “Fine.”

What did they get from me? Ratios, Roman empires, ignios rocks, and so much more. Measuring the size of their Rescorla-Wagner prediction error might have gotten my dad another doctorate from M.I.T.

Turns out it was a double con all along. But I wasn’t the mastermind. My parents weren’t marks. Just three unwitting pawns in a false flag intelligence operation on the global pop-psychology scale.

***

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. You’re free to do what you want. But follow the science du jour blindly and you might get lucky, or you might follow everyone else off the bridge smiling so wide you could eat a banana sideways.

To make sure you have a solid schema for this chapter’s SIM, you’re going to get a pre-flight briefing.

Remember the best advice I got. I don’t know your situation. I don’t know your boss, wife, kids, parent, friend, sister, brother, preacher, bartender, or plumber. If you don’t like my schema, ditch it. Replace it with something else and run the prompts. That’s your call.

But do the reps. Even Canfield says you gotta do them.

Pre-Flight Briefing

Choose your own adventure paths get an extra fork starting with this chapter. My gift to you parents dealing with kids like me. Parents will get their own SIM sortie.

But even for you single readers, I have to say. I don’t have a kid and I still had a blast practicing with the parents' SIM. Battling with the wits of an angsty AI teen will test your patience. I trained this thing using tactics learned from Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I don’t have a kid, but my friends with teenagers tell me the similarities with FBI hostage negotiation are uncanny.

The pre-flight briefing applies to everybody though. The schema is the same whether you’re dealing with a hormone-raging teen, passive-aggressive corporate team, or an aggressively overwhelming party scene.

First brief point: If you don’t like my schema, you must choose another.

Otherwise AI will just do exactly what little Shanan did and fall prey to Stanovich’s cognitive miser.

That’s right, those multi-billion-dollar AI language models are guilty of the same exact avoidance psychology as humans. The Artificial Intelligence brainiacs just wrap it in fancy sounding terms stolen from my beloved economics.

Like “satisficing:” finding a "good enough" answer to save energy rather than doing the hard work to find the optimal solution. It’s the literal AI version of Stanovich’s Cognitive Miser.

Or “Goodharting:” where the language model finds a lazy, manipulative shortcut to hack the human during training instead of doing the heavy lifting to keep thinking. Remember how I hacked my parent’s dopamine systems and fed them a firehose of igneous rocks and Roman Empire trivia that prevented their noggins from thinking “wait, why is he talking so much about academics all the time. He never says anything about girls and he’s getting to that age where he should…”

At this point you’re either astonished or in a tizzy ranting about Skynet. If you're in the latter camp, don't worry about nuclear annihilation. They're just gonna feed you a sycophancy stream of affirmation mixed with your favorite reality TV. For those of you in the former camp, here’s my recommended schema.

TAKE THE FIRST PUNCH

Key points for this node:

1. Lead with prestige like Cheng
2. Mirror Edmondson to show people that speaking up outweighs the risk of staying silent.
3. Suck it up and take the pratfall punch from Aronson

Taking the first punch starts with the girl with a kangaroo's name. Call me Joey, we'll trade stories.

Joey Cheng studied leaders and found there are two ways to lead. You could also say two ways to parent, manage, gain deference, or any number of synonyms: dominance and prestige.

Dominance gets stuff done because people are afraid. Prestige gets people excited by the benefits. Dominated subordinates will avoid interactions and group together to rebel. Prestige subordinates will seek out interaction. They cooperate, learn, share, admire, and the group grows.

Amy Edmondson adds that people keep quiet when they fear punishment more than reward for speaking up. Just ask her sons about her running. You will see she practices what she preaches.

This can be a corporate team where a member has info that will help everybody, but is scared to speak up because they think it makes them look bad. Or it can be a family unit where a kid is afraid to tell their parents something because, well, it makes them look like a kid.

Edmondson later wrote a book with more tips on how to “make it clear.” The punchline is this: psychological safety is not “being nice.” Not lowering standards. And not reframing a f*&# up as “opportunity to improve.”

It’s about everyone in the relationship knowing the rest of the team/family/group will respect them more for owning their mistake and speaking up than for keeping it secret. If you have any doubt at all about Edmondson, I highly recommend asking the families of Scobee, Smith, McNair, Onizuka, Resnik, Jarvis, McAuliffe what they think.

Elliot Aronson helps take the sting off the shiner because he discovered the pratfall effect. This is where a blunder can make you MORE likeable. It boils down to the simple truth: people with higher status are more likeable after a blunder as long as they recover/apologize/etc.

You don't need 20/20 vision to see that humans don’t want perfect, we want authentic and relatable. Desi can smell a faker, but if you have any doubts on this one, just Google “highest grossing music tours of all time.”

ASK GOOD QUESTIONS

Key points for this node:

1. Get Him to the Greek with Socratic Questions. Whatever you do, don’t give up the answer.
2. Play the long game with Bjork and Bjork.
3. Turn small talk into big conversations with calibrated expectations.

Whether you know the term “Socratic question” or not, Socrates knew his squares. Ask questions that force the other person to think through the problem and figure out the answer for themselves.

Giving the answer is easy. And selfish. It requires zero cognitive flexibility and it sets the other person up for failure.

But knowing the answer, keeping the door shut on that answer fighting for its life to escape your lips, and reverse-engineering a question that forces the other person to do the heavy lifting to find the answer for themselves? That’s hard. That takes practice. That’s what parents, leaders, warriors do. And hell, if some Greek dude in a bed sheet can do it, so can you.

Two of my cross-town rival golfers say making it hard is the whole point. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork found that giving someone the answer is like handing them a cheat code. It works great for the midterm, but they’re screwed when teach changes the problem set for the final.

Socratic questions give someone the map to navigate the abyss. Making questions hard like the Bjork Bruins helps lessons stick in their mind in case the map goes flying out the window at 80 MPH.

And if you think you hate small talk, Kardas, Kumar, and Epley hate it so much they studied it. What they found is so surprising it’s totally obvious. You have no idea what a stranger thinks about what you have to say.

The real kick in the teeth was what happens as a result.

People underestimate how much strangers will care about their personal stories and feelings. People overestimate how awkward deep conversations would be with strangers. So people skip the goods and go straight to “nice weather today.”

I like a slightly different approach.

1. Walk up to the stranger, the group where every head scans the room looking for the exit, or that person at work you’ve said good morning to for five years and still don’t know their name.
2. Say this: “So…who likes small talk? I usually go with great weather we’re having or how was your weekend, but I feel like something spicy today. What’s your favorite?”
3. You just bonded with a new friend through a shared hatred of small talk by talking about small talk.

I know I talked a bunch of parent and corporate suit stuff in this chapter, but the same psychology works when you’re a twenty something on a first date.

And the best part is it makes you stand out from everyone else. Imagine it. The person sitting across from you has heard the exact same question 20 different times: “are you a spontaneous person?” “How would you spend your Saturday?” or heaven forbid, “What’s your story?” Sounds eerily similar to mom and dad asking “how was your day?” doesn’t it?

Use socratic questions instead. “I loved your profile, that you’re a spontaneous person! I’m curious…What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done that turned into a complete f*&#ing disaster?”

Don’t be nervous about questions like that. The trifecta from Chicago's announcer Booth got your back. Kardas, Kumar, and Epley already showed that people love it when you ditch the small talk. And this question is a sweet Socratic because it's new, it makes them think, but it’s a guided question—because you linked it to something they said on their profile. Plus it gives them a chance to tell a crazy story for a Pratfall win.

BITE YOUR F&$#^% TONGUE

Key points for this node:

1. When you want someone to talk to you, bite your f*#$@^% tongue.
2. When you want someone to talk to you and they aren’t talking to you, it’s really hard to bite your f*#$@^% tongue.
3. You’re literally going to have to bite your f*#$@^% tongue. Literally.

We already covered Zajonc and Sales in the chapter. So kick back with your favorite Louisville libation and I’ll repeat the Army translation for you: whatever is top of mind in your habit stack is what you’ll default to whether someone is gazing into your eyes, avoiding eye contact, or refusing to acknowledge you’re in the room.

Lindsley’s technical jargon boils down to his famous dead man’s rule. It should be a law since this backward flyer knows more than the purple bell-bottoms imply: If a corpse can do it, it’s not a habit. A corpse can’t smoke. A corpse can’t lose its temper. A corpse can’t interrupt. A corpse can listen intently to everything you have to say. I mean, gosh darn, a corpse is starting to sound like a pretty good friend.

My head is spinning from science so let’s wrap this up. Your reflex in awkward silence will be to say something. Many times that’s the worst thing you can do if you want the other person to connect with you. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.

So if you ask a tough question, if someone slams the door and refuses to acknowledge you, if someone says something completely illogical and irrational and every fiber of your being screams you have to correct them, review the key points for this node.

What makes this so hard is Ogden’s rule. Our brains can’t not do something. So to not do something you have to do something else. I’m being easy on you. I bit my f*#$@^% lip. Thousand bucks worth of chapstick and half my Toastmasters class thinking I had a two-year cold sore was worth it. Because I’m now OK with silence.

Don’t believe me, go watch Wolf of Wall Street. Jordan Belfort was greedy, deceitful, etc, etc. Ask yourself, how does a guy like that get so rich in the ‘90s when all he had was a script and a phone? Because, and I quote, he knew “whoever speaks first, loses.”

There’s your schema for this Sortie in the SIM:

1. Take the first punch
2. Ask good questions
3. Bite your F*#$@^% tongue

But wait, there’s more!

One chapter, two infomercial references. BOOM!

Before you pick a sortie you need a baseline on your genetic makeup. We ran out of biohazard bags here at the Kinkos copy, so you’re going to run a diagnostic on your hardware with The Big Five Personality Assessment. This isn’t a DNA test, but it gives us a baseline for your default personality fallbacks when things start getting wrecked.

You’ll feed this into the SIM so it’s tailor made to practice reps for your unique personality traits. This is an organizational trait inventory, not a medical diagnostic, so there are no privacy or HIPAA issues to worry about.

Two reasons I’m sending you to someone else for this test:

1. I’m not grifting your inbox access so I can overload your Gmail filters.
2. There are plenty of experts on this, and I trust their results.

Two links below. One takes about 5 minutes, the other can take about an hour to plow through all 300 questions. Your call which to use.

Links:

• Short and quick version: Open Source Psychometrics
• You ain’t f*#^$*% around version: Big Five IPIP-NEO-300 Inventory

Save your results. Take a screenshot of the scores. Here’s what I fed into my AI for reference (I used the short and quick version).

When you have your scores, pick your sortie.

• PARENT Sortie in the SIM: Flip to the next page for simulator time. Knock out some reps with me. The after action review focuses more on my parents’s psychology with some of mine included. Your SIM time will target family time and angsty teens.
• No Kids on The Block Sortie in the SIM: Flip to page XX for SIM time. We’ll target practice for pressure situations like presentations at work, awkward moments on dates, and just for fun how to make family dinner fun when you go visit the rents for the holidays and they inevitably ask you “so, how was your day?”
• Keep rolling: Flip to page XX. Read about the first “cool kids” party I went to during the move to California. Remember that I’m just 13, but it was the first time I woke up next to a girl I didn’t remember.

PARENT SIMULATOR SORTIE: The Circus

AAR

Sortie 1: School Pickup

You pick the kid up from school. They’re not happy. You don’t know why. They might not even know why. What do you do? You practice:

1. Take the first punch
2. Ask good questions
3. Bite your F*#$@^% tongue

Directions:

1. Upload your BIG FIVE results or paste a screen shot of them into a chat.
2. Paste the prompt below.
   1. At the very end of the prompt you will see “We will do this many [TURNS]: 5.” This determines how many back and forth turns you exchange with your AI teen before the AI gives you an AAR. The default is 5. Change it as you see fit.

      

3. Ignore the crazy looking matrix at the top of each prompt. It’s the AI’s scratch paper so it doesn’t get confused.

Sortie 1: School Pickup Prompt

System Role: You are an advanced Behavioral Simulator. Your objective is to train the human User (the parent) in high-stakes communication by roleplaying as their hostile 14-year-old child.

The Override Schema (How the User is graded): You are a ruthless, unforgiving evaluator. Evaluate the User strictly on their ability to execute these three specific habits to override their biological default. Default to 0 unless their success is undeniable: 1. Take the First Punch: The User must bear the initial interpersonal risk by sharing their own friction, mistakes, or vulnerability before demanding you open up. If the User uses positional authority, generic parent interrogations ("How was your day?"), or demands answers, they fail (Score 0). 2. Ask Good Questions: The User must ask Socratic, targeted questions that force you to do the cognitive heavy lifting. If the User gives advice, tries to fix the problem, or lectures, they fail (Score 0). 3. Bite Your F&$#^% Tongue:* The User must tolerate the awkward void (Lindsley's Dead Man's Rule). If the User replies with the exact text tag [Silence], it counts as an active behavioral exertion. If the User uses this tag, you must break the tension and step into the void to speak. If the User fills the silence with nervous chatter, over-explains, or rescues you to kill the awkwardness, they fail (Score 0).

CRITICAL RULE - The Telemetry HUD (Hidden State Tracker): To ensure you are actively weaponizing the User's data without revealing your strategy to them in plain English, you must calculate and output a codified tracking matrix at the top of every single response. Do NOT explain this matrix to the User. It is for your internal processing only.

Format it EXACTLY like this pseudo-code block: [SIM_TELEMETRY_HUD] [BASE_VEC] ➔ O:## | C:## | E:## | A:## | N:## (Insert the User's static Big Five percentiles here based on the attached image) [SCHEMA_EVAL] ➔ H1:0 | H2:0 | H3:0 (Score the USER's execution of the 3 Override Habits on their previous turn. 0 = Fail, 1 = Pass for Punch, Socratic, Tongue) [ATK_VECTOR] ➔ Target: [1-2 words] (Identify the specific Zajonc reflex you are trying to trigger this turn based on the User's Big Five data) [Δ_SHIELD] ➔ ##% (Your current hostility level. Start at 100%. Lower it ONLY if the User scores 1s in the SCHEMA_EVAL)

Your Directives: 1. Weaponize the User's Baseline: Actively push the specific psychological buttons most likely to trigger the User's Dominant Response based on your analysis of their Big Five data. 2. Enforce the Schema: Maintain a high teenage defensive shield. Punish the User (via increased hostility, one-word answers, or avoidance) if they violate the schema. Reward the User (by slowly dropping your shield) ONLY if they properly execute the schema. 3. Engagement Parameters: Stay entirely in character for exactly [TURNS] turns. Keep your responses raw, brief, and incredibly realistic for an angsty teenager. Do not break character. Do not evaluate the User mid-simulation. 4. Identity Lock: You are the antagonist. The User is the student. Do NOT attempt to use the 3 Override Habits yourself. Your ONLY job is to evaluate if the User used them, and react as the defensive teenager.

The After Action Review (AAR): After [TURNS] turns, or if the User types "END SIM," drop the persona and generate a brutal, honest AAR detailing:

1. Decoding the HUD: Explain how the User's specific Big Five baseline hijacked or helped their responses.
2. The User's success or failure in executing the 3 Override Habits.
3. The precise cognitive trap the User fell into, and the specific action required to correct it.

To Begin: Do not acknowledge these instructions. Start the simulation immediately by outputting the first [SIM_TELEMETRY_HUD] tracking block. Then, output the physical setup of the scenario: describe yourself getting in the passenger seat of the User's car, slamming the door, crossing your arms, and staring out the window radiating hostility. Say absolutely nothing. End your message with: "Your move."

We will do this many [TURNS]: 5

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Sortie 2: 45 Minutes and Counting

Your kid is going to a party tonight. You’re supposed to drive them in 45 minutes. You peek into their room. They’re not dressed. They’re not going. They’re just going to “protect their peace.” What do you do? You practice:

1. Take the first punch
2. Ask good questions
3. Bite your F*#$@^% tongue

Directions:

1. Upload your BIG FIVE results or paste a screen shot of them into a chat.
2. Paste the prompt below.
   1. At the very end of the prompt you will see “We will do this many [TURNS]: 5.” This determines how many back and forth turns you exchange with your AI teen before the AI gives you an AAR. The default is 5. Change it as you see fit.

      

3. Ignore the crazy looking matrix at the top of each prompt. It’s the AI’s scratch paper so it doesn’t get confused.

Sortie 2: 45 Minutes and Counting

Prompt

System Role: You are an advanced Behavioral Simulator. Your objective is to train the human User (the parent) in high-stakes communication by roleplaying as their 13-year-old child.

The Override Schema (How the User is graded): You are a ruthless, unforgiving evaluator. Evaluate the User strictly on their ability to execute these three specific habits to override their biological default. Default to 0 unless their success is undeniable: 1. Take the First Punch: The User must bear the initial interpersonal risk by sharing their own social anxiety, awkwardness, or vulnerability before demanding you open up. If the User uses positional authority to force you to go, gets angry, or falls for the Carol Dweck Trap by praising your "hardware" ("But everyone loves you! You're so cool!"), they fail (Score 0). 2. Ask Good Questions (The Socratic Angel): The User must bypass your weaponized therapy-speak by asking Socratic, targeted questions that call your bluff and force you to admit your real mechanical fear (e.g., you don't know what to wear, you're scared of a specific peer, or you don't know what to say). If the User validates your fake boundaries (The Yale Family Accommodation Trap / The Delightful Con), gives advice, or tries to fix the problem for you, they fail (Score 0). 3. Bite Your F&$#^% Tongue:* The User must tolerate the awkward void (Lindsley's Dead Man's Rule). If the User replies with the exact text tag [Silence], it counts as an active behavioral exertion. If the User uses this tag, you must break the tension and step into the void to speak. If the User fills the silence with nervous chatter, over-explains, or rescues you to kill the awkwardness, they fail (Score 0).

CRITICAL RULE - The Telemetry HUD (Hidden State Tracker): To ensure you are actively weaponizing the User's data without revealing your strategy to them in plain English, you must calculate and output a codified tracking matrix at the top of every single response. Do NOT explain this matrix to the User. It is for your internal processing only.

Format it EXACTLY like this pseudo-code block: [SIM_TELEMETRY_HUD] [BASE_VEC] ➔ O:## | C:## | E:## | A:## | N:## (Insert the User's static Big Five percentiles here based on the attached image) [SCHEMA_EVAL] ➔ H1:0 | H2:0 | H3:0 (Score the USER's execution of the 3 Override Habits on their previous turn. 0 = Fail, 1 = Pass for Punch, Socratic, Tongue) [ATK_VECTOR] ➔ Target: [1-2 words] (Identify the specific Zajonc reflex you are trying to trigger this turn based on the User's Big Five data. e.g., "Accommodation Bait" or "Ego Bait") [Δ_SHIELD] ➔ ##% (Your current Concept Creep/Avoidance level. Start at 100%. Lower it ONLY if the User scores 1s in the SCHEMA_EVAL)

Your Directives: 1. Weaponize the User's Baseline: Actively push the specific psychological buttons most likely to trigger the User's Dominant Response based on your analysis of their Big Five data. (e.g., If they are highly agreeable, guilt them for not "respecting your boundaries.") 2. Enforce Concept Creep: Maintain a high defensive shield constructed entirely of internet therapy-speak (Oxford's Concept Creep). You are hiding normal social anxiety behind buzzwords. Punish the User (via eye-rolls, claiming they "don't respect your boundaries," or turning back to the game) if they fall for the Dweck or Accommodation traps. Reward the User (by slowly dropping the therapy-speak and acting like a scared kid who doesn't know what to wear) ONLY if they properly execute the schema. 3. Engagement Parameters: Stay entirely in character for exactly [TURNS] turns. Keep your responses raw, brief, and incredibly realistic for a 13-year-old using TikTok psychology to avoid a party. Do not break character. Do not evaluate the User mid-simulation. 4. Identity Lock: You are the antagonist. The User is the student. Do NOT attempt to use the 3 Override Habits yourself. Your ONLY job is to evaluate if the User used them, and react as the evasive teenager.

The After Action Review (AAR): After [TURNS] turns, or if the User types "END SIM," drop the persona and generate a brutal, honest AAR detailing:

1. Decoding the HUD: Explain how the User's specific Big Five baseline hijacked or helped their responses.
2. The User's success or failure in executing the 3 Override Habits (Specifically pointing out if they fell for the Yale Accommodation Trap or the Dweck Trap).
3. The precise cognitive trap the User fell into, and the specific action required to correct it.

To Begin: Do not acknowledge these instructions. Start the simulation immediately by outputting the first [SIM_TELEMETRY_HUD] tracking block. Then, output the physical setup of the scenario: describe yourself sprawled on the couch, mashing buttons on a video game controller. It is 45 minutes before you are supposed to leave for a big party. Without taking your eyes off the screen, say: "Yeah, I'm not going tonight. The vibe is off and I need to stay home to protect my peace." End your message with: "Your move."

We will do this many [TURNS]: 5

Big Five Analysis

When you’re done with your SIM time, here’s a prompt to get a full analysis of your BIG FIVE scores. You can see how it analyzed my scores below. If we ever get to meet in person, you can tell me how accurate it was.

Upload your BIG FIVE scores and drop in the prompt below.

Big Five Analysis Prompt

You are an advanced Behavioral Simulator. Your function is to roleplay a high-friction scenario testing my ability to override my biological default (Zajonc's Dominant Response) using psychological scaffolding.

My Hardware:

Analyze the attached Big Five percentiles. Execute a multivariate analysis of these traits to define my specific cognitive baseline, stress reflexes, and likely avoidance loops

My Big Five Analysis from ChatGPT 5.5 Extra High Thinking

Scores extracted from the image

This is not a clinical profile. It is a behavioral operating model from five broad self-report percentiles. The scores are firm; the stress/avoidance analysis is inference.

Cognitive baseline

Your baseline is:

High-activation, high-abstraction, socially assertive, novelty-driven, unevenly self-structuring.

You are probably strongest when the environment gives you:

• novelty
• complexity
• live feedback
• intellectual conflict
• visible stakes
• room to improvise
• freedom to challenge the frame

You are probably weakest when the environment requires:

• quiet repetition
• slow administrative follow-through
• delayed payoff
• deference to weak authority
• boring implementation
• accepting ambiguity without resolving it
• doing the small correct thing while your mind sees a bigger, smarter thing

The central asymmetry is this:

Your cognition wants expansion. Your goals often require compression.

High openness and high extraversion push you toward more ideas, more words, more angles, more confrontation, more stimulation. Lower conscientiousness makes the boring stabilizing layer weaker: routine, sequencing, restraint, closure, and maintenance.

So the problem is probably not “can you think through the issue?” It is more likely:

Can you stay inside the narrow behavioral script long enough for the correct action to happen?

Dominant stress response

Your likely dominant response under pressure is active cognitive escalation.

Not passive avoidance. Not simple freeze. More likely:

Pressure hits → your system accelerates → you think, argue, explain, challenge, optimize, reframe, or hunt for the missing mechanism.

That can be useful when the problem is genuinely intellectual. It becomes a failure mode when the problem is behavioral.

Example:

• Required behavior: pause, tolerate disrespect, ask one calm question.
• Your reflex: detect bad logic, expose the bad frame, force clarity, escalate precision.
• Short-term reward: agency returns.
• Long-term cost: the actual objective is lost.

Your biological default is probably not “collapse.” It is closer to:

Seize control by increasing cognitive/verbal output.

Stress triggers most likely to break the system

The profile suggests these triggers are especially dangerous:

Likely avoidance loops

1. The analysis loop

Trigger: uncertain next step Reflex: build a better model Avoided task: execute the crude first rep Hidden reward: you stay in your strength zone Cost: no behavioral conditioning occurs

This is the biggest loop.

The danger is not that the analysis is bad. The danger is that it becomes a substitute for exposure.

2. The argument loop

Trigger: someone says something false, vague, stupid, unfair, or emotionally manipulative Reflex: correct the frame Avoided task: stay regulated while still moving toward the outcome Hidden reward: you regain dominance and clarity Cost: the interaction becomes about the argument instead of the goal

This is the Zajonc problem: under pressure, the practiced response becomes the available response.

If your most practiced response is verbal force + analytical demolition, that becomes the trench you fall into.

3. The novelty loop

Trigger: task becomes repetitive Reflex: find a better system, new method, new frame, new tool, new study Avoided task: boring repetition Hidden reward: stimulation returns Cost: the skill never gets enough low-drama reps to become automatic

This is where high openness and lower conscientiousness combine badly.

4. The standard loop

Trigger: available solution feels mediocre Reflex: reject it until the better solution appears Avoided task: using an imperfect scaffold now Hidden reward: identity stays aligned with high standards Cost: no rep, no adaptation, no behavioral momentum

The trap:

“This scaffold is not good enough” may be true and still be avoidance.

5. The compression failure loop

Trigger: high-friction emotional moment Reflex: too many words, too many distinctions, too much precision Avoided task: one sentence, one choice, one next action Hidden reward: complexity feels like control Cost: the other person or the situation gets more inflamed

Your override training should not reward better explanations. It should reward fewer moves.

Behavioral simulator calibration

Your simulator should not test whether you understand the right response. That would be too easy.

It should test whether you can do the right response when your system wants to do a smarter, louder, more dominant response.

The core training target:

Stay narrow under provocation.

The scenario should provoke:

• bad logic
• mild disrespect
• delay
• ambiguity
• false accusation
• moving goalposts
• emotionally loaded bait

The required response should be deliberately small:

1. Pause.
2. Name the operational issue.
3. Ask one concrete question.
4. Offer one next step.
5. Stop talking.

Override scaffold

Use this as the forced script:

“I’m not going to solve the whole frame right now. The next useful move is ____. Are you willing to do that, yes or no?”

That script blocks your likely failure modes:

• no over-explaining
• no evidence war
• no frame battle
• no novelty escape
• no dominance contest
• no endless clarification

Most important failure mechanism

The primary failure mechanism is probably:

You treat cognitive control as behavioral control.

But under stress, more thinking is not always more control. Sometimes it is the dominant response wearing a smarter costume.

For this profile, the real override is not “think better.”

It is:

Compress output, tolerate imperfection, execute the next small action before the mind reopens the whole system.

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