Unthwarty: Two Examples of Unthwartability

MY GRAMPA LIVED NEAR Kitty Hawk when he was a kid, and used to go watch the Wright brothers testing their aircraft. One time, because the Wright brothers wanted to shut the mouths of the doubters and improve the accuracy of some of the crazy stuff newpapers were printing about their work, the brothers invited reporters out to Kitty Hawk for a demonstration.

Everything went wrong. It was raining pretty hard and they were having trouble with the engine, so they didn't even get a chance to do anything until late afternoon. They made one attempt that day, and although the aircraft got up some speed, it never got off the ground.

The rain didn't let up, so they had to wait two more days before they tried it again. This time they got about seven feet off the ground before the plane crashed. The next day, a New York Times headline said, "FALL WRECKS AIRSHIP." It was over a year before any reporters came out for another visit.

But the Wright brothers continued their work, as determined as ever. Why? It all boils down to how they explained the setback to themselves. If they told themselves their goal was impossible, or that they weren't capable, or some other explanation that took the wind out of their sails, they would not have pursued their goal and would have disappeared into oblivion. But their explanations of the setback must have been rooted in temporariness. They just needed to make some changes to the engine or whatnot. It was fixable. It was changeable. That kind of explanation is what keeps people motivated and determined in the face of setbacks. It's not willpower. It's the way setbacks are explained. Remember that.

"Through some strange and powerful principle of 'mental chemistry' which she has never divulged," wrote Napoleon Hill in 1937, "Nature wraps up in the impulse of STRONG DESIRE 'that something' which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts not such reality as failure." Nobody knew what it was back then. Nature has since divulged her secret. The unremitting efforts of cognitive scientists have rooted out yet another of Nature's secrets. It is an unthwartable explanatory style that makes people persistent in the face of setbacks.

A clergyman in his fifties had written the manuscript for a book. Since he lived in New York where all the publishers were back in those days, he spent quite a bit of time going into publishers and asking them to look at his manuscript. Nobody was interested. It can, of course, be disheartening to get rejection after rejection. One day, while he was talking to his wife, he threw his manuscript in the trash, saying he'd had enough. His wife knew how much the manuscript meant to him, so she reached in to pull it out. "No," he said, "I've wasted enough time on it. I forbid you to take it out of there."

The next day, his wife was thinking about it and got an idea. She took the manuscript to another publisher still inside the wastebasket. She did not take it out of the trash. The publisher, intrigued by this unusual way to bring in a manuscript, read it, and published it, and boy is he glad he did! The book became one of the bestselling books of all time, selling fifteen million copies! The ironic part of the story is that the book is the famous, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.

That story is so ironic, I had some doubts it was true, so I wrote to the Peales and heard back from Mrs. Peale, who said yes, that's the way it happened.

Positive thinking is obviously different than explanatory style. With positive thinking, I'm sure Norman Vincent Peale would have felt good about throwing that manuscript in the trash. With an unthwartable explanatory style, he would have simply tried again, perhaps in a different way.

What kind of explanation would make someone throw away their life's work? He must have thought something like, "My book is unpublishable." Or "Nobody wants it."

Mrs. Peale must have explained it differently. Perhaps, "It hasn't been seen by the right publisher." Or maybe, "It hasn't been delivered the right way yet. Perhaps in a trashcan would do the trick!"

If you ever feel demoralized, write down your negative thoughts and then go back through what you've written and find out if you've made any mistakes. If some of those demoralizing thoughts are mistaken, your discouragement will vanish and your determination will arise in its ashes. Read how to do it here: Antivirus For Your Mind.