No Success Like Failure: UNLIMITED POWER, by Anthony Robbins (Part 3)

“Hard, sharp…smooth, flexible…stiff.”

*****

The natural extension of controlling your own mind is bending the world to your will, for what is the world independent of your perception of it? If I’m sick, but I tell my mind that I am not, and my mind listens, then I am well. Mind 1, Reality 0. At least that would be the score if Robbins believed in reality. Instead, a more accurate tally might simply be Mind 1, or Mind Won.

Despite the ease with which a number of Robbins’ observations can be ridiculed, he does occasionally hit on a point that smacks of truth and, dare I say it, profundity. Take, for example, a line like “Nothing has any meaning except the meaning you give it,” which, if you presented to me divorced from its speaker—say, as a bumper sticker or beneath the signature on an email—I would have a hard time arguing against and might even stop a moment to consider its depth. I do believe that much of life is perception and that success and failure hinges on choices we make when opportunities emerge, opportunities that are, more often than not, of our own making. I draw a line at being able to “pop” into and out of clinical depression, and, indeed, I wonder if 25 years down the road Robbins might want to rethink that one, in the same way that he might want to rethink including the promise by a couple of overly ambitious entrepreneurs that air travel from New York to California will take 12 minutes by 1996. History has proven that goal to be preposterous, and, even with the allowance that hindsight is 20-20 and all that, I have a hard time believing that it was ever really seriously on the table. However, this represents exactly the kind of big-idea thinking that Robbins champions (or at least the kind of thinking that he wants to steal), and, in fairness, I am loathe to mock someone for having a dream, even if it is stupid.

Where Robbins loses me is in his notion that bending the world to his will means that the world exists to serve him. This isn’t making lemonade out of lemons. This is demanding that the lemonade be made for you. Oh, sure, he makes some noise about ensuring the purity of your motives—“It goes without saying you do whatever it takes to succeed without harming another person,” he says in a footnote, though, apparently given Robbins’ audience, it had to be said—and he includes someone else’s recommendation (of course) about what percentage of your earnings should be earmarked for charity, but this emphasis on good deeds appears near the end of the book, long after everyone is done reading, and, in any case, the idea is to give because it will come back to you, which is really just giving to get, which is no kind of giving at all. His argument in favor of vegetarianism fascinates because he focuses exclusively on what it can do for him and fails to mention any environmental concerns or the inhumane treatment of animals, which—I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here—tops the list of why most people who don’t eat meat don’t eat meat.

As I read, I kept wondering, “If everyone in the world adhered to this way of thinking, would the world be a better place?” The answer is that, no, it would not, because the philosophy expressed is, at its core, selfish, and, though Robbins cautions against letting your drive hurt others, I bet he allows for different gradations of “hurt.” What happens when my world bumps up against his? Since everything is created, accidents don’t exist, so any offense has a very specific agent if one requires retribution (or at least if one perceives he requires retribution, which, according to Robbins, is all that really matters).

Failures are to be celebrated, because we should reward the person who ventured to take a chance. Robbins lists Great Men (and, yes, they are all men) failing and failing and failing again, the most famous failure being Abraham Lincoln who faced defeat repeatedly before finally breaking through and ascending to the presidency (and how’d that work out, huh?).

But what if your failures belong to somebody else? What if, say—oh, hypothetically— you and a number of people that you care about deeply all lost your jobs because of the whim of others?

I know how Robbins would accommodate such an event—recast it as an opportunity, focus on what you can achieve with all of that found time, things happen for a reason and all of that fucking shit—but I find it unacceptable to advance a worldview that denies the reality of the situation and that refuses to admit that some things are beyond our control.

“If you don’t believe that you’re creating your world, whether it be your successes or your failures, then you’re at the mercy of circumstances,” Robbins writes. “Things just happen to you. You’re an object, not a subject. Let me tell you, if I had that belief, I’d check out now and look for another culture, another world, another planet. Why be here if you’re just the product of random outside forces?”

“Check out now”? You’ve got to hand it to the guy: Not many motivational speakers recommend suicide. The dead can’t attend refresher classes. The truth is that I know a whole bunch of people who would be on another plant right now, to steal Robbins’ phrase (see, I’m learning), if they actually adhered to this belief. 

Swear to god, I had no idea.

I worked for a company that was part of another company that was owned by a parent company, though the term “parent company” has never sat well with me because any parent who treats his children like most parent companies treat their offspring would expect a visit from the Department of Family Services. Come to think of it, that’s not a half-bad idea: A DFS for negligent parent companies.

Honestly, I was never sure just how far we were removed from the parent company. Mom and Dad seemed to be working through some issues, and we were caught in the middle like a summer house. Every six months or so someone would subject me to a new org chart, but it took longer than I care to admit to realize that “org” mean “organization,” which gives you an idea of what those charts meant to me. Speaking from the kids’ point of view, I rarely felt supported, let alone loved, by our alleged progenitors and instead felt akin to a foster child, a charity case that seemed like a good idea at the time but that had long ago been cropped out of the picture that graced the front of the Christmas card. This image of a modified holiday photo is actually more apropos than you might think, as, near the end that we didn’t yet recognize as the end, our little piece of the company was told to scrap our own holiday party and instead to crash the party that was being hosted by another branch of the company. I say “little,” but we’re talking 160 employees here, which made it all the more humbling when the larger group at the party that night absorbed us all and still I hardly recognized a soul. You think you matter, that you’re part of something, and then one day you realize that you don’t, you’re not. Talk about a charity case.

Not that any of the dysfunction at the top influenced our day to day. Our job was to create educational-resource books, and we did just that with passion, enthusiasm, and care. We were a young group, so details like whether page ranges should be separated with an en dash or a hyphen or whether the “f” in “F/ferris wheel” should be capitalized still mattered. Manuscripts would move from the writers to the editors to the proofreaders, and after each step of the process they would come back lousy with queries, each member of the team doing everything he or she could to make the book as sound as possible. One woman was so proud of her first project that she inscribed it with a note in her native Indian dialect and presented it to her parents.

There was some turmoil. For whatever reason the turnover rate was exceedingly high, which meant that people were forever shifting jobs to fill open roles (I didn’t once begin and end a calendar year in the same position during my five-year tenure), and one ominous December a restructuring cost a number of people their jobs. But even that was communicated as a kind of correction, a necessary cutting of dead weight in order to avoid sinking and to ensure that it would be smooth sailing from there on out. (Sorry, Dead Weight. Their line, not mine.)

The truth is that the only money we had in the first place was because of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Policy, which flooded the states with money to spend on test-prep materials. When the president left office, so did our livelihood. At meeting after meeting, we would ask, What does the new administration mean for us? What are we making now? Who’s going to buy it? With what money? Everyday the news reported more jobs lost, more cities struggling. So? we said. We’re still trying to parse that out, they replied. Well, consider it parsed.

The irony was rich: Not only did we not support the Bush administration, but we were outright hostile toward it. The greatest day any of us had ever had at work was when we circulated a clip from The Daily Show the day after Vice President Cheney shot that guy in the face. We openly howled. Just goes to show what an idiot he is. What idiots they all are. Oh my god. Can you believe it? Actually, I kind of can. Our only regret was that the guy didn’t die. That would have really put Cheney in a bind. Not a single one of us would have walked across the street to shake President Bush’s hand let alone vote for the man, yet the policies of his bumbling administration were inextricably linked to our lives. We never would have admitted it, but he was good for us.

Like him or not--and none of us did--his fate was entwined with ours.

A year after we cut all of that dead weight in a last-ditch effort to stay afloat, the whole outfit sank all the way to the bottom. They called a special meeting on the first Tuesday in January, herded us all into a single room so they only had to bloody one blade, and then some man none of us had ever seen before told us we no longer had jobs. There were few questions. A packet we were supposed to receive later in the week promised all of the answers anyway. As the guy was still talking, I remember thinking, What am I supposed to do tomorrow? And then immediately after, When did I forget how to spend a free day?

A friend was on vacation at the time. His wife saw my Facebook status when they landed nearly a week after her husband had been let go. They had been incommunicado in the interim. “A stiff drink at the end of a bad week,” the status said. “Uh-oh,” she thought. Another friend was due to deliver her first baby at the end of February, right when her company-supplemented insurance would have been discontinued. She ended up having the baby the day before she lost her coverage. My wife and I had been trying to have a second kid at the time. I acted cool when I got home from work that day, let her attend her yoga class in peace while I watched the boy. After she got home, I said, Honey, we should talk. We decided to stop trying until things got more stable.

The strangest part of the whole ordeal was that we were told in January that we were being terminated, but our last day wasn’t until mid-February. The house was shuttered, in effect, though we continued living there. This made for a strange five weeks, in which we put a bow on projects we were looking to sell and attended company-sponsored resume-building seminars that more often than not deteriorated into group-wide bitch sessions, our growing disdain for the leadership—who had abandoned their offices with suspicious haste, by the way: just how long had they known?—was scarcely defused by discussions about how to stick a 30-second interview, just in case you’re asked to interview between floors on an elevator.

For my part, I used these five weeks to explore other options in the company. I know, I know. To return to the sinking-ship metaphor: I decided to move to a spot that was dry for now, which didn’t mean that I wouldn’t eventually be scooping out water by the bucketful again. (To our references to Never Been Kissed, Office Space, Seinfeld, and Friends let’s go ahead and add “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” shall we?) As much as I like to think of myself as an adaptive, freewheeling spirit, I am really a creature of habit, so much so that I find great comfort in taking the same train to the same part of town and buying grapes from the same street vendor each and every business day. Plus, I have this naïve idea that as much as an employer invests in an employee, the employee also invests in the employer. A symbiotic relationship exists between the two: you give me wages, benefits, and the security that enables me to build a life, and I’ll give you my best for a full third of my life as we work together to realize our shared goals. Does that sound so ridiculous? (Don’t answer that.) I won’t go so far as to say that I owed the company anything, but I will say that building on the foundation of four years seemed like a smarter move than starting over from day one.

The rodent in the hat? That was me.

So, much to my muted glee, I landed another job within the company. Five times more responsibility at the same wage. Didn’t matter. I bought a good bottle of whiskey on the way home that night. Let’s celebrate. Vacation days and insurance for everyone! Best of all, we can start thinking again about expanding our family again. I had survived. My belief that pleasant, respectful, hard-working employees would be rewarded in the end had been tested, and it had passed. No matter what happened, I would always have a place.

Back at the office, however, I stayed quiet about my good fortune until the last week when I started slowly disseminating the information like I was a politician sending up test balloons. I was one of the few people company-wide who was staying. None of the people with whom I had worked on a daily basis for half a decade had found anything, either within the company or elsewhere. This was the height of the recession. There wasn’t anything out there. I mean, like, nothing. They had wives and kids too, ideas about how their lives were supposed to proceed. Nonetheless, they greeted my news with enthusiasm. Hey man, that’s great. Congratulations. Right on. Things were so bad that good news for one meant good news for all. At least one of us is going to be OK. Take solace in that, anyway. Despite their kind words, I had a hard time seeing it that way. In my mind, they seethed at me. Motherfucking traitor. Of course he’s staying. Brownnoser like that, what else is he going to do? I hope he’s damned to middle management for all time.

We were supposed to get drinks on the last day, but everyone was too depressed to do anything other than go home and be by themselves. By this point, mine was the only desk that wasn’t cleared off, the one house on the block that hadn’t been leveled by the tornado. People brought me offerings: a pig fashioned out of a corkscrew and pushpins; a handwritten note that said “a shy, stuttering man playing Bingo”; a pencil drawing of an executive meeting in which one of the participants had pulled a gun, another of the men sitting at the table saying, “What the shit, Dave?” I thanked them, shook hands, offered and received hugs. One by one, they would say their goodbyes and then disappear down the hall, a third crying, a third cursing, and a third clicking their heels.

Eventually, just I and the woman who had inscribed the book for her parents remained. We had built something like an actual friendship over the years. Ours was a relationship that was based on antagonizing one another. We teased and mocked and when one of us made the rare error or misjudgment the other would make sure it became part of the permanent record, which is why once a day I would ask her why, six months earlier, she had told a member of my staff to transcribe Genesis word for word. Do you know how many rules you’re violating, I would say. Kirby! She would respond, and she’d tighten her fists and jut out her chin and bug out her eyes in faux hatred. When she played Prospero to my Caliban during some festivities celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday, everyone screamed with laughter. “Abhored slave!” she bellowed. I cowered. “Oh my god,” everyone said. “That’s how you two treat each other in real life.” Deep down, of course, we respected the hell out of each other. We once argued fiercely about the correct capitalization of “double Dutch.” She claimed that only the “d” in “Dutch” should be capitalized, but I told her that the dictionary had “double” up as well. “In all of my books at home, I’ve never seen ‘double’ capitalized,” she raged. “Just how many books do you have on the subject?” I asked. I would attend her wedding later that spring.

In the end, it was jut the two of us on our last day. On her last day, I should say. “Well,” she said, and gave me a hug. I watched the last of my colleagues walk out the door.

Never what you want to see.

My wife says that I have a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from the events that started on the first Tuesday of the New Year and ended shortly after President’s Day. I don’t want to overstate the situation, but I have a hard time denying something close to survivor’s guilt anyway, if not exactly PTSD. I’m hardly Oskar Schindler saying This watch, this watch, but there was a sense that I should have gone with them, if only out of a solidarity. “Family” is a little strong, but “team” captures it well, and teams win or lose together. I was winning, though it somehow felt like a loss. And, besides, the person who stayed behind was a husk of his former self. I needed a new ID, but I got it into my head that if I asked for one they were going to let me go. I kept quiet in meetings, when I knew I should have spoken up, made promises that were impossible to keep. I thought, If I keep my head down, say yes when asked, they won’t know enough to let me go. It was a classic case of an athlete playing not to lose rather than playing to win. We were moving from our downtown office to an office in Soho. I had started at the company before we moved to the downtown locale. I was one of the few who had been there the entire time. Despite all that had happened, I felt secure there. The impending move worried me.

I was convinced that that they weren’t going to move anyone just to let them go. Surely they wouldn’t make the financial and logistical investment just to cut ties at the new digs. Surely they wouldn’t lead you on like that. I would surreptitiously ask where I was going to sit at the new place. Before a seating chart became available, I was just sure I wasn’t going to be on there. Kirby, we’ve got some bad news. I was going to swipe my badge and be denied. Please see the building manager. My wife was pregnant. She liked her doctor. The doctor had delivered our first baby, which had been a challenging birth. I felt comfortable calling in when the boy was sick. I had accrued 20 days off. Twenty. One morning, the seating chart appeared on the wall. There I was, right with the rest of the team. Proof. Hard evidence that they were counting on me at the new place. I was a member of the team. A new team, yes, but a team, regardless. Everything checked out, but, still, something felt wrong. My grandfather lived all 82 years of his life in West Virginia. After he moved to Missouri, he was dead in two weeks.

I lasted three in Soho.

I know what Robbins would say about all of this. “You created this show you call unemployment.” Really, you can just plug in one perceived weakness for another: You created this show you call depression, unemployment, addiction, stagnation, your life. “If you believe that you’re the ball on the tether, waiting for someone to hit it, that’s how you’ll behave,” he writes. “If you believe that you’re in control, that you can change your patterns, you’ll be able to.”

It’s as simple as that. Only it’s not.

Alone on the 22^nd floor, after my sparring partner had left, I surveyed the ruins. Another branch of the company would move in soon. I would move to another side of the building and never pass that cluster of desks without a wave of nostalgia overtaking me on good days, a wave of sorrow on bad. Weeks before the axe fell, a woman from HR called and said, Hey, how many desks you all have down there? A project we had been developing all year was put on indefinite hold. They took an inventory of every computer in the building. Rumors swirled that our budget hadn’t been approved for the following year. Omar coming, Omar coming. A friend and I requested a meeting with our supervisor. No one said “boss” anymore. It was “supervisor” now. What’s going on, we asked. What do you mean, she said. We told her what we knew, pieced the puzzle together. The imagination you have, she said. You should really write a book.