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One antidote is to pursue multiple paths, generating different ways to win. This meeting

or that proposal no longer means everything. If nothing is do-or-die, then you don't have

to worry so much about the dying part. Confidence self-fulfills as well. If you can bring

more of it to an interaction, you're more likely to succeed, which of course creates more

confidence for the next interaction. The cycle can bring you up, or it can bring you down.

It's up to you.

If you're on a speaking tour with forty events booked, it doesn't seem as bad if one fails.

If you have three great job opportunities, you can be a lot more comfortable in each

interview. You may be saying, "Sure, that would be nice," but nice isn't the point. Effort

gets you to this nice spot; effort and planning are tools to beat the resistance before it

beats you.

The Paradox of the Safety Zone

The resistance would like you to curl up in a corner, avoid all threats, take no risks, and

hide. It feels safe, after all.

The paradox is that the more you hide, the riskier it is. The less commotion you cause, the

more likely you are to fail, to be ignored, to expose yourself to failure. We tried to set up

an economy where you could hide your big ideas, go through the motions, and get what

you needed. That's not working so well now.

The Resistance Works to Destroy the Tools That Oppose It

Getting Things Done could actually help you get things done. A Whack on the Side of the

Head could help you be creative. Sales training could in fact help you make more sales.

There are books and classes that can teach you how to do most of the things discussed in

this book. And while many copies are sold and many classes attended, the failure rate is

astonishingly high.

It's not because the books and classes aren't good. It's because the resistance is stronger.

Few people have the guts to point this out. Instead, we turn up our noses at the entire

genre of self-help. We cynically ridicule the brownnosers who set out to better

themselves. We marginalize the teachers who are unaccredited or not affiliated with

Harvard, et al. It's a brilliant plan by the resistance, and it usually works.

Don't listen to the cynics. They're cynics for a reason. For them, the resistance won a long

time ago. When the resistance tells you not to listen to something, read something, or

attend something, go. Do it. It's not an accident that successful people read more books.

Symptoms of the Lizard Brain

The resistance is everywhere, all the time. Its goal is to make you safe, which means

invisible and unchanged. Visibility is dangerous. It leads to the possibility of people

laughing at you, or even death. Change is dangerous because it involves moving from the

known to the unknown, and that might be dangerous.

So, the resistance is wily. It works to do one of two things: get you to fit in (and become

invisible) or get you to fail (which makes it unlikely that positive change will arrive, thus

permitting you to stay still).

Here are some signs that the lizard brain is at work:

Don't ship on time. Late is the first step to never.

Procrastinate, claiming that you need to be perfect.

Ship early, sending out defective ideas, hoping they will be rejected.

Suffer anxiety about what to wear to an event.

Make excuses involving lack of money.

Do excessive networking with the goal of having everyone like you and support you.

Engage in deliberately provocative behavior designed to ostracize you so you'll have no

standing in the community.

Demonstrate a lack of desire to obtain new skills.

Spend hours on obsessive data collection. (Jeffrey Eisenberg reports that "79 percent of

businesses obsessively capture Internet traffic data, yet only 30 percent of them changed

their sites as a result of analysis.")

Be snarky.

Start committees instead of taking action.

Join committees instead of leading.

Excessively criticize the work of your peers, thus unrealistically raising the bar for your

work.