Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [69]
The question may well be: How much truth can you take? An athlete may feel uncomfortable watching a video of herself using incorrect technique, and the salesman may squirm to look back on his projections, but such is the price of self-improvement. Successful people don’t shy away from the honest record. Management guru Peter Drucker relates this to a person’s career, saying:
The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or twelve months later, compare the actual results with your expectations. I have been practicing this method for fifteen to twenty years now, and every time I do it, I am surprised. The feedback analysis showed me, for instance—and to my great surprise—that I have an intuitive understanding of technical people, whether they are engineers or accountants or market researchers. It also showed me that I don’t really resonate with generalists.
Feedback analysis is by no means new. It was invented sometime in the fourteenth century by an otherwise totally obscure German theologian and picked up quite independently, some 150 years later, by John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola, each of whom incorporated it into the practice of his followers. In fact, the steadfast focus on performance and results that this habit produces explains why the institutions these two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came to dominate Europe within thirty years.
Imagine being confronted with the actual amount of time you spend with your daughter rather than your rosy accounting of it. Or having your eyes opened to how truly abrasive you were in a conversation. Right now, only very special friends could confront me with such facts in a way I would accept. And they receive my thanks for helping me grow as a person. In fact, for such a mirror of ourselves, we sometimes pay such special friends and call them therapists or counselors.
It’s up to you: You can tackle as much or as little truth about yourself as you have the stomach for. In court, we ask for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It might be painful, but I believe better memory really is better.
ADAPTING TO BEING RECORDED
Of course, having Total Recall to help with your self-awareness is one thing; having a spouse drag up e-memories to berate you is another. Even worse, imagine a moment of weakness being posted to YouTube by a bitter former friend. The Total Recall revolution implies that others are recording just as much as you are. That’s a big change to adapt to.
The world is already adapting to being recorded. Google has cars drive down streets with a 360-degree camera on the roof of a car to create their street views for their maps. As soon as they were launched, street views prompted an outcry by people concerned that they would be shown in places or situations that were embarrassing to them. Sure enough, street views have included such things as men entering strip clubs, the view up a girl’s skirt, a man relieving himself against a bus, and a police bust. Canada’s privacy minister warned Google that street views may be illegal there, and many other countries have raised legal questions. The U.S. military prohibited pictures of military bases. In response to these reactions, Google began blurring faces and license plates in the pictures, and also has taken down many of the embarrassing ones (however, copies live on elsewhere in the Internet). The world is still adapting to street views.
Wearable computing pioneer Steve Mann has a unique response to being recorded: He “shoots back.” Ever since he was an MIT graduate student in the 1980s, Steve has been wearing a computer-and-eyewear combination that captures the light that would have gone to his eye, sends the signal to a computer, and then presents a computer-processed image for him to actually see. His view can thus be altered or