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If you run into obstacles on the way to an important goal, and you feel your motivation starting to fade, or if people have been telling you you’re foolish to keep trying, I urge you to watch Lorenzo’s Oil. It’s a true story of a husband and wife (Augusto and Michaela Odone) and their five year-old boy, Lorenzo.

They were a happy family who moved to the U.S. after living for awhile in the Comoros Islands. Lorenzo began having behavioral problems, so they took him to one doctor after another, trying to get a diagnosis. Nobody seemed to know what was wrong with him.

Finally they found a doctor who did the right kind of tests. The doctor sat the parents down in a quiet room and gravely told them the diagnosis: “Your son has a fatal disease. He might live another two years, but during that time, the white matter of his brain will slowly liquefy, and then he will die. There is no treatment for this disease. Nothing can be done about it.”

They were at the best facility they could find. The tests were thorough and extensive, and there was no mistake: Lorenzo has a disease called adrenoleukodystrophy (known simply as ALD).

What would YOU do if it happened to you? They were, of course, devastated by the news. No matter how well-schooled you are in the science of determination, news like that will knock you down, at least at first.

Very little was known about the disease, but Augusto (Lorenzo’s father) started reading about it. He found the progression of the disease unthinkably horrible. Kids go blind and deaf, become autistic, lose their ability to speak, become paraplegic, have seizures, and so on over a period of two years. And then they die.

And nobody knew how to stop it.

Augusto and Michaela were plunged into a black despair that would be hard to imagine. When anyone hits a setback, demoralization is almost always the first response. The only question is, “How quickly will you recover your fighting spirit?” How soon, if ever, will you regain your determination?

The answer depends entirely on how you explain the setback to yourself. If the Odones believed the doctors, they would have given up on their son. They would have felt helpless and depressed.

But they decided there must be a way.

In other words, the setback was: Lorenzo has ALD.

The explanation the doctors gave was: It is a fatal disease without a cure. That’s a demoralizing belief, and makes four thought-mistakes: overcertainty, negative guessing, self-defeating conclusions, and false hopelessness. Many people felt sorry for the Odones because the couple were obviously living on “false hope.” But if you look at the the doctor’s conclusion (there is no cure for ALD) you can easily see it was a premature conclusion. It was not a certainty that a cure was impossible. And it was unnecessarily demoralizing to say it with any certainty.

The Odone’s explanation of the setback was not demoralizing. They believed the cure had not been found…YET. And they decided to help find the cure. Their explanation was the opposite of demoralizing — it was powerfully motivating.

Even if they wanted to do something about it, most people would not because of another set of demoralizing beliefs: Who am I to think I could help? I’m an ordinary person. How could I find a cure if all these doctors and researchers haven’t found one? These thought-mistakes would prevent most people from trying. They would give up.

But the Odones knew better. Augusto said to Michaela, “What did we do when we first arrived in Comoros? We read about it. We read about their culture, their history, their laws. That’s what we need to do now. We don’t know enough about this disease.”

So they went to libraries and started reading as if their son’s life depended on it. They stayed up late and got up early. They read books on biochemistry, biology, neurology. They read microfiche, pursued references, talked to researchers, and followed every clue they could find. They shared with each other what they were learning and what ideas they came up with, they argued with each other, and they kept trying.

Why did they keep trying? This is the crucial question. They kept trying and stayed motivated because the way they explained their setback to themselves set them on fire with determination and commitment. Please remember that. When you feel demoralized by the setback, look at your explanations. Use the antivirus for your mind. Your motivation depends on it.

They discovered several researchers in different places working on the disease, but they worked in isolation from each other. The Odones thought they might speed up the process of discovery by funding a symposium, so they did. They got all the experts together in one room to discuss ALD. Maybe pooling their insights would help them find a new approach.

The Odones were trying to find a way. And they were urgent because the clock was ticking. Every day their son was losing more myelin (the protective sheath that covers the neurons in his brain). Lorenzo was going blind, couldn’t speak, and was no longer able to feed himself.

At the symposium, in a conversation between scientists who each brought different pieces of the puzzle to the table, they concluded a particular oil might help. The Odones tracked down a manufacturer who could make it, and tried it on their boy. Their goal was to keep his level of long-chain fatty acids low. Those were the acids destroying his myelin.

The oil helped some, but not enough. They did more reading and found another line of possibility. They needed another oil extraction of a different kind but it couldn’t be made legally in the U.S. So they found a chemist in England who could do it.

And the combination of the two oils achieved the goal! The level of fatty-acids in Lorenzo’s blood became normal. The oil is now used as a treatment for boys with ALD (girls don’t get the disease) and if it is started early enough, it stops the disease completely in many of them, allowing them to lead normal lives.

Lorenzo, however, did not return to normal. He had lost too much myelin. But he recovered some of his functions (including his eyesight) and is now 28 years old.

Have the Odones given up? Of course not! They started The Myelin Project, aimed at finding a way to re-myelinate neurons. It has already been successfully done in dogs.

The movie is one of the most inspiring I’ve ever seen. If you would like to see a demonstration of determination in action, if you would like to see a real-life example of the power of persistence, if you would like to put the difficulty of your own goals into perspective, watch Lorenzo’s Oil.

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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I had always been slim until I was about 35. Then I started to put on weight and it bothered me. My first response was the obvious solution: I tried eating less. But then I was hungry a lot and I kept “falling off the wagon” and eating too much, so every few pounds I lost I gained right back (plus a little more). That was discouraging.

I felt discouraged, so what did I do? I used the antivirus for the mind: I wrote down my demoralizing thoughts and argued with them on paper. I discovered several mistakes I made in my thinking, and my desire to try again resurfaced. I decided the situation wasn’t hopeless, and I should try a different tack.

I was already exercising regularly, but to lose weight I started exercising more. I thought I could keep ahead of how much I ate. I would stoke my metabolism so high that I lost weight. And it worked for a little while.

But then I injured my knee. What a setback! That was very demoralizing. Can you see why? The best kind of exercise for losing weight is aerobic exercise. How can you get aerobic exercise without using one of your knees?! It’s almost impossible (I didn’t have access to a pool).

This setback took the fight out of me. I gave up on trying to be slim. And I gained weight. I also felt bad. I was depressed. I was surprised at how disheartened I became. I got up to almost 200 pounds. That’s not really obese for a six foot, two inch man, but I wasn’t slim any more, and it looked like it would just continually get worse.

I’d like to say I used the antivirus for the mind, but in this case, I didn’t. My wife, Klassy, did it for me. “I can’t lose weight without aerobic exercise,” I said one day, “and I can’t exercise because of my knee.”

“Maybe there is some way to lose weight you don’t know about,” she said, “My dad used to say it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know. Maybe there is something you don’t know about food or exercise — maybe something you don’t even suspect you are ignorant about.”

This was a brave thing for her to say, really, because one of my hobbies has been to study about nutrition, and it has been a strong interest of mine since I was fourteen. I pretty much thought I knew everything about nutrition.

I’m not casual about the things I study. When I say I was “interested” in nutrition, I mean I had read maybe eighty books on the subject, had a subscription to several health magazines for years and read them with keen interest, and I read the monthly Consumer Reports on Health newsletter, the Berkeley Health Newsletter, etc. This was a strong and enduring interest of mine and I thought I knew almost everything about it.

But when Klassy said that, I realized I really didn’t know everything, of course, and maybe there was something outside my knowledge — a way to lose weight I didn’t know about.

The idea that I might not know something — just entertaining the possibility — introduced uncertainty, which is a very powerful antivenom. Uncertainty about a demoralizing belief weakens the power of that belief. It instantly makes you less demoralized and more open to solutions.

As it turned out, a short time later Klassy’s cousin sent her a book called Protein Power, and I read it. Nothing in this biochemically sophisticated book contradicted what I knew about nutrition, but the conclusion was totally different than anything I’d ever read before: that modern people eat far too many carbohydrates than our bodies have evolved to deal with, and a simple solution to losing weight is to eat fewer carbs.

Everybody knows about it now, but at the time, I had never read anything about low-carb diets. I had heard of it, but assumed it was a diet scheme guaranteed not to work (because it was impossible to sustain) like something in the category of “the grapefruit diet.”

I immediately started eating fewer carbs and within two months I lost twenty pounds and stayed there. I felt great. And of course, I was no longer demoralized. In fact, I was happy. I wasn’t helpless about my weight after all.

The cause of my happiness can be traced back to the introduction of a little uncertainty — Klassy helped me feel uncertain about my pessimistic conclusion (that losing weight was hopeless for me).

I was, however, still depressed about my knee. It had been years since I went for a good hard run and I had always counted on that to keep me in a good mood.

I pulled out my trusty tool again — this antivirus for the mind — and looked at the knee problem. After arguing with my pessimistic beliefs on paper, I didn’t feel so demoralized. My motivation returned. I wanted to do something about it, but I didn’t know what. I needed the advice of an expert.

I didn’t want to go to regular doctors because I figured all they could offer was drugs or surgery. So I decided to go to a physical therapist first. I figured if that didn’t work, I could always try something else. But if I got surgery first, I might not be able to try something else.

It was a great decision. The physical therapist told me my main problem was a lack of flexibility. She said when muscles contract again and again without stretching out, over time the muscles get shorter. “When your hamstring gets shorter,” she told me, “it pulls on your knee.” She gave me some flexibility and strength exercises I could do. I did them, and the pain went away! That was almost ten years ago and I haven’t had any knee problems since then. Every once in awhile, I will start to feel some pain in my knee, but I just do some stretching and within days it is gone.

When life presents you with a setback and you feel demoralized by it, the first and most important thing to do is undemoralize yourself. The fastest and surest way is to question your demoralizing, negative thoughts. Inspect them for mistakes.

And as you find mistakes in your negative assumptions, your feelings of discouragement will start to lift. Your mind will open and new ideas and information will be allowed in. You will start doing things to solve the problem (now that you no longer feel defeated by it) and your chances of overcoming the obstacles will increase tremendously.

Mistake-free explanations of setbacks make you highly resistant to feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, discouragement, demoralization, and depression. The habit of explaining setbacks without making those mistakes gives you the ability to bounce back, to try again, and to refuse to give up when things don’t go your way.

Feeling not-at-all defeated by setbacks does more than prevent you from giving up. It makes you more successful at accomplishing your goals. It makes your tasks easier and more fun. Giving up on a goal feels bad. Trying to “push on” when you feel demoralized is not only difficult, it’s no fun.

If you can try again after setbacks, your life will be one of growth and accomplishment. If, on the other hand, even half the time, you give up after a setback, your life will be full of unfulfilled dreams and wasted potential and outright failure.

Every time you try to make your marriage better and your spouse seems reluctant to communicate, every time you try to do a good job at work and run into a problem, every time you decide to get in shape and pull a muscle, your explanatory style — your usual way of explaining setbacks to yourself — will make the difference between trying again or giving up.

And the way to ensure you’ll try again is to write down your negative thoughts and then argue with them. Use the antivirus for your mind.

So now you know. Nature has divulged her secret. You have a powerful weapon against feeling demoralized, disheartened, or depressed.

Practice several times a week, arguing with your own negative thoughts. Sit down and do it for a half-hour at a time. Or simply do it every time you feel even slightly demoralized. You hit small setbacks every day. Use those to train your mind. Write your explanations and criticize them every day.

Habitual mistake-free explanations make you healthier, happier, and more successful. The habit will move you toward accomplishment, success, courage, determination, persistence; toward wins and health and satisfaction.

Here is a summary of how it works:

1. The mind automatically and unconsciously explains setbacks.2. The explanations sound plausible but don’t necessarily have anything to do with what really caused the setback.

3. Those explanations have an enormous impact on what you’re capable of and what you decide to do. They influence your attitude, your mood, your relationships, your ability, your creativity, and your health. What you think matters.

4. To uncover your explanation (to find out what it is) ask, “What do I think caused the setback?”

5. The most effective way to improve your explanations is to simply try to correct mistakes.

6. It works best to write out your explanations and arguments.

7. You can feel better quickly by arguing with your negative thoughts.

The skill to improve is to make your explanations contain fewer mistakes. The skill that will benefit your health, the skill that will bring you more success, the skill that will give you more positive emotions and fewer negative feelings is making your explanations contain fewer mistakes.

Form this habit: Whenever you feel negative emotions, discover what you are thinking and see if anything is wrong with it.

Whenever you feel down: Search for mistakes in your negative thoughts.

Here are the thought-mistakes for easy reference: 22 Virus Definitions

Tags: examples by Adam Khan
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For easy reference, here is the list by itself. Each link goes to a description and examples of the thought-mistake.

1. exaggerating
2. overgeneralizing
3. oversimplifying
4. extremism
5. overcertainty
6. negative guessing
7. self-defeating conclusions
8. false implications
9. choosing the worst possible explanation
10. false helplessness
11. false hopelessness
12. shoulds and musts
13. misplacing responsibility
14. focusing too narrowly
15. harmful judging
16. asking unanswerable questions
17. bias for confirmation
18. using emotions as evidence
19. dismissing facts
20. ignoring alternatives
21. assuming
22. negative bias

Find out how to use these to increase your persistence, restore your determination after a setback, and recover your lost motivation: Antivirus For Your Mind.

Tags: virus definitions by Adam Khan
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Why would anyone focus on one negative aspect of a situation? Why would anyone dwell on the most upsetting aspect of the circumstances? Why would anyone think depressing thoughts, knowing those thoughts make them depressed? Do people want to feel bad?

No.

You, me, and everyone else wants to be happy, but we’re all under the influence of four powerful negative biases.

Really the driving force behind all 22 of the thought-mistakes are these negative biases. So let’s go into some detail about them right now, because they will help illuminate the rest of the virus definitions.

The four biases are:

1. The brain’s negative bias
2. Reality’s negative bias
3. Communication’s negative bias
4. The media’s negative bias

These four biases drain away your life force, much in the same way as a lamprey. A lamprey is a fish with a suction cup for a mouth that attaches itself to other fish and drinks their blood. When that fish is dead, the lamprey lets go and finds another fish. Learn more about lampreys here.

Lampreys are a good metaphor for the devastating impact negative emotions have on people. Negativity has a way of attaching itself to your mind, draining you of your health and ability — not metaphorically, but literally.

Negative emotions produce heart disease and strokes, encourage the development of cancer, and even weaken your bones. Negative ways of thinking and perceiving the world can take away your creativity, your persistence, and your ability to achieve your goals. Negative emotions undermine your relationships, ruin your sense of humor, and destroy your ability to solve problems. And they damage your ability to remember.

A negative bias is a lamprey of the mind, a deadly parasite, and this parasite uses your lifeblood, your energy, your mind, to breed and spread to other minds, using and destroying life force wherever it goes.

These are the four negative biases.

1. The brain: Your brain reacts more strongly to negative information than it does to positive information. Threatening images capture your attention more compellingly than pleasant images. When your mind isn’t otherwise engaged, it drifts randomly until an upsetting thought occurs. Then your mind will stop drifting and think about the thing that upsets you.

Because of the brain’s stronger reaction to (and greater fixation on) negative images and thoughts, the naturally-occurring thought-mistakes brains are prone to make produce a pessimism, cynicism, and defeatism, all three of which are self-defeating and counterproductive. Read more about the brain’s negative bias.

2. Communication: Because of the media and the pressures of social interaction, negativity has become chic. For social reasons, people you talk to will often withhold good news and share bad news. And a prominent topic of everyday conversations has an inevitably negative tone: talking about grievances. You and everyone else on this planet are compelled by your own biology to gossip — to share your complaints about other people, to listen to complaints about other people, and to sympathize with the complainer.

On top of all this, your most significant goals are likely to be stomped on my well-meaning friends and family.
This makes any conversation an opportunity for lampreys to invade your mind. Read more about communication’s negative bias.

3. Reality: It is usually easier to notice and remember something going wrong than something going right. This leads to pessimistic (and false) conclusions like, “My boss is always on my back,” or “My wife never wants to do what I want to do.”

Reality’s negative bias works in several different ways. Sometimes no matter what decision you make, things will turn out badly. Under certain circumstances, the cut-throat behavior of others encourages nice people to be more cut-throat just because of the nature of reality.

To make all this even worse, once reality shows its negative bias, it is natural to form negative conclusions that then function like self-fulfilling prophesies as your mind automatically seeks evidence to confirm your conclusions. Result: A tendency to become more pessimistic, cynical, and defeatist as you get more experience dealing with reality. Read more about realities negative bias.

4. Media: Because of the brain’s negative bias — combined with the intense competition between stations — producers and advertisers constantly exploit your natural reaction to threats of danger. The unfortunate side-effect is the airwaves are filled with hour upon hour of pessimism-producing programs.

And they use all the know-how at their disposal (which is considerable) to keep you glued to the set longer than you want to be, absorbing a distorted view of the world as a far more dangerous and depressing place than it really is. Read more about the media’s negative bias.

The negative biases function like a lamprey of on your mind, draining you of life — sapping your strength and determination, impairing your health, and weakening your ability.

You obviously care about having a good attitude. Let us destroy the lamprey of the mind and bring back the determination, the positive attitude, the openness, the love, the accomplishment, the self-expression that was once native to our minds.

Begin here: Antivirus For Your Mind

Tags: virus definitions by Adam Khan
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