U PSTREAM E FFECTS #2: E NTRAINMENT

MANAÑA, MANAÑA, MANAÑA 

We were seated together on a flight from Dublin to Dubai.

“Oh, it was a disaster. I love the Spanish, but how did they ever manage to build an empire?”

She laughed. “I know, eh? When I was in the Madrid branch, they needed to approve everything  before it went out — not just final reports, but even an email to a single client.”

“Everything?” I asked.

“Yeah. So it’s my second week, I go to my boss, it’s Wednesday,” the accountant continues, “and I say — I’ve got this basic outline for the client, can you approve it to send it out?”

She pauses a moment, continues in a different voice imitating her boss in a Madrid accent: “Oh, umm, how about next Tuesday?”

The Irishwoman raises an eyebrow. “And I say, umm… well… and she says, ‘It’s so busy lately!'”

You can she her recalling the memory, and she chuckles before continuing: “So lunchtime comes around, and my manager says — want to go out to lunch? I say yes, I figure she wants to talk about the report. We go out, we chat a bit about everything — food, parties, men — and the report doesn’t come up. In our three hour lunch.”

“Huh? How’d you get by there?”

“I eventually just gave up. I like to work, but how can you? Everyone says ‘I’m so busy, I’m so busy’ and everything is 'Mañana, mañana, mañana’ — you ask them to do something, it’s ‘I’m so busy, mañana’ — I think they actually believe they’re busy and are stressed about it. It’s like, things get written on their to-do list at the bottom, but the stuff at the top never gets done. It just gets longer and longer.”

She twirls her hand in a whimsical gesture in the air. “Mañana!”

***

THE MISSION’S NOT OVER UNTIL...

The Petty Officer has been awake nearly 28 hours straight, snatching only a few moments of vigilant half-sleep aboard the transport going in both directions.

Aware and in-tune with his body, adrenalin and cortisol rising didn’t make him nervous and jerky; he harnessed it; he functioned most strongly on the border of Condition Yellow and Red, heart beating 115 beats per minute; that spot where fine motor control does not give way, yet reflexes move lightning fast. Controlling his breathing is second nature, adjusting his level of arousal and periodically re-centering to the zone to suit the mission. 

The biochemical feedback loops could get out of control, tear one’s body apart — not so, in this man’s case. The training had seen to that. Now, there was no excess thinking; the training became execution. The mission, the team, was all and everything.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say he wasn’t feeling the aftereffects of the stress hormones, intense exertion on the body, and the fatigue. 

But that’s what they trained for.

Once back at his quarters, the mission was still not over. Stay in Condition Yellow. He spreads his gear over his work bench, breaking things down into the meticulous patterns, losing sight of nothing. He dissembles his rifle and sidearm, stows the remaining ammunition, inspects and cleans every piece, before delicately polishing the rifle’s scope. The weapons cleaned and maintained, he re-packs them.

He examines his go-bag — no damage, but a bit of dirt on one corner — and takes an old t-shirt now turned into a rag, wets it with a dash of soap, and scrubs the corner thoroughly before running the wet rag over the rest of the bag.

He checks the bag, the straps on it — nothing frayed.

The exhaustion and effects of adrenalin withdrawal were there, but irrelevant.

He removed the used batteries from all the electronics and threw them in the trash, and packed new batteries into his go-bag. His knife hadn’t been drawn this mission; nevertheless, he drew it, inspected it, re-sheathed it, and packed it.

He inventories, counts, and re-counts his gear, and then places his go-bag in its customary place on the shelf, ready to be grabbed on the way out the door.

He checks every one of his pockets before stripping off his fatigues, and walks to the washing machine in his underwear. Standing over the washing machine, he checks the pockets again — he knows they’re empty, but checks again — before putting them in the washing machine.

He pours in detergent, strips off his underwear last, throws it in, and presses the button to start the washing machine.

Walking into the bathroom, he turns the shower on to maximally hot, and only when the water hit his skin does he allow his mind to truly succumb to the waves of fatigue that had been lurking in the background. 

Before fully giving way to the withdrawal and exhaustion, he feels along the lines of his ankles, elbows, wrists — no damage — and checks his fingernails and toenails. Then, transforming from ultra-warrior to exhausted man, he lets the water run over his face and temples, thinking one last thought before his mind mercifully switches off — “Mission accomplished.”

***

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

What accounts for the difference between how the lazy manager at the Spanish accounting firm does things, and how the Navy SEAL does things?

Both are real people. Scenes like that played out sometime in the last week somewhere in the world.

You can read about the discipline of the SEAL Teams in memoirs and guides written by their veterans. And you can find stories of half-assed managing all over the world, even at the most elite firms (of which the Irishwoman worked at, in the Spanish branch).

Maybe it’s silly on the surface to compare an elite soldier and an accounting manager, but then again, maybe not. Professional soldiering is a set of training and discrete tasks; if accounting isn’t also a series of training and discrete tasks, then what is?

Richard Machowicz was a sniper for the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams. In his excellent book “Unleash the Warrior Within,” he writes —

“For us in SEAL Team, work was only over once we were physically back home. The conventional wisdom said that the operation wasn’t over until we were actually back in the showers at home. Up until that point, nothing could be taken for granted. When you are going toward your extraction point after you have taken out your primary target, you can get ambushed on the way home. Once back, when you’re cleaning your gear, putting everything away so that you are set up for the next mission, you could have a loaded round in your weapon and accidentally shoot yourself or someone else through carelessness or lack of attention. There were times I was so dog-tired after a twenty-hour day in the field, I had to fight the call of sleep during that final half hour it would take to clean my M14. It was a chore that I would have loved to have blown off were it not for the fact that my training drilled into me the fact that a professional doesn’t quit until every task is complete."

*** 

DID THE SPANIARD HAVE A CHOICE?

Here is a question for you —

The Spanish accounting manager made two very simple choices — to procrastinate approving a report for six days because she was “too busy," and then to take a long lunch with her direct report without even pretending to be busy. This resulted in someone on her team being demoralized, work backing up, the manager being the bottleneck, the client waiting a week unnecessarily and getting worse service, and — eventually — the work of that branch drastically slowing down.

Here’s the question —

Did she have a choice in the matter?

***

THE WAY THINGS ARE DONE AROUND HERE

Here’s my answer, maybe it’ll be controversial —

No, she didn’t have a choice.

And that’s not meaning to pardon or condone negligence.

But I don’t think she had a choice.

“Can you look at this?” “Next week” — the reply was automatic. Reflex. There was no decision there, no real thinking, no real reflection.

She probably wouldn’t have even thought through the matter explicitly; this was simply “the way things are done around here."

***

ENTRAINMENT RULES OUR LIVES 

The word “habit” has, unfortunately, become very popular in recent years.

It’s thus morphed, expanded, contracted, gotten confused. The word is useful still, I think of the habits I’m running, but most people associate habits with seeming “additions” to life, things like “flossing” or “going to the gym three times per week.”

We should talk about a different type of habitual behavior — entrainment .

Entrainment is a not-actively-conscious, nearly automatic response to a stimulus.

A member of SEAL Team goes through the motions of checking, re-checking, cleaning, maintaining, and storing their gear post-mission repeatedly. When a mission ends, that entrainment takes over — check, re-check, clean, maintain, store — and the work gets done.

At this particular accounting firm, the entrained behavior is “mañana, mañana, mañana” — when asked to do something, immediately reply that you’re busy and you’ll get to it… later.

This has nothing to good with good or bad, good or evil, moral or immoral. I would even go a step further and say that it’s not about being lazy or diligent. 

It’s about entrainment.

***

ACTUAL THINKING DOESN’T HAPPEN MUCH

In my social circle, we regularly have ‘salons’ — gatherings of smart people who discuss high-concept stuff. We actively fight against smalltalk and frivolity, and try to uncover the various secrets of the universe.

Typical salon format is hosting it with one other person, and each of the two hosts will invite half the guest list. We’ll hold it at a cool cafe, low-key restaurant, someone's home, or a park. We first make sure we’ve got a core group such that we’d be happy if none of the might-make-it people show up. Then we invite the likely-to-come people to build the group out. Finally, we might invite a few people we don’t know and want to get to know — authors we like, local luminaries, distant acquaintances, friends-of-friends we admire.

Over the last couple years, one repeatedly fruitful conversation at salon has been: “How much time are people actually thinking and making decisions?”

Not once has an elite person suggested a number higher than 10% of the time.

10% of the time is the highest number I’ve heard. I’ve heard as low as “close to zero percent of the time."

What’s happening the rest of the time?

Entrainment. Running automatic patterns.

You eat today whatever you’ve been eating recently.

You start the morning today however you’ve been starting the morning recently.

If you’ve been reading as a default leisure activity lately, you keep reading. If you haven’t been, you don’t read.

Your reply to a request for something is the same reply you’ve given lately.

***

ENTRAINMENT AS ONE OF THE MOST KEY UPSTREAM EFFECTS

Let’s look at part of Machowicz’s quote again —

“There were times I was so dog-tired after a twenty-hour day in the field, I had to fight the call of sleep during that final half hour it would take to clean my M14. It was a chore that I would have loved to have blown off were it not for the fact that my training drilled into me the fact that a professional doesn’t quit until every task is complete."

I think, if someone wanted to rip part of this quote and put it on Twitter, they’d likely put down —

“A professional doesn’t quit until every task is complete.”

I think that’s a misguided excerpt.

A better one would be —

“My training drilled into me the fact that a professional doesn’t quit until every task is complete."

Trying to apply heroic willpower, make the right decisions in the moment… this can be useful for brief periods of time, and it’s necessary to fight and struggle with if you’re trying to establish new or different ways of doing things.

But you can’t fight your life as a series of moment-by-moment struggles. If you do, sometimes you’ll clean your gear and put it away, and sometimes you’ll lose that struggle and take the lazy way out.

No, willpower alone is no answer.

Training is key.

Entrainment is key.

If you’re not so lucky as to work for a world-class organization with elite training, you’ll need to set up your own training protocols.

***

ENTRAINMENT IS STUPIDLY EASY TO DO

It’s stupidly easy to start doing entrainment for yourself. 

You pick a single type of action, behavior, or situation.

You carefully think through what the ideal response is.

You train that response into yourself so it becomes automatic.

***

NANCE’S COMMITMENTS FILE

Greg Nance is the CEO of ChaseFuture, a venture-funded company changing the EdTech landscape in Shanghai. Prior to that, he’s has a thriving and winning life — playing high-level sports in high school, winning the State of Washington Debate Championship his senior year, going to UChicago and founding the nonprofit Moneythink there which has been honored by President Obama for helping change financial education for young Americans, getting his masters at Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, and doing a variety of ultra-endurance runs, mountaineering, and other elite athletics. 

As you can imagine, he gets asked for lots of things — introductions, reports, book recommendations, files, collateral, etc. Besides working with his terrific staff, he’s got a network across three continents doing exceptional things.

He’d always prided himself on reliability, but one day in Shanghai, he realized things were starting to drop. He’d say he’d get something to someone, and then the delivery would be haphazard.

Common enough, right? All the time, I have people saying they’ll send me a book recommendation, music recommendation, article, thoughts on a topic, whatever — and then not do it.

This is normal, right? We’re all busy.

It’s understandable, right? It’s hard being a busy startup CEO.

It’s acceptable, right?

No.

Not for Nance. He thought about this problem, and eventually his solution was to create a “Commitments” file in the app Evernote.

Everything he committed to do, he immediately wrote there.

This wasn’t about him being great, noble, or lofty — he just simply started doing it every time. Every single thing he said he’d do went in the Commitments file.

Soon, it was second nature.

Entrainment.

Then he’d sweep through his Commitments file, usually daily, but at least weekly. Everything started getting done.

It spread through our network — Stepan Parunashvili, the brilliant Scientific Technologist and most likely youngest programmer at Facebook, took this up from Nance.

From Nance-via-Stepan, I picked this behavior up too. Whenever I say I’m going to do something, I either note it in my Commitments file immediately, or I write it down on my iPhone’s notes or email it to myself, both of which get swept into the Commitments file soon after.

Just like that, a whole class of behavior — promising to do something for someone — went from being shaky and haphazard to being nearly automatic.

Entrainment.

***

There’s hundreds of little behaviors like this. Successful people adopt them frequently and often.

Planning the next day the night before, every single night, is one of them. If you do it enough times, it becomes automatic.

But wait, what if you’re not going to be at your computer and not going to have paper when the night ends? This happened to me numerous times; on those days, I would forget to plan the next day and suffer for it.

In those cases, instead of trying to be heroic, you just analyze the behavior and make adjustments. For me, I was used to planning the next day right before I slept. But now, I know there’s certain types of days — a red-eye flight, for instance — where I won’t do it. On those days, I’ll plan the next day in the mid-afternoon before boarding the flight, or whatever else.

The key shift here is going from trying to remember or choose the right thing, to trying to design your future behavior and response to stimuli.

Your entire morning routine works this way — always drink water upon waking, always check calendar and commitments on waking, block the internet with the Freedom app or block specific websites with the SelfControl app to start the day — these are all easy to entrain.

Doing a weekly review every single Sunday, and making that the first thing you do on Sunday — entrainment.

Default replies to “Can you help me with this?” and “Can you mentor me on this?” are critical. Saying yes blindly to things can be fatal if you’re busy. What’s your default reply? “Can you send me a half-page document that explains my role and what you want?” goes a long way.

What’s your default suggested length of time for a meeting or call? Is one hour is too long for most situations?

On the meetings topic, whenever someone suggests one, immediately counter-suggest, “Can you send me an agenda for it of what we want to get done?”

If a meeting is starting and there’s no agenda, say, “Hey, before we start, do we want to draw up an agenda of what we want to accomplish?”

***

ENTRAINMENT OF EVERYTHING

The above are brief examples — the key is to gradually go to work on all your default entrained patterns of how you act.

The Spanish manager says, “Ehh, I’m busy” automatically — without thinking. It’s entrained at this point.

America's elite soldiers have been trained to always clean and maintain their gear after a mission, and stay vigilant until that’s complete.

Two pieces of advice —

1. If you’re unused to this pattern of acting, start gradually. Far better to have one or two things you actually install than a few dozen that you don’t.

2. Counterintuitively, I recommend you start doing entrainment on areas you’re already good at and already succeed at. Entraining behavior can become second-nature eventually, but it’s a different way of doing things at first. (The “heroic” or “willpower” or “I’ll get it right when the time comes” approaches tend to be what most people do.) So stack the deck in your favor by doing this in an area where it’ll be easy for you. Attack problematic areas after you’ve gotten practice in areas you’re already broadly successful.

***

IN SUMMARY: BUILD ENTRAINMENT INTO YOUR LIFE

Willpower is great to get things moving, and terrible for keeping things moving.

We tend to do things automatically, reflexively.

For the things that are important to you, you can design training protocols so that you automatically do the right things.

There's a few simple ideas here, but it's less about particular tactics and more about a way of thinking about the world.

If you always take out a physical piece of paper or notebook and write the top 5 things you have to do before you open your computer, you'll spend less time aimlessly online.

Start thinking about what type of behaviors you'd benefit from training into yourself. Again, counterintuitively, I recommend you start on areas you're already good at. Build the general skill of training/entrainment in areas you don't have any resistance or blocks before moving on to applying to areas you've struggled in the past. It's a master skill, start developing it.