passion or money? Take a cross-over path

You hear it all the time- especially on self-help blogs- go after what you are passionate about and money will follow...er, right, but what if you're skint?

I have said similar stuff- my solution, for myself, was to work for money at weekends or downtimes and use my primetime- the day- to do my own thing.

But what if you have a family to support? You can't do that easily working a couple of nights.

You need to be both self-supporting and also, preferably, on what I call a cross-over path.

If you earn your bread at a call centre and spend your free time doing what you are passionate about the passion will probably fizzle out. You'll be so pissed off you'll want to spend your downtime doing other stuff.

A cross-over path is one that earns money, reasonable amounts, but allows you to cross over more and more to what really interests you. Journalism is a good cross-over path to writing and film making. Think of activities that are congruent with your ultimate ideal way of earning a living/spending your days. Take a long term approach. Look for other people who are doing what you want to do and see what cross-over path they used.

Be Extraordinary

What do self-help books offer? The promise of wealth? Success? Happiness? I remember a gut shot of recognition when I saw Anthony Robbins first book on the shelves: Unlimited Power! Isn’t that ultimately what the punter wants? Us?

All of us believe that we do indeed have a slumbering colossus within, waiting to do incredible things, if only we could just find the key…We firmly believe we are only using 5% of our brains, as in the movie Limitless, the only problem being in the details ie. accessing the other 95%.

Then there was The Secret- if you worship what you want to achieve you will achieve it.

I have a friend, the most successful entrepreneur I know from my callow days in academe, he’s a multi-millionaire and a very nice chap. Thirty years ago when he was a just a (highly successful) salesman he’d have a self help book on his desk next to his phone. “You don’t read them to get the answer,” he told me, “You read them to get re-energised when you’re feeling down. Then you can make that call and sound like you mean it.”

The father of another friend was also a very wealthy entrepreneur- he had a whole bookcase of self-help books. Maybe he, too, was using them to get some kind of lift. In any case it made me sceptical of the nay sayers, those who pour scorn on any attempt at self betterment using a book that screams: Go For It!

Naturally, there are some crap self-help books out there. But even the crappest has one thing, or perhaps two things, of value in it- usually stuff that they are repeating, or a lively quote they’ve borrowed from another righteous tome of personal development. There’s an awful lot of recycling going on in the self-improvement field.

Anthony Robbins, despite his nutty NLP ideas and simplistic pleasure/pain motivational schemas, hits the nail on the head with his titles: The Unlimited Power I’ve mentioned, along with Awaken the Giant Within. He understands that it is a FEELING we want NOW not some nebulous future state.

Stephen Covey with his worthy ‘Habits of highly successful people’ pushes, as many do, the concept of SUCCESS as the ultimate goal. Gawd knows I’ve been suckered down that alley a few times. Just what is it exactly I now ask? Being on telly? Having people stop you in the street? Lots of cash? And when does it start? Or end? The world is littered with successful people who think of themselves as failures because they aren’t as successful as someone else a notch higher up the bed post; Napoleon torturing himself because he hasn’t got to India as Alexander did, Steve Jobs thinking he isn’t Bill Gates, Bill Gates whinging that he isn’t Steve Jobs…

Success- as I’ve written elsewhere- is an exercise in framing an enterprise. Frame it so that it succeeds and you are a success. You have bragging rights. But you’ll still be disappointed unless you’ve grown to recognise the warm feeling in your midriff that success gives you- that’s what people want, cut to the chase and get the feeling direct from pills, the bottle, a line of cocaine. Which is why so many successful people turn to such things. Success, is, literally, in your head.

Money- well- there’s never enough and then you’re approaching the later stages of your life and you realise that hey, you don’t need that much, and actually time is rather more attractive as a commodity, and health isn’t bad too…

Beyond the functional requirements for money it becomes a ‘success token’. A kind of substitute currency for success. And success can likewise be turned into money.

So the books offer chimeras. Or they offer the equivalent of a day dream.

Real self-help is about building the exterior self, making it work better in the world, enabling you to be happy. Happy enough to pursue, probably at the same time, worthier goals of inner evolution. The two help each other, but it’s hard to concentrate on becoming a better person if you’re just not happy.

As Idries Shah suggests: first make yourself happy. Then think about higher studies.

Hitching yourself to open-ended concepts such as ‘being a success’ is a recipe for unrelenting toil and unhappiness. You need to be happy NOW.

I give lectures every now and then at Universities- I love doing it- but the message I find myself putting over time and again is: travel. Travel while you have no financial burdens and responsibilities, travel while you are still automatically open to new experiences, travel while you can still enjoy roughing it, travel while you can still be mentored by people along the way. With a bit of recalibrating, people of any age can do all of the above, but they can do other stuff too. People aged 18-30 often can’t- but they can travel.

And while I was on my own travels recently I connected travelling with ‘Being Extraordinary.’

When you come back from a trip- and increasingly I have ceased to use the word holiday, trips seem to offer more than that nugatory term seems to supply, when you come back you have this altered energy. Probably you are more relaxed, but usually you are more focused- things you have ignored for months you quickly achieve. In fact there is a curious parallel with the week BEFORE a trip when your productivity soars and you get everything finished in time and the week when you return when you blast through all the things you’ve been thinking about on the trip…what if you could just have the week before and week after and cut out the trip altogether?

Keep the trip. What I am circling is the idea that travel allows ANYONE to be extraordinary- by definition you are taken out of your ordinary and put somewhere new and challenging. That’s where your special energy comes from, and that’s where your special powers come from.

Special powers? Yep- all travellers know that after a few weeks you become a sort of superhero out there on the road. You can talk to anyone. Shyness goes- it has to- as you need to talk to lots of people each day just to survive. Of course you have your ups and downs, but basic extroversion becomes the order of the day. And talking to anyone you find a strange equality pervades the world of travelling. Just moving on- the downsides of class, race and sect just don’t drag you down. What other powers? Coincidence, happy chance encounters, miraculous meetings- all that becomes…expected. You become the beholder of strange sights, strange experiences, incongruities that seem to offer the key to a place, amazing rushes of energy.

Of course, all the time your money is running out, so, eventually, and probably rightly, you head home.

A week or two later you’re ordinary again.

Unless you decide to Be Extraordinary…all the time.

That, I have decided after long consideration, is the real deal. My next post will outline how…

Going higher: altitude, breathing and success

I was counting my steps as I went higher towards the 5000 metre Goeche-La Himalayan pass. I wasn’t walking that slowly but I found after 100 paces I had to stop. OK then, I would count 100 paces then rest and then keep going. After a short while I was down to 80 paces, then 60 before I had to rest. I wasn’t breathing that hard- altitude isn’t like that- your WHOLE body is starving for oxygen (even at this relatively ‘low’ altitude people feel it) but you just CAN’T go any faster- a leaden feeling in the legs is just as debilitating as the feeling of being puffed out. Your body knows there is enough air- so you’re not panting like a dog or someone who’s been holding their breath- what it doesn’t ‘know’, at first, is that this air is different and only has a third as much oxygen as usual. So it keeps on breathing as normal but registers the difference as headaches, nausea, odd body pains, yawning, increased flatulence- general system upsets. Over a few days the body (which is even dumber than the emotions) finally ‘get’s it’. The body’s systems realign. Your guts calm down. The lungs start breathing more deeply allowing the heart to stop beating so fast. More red blood cells are produced. It is this highly subtle interplay between heart, lungs, digestive and excretory systems that makes altitude such a hard one for modern medicine to pin down. Sometimes super fit young people are poleaxed by altitude while old unfit smokers have no problem. But if you look at the thing from a more general viewpoint certain things emerge:

Overweight people have a harder time than thin people

Fit people with mountain experience do better than fit people without mountain experience.

People with big packs do worse than people with no pack.

But the two key features of doing well at altitude are behavioural: don’t be a hero, and, act like a tortoise rather than a hare.

We all know the heroes on the hills; they carry massive rucksacks, often with other people’s gear in them too, just to show how strong they are. They do unnecessary excursions, wear heavy boots and crampons on flat snow and run downhill when they can. The heroes are often among the first victims of altitude sickness.

Heroes are also temperamentally unsuited to being a tortoise. It’s far more glamorous to being haring off ahead (and then getting that sneaky rest while the others catch up)- then haring off again. But as I was to find- the periods of haring get shorter and shorter- until you are resting as much as you are climbing or ascending.

Moving at altitude is fundamentally different to operating at sea level- you don’t recover quickly. You can’t have a quick rest and be good as new. You’re depleted every time you have to rest and won’t recover until the next day or even later. You have to be sly and cunning, husband ALL your resources and never waste any energy. And you have to be  tortoise.

Being a tortoise doesn’t mean you have to be super slow- though you may be. It simply means a 100% change in the way you approach moving at altitude. Forget pace, distance, time- forget all that usually motivates you in walking and running and think SOLELY of breath. The tortoise goes exactly as fast as he can without needing to stop, without his breath rate rising and his pain rate rising so much that he has to stop. You have to feel that the rate you are walking at you can carry on forever. In addition, when you get to a flat or downhill bit you have to resist the urge to hurry up, instead, you must act like someone who has switched out of gear on a hill, freewheeling to the bottom- going at a similar speed to other downhill drivers but not using any energy to go faster just because you can. Instead of wasting that downhill energy by running on ahead, maintain an only slightly increased pace and save energy.

I’ve talked elsewhere on this blog about being ‘sly with the river’- how you have to use every advantage you have when ascending a fast river. The same is true about moving at altitude- carry the lightest pack you can, or better- a bum bag or no pack at all. Forget lugging tons of water- hydrate heavily at the start and end of each day. Leave the extra lenses behind. Don’t wear monster boots, use approach shoes. Some altitude experts use cleated shoes even on glaciers, waiting until the last possible moment to switch into big boots and crampons- remember Nanda Devi (2^nd highest mountain in India, 23^rd highest peak in the world) was climbed without crampons because the bag containing them was lost. The sly ones, who may look like speed merchants, carry less weight and save all the energy they can.

But the main thing, for a beginner like me, was learning the ‘tortoise pace’, learning to key everything into whether I thought I could continue forever at this pace or not. And slowing down even to a crawl the minute I felt my breathing and heart rate soaring- say on the very steep bits.

As I approached the pass I still hadn’t learned. I was resting and resting more and more often. But when I arrived the guide had some bad news- the real pass was about a half kilometre further ahead- down 200 metres, up another 300, down 200 more and up another 400. I was crushed, but when the guide suggested I wait here until the party returned some inner pigheadedness rebelled. Bugger it- I was going to get to 5000 metres like everyone else.

This time I fixated solely on breathing rate. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop and rest and I knew by now that those who kept going without rests always overtook the ‘resters’ sooner or later. I didn’t need to worry how slowly I was going as long as I never stopped. And sure enough, as the final pass emerged, I was right behind the guide- who had been stopping with the front runner (who needed rests).

In that final ascent I ‘pushed myself’ in the sense that I could feel my legs getting a muscle burn- but that didn’t matter as long as I maintained the breathing rate. The breath rate – as many meditation systems proclaim – is the key to the whole thing.

Days after this Himalayan excursion to a Sikkim pass, I read of a fascinating character in a book entitled Running for their Lives recommended by my good friend Ramsay Wood. Arthur Newton was an Englishman living in South Africa in the 1920s when he decided to take up distance running at the age of 40. Four years later he was the holder of every amateur running record from 29 miles to 100 miles. Mere marathons were too short for him. Newton’s secret was that he was tortoise. His average speed was often 7mph- which is why a marathon was too short for him- but not many people can keep up 7mph for 13 hours without a single break. Newton’s whole training method revolved around forgetting the opposition, forgetting speed and simply aiming for a pace that he could maintain hour after hour without a break. A pace that would enable him to climb any hill without stopping and walking, because in a very long race it is the breaks that ruin your overall time.

Newton smashed all the distance records of his time by approaching running from a completely different perspective. Instead of treating a long race as an extension of a short race he treated it as a completely different beast, one that required energy saving as a key factor. Just as formula one drivers must worry as much about fuel and tyres as overtaking- unlike a drag racer- so, too, Newton realised that maintaining pace, as long as it was the right pace, was way more important for conserving energy. And energy conservation- which is repaid as second, third and fourth 'winds' is more useful than speed the longer you go for, the higher you attempt to climb.

If you want to go higher or further then the message is simple: treat the enterprise as one of energy conservation, slyness, maintaining your breath rate as much as one of power, determination and fitness. Ask yourself of any enterprise; how can I structure this so that I can keep going forever? It may reveal some surprising answers. 

You have to be sly with the river

Joe Vermillion was a Chipewyan Indian I met on the Peace River about twelve years ago. I was engaged, then, in the seemingly impossible task of paddling against the 8mph current of that river- which was over a 1000 miles long. Joe said we could do it, but we had to be sly with the river. We had to use the back channels, the places near the bank where the current was slack, the reverse currents you get behind obstructions; we had to tow the boat when the bank was clear, we had to sail when there was a good tailwind. If we tried to tough it out, battle headlong into the current like heroes we’d last about a week. I saw that when I started. We had to be sly with the river.

I was thinking today it is the best advice for any adventure. And maybe for life, especially for long drawn out and difficult tasks. Use every advantage, every place where the current reverses for whatever reason. Even when things are against you, when you’re battling against everything you can make progress, bit by bit, looking for the easiest route, the openings. You have to be sly with the river.

Adventurers who want to be looked after

Being looked after. There is an excellent book by psychoanalyst Arthur Deikman called The Wrong Way Home. In it he talks about how ‘cult behaviour’ is really the extrapolation and realisation of the desire to be looked after, a manifestation of that childhood sense of family security when you are being driven late at night and you’re all cosy drowsing on the back seat while Mum and Dad sit in the front effortlessly whisking you home.

Wake up and smell the coffee instead! No one is going to look after you like your parents- and for very good reason. Wanting to be looked after, beyond the usual requirements of childhood or extreme illness, is one the most damaging desires in the world.

Extreme stuff. Damaging because wanting to be looked after makes people vote for tyrants, take jobs with bullies, do work they hate, live with men or women who abuse them, and do nothing when the thing looking after them exacts a huge and unwarranted price: such as asking you to serve in a murderous army, or turn a blind eye to civilian disappearances. It is a commonplace, perhaps, to assert that leaders aren’t the problem, followers are. What if Hitler had been ignored, left as a man spouting racist claptrap in a tramp’s hostel? He was made dangerous by the followers he was able to attract. Instead of ignoring or ridiculing him people imagined he could look after them.

One reason the West is inferior to the East, is that in the West people are encouraged by many of society’s institutions to want to be looked after. We encourage people to imagine that this is even possible. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting we shouldn’t look after people, but we need to be able to do it without infecting ourselves with the desire to be looked after as well.

There is a traditional story about a man who watched a limbless fox living in a small cave near a water hole. Whenever a lion brought his kill there the limbless fox would wait until midnight and crawl out and eat and drink his fill. The man concluded that was all one needed to do so he sat in the market place living off whatever scraps he could find. Often he went hungry. Most of the time he was bored and depressed. But he soldiered on with his ‘limbless fox’ strategy. Finally God spoke to him- “why be a limbless fox when you can be a lion?”

One man who appeared to live the life of a lion was Freddy Spencer Chapman – mountaineer, explorer and WW 2 hero. While still at Cambridge he took part in expeditions to Greenland. He climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, making a first ascent of the 7326metre peak Jomolhari in 1937; a peak which wasn’t ascended again until 1970. When WW2 started in the far east he was in his mid thirties and elected to be part of a group who would stay behind enemy lines and harass the Japanese. He managed this for three and a half years, spending 17 days once in a malaria induced coma. At one point he was actually captured by the Japanese, but employing his theory that escape becomes exponentially harder the longer you leave it he broke away the night he was captured, literally running away through the jungle with only his shirt on his back.

There was no question that Spencer Chapman was a hero and yet even he wanted to be looked after. His fatal flaw was a fear of financial ruin. He eschewed the life of an explorer after WW2 for that of a schoolmaster and later Warden of a residential hall at Reading University. However, when he was due to retire worries about financial security drove him to take his own life. Though he feared he might have cancer this was found to be untrue. And many accounts substantiate the fact that he was worried about not being able to survive on his pension- which was small but perfectly adequate. Bizarrely and tragically his final note expressed his desire to ‘not be an invalid’- he pessimistically assumed he would become one. Chapman wanted to be looked after financially; he sensed this was wrong and this became perverted into a delusion of being a burden when this was simply not the case. There is no question that if Chapman had been given a generous pension or had been allowed to work until he died that he would never have killed himself. It was his inability to believe that he could look after himself that drove him to take drastic action. He was like the man starving in the market place rather than taking control of his life.

Oddly enough this pattern is not unusual- both Peter Fleming and Wilfred Thesiger lived at home with their mothers, whilst Bill Tillman lived with his sister- looked after while they planned their next big adventure. In a sense some explorers are really still like boys, with a hypertrophic sense of adventurous self-reliance but an underdeveloped sense of social self-reliance. For some ordinary life is just too dull to be taken seriously. But I suspect a big part of it is a failure to root out once and for all that warm and cosy desire to be looked after…

personal tactical innovation: a key element to success

Charles Upham was one of only three men to receive the VC twice- and the only one to receive two in WW2 (for non-UK readers a VC is the highest award for valour). Upham, a New Zealand farmer by origin, was not only exceedingly brave, he was a tactical innovator. Upham realised that storming a machine gun post armed with just a rifle, or even a sub-machine gun, is a very hit or miss affair. It requires near suicidal courage because the odds are very much stacked against you. However, if you are a skilled bowler- as Upham was, a hand grenade can become a much more deadly and useful weapon. Typically, in the ordinary model of infantry tactics a man will carry 3 to 5 grenades. Upham fashioned a special carry bag on his hip holding up to 20 grenades. He would then advance carefully and throw his grenades accurately, using them to knock out machine gun nests in a dynamic fashion – something a mortar team cannot manage when under heavy fire and moving fast.

But the key thing is the way this personal tactical innovation boosted his courage. Because he now had a weapon that worked really well he had a much better motive for attacking what others saw as hopeless situations.

It is this synergy between personal tactical innovation and courage that drives success in many areas including an expedition.

One of my favourite explorers is the Japanese Polar explorer Naomi Uemura, the first man to reach the North Pole solo. Uemura mainly travelled alone. He trusted himself and he wasn’t foolhardy. His personal tactical innovation for crossing crevasse fields was to wear two long bamboo poles, like a twenty foot ‘X’, attached to the top of his pack. He must have looked like a weird human helicopter. However, if he fell down a crevasse this apparatus stopped the plunge into the abyss below.

Often a personal tactical innovation looks a bit silly. I am sure many people have died because they wanted to keep looking cool.

When I wanted to explore the Sahara I had to endure a mild level of ridicule when I unveiled ‘the trolley’ – a cumbersome 4 wheeled trolley used for carrying up to 200kg of supplies (we actually carried around 120kg). But it worked, allowing two men to travel for over ten days without needing camels or 4x4s.

A personal tactical innovation addresses a seemingly ‘hopeless’ problem with more than just plain human doggedness. Scott’s response to the polar cold was to man haul his sledges. Amundsen’s personal tactical innovations were to use the skills of indigenous arctic peoples (dog sleds and skis) and apply them to the Antarctic. Scott attempted to use ponies and tractors in his attempt. But neither were tested and neither were personal. Amundsen had lived in the arctic for four years during his Northwest Passage expedition. Here he learnt the value of Eskimo ways and enjoyed using them.

A personal tactical innovation is not just a good idea; it is a good idea that suits YOU. It emerges because it favours something you are already good at. It is a personal solution not a generic one. I was interested in the trolley because it involved towing, something I knew I was good at, having towed a canoe up a 1600 mile river in Canada.

During the subsequent crossing my team made of the Rocky Mountains I knew we would encounter a river that had defeated many recent attempts at descent- the aptly named Bad River, a tributary of the Fraser River system. The Bad River was not just very steep, it was ice cold from glacier melt and blocked in many places with logs. Because no native peoples lived in the area anymore there was no motive to keep the river clear. Reports of canoeists retiring with their legs blue from bruises and cold made me consider using a slight, but highly effective personal tactical innovation. I knew that we would have to manhandle our bulky 21 foot canoe over considerable debris, and also resist a powerful current. I knew that even wearing wetsuits we’d get cold after spending hours in glacial melt water. However neoprene chest waders with sock feet would allow us to remain warm and dry at the same time (though each man carried a knife around his neck in case he upended in the waders- trapped air can keep you forced underwater in some situations). This solution worked admirably- and though the Bad River, was indeed a bad river, which supplied a few close calls, it was not in the end, the Worst River.

When we learn a new skill we often neglect our own personal inclinations and aptitudes. We often try and learn something ‘the official way’. My view is to have a go on your own and see what seems, to you, to be the logical solution. Remember this and then see what the regular practitioners are doing. Finally combine both. Many times the ‘obvious’ solution to you has been overlooked because the original solution has outgrown its application, or been superseded by a new development, but people have carried on blindly copying what their elders and better do. I remember aikido students banging their toes on the mat because that is what a top teacher did. Later I discovered he only did this because he had incipient arthritic pain in his toes and this was a way to dispel it. Yet his students did it as if it was part of the technique.

Most things are easy or impossible, not difficult

Most things are easy or impossible, not difficult.

I read this the other day, a comment left on facebook by an old pal. It set me thinking. At first I wanted to agree. I could see it meant either, whenever we attempt something new, there's an obvious procedure to follow which will result in success, or there isn't- in which case we give up, move on to something easy, clear, not a waste of one’s valuable time. 

One definition of ‘impossible’ becomes 'not worth the effort'. Impossible things become synonymous with wasting a lot of time.

In fact it resonated with something I've learnt the hard way- how to spot a deadend without having to go right to the end to see for oneself. Being able to spot deadends- novel ideas that just won't fly- is a very useful kind of mastery. Often you find, say when writing a story, it's either great straightaway or never really gets going no matter how much flogging you do. So saying something is either impossible or easy could be another way of saying that most promise is in the premise.

No one wants to waste time. If we are having to do a lot of new things on a regular basis then we might need a way of weeding out what is a good or not so good way to spend our time. When a new thing presents itself with a bolted on procedure so we can see what it entails we think ‘oh goody, it’s easy’ or, if it has no obvious procedure we think ‘impossible! Next!’

As we get older we get to hate ‘wasting time’. But we actually still spend hours watching TV, drinking, eating, socialising, pottering. What we mean by ‘wasted time’ is there is no payback for us, no pleasure. We get greedy. My friend’s son spent hours and hours learning how to do football tricks. Tricks that looked impossible to me. It didn’t look like fun either, constantly doing them wrong until he finally cracked a trick. He no longer does those tricks. Was that time wasted? Of course not. Time spent learning anything is rewiring the brain, building connections. In a sense, any time we spend NOT learning is time wasted.

To be able to call the shots, pronounce on whether something is impossible or not also implies we have some choice over which missions we accept and which we reject. If you HAVE to do something then it may seem impossible at first. But you keep at it and eventually work out how to do it. In some situations, like an expedition there is a lot of seemingly impossible stuff to overcome, but you HAVE to do it and you find it is, after all, merely difficult; but an expedition doesn’t last forever.

When we get back to real life we gradually make things easier for ourselves, and shift towards things that are ‘easy’ in as much as they are non-challenging.

In fact as we get older the fear of what is difficult, the dislike of the ambiguity of not knowing, the humiliating experience of being a new boy or even a class dunce, the feeling of being all at sea- these are increasingly unwelcome experiences. So we are tempted to label anything that suggests these things as impossible. Which means we can safely ignore them without impugning our ability to learn.

I think putting up with the ambiguity of not really knowing exactly what is going on becomes less tolerable as we get older. People who are good at learning languages have a higher tolerance for this ambiguity than people who aren’t. or else they know how to deflect unwanted attention when they screw up. Or they make a game of it. Otherwise clever folk are too serious in this respect. I know several very clever people whose prediliction for being in control means that, abroad they only speak English. They can’t bear to lose face, and face having their accent mocked by a Parisian waiter or a Croatian bus conductor.

The ambiguous feeling of being a ‘bit at sea’, like your first day at school, merely requires us to observe and see what happens. Mostly we try and assert ourselves though, remind others we’re important too. So it isn’t about being in control, it’s about using control as a way of saying ‘look at me, I’m important too’.

If we sense we are going to be a bit lost for a while we learn to call this option ‘impossible’, safe to ignore, whereas it is actually merely rather hard, hard because the experience of ‘being small’ and not very important is a hard one for some to bear when you’ve got used to the magnificent feeling of being very important.

‘Difficult’, to any schoolchild, means a slightly different sort of  ‘hard’; hard to do, hard to grasp, hard work to learn. It means hours of effort. It means brainache. For some, maths is easy, but for many it is hard. But not impossible.

One also has to consider the fact that what constitutes 'difficult' changes over time. What was difficult aged 10 or 20 might seem pretty easy now. And also the reverse of course - crawling through narrow spaces springs to mind. But more importantly our sense of 'difficult' can change when we adopt a different outlook. Yesterday my phone line stopped working but the broadband didn't. Normally I would consign fixing this to the impossible category. The line tested as OK so the fault was probably in the wiring...maybe. Because I have been writing about polymathy I thought I ought to investigate. Now the problem was borderline difficult/impossible. Phone wires come in thick confusing bundles, but then I looked on the net and found an explanation; and of course for a normal line you need only two wires. Now it was just difficult. I rummaged under the stairs and found these- together with an unused extension cable. One comment on a thread suggested electrical effects in extensions could affect the phone line. I disconnected it and sure enough fixed the phone. A day earlier it had seemed impossible, then, with the head change to polymath, merely difficult. And in the telling it sounds all too easy.

I have been rather good recently at shying away from tasks that involve serious learning- such as languages and new skills. I began to feel a growing reluctance to make my brain suffer, to make it recall new stuff. Everything we currently know about brain plasticity tells us we should engage with the difficult. Even if we are tempted to call it impossible at first or even second glance.

Take a look at what you think is impossible and see if it isn’t after all, merely difficult. And with a great deal of effort might actually be accomplishable. So that later, when people ask, you’ll be able to say ‘It was pretty easy actually’.