Guides and Rules of the Road 113achieve their goals. No one knows the future, but acting as if
you will succeed gives you the best chance, and is just as re-
alistic as pessimism, given that you have prepared as best you
can. In the absence of certainty, optimism is not such a bad
idea.
The Winning State of Mind
The winning state of mind is a skill. You can develop it your-
self by changing the way you create your expectations.
How do we create expectations? In three ways. First, we do
not give every experience equal attention and importance,
but deletemost of it. At every moment there are thousands of
possible things we could pay attention to. We cannot take
them all in, so we develop rules, mostly in childhood, about
what we pay attention to.
What are you aware of right now?
And what were you not aware of that you could have been
aware of?
We all see the world differently. Fifty people looking on the
same scene will give 50 different accounts of it. We filter our
experience through our memories, values, interests and pre-
occupations, always keeping an ‘emergency channel’ open
for danger signals like the smell of smoke or the threat of vi-
olence. And we do not remember what we have not noticed.
Think of it like choosing what television channel to tune
into. Sports, current affairs, soaps, action films, news and
documentaries all vie for attention. We cannot watch them all
at once, so we watch what interests us. All the channels are
available all the time, but you cannot watch them all at once.
Secondly, we distort and change our sense experience,
reading meanings into situations that may not be there or
were not intended. This is the basis of suspicion and para-
noia, but also of creativity. Life would be very boring if
everything had one ‘right’ meaning.
We also generalizefrom our experience. We make rules
about the world, based on the past. Then we apply those
rules to new experiences. This is a really essential skill,
otherwise we would have to work out ever y problem from