Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Taking Your Thoughts and Life Out of the Shadows
March 19, 2009
What You Will Learn
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One of the largest challenges to finding a job, changing direction in our lives and becoming the people we are capable of becoming, is learning to see the world in different ways. Several years ago I was on a jet with one of the wealthiest men in the country. This guy had recently purchased a jet that I estimate was probably worth at least $25,000,000 at the time. He used the jet to hop around the United States for leisure purposes. He really did not do any business at that point anymore, and had been retired for a few years.
I had been brought along as a passenger with him at the last minute because we were both traveling to a wedding together. I want to be clear with you at the outset that this is not the sort of society I normally travel in. However, on this day I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with one of the richest men in the United States, and someone who by the time he was in his mid-40s was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
What I am about to tell you right now is not about how this guy got so rich. What is most interesting about this particular guy is how he thought about the world and the opportunities in it. I spoke with him during the flight that day and then I spoke with him for several hours once we arrived at the wedding. This was some time ago and I was just starting out in some respects, and was very eager to learn the secrets of someone who was so successful. In fact, I thought this person had a tremendous amount to teach and the more I spoke with him and asked him questions, the more I realized that he had a way of looking at the world that was much different from mine.
A few weeks before traveling with this mogul, I had been to a party at one of his friend’s houses. His friend was an electrician. The two of them had gone to high school together and stayed best friends ever since then. His friend was uneducated and had not gone to college, but was someone who worked very hard. The house I visited for the party was the most unbelievable house I ever saw. They guy had done so well as an electrician that he had actually had gold laid between the cracks in marble on his floor. The home must have been at least 20,000 square feet. I had never seen anything like it. On the airplane that day the guy started telling me about how his friend had gotten so rich.
“When I made all this money I started getting disappointed that all my friends were uncomfortable around me. If I ordered a $300 bottle of wine at dinner, they would be worried they would have to contribute to the bill and then would not order entrees . It was very uncomfortable. People did not want to travel places with me because they were uncomfortable with me paying for their hotel rooms. So at some point I decided that my best friends needed to be ridiculously well off as well, and I made sure they were.”
“What did you do?” I asked him.
I was expecting him to tell me that he gave them the money they needed. Instead, he really opened my mind about how some of the wealthiest people out there think.
He explained that his friend who was an electrician had spent 20 years with a little ad in the Yellow Pages driving around doing electrical work in the blue collar area of Los Angeles he worked in. The guy had one helper and they worked Monday through Friday traveling around doing some work, giving estimates and so forth. When the electrician’s friend got really rich he sat him down because he realized they could not be friends if they were not both obnoxiously wealthy.
“How much do you make a day?” he asked him.
He explained how he billed out at $65 an hour, his helper at $32.50 and hour, and how the two of them spent about half an average day giving estimates and the other half actually doing work and making money. When the tycoon listened to this, he thought the solution to the problem sounded really easy.
“All you need to do is get 200+ guys like you billing $65 an hour, seven days a week and not have to give any estimates and you’re going to be fabulously wealthy!”
“That’s impossible!” the electrician said.
“Absolutely not. We’ll figure it out.”
A few days later tycoon took the electrician to Beverly Hills, got him a haircut and bought him a $1,500 suit. He paid someone $500 to put together a little write up about the electrician’s company on expensive stationary. Without being dishonest, he made sure the write up sounded like the electrician had one of the largest electrician outfits in the country. A week later the electrician was sitting in a conference room at a major cell phone company in his new suit, after having been coached by the tycoon.
“Our company is one of the most established electricians in California. We can service and do all the electrical maintenance on all of your cell phone towers in California, Arizona and Nevada …” was something along the lines of what the electrician told this company.
“You need to look the part to get the job!” I remember the tycoon telling me about why he bought his friend such a nice suit. “You need to go for the moon. Show up ready to do the most outrageous and highest paying thing imaginable, and deliver. That’s all you need to do.”
Within a few weeks of his friend sitting him down, the electrician had landed a contract to maintain and do all the electrical maintenance for all of the cell phone towers in several states for a major cell phone company. Within a year his company had gone from two people to several hundred, and the electrician was making more than a million dollars a month. Aside from some coaching from a tycoon, he did this all on his own. Now he travels around with his friend to vacations on private islands and so forth, and pays his own way.
Is this story incredible? Yes. But this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. There are countless people out there who live lives in obscurity because they cannot see the opportunities that are right there in front of them. How many electricians out there are taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there like this guy?
Are you taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of you? I refer to ideas like what we see with the electrician as “people discovering the truth.” There is “truth” out there, and this truth is that you can be whatever you want to be and become. But you need to see the truth first. So many peoples’ lives are held back forever by their complete inability to see the truth. The truth is that most of the obstacles out there are in our own mind and and this is something that holds us back. Most of us are in the dark figuratively, and cannot see everything that we are capable of becoming.
In Plato’s, The Republic, he writes:
See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their head all the way around …
This passage is well known both for its simplicity and the profoundness of the message that it contains. This particular passage of The Republic is written as a dialogue between Socrates and his students.
Men trapped in a cave sit with their backs to a fire and are not allowed to turn around to see what is behind them. They are chained in the cave their entire lives and all they can see is a blank wall. The only thing they can see is the shadows of objects that are held up behind them. When objects are held up to the fire, they project shadows and the men identify these shadows. But the men can only identify objects by the shadows, and they cannot see the objects themselves. The shadows are as close as the people ever get to seeing reality.
Between the fire and the prisoners there is a walkway that is raised. Along this walkway various animals, plants, puppets and other things are moved. The prisoners see these shadows. There are also echoes that come off of the wall from the sounds on the walkway, so the prisoners are not even hearing reality. Socrates implies that it would be reasonable that the prisoners would see the shadows as real things and the echoes as real things as well. Hence, the prisoners would see the sounds and sights not just as “reflections” of reality, but as reality itself. The entire group of men and their society would become dependent upon the shadows on the wall. Thus, the men would praise the men who were able to guess the next shadow and these would be seen as among the most intelligent prisoners and as people who understood the true nature of the world.
Socrates then introduces another idea to the scene and the cave. For example, what if a prisoner is allowed to stand up and someone showed him the things which cast the shadows. The prisoner would not be able to recognize the objects because all he understands are shadows. He would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real that what he is actually seeing.
Socrates also asks about what would happen if a man were forced to look at the fire. He would likely turn away and look back at the shadows, because this is what he perceives to be real. If the man were dragged out of the cave, would the man would the man be angry for this being done to him? He would be at first pained by the Sun and confused by the objects around him. However, when he eventually came to understand what the world really is, he would be sorry for the men whose lives were spent in the shadows. When the man tries to describe the truth to the men in the cave, they resist learning the truth and think their friend is crazy for doing so.
In the cave allegory, the men who are in the cave represent most of the world. They do not see truth and only see representations of objects and things. They are the majority. The man who escapes the cave and sees the true nature of things is the minority.
What the cave represents to me is that there are few people out there who really see the true nature of things in the world. Instead, they are interpreting the world through reflections, shadows and echoes. For example, why did the electrician in the story I told you take out a little advertisement in the Yellow Pages and travel around from house to house giving estimates and doing small jobs throughout his career until advised otherwise by the Tycoon? Probably because this is how he believed the work should be done. Everyone else did things this way and he saw this and followed the crowd.
What does all of this mean to you, your job search and your life? I would submit to you that if you are like 99% of all people, you are operating by interpreting shadows and sounds. You are not seeing reality and what opportunities lie before you. You are not seeing what you are truly capable of, and what you can do. You do not realize the incredible number of opportunities there are.
When you are operating in the shadows you are not seeing the true nature of things. There are powerful and penetrating insights into the world and the nature of things that are available when you start to think very carefully and closely about things. These insights are what are separating the people who are going to really get the results they want, from those who will not.
I have heard numerous stories about people over the years who achieve incredible success in their careers and lives. In every case, these were people who stepped out of the shadows to see some new way of doing things. They opened their mind by challenging an assumption or something along those lines about the way they have done something in the past. The rewards for stepping out of the shadows are huge. When you see the truth out there, you can accomplish far more than when you are simply in the shadows.
The idea that Plato is attempting to make clear is that people who are trapped in a cave can only see the shadows of objects projected on the wall.
Your Perceptions Will Control Your Outcome and Life
January 8, 2009
What You Will Learn
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When I was in middle school my girlfriend announced to me she was going to be trying out for the cheerleading squad. Our relationship consisted mainly of us riding our bikes to school together each day. Occasionally, I might call her after school. The cheerleading squad in our school cheered for the basketball team. I attended a public high school in middle school and the basketball team was the most important one in the school. The entire gym filled up with students, parents and teachers every Friday night. Everyone was very enthusiastic about it.
“You should try out for the basketball team,” she told me.
I had never been good at basketball. In fact, it was my worst game and not something I really enjoyed. However, the more I started hearing about this basketball team and what a big deal it was, the more I realized I needed to try out for it if I had any hope of hanging on to my girlfriend. It was a little bit more complicated than that.
I had just left elementary school and come to this new school and, because my girlfriend happened to be popular, I was meeting a bunch of new guys and sitting at the right table in the lunch room. Unfortunately, I realized all of the people she was friends with were also basketball players. I am not sure how it happened, however, I was hanging out with the basketball crowd. We were all very clean-cut and got good grades and sat at lunch looking like good kids. These kids were pretty boring compared to the sorts of kids I would eventually be friends with, but I was tolerating it. Their mothers typically packed their lunches, for example, and they bought milk in the cafeteria. Their sandwiches would be neatly wrapped in wax paper or little plastic sandwich bags and they would have an apple and maybe some chips . My mother had never packed lunch in my life. I would sit there at lunch with a couple of Ho Hos I bought from the vending machine with some change I’d scooped from the bottom of my mother’s purse. I have no idea how I fit in with these kids to this day.
I went home and told my mother about this dilemma. I told her I needed a basketball net built immediately over the garage because tryouts were in three weeks. My mother grew up in a town where athletics were very important, and she had a strange history with obscure sports. I think she’d actually been a state champion in ping pong when she was younger
My mother reacted in a way I’ve never seen when I told her I needed a basketball net. For example, once I told her I needed a desk in my room and she told me that was nice but I could study on the floor or on the kitchen table. When a spring came through my mattress that was a hand-me-down from my mother’s mother after she died my mom told me to flip it over. The basketball net was different.
“Oh my! There is no basketball net for you to practice on? We need to fix this right away!” She grabbed her cigarettes, made a drink, and started calling her friends to get recommendations for contractors and so forth. She found one that would come over in the afternoon. I was incredulous because I had never seen my mother react to anything this way. I went to my room to watch re-runs of Three’s Company. An hour or so later she popped her head in my room:
“Hurry!! The sporting goods store closes in 30 minutes. Let’s go.” I’ve got some blue collar roots and my mom was very aware of what was important in life. When we got to the store she purchased me the most expensive basketball backboard they had. The next morning I got home from school and there was the most professional contractor my mom had ever hired putting the finishing touches on the basketball backboard. He was going around with a leveler and making sure it was perfectly installed. My mom usually cut corners with contractors but not this guy. I was old enough to know he was really good at what he did.
My mom came home from work early to make sure the backboard was installed properly. She even demanded the contractor install some lights so I could practice at night.
For the next couple of weeks I must have practiced at least three or four hours a day. I hit shots from every direction I possibly could, I practiced layups and every conceivable type of shot. I was getting really good at making shots and starting to really enjoy basketball. Meanwhile, not only did my girlfriend make the cheerleading squad, she was chosen to be the captain. She rode her bike over to see how I was doing with my practice one Saturday afternoon.
“We’ll both be captains!” she told me with approval.
When the day of the tryouts for the basketball team finally arrived I felt I was ready. While I had gotten very good at making shots, the thing I had not prepared for was the fact that none of my shooting abilities mattered if I could not make it to the net. Basketball is as much about footwork as it is about making shots. The most damaging aspect of my tryouts came when I was running defense against a very good player and instead of slapping the ball I slapped his nose by mistake with the palm of my hand. Hard. He fell down to the gym floor with blood pouring out of his nose. After that I realized I probably would not make the team. Kids thought this was funny and word of this quickly got around the halls of the school. I remember walking to class and people jokingly getting out of the way like I was going to clock them in the face. The guy I had hit showed up with a giant piece of tape across his nose the next day. I did not make the team.
How we feel about ourselves is all due to what we tell ourselves certain things will mean. I told myself if I did not make the basketball team my girlfriend would no longer like me. I told myself my friends would no longer want to be friends with me if I did not make the basketball team.
When you are thinking about your life you need to ask yourself a few things:
- Is how you feel determined by the economy?
- Is how you feel determined by how others treat you?
- Is how you feel determined by how you think others perceive you?
- Is how you feel determined by the things you own?
The truth is how you feel is determined by how you direct your mind. The ability to direct your mind and control your emotional and psychological states is about the most important tool you can possibly have. Very few people have the ability to control their minds and their states. You need to be able to control how you feel about yourself and your emotions. I read the papers every day and most of the human interest stories I read are about people who are not able to control their minds and their states. Lately I have been reading a lot of stories about people who have been committing suicide due to dire economic circumstances. These people are not controlling their states. We also continually hear stories about stars and others who die due to drug overdoses. These people are using drugs to try and control how they feel, and it ends up killing them. When I think about people like Chris Farley and Marilyn Monroe, I am thinking about people who, despite an incredible amount of success, could not control how they felt. One of the best writers of all time, Ernest Hemingway, ended up killing himself. He, too, could not control how he felt. Despite a wonderful world around him he did not care.
You really need to control the meaning you give things and the meaning you allow things to have. The meaning you give things will control the quality of your life.
When my girlfriend found out I did not make the basketball team she did not appear to care at all. She was really nonchalant about the whole thing and told me she was sorry about this. Unfortunately, the meaning I gave this was quite severe. I immediately assumed she would no longer like me at all. The next day I told her that I needed to go to school at a different time and did not ride my bike with her to school. At lunch I felt really out of place with my new friends who had all made the basketball team. That was all they talked about at lunch. In class, several of my teachers started talking about the first game. Despite some decent friendships, I started to feel like I did not belong with this athletic crowd because I hadn’t made the team. I felt like I’d failed horribly. I started blowing off my girlfriend more and more. I started sitting at other tables at lunch and associating with different sorts of kids.
My girlfriend broke up with me. I did not really like her all that much so I was not too upset. I knew it was coming. I had allowed myself to get really depressed when I did not make the basketball team. The real low came about a week after the breakup when she called me one day after school and told me she’d bought me a Christmas gift when we were dating and still wanted me to have it. She showed up at my house with half the cheerleading squad who all watched me open the board game Yahtzee.
“Wow Yahtzee!! I have always wanted this.” What a pathetic sight it must have been seeing me open that board game. I could not hug her. I could just stare at this board game with 6 gorgeous cheerleaders standing in my messy bedroom with my ex-girlfriend looking on smiling.
In retrospect, I now realize that not much would have changed with my friends, my relationship, and more if I had not told myself my failure to make the team represented something it did not. Like people who kill themselves because they cannot control their emotions, I, too, could not control my emotions and what I was telling myself. The thought that crossed my mind was the head of the cheerleading squad would only want to be with someone who was also the captain of the basketball team. On yet another level, I thought the basketball players would only want to be friends with someone who was also a basketball player. The more I thought about all this the less worthy I felt and the more I felt like I needed to fit in somewhere else completely.
Within a short time of not making the basketball team I had made new friends who were not athletes and who were more dedicated to getting into trouble than anything. My grades plummeted and were so bad the next year my parents enrolled me in a different school. Most of this happened because of what I told myself not making the basketball team meant.
I remember one public high school I attended had a small enclosed courtyard where students were allowed to smoke between classes. These kids wore jean jackets or leather jackets and grew their hair long. These were the bad kids. They also would get stoned out there, and the school must have known about it. These were all kids who at some point probably had dreams, too, but gave up somewhere along the way and looked for a way out of their presumed failure. They started smoking and using drugs and living a life of which they could never be proud. Who knows what sent them over this edge. It could have been a bad grade in an important class, it could have been the divorce of their parents, it could have been a nasty breakup. What I do know is that in the year I attended that school I witnessed kids who were normal and clean-cut go over to the other side and join this group in the courtyard.
People look for things outside themselves to help people control their states and how they feel. Many people feel like they cannot control their emotions and so they start looking for stuff outside of themselves to help them feel good. You pay a hefty price when you are not able to manage your states and how you feel about yourself. There are huge rewards when you know how to manage your states. The rewards for managing your states are happiness and the ability to control your destiny and what happens to you and your life. These rewards are something that can pay huge dividends.
The problem most of us have is we tell ourselves something means something it does not.
- You may have lost a job and represented to yourself that the reason you lost the job was because you are a bad person. You may have lost the job because the company had no money to pay you.
- A relationship may end and you may represent to yourself it is your fault when, in reality, the person who broke up with you is working through some psychological roadmap that existed long before you came along.
- You cannot find a job and you represent to yourself it’s because you are not good enough instead of the fact the economy in the area of the country you are in is horrible.
- High school kids become “stoners” because they represent to themselves they are losers instead of just normal kids suffering through problems.
- I sabotaged my friendships because I represented to myself that not making the basketball team meant I would be rejected by my girlfriend and friends.
Even if something does mean the worst, it does us little good to hold on to this representation. Instead, we should represent the events in our lives to ourselves in a way that empowers us. How could I have reacted differently to not making the basketball team? I could have decided I was cool enough I did not have to play basketball every day to date the captain of the cheerleader squad. I could have told myself despite not being a good basketball player, I could continue to be good friends with the most popular kids in school. All of these interpretations would have empowered me. Instead, I represented the opposite.
The meaning you give things is crucial for your career success. Whatever happens to you in your career you need to choose meanings that make you stronger and not weaker. Bad things happen to everyone and the messages we receive from the world are often not positive. The most important thing you can do is choose meanings that are going to allow you to succeed and do even better. This is what you need to be doing with your career and job right now. You need to ensure you interpret things in a way that serves you and does not hurt you.
Don’t fail to reach your full potential or mistakenly classify yourself as someone who is not fit to succeed at the level at which you’re capable. This is not what you want for yourself. You need to take charge of your mind to have the career and life you are entitled to and deserve.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.