(Excerpt) Ch. 7
Great Expectations
Are you good enough to get mad?
“Not doubt, certainty is what drives one mad” -Nietzsche
Robert Rosenthal performed an experiment in a school one year to disclose the extent expectations have on people. He had the principal of the school call in three teachers into the office at the beginning of a school year. These teachers were told that they had been chosen as the best teachers in the entire school based on performance tests and likeability from the students. Because of this they were told that three classes were set aside for them consisting of only the brightest students in the school. They then told the teachers that they weren’t allowed to tell the students of this special accommodation in fears of discrimination suits. The teachers were told to use the same teachings, curriculum and that they expected great things to come of this. These students not only lead the school with their test scores, but the entire district. Grade levels were 30% better than the rest of the school. The teachers were interviewed at the end of the school year and the overwhelming response was that it was rather easy to teach the kids, because they were so eager to learn. After the interviews, the teachers were brought into a room. They were then told that the 90 students they taught were a random group of students. They weren’t selected because of there academic excellence but by a random computer selection. The teachers were stunned, and came up with the conclusion that it was there excellence in the classroom that made these students score so high. The experimenters then stated that the names of all the teachers in the school were placed in a hat and they were the first three drawn out. These achievements were accomplished only through positive expectations, everyone was immersed in positive expectations.
UNPREPARED
These teachers were manipulated and in return produced results that were better than they were doing before. Should they blame the school officials for tricking them or be more conscious and take notes from the lessons they learned. In all honesty, if they were in tune to their skills as teachers from the start of their careers then they would have never been duped. Obviously they weren’t good enough at their craft to get mad at someone outsmarting them. What about in your relationship? Have you been manipulated? Did that manipulation turn into a positive like it did with these teachers? Did you look at your partner the same way these teachers looked at these kids that were supposedly the smartest in the school? Are you good enough at what you do to get what you want? Malcolm Gladwell did a study and concluded that it takes 10,000hrs. To perfect a skill. That goes for athletes, musicians, and pretty much anybody that would be good enough to get mad if things didn’t go accordingly. Just say Mr. Gladwell was off a thousand hours, you still get an idea of the amount of time it takes. In that amount of time you can expect disappointment and heartache, so the real question is, who’s willing to withstand all of that in order to get what they really want…..not many. So are you good enough to get mad? Better yet, was your short comings worth infecting other people with garbage ideas you’ve formulated because you didn’t have the heart to get what you wanted. Are black men selfish? Or are these thoughts you keep saying to yourself to keep you from wanting to understand the whole story, like when you save a person in your phone as “Don’t Answer”. Some things should be kept to yourself, just like “Don’t Answer” is going to make somebody happy one day, even if its not you.
Maybe its expectations that turn you into a whirlwind of hope and despair. Placing an abundance of expectations whether communicated verbally or not will become a burden that will inevitably cause problems in your relationship either sooner or later. How does it feel, or how would it feel to hear “I expect the dishes to be done when I get back”. It should feel like a negative attack. Rather than asking the person, you’re saying in other words “In order for things to go smoothly between you and I this has to be done”. You may think, “you’re treating me like a little kid”. To have an abundance of expectations is very much like how you acted as a kid. Every Christmas you expected a toy, for every tooth knocked out you expected a dollar, or whatever other expectations you had because of the constant nature of your environment. You got older and got introduced to gray areas. You realized that the amount of toys you got the last Christmas diminished cause your parents got layed off, or that the amount of work you did to receive that A in geometry is not enough to receive that same grade in trigonometry. You realized that it was no longer worth expecting and having the worry and fear that accompanies it, yet that you would intend on completing that goal.
Excerpt) Ch. 4
“The Man”
“As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can”. -
The reasons behind this can be attributed to many things, but one reason stands out in my mind and is kind of personal to me. My mother was diagnosed with Breast cancer a year ago, right around the time of Breast cancer month. My next-door neighbor had died from breast cancer two month’s prior. With this entire situation happening I had no choice but to be aware of this tragedy that is attacking women at an alarming rate. My mother was able to recover. During a long car ride with my brother and I, my father sneaks in that his doctor informed him that he might have prostate cancer. Now I was facing two parents with a deadly disease, and thinking back, I had more information about breast cancer than I did about prostate cancer. There were a couple commercials about prostate cancer, but no prostate cancer month as far as I know, nothing else about it. When I was aware of my mother having breast cancer, I knew statistics about it, there was a month devoted to raising money to help the cure, people were wearing pink at sports events, I knew so much just by watching TV. I even knew when I should get checked, and where to go to get checked...and I’m a GUY. This was odd to me, yet I was unable to draw a conclusion about it until I went to the grocery store looking at magazines. The answer was right in front of me. I saw so many women self-help magazines, more than I had ever seen before. “What to do if this happens...” or “Ten ways to help you with this...” all geared towards women. The thing is, when men get sick, they get sick alone. When they go down, they go down alone. When men are in trouble, few come to help. Men die 10-15 yrs earlier than women. 80% of suicides are down by men, men who quit. Men between the ages of 40-55 are 3x more likely to commit suicide than anyone else, just without warning, just quit and die. If you’re a woman and are thinking, oh, what do you want sympathy? You should think about what YOU want. Women a lot of times state that men don’t have feelings, and that statement couldn’t be farther from the truth. Men have every emotion that women do. Men a lot of times have the mentality, “if I breakdown who’s going to be there to catch me”, as many women do as well, but the fall for a man is far more dramatic because we are in constant mode of becoming. Men are characterized as the hero. Got to be everyone’s hero, the backbone of the family, and generally that is what attracted you to that man in the first place. His masculine mask. Men are asked to be Superman and to reveal their vulnerabilities at the same time.
Likewise, it is that king you saw inside of the guy that made him want you, because you pushed him into being what he saw of himself. He felt that he would be able to “become” with you because you wouldn’t allow him to fail. Like in the first story when “You” taught ‘previous guy’ how to listen instead of solve your problems. He was then inclined to please you. You taught him how to, and you saw that he could be something special. He was flattered you saw something greater inside of him. There was a mutual agreement and common interest that fed the relationship. Anytime someone sees the king inside of you, while your dealing with the kid inside of you is an attractive thing. To have somebody believe in you, to trust in you and see what you’re going to be before you become it. It’s easy to believe in somebody when they’re already there, but to believe in somebody when they’re in an embryonic state is powerful. Men a lot of times struggle so much with the kid inside of them and have so many few witnesses of the king in them, they need those who see the invisible while they deal with the impossible, to “become” what they saw so many men fail to do. Mediocrity doesn’t convince a man to settle. When she sees greater in him, his mentality becomes “If you love me, be attracted to that potential inside of me, so that when I look into your eyes I see reflections of the king and not the kid”. CH.6
Why Do You Still Love Us?... Attraction!
“What makes electricity? ... A positive and negative energy”
If someone isn’t attracted to you with his or her first impression, there’s nothing you can do about it. If someone is attracted to you with their first impression, there is nothing they can do about it. Whatever it would take for you to reverse these actions is simply not worth the time end effort. Attraction happens by law, not by chance, so it’s not your choice. It’s an emotional response to certain things that has been programmed into our minds from thousands of years of existing on Earth. Very early in your dating life you find yourself telling yourself what you want. You want a thug, you want a smart guy, you want someone that is funny etc. I remember dating a girl that had “I Love Thugs” in an about me section on her social network page. Of course, I thought I could change her, but kind of knew the angle of how this was going. Whatever your weird tastes may be, you find yourself changing these as you get older and farther along in the dating scene. You’ve been conditioned all your life to find the cute, sweet, nice guy that won’t hurt you. As you evaluate your life you find yourself in love with a jerk, and you know he’s a jerk cause you call him that all the time. Why are women attracted to jerks? Why do men fall in love with the girl that’s in the club every weekend? Why is the black man the only type of guy you would date? Why would you call a black man selfish yet continue to date them?..........
