Understanding "ME."

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Who are we really?

Michael E. Gerber has a better understanding than most of us.
He wrote about it in "The E-Myth : Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It" - Jan 1, 1986

Do yourself a favor and read the section about the internal battle between the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur.

The Fat Guy and The Skinny Guy

Let's examine the way our various internal personalities interact. Let's take a look at two personalities we're all familiar with: The Fat Guy and The Skinny Guy.

Have you ever decided to go on a diet? You're sitting in front of the television set one Saturday afternoon, watching an athletic competition, awed by the athletes' stamina and dexterity. You're eating a sandwich, your second since you sat down to watch the event two hours before. You're feeling sluggish in the face of all the action on the screen when, suddenly, somebody wakes up in you and says, "What are you doing? Look at yourself, You're Fat! You're out of shape! Do something about it!" It has happened to us all. Somebody wakes up inside us with a totally different picture of who we should be and what we should be doing. In this case, let's call him The Skinny Guy. Who's The Skinny Guy? He's the one who uses words like: "discipline," "exercise," "organization." The Skinny Guy is intolerant, self-righteous, a stickler for detail, a compulsive tyrant. The Skinny Guy abhors fat people. Can't stand sitting around. Needs to be on the move. Lives for action. The Skinny Guy has just taken over. Watch out - things are about to change. Before you know it, you're cleaning all the fattening foods out of the refrigerator. You're buying a new pair of running shoes, barbells, and sweats. Things are going to be different around here. You have a new lease on life. You plan your new physical regimen: up at five, run three miles, cold shower at six, a breakfast of wheat toast, black coffee, and half a grapefruit; then, ride your bicycle to work, home by seven, run another two miles, to bed at ten - the world's already a different place! And you actually pull it off! By Monday night, you've lost two pounds. You go to sleep dreaming of winning the Boston Marathon. Why not? The way things are going, it's only a matter of time. Tuesday night you get on the scale. Another pound gone! You're incredible. Gorgeous. A lean machine. On Wednesday, you really pour it on. You work out an extra hour in the morning, an extra half-hour at night. You can't wait to get on the scale. You strip down to your bare skin, shivering in the bathroom, filled with expectation of what your scale is going to tell you. You step lightly onto it, and look down. What you see is. . . nothing. You haven't lost an ounce. You're exactly the same as you were on Tuesday. Dejection creeps in. You begin to feel a slight twinge of resentment. "After all that work? After all that sweat and effort? And then - nothing? It isn't fair." But you shrug it off. After all, tomorrow's another day. You go to bed, vowing to work harder on Thursday. But somehow something's changed.

You don't know what's changed until Thursday morning. It's raining. The room is cold. Something feels different. What is it? For a minute or two you can't quite put your finger on it. And then you get it: somebody else is in your body. It's The Fat Guy! He's back! And he doesn't want to run. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even want to get out of bed. It's cold outside. "Run? Are you kidding me?" The Fat Guy doesn't want anything to do with it. The only exercise he might be interested in is eating! And all of a sudden you find yourself in front of the refrigerator - inside the refrigerator - all over the kitchen! Food is now your major interest. The Marathon is gone; the lean machine is gone; the sweats and barbells and running shoes are gone. The Fat Guy is back. He's running the show again.

It happens to all of us, time and time again. Because we've been deluded into thinking we're really one person. And so when The Skinny Guy decides to change things we actually believe that it's I who's making that decision. And when The Fat Guy wakes up and changes it all back again, we think it's I who's making that decision too.


But it isn't I. It's we. The Skinny Guy and The Fat Guy are two totally different personalities, with different needs, different interests, and different lifestyles. That's why they don't like each other. They each want totally different things. The problem is that when you're The Skinny Guy, you're totally consumed by his needs, his interests, his lifestyle. And then something happens - the scale disappoints you, the weather turns cold, somebody offers you a ham sandwich. At that moment, The Fat Guy, who's been waiting in the wings all this time, grabs your attention. Grabs control. You're him again. In other words, when you're The Skinny Guy you're always making promises for The Fat Guy to keep. And when you're The Fat Guy, you're always making promises for The Skinny Guy to keep. Is it any wonder we have such a tough time keeping our commitments to ourselves? It's not that we're indecisive or unreliable; it's that each and every one of us is a whole set of different personalities, each with his own interests and way of doing things. Asking any one of them to defer to any of the others is inviting a battle or even a full-scale war. Anyone who has ever experienced the conflict between The Fat Guy and The Skinny Guy knows what I mean. You can't be both; one of them has to lose. And they both know it.

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In a television commercial, the sale is made or lost in the first three or four seconds.

In a print ad, 75% of the buying decisions are made at the headline alone.

In a sales presentation, the sale is made or lost in the first three minutes.
- John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods [Inglewood Cliffs NJ; Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974

Meeting Your Decision-maker

Try to visualize the part of you that makes decisions. s/he's standing before you. s/he's not frowning, nor is s/he smiling. s/he is perfectly neutral, yet, there's something strange about her/him. Coming out of her/his forehead, reaching up toward the ceiling, is an antenna! And at the end of the antenna is a sensor, beeping away like crazy. And the sensor is taking in sensory data of things around you - the colors, shapes, sounds, and smells of everything around you. It's also taking in sensory data from everyone around you: how they are standing or sitting, the color of their hair, how their hair is combed, the expression on their face, Do they looking directly at other people, or off to the side, is his suite in style? the color of his shoes - are they shined, worn, are the laces tied? Nothing escapes the sensor as it absorbs the stimuli from the environment. Nothing escapes your decision-maker as s/he absorbs the information s/he uses to make her/his decisions to do or not to do on anything and everything.
But this is only the FIRST step in the decision making process. It's what the sensor does with the information that's of interest now. It's how the sensor processes the information that will determine the decision you are about to make. Think of the sensor as your Central Nervous System. Its job is to gather up the information needed for a decision. Most of what is does, however, is subconscious, that is, automatic, habitual. It can literally absorb information in its sleep. In fact, it can't stop doing it! So even though your Mind is actively absorbing all manner and forms of impressions, your Conscious Mind is totally unaware of most of them. Fortunately, the Conscious Mind doesn't need to be aware. For the Conscious Mind doesn't have to make a decision. The decision is made by your Subconscious Mind.
It's in your Subconscious Mind where all the action is. Where the SECOND step of the decision making process takes place. What is your Subconscious Mind? It's like a vast, dark, underground sea in which a multitude of exotic creatures swim about, singly and in schools, each with entirely different needs and tastes, silently seeking out food, Those creatures are your expectations. and the sea in which they swim is a truly foreign place to your Conscious Mind. It has no idea what's swimming around down there. What's lurking behind those subterranean rocks? What's that lying still and quiet as a stone on the bottom, waiting patiently and deliberately for some sweet morsel to wander by?
Every creature in that sea - every one of those expectations - is a product of your life! Of your attitudes, associations, beliefs, conclusions, inferences, opinions, perceptions, and reactions. They are the accumulation of all your experiences since the instant of your conception (and for all we know, before it) to this very moment. And all of your expectations are nothing more or less than the means through which the sum of them all - your personalities - get fed what they need. The food it needs comes in the form of sensory input from the Central Nervous System (the "surface"). And if the food is compatible with its expectations, that part of the Subconscious Mind says, "Yes." And if the food is incompatible with its expectations, that part says, "No." And the decision, yes or no, is made at the instant it gets a taste! And all that happens after that moment of truth, after the decision is make, is that the Subconscious Mind sends its answer up to the Conscious Mind, which then goes back out into the world to assemble the rational armament to support its already determined emotional commitment. And that's how decisions are made. Irrationally! No one has ever make a rational decision on anything! So when some one says, "I want to think about it," don't believe them. they are not going to think about it. They don't know how. They have already done all the "thinking" they are going to do - they either want it or not. What people are really saying to you is either One. They are emotionally incapable of saying no for fear of how you might react if s/he told you the truth, or Two. You haven't provided them with the "food" their Subconscious Mind craves. Either way, little or no thought enters into the transaction. The decision was made subconsciously and instantaneously. In fact, it was made long before the two of you ever met. But you didn't know it.

- The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber, Harper Business 1985