So, it’s a rare occurrence that something pops into my brain and bounces around my cranium loud enough and long enough that I feel the need to write about it.

This is one of those times, apparently.

Let me start here: I’m an unusual person.

I don’t mean that I’m better/worse than others. And I don’t mean it in any “we’re all special” way. I mean it as a statement of fact. I can do a few physical things that a small sub-set of other humans can do. There aren’t a lot of All-American gymnasts or All-American sprinters out there… and an even smaller group that are both. I’m one of them.

I say this not to toot my own horn (beside, if I could toot my own horn, I’d never leave the house… oh, wait, different joke), but to let you know where I’m coming from when I launch into the following:

Sprinters are born, not made. Sprinters are different than non-sprinters. Non-sprinters have no clue what real sprinting (running at 23 mph+) is, but sprinters can and do know what long, slow running is like (and we HATE it). Running as fast as you can… if you’re not a sprinter… is NOT sprinting.

So what? you may ask.

And what does this have to do with the personal development biz? you may wonder.

I’m getting there.

What set me off on today’s diatribe is the straw that broke the sprinter’s back, the umpteenth time some fitness “guru” said, “If you want to be lean and muscular, look at sprinters!” implying that if YOU want to be lean and muscular, all you need to do is the same thing that us sprinters do. Simple.

And it sounds like it makes sense.

Until you go back to my “sprinters are born and not made” argument.

These fitness guys have it backwards. You don’t look like a sprinter because you sprint. You sprint because you’re one of those people who can/does look like a sprinter (and there are those who have the same look who can’t sprint).

The direction of causation is upside down, or backwards, or inside out, or reversed… it’s WRONG.

Sprinters look like sprinters, not because they sprint… but because they’re born sprinters (and because they sprint, which brings out the best in their body).

Oh, the other thing about those buff sprinters — they do a lot of weight lifting. REALLY HEAVY weight-lifting. That’s an even bigger reason they look the way they do. AND, the weight lifting has the muscle-building effect it does, NOT because weights make you lean and buff, but because weights make born-sprinters lean and buff. How big/not-big you get from lifting is also genetically limited.

By the way, this whole conversation about lean, buff sprinters is really only relevant for sprinters in their 20′s and 30′s.  Go to a masters track meet and look at the sprinters in their 40′s, 50′s and beyond… the number of really lean and buff people plummets (and those that are still packin’ on the muscle are often also packin’ in the “supplements.).

Okay, what’s the connection between sprinting and spirituality?

If we can accept that some people are different — sprinters — and that non-sprinters will never achieve what sprinters can do (did I mention that, at 48, I’m still faster than most high-school runners?), then why do we think that it’s any different for other aspects of our lives, like: the ability to meditate, your general outlook on life, whether you’re “grounded” or “ethereal”, how well you function in relationships, your willingness to take risks, whether you’re entrepreneurial… shall I continue? (I won’t, so don’t answer that).

Why do people believe the classic self-help guru — or guru guru — pitch: “If I can do it, you can too!”

Why don’t we see those people, and their professed state of whatever, and, assuming they actually do have what they claim (most — maybe all — do not), think “sprinter”?  IF they’ve achieved anything special (and, again, that’s HIGHLY arguable… as I’ve done throughout this blog), then let’s just chalk it up to something other than whatever technique they’re teaching. Perhaps, in fact, the only thing that sets them apart from the rest of the pack, is the ability to convince large groups of people that they’re special… maybe THAT is their version of being a sprinter.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t practice and enjoy running as fast as you can (meditating, or whatever)… but maybe you’ll cut yourself some slack if you don’t become “enlightened” because you’ve gotten causal direction correct (meditating doesn’t make you enlightened — whatever that is/isn’t — but people with a natural propensity toward that state — whatever it is/isn’t — also tend to meditate).

Back in another 4-6 months when something else has gotten my goat… perhaps.

It’s been right under my nose and, in the past, on my calves and hamstrings, too.

I’m talking about homeopathic arnica remedies.

That’s right, in the past I applied homeopathic arnica with the expectation that it would reduce inflammation, eliminate muscle soreness, and generally help my body feel better. In my mind, arnica was like topical aspirin.

I say “in my mind” because it never did a thing to my body. Never. Ever. A thing. Nothing.

But here’s the joke (and that bad thinking example I mentioned):

1. Homeopathy is based on the idea that to CURE something, you give the patient a small dose of something that usually CAUSES the same symptoms
2. So if you want to reduce inflammation/soreness, the homeopathic treatment should be something that would normally cause those symptoms
3. Arnica, in it’s non-homeopathic form, has been used for centuries to reduce inflammation and soreness (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnica)

Do the math here, folks.

Applying a homeopathic treatment of arnica should make you MORE sore and MORE inflamed!

And, in my experience it does exactly that. I was pretty sore and inflamed after spending all that money and all that time (applying it 5x/day) on a treatment that didn’t help me a bit.

Q.E.D.

I may have to punch the next person who tells me they’re “intuitive.” (Of course, if they’re really intuitive, they should be able to see it coming and avoid the blow… but I’m willing to bet there’s a contusion coming.)

Why so anti-intuitive, Steven?

Because I dislike lazy thinking and to call oneself (or another) intuitive, is not descriptive, it’s laziness.

There are 2 reasons why.

First, I haven’t met an “intuitive” yet who has kept an accurate “hit counter.” Simple thing, really. Write down every “intuitive hit” you have, as accurately as possible. Then, at a later date, check and see how accurate you really were.

Now the problem with this method is the “as accurately as possible” part, combined with our brain’s entertaining ability to mis-remember, especially in the wake of information that could validate our beliefs.

Let’s just say that every study ever done about precognitive dreaming shows that:

1. When the dreamers were required to write down their dreams, their accuracy dropped to less-than-random
2. After some event happened, they often misremembered dreaming about it.
3. There are, of course, millions of events that did occur that they never dreamed about at all.

So, it’s the same thing with “intuitives.” If they actually checked their batting average, and adjusted for mis-remembering or vague predictions, they’d find they aren’t so Sylvia Browne after all (or, more accurately, they’re EXACTLY like Sylvia Browne! That is, not intuitive.)

Here’s the 2nd reason.

Human beings are really good at identifying patterns. Too good, in fact (we “see” patterns where none actually exist).

When our brain is looking for a pattern, it’s working hard, expending energy. This effort and glucose use takes up valuable CPU cycles that could be used for something else. We’re built to find patterns quickly so we can stop wasting energy.

And when we “spot” a pattern, we get a nice hit of chemicals and a handful of interesting sensations — sometimes a feeling in our gut, even.

Circling back: if we recorded and audited our “gut feelings” we’d find that we aren’t as accurate as we thought. But if we do get a hit…

It’s not because we’re intuitive, it’s because our non-conscious pattern recognizer was working.

That is, we’re not channeling some disembodied entity who is telling us that you may be coming down with a cold… we’re using our millenia-old pattern recognition circuits that are wired to identify “oncoming cold!”… and it happens below our consciousness.

In other words, it ain’t magic Houdini.

Think about this one: We often find it almost spooky that we can tell when someone is looking at us, right?

Well, first of all, we can’t tell as accurately as we think. If we have no idea if someone is behind us, and we have no idea if they’re looking… we can’t tell.

But we *DO* have millions of years of evolutionary hardware inside our cranium that responds to images of eyeballs (because seeing eyes could have been a life/death/sex moment).

When we spot eyes pointing in our direction, we don’t “know” it or “think” about it discursively. The whole thing happens like a reflex. So, it’s not a mystery when we turn our head and catch someone’s gaze. It’s simply that we turned our head in response to a signal we had no conscious awareness of.

Now THAT’s spooky because it makes you wonder: Hmmm… what else is going on where something automatic in my brain is running the show? Could it be… EVERYTHING?!

Humans like to ignore that we have some of the same psychobiological history as other animals. We like to think that everything that goes on for us is something we can clearly feel, perceive, conceive and deliberately affect.

It just isn’t so.

I’d LOVE to see an example of “intuition” that isn’t covered by either luck, or some form of non-conscious pattern recognition. Just hasn’t happened yet.

In the meantime, I like to remember a story that Richard Feynman tells about intuition: He was at home one evening and the phone rang and he knew, just KNEW, it was a call to tell him his mother died. He could feel it in his gut and dreaded picking up the phone. But not wanting to delay the bad news, he picked up the phone, ready to confirm his intuitive suspicion and… wouldn’t you know it… telemarketer.

1. Getting a bit tired of rehashing the same themes (there are only so many ways that thinking goes awry in the New Age and “spiritual” world, really)
2. Being busy with things like Invisible Shoes running sandals
3. Nothing spinning in my head  loudly enough that I need to get it out by writing it down

Well, that’s about to change. There’s a thought-storm a-brewin’ and this brief post will hint at what it is.

So let me get there by starting here:

You probably know about the various “caveman” or “paleolithic” diets. They suggest that we should eat like our 100,000 year old ancestors for maximum health and a lean, trim body.

Okay, let’s ignore for a moment that most of what they ate no longer exists — the fruits and vegetables they would find have long since been selectively bred out of existence, for example.

And let’s ignore that their lifestyle — which involved a surprisingly small amount of driving, deskwork, and Twitter/Facebook status updates — is, oh, a bit passe.

But here’s what gets me. I’ve never heard one of the paleo/cave proponents recommend a food that was eaten frequently by our more hirsute relatives… one that is a source of a significant percentage of protein in the diets of many modern societies.

Insects.

Yup. Bugs, grubs, spiders, creepy-crawly things. Oh, and let’s not forget lizards who, it seems, had not yet been turned into hyper-expensive boots.

If you’re going to propose that we get in the Way-Back Machine and knosh at a pre-historic Denny’s, then you can’t cherry-pick your data (and cherries, back then, were sour and sucked). You can’t leave out the pieces of the puzzle that you find unpleasant or, worse, unmarketable.

So, you paleolithic pansies, get thee to an Asian grocery for some palm grubs (smoothies, anyone?). Hop over to an exotic pet store for a plateful of crickets and grasshoppers. Don’t feed that monitor lizard you have as a pet… pet it gently with marinade as you roast it over an open flame.

Oh, and walk all the way to and fro on your gathering errands, cause finding this stuff shouldn’t be easy.

Now, all that said, how does this relate to our normal topic-du-blog?

I’ve been struck lately by how Western Buddhists have been cherry-picking philosophy and taking the bugs out of the teachings they don’t find palatable (like, oh, the little idea that “enlightenment” or the “end of suffering” — the promise and #1 sales pitch of Buddhism — is attainable through diligent practice of monastic life… and, instead, Buddhism is really promising that, in the moment, you have the ability to be more present and less reactive… Whoopty-friggin’ do).

But more about that later, once the volume of that thought in my brain gets to 11.

The one group of people who could fix all the world’s problems, but, do they?

Noooooooooo.

How dare they hoard their knowledge and mastery over the world in exchange for the selfish act of earning a living and supporting their families?

Look, I like being able to pay the rent as much as the next guy/gal, but if I could cure all the world’s ills with a couple of simple day trips, I’d sacrifice my livelihood in exchange for utopia. Wouldn’t you?

Of course you would.

But once again, as I go to my tap for a glass of water, I’m reminded of the callous arrogance of the community of practitioners of Samuel Hahnemann’s art.

Because, if it were me, and I were a homeopath, and I knew homeopathic treatments became stronger the more you diluted them, I would take my entire arsenal of homeopathic medicines, get in my car, drive to the city’s reservoir, and dump them all in!

Then, I’d whip around the rez in my speedboat to make sure that 1 milliliter of already hyper-diluted substance imprints the entire body of water with its energetic memory (clearly more powerful than the imprint of the gas from my motor), so that everyone who partakes in a sip of municipal H2O would receive the healing powers.

“Hold on!,” some of you might complain, “The homeopath picks JUST THE RIGHT medicine for your specific condition! You can’t go dumping everything in at once?!”

Okay, I’ll grant you a flaw in my original plan.

But that will merely highlight the level of my altruism and the greediness of my homeopathic peers (if, I were a homeopath and, therefore, had peers, that is).

See, I’d be willing to start with only one remedy, and let the people who have that matching illness recover, as if by magic. And then I’d go out to the reservoir every month, or every week, or every day, until I had exhausted my collection of treatments and my entire stash of medicines was exhausted.

And, when the mainstream medical community was out of work (other than for things like setting broken bones), I’d spearhead the movement for homeopaths around the world to do the same for their communities, bringing true healing of the root causes, and ending the oppressive conspiracy of Western medicine once and for all.

Finally…

Oh, wait…

I just realized the fatal error in my thinking, and perhaps now understand the psychic pain that homeopaths must endure every day of their live, knowing that they could cure all beings by following my subversive method, were it not for this:

By diluting the treatments THAT much, so that the odds of finding even one molecule of the original substance in the entire reservoir is absolutely zero, the treatments would become too powerful for all but denizens of Krypton to tolerate.

If positive thinking is supposed to be so powerful that it can bend the molecules of the universe to its will, magnetize money, eradicate disease, overpower anyone else who wants the same thing you do, and otherwise exert more control over the external world than all other forces combined…

Then why is it such a wimp in the face of “negativity?”

Why is saying to a positive thinker, “You’re a delusional narcissist” kryptonite to positivity’s Superman?

If being positive is so uplifting that it gets you a better job, improves all your relationships, and alters your physiology to make you impervious to anything shy of a nuclear bomb suppository, then why do you need to protect it like the Bubble Boy in a Swine Flu farm by running away from anyone who might brush up against your rosy attitude?

Positivity, it seems, is the 98-pound weakling at the beach.

Well, no more!

Now you can get my new positivity training program, Positively Positive, a Charles Atlas-like course for positive thinking wimps.

No longer will the Negativity Bully kick sand in your face and embarrass you and your scrawny, sunken-chested positivity!

In just 2.3 seconds a day, in the comfort of your home, you’ll use Dynamic at-Tension and build negativity armor arms, positively powerful pecs, LOA legs, and back that looks like a giant V for visualization!

You’ll go back to the beach and punch that bully in the face (metaphorically, since you’ll use Non-Violent Communication), and prove to your Indigo Child girlfriend that you really are on the Hero’s Journey!

It’s guaranteed!

If, in just 30 days, you’re not radiating so many positive vibes that the Dalai Lama calls and asks you to tone it down, you’ll get all your money back, plus all the money AIG got in the government bailout.

Order today by calling the phone number on the next line (which can only be seen if you’re not too full of negativity to render useless even this Quantum Physics proven program):

Here’s my prediction about that upcoming non-event.

Unless the upcoming movie 2012 is a documentary made in the future and sent back through a wormhole (or put in the mailbox shared by Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves), 12/21/2012 will be so uneventful that it’ll make Y2K look like the Harmonic Convergence.

But when the “planetary alignment” occurs, without the warned-about mayhem, here’s how the 12-ers will spin it:

“YOU DID IT, HUMANITY! You made the shift in consciousness that we needed to avert disaster and have ushered in a new era in global connection and enlightenment.”

This announcement will be followed on 12/22/2012 by a dramatic continuation of the status-quo with the only enlightenment coming from the burning of 2012 books (stock up on ingredients for s’mores!).

Once again, you heard it here first (because, I, too, have come back in time through a wormhole — or through the ham radio transmissions of Dennis Quaid, I can’t tell).

I have a flyer that I got 25 years ago. It was for some transformational workshop. I can’t tell you what it was for because “have” means that it’s packed away in a box with other stuff I’ve been moving from place to place for the better part of 3 decades.

But the content of the workshop isn’t the important part. What is important is the content of the presenter’s curriculum vitae (which is Latin for “you done what? when?”).

His claim to fame, his demonstration of mastery, the shingle he hung to prove his value as a presenter of psychological power tools and transformational whatnots was… drumroll please…

An 11 year history of alien abduction.

The reason I kept his flyer was as a reminder that PT Barnum was underestimating humanity when it comes to the birthrate of suckers.

Not only did this guy think his now-35+ year history of playing with the Pleadians was worthy of veneration, but, more importantly, people who agreed would shell out money to hear what information he received through the repeated application of the anal probe.

So, what got me on this rant?

An email I received from a “transformational” teacher who will remain nameless so as not to give him any money-making publicity, but which I’ll be saving along with alien-boy’s workshop info.

This email used demonstrated the oft-overused technique of misrepresenting science to support ludicrous mumbo-jumbo theories that, once believed by the critically-unthinking, result in a transfer of dollars from  the wallets of those who so desperately want more money, to the bank accounts of those who claim they have transcended the desire for it.

Here’s just a sample (it’ll be hard for me to comment on it, it’s so absurd):

You may have even seen a “blown up” image of a DNA chromosome in Scientific America or in a science book. It consists of two intertwined strands known as “The Double Helix.”

“Scientific AmeriCA” a favorit magazin of min.

And what’s with the quotes around The Double Helix? Or around blown up for that matter?

We’re just getting started. Let’s continue:

However, what most people do not know is in addition to the two strands – there are an additional 10 etheric strands of DNA – known as “junk DNA” — available to each human which are thought to have been dormant since the beginning of mankind.

Let the screaming begin.

“Junk DNA” is just a label for the parts of the genome for which we don’t currently know the purpose. Yesterday’s “Junk” is tomorrow’s “Oh, this is the part that makes you think Family Circus is funny.”

Junk DNA has nothing to do with… did you catch it… etheric DNA. Which, of course, most people don’t  know about it because… THERE’S NO SUCH THING!

At least the author (and I hate to use that word for the creator of the email I’m dissecting, when it’s been used for creators of better works, like Holocost denial pamphlets) concedes:

I know this sounds far-fetched…

Except he’s mistaken. It doesn’t sound far-fetched. It sound cah-ray-zee!

Okay, the fun is just beginning. Because next we discover:

As Humans We Currently Only Using Less Than 20% Of Our Available DNA.

16.6% to be exact.

No wonder I can never remember where I left my car keys!

When I read this, I wondered,  “Why didn’t you just say 16.6% to begin with?” Well, the answer is that, in the next paragraph, we learn:

It gets worse. Because what “cutting-edge” scientists have recently discovered is we only use a paltry 3% of our active two strand DNA.

Make up your damn mind! Is it <20%, 16.6% or 3%?!

You know, of course, that “cutting-edge” means on the edge of being certified a “cuckoo-cuckoo” whack job and escorted to a rubber room.

“But wait,” you say, “3% of our two-strand DNA. What about when we include the invisible, never-before-seen, ETHERIC DNA from the fictional land of Fictitia?”

I’m glad you ask. And, better, the answer is waiting in the next sentence:

So on a percentage basis, we are really only using 0.5% of our total DNA.

This is my favorite part. Because it’s the only one that makes sense. Oh, not because it’s true, but because the math is correct.

our 2-strand DNA is 1/6th of the total DNA (2 strands + the 10 strands from Unicornville), and “0.5%” is 1/6th of 3%. Phew, at least this proves the email’s writer (and I hate to use that word when it’s used for the generators of better prose, like fetish porn), isn’t prone to silly non-sequiturs, like:

And this means most everyone struggles through life – never living enjoying the abundance they rightfully deserve.

Holy Leaps of Logic, Batman!

Uhh… the connection between the meaningless DNA usage rates and struggling is, ummm… what, again?

And, “deserve”? Don’t even get me started on that (oh, no need, I already ranted about it )

Anyway… let’s take in in for the wallet-clearing landing:

When you use [[Magical Technique Name Withheld]] – you “reactive” your dormant DNA.  And when you reactivate your DNA… you begin “magnetizing” yourself to the abundance… and… you can easily manifest.

I can only hope that what you start magnetizing is an abundance of common sense, critical thinking skills, and the Sharper Image Bullcrap Detector.

If you do, you’ll recognize the screamingly obvious points that:

1. Since there is no such thing as etheric DNA, you can’t “reactive” it (I’ll let the typo slide)
2. REactivated? You mean it used to be active and now is dormant? What happened?
3. There’s no way to demonstrate that said DNA, if it existed, were “reactivated”
4. The only “proof” they could possibly give is the famous “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (a.k.a. There’s a big pile o poo in my front yard, which means there MUST be a pony underneath!”)
5. In this context, “magnetize” “abundance” and “manifest” are meaningless words that, sadly, tap into our innate desire to control our environment in order to ensure our happiness and survival and, therefore, are used by naive (at best) people whose means of “manifesting” is by selling you the “magic manifestation method.”

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the guy… after all, 10 years ago I bought his course (that’s why I got the email), and clearly my etheric DNA has been reactivated. Otherwise, how can you explain my ability to attract stupid emails that inspire blog posts?

Actually, I’m writing this post just so I have the ammunition later to say, “I told you so.”

I was thinking about how proponents of Intelligent Design (a.k.a. creationism, a.k.a. religious fiction), like to look down their nose and say, “Nobody has ever shown that you can create LIVING things from non-living chemicals.”

Ignoring that non-living chemicals are required for living things to survive (salt, iron, ascorbic acid to name a few, anyone?), and ignoring that any parent of a teen-aged boy sees life emerge from non-life every morning, all that’s probably going to change soon.

Craig Venter is getting pretty close to building an organism from scratch (I think by following an unpublished Julia Child recipe for flan).

Get that? He’s going to take some non-living chemicals, put them together and, Mary Shelley, This Is Your Life… he’s going to turn ‘em into something living.

Okay, now here’s where I predict the future:

The boneheads creationists will use Venter’s accomplishment — the one that debunks their arguments with a 360-degree spinning slam dunk — as proof for their theory.

Can you guess how (gold stars if you do)?

BAAAAP! Time’s up.

It’s simple.

They’ll dust off the “blind watchmaker theory,” give it a new coat of crap-colored paint and say:

See! It took an intelligent designer to create life! We win. Nanny-nanny boo-boo!

May I reserve the space now to, in the future, scream, “Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh!”

Oh, they may whip out another classic from the anti-rational archives:

Yeah, but he made a little one-celled organism. That doesn’t prove anything.

I’m sure it’ll be lost on anyone who would make that argument that even if there were an Adam and Eve, the guy who was intelligent enough to be the designer of that one-celled organism EVOLVED from them. After all, A&E never brewed up a batch of biologically activity in the garden (thanks to my wife for pointing that one out).

So bookmark this page, once Venter (and, admittedly, the equally brainy bunch he works with and competes against) succeed, we’re in for a bumpy ride as we careen through the intellectual vacuum.

Every now and then, I’ll get an idea about something to write and then realize, “I’ve already made that post.”

I don’t feel an urge to beat the same dead horse just for the sake of having content… so, I’m not saying a whole lot lately.

Now, that said, I’ve probably already talked about the subject of this post, but I was overtaken by the urge to scream and, instead, turned here…

I just got an email advertising Tony Robbins’ ‘Creating Unstoppable Confidence” course.

If ever there were an idea that needs to be taken in the back and flogged, it’s the notion that you need to be confident in order to succeed.

Come on, think about it.

Is it possible to have REAL confidence about something you’ve never done before you do it?

No, that’s called bravado, or naivete, or arrogance, or… oh, what’s the Latin word?… right, STUPIDITY.

Like all these ideas about “what leads to success” if you just look at your own life, you can find innumerable examples that disprove the theory.

Confident you could learn to ride a bike? Nope. Not until the AHA! moment where you understood what balance felt like. And even then it took more time until you were able to hop on and start riding without a bit of anxiety.

Confidence is not something you get in ADVANCE, it’s what you get with EXPERIENCE. And, even then, it’s iffy and, probably unnecessary.

I was remembering how, back in 1976, when I learned to do a standing back flip, I would spend 5 minutes psyching myself up before I gave it everything I had, with the hopes I wouldn’t screw up and land on my head. Now, 200,000 back flips and 33 years later, I know I can spin around with the best of ‘em. AND, if I haven’t done one in a couple of months (you might be surprised at how infrequently one needs to do a standing back flip in real life), I’m still a bit anxious as I throw myself in the air.

It’s only when I land, preferably on my feet, that my confidence comes back, and then I’m more than happy to play circus monkey and do another one or two for the kids (not mine; whichever kids were around).

And think of the number of things you’ve attempted because you were confident you could do them, and then, well, reality had a different opinion. Orthopedic surgeons pay for their Porsches with the confidence of weekend warriors who are SURE they’ll be fine if they go chasing a Frisbee like they remember doing 20 years earlier.

Of course, you don’t need to rely on your own experience to debunk the “Confidence leads to success” theory.

Ever heard of a politician who DIDN’T believe, with utter confidence, that s/he would win?

I met one of Walter Mondale’s kids back in 1974… by then Walter had already spent 2 decades getting ready to become president. I’m sure he’s just waiting in the wings for his comeback.

I keep a collection of videos of interviews with people who are thought of as successful (not saying they aren’t, but yesterday’s success may become tomorrow’s bankrupt jailbird).  My two favorites are Lance Armstrong and Larry David (co-creator of Seinfeld) when each of them was interviewed by Charlie Rose.

In each, Charlie tries to get his guests to admit they had confidence about their successes.

But in each, neither one concedes that point. Lance keeps saying, “Anything can happen in a race. You never know.” And Larry talks about how, every time the network asked him for more shows, he was 100% confident… that he couldn’t deliver!

Does that remind you of the stories you’ve read about actors and athletes who have to puke before each performance because they’re so anxious about bombing?

See? It doesn’t take much to debunk the theory.

I’m sure that, were I in a different mood, I could posit some clever idea from evolutionary psychology to say why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we still hold onto this lie that confidence and success have any correlation… in fact, I have unstoppable confidence that I could.