How much of you can be changed?
If you hate meeting new people, can you learn to love the icebreaking with strangers? If you shy away from confrontation, can you be made to revel in the cut and thrust of debate? If the bright lights make you sweat, can you be taught to thrill to the challenge of public speaking? Can you carve new talents?
Many managers and many companies assume that the answer to all these questions is “Yes.” With the best of intentions they tell their employees that everyone has the same potential. They encourage their employees to be open and dedicated to learning new ways to behave. To help them climb up the company hierarchy, they send their employees to training classes designed to teach all manner of new behaviors—empathy, assertiveness, relationship building, innovation, strategic thinking. From their perspective, one of the most admirable qualities an employee can possess is the willingness to transform herself through learning and self-discipline.
The world’s great managers don’t share this perspective. Remember their mantra:
People don’t change that much.
Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.
That is hard enough.
They believe that a person’s talents, his mental filter, are “what was left in.” Therefore no amount of “smile school” training is going to transform the person who is intimidated by strangers into a smooth wooer. Despite his best efforts, the person who becomes less articulate the angrier he gets will never acquire what it takes to excel at debate. And no matter how much he understands the value of “win-win” scenarios, the intense competitor will never learn to love them.
A person’s mental filter is as enduring and as unique as her finger-print. This is a radical belief, one that flies in the face of decades of self- help mythology. But over the last ten years, neuroscience has started to confirm what these great managers have long believed.
In 1990 Congress and the president declared the nineties the decade of the brain. They authorized funding, sponsored conventions, and generally did everything within their power to help the scientific community unravel the mysteries of the human mind.
Their encouragement accelerated ongoing efforts by industry, academia, and research organizations. According to Lewis L. Judd, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health: “The pace of progress in neuroscience is so great that 90 percent of all we know about the brain we learned in the last ten years.”
In the past we had to infer the workings of the brain from the behavior of the patient. Today new technologies like positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) actually allow scientists to see the brain at work. Armed with these and other tools, we have taken giant leaps in learning.
We have learned that the causes of mental illness are as biological as any physical disease. We have learned why the neurotransmitter dopamine calms us down and why serotonin fires us up. We have learned that, contrary to what we used to think, our memories are not stored in one particular place but are scattered like clues on every highway and back alley of our brain.
And we have learned how the brain grows. Given the pace of scientific discovery in this arena, we shall surely advance our knowledge dramatically over the next few years. But this is what we know today.
At birth the child’s brain contains one hundred billion neurons, more brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way. These cells will grow and die regularly throughout the child’s life, but their number will remain roughly the same. These cells are the raw material of the mind. But they are not the mind. The mind of the child lives between these cells. In the connections between the cells. In the synapses.
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