Gotta go to Walmart, Gotta watch Wopner

He can have it. He really can.

I was playing poker the other night and I was dealt two beautiful queens, a great pair that is going to be ahead of somewhere in the nature of 1200 other possible starting hands in Texas Hold'em. I dutifully raised before the flop and was called by one other player. The flop was jack-jack-ten. Still holding the likely best hand, I bet. The villain raised me. You gotta be kidding me. You're raising me, representing that you have either a jack or two tens? (It was not likely that he had aces or kings since even lousy players raise with those two hands before the flop.) So either this guy was bluffing or had the goods and I was in trouble. As it turned out, I put all my chips in the middle and he showed me two tens giving him a full house. Good game, me. There's a sucker born every minute.

Well, I'm not that sucker. Not in this case. I am a different sucker. The sucker in the case above at least thought about the situation. In this case, I did not even remotely go through the deductive reasoning process described above to determine if I held the best hand or not. Instead, when faced with aggression, my competitive juices started flowing and I thought, “Hey, buddy, don't try to bluff ME! I'm all-in!”. In fact, I had tossed my advantage - my deductive reasoning skills - right out the window. I had gone into what I call temporary autism, a mental form of thinking too narrowly and decisively.

Have you ever been around an autistic child or have you watched the movie Rainman? I'm no expert on autism, but from what I have observed, autistic people tend to focus narrowly on certain things. Rainman, if you recall, focused on Judge Wopner and buying underwear at Walmart - “Gotta watch Wopner, gotta go to Walmart and buy underwear. Gotta watch Wopner – 5 o'clock. Gotta watch Wopner. Gotta go to Walmart.” The focus is super-narrow and it is strikingly debilitating.

Basically, isn't that what I did? Instead of thinking outside of the box, I didn't even get out of a corner of the box. All I knew is that I had been threatened and that I was going to strike back!  I narrowed my thinking to one of self-defense and counter-aggression.  Kill thine enemy!

Take, for example, this paraphrased but true story of two New York City policemen that were patroling a dangerous neighborhood. They drove by one house and noticed a man sitting on the stairs in front of the house. But, when the man saw them, he got up quickly and started heading into the house. The policemen stopped their car quickly when they saw the suspicious action. They got out of their car and told the man to stop. The man, instead of stopping, tried to go into his house and was fumbling with his keys to unlock the door. When the police called him again, he reached for his side pocket, which was hidden from view from the policemen. When he did that, the cops felt threatened, as if the man was drawing a gun, and they shot him dead. In reality, the man was mentally disabled and was only reaching for his wallet so he could show them his ID. How's that for narrowing your focus into one of self-defense and counter-aggression? 

It happens all the time. A man was driving on a mountainous, winding road, and when rounding a curve, another car headed towards him, but in the first driver's lane. The other car swerved to the opposite and correct lane and yelled out of his window, “PIG!!!”. The first driver took a glance back at the other driver in his side-mirror and thought, “What a jackass! That guy was driving the wrong way in MY lane and he has the gall to call ME a pig?!” As he rounded the curve, he looked up to the road and suddenly saw a big, black boar with huge tusks standing in the middle of his lane! He slammed on his brakes and swerved in to the opposite lane to avoid crashing into the boar.  Again, narrow thinking working to someone's detriment.

Thinking too narrowly prevents us from being as successful as we would like to be or, in some cases, it prevents us from being successful at all. When you get into stressful situations, you must work very, very hard to not become “temporarily autistic”. Calm down. Take a deep breath. Don't panic.  Don't get angry.  Think of every possibility, even ones you consider ridiculous or strange. Even thinking of the strange ones and the unlikely ones can assist you in developing solutions to problems that you otherwise could not consider.  It's not easy, but I am telling you, to be truly successful, you have to think on a wide range, not a narrow one. All supremely successful people have the natural ability or have developed the ability to think and act on a wide range.  Narrow thinking is for suckers, I promise you. Trust me when I tell you, he can have it. He really can.