Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Welcome to the stone outhouse on the Burrow where the Weasley’s keep their broomsticks.

The adventure begins!

The first piece of wisdom Dumbledore drops on us in this book? “You need your friends, Harry.”

Alas, our wise wizard confirms what we all know to be true and what science unequivocally echoes. How about a few thoughts on the subject?

We’ll start with a recent Note on Stick with It in which Sean Young tells us about the importance of Community in changing behavior and says: “In the 1930s, a team of Harvard researchers began a study that tracked the life choices of a group of Harvard undergraduates. They continued this study for seventy-five years. One thing they found was that strong social connections were the most important factor in achieving happiness.”

In Pursuing the Good Life, another leading Positive Psychologist, Chris Peterson puts it this way: “‘Other people matter.’ I say that in every positive psychology lecture I give and every positive psychology workshop I conduct. It sounds like a bumper sticker slogan, but it is actually a good summary of what positive psychology research has shown about the good life broadly construed. It is in the company of others that we often experience pleasure and certainly how we best savor its aftermath. It is through character strengths that connect us to others—like gratitude—that many of us find satisfaction and meaning in life. It is with other people that we work, love, and play. Good relationships with other people may be a necessary condition for our own happiness, even in markedly individualist cultures like the contemporary United States.”

Plus: “The happiest places on earth are not the internal ones. They are not the geographical ones. The are the places between us, and the closer they are and the more comfortable, the happier they are apt to be. [Eric] Weiner apparently agrees. He ends his book [The Geography of Bliss] by observing, ‘Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction.”

Then we have George Valliant, psychiatrist and Harvard professor who, for 35 years, led Harvard’s 70+ year Study of Adult Development (that same one Sean referred to above). In Spiritual Evolution he puts it this way: “Modern ethology and neuroscience make clear that all mammals are hardwired for love. Of all the fauna on earth, however, Homo sapiens is the most radically dependent on love. Thus, ethologist Konrad Lorenz called love ‘the most wonderful product of ten million years of evolution’; psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote, ‘Without love humanity could not exist even for a day’; and Saint Paul concluded, ‘And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’”

Plus: “Love is the shortest definition of spirituality I know.”

I’m also reminded of Brené Brown and her wisdom on vulnerability when I read Dumbledore’s words. In The Gifts of Imperfection, she tells us that “ordinary courage” (and our Gryffindor’s are certainly courageous, eh?!), requires the willingness to be vulnerable: “I realized that courage is one of the most important qualities that Wholehearted people have in common. And not just any kind of courage; I found that Wholeheartedness requires ordinary courage. Here’s what I mean…

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” Over time, the definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics is important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage. Heroics is often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

In sum: Friends matter. A lot.

How can you share yourself just a little more with your loved ones today?

Say hello to our new potions master: Slughorn. And, say hello to liquid luck, Felix Felicis!

I laughed out loud at the effects of the potion when taken in excess when reading to Emerson and again as I typed that out.

“Too much of a good thing, you know”!

First, I’m reminded of our friend, the Inverted U. In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell tells us: “That’s what is called an inverted-U curve. Inverted U curves are hard to understand. They almost never fail to take us by surprise, and one of the reasons we are so often confused about advantages and disadvantages is that we forget when we are operating in a U-shaped world.

… * The psychologists Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant argue, in a brilliant paper, that, in fact, nearly everything of consequence follows the inverted U: ‘Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y. … There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.’”

Yep. Too much of a good thing—like a feeling of invincibility in this case—can be a bad thing: causing “giddiness, recklessness, and dangerous overconfidence.”

For our purposes, we’ve gotta know that our hope and optimism and confidence is absolutely essential to Optimizing and Actualizing. Yet, although it’s certainly necessary, on its own its insufficient. We need to ground that hope and optimism and confidence in reality, lest it turn into recklessness and dangerous overconfidence.

How do we do that? We’ve discussed many ways!

How about Ray Dalio’s 1st Principle? “Embrace Reality and Deal With It.” Be a “hyperrealist” and learn to love your problems rather than ignore them recklessly.

Have Stockdale’s Paradoxical confidence such that you KNOW you will ultimately prevail AND you are willing to embrace the harsh facts of your current reality.

WOOP your vision board by rubbing it up against reality so you can make an effective plan.

Be Antifragile by embracing a “barbell strategy” in which you’re simultaneously super aggressive *and* super conservative. Dreaming big while playing small.

Yep. That’s the way to have fun with our own liquid luck potions!

(We’ll come back to our friend Felix Felicis in a moment.)

Reading that last line was another laugh-out-loud moment that required me to get up out of bed where Emerson and I were reading to grab a pen and highlight that section. To review:

a) Dumbledore reminds us yet again that he is human and, therefore, makes mistakes just like the rest of us; and,

b) He happens to be “rather cleverer” than most men and, therefore, his mistakes “tend to be correspondingly huger.” (Hah!)

May we all have the playful humility and audacity to embrace such truths.

btw: That passage also reveals another aspect of Dumbledore’s awesomeness we talked about in a prior Note: His COMPLEXITY. He’s simultaneously humble and not so humble.

And, he pulls it off with a wonderful, endearing panache. :)

btw: Quick vocab + etymology lesson. Panache means “flamboyant confidence of style or manner.” It comes from the late Latin pinnaculum, diminutive of pinna ‘feather.’

Here’s to your endearing panache today! :)

I might’ve laughed out loud reading that scene as well. (Am I easily amused? Very well then, I’m easily amused.)

But that spectacular performance of Ron’s during the Quidditch match after he *thought* he had a little liquid luck in his belly was epic. His goalkeeping skills went up about ten notches with the proper amount of confidence aided by just *thinking* he had a dose of Felix Felicis.

Alas, science would like to confirm the power of this wisdom as well. Enter: The Placebo Effect.

It’s actually CRAZY powerful. Joe Dispenza wrote a whole book on it called You Are the Placebo and we talk about it in Harvard researcher Ellen Langer’s Counterclockwise. Plus another Harvard researcher named Herbert Benson shares some nutty stats in his book The Relaxation Revolution.

Check out our Notes on those books for some astonishing examples rivaling Ron’s goalkeeping performance. (The most mind-boggling might be a carefully controlled study in which people who THOUGHT they were getting an arthroscopic surgery on their knee showed the same benefits as if they actually got the real surgery when all they got was a pretend surgery. Nuts.)

For now, know this: According to Benson: “Many hundreds of scientific studies have shown that an inner conviction, which the medical community has linked to the phenomenon called ‘the placebo effect,’ can help produce healing for scores of diseases and medical complaints. The placebo effect is a mind body mechanism that may bring about healing through a person’s expectation and belief that a certain treatment will work.”

Langer says: “When we see mind and body as parts of a single entity, the research on placebos takes on new meaning and suggests we can not only control much of our disease experience, but we may also be able to extend our ability to gain, recover, or enhance our health.

Placebos often come in the form of a single word that captures a richer mindset. In one study I conducted with my students, we explored the mindset most of us have regarding excellent vision air force pilots have. All participants were given a vision test. One group of participants were then encouraged to role-play ‘air force pilots.’ They dressed the part and, in uniform, sat in a flight simulator. They were asked to read the letters on the wing of a nearby plane, which were actually part of an eye chart. Those participants who adopted the ‘pilot’ mindset, primed to have excellent vision, showed improved vision over those who were simply asked to read an eye chart from the same distance.”

A little belief goes a long way…

How’s yours?

There are two ways to walk into the arena that is our lives: Like we’re being dragged in or with our heads held high.

Makes me think of the Threat vs. Challenge response we talk about all the time—most recently in The Telomere Effect. And, David Emerald’s Victim vs. Creator distinction in The Power of TED*. I also think Seneca’s line: “There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly.”

Then, of course, there’s Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly which is named after that man in the arena Teddy Roosevelt described in 1910: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

What challenge is beckoning you into the arena today? Let’s walk in with our heads held high and hearts full of courage! (And, perhaps, a mouthful of Felix Felicis!!! :)