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Success in the wild or in everyday life lies in the willingness to stop and question what you're doing. For example, if your chosen sport is running steep creeks in little boats, you will unconsciously form a model that says slow is bad, fast is good. Up to a point that's true. But at a certain rate of flow the creek or river becomes too hazardous to run, and "fast equals fun" becomes "fast equals dead." To revise the mental model, we have to make a deliberate analysis of what we're doing and its cost. It might go something like this:
1) Do I actually know the maximum flow at which I can reasonably run this river? (If the answer is no, you've got some homework to do.)
2) Do I have a plan for bailing out if this turns out to be too fast?
3) What is my ultimate goal here? (If you're out to set a world record at all costs, including your life, then go for it. If you're out for an afternoon of fun, proceed to number four.)
4) What is the most I am willing to risk to achieve that goal? (Remember, you could pay with your life. If you want to eat dinner with your family tonight, better go back to number one.)
This is just one example of the type of analysis that can be done to displace or revise mental models that could hurt us. But this process should always include a risk-reward analysis that answers the question: What am I willing to pay to achieve my goal? And it should always answer the question: How bad does it have to get before I quit? How cold? How windy? How late the hour?
But we often forget to ask these important questions. In part that's because we've created an environment for ourselves that is doubly misleading. On one hand, we've created a material culture that changes extremely fast. On the other, it appears to the animal side of us that nothing changes, because all of our needs are taken care of. We struggle with this paradox: We go into the wild to escape our material culture, but our material culture has cheated us out of the mental models that we need to survive. To live with an unquenchable curiosity that makes everything new is the ultimate triumph over the forces that inexorably pull us apart in the end. Perhaps, like the wildland firefighter, we should all set our watches and wake up once an hour.
Although it's easy to pass through life as if in a waking dream, we could enrich our lives, be more effective, and sometimes even cast a protective web around ourselves by developing a habit of knowing our world and ourselves and by consciously paying attention. Many survivors of terrible calamity have told me that this is exactly what they do now. Ernie Hazard survived two days lost at sea after his fishing boat sank off Georges Bank in 1980. In Fatal Forecast, an account of the ordeal, Hazard told the author, "These are free years I'm living. And so I don't let the little stuff get to me. . . . I appreciate the little things. Each day I take the long way to work, just to see the beauty of the coast." I've had survivors of cancer say nearly the same words to me.
All my life I've had this fear that I'll be hit by a bus one day and be lying in the gutter, the last of life leaking from me, thinking, Dang. I never found out how stars were formed. Or how old the Earth is. I've been here all my life in the most advanced civilization in the world, and I still don't know what makes my muscles work. How far away is Mars, anyway? Are whales really horses that returned to the sea long ago? And why wasn't I paying attention when that big, brightly painted bus came barreling down the road? Where was my mind when I needed it most?
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Survival Main Page >>
Page 2 - The Darwin of Dumb >>
Page 3 - When Mental Models Go Wrong >>
Page 4 - The Trouble With Success >>
Page 5 - Learning How to S.T.O.P. >>
Page 6 - Living Mindfully >>
Page 7 - The Survivor: Rulon Gardner >>
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