What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny

One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. I realized that discovering ideas and strategies that could help me to shape human behavior and emotion could give me virtually everything I wanted in my life. It could get me out of pain and into pleasure. Learning to unlock the secrets behind our actions could help me to become more healthy, to feel better physically, to connect more deeply with the people I cared about. Learning provided me with something to give, the opportunity to truly contribute something of value to all those around me. It offered me a sense of joy and fulfillment. At the same time, I discovered an even more powerful form of pleasure, and that was achieved by sharing what I'd learned in a passionate way. When I began to see that what I could share helps people increase the quality of their lives, I discovered the ultimate level of pleasure! And my life's purpose began to evolve.

What are some of the experiences of pain and pleasure that have shaped your life? Whether you've linked pain or pleasure to drugs, for example, certainly has affected your destiny. So have the emotions you've learned to associate to cigarettes or alcohol, relationships, or even the concepts of giving or trusting.

If you're a doctor, isn't it true that the decision to pursue a medical career so many years ago was motivated by your belief that becoming a physician would make you feel good? Every doctor I've talked to links massive pleasure to helping people: stopping pain, healing illness, and saving lives. Often the pride of being a respected member of society was an additional motivator. Musicians have dedicated themselves to their art because few things can give them that same level of pleasure. And CEOs of top organizations have learned to link pleasure to making powerful decisions that have a huge potential to build something unique and to contribute to people's lives in a lasting way.

Think of the limiting pain and pleasure associations of John Belushi, Freddie Prinze, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Their associations to drugs as an escape, a quick fix, or a way out of pain and into temporary pleasure created their downfalls. They paid the ultimate price for not directing their own minds and emotions. Think of the example they set for millions of fans. I never did learn to consume drugs or alcohol. Is it because I was so brilliant? No, it's because I was very fortunate. One reason I never drank alcohol is that, as a child, there were a couple of people in my family who acted so obnoxiously when drunk that I associated extreme pain to drinking any alcohol. One especially graphic image I have is the memory of my best friend's mom. She was extremely obese, weighing close to 300 pounds, and she drank constantly. Whenever she did, she wanted to hug me and drool all over me. To this day, the smell of alcohol on anyone's breath nauseates me.

Beer, though, was another story. When I was about eleven or twelve, I didn't consider it an alcoholic drink. After all, my dad drank beer, and he didn't get that " obnoxious" or disgusting. In fact, he seemed to be a little more fun when he'd had a few beers. Plus, I linked pleasure to drinking because I wanted to be just like Dad. Would drinking beer really make me like Dad? No, but we frequently create false associations in our nervous systems (neuro-associations) as to what will create pain or pleasure in our lives.

One day I asked my mom for a " brew." She began arguing that it wasn't good for me. But trying to convince me when my mind was made up, when my observations of my father so clearly contradicted her, was not going to work. We don't believe what we hear; rather, we are certain that our perceptions are accurate—and I was certain that day that drinking beer was the next step in my personal growth. Finally, my mom realized I'd probably just go drink somewhere else if she didn't give me an experience I wouldn't forget. At some level, she must have known she had to change what I associated to beer. So she said, " Okay, you want to drink beer and be like Dad? Then you've really got to drink beer just like your dad." I said, " Well, what does that mean? " She said, " You've got to drink a whole six-pack." I said, " No problem."

She said, " You've got to drink it right here." When I took my first sip, it tasted disgusting, nothing like what I'd anticipated. Of course, I wouldn't admit it at the time because, after all, my pride was on the line. So I took a few more sips. After finishing one beer I said, " Now I'm really full, Mom." She said, " No, here's another one, " and popped it open. After the third or fourth can, I started feeling sick to my stomach. I'm sure you can guess what happened next: I threw up all over myself and the kitchen table. It was disgusting, and so was cleaning up the mess! I immediately linked the smell of beer to the vomit and horrible feelings. I no longer had an intellectual association to what drinking beer meant. I now had an emotional association in my nervous system, a gut-level neuro-association—one that would clearly guide my future decisions. As a result, I've never had even a sip of beer since!

Can our pain and pleasure linkages produce a processional effect in our lives? You bet. This negative neuro-association for beer affected many of my decisions in life. It influenced whom I hung out with at school. It determined how I learned to get pleasure. I didn't use alcohol: I used learning; I used laughter; I used sports. I also learned that it felt incredible to help other people, so I became the guy in school everybody came to with their problems, and solving their problems made both them and me feel good. Some things haven't changed through the years!

I also never used drugs because of a similar experience: when I was in the third or fourth grade, the police department came to my school and showed us some films about the consequences of getting involved in the drug scene. I watched as people shot up, passed out, spaced out, and leaped out of windows. As a young boy, I associated drugs to ugliness and death, so I never tried them myself. My good fortune was that the police had helped me form painful neuro-associations to even the idea of using drugs. Therefore, I have never even considered the possibility.

What can we leam from this? Simply this: if we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives, from a pattern of procrastinating to drug use. How do we do this? Let's say, for example, you want to keep your children off drugs. The time to reach them is before they experiment and before someone else teaches them the falseassociation that drugs equal pleasure.

My wife, Becky, and I decided that the most powerful way to make sure our kids would never use drugs was to cause them to link massive pain to drugs. We knew that unless we taught them what drugs were really about, someone else might convince them that drugs were a useful way of escaping pain.

To accomplish this task, I called upon an old friend. Captain John Rondon of the Salvation Army. For years, I've supported John in the South Bronx and Brooklyn in helping street people make changes in their lives by raising their standards, changing their limiting beliefs, and developing life skills. Becky and I are very proud of the people who've used what we've taught to get off the streets and increase the quality of their lives. I've always used my visits there as a way of giving something back and as a reminder of how fortunate I am. It keeps me feeling appreciative of the life I have the privilege to lead. It also gives me perspective and keeps my life balanced.

I explained my goals to Captain John, and he arranged to take my children on a tour they would never forget, one that would give them a clear experience of what drugs do to the human spirit. It began with a firsthand visit to a rat-infested, rotting tenement building. The minute we walked in, my children were assaulted by the stench of urine-soaked floors, the sight of addicts shooting up heedless of who was watching, child prostitutes soliciting passers-by, and the sound of neglected, crying children. Mental, emotional, and physical devastation is what my kids learned to link to drugs. That was four-and-a-half years ago. While they have all been exposed to drugs many times since, they have never touched them. These powerful neuro-associations have significantly shaped their destinies.

" If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

MARCUS AURELIUS

We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it's not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it's how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future. One of the things that makes us so special is our marvelous ability to adapt, to transform, to manipulate objects or ideas to produce something more pleasing or useful. And foremost among our adaptive talents is the ability to take the raw experience of our lives, relate it to other experiences, and create from it a kaleidoscopic tapestry of meaning that's different from everyone else's in the world. Only human beings can, for example, change their associations so that physical pain will result in pleasure, or vice-versa.

Remember a hunger striker confined to jail. Fasting for a cause, he survives thirty days without food. The physical pain he experiences is considerable, but it's offset by the pleasure and validation of drawing the world's attention to his cause. On a more personal, everyday level, individuals who follow intense physical regimens in order to sculpt their bodies have learned to link tremendous feelings of pleasure to the " pain" of physical exertion. They have converted the discomfort of discipline into the satisfaction of personal growth. This is why their behavior is consistent, as are their results!

Through the power of our wills, then, we can weigh something like the physical pain of starvation against the psychic pain of surrendering our ideals. We can create higher meaning; we can step out of the " Skinnerian box" [9]* and take control. But if we fail to direct our own associations to pain and pleasure, we're living no better than animals or machines, continually reacting to our environment, allowing whatever comes up next to determine the direction and quality of our lives. We're back in the box. It's as if we are a public computer, with easy access for lots of amateur programmers!

Our behavior, both conscious and unconscious, has been rigged by pain and pleasure from so many sources: childhood peers, moms and dads, teachers, coaches, movie and television heroes, and the list goes on. You may or may not know precisely when programming and conditioning occurred. It might have been something someone said, an incident at school, an award-winning sports event, an embarrassing moment, straight A's on your report card—or maybe failing grades. All of these contributed to who you are today. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that what you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny.

As you review your own life, can you recall experiences that formed your neuro-associations and thus set in motion the chain of causes and effects that brought you to where you are today? What meaning do you attach to things? If you're single, do you look upon marriage wistfully as a joyous adventure with your life's mate, or do you dread it as a heavy ball and chain? As you sit down to dinner tonight, do you consume food matter-of-factly as an opportunity to refuel your body, or do you devour it as your sole source of pleasure?

" Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings."

—LORD CHESTERFIELD

Though we'd like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation. Intellectually, we may believe that eating chocolate is bad for us, but we'll still reach for it. Why? Because we're not driven so much by what we intellectually know, but rather by what we've learned to link pain and pleasure to in our nervous systems. It's our neuro-associations— the associations we've established in our nervous systems—that determine what we'll do. Although we'd like to believe it's our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions—the sensations that we link to our thoughts—are what truly drive us.

Many times we try to override the system. For a while we stick to a diet; we've finally pushed ourselves over the edge because we have so much pain. We will have solved the problem for the moment—but if we haven't eliminated the cause of the problem, it will resurface. Ultimately, in order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior, and condition it until it's consistent. Remember, we will all do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Going on a diet and overriding our pain in the short term by pure willpower never lasts simply because we still link pain to giving up fattening foods. For this change to be long-term, we've got to link pain to eating those foods so that we no longer even desire them, and pleasure to eat more of the foods that nourish us. People who are fit and healthy believe that nothing tastes as good as thin feels! And they love foods that nourish them. In fact, they often link pleasure to pushing the plate away with food still on it. It symbolizes to them that they're in control of their lives.

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors. With smoking, for example, all you must do is link enough pain to smoking and enough pleasure to quitting. You have the ability to do this right now, but you might not exercise this capability because you've trained your body to link pleasure to smoking, or you fear that stopping would be too painful. Yet, if you meet anyone who has stopped, you will find that this behavior changed in one day: the day they truly changed what smoking meant to them.

IF YOU DON'T HAVE A PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE,