Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Kenny alludes to this in his essay’s opening paragraph: “Given that our brains seem hard-wired to remember singular tragedy over incremental success, it's a hard sell to convince anyone that the past 10 years are worthy of praise.” Because I’m not him!” Rosen says. “So you try not to be burdened?” I ask. “Or not to be a burden?” “Both, actually,” he says. “I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them.” I think world peace is eminently attainable particularly when it comes to wars between states. In fact, we’re getting there . The number of interstate wars has been in steep decline, and the world hasn’t had one since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. There are only 193 actors it’s not romantic to think that the world could come to an agreement to outlaw war in the same way that it outlawed slavery, human sacrifice, child labour and other practices which go on but which the world could be unanimous in condemning. Civil wars will be harder to eliminate because these actors can be a bunch of guys who get their hands on some semi-automatic weapons. Why relationship building is essential for executing change. Why major company acquisitions fail and lose the best people – ability to spot what change is needed vs. the ability to execute the change.

While all the self help rant the same stuff, this book is crisp & clear with the sole purpose of what it wants to deliver. I would like to recommend this book to everyone who like me are unable to find some answers or I will say who have poor GBM (getting better model)

"It's very hard to discern a coherent criticism beneath all of the belligerence and macho posturing."

Without at least a concept of cure, or conversations about cure, medicine wouldn’t make sense; likewise psychoanalysis, Freud would discover, only made sense with and without a concept of cure. And through psychoanalysis – always only a form of local knowledge – Freud would also discover, of course, the limits of the making of sense, and the competing claims about sense-making. It wasn’t long before psychoanalysts also had to imagine what psychoanalysis would be like without agreed aims, without an agreed concept of cure, of acceptable goals of change. As though psychoanalysis may have opened something up that couldn’t be foreclosed by compelling representations like concepts of cure. get better at getting better is a great follow-up to the Catalyst. It is about building the capability, to build a model to be successful. The book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model (GBM)” to be successful. To excel in today's VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, it is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have, to improve how good you are. If you have a strong model – then you will be able to multiplicate the model and achieve success in different roles and domains throughout your career. This is my takeaway from the book GBAGB. Don’t stop at the answer, get to the method of deriving the answer. Introspect on how your method of deriving the answer improves every time.

Making and implementing a get-better plan: This is about deliberately making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus. There are tradeoffs along the way, existential anguish seems to be on the rise, innovation is pushing us into an unknown stratosphere, but overall our lives are a picnic compared to a century or two ago. No,” he says. “It’s different. Sometimes he’s wearing clothes I’ve forgotten about, so I wake up and go, ‘Oh my God, I remember that shirt!’” Getting better by yourself: This is about deliberately getting better from what you do on a daily basis by yourself, without external help. I notice on Rosen’s desk an unframed photograph of a young man. Rosen swivels to look. “That’s him,” he says, “not all that long before he died.”Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it,” reads the subtitle of celebrated children’s writer Michael Rosen’s new book. It’s a reference to We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, one of his best-loved works. Part memoir, part self-help manual, Rosen’s latest publication considers what it is to get better, “what it means, and how we do it.” In spite of his adamant refusal to be caught up with any sort of therapeutic evangelism,’ comments Khan, ‘there is a definite, and progressive, theory of cure in the writings of Freud.’ ‘Progressive’ here depends on what counts as progress. We should remember, that is to say, at the outset, Freud’s disparaging remarks – disparaging about both his most inspired follower, and about the wish to cure – in his infamous obituary for Sándor Ferenczi, his colleague and collaborator, in 1933. ‘After this summit of achievement,’ he wrote, ‘it came about that our friend drifted away from us … the need to cure and to help became paramount to him.’ As though the wish to cure and help someone was itself a betrayal, a misunderstanding of psychoanalysis. This we might take as an emblem of Freud’s ambivalence about the concept of cure in relation to psychoanalysis. If you want to stay in the psychoanalytic fold, the wish to cure and help must not become paramount. This rather starkly dissociates psychoanalysis from medicine, and indeed, from the so-called helping professions. At its most minimal, the patient wants something they have been unable to get elsewhere – call it relief of suffering, enhanced freedom – and the analyst has a treatment that he values and wants to practise. To write of the concept of cure may involve the analyst in making controversial claims about the efficacy of his work; it may, at its worst, encourage the making of false or dubious promises; it may promote spurious success stories. And it may expose failure. But above and beyond this it raises the difficult questions that are at the heart of psychoanalysis, though not always at the heart of medicine: what has what the analyst wants for the patient got to do with the patient? And what is the significance, the history, of what the patient expects from the doctor? This patently replicates one of the essential perplexities of development: what has what the parents want for (and from) the child got to do with the child and her development? And at this point, as each psychoanalytic writer states the aims of psychoanalysis, everybody comes along with their specification: for Anna Freud and Winnicott, for example, the aim of analysis is to facilitate the patient’s development; for Klein it is for the patient to reach what she calls the depressive position; for Lacan it is to enable the patient not to betray their desire, and so on. This – as this brief menu of options and possibilities makes clear – is where the trouble starts, and where the real interest of psychoanalysis begins.

Data in a sense aggregates all of these events and non-events. When you’re counting up the number of crimes, the number of wars, people killed in war, the number of people who live below the line of extreme poverty as well as the happy non-events the view of the world that you get is not only different but as it happens, quite a bit more positive. In this digital world, there is quite a lot of buzz around Machine learning/ML (application of AI that provides the system the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed) – however, the better rhetorical question to ponder upon is – aren’t we humans supposed to be good at it in the first place? This certainly needs a good introspection and no debate. As the numbers and targets take more precedence in today’s cut-throat competitive organizations … people tend to rush towards results and often miss the learnings which they could have done during the journey. Each one of us has a profound capacity not only to get the results but also learn from it and get better every day (or rather “every hour” as Chandramouli often says 😊). As the saying goes, it’s not the destination, but the journey as well that matters. This book exactly focuses on the topic of taking time to “get better” by contemplating with right questions (“what” and “how”) to arrive at building a better learning model (GBM – Get-Better-Model). In another chapter, he recalls a bag of letters written in Polish by two relatives to their teenage son during the Second World War, letters that come to a sudden, horrible end when the ghetto in which they were being written was “liquidated” by the Nazis. Rosen has the letters translated into English; an act of remembrance and a way to regain control of the narrative. “It felt good to do this,” he says. There is a story told about one of Freud’s early followers, Alfred Adler, that often, when he did an initial consultation with a patient, he would ask them – after they had given him an account of their symptoms and taken a history – ‘What would you do if you were cured?’ They would answer, and he would say, ‘Well go and do it, then.’ It is a seemingly heartening story, not least because it suggests that the patient knows what he wants, and what it would be for him to be cured; and, indeed, that he may well have the wherewithal to do what he has wanted to do (being cured means finally doing something you have always wanted to do). As though a symptom is simply an inhibition; and the aim of analysis – in the Kleinian analyst Roger Money-Kyrle’s words – is ‘to show the irrelevance of the inhibition’ (or rather, to show the irrelevance of the inhibition by revealing its apparent relevance). The cure here, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is the cure of an inhibition. There is something – perhaps many things – that a person wants to do that he needs to feel he is unable to do. He suffers both from his inhibition and from his fear of his more disinhibited self; of the more or less grandiose fantasies he has about his disinhibited self. It has now been 23 years since Eddie’s death. For the most part, Rosen has succeeded in escaping incapacitation. “I’ve tried not to be burdened by it,” he says. “I talk in the book about ‘carrying the elephant’.” Rosen hands me a postcard replica of an engraving of a man struggling to carry an elephant up a hill. “I bought that in Paris,” he goes on, “and it’s a great reminder. You know, I’m not carrying an elephant. At the time I thought I was. Eddie’s dead and I’m carrying all this grief and it’s bigger than me – it’s as big as an elephant. But not any more. Even with this Covid thing, or with any of that other stuff, I’m still not carrying an elephant. So this picture, it inspires me.”Making and implementing a get-better plan: Making a plan and implementing it to get better in a few areas of focus. One of the ways of describing how psychoanalysis revises (and reprises) the medical model of cure, I think – though Freud was not always either explicit about this or conscious of it – is to say that it re-presents the concept of cure as if it is, unavoidably, a question of morality, a moral issue; as though the so-called ‘good life’ of ancient and traditional philosophy has been somehow all too literally replaced, or displaced, by the criteria of health of modern medical science; the good person has been redescribed as the healthy person (without the question ‘What is health good for?’ being asked, health tending to be less controversial than goodness: health as the solvent, the redescription of morality). As though shared knowledge has replaced each individual, personal hope. As though to know what it would be to be cured would be to know more or less what a good life was, if only for oneself. As though, in a sense, medical science could cure us of the perplexities of morality (by telling us who we are, it tells us who we can be); what Foucault described in Madness and Civilization as ‘the doctor–patient couple in which all alienations are summarized, linked and loosened’. This is a book about surviving. For Rosen, that invariably involves writing, to process his thoughts and emotions. Through a mixture of reminiscences and lessons, he also shows us “getting better” as running, as taking pills, as self-improvement, as something you cannot do on your own, as joy; and even as stuffing difficult feelings into a box when necessary. Rosen never imposes answers on us: “We can watch what others do, listen to what people say, but in the end we have to make it work for whoever we are and whatever life situation we’re in.” If you do pay attention to detail and the little things are important to you, you make them important to people.”– Coach Bill Snyder

Book talks about the “what to get better” and “how to get better” components which will help us to build a better and effective “Get Better Model” When the British analyst Masud Khan wrote his paper on cure in psychoanalysis, he gave it a duly complicated title, alerting us to cure as a problem of knowledge – ‘Towards an Epistemology of the Process of Cure’ – and began with a necessary admission: ‘It is a well-known fact that psychoanalysts shirk using the concept of cure in their written work.’ It could have been entitled ‘Towards a Theory of the Process of Cure’. And it is responsibilities that people tend to shirk, and if they shirk using the concept of cure in their written work, we can infer that cure is something they do, perhaps, speak about among themselves. Why then are psychoanalysts so evasive, so cautious about the concept of cure? The responsibility shirked – using the concept of cure in their written work – would seem to be of the most ordinary kind: it would be a declaration of therapeutic intent, a promise of sorts, in which the analyst proposes what she has to offer that the patient might need. It would present psychoanalysis as simply another commodity in a commodity culture, and not as the anti-commodity that it is. I think that John Gray’s dismissal of data is sophistry. It’s a formula for surrendering to our own cognitive biases and to allow ourselves to be jerked around by entrepreneurs of attention like our politicians and the terrorists.In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie. I recently finished reading Chandramouli Venkatesan's new book, get better at getting better, a very interesting take on ‘What makes people succeed?’ Why do some people succeed, while others find it very difficult? If you’re using the word more or less or improve or decline you’re already making a quantitative claim. If you do it without data, you’re talking through your hat. You’re just making stuff up. So the idea that we can do without data is just a recipe for your irrationality. Not quite the crusade because I am distrustful of leading an argument by passion or by my moral fervour. But I decided partly at the urging of leaders and critics to not let the book be completely bloodless and to muster some moral and emotional energy for the values that I argue in the book namely humanism.