Book Review - How To Achieve Unreasonable Success

Book Review

Really?

I’m doing book reviews now?

Well, yes. But not really, not like “The New York Times Book Review” heaven forbid. Just my usual ramblings. You can skip this one unless you’re interested in…

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Unreasonable Success & How to Achieve It
By Richard Koch (2020) London

Right now I am sitting in a Hotel near Dublin airport at 5:08am.

I’m here to attend a 7-day “Influential Writers” retreat with Perry Marshall and 12 others on the Great Blasket Islands in Ireland. The book I’m reviewing was assigned reading for the course, so, like every other undergraduate in the world, I am scrambling to finish my homework in the wee hours of the morning before we start.

I’ve timed this to be published on June 13th – the day I finish the writers’ retreat - so expect my next dispatch to be about “Revelations from Blasket Island” or something like that.

Richard Koch has assembled an impressive and very readable book, full of anecdotes and inspiration. He references the lives of these people and asks: what is common about their ride to the top?

THE PLAYERS

Walt Disney
Nelson Mandela
Winston Churchill
Jeff Bezos
Mari Curie
Leonardo de Vinci
Bob Dylan
J K Rowling
Steve Jobs
Paul of Tarsus
Valdimar Lennin
John Maynard Keynes
Margaret Thatcher
Helena Rubinstein
Bill Bail
Bruce Henderson
Otto von Bismark
Albert Einstein

F M Alexander
Jeremy Chance

Well, not the last two names – but they both appear in this book review.

I added my name because Koch – without knowing it – has produced a map which can be lucidly expressed through the Navigator, something I have been teaching for 40 years.

Obviously, that’s why Koch’s book excites me so much!

What is The Navigator?

The Navigator – which I presented at the Berlin Congress in 2020, and will again at Dublin in 2023 – is based on Gurdjieff’s enneagram symbol, which itself has unknown origins. The enneagram is most famous today as a way of categorising personalities, but the symbol itself is just that – a symbol. You can map onto it anything you like.

Since my readers are most familiar with F. M. Alexander – or FM for short – I will take you through the concepts of Koch’s book by illustrating how Alexander also passed through the exact same stages that Koch describes for all the luminaries in his book.

In fact, it’s a summary of my ThinkingBody Course:

Module One – FM Alexander’s life mapped on the Navigator Enneagram
Module Two – Jeremy Chance’s life mapped on the Navigator Enneagram
Module Three – Your life mapped on the Navigator (unfinished work)
Module Four – Koch’s book mapped on the Navigator (under review)

The first two modules are completed and available online as part of my new ATSuccess coaching plan here:

https://www.atsuccess.com/offers/5dW7qttb

What is “Unreasonable” Success?

Koch defines “unreasonable” using George Bernard Shaw’s dictum from his play Man & Superman:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

FM Alexander was definitely an unreasonable man.

One of his crucial marketing techniques – even more popular today – was trolling establishment figures in the Letters-to-the-Editor section of The Times in England. We’re talking of the period before the First World War. This kind of negative marketing was one of Alexander’s favourite ways of attracting attention to his work – because his work was against the norms, against the ‘reasonable’ people and what they believed. It upset people and challenged conventional wisdom.

But then, so did Nelson Mandela. A peaceful transfer of power to black majority rule in South Africa? Impossible. But he did it. And so did each of the players Richard highlights.

My unreasonableness? An Alexander Teacher Training school with 140+ trainees? Impossible. But I did it.

FM’s work also attracted great minds. Sir Charles Sherrington gave Alexander a shout-out in his book “Man on His Nature.” George Bernard Shaw took lessons, as did Aldous Huxley and John Dewey. William James was said to look favourably on Alexander’s discoveries, and Fitz Pearl was influenced to underpin his Gestalt concept of therapy, analogous to Alexander’s “psycho-physical unity.”

Alexander reminds me of “Where’s Wally?” or Forest Gump, a figure who somehow manages to appear in the background of significant historical events - but you must search carefully to find him.

Today, Alexander’s hidden influence extends everywhere.

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Three Energies that Drive Success

Koch rightly infers three critical kinds of energy that power anyone who achieves unreasonable success. Still, he does not distinguish these in any way from the other 6 landmarks in his book.

However, in the Navigator, we see three of Koch’s landmarks sitting on each apex of a triangle – refer to the diagram. The Navigator triangle distinguishes that these three are drivers – not steps we must take - but energies to find that can motivate our movement. Three kinds of energy drive transformation and unreasonable success, so it can benefit you to understand from where each energy arises…

Here are the three noted as positions on the Navigator, together with the landmark name Koch uses in his book to describe them.

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1st Energy

YOU – Point 9 on the Navigator

Koch Landmark 1: “Self-Belief”

You are the first energy, which is obvious.

What isn’t obvious is how unshakable is your belief in your Self?

The Navigator places this at the top – Point 9 - representing both the beginning and the end of a journey. That primary position, just before Step 1 in the Navigator, shows that self-believe forms an energy that propels you into any kind of success, but certainly into ‘unreasonable’ success.

What would life look like without it?

In Japan they have a concept of “引きこもり” (hikikomori), which literally means “to pull inward”. A ‘hikikomori’ does not want to interact with people; wants to stay secluded and alone. Look at all the names of the unreasonable people listed above – did any of them display this behaviour? Churchill may have had his ‘black dog’ depression, but he never gave up believing in himself or his ideas.

Koch calls this “Self-belief” and nominates it as the first and primary quality of anyone aspiring to unreasonable success.

2nd Energy

SHOCKS – Point 3 on the Navigator

Koch Landmark 3: “Transforming Experiences”

This is your “wake-up” call.

It reminds me of what my precious teacher Marjorie Barstow (1899~1996) once said to us at a workshop in Australia in 1986:

“All I want you people to do is wake you. Not from bed in the morning but during the day. To know what you are doing with your Self, and why.”

Hallelujah to that.

Koch calls these “Transforming Experiences”. You may have more than one, but usually one stands out above all the rest: Thatcher’s Falklands War; Mandela’s long period in prison; Lenin watching his beloved brother Sasha being hung in 1887 by the Tsar
Alexander III. For FM, it was losing his voice just as his acting career took off in Melbourne in the late 1880s. The shock and loss of that - together with his belief in himself – drove FM to make his momentous discoveries.

My personal transformation happened at 18 – my family calls it “Jerry’s God trip” - when I was touched by God to dedicate my life to bringing the world’s attention to Alexander’s Discoveries. Hmm. Still going. Not there yet.

Never give up.

However, these ‘transforming experiences’ can also come through interaction with teachers, mentors, and guides. What it takes from your side is surrender – to admit, “I need help”. Our luminaries got help – often unbidden – but it need not be an accidental shock that sets you in action. You can strive to create such transformational experiences if you are willing to take risks with your ego.

3rd Energy

TRUST – Point 6 on the Navigator

Koch Landmark 8: “Acquire Unique Intuition”

Trust in what?

Trust in your intuition that your actions are all you can do. Even if you have no concrete proof, no feeling of consensus around you that this is the action you must take – your past experience tells you: I must do this, even though I can not predict what will happen.

Mother Teresa puts it this way:

“I do everything I can and leave the rest to God.”

Can you hear the trust in that?

An example Koch gives is Churchhill’s total rejection of Hitler, even while thousands cheered Neville Chamberlain’s infamous declaration in 1938 of “peace for our time” following his return from the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. Since he had visited Germany in 1932, Churchill stood against the entire English establishment in rejecting any negotiations with Hitler.

That took trust, which comes as an energy of conviction, belief, and sureness without any reassurance. Instead, you usually face tremendous opposition either by those around you or by even the emotions you experience that tell you to stop.

Steve Jobs believed the iPod could be incredibly small. His engineers brought him a final prototype and said:

“This is the smallest we can make it Steve.”

“Give it to me.” Steve said.

He threw the precious million-dollar prototype into a nearby fish bowl of water…

Bubbles appeared.

“See?” Jobs countered, “Make it smaller.”

Again, he has unbelievable trust in his intuition.

Alexander expressed the nature of his trust in the story “Evolution of a Technique” when he wrote that at the very end…

“This meant that I must be prepared to carry on with any procedure I had reasoned out as best for my purpose, even though that procedure might feel wrong. In other words, my trust in my reasoning processes to bring me safely to my” end” must be a genuine trust, not a half-trust needing the assurance of feeling right as well.” FM Alexander, “Use of the Self” (1932) London.

What Koch makes clear is that these leaps of faith are not random acts, or even lucky. As Alexander writes above, they are based on a lifetime of “reasoning processes”. Reasoning requires collecting information, doing experiments, forming hypotheses, and then retesting them repeatedly until this “energy” of intuitively trusting in your decisions appears.

Koch quotes Albert Einstein as saying:

“A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

This is why the Navigator puts intuitive trust in your idea at Point 6, long after you have been through the processes of gathering information, analysing and experimenting. And it is an energy, a conviction that is built over time.

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As shown on the Navigator, I have described the three divers of ‘unreasonable success’ – repacking three of Richard Koch’s Landmarks into energy drivers. I wanted to review all nine Landmarks in Richard’s book, but I wonder if I will ever do that…

Stay tuned.