4.1 Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
明白你和其他人的根本差别是力量来源
As I related in the first part of this book, my first breakthrough in understanding how people think differently occurred when I was a young father and had my kids tested by Dr. Sue Quinlan. I found the results remarkable, because she not only confirmed my own observations of the ways that their minds were working at the time but also predicted how they would develop in the future. For example, one of my kids was struggling with arithmetic. Because he tested well in mathematical reasoning, she correctly told him that if he pushed through the boredom of rote memorization required in elementary school, he would love the higher-level concepts he would be exposed to when he got older. These insights opened my eyes to new possibilities. I turned to her and others years later when I was trying to figure out the different thinking styles of my employees and colleagues.
在本书的第一部分我已经提到，我第一次意识到人和人之间的差别是我还是一个年轻的父亲，由苏奎因医生检查我的孩子时。我发现检查结果很不可思议，因为苏医生不仅根据大脑的运转状况确定了我的观察结果，还预测了未来的发展结果。举例，我的一个孩子在同算数战斗，在数理推演是孩子表现得很好，苏医生辩证的告诉他如果他通过小学的无聊的死记硬背的阶段，而当他大一点他会爱上更高阶层的概念，这些观点点亮了我的世界。在我竭力搞清楚我的雇员和同事思维不同时 我开始求助于苏和其他人。
At first, the experts gave me both bad and good advice. Many seemed as if they were more interested in making people feel good (or not feel bad) than they were at getting at the truth. Even more startling, I found that most psychologists didn’t know much about neuroscience and most neuroscientists didn’t know much about psychology—and both were reluctant to connect the physiological differences in people’s brains to the differences in their aptitudes and behaviors. But eventually I found Dr. Bob Eichinger, who opened the world of psychometric testing to me. Using Myers-Briggs and other assessments, we evolved a much clearer and more data-driven way of understanding our different types of thinking.
刚开始，专家们总是给我好的和坏的建议。很多似乎是更倾向于使人们感觉良好（或者不坏）而不是告诉他们真相。更让我吃惊的是 我发现大多数心理学家并不了解神经科学，而大多数神经学家也不知道很多心理学—而这两者都不情愿通过人们大脑的不同决定他们的态度和行为的 不同。即使最终我发现鲍勃因琴歌医生—带我认识心理检测。使用迈尔斯-布里格斯和其他评估，我们开始了一个更清晰，更多数据驱动的方式去理解我们大家不同的思考类型
Our differences weren’t a product of poor communication; it was the other way around. Our different ways of thinking led to our poor communications.
人和人不同不是可怜的沟通的产物；相反，是我们不同的思考方式导致了我们可怜的沟通。
From conversations with experts and my own observations, I learned that many of our mental differences are physiological. Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of what we are able to do physically—some people are tall and others are short, some muscular and others weak—our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we are able to do mentally. As with our bodies, some parts of our brains cannot be materially affected by external experience (in the same way that your skeleton isn’t changed much through working out), while other parts can be strengthened through exercise (I will have more to say about brain plasticity later in this chapter).
从我和专家的谈话以及我自己的观察，
This was driven home to me by my son Paul’s three-year struggle with bipolar disorder. As terrifying and frustrating as his behavior was, I came to realize that it was due to his brain’s chemistry (specifically, its secreting serotonin and dopamine in spurts and sputters). As I went through that terrible journey with him, I experienced the frustration and anger of trying to reason with someone who wasn’t thinking well. I constantly had to remind myself that there was no basis for my anger because his distorted logic was a product of his physiology—and I saw for myself how the doctors who approached it that way brought him to a state of crystal clarity. The experience not only taught me a lot about how brains work but why creative genius often exists at the edge of insanity. Many highly productive and creative people have suffered from bipolar disorder, among them Ernest Hemingway, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, and the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison (who has written frankly about her own experiences with the disease in her book An Unquiet Mind). I learned that we are all different because of the different ways that the machine that is our brain works—and that nearly one in five Americans are clinically mentally ill in one way or another.
Once I understood that it’s all physiological, many things became clearer to me. While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked. I also realized that as off-base as they seemed to me, they saw me the same way. The only sensible way of behaving with each other was to look down upon ourselves with mutual understanding so we could make objective sense of things. Not only did this make our disagreements less frustrating, it also allowed us to maximize our effectiveness.
Everyone is like a Lego set of attributes, with each piece reflecting the workings of a different part of their brain. All these pieces come together to determine what each person is like, and if you know what a person is like, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you can expect from them.
