Mastery (56 page)

The instincts of these animals were obviously not designed for living in an industrial feedlot, and this created a great strain. Whenever the animals would become instinctively frightened by something and react, the fieldworkers would grow irritated and hurry them along, which only exacerbated the cattle’s fear. The number of injuries and deaths was rather appalling, and the time lost when they all piled up into gridlock was incredibly high; and yet, as she knew now, this was all quite easy to fix.

After graduating, she got her first series of jobs working on various design elements for feedlots throughout the Southwest. For meatpacking plants, she devised cattle ramps and restrainer systems that were infinitely more humane than what was there before. Some of this was accomplished through attention to simple details, such as making a ramp curved so the cattle could not see anything to the sides or too far ahead, which kept them calmer. At another site, she redesigned the dip vat so that the incline leading to it sloped gently and had deep grooves in the concrete to help them with their footing. The drop into the water was ever so slight. She also redesigned the area where they dried off, making it a much more placid environment for them.

In the case of the dip vat, the cowboys and fieldworkers would stare at her as if she were from Mars. They secretly mocked her “touchy-feely” approach to farm animals. But when her design was finished, they would watch in amazement as the cattle would blithely approach the dip vat and plop into it with hardly a sound or a complaint. There were no injuries or deaths, and
no time lost with pileups or group panic. Such an increase in efficiency would occur in all of her other designs, and this would win her begrudging respect from the skeptical men on the job. Slowly, she was making a name for herself in the field, and considering how far she had come from her earliest days as a severely impaired autistic child, such achievements gave her an incredible feeling of pride.

As the years went by, her knowledge of cattle continued to grow, both through research and through frequent contact with them. Soon her work expanded to other farm animals, such as hogs, and later to antelope and elk. She became a sought-after consultant to farms and zoos. She seemed to possess a sixth sense for the inner lives of the animals she dealt with and a remarkable power to calm them down. She herself felt that she had reached a point where she could imagine the thought processes of these various animals. This was based both on her intense scientific investigations and a great deal of thinking inside their minds. She determined, for instance, that animals’ memory and thinking is largely driven by images and other sense traces. Animals are more than capable of learning, but their reasoning process cycles through images. Although we might find it hard to imagine such thinking, before the invention of language we reasoned in a similar way. The distance between humans and animals is not nearly as great as we like to believe, and this connection fascinated her.

With cattle, she could read their moods by the movement of their ears, the look in their eyes, the tension she could feel through their skin. In studying the brain dynamics of cattle, she had the strange feeling that they resembled people with autism in many ways. A scan of her own brain revealed that she possessed fear centers that were three times larger than normal. She always had to manage higher levels of anxiety than most other people, and she would see continual threats in the environment. Cattle, as prey species, were continually on guard and anxious. Perhaps her own enlarged fear center, she reasoned, was a throwback to the deep past, when humans were prey as well. These reactions are now largely blocked or hidden to us, but because of her autism, her brain had retained this ancient trait. She noticed other similarities between cattle and people with autism, such as the dependence on habit and routine.

Thinking in this way led her back to her early interest in the psychology behind autism, and to deepening studies of the neuroscience involved. Her condition as someone who had emerged from autism to a career in science gave her a unique perspective on the subject. As she had done with animals, she could explore it both from the outside (science) and the inside (empathy). She could read about the latest discoveries on autism and relate them to her own experiences. She could illuminate aspects of the condition that no other
scientist was able to describe or understand. As she delved deeply into the subject and wrote books on her experiences, she quickly became an extremely popular consultant and lecturer on the subject, as well as a role model for young people with autism.

As she looks back on her life from the present, Temple Grandin has a strange sensation. She emerged from the darkness and chaos of her earliest years of autism, her mind partially guided out of it by her love of animals and her curiosity about their inner lives. Through her experience on her aunt’s ranch with cattle, she became interested in science, which then opened her mind to studying autism itself. Returning to animals for her career, through science and deep observation, she made innovative designs and unique discoveries. These discoveries led her back to autism yet again, a field to which she could now apply her scientific training and thinking. It would appear that some form of destiny kept directing her to the particular fields that she could explore and understand with single-minded purpose, and master in her own ingenious way.

For someone like Temple Grandin, the possibility of achieving mastery in any field would normally seem like an impossible dream. The obstacles in the path of someone with autism are enormous. And yet she managed to find her way to the two subjects that opened up possibilities for advancement. Although it might seem as if luck or blind fate led her there, even as a child she intuited her natural strengths—her love and feel for animals, her visual powers of thinking, her ability to focus on one thing—and leaned on them with all of her energy. Moving with these strengths gave her both the desire and resiliency to put up with all of the doubters, all those who saw her as strange and different and who found the subject matters she chose to study too unconventional. Working in a field where she could use her natural empathy and her particular way of thinking to great effect, she was able to delve deeper and deeper into her chosen subject, arriving at a powerful inside sense of the world of animals. Once she had mastery in this realm, she was able to apply her skills to her other great interest—autism.

Understand: achieving mastery in life often depends on those first steps that we take. It is not simply a question of knowing deeply our Life’s Task, but also of having a feel for our own ways of thinking and for perspectives that are unique to us. A deep level of empathy for animals or for certain types of people may not seem like a skill or an intellectual strength, but in truth it is. Empathy plays an enormous role in learning and knowledge. Even scientists, renowned for their objectivity, regularly engage in thinking in which they momentarily identify with their subject. Other qualities we might possess, such as a penchant for visual forms of thinking, represent other
possible strengths, not weaknesses. The problem is that we humans are deep conformists. Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others, or criticized by teachers. People with a high visual sense are often labeled as dyslexic, for example. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery. Mastery is like swimming—it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. Know your strengths and move with them.

3. Transform yourself through practice—The Fingertip Feel

As narrated in
chapter 2
(
here
), after graduating from the Citadel in 1981, Cesar Rodriguez decided to enter the pilot training program for the United States Air Force. But soon he had to confront a harsh reality—he was not naturally gifted for flying a jet plane. Among those in the program were some who were known as “golden boys.” They seemed to have a knack for flying at high speeds. They were in their element. From the very beginning Rodriguez loved to fly, and he had ambitions to become a fighter pilot, the most elite and coveted position within the air force. But he would never reach such a goal unless he somehow managed to raise himself up to the skill level of the golden boys. His problem was that he was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of information that a pilot had to process. The key was to learn how to take a scan pattern of all the instruments—a quick reading here and there—while maintaining a feel for one’s overall position in the sky. Losing situational awareness could prove fatal. For him, this scanning ability could only come through endless hours of practice on the simulator and in flying, until it became relatively automatic.

Rodriguez had played sports in high school and he knew the value of practice and repetition, but this was a lot more complex than any sport or any skill he had ever tried to master. As soon as he became comfortable with the instruments, he would be faced with the daunting task of learning to execute various flying maneuvers (like rolls), and to develop a feel for the exact speeds needed to enter them. All of this required extremely rapid mental calculations. The golden boys would ace these maneuvers in no time. For Rodriguez, it would require a lot of repetition and intense focus every time he entered the cockpit. He noticed sometimes that his body would get there ahead of his mind; his nerves and his fingers would intuit a sense of what command of the maneuver should feel like; he would then consciously aim to recreate that feeling.

Once this mark was passed, he would have to learn how to fly in formation, working with other pilots in an intricately coordinated team. Flying
in formation meant juggling several skills at the same time, and the complexity of it all could be mind-boggling. Part of him was motivated by the great excitement he felt commanding such a jet and working with the team, and part of him was also motivated by the challenge. He had noticed that in gaining control of the jet and the various maneuvers, he had developed acute powers of concentration. He could tune everything out and immerse himself completely in the moment. This made every new skill set a little easier to master.

Slowly, through sheer tenacity and practice, he rose to the top of his class, and was considered among the few who could serve as fighter pilots. But there remained one last hurdle in his ascent to the top: flying in the high-scale exercises run by all branches of the military. In this case it was a matter of understanding the overall mission and operating in an intricately orchestrated land-air-sea campaign. It required an even higher level of awareness, and at moments during these exercises Rodriguez had an odd sensation—he was no longer focusing on the various physical elements of flying or on the individual skill components, but was thinking and feeling the overall campaign and how he fit into it in a seamless fashion. It was a sensation of mastery, and it was fleeting. He also noticed a slight gap between himself and the golden boys. They had relied for so long on their natural skills that they had not cultivated the same level of concentration that he now possessed. In many ways, he had surpassed them. After participating in a few of these exercises, Rodriguez had risen to elite status.

On January 19, 1991, in the space of a few minutes, all of his elaborate training and practice would be put to the ultimate test. A few days before, the United States and allied forces had launched Operation Desert Storm in response to Sadaam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The morning of the 19th Rodriguez and his wingman, Craig “Mole” Underhill, flew into Iraq as part of a thirty-six-aircraft strike force, heading toward a target near Baghdad. It was his first real taste of combat. Flying F-15s, he and Mole quickly spotted a pair of Iraqi MiG fighters in the distance and decided to give chase. Within seconds they realized that they had been lured into a trap, the pursuer turning into the pursued, as two MiGs now bore down on them from an unexpected direction.

Realizing how quickly one of the enemy planes was approaching, Rodriguez suddenly jettisoned his fuel tanks for greater speed and maneuverability. He then dove toward the ground, below the level of the approaching MiG, doing everything he could to make it difficult for the enemy to get a read on him with his radar, including flying at a right angle to the ground to make his plane as skinny as possible. Without a radar reading, the MiG could not launch a missile. Everything was happening so fast. At any moment his own radar could light up, indicating the enemy had locked into
him and he was as good as dead. He had one chance to make it: evading the MiG until it got too close to fire, and drawing it into a dogfight—a circular battle in the air that was a rare occurrence in modern warfare. At the back of his mind he was also trying to buy enough time for his wingman to help him out, and he could somehow sense Mole’s presence following him from a distance. But time would bring another danger—the presence of the second MiG on the scene.