“The level of success you achieve will be in direct proportion to the depth of your commitment.” ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

There is a new feature of the Wednesday Weblog and your chance to share the Best Advice You Ever Got with the readers. Only your first name, last initial and maybe a vague representation about you will be included so your identity is protected. Of course, if you want all your information published and to give folks a way to contact you, let me know.

There are two categories of advice, PERSONAL and PROFESSIONAL. To submit your advice, in either category or for both, simply reply to this email and send it in. There is no guarantee it will be published, but I'll do my best to get the best ideas included.

Shortly before finishing my freshman year at UMass, I got the great news that one of my new fraternity brothers had helped me score a summer job at the General Dynamics Shipyard in Quincy, walking distance from my home. The position would be as a union pipefitter, (Third Class, Unskilled) making the incredible sum of $2.89 per hour when the minimum wage was $1.60. (Of course, gas was 36 cents and the average apartment rented for $108 per month.)

If I wasn’t going to be rich working that summer, I was going to be damn close, I thought. The good news continued. I had been working in high school as a grill man at a fast-food burger place and would also be working there for the summer as a shift manager during evenings. Two jobs, about 75 hours per week. Sweet.

Since I came from a large family, when I went away to school that prior Fall, my bedroom space was ‘reallocated’ to a younger brother, but we had a great couch that was to become my sleeping space. Since I ended up working Monday through Saturday at the shipyard from 6:30 to 2:30 (yes to union overtime!) and Thursday through Sunday nights at the restaurant (3:30 to 1:30 am), I slept very little anyway. (See the weblog titled "Third Class, Unskilled" here for more details of that summer, including how I slept on the job. No really, I slept on the job).

Being new to union work, I learned firsthand of the tension between management and labor almost immediately. I was part of a ‘gang’ of pipefitters, about a dozen, who were working on a US Navy LSD ship that as soon as it was finished was designated to head to Vietnam since that war was in full force.

The ‘gang’ would gather at 6:30 am in a designated spot below deck and await instruction from a ‘white hat’ before heading off to specific job sites or projects. All managers wore white hard hats, maybe a throwback to cowboy days? Us pipefitters had baby blue hard hats. Each of the other trades had their own color hard hat. There were chasers (red), carpenters (green I think) and so forth.

The second day on the job, all twelve of us are standing around waiting to start “work” and a white hat makes a beeline for me and demands to know why I am standing around doing nothing. I don’t remember what I stammered but I remember he told me not to do it again or he’d write me up. Hmmm.

My mentor that summer, an Irishman named Ray, told me when we got to the job site that the white hat targeted me because I wasn’t holding a cigarette: the union contract allowed smoking, but if I was standing around doing nothing, the contract didn’t protect me. Interesting.

The next day when we were standing around waiting to start, I bummed a cigarette from Ray to hold and the white hat backed off.

The third day, when he realized I was just holding an unlit cigarette, he came at me and said, ‘light it.’

By the second week, other members of the gang were tired of me bumming cigarettes and told me to buy my own, which I did. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, I became a smoker. Courtesy of a union contract, an intractable white hat and the United States government.

In those days, everyone smoked.

You get the picture. Everyone smoked. Everywhere. All the time. Inside, too. Can you imagine?

My pipefitter job started me on two decades as a puffer.

Of course, I tried to quit intermittently. My problem? I really liked to smoke. Blasphemous I know. But I did, and my efforts to stop were stopped by the fact that deep down inside, I wasn’t committed.

Ok, many years later, I have a newborn baby and I have an additional reason to quit, but I know I need help. These were the days before nicotine patches and gum and other quit smoking aids. 

I had heard about ‘Shick Shock Therapy’ from a newspaper account or a friend (remember, no internet either). So, I investigated the concept. Here’s the definition:

You may have heard or seen a celebrity or other person wearing a wristband and snapping it against their skin from time to time? That used to be more common, and it was sign they had gone through aversion therapy. Here’s what it was like for me:

In case you were wondering: the closet/room stunk to high heaven. 

Definitely wanted to hold my nose. It was that way by design. They rarely cleaned it, hoping to maximize every client’s distaste for the smell of cigarettes.

For the next hour, I would smoke all or part of 20-30 cigarettes. Yes, you read that right. 

Every time my right hand lifted up a cigarette to my mouth, my left wrist experienced a mild shock, like snapping a rubber band against the arm. The room had no ventilation, did I mention that? It got smokier and smokier and stinkier and stinkier.

There were various exercises, for example.

Speed Smoke: I would have 60 seconds to puff a complete cigarette down to the filter. Suck, suck, suck as fast as I could, no break, no pause, until it was gone. That probably took about 25% of the smokes.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Then of course there was an exercise where I smoked a cigarette with my face parallel to the ground so that the smoke went directly into my eyes. Another 25% of the butts were burned that way.

To be honest, I don’t remember the other ‘exercises’ too well, the passage of time and our natural erasures of bad memories may be factors.

Did I quit? If I answer ‘sort of’ those current and former smokers will understand. I stopped smoking compared to the two-pack a day habit I formerly had but became expert at sneaking cigarettes and quite proficient at bumming them. The practice maybe moved me to half-a-pack a day but didn’t really do its job. 

Remember, I loved to smoke, but deep down inside, since I wasn’t fully committed, even the birth of a new baby couldn’t help me, and the aversion therapy that made me avoid smoking in closets only partially worked.

Fast forward just a couple of years. We’ve relocated to Memphis for work and my wife leaves a newspaper ad for a hypnotherapy session to be held at a hotel ballroom in a couple of weeks, where the ‘charlatan’ has the capacity to hypnotize up to 300 people at once to quit smoking.

I signed up, not because I had stopped enjoying a smoke in key places of my day, but smoking was becoming a hassle. A real hassle. No longer were there ashtrays in every room and office,

So, I signed up to be hypnotized in a ballroom with 300 people.

But something was different.

Don’t get me wrong, I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I was also absolutely certain that I was not hypnotizable. Even then, my mental discipline was famous, and I knew no guy on a stage in a ballroom in Memphis, Tennessee could possibly have the power to hypnotize ME. No way. But I really wanted to quit and didn’t care if it was a quick fix. I wanted to check all the boxes until I quit and if hypnosis was one of them, so be it.

The instructions said to bring your cigarettes to the event. The ballroom was packed. There was one of those aluminum ashtrays on every seat. The deal was the program would be in two parts. Part 1 you could smoke, and the hypnotist would explain some things about the process, habits, and more.

At half-time he instructed us to take our smokes, have one last cigarette on the break and to throw all tobacco away before coming in for part two. The hotel provided large barrels for everyone to toss their butts. 

So, behind the Hyatt hotel with the noise from the traffic on I-240 in the background, I threw away my last Marlboro and came into the ballroom, hopeful but still skeptical, in spite of what he had told us before the break: that the key was to ‘become a non-smoker’ rather than to ‘quit smoking.’ The concept was to replace the negative of quitting with the positive of becoming.

Lights were dimmed. Soft voice. He stated the start time of the exercise, then started a large timer on the stage and spun it around so we couldn’t see the elapsed time.

Everyone relaxed appendage by appendage. 

Then he said something like ‘you won’t want a cigarette with coffee’ and I’m thinking, damned if I don’t. And he said, you won’t want a cigarette first thing in the morning.’ And he kept going, listing just about every situation he could think of where I could possibly want a cigarette.

About half-way through the litany, I started hoping really hard that I was hypnotized and that I wouldn’t want a cigarette with a beer or any of the other situations. But I wasn't sure that this was going to work.

The lights were turned up and we all returned to full consciousness. 

He asked a single question that changed my life. 

He asked for a show of hands for those who believed that we were hypnotized for less than a minute. 

A smattering of hands. Then he asked the same question for various intervals, and I raised my hand that I believed we had been in the exercise for about 4 minutes. 

He then told us to look at the timer he spun around and our watches, and I freaked out. It was, gulp, almost twenty minutes. Are you kidding me? Me of the powerful mind? Me of the mental discipline? Me who could not possibly be hypnotized, just went through an experience I thought lasted 4 minutes and was actually 20?

Maybe it worked. I drove home without cigarettes and arrived about 8:30. I told my wife I was going directly to bed, since to the best of my recollection I had never smoked while sleeping. I wanted to get 8 or so hours under my belt as a non-smoker before being tempted.

When I woke up a non-smoker, I had an urge to grab a cigarette, but it strangely passed in a few seconds. Then I had a cup of coffee. Small urge. Same pass. Then I drove to work. Same urge. Same pass.

That first day, I had the urge every ten minutes, but they all passed. The second day, the same thing, but it was every 30 minutes. The third day, every couple of hours. By the end of the week, the urges were sporadic, a couple a day and passed. By the second week the urges were gone, and I happily agreed that I had been hypnotized to become a non-smoker.

I'll never know if I was able to be hypnotized because I was committed to being a non-smoker or if I was committed to being a non-smoker because I was hypnotized.

But it helped me in a very specific way that might not be apparent. It changed the way I thought about the way I thought. I realized two things from that rainy night in Memphis.

First, most of us are not as smart as we think we are, and it is important to seek out people that are smarter or who have expertise greater than our own. Whether that is financial, nutritional, conditioning or other types of advice. Since that night, I have been zealous in connecting with those smarter than me, whether they be employees or functional experts.

Second, I realized how many times we fool ourselves into failure because we ‘think’ we are committed. You have to ‘know’ you are committed, you have to be all in. 

Successful people form the habit of doing the things that failures don’t like to do, and one of those things that failures don’t like to do is to be all in.

When I look back at those things that I succeeded at, and those that I didn't, I could make a case that the main difference was my commitment level.

I'll never know if I was able to be hypnotized because I was committed to being a non-smoker or if I was committed to being a non-smoker because I was hypnotized. To be completely honest, I don't even know if I WAS hypnotized. It doesn't matter today, but I do know that I was committed to being a non-smoker and it is 33 years later.

The commitment to be a non-smoker has saved me a lot of money, according to an article in the Worcester Daily Voice.

A pack-per-day Massachusetts smoker will spend $3.17 million over a lifetime on cigarettes, lost income, health care, and other financial losses due to tobacco addiction, according to WalletHub’s “The Real Cost of Smoking by State.”) Massachusetts is the most expensive state in the nation in which to be a smoker.

The study considers several categories including out-of-pocket costs for buying cigarettes; financial opportunity costs, which include how much a person would have earned by investing the money in the stock market instead of smokes; health-care costs; income loss due to absenteeism, workplace bias, or lower productivity due to smoking-related health issues; and other costs such as higher homeowners’ insurance premiums and the price of second-hand smoke to others.

Annually, tobacco use costs a Massachusetts smoker more than $66,000 per year, the study said.

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