What He’ll Go For
In Naples the police once planted a bug in a car where young Antonio Galeota Lanza was sitting with the music turned up loud. He was one of those teenagers whom Cosimo Di Lauro, after his reform, had put in charge of whole sections of the drug trade: fifteen-year-olds had forty-year-olds working under them. The boy was telling a friend about his life, and the bug was recording. “Every Sunday evening I get eight or nine hundred euros,” he said, “even if this job has to do with crack and cocaine, even if it’ll get you five hundred years in prison.”
Eight hundred euros every Sunday. Five hundred years in prison some day. The boy knew both numbers perfectly well. And he chose the first.
You can call him stupid. I’ll call him human. Because every one of us has made exactly that choice many times in our lives, only with smaller numbers.
What Moves People
Two forces move people: the wish to gain and the fear of losing. They want money, respect, pleasure, safety—and they go after it. They’re afraid of losing what they have—and they’ll do anything not to lose it. Everything we call motivation is a mixture of those two forces.
But they have a property that explains the boy from Naples. Both forces are far stronger when the reward or the threat is close, concrete and visible. Eight hundred euros on Sunday is a wad in your hand, trainers, a moped, respect in the courtyard. Five hundred years is somewhere later, somehow, maybe to somebody else. The caveman we talked about chooses what he can see on Sunday.
Hence the first rule for anyone who manages people. If you want a man to do something, make the reward close and tangible. A bonus at the end of the year motivates less than praise today and a small extra at the end of the month. If you want a man not to do something, make the consequence close and clear. A vague threat that “one day this will end badly” stops nobody. Not the boys in Naples, and not the accountants in your office.
Holding Yourself Back
The second thing is restraint. A man can want something and not do it. He can be angry and keep quiet. He can want to leave and stay. This ability is one of the main things that set us apart from the hunters with spears. And one of the most expensive.
Pistone writes that undercover work takes an iron character: discipline, self-control, confidence, calm, endurance. Only with those can you bear the psychological strain and resist the daily temptations. You hide your thoughts, feelings and fears just as you hide your real name. Day in, day out. You laugh at the jokes of criminals. You can’t share what you’re going through even with your friends and family. Only with your contact agent: a phone call a couple of times a week, a few minutes each, and a meeting once a month, also for a few minutes—to collect your expense money.
Nearly five years of that. Holding everything in: anger at Mirra, irritation at Lefty, the fear of being found out, the urge to tell the truth. And that’s with Pistone’s self-control being outstanding.
When Self-Control Runs Out
Now look at what happens when self-control runs out. That’s the third thing, and almost nobody remembers it.
In June of one of the last years of the operation, Pistone managed to get home for his elder daughter’s graduation. He hadn’t been home for almost two months. At home he learned that a month earlier his wife had fallen while mowing the grass and cut her ankle open; she had needed six stitches, and nobody had told him. His daughters had picked up a few bad habits—nothing special, as he writes, but he hadn’t been there at the right moment. And when at last he was alone in the bedroom, he couldn’t hold back and punched the door with all his strength. His fist went right through it.
A man who had kept quiet for years while mafiosi promised to carve him up put his fist through a door at home, in the bedroom, with no witnesses. That’s no contradiction. Holding yourself back is work, and after long work a man gets tired. For a while scientists thought willpower had a common tank that drained with every effort. Then more than thirty laboratories tested the idea to a single plan and found no tank. So the tank is my image, not physiology. That doesn’t make tiredness and long fear an invention. Why he snapped on that particular evening, and at that particular door, nobody can say. I think at home there was simply no one left to hold himself together for. His wife told him afterwards: it was their daughter’s big day, he could at least have taken one evening off from work, or at least smiled. He spent three days at home. On Tuesday, 3 June, his wife drove him to the airport. It was their nineteenth wedding anniversary.
Pistone also writes about how things were with his family in general in those years. Sometimes he would spend a single day at home and leave early in the morning while everyone was asleep. If a problem came up, he would settle it instantly, on the fly, make up new rules, and his daughters would shout that he had no right to give orders when he only came home for a day. In the end, he writes, his family came to hate his job, and the whole FBI along with it.
What to Do with It
Don’t spend self-control where you can manage without it. How much of it a man has and how it works, I don’t know. What I do know is this: an argument with temptation that you have every day, one day you lose. That’s why clever people arrange their lives so that they don’t have to beat temptations; the temptations simply aren’t around.
Don Vincenzo never kept grappa or sweets in his office, though he was fond of both. He said he didn’t want to win the same argument with himself every day. He made important decisions in the morning, not in the evening, when he had already used up his patience on suppliers and complaints during the day. He scheduled unpleasant conversations for the start of the week. And on Sundays he didn’t discuss business at all, however much he wanted to: Sunday, he said, is the day you fill the tank, not burn it.
For you, a few things follow from this. Put temptations out of sight instead of fighting them. Do the hardest things while your strength is fresh. Don’t expect yourself or others to hold out for ever: every kind of endurance has a bottom. After a hard day, don’t make decisions that can’t be undone. And save part of the tank for home. The people you love shouldn’t get your leftovers.
And when you see someone choosing eight hundred euros on Sunday over five hundred years later, don’t be quick to judge him. Ask yourself which Sundays you choose. And what those five hundred years you’d rather not think about are promising you.