What's Real? Rose-Colored Glasses, a Theranos Movie, and a Chicken Avocado BLT
Last Thursday, Jana and I took a mid-week lunch-and-movie date. One of the best parts of setting your own schedule is that you can do the things you want, when you want, with who you want, and on a Thursday at noon that meant Cinépolis in Hamlin.
I had the Chicken Avocado BLT. It wasn't as good as I remembered. Still good. Jana had something lighter, which is what Jana usually has, and which is why she gets to look at me sideways while I'm finishing a Chicken Avocado BLT at noon on a Thursday.
The movie was You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. He made it with Lance Oppenheim, and it follows her through the last 34 days before she reported to prison. It runs 174 minutes. I'll say it again for the people in the back. One hundred and seventy-four minutes, at lunch, on a Thursday.
We've watched Fielder's stuff for years. Deadpan, uncomfortable, a lot of psychology under the jokes. This one starts like a regular documentary, cameras in her house, and then slowly turns into something closer to a reality show, and then at one point a reenactment. By the end you're not sure what you're watching. Which, if you know her story, is kind of the point.
Jana hasn't stopped talking about it since. Neither have I.
The short version, if you missed the whole thing
Elizabeth Holmes founded a company called Theranos. The idea was one finger prick, one drop of blood, and a box about the size of a shoe box that could run hundreds of tests on it. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars. On paper she was worth around four and a half billion.
The box didn't work the way she said it did. Theranos ran a lot of its tests on other companies' machines, and patients got results they couldn't trust. In 2022 a jury convicted her of defrauding investors. She was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months, since cut by about a year.
If you watched The Dropout on Hulu, with Amanda Seyfried, you've seen the dramatized version. That show was built from depositions with some creative liberties to fill in the gaps. Watching the documentary right after it was a strange experience. I kept catching myself asking which version I believed. What did I think before? What do I think now? And what am I telling myself about it?
I wear the rose-colored glasses
Jana opened the episode with a line I liked. We all wear glasses we see life through, and they're all tinted a little by what's happened to us. Then she pointed at me. "Jason definitely does."
She's right. Mine are rose. I'm the optimist in the house. I see the best in people, the best in ideas, the best way something could go.
So I'll admit something about Holmes. Part of me understood her.
In college I dated someone who was working on her master's in organic chemistry, so I heard a lot about the mass spectrometer, a machine that can figure out what a sample is made of. I was terrible at chemistry. I learned just enough to pass my science classes. But I learned enough to know that what Holmes was chasing is theoretically possible, and probably not that far off. Maybe she really was a few steps from the finish line. Maybe.
That's the part that bothers me. She didn't start with a crazy idea. She started with a plausible one. And somewhere along the way, she stopped looking at the data.
Jana said it best on the episode. Holmes developed a blind spot to the actual evidence. She got so focused on the future working that she started ignoring every sign it wasn't working yet, until the gap between the two had to be covered with something. And what covered it was lies.
The time my glasses cost me
I’ve been on the wrong end of my own rose-colored glasses.
Years ago I got close with a guy. Real close, the kind of friend you’d call at 2 a.m. And he lied. Big things, small things, things where the truth would plainly have been easier. I don’t think he could help it. It was like the truth hurt him somehow.
I didn’t see it for a long time. There were signs. Stories that didn’t quite line up. Details that changed between tellings. I explained every one of them away, because that’s what my glasses do. I’d rather assume the best.
When it finally started unraveling, it was weird. Not dramatic. Weird. Mostly I was confused. It was a friendship with rules nobody had told me, and the rules kept changing without warning. And somehow those same rules followed us into everything the friendship touched, every dinner, every group, every time we were out in public together. You go back through years of conversations and start wondering which ones were real.
I don’t think there’s a question I could have asked that would have fixed that. His side was his.
What I could have done is write down my side. If I’d been running the evening questions back then, what did I do well and what MIGHT I have done differently, I think the pages would have shown me the pattern long before I was willing to see it. The same story told three ways. The same confused feeling, every time.
Did any of it make me take the glasses off? No. I’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right. I want to be the light somebody wants to grow toward, and you can’t do that squinting at everyone. I just keep a notebook now.
Possibility plus proof
A dreamer and a con can have dreams the same size. The Wright brothers had a dream that every sensible person at the time knew was impossible. Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton were going to fly.
What they did next is the opposite of Theranos. The published data on wing lift turned out to be wrong, so they built their own wind tunnel and tested wing shapes until they had numbers they could trust. When they finally flew, near Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, the first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. Not exactly a cross-country trip. But it was real, and they had the data to show it was real, and everything after that got built on it.
That's bending the future. You step into the possibility, then you bring the facts along with you, one test at a time.
Jana added one more piece on the episode, and it matters for anyone doing this in their own life. There's a latency period. You change your thinking, and your results haven't caught up yet. Say you've been telling yourself "I just don't feel good" for months, and you start catching that thought and changing it. Your energy doesn't flip overnight. For a while, the honest truth is you still feel like crap. That's the latency period, and it's where people quit.
It's also where people start lying to themselves, which is the Holmes move on a smaller scale. "I feel great" when you don't. "The business is fine" when it isn't. The fix is to hold the dream and tell the truth about where you are, both at the same time.
Running the questions with your eyes open
This is what our morning practice, the 4-Minute Luck Activation Formula, is built for. Four questions:
What do I want to experience?
How do I want to grow?
How do I want to contribute?
How lucky am I?
And the honesty check: Where am I now?
What do I want to experience? How do I want to grow? How do I want to contribute? How lucky am I?
Those questions put you squarely in possibility. On the episode, we added the one that keeps you honest: Where am I now?
You need both. The first four tell you where you're headed. "Where am I now?" tells you the truth about the starting line. Skip it and you're Theranos, selling a destination you haven't checked the map for. Ask only that one and you never leave the driveway.
The evening side does the same job from the other end. At night we run the 4-Minute Reflection Formula, the one in our Claim Your Luck Journal. What did I do well? What MIGHT I have done differently? How will I be more effective or efficient next time? How lucky am I?
Write those answers down and they turn into data. "What did I do well?" is the proof of progress, in your own handwriting. The two middle questions are the proof of the gap. Every night you put the distance between the dream and where you actually are on paper, in plain sight, and you write down one way to close it a little.
That's the opposite of what happened at Theranos. The gap was there the whole time. They spent years covering it. All you have to do is write yours down.
Morning questions going in, evening questions coming out. That's the Living Lucky® Loop, and it keeps the dream and the truth in the same notebook.
Then take steps small enough that you don't outpace yourself. Some people want to go all the way, right now. Most of us would rather enjoy life at a reasonable pace and still feel like we're living an extraordinary one. And there's no wrong way to run these. Run them on a whole season or on a single phone call. In the morning or before you walk into a meeting.
And as you work through the beliefs that have been tinting your glasses, the lenses change. What you want to experience changes. How you want to grow changes. The people who show up for it change too.
Living Lucky® Practice
Rose-Colored Glasses Check
Run this before you go all-in on a dream, a deal, or a person. Keep the glasses on. Just check what's in front of you.
Checkboxes reset when you leave the page. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: Pick one dream you're chasing right now. Write it at the top of a page. Under it, write "Where am I now?" and answer it in plain numbers and facts, no spin.
Reflection question: Where have my rose-colored glasses helped me, and where have they let me explain away something I should have looked at?
Journal prompt: What's one sign I've been ignoring because I don't like what it says?
Action: Before your next big decision, run the four morning questions, then ask "Where am I now?" and answer it out loud to someone you trust.
Questions people ask about this
What's the difference between reality and perception?
Reality is what actually happened. Perception is the meaning you put on it, tinted by everything that's happened to you before. Two people can watch the exact same thing and walk away with completely different stories about it.
Is it bad to wear rose-colored glasses?
Not by itself. Optimism helps you see possibilities other people miss. It turns into a problem when it makes you explain away evidence. Keep the optimism, and add a habit of checking where you really are.
What is the latency period in personal growth?
It's the gap between changing your thinking and seeing the results. Your mindset can shift in a day. Your energy, your health, or your bank account can take weeks or months to catch up. Most people quit in that gap.
How do I know if I'm dreaming big or fooling myself?
Ask what evidence you have. A big dream comes with a plan to test it and a willingness to hear "not yet." Fooling yourself looks like avoiding the data, changing the story when it doesn't fit, or hiding the gap from people who'd notice.
What happened to Elizabeth Holmes?
The Theranos founder was convicted in 2022 of defrauding investors over blood-testing technology that didn't work as claimed. She was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months, later reduced by about a year. The documentary You Can See Everything follows her last 34 days before prison.
How do the 4-Minute Formulas help with this?
The morning one, the 4-Minute Luck Activation Formula, helps you define what you want to experience, how you want to grow, and how you want to contribute. Adding "Where am I now?" keeps it grounded in what's true. The evening one, the 4-Minute Reflection Formula, gives you data: "What did I do well?" proves your progress, and "What MIGHT I have done differently?" and "How will I be more effective or efficient next time?" show you the gap, in writing.
If you want a place to run these questions every day, our journals and books are on Amazon under Jana and Jason Shelfer, and at livinglucky.com. If you want a second set of eyes on where you really are, the kind that doesn't come with your tint, that's what our coaching is for, at livinglucky.com too. And if you'd like more of this, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Hear the whole conversation on the Living Lucky® Podcast with Jana and Jason Shelfer, Season 11, Episode 51: "What's REAL?"
So keep your glasses on, if they're rose like mine. Just take a look at the starting line before you go.
We Create Our Luck®
