McNab Andy - The Good Psychopaths Guide to Success

ABOUT THE BOOK

What is a good psychopath? And how can thinking like one help you to be the best that you can be?

Dr Kevin Dutton has spent a lifetime studying psychopaths. He first met SAS hero Andy McNab during a research project. What he found surprised him. McNab is a diagnosed psychopath but he is a GOOD PSYCHOPATH. Unlike a BAD PSYCHOPATH, he is able to dial up or down qualities such as ruthlessness, fearlessness, decisiveness, conscience and empathy to get the very best out of himself and others in a wide range of situations.

Using the unique combination of Andy McNabs wild and various experiences and Dr Kevin Duttons expertise, together they explore the ways in which a good psychopath thinks differently and what that could mean for you. What do you really want from life, and how can you develop and use qualities such as charm, coolness under pressure, self-confidence and courage to get it?

The Good Psychopaths Guide to Success gives you an entertaining and thought-provoking road-map to self-fulfilment, both in your personal life and your career.

@profkevindutton

@The_Real_McNab

@goodpsychopath

CONTENTS

Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce... in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.

Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.

William James, Father of American psychology (18421910)

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.

From The Golden Road to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker (18841915). This verse is inscribed on the clock tower of the Special Air Service base in Hereford.

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PROLOGUE

The University of Londons Birkbeck College is a sprawling complex with some 20,000-odd students rushing about with backpacks full of books. I was meeting Professor Kevin Dutton here because his colleague Professor Naz Derakhshan was Director of the Affective and Cognitive Control Laboratory in the Department of Psychology and she had some of the countrys most up-to-date equipment for the type of experiment Kev had in mind for me.

After paying an outrageous university parking fee, I took a walk through the grounds and met Kev. He still had long, centre-parted hair and Buddy Holly-style thick rims, and looked more like the bass guitarist in a 1980s rock band than a professor.

But for once he had the university geek look.

He was dressed in a woollen, blue-checked Rupert the Bear three-piece suit, and a pink shirt buttoned up, but with no tie. He resembled one of those mad professors who forgot to dress properly or put his shoes on before leaving the house because his brain couldnt stop thinking professor stuff from the moment he woke up after dreaming professor stuff all night. All the normal life stuff he just couldnt fit it into his day.

He greeted me with a very Cockney, All right, mate, hows it going?

Better than it is for you by the looks of things, I replied. Where did you get that suit Disneyland?

Kev took me into one of the buildings and we squeaked along white-walled corridors with shiny lino flooring. Andy, thanks for doing this, mate. The more volunteers we have, the better the science gets, know what I mean?

We pushed our way through a thick, wooden swing door and into a white, sterile laboratory. Six or seven young men and women hovered around, being busy in white sterile coats to match the room. It might have been a laboratory with waist-high tables, but the Bunsen burners had been put away. Instead, three of the tables were laden with monitors, hard drives and printouts. A mass of wiring spewed from the back of all that hardware and came together on the floor. From there, it was duct-taped all the way along the shiny lino to a rubber skullcap and a tube of KY jelly, sitting next to what looked like a dentists chair with a 50-inch flat screen attached to the wall in front of it. Kev nodded proudly.

Welcome to my world: brain science central, and Im your chief tormentor.

He pointed over to the chair that faced the wall and the screen. More wiring led from the chair and joined up to the stuff duct-taped to the floor.

Rupert the Bear was very pleased with his hardware. That seat, Andy, thats your world. Thats where you will sit once we get the KY on and some of that headgear, and then well see what goes on in that nut of yours while youre under the cosh a bit. Im going to show you some pretty nasty things on the screen and give you an ear bashing at the same time and then measure how you react to it. Easy enough, yeah? You just sit there and the girls will sort you out. Just imagine youre in a hair salon.

I took the hint, and settled into the high-backed chair as a couple of the white-coated girls KYd my hair. While I had the salon treatment other white coats unbuttoned my shirt and stuck heart-monitor sensors to my chest. Then came the Matrix skullcap with twenty or more electrodes on the inside, their wires trailing out of the back and down towards the floor like the worlds longest hair. This was the EEG (electroencephalogram) recording equipment, Kev explained, the device that measured the electrical activity in my brain. The two girls squashed it down around my head so all the electrodes made contact with the KY jelly. Another white-coat wrapped Velcro around my fingers, with wires that went into a yellow box on the table. These were GSR (galvanic skin response) measures, Kev said, which assessed stress levels as a function of electrodermal activity. By the time all these students had finished, I looked like I was trapped inside a giant telecom junction box.

I feel like Hannibal Lecter in here, I laughed.

Kev laughed back, a lot more than he should have as he let go of the headsets cans and they slapped against my ears. He leant forwards and shouted as if the headset had blocked out the world completely.

Mate, youre gonna be seeing the sort of handiwork he would have been proud of in a minute. Im getting into professor mode now so Im binning the jokes. Nothing personal, know what I mean?

Directly in front of me, about two feet off the wall, was the flat screen. Kev flipped the switch and it crackled into life. The sort of music youd hear in the elevator at a health spa wafted through the headset. Silky, twilight ripples on a lake filled the screen in front of my eyes. It was like watching an advert for incontinence pads.