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On becoming more compassionate — practical guidelines

A series of TED talks related to the Charter for Compassion provide deep insights on the nature and importance of compassion. This post summarizes and extracts practical guidelines from them. Reading time: 10 min.

During a recent TED talk delivered a couple of weeks from the Charter for Compassion launch, religious scholar Karen Armstrong reminds us of a fact that regrettably is still not entirely obvious to all of us: the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths, and ultimately as the basis of all morality.

For getting us all back in touch with compassion, she urges us to revive the Golden Rule: Always treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.

For years I’ve been feeling frustrated because as a religious historian, I’ve become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what’s being called the Golden Rule.

Sometimes it comes in a positive version — “Always treat all others as you’d like to be treated yourself.” And equally important is the negative version — “Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”


How we got to where we are

But before we go into the practical issues of how to revive the Golden Rule in our personal lives and our global community, it’s important to understand how we got into our modern mess of moral confusion.

According to Armstrong, part of the problem is human nature:

But… you’d never know that [compassion] was so central to the religious life. Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together… they’re arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveying against homosexuality…

Often people don’t really want to be compassionate. I sometimes see when I’m speaking to a congregation of religious people a mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. And that of course defeats the object of the exercise.

As discussed in my previous post, wanting to be right all the time is simply inevitable for human beings.

We’re biologically wired for it. It’s an instinct that helped us survive back in the days when we were subject to the forces of natural selection; but in modern life, it creates more problems than it solves.

There are also deep cultural reasons that led religion to loose its focus on compassion and the Golden Rule.

In her earlier TED Prize wish talk where Armstrong argues for the creation of the Charter for Compassion, she points out that

To my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other [religious] traditions, I began to realize that … the word “belief” itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus… to mean an intellectual ascent to a set of propositions: a credo.

“I believe” — it did no mean “I accept certain creedal articles of faith.” It meant: “I commit myself. I engage myself.” In the Qur’an, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as “zanna”: self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of… but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.

In this light, religion is not about believing things. It’s about behaving in a certain way:

Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you to do something. You behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion… religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.


How to become more compassionate


Just doing it

Action is then the key that will revive our emotional connection with the Golden Rule.

Practicing diligently, compassion will slowly but surely produce its transcendental magic on our character:

People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, “all day and every day,” not just doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism… you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself.

And it brings you into the presence of what’s being called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao.

In a related talk recorded at the Chautauqua institution for the Charter of Compassion, Swami Dayananda Saraswati agrees with Armstrong, and urges us to act compassionately even if at first it doesn’t feel much natural:

To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate… You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. You learn swimming by swimming…You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook.

And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) You have to act it out. You have to act compassionately.


Expanding our moral imagination

Relying on willpower alone for becoming truly compassionate is not enough. We need techniques that act against our subconscious resistance to compassion, which unfortunately, happens to be as much a part of human nature as judgmentalism and our obsession with being right.

Also during a TED talk, Robert Wright explores the the biological roots of compassion and the Golden Rule.

First off, compassion is built in our genes through the principle of kin selection:

…. the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then… compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself.

So, from a biologist’s point of view, compassion is actually a gene’s way of helping itself.

So while it is good news that compassion is in our genes, the bad news is that kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family.

Fortunately, we’re endowed with a second kind of evolutionary trait that biologists call reciprocal altruism: compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor.

And while reciprocal altruism is ultimately self-serving and doesn’t bring universal compassion by itself, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule:

… you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, to ethical philosophy, and you’ll find… that they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished.

And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes… That’s close to being a kind of built in intuition.

But not even something quite close to a built in intuition makes us fully compassionate beings:

…in everyday life, the way we decide who we’re not going to extend the Golden Rule to… is through a rough and ready formula: if you’re my enemy, if you’re my rival… if you’re not my friend, if you’re not in my family, I’m much less inclined to apply the Golden Rule to you.

We all do that… For example, people from Gaza wouldn’t want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, “Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category.”

The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, “Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves.”

But moral imagination is also part of human nature. And religious leaders have the power of helping people expand their moral imagination to places where it doesn’t naturally go:

… religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think… They are in the inspiration business.

It’s their great calling to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they’re in the same boat.

Expanding our moral imaginations is not the work of religious leaders alone.

Karen Armstrong points out that reflecting deeply upon the negative version of the Golden Rule, “Don’t do to others what you would like them to do to you,” should help us do the trick:

Look into your own heart. Discover what it is that gives you pain. And then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.

This sounds like material for a five-minute reflection exercise similar to the one I propose for becoming less judgmental in my previous post.


Meditation

Meditation also can help us expand our moral instincts out of the confines of family, friends and allies.

Many people swear by the power of guided meditations that focus on compassionate visualizations, but in my experience mindfulness meditation, and even more traditional approaches that seek to empty the mind of all thoughts, have a profound effect of calming the never-ending demands of the ego, of removing the self from its central place in our psyche, and therefore facilitate the emergence of compassion.

I have been practicing traditional Taoist meditation for about a year now — no wonder I all of a sudden went through a consciousness explosion of sorts that boosted my sensibility towards meaning, truthfulness, and ultimately compassion; and triggered my fascination towards these subjects.


Physical exercise

The Eastern traditions also embrace the idea that physical exercise, specially in the form of the martial arts, Yoga, etc., have an impact on our character.

These are in part considered as forms of meditation, but in my experience with practicing Tai Chi Chuan for as long as I have been meditating, there is a subtle difference between the two activities.

In the West, we also have a strong intuition that physical exercise is not only healthy, but that it makes us better persons. It boosts our moods and energizes us.

We glorify the Olympics and the Soccer World Cup as major events that celebrate our common humanity — even if the underlying sports are very competitive, they unite us in a quasi-religious, transcendent experience.

Actually, Argentines swear they have seen The Hand of God intervene in one of the best goals in the history of Soccer :-D

This idea fits nicely with Karen Armstrong’s view that action is the most important requirement for learning how to be compassionate: we become more compassionate not only by performing acts of compassion, but also indirectly through doing meaningful work — such as invigorating, health-enhancing physical exercise.


Build an appetite for knowledge

Karen Armstrong also advocates during her TED talk for education that teaches students how to expand their moral imaginations:

[Educators] are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people… I’d like youth to get a sense of the dynamism and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling.

In my opinion there is yet another sense in which education can helps us become more compassionate. There is a great need to rescue the value of philosophy, the great works of literature, and other subjects that are not immediately practical and therefore tend to be under-represented in basic education programs.

But these are the subjects that are truly inspiring, that have the power of imbuing people with a sense of awe and fascination with knowledge for the sake of knowledge that has an impact on personal development.

As Bertrand Russell put it in his short but powerful classic “The Problems of Philosphy”:

…philosophy has a value (perhaps its chief value) through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation… The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion.

The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable.


Travel

Traveling has a tremendous capacity to change us for the better, not least because it forces us to embrace the otherness of people foreign to our culture, to put ourselves in their shoes and understand their world.

And putting ourselves in other people’s shoes is the first step towards empathy, kindness and compassion.

I’ll never forget an incident that had a huge impact on me while visiting my dentist in Jordan, where I was living during the 2006 Lebanon war.

There was a TV in the room switched on an Arab news channel that suddenly started transmitting the raw images of the latest Israeli bombings. My conversation with the dentist stopped abruptly, and we both fixed our attention on the monitor.

Watching for 30 minutes the gut-wrenching images that usually don’t make it to Western news channels would have probably been enough.

But what truly changed forever my interest and views on the whole Arab-Israeli conflict in a way that no amount of news, books or lectures could have, was the expression of pain, of deep anguish, on my dentist’s face.

He became a sort of transfixed automaton whose hands were still doing the dentist’s job, but whose whole being was in Lebanon with the children, the mothers and the elderly assassinated by the bombs.

I couldn’t understand his incessant mumbling in Arabic. But I definitely felt his anger and his pain.


Advocating globalization

Wright encourages us in his TED talk to see the globalization glass half full and appreciate that there are very real reasons why it can be a force towards international harmony, and ultimately towards compassion:

Any form of interdependent, non-zero sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. And the world is full of non-zero sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat.

I think there’s evidence that this non-zero sum connection can expand the moral compass… if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II… at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs… without giving it much of a thought. And you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence.

Rabbi Jackie Tabick, the first woman in the UK to be ordained in the Jewish faith, is also optimistic about this effect of globalization:

…in the mdern world, with the environmental movement, we’re becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa… And… that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs.

[Compassion] entails understanding the pain of the other. But even more than that, it means understanding one’s connection to the whole of creation… that there is a unity that underlies all that we see… hear, and feel. I call that unity God.


Affirming the charter for compassion

A very first, basic step you can take for the sake of compassion is to visit the Charter for Compassion’s website, launched by Karen Armstrong and TED, and join the thousands of people around the world who have affirmed the charter.

I just did. And it definitely felt good.

Posted on November 25, 2009
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Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

It’s always great to find brilliant people who understand the benefits of a Year of Nothing.

In this TED talk, renowned designer Stephan Sagmeister shares his rationale for closing down his New York studio for an entire year every seven years.

During his last sabbatical, he came to the conclusion that after a Year of Nothing:

  • His job became a calling again.
  • Over the long term, it was a financially successful exercise due to the positive impact on the quality of his work.
  • Everything his studio designed in the seven years following the Year of Nothing had originated in it.

I hope my Year of Nothing has a big impact on my next seven years of life too. And then I can go for another one. :-)

A big hat tip to @philippawhite for this one!

Posted on November 22, 2009
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The Year of Nothing, Part 2

This Year of Nothing allowed me to develop a razor-sharp sense of what I want to do next and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.



Do not pull, do not push
And fortune will return of its own accord
And the Way will naturally come…
If you are still, you will get it,
If you are active, you will loose it.
Yang Zhu


Besides reminding me of the value of friendship, this Year of Nothing has provided me with a razor-sharp sense of self-knowledge.

Never before have I been clearer on what I want to do and what I want to be. Never before have I felt that I Get It as I do now.


Getting It

While it’s true that practicing formal Taoist meditation has helped me a lot in gaining this newfound clarity of values, the process has been simpler than that.

As soon as I stopped spending most of my waking hours doing something I didn’t find meaningful, eliminating the inherent cognitive dissonance, I started to Get It.

Not having a clear objective, nothing to achieve for a while, liberated a ton of psychic energy, and refocused it inwards.

Now I know that while I’m alive and awake, I want to do something that delivers genuine value to others — not just to myself.

I want to contribute, however humbly, to change the world for the better.


Money

An obvious question I’ve been pondering all this time is how to align my quest for meaning with the necessity of making a living out of it.

In the beginning, I was quite pessimistic about this. I was still working on the assumption that running a business was a fundamentally selfish thing.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this prejudice was in large part due to my training in Economics.

Traditional economic theory is based on the notion that people seek their narrow self interest, and that this is perfectly fine — the market’s Invisible Hand is supposed to ensure that selfish individual behavior translates into broad social gains.

But after some time I managed to break free from that prejudice.

The idea that business can be motivated by forces beyond profit is, of course, one of the hottest topics in the media today.

This Year of Nothing gave me the time to absorb the huge amounts of information available on- and offline on the subject, and to meet lots of people who have embraced the concept.

But most importantly, because I haven’t been involved with any particular business for a while, I was able to open my mind and truly ponder the validity of this idea against my previous conceptions.



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The business guidelines

Here are a few rough guidelines I’ll be following for my upcoming income-generating initiatives. Of course, I’ll be updating you on their evolution through this blog:


Affiliate information products

Since I started sharing my insights and tips about creating a lifestyle based on meaning and personal development through this blog, I’ve had some tremendously encouraging feedback from readers about the value they receive from the project.

This feedback, and the steady increase in traffic that the blog has enjoyed since its launch, made me conclude that there is room for a little “store” section where readers will be able to buy information products that I endorse.

I will only endorse products that I have found to be extremely useful and empowering during this already 1-year old journey. Eventually, I will also offer information products created by yours truly.

A store section for the blog is the most obvious way I can think of for creating a small business based on meaning and real value.


Art

Throughout this Year of Nothing I have re-connected with my passion for art.

I have had plenty of time to listen to music again. That was one of the things I missed the most in my life, and I got it back.

Through my travels, I have attended all kinds of concerts, shows and music festivals. I have been stopped in my tracks by dozens of awesome street musicians in subways and alleys, and been able to take the time to properly contemplate their performances.

I even ended up one night hanging out with Farruquito (one of Spain’s most acclaimed Flamenco dancers) and his friends at El Taxidermista bar in Barcelona until almost 6 am the next day.

I don’t know what got me more drunk: the alcohol, or the insanely powerful energy emanating from these people when they’re offstage, partying, singing and dancing for themselves. :-D

Check out some of Farruquito’s incredible moves here:

I’ve been in many museums and exhibitions. I’ve attended cinema festivals and rented tons of old movies I hadn’t had the time to watch.

This Year of Nothing allowed me to truly appreciate art as the ultimate human activity aligned with higher purpose. Art can do so much good to the world at so many levels that it’s hard to think about a more valuable human activity.

So I have come to the conclusion that I want to launch a little project related to the art business. I still don’t have much of a clue about the form it will take, but I’ll keep you posted on its progress…

And to those of you who know about my frustrated musician background: yes, I have seriously started thinking about playing an instrument again. But that’s a bit of a longer term project — I will still probably do Nothing about it until mid next year :-)


Economics

During this Year of Nothing I have also re-connected with Economics, and I have revived the excitement that I felt for the discipline back in college.

I definitely think I can use my skills as an economist for dedicating some of my time to contribute to projects aligned with a higher purpose.

Before this Year of Nothing, whenever I read or heard someone say that quietness, idleness and meditation can be a big emotional amplifier, I used to discard it as New Age BS.

Not anymore. Somehow, a Year of Nothing hugely expanded my sensitivity towards poverty, the environment, and the myriad sustainability problems we must all deal with. It’s like I’ve developed a visceral repulsion towards them that goes beyond the rational understanding of their causes and nature. And I’ve decided that I want to deal with them indeed.

Again, this is all work in progress… stay tuned for updates in this area too.



So what do you think? Does my plan make sense to you? What are your plans for 2010 (resolution time is approaching!) in terms of aligning your business or career with a sense of meaning and higher purpose?



Posted on November 3, 2009
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Beyond flow: meaning as the key for truly fulfilling work

In a previous post we argued that an important condition for us to truly love our work is for it to allow us to regularly achieve a state of flow. But developing a truly fulfilling relationship with our work goes a long way beyond that.

This post is the final one of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

The best way I have for illustrating why achieving flow is not enough for truly fulfilling work, comes from my own experience.

From 2000 to 2003 I worked in an industry that allowed me to travel the world 11 months per year producing special advertising sections on developing countries (so called “emerging markets”), distributed with several of the world’s most widely read business publications.

I can fairly say that besides providing me with a lifestyle of the “rich and famous”, this line of work allowed me to achieve states of flow with reasonable frequency.

The “interviews”

I was in charge of the editorial for the supplements, so I had to “interview” CEO’s and key government officials on their views about the attractiveness for business of their countries and companies.

A typical “interview” was structured as a 30-minute conversation that had to strike a delicate balance between gathering information for the copy of the supplements, and most importantly, making the interviewee say the right things that would allow my accompanying colleague — invariably an attractive, sharp, aggressive saleswoman as most people in positions of power in the developing world are still men — to construct the arguments for selling him an expensive ad in the supplement.

“So Mr. X, as you said during the interview, your company is the fastest growing luxury hospitality provider in your country today, and Europe your most important market by any measure. As you very well know, readers of Time magazine’s European edition, with which our supplement will be distributed, belong to the very elite of the European business community — people who are always on the lookout for new, exciting options for enjoying a luxurious holiday… of course, they would also surely be interested in looking into solid investment opportunities, such as the ones offered within your company’s ambitious expansion plan… so we truly feel that you should strengthen your company’s presence in our supplement beyond the editorial coverage with a full-page advertisement for 95,000 Euros. What do you think?”

Conducting these interviews was a challenging exercise. Most of our interviewees were very busy and powerful people, so we had to make the most of the precious 30 minutes they granted us. A good “interview” had the right mix of questions, making the interviewee feel intellectually challenged, admired, and entertained at the same time.

If I didn’t strike that balance, my colleague would find it significantly more difficult to sell him an ad. And the process of striking that balance was a surefire way to achieve flow.

I became totally focused on listening attentively to my interviewee’s answers, taking notes, and coming up with witty comments for sparkling the space between questions and adding flavor to the conversation. I had to pay close attention to my interlocutor’s body language to gauge his emotional state: if he was tired, bored or angry, the pressure was on. I needed to wake him up somehow, to find which buttons to press in order to put him in the right frame of mind for a sale, while still feeling he had been “interviewed” by a journalist. Seeing his mood change subtly in the right direction was exhilarating, each favorable micro-expression getting me a bit closer to signing an advertising contract, and a commission of several thousand dollars.

Hunting for virgins

There were, of course, interviewees that were being interviewed for the very first time for a special ad section, and therefore much easier to get sold on the idea — we called these interviewees “virgins”. Interviewing them was much less challenging, and less conducive to flow.

But the process of finding “virgins” in the country was an art that required lots of strategic thinking and resourcefulness, providing an alternative path towards flow. For instance, sometimes the countries we covered had been hit by several teams producing ad sections before us, and most of the large, prominent companies and government institutions were not interested in spending any more advertising money on the concept. So the name of the game was to find enough “virgins” that could be sold on a larger number of smaller ad spaces.

In our hunt for “virgins”, we scoured the countries searching for them, storming into office buildings, taking advantage of relaxed, unstructured, friendly local cultures to steal 30 minutes of the boss’s time, and walking out with a 25,000 USD ad contract from a small stock brokerage firm that didn’t make a million USD in yearly turnover. Or for that matter, from a truck-manufacturing company that had no exports, no international expansion plans, or any other minimally rational reason for advertising with us.

The euphoria of achieving success under these circumstances, totally against the odds, was intoxicating, even if all it took to sell these companies were a couple of very basic questions and a very simple sales technique: nod at whatever the interviewee says, and take copious notes even if what you’re really writing is the grocery shopping list — when well executed, even Tom Peters can fall for this!

Yet another strategy that required a great dose of cunning networking ability and relationship management was figuring out which minister or other powerful political figure could give a call to any of the large companies of the country for exhorting, or even ordering them to advertise with us. We would interview the minister, and they would almost always get free exposure in the ad section in exchange for the “magical phone call”. When we succeeded at this, the euphoria was comparable to signing an ad contract, as this significantly increased the odds of actually signing one with the company at the other side of the minister’s phone line.

From economic hit man to espresso entrepreneur

So what can possibly be wrong with a business that gives you the opportunity to become an expert of sorts in persuasion techniques, earn good money and other perks in the process, and on top of everything, to access a state of flow on a regular basis?

Of course, it’s the fact that this business lacked a meaningful purpose beyond earning as much money as possible for myself.

I reached a point where I just couldn’t believe that neither the companies that sponsored our editorial products nor the countries that we covered were getting anything close to fair value from these products as marketing tools. I couldn’t understand how I was selling people on something I would never do myself if I were one of the CEO’s we “interviewed”. But somehow I managed to rationalize the whole thing. At the end of the day, I was just being a “good salesman,” judging by the selling-ice-to-Eskimos standard — a standard that is pervasively embraced by many businesses in free market economies. If you need any evidence on this, just look around you. The world is in the midst of its worse financial crisis in a century thanks to it.

I had become a sort of small-scale “economic hit man,” an expert on selling ideas and “projects” to people on the belief that they were doing something good for their companies and countries, regardless of whether this was true. But to be sure, in the great majority of cases the sale wouldn’t go through unless the man at the other side of the table had some self-interested reason, however bizarre, to sign the contract.

In the Middle East, most CEO’s simply felt flattered and proud that sophisticated western media people were apparently so thrilled to be promoting their country. And due to the gargantuan size of the marketing budget of large companies in the region, they saw doing business with us as a harmless gesture of gratitude.

But in many other cases, more bizarre motivations were present: wanting to advertise in the ad section simply because competitors or other important people in the country had done so; appearing as patriotic and socially responsible in the eyes of government officials who were supporting the ad section; the need to spend money for exhausting advertising budgets and avoid financial cuts in the next year due to incapacity to use the funds; bragging about the financial strength of the company, about the interviewee’s capacity to sign big contracts on the spot, or simply being so carried away, so drunk on the egomaniacal high produced by answering so many questions strategically aimed at making him talk about his executive super-human abilities — or the nationalistic pride produced by talking for 30 straight minutes about the grandiose “economic potential” of his country — that all his capacity for a rational evaluation of our offer was effectively suppressed.

In the last stage of my career in the special ad section industry I quit freelancing for larger media groups and established my own small media company with a friend and colleague. We did put all our heart and soul in delivering ten times better value than the competition. This wasn’t difficult to do due to the appalling quality that many of our large competitors’ ad sections deteriorated to over the years due to their extreme mentality of extracting as much money as possible from advertisers at the lowest cost. We were producing 60-page, well written and decently researched magazines for a country at the same cost that our competitors would produce a 6-page ad section (it has to be said though that the magazines and newspapers we distributed our magazines with were less influential and had a smaller readership than our larger competitors).

But the nature of the business severely constrained the editorial quality of our magazines — we just couldn’t afford to be as objective as we would have liked to about a country when its government and key companies were paying us to promote their image abroad. And when you’re covering a country like, for example, the United Arab Emirates, you inevitably end up biasing your coverage towards the 7-star hotels and luxury spas, and away from the labor camps and problems with environmental sustainability.

This added a whole new dimension to the moral dilemma of the business beyond the value delivered to stakeholders. What was the broader impact of promoting a country’s positive developments without openly addressing its problematic issues, which sometimes actually were much larger in scope and importance than the former? In many cases, what these countries needed was more international pressure, not international promotion.

These were the kind of questions I couldn’t give a satisfactory answer to, and that ended up killing all my motivation to continue in the industry. There was no amount of money, fun, excitement, or for that matter, flow, that could compensate for the fact that I was spending most of my time and energy in an enterprise that didn’t deliver any meaningful value to others.

Back in 2003 I took a break from the country-promotion business and set up a small Argentine-themed cafe in Barcelona, Spain (the city was my base for several years) in association with a friend from childhood. Setting up that business was a blessing. I remember how good it felt to work towards providing others with a truly valuable experience. It all seemed so spontaneous and natural: an espresso and a pastry in an uplifting, cozy environment, for a fair price. A simple conversation with the customer. An exchange of smiles. No strings attached, no need to pitch anybody for anything. It might be debatable whether working behind a bar serving coffee 12 hours a day can provide you with anything that you can properly call flow, but the experience was perhaps even more satisfying than that — specially for someone who had been working without any sense of higher purpose for so long.

When I eventually went back to the country-promotion industry in mid 2005, those days of espresso, spontaneity and sincerity kept haunting me until the end. That is, until that day in October 2008 when I decided to quit the country-promotion business for good.

Making sense of life looking backwards

After going through all this, I gained a very sharp sense of clarity on what’s important for work to be truly rewarding and fulfilling. In a way, I feel that having worked in such an extreme industry as the country-promotion business was exactly what I needed to learn about the importance of meaning in whatever activity one chooses to pursue.

Actually, looking back at the whole process, I can’t help but seeing it as a form of mystical experience that I was meant to live and that has changed much more than my perspective on work — I can fairly say I am now a new person. And although I can almost see many of you grinning with cynicism at this claim, specially many of you who are very close to me and know how cynical I used to be myself about anything resembling a “mystical experience,” I’ll let it all out and give you all the details of my journey in an upcoming post.

Posted on September 2, 2009
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If you need to “have fun” at work, you probably don’t love it

Having fun at work is an art that we all should try to master because, well, having fun is great by its own merit. It’s an obvious way of increasing our overall happiness and health.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

Having fun at work is an art that we all should try to master because, well, having fun is great by its own merit. It’s an obvious way of increasing our overall happiness and health.

Having fun at work also makes us more productive. The better our sense of humor and that of our colleagues, the better able to handle stress and more creative we’ll become.

Working in any of these seriously cool workplaces will not only be more fun, but will surely enhance our performance. There is some evidence according to which even the pastime of surfing the web at work, so dreaded by employers, can actually increase productivity.

Smiling more often, taking breaks, and doing things differently, can have a positive impact on our ability to have fun at work, and become better at it.

But we should never confuse the concept of cleverly using fun for productivity, and thinking that having fun at work is the same as loving our work.

I’m sure that stand-up comedians must have much more “fun” at work than opera singers, if we measure that for the overall lightness, laughter, flexibility, relaxation and improvisation that impregnates the atmosphere of their performances.

But if we would ask both kinds of artists why they love what they do, they would both tell us that it’s mostly about two things.

The first would be that their work allows them to achieve a state of flow.

The second, and most important, is the sense of meaning they derive from their work, which in both cases would be quite similar, and common to almost all forms of art: self-expression, giving an aesthetically rewarding experience to their audiences, delivering an important sociopolitical message, etc.

As Jay Sankey puts it in his Zen and the Art of Stand-up Commedy, “In this suspicious and often ‘edited for television’ world, the challenging comments of the stand-up comic make him a type of outspoken philosopher, an anarchist dreamer, even a kind of social hero.”

In my next post we will elaborate on the crucial importance of meaning for work to truly contribute to our happiness, and the ways in which the idea of meaning relates to flow.

Posted on June 3, 2009
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What does it mean to love our work? Hint: It’s not about success (Part II)

One of the conditions for work to contribute genuinely to happiness is that we enjoy, in a very particular way, to practice — doing the work itself.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

Success as excellence. Being excellent at our work won’t necessarily contribute to our happiness. The world is filled of excellent pianists, engineers, cooks, lawyers and doctors who have managed to work hard and achieve excellence despite not loving their careers at all.

To the usual conformist reasons that people use to force themselves into work they don’t love, being excellent at it can add to the social pressure contributing to choke the motivation for quitting.

As I will argue below, one of the conditions for work to contribute genuinely to happiness is that we enjoy, in a very particular way, to practice — doing the work itself. And usually people who enjoy practicing achieve high levels of excellence, because they joyously get by with the insane number of hours of practice necessary for it.

One of the reasons why people usually love practicing and become excellent at what they do is that their work is well aligned with their natural strengths and talents. But again, excellence comes about as a byproduct of them simply enjoying the work they do.

Truly excellent people usually are very humble and seem to not care much about their position of excellence. They seem to know deep down that excellence is defined by comparing their performance to others, and therefore can only deliver a similar sort of superficial satisfaction to that provided by prestige.

Wanting to become excellent in our work can be a powerful motivator, but when we focus too much on it, we can shoot ourselves in the foot. Mindfulness is a great mental state for becoming productively engaged with work. And it’s hard to be mindful at the work at hand if we’re obsessed with becoming excellent.

Becoming obsessed with excellence can lead to perfectionism and other forms of self-sabotage that can kill our joy for work and motivation altogether.

Success per se Regardless of whether we define success as high income, prestige, security or excellence, work cannot genuinely contribute to our happiness if we think of it as a means to achieve an external goal.

The euphoria of success, even during the biggest achievements, is transitory. It will last a few days at most. Most of our time at work is spent making progress towards a goal.

Not even rock stars have the privilege of enjoying constant euphoria at their work. Seriously. Look carefully at your favorite one while performing live and you’ll notice that even during the pieces that transmit incredibly electrifying emotion to the crowd, they seem to be quite cool and collected.

For work to contribute significantly to our happiness it has to provide us with a reward that is both more immediate and more continuous over time than the euphoria of success.

The feeling that we must aim for at work is what psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”.

Flow is the feeling of being totally immersed in an activity, being engaged to the point that it seems to be no effort involved in the activity whatsoever. Time flies by. We are “in the zone”.

Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal studies found that people achieve flow when they perform activities that are challenging, yet closely matched to their abilities.

That’s the most important reason for being clear about our strengths. Flow comes about as a result of using our natural talents and abilities, so it feels like an empowering expression of our true selves.

Also, the subtly energizing flashes of gratification (even brief moments of euphoria) that come with every step in the right direction towards reaching a goal will be much more frequent when we are working in harmony with our natural strengths.

And the cherry on top is that it will be much easier to achieve big goals and success if our work allows us to flow on a regular basis.

In my next post I’ll contrast the feeling of flow to the notion of “having fun at work.”

Posted on May 29, 2009
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What does it mean to love our work? Hint: It’s not about success (Part I)

More often than not, we fool ourselves into thinking that we love our work because we are successful at it.

This post is part of a series exploring what it really means to love our work. Make sure to check out the table of contents for other posts in the series.

More often than not, we fool ourselves into thinking that we love our work because we are successful at it.

A basic problem with this is that we usually think of success as equivalent to a set of socially-conditioned values that aren’t conducive to happiness.

The conventional concept of success is equivalent to one, or a combination of the following ideas:

Success as high income. If common sense and introspection were not enough, we count with an overwhelming amount of evidence from economics and psychology confirming that beyond levels of abject poverty, higher levels of income don’t translate into higher levels of happiness.

This is why work that generates high income isn’t the same thing as work we love, and therefore not a necessary ingredient for happiness.

Success as prestige. We tend to identify success with prestige — our capacity to impress others and the feeling of recognition that comes with it.

Part of the frustration people feel with trying to impress others, is that it’s so difficult to accomplish it by, well, trying. Emotionally intelligent people are very good at spotting deliberate attempts to impress them, and are easily put off by people who do that.

That’s why prestige usually comes as a by-product of a high income, an impressive job title or other things that we pursue more directly.

But invariably, prestige doesn’t bring real happiness. All it can provide us with is a temporary endocrine rush that far from satisfying us in any sense, triggers an addictive craving for more.

In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out that unfortunately, we’re biologically wired by natural selection to seek prestige as it does indeed help us to amass resources at the expense of others — and during prehistorical times, this usually meant higher probabilities of survival.

Part of the art of happiness is, therefore, learning to control our natural impulse for seeking prestige, and not letting ourselves be fooled into work that doesn’t contribute to happiness because of it.

Success as “security.” Another idea closely associated with being successful at work is the sense of “security” that we obtain from a predictable source of income. This is more a case of employees who earn salaries and work for large corporations that supposedly can assure long term survival of their jobs.

Beyond the point of whether there can truly be much predictability of income for employees in modern economies characterized by enormous amounts of change, “security” is at least a problematic indicator of how work contributes to happiness.

There is no doubt that some degree of continuity in our work is necessary for satisfactorily seeing our efforts come to fruition, but beyond that, “security” mostly becomes an excuse for being stuck in work that we don’t love — or that we hate.

When people claim they love the “security” their jobs or businesses give them, what they usually really mean is that they don’t believe themselves to be able to both generate a “sufficiently large” income, and love their work.

This “sufficiently large” income is most of times determined by a set of false, socially-imposed beliefs about how buying things contributes to our happiness (see “Success as high income” above).

Also, when people conform to work they don’t love for a long enough period of time they become disconnected from their genuine convictions and interests to a point where they feel clueless about which line of work they would love.

And while the most important step towards breaking this state of cluelessness would be to quit their current jobs or leave the businesses they’re involved with, a false sense of “security” makes the decision to quit less attractive.

Working for “security” is very different to loving our work.

In my next post, I’ll explore the misconceptions around the idea of working for achieving success in the form of excellence, and the problem with the general idea of focusing on success altogether as a motivation for work.

Posted on May 25, 2009
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