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Learning from what is not

The very last post on the Year of Nothing series, or the yearlong process during which I became a Taoist without noticing.

Reading Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts — Change Your Life towards the end of my Year of Nothing was remarkably revelatory. Both the chain of events that led me to the book and its content helped me put in perspective what I gained during this year, and made me realize that I had become a Taoist without noticing.

Here are the most important Year-of-Nothing lessons, and the corresponding passages of the book that clarified each of them.


Contentment

Doing nothing for a whole year detoxed my system from “achievement addiction.” It developed my capacity to be content with who I already am, the serenity to appreciate all the positives that already exist in my life.

The 3rd verse of the Tao Te Ching hints at the connection between non-doing and contentment.

…

The sage governs by emptying minds and hearts, by weakening ambitions and strengthening bones.

Practice not doing… When action is pure and selfless, everything settles into its own perfect place

Taking a long enough break from goal-oriented action seems to have a taming effect on the ego, isolating us from its constant push to move things forward, and therefore allowing our better appreciation of the blessings of what we already are and have.

Here’s Dyer’s interpretation of this part of the 3rd verse, which he entitles “Living Contentment”:

You may have a long list of goals that you believe will provide you with contentment when they’re achieved, yet if you examine your state of happiness in this moment, you’ll notice that the fulfillment of some previous ambitions didn’t create an enduring sense of joy… “Stop pushing yourself,” Lao-tzu would say, “and feel gratitude and awe for what is. Your life is controlled by something far bigger and more significant than the petty details of your lofty aspirations.”


Humility

Doing nothing for so long somehow directed a lot of my psychic energy inwards, building my courage to take hard looks at myself. I now am clear about what made me deviate from my core values in the past. I feel more compassionate.

I am also more able to accept that many of the things we assume as “achievements” are due to factors out of our control — for instance, the huge material abundance in our lives is in large part a result of simply having been born in the Western hemisphere of the world.

In this regard, the 9th verse of the Tao Te Ching reads:

To keep on filling is not as good as stopping.

Overfilled, the cupped hands drip, better to stop pouring.

…

Retire when the work is done; this is the way of heaven.

Dyer interprets the central message of this verse to be “Living Humility”:

Cramming life with… activities when we’ve obviously reached a point where more is less indicates being in harmony with ego, not the Tao! Living humility knows when to just stop, let go, and enjoy the fruits of our labor. This verse clearly analogizes that the pursuit of more status, more money, more power, more approval, more stuff, is as foolish as honing a carving knife after it has reached its zenith of sharpness. Obviously, to continue would just create dullness, and it is obvious that a keen edge represents perfection.


Giving

Our happiness comes mostly from the relationships we build. We cannot really say that we “achieve” truly meaningful and fulfilling relationships, for what works best in that department is to allow our capacity for joyful giving to emerge. This is a state that by definition cannot be willed. It comes about as a spontaneous byproduct of contentment and humility, both also elusive to our conscious efforts. Try too hard, and you break the spell.

But there’s something to doing nothing for a while, either by meditating or taking a quiet walk in the park or surrendering to a Year of Nothing, that does the trick.

In this regard, the 7th verse of the Tao Te Ching reads:

…Why do heaven and earth last forever? They do not live for themselves only. This is the secret of their durability.

For this reason the sage puts himself last and so ends up ahead. He stays a witness to life, so he undures.

Serve the needs of others and all your own needs will be fulfilled. Through selfless action, fulfillment in attained.

Dyer interprets this verse as “Living Beyond Ego”:

The more you pursue desires, the more they elude you. Try letting life come to you and begin to notice the clues that what you crave is on its way… Stay appreciative of all that you receive… Stop the chase and become a withness — soothe your demanding habits by refusing to continue running after more. By letting go, you let God; and even more significantly, you become more like God and less like the ego…


Luck

Soon after I took the plunge, quitting a business and lifestyle that were clashing with my most important values, and let myself go with the flow without specific expectations, I was surprised with a very particular sense of self-confidence. Not the kind that comes from reinforcing the ego, but from faith — a conviction that whatever was going to happen, I would be just fine. I felt happy to live with the worst case scenario if I ever needed to, in order to stay true to myself and do the right thing.

Gradually, all sort of synchronicities started to happen, as if by meaningful coincidences the right people, information, opportunities and resources stumbled into me at the right time and place. I started feeling incredibly “lucky.” And yet, I sensed that somehow this luck was the result of my having become less fearful towards the fuzziness of life’s adventure.

The 55th verse of the Tao Te Ching states that

He who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child. Deadly insects will not sting him. Wild beasts will not attack him. Birds of pray will not strike him. Bones are weak, muscles are soft, yet his grasp is firm.

In his interpretation of this verse, entitled “Living by Letting Go,” Dyer elaborates:

Verse 55 of the Tao Te Ching incites you to realize that what you call luck isn’t something that randomly happens–it’s yours for life when you decide to live by letting go… letting go for protection sounds paradoxical… But try seeing it as a way of allowing life’s natural rhythm to flow unimpeded through you. Living by letting go means releasing worry, stress and fear. When you promote your sense of well-being in the face of what appears as danger to others, your alignment with your Source frees you from pushing yourself to act in a forceful manner. La-tzu reminds you here that “things that are forced grow for a while, but then wither away.”

Living by letting go will allow you to appreciate Lin Yutang’s wry observation in The Importance of Living: “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

The notion of luck postulated in this verse of the Tao Te Ching resonates much stronger with me than the Law of Attraction and similar concepts preached by all sorts of personal development gurus these days. There’s no way that “the universe will conspire to get us what we want” until we loose our attachment to whatever it is that we want so badly, are content with what we already have and who we are, and have faith that as long as we let go and let our actions be guided by a sense of higher purpose, we will be OK with whatever life puts us through.


Action

During the last 2-3 months of my Year of Nothing, my desire for pursuing goals again started growing fast. But I noticed important changes in the way I approach the concept of action. Paradoxically, there is something to non-doing and trusting your “luck” that also brings clarity as to how simple (yet not easy) it is to voluntarily bring about change in the world through action. It’s as if I can see the chain of causality from action to results much more clearly. That fresh clarity gave me a huge motivational boost.

This goes as well for the negative consequence of our actions in the world — I can confidently say that today I am much more conscious of the environmental impact of my lifestyle, and of the unintended consequences for others that my actions might have.

Also of crucial importance has been a strong intuition on the value of following the path of less resistance in life. As it happens to be, I also discovered that traditional Chinese thinkers regarded this principle as the key to enlightenment, the concept of “effortless action” or wu-wei being an analogue to the Buddhist notion of Nirvana.

This is very much in line with modern notions of personal development and business thought that advocate a motivational focus on personal strengths, passions and meaning instead of profit and other external forms of reward. Action that is in line with our talents or level of skill, is exciting, and/or meaningful cannot be said to involve effort in the sense of struggle, tedium or moral torment.

Doing nothing and wu-wei are so interlinked in the traditional Chinese psyche that both are sometimes identified and referred to as “non-action.”

The Tao Te Ching’s 43rd verse is particularly straightforward on this subject:

The softest of all things overrides the hardest of all thigns. That without substance enters where there is no space. Hence I know the value of non-action.

Teaching without words, performing without actions–few in the world can grasp it–that is the master’s way…

And Dyer’s commentary:

[The principle of non-action] is clearly seen when you look at great champions as they perform their chosen activities. The greatest golfers are effortless in their swing… they don’t use force, nor can they find words to describe how they do it. The most talented artists dance softly, without effort; paint quietly, without force; and write easily, without struggle, by allowing the words to come to them.


…Some marathon runners say that they’ve learned to relax and stop pushing, letting their legs, arms and torso simply be as their bodies begin experiencing extreme exhaustion with only only a few miles to go. They report that when they shut down the mental interference and instructions they magically cross that finish line.


Apply this way of seeing everything in your world: Tasks will be simplified, your performance level will increase, and the pressure to be better than others by using superior hardened strength will cease to be a factor.

As a result of my Year of Nothing, I have also gained a much tighter control over my urges to be active for its own sakes, which more often than not is simply a modern form of procrastination.

In a nutshell, having spent such a long period of time in non-action, paradoxically gave me a much better sense of the value of action.


Patience

Equally important in the Taoist notion of wu-wei is the concept of timing. In order for action to be effortless, we must learn to act only when the time is right. Doing nothing for such long time allowed me to appreciate the value of dwelling in non-action for as long as it is needed, until the right time to act arrives.



Living from the void

Last but not least, doing nothing for a whole year somehow infused me with a sense of spirituality, with the notion that there is a creative, overarching consciousness “out there” that nurtures every single thing in the universe. I can’t help but wonder about the possibility of synchronicity and “luck” as discussed above being mechanisms by which this higher consciousness communicates with us.

With hindsight, I think I now have a better idea of how this process of “illumination through non-action” might occur. In the Taoist view, “emptying” the mind of thoughts and desires through meditation and other techniques, takes us from doing nothing to being nothing — and nothingness is at the core of the “nameless,” “formless” source of everything that they called the Tao.

That’s why meditation is viewed by Taoists as a means to “harmonize people with nature:” making us more spontaneous, allowing us to discover our true vocations, more respectful of other life forms by becoming empathetic, compassionate and less judgmental, etc.

But above and beyond all these positive effects, there is a deeper experience of transcendence, a sort of heightened awareness about the Tao as that higher form of consciousness that is so appealing to me nowadays. A deeper inner conviction that in ancient Chinese thought was the spiritual anchor that allows one to “live by letting go” as discussed above.

That is the principle embodied in the 11th verse of the Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub; it is on the hole in the center that the use of the cart hinges.


Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful. Carve fine doors and windows, but the room is useful in its emptiness.


The usefulness of what is depends on what is not.

These are Dyer’s words on the meaning of this verse, which he interprets as “Living from the void”:

A composer once told me that the silence from which each note emerges is more important than the note itslef. He said that that it’s the empty space between the notes that literally allows the music to be music — if there’s no void, there’s only continuous sound. You can apply this subtle awareness to everything that you experience in your daily life. Ask yourself what makes a tree, a tree. The bark? The branches? The roots? The leaves? All of these things are what is. And all of them do not constitute a tree. What’s needed to have a tree is what is not — an imperceptible, invisible life force that eludes your five senses. You can cut and carve and search the cells of a tree endlessly and you’ll never capture it.

Posted on February 4, 2010
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Amy Tan on creativity

Novelist Amy Tan’s insights on creativity are perhaps very much applicable beyond artistic work. My Year of Nothing allowed me to open up to a worldview similar to hers in many ways.

I watched this TED talk by Amy Tan for the first time earlier this year and immediately felt identified with it. And watching it again now that my Year of Nothing just finished, it makes much more sense.

Here are the elements of Tan’s personal philosophy and approach to creativity that I found most interesting:

  • Embrace uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox with an adventurous attitude. Try to approach all situations with an open mindset that allows you to immerse yourself in “the specifics of the story.” This stance is more conducive to the truth than when we thrust forward in life with too much attachment to a particular paradigm.
  • Imagination is as much a tool for creative work as it is for understanding the world and getting ourselves more aligned with truth. Because through imagination we can put ourselves within “the specifics of the story” that other people go through, it is also a means to becoming more compassionate.
  • For getting creativity flowing, Amy goes out to the world and wanders around until she’s hit by some uncanny incident that “delivers” crucial information that she was missing, or that “validates” the direction taken by a particular story she’s working on. Whether this is the work of synchronicity or of a “wider mental filter” caused by her immersion in the particulars of a story, the fact is that the more she’s aware of these meaningful coincidences, the more they happen, and the more she’s able to learn from them. My hunch is that this approach is applicable beyond artistic work.
  • “What’s our place in the universe? Did the universe intend for us to have a particular role, or is it all an idea we just come up with?.” While these are perhaps unanswerable questions, truly creative, meaningful work often feels like walking on a path that will enable us to grasp, at least, “particles of truth” in this regard.
Posted on December 11, 2009
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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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How to become less judgmental in 5 minutes or less (The Year of Nothing, Part 3)

During this Year of Nothing I became more aware of my mind’s natural tendency towards judgmentalism. And I learned a 5-minute exercise to counter that tendency.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.
Sent-ts’an


From the vantage point of the non-doer, during this Year of Nothing I became much better at detecting the petty little games I play with myself and others when caught up in the race towards achievement — a race we all inevitably participate in every single day of our lives.


Being right

The luxury of being able to spend long periods of time reflecting on my not-so-lovable traits allowed me to conclude that one of those petty little games I love so much, is that of being right.

If I consider a topic important enough to have a strong a opinion about it, I adore the feeling of proving to others that my opinion is supported by strong evidence and is logically coherent.

And I must confess, I get almost the same rush from proving that others who dare contradict me on these Important Subjects, are wrong. That their opinion on these Crucial Topics is biased, incoherent or otherwise flawed.

Having caught myself in the act more times than I would have liked to, I decided to do a bit more research on the subject.


Self-serving biases and natural selection

An hour of Amazon.com browsing and ten bucks less in my bank account later, I was reading The Happiness Hypothesis, an awesomely illuminating book by Jonathan Haidt. (Full disclosure: that’s an affiliate link.)

Haidt’s TED talk, to which I link below, addresses many of the book’s key arguments:

After reading for a while, I was comforted to confirm that I’m not alone in my addiction to being right. The book presents lots of research supporting the idea that humans are biologically wired to hold the belief of being right — regardless of the truth.

Actually, this tendency to think we are the Chosen Holders of the Truth is a special case of a genetically ingrained bias towards detecting the faults of others, and turning a blind eye on ours.

We’re programed from birth to see the speck in our brother’s eye, but not the log in our own. We have an instinct for hypocrisy.

The argument goes like this. Evolution favored those who played the game of life using a strategy of tit for tat: cooperate with others as long as they don’t cheat. And whenever they cheat, do not hesitate to retaliate.

React to what the other does to you, paying in kind.

But in real life we don’t react to what someone does to us. We react to what we think they did:

… and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Natural selection, like politics, works by the principle of survival of the fittest, and several researchers have argued that human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way. The Machiavellian version of tit for tat… is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever reality may be.

… Machiavellian tit for tat requires devotion to appearances, including protestations of one’s virtue even when one chooses vice. And such protestations are most effective when the person making them really believes them (this last emphasis is mine).

As Robert Wright puts it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”


Naive realism

Our natural tendency to think that we are right is what Emily Pronin at Princeton and Lee Ross at Standford university call “naive realism”:

Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not been exposed to the relevant facts or else they are blinded by their interests and ideologies… It just seems plain as day to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self interest. Except for me, I see things as they are.

Whatever the benefits naive realism gave us when we were subject to the forces of natural selection, its usefulness in our modern societies is much less clear:

If the only effect of these biases was to make people feel good about themselves the would not be a problem… Evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.

And when naive realism gets a grip on group dynamics, things get much uglier:

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.

As it seems, naive realism is similar to overeating. An instinctual drive to eat as many calories as physically possible gave an evolutive advantage to our pre-historical ancestors, who probably ate a couple of times per week, whenever the hunting or gathering session was successful.

But in a society flooded in caloric over-abundance, the instinct doesn’t favor our survival. Quite the contrary. So it pays to learn how to control it.


The antidote: taking a 5-minute hard look at ourselves

First off, Haidt advises us to humbly accept two basic facts about our nature. First, judgmentalism is, however harmful, a natural tendency of out minds. Second, we cannot change that by willpower alone:

[As stated by Chinese Zen Master Sent-ts'an in the opening quotation of this post] Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition — the [subconscious] is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.” So … you can’t simply resolve to to stop judging others or stop being a hypocrite. But, as Buddha taught, [you] can gradually learn to tame the subconscious…

And a simple exercise for taming the subconscious, for changing our automatic judgmental reactions starts, as Jesus advised, with ourselves and the log in our own eye:

And you will see the log only if you set out on a deliberate and effortful quest to look for it. Try this now: Think of a recent interpersonal conflict with someone you care about and then find one way in which your behavior was not exemplary. Maybe you did something insensitive (even if you had a right to do it), or hurtful (even if you meant well), or inconsistent with your principles (even though you can readily justify it).

When you first catch sight of a fault in yourself, you’ll likely hear frantic arguments from your inner lawyer excusing you and blaming others, but try not to listen. You are on a mission to find at least one thing that you did wrong…

… When you find a fault in yourself it will hurt, briefly, but if you keep going and acknowledge the fault, you are likely to be rewarded with a flash of pleasure that is mixed, oddly, with a hint of pride.

It is the pleasure of taking responsibility for your own behavior. It is the feeling of honor.

I have been doing this exercise for 5 minutes, a couple of times per week during the last few months, and I’ve found it to be incredibly rewarding and effective.

I recommend you to keep a log of the times you catch yourself at being judgmental, wanting to be right, to prove others wrong, and all those petty little games we play. I did that for the first couple of weeks, and was impressed by how visible the results of the exercise were.

I meditate regularly, and sometimes perform this exercise after a formal meditation session, which has the effect of amplifying the “pleasurable feeling of honor” that Haidt talks about. And meditation itself, of course, can help us become less judgmental:

Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life. Meditation is the Eastern way of training yourself to take things philosophically.

You don’t need to perform any formal meditation before the exercise, but definitely take a few extra minutes to sit down in silence, breathe and relax.

And of course, let me know how you feel afterwards.

I’d love to hear you say my advice was right on spot. But if you think I’m wrong, I won’t try too hard to prove I’m not. :-D

Posted on November 15, 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.



###

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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The Year of Nothing, Part 1

It’s been a year since I quit the PR industry and took the plunge into an intense process of self re-discovery and growth. Through a series of posts, I’ll recap what I’ve achieved since then, and where I’m going from here.

The myriad things are born from Something.
And Something is born from Nothing.
Laozi

A couple of weeks ago, I realized that it’s been a year since I quit the public relations industry and took the plunge into the process of self re-discovery and growth that inspired the creation of this blog.

Dubai-NYC ticket

So through a series of posts, I’ll recap what I’ve achieved since then, and where I’m going from here.

Nothing

This year I learned the importance of stepping back, pausing, and “doing nothing” for a while.

Of course, it’s impossible to literally “do nothing”.

What I mean is that this year I have not executed any deliberate, purposeful action towards achieving any important goal.

Well, OK, I have done some of that. But very, very little. :-)

One of the things I did was to start practicing Tai Chi Chuan and Taoist philosophy more seriously. But as Laozi’s quote at the beginning of this post indicates, Taoism is all about the paradoxical virtues of non-doing as a creative force.

So, what do you do?

Whenever I’ve been introduced to people lately, my answer to the proverbial “So, what do you do?” has been a clear, straightforward and resounding “Nothing.”

After explaining myself a bit better about this Year of Nothing, people usually understand that I needed to take a break, recharge my batteries, and reflect upon what I wanted to do next.

At this point, they usually acknowledge that it takes time to discover what makes us tick, and that trying too hard might defeat the purpose. That true self-discovery arises much in the same way as genuine intellectual or artistic discovery: through spontaneous “aha!” moments.

But they’re usually still skeptical on the practicality of taking a whole year in order to do that.

And a key reason behind their skepticism, is the belief that they “just can’t afford” a Year of Nothing.

Stuff

And yet, I have spent close to nothing for a Year of Nothing.

One of the key lessons of this Year of Nothing has been that when it comes to consumption, the best policy is to keep it as close as possible to nothing. And that this is easier to do than what I used to think.

I certainly haven’t bought almost any stuff at all. That I can remember, only a pair of shoes, a piece of luggage, and a Kindle.

Actually, I got rid of most of the very few material possessions I still carried with me. The Kindle substituted for all my books, which I donated together with half of my clothes.

Nowadays, all my stuff fits in one piece of luggage.

Getting rid of stuff has been an incredibly energizing and liberating exercise that I started a couple of years before this Year of Nothing. But I won’t elaborate on this topic because the always inspiring Colleen Wainwright (AKA Communicatrix) wrote a brilliant series of posts about her de-cluttering experience that do just that.

Traveling on Nothing, and my biggest Something

During this Year of Nothing, I learned to travel on almost nothing.

I am truly lucky of having many wonderful friends spread all over the globe. And whenever I asked them for advice on accommodation in their cities, they have invariably invited me to stay at their homes.

So with a little help from my friends, I spent this Year of Nothing in New York, Buenos Aires, Caracas, London, Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco and Los Angeles, spending close to nothing in accommodation.

But most importantly, having been able to spend so much time with friends and being in the state of calm mindfulness that comes so naturally from doing Nothing, has boosted my gratitude for friendship to levels I had never experienced. Sometimes to a crazy level of euphoria that makes me cry out of happiness.

This deeper connection with friends has pushed further down the value of consumption in my scale of values. I know now for sure that I really don’t need to buy any stuff to be happy. I need Nothing. Zero. Nada. As long as I have truly good friends, I will always have a reason for being happy.

This realization was for me the first, and biggest Something born from this Year of Nothing.

Posted on October 23, 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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