Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties

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Work is not a series of words on a LinkedIn profile. It’s a series of moments in the world. And if you don’t enjoy those moments, no sequence of honorifics will dispel your misery.

Some people take jobs with long commutes not fully considering what it will do to their health. Or they take jobs that require lots of travel not fully intuiting what it will mean for their family life. Or they’ll take horribly difficult jobs for money they don’t need, or take high-status jobs for a dopamine rush with a half-life of about three days. Don’t take the job you want to talk about at parties for a couple of minutes a month. Take the job you want to do for hundreds of hours a year.

If you outsource your sense of worth to the feedback of crowds and the approval of peers and professional counterparties, your working identity will feel like a sailboat in a hurricane. You have to moor yourself to something that doesn’t change direction every few moments, whether it’s the confidence that you’re helping people or the joy of pure discovery.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

What does it means for a human being to possess the truth

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Kierkegaard’s concern is really not with the adequacy of a philosophical theory of truth, but with the question of what it means for a human being to possess the truth. To grasp the significance of this, we must not think of truth in the way characteristic of contemporary philosophy, focusing on the properties of propositions, but in the way ancient thinkers conceived of truth. For Socrates and Plato, at least as Kierkegaard understood them, having the truth meant having the key to human life, possessing that which makes it possible to live life as it was intended to be lived.

C Stephen Evans, Introduction: Kierkegaard’s life and works

Was there nothing worth fighting for?

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You’ve probably heard the story of the guy who climbs up the steep steps to the Golden Gate to presents himself to St. Peter and St. Peter says, “So, show me your scars!” “Scars?” the guy says, “Uh, I...I don’t have any scars..” “No scars?!” St. Peter asks incredulously.” Was there nothing worth fighting for?”

What is worth fighting for? As the American rock singer, actor, author and poet, Henry Rollins says, “Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength and move on...”  

Gail Blanke

 

Is it Hard for You to Ask for Help?

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If you are inclined to avoid requesting help, it’s important to examine any thoughts or beliefs that might be getting in your way. These could include: 

·      Negative associations: you might think that someone is lazy if they can’t do something themselves.

·      Self-criticism: you could think that asking for help means you are incapable or weak.

·      Concerns about how you will be perceived: you might worry that someone will think less favourably of you if you ask for help.

·      Self-sacrificing beliefs: you might worry about burdening someone with your needs.

·      Overestimating the likelihood of rejection: ‘No one is going to want to help me out,’ you might assume – ‘why would they?’

Research suggests that we tend to underestimate the likelihood of someone saying yes to a request for help. Most people feel good when they do helpful things for others, and prefer to think of themselves as generous and willing to help when they can. If you fear that someone will like you less if you ask them for help, consider the opposite possibility: people might actually like you more if they’ve done you a favour. Expressing vulnerability and openness, by acknowledging that you could use help, can lead to deeper connection.

Debbie Sorensen writing in Psyche

Is Learning a Struggle?

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Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connection, building mental models, increasing your capacity. The implication of this is powerful: your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control. Knowing that this is so makes the difficulties worth tackling. 

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Embracing Uncertainty

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Research by Saras Sarasvathy, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia, suggests that learning to accommodate feelings of uncertainty is not just the key to a more balanced life but often leads to prosperity as well.

For one project, she interviewed 45 successful entrepreneurs, all of whom had taken at least one business public. Almost none embraced the idea of writing comprehensive business plans or conducting extensive market research.

They practiced instead what Prof. Sarasvathy calls "effectuation." Rather than choosing a goal and then making a plan to achieve it, they took stock of the means and materials at their disposal, then imagined the possible ends. Effectuation also includes what she calls the "affordable loss principle." Instead of focusing on the possibility of spectacular rewards from a venture, ask how great the loss would be if it failed. If the potential loss seems tolerable, take the next step.

Oliver Burkeman writing in the Wall Street Journal

Embracing Errors

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In the 1950s and 60s, the psychologist BF Skinner advocated the adoption of "errorless learning" methods in education in the belief that errors by learners are counterproductive in result from faulty instruction. The theory of errorless learning gave rise to instructional techniques in which the learners were spoonfed new material in small bites and immediately quizzed on them while they still remained on the tongue, so speak, fresh in short-term memory and easy to spit out onto the test form. There was virtually no chance of making an error. Since those days we've come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one's mastery over new material. Yet in our Western culture, where achievement is seen as an indicator of ability, many learners view errors as failure and do what they can to avoid committing them. The aversion to failure may be reinforced by instructors who labor under the belief that when learners are allowed to make errors it's the errors that they will learn.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Literature as antidote

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Poetry was always more than poetry in Russia. Former Soviet prisoners are said to have attested that Russian classics saved their lives in the labor camps when they retold the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to other inmates. Russian literature could not prevent the Gulags, but it did help prisoners survive them.

Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture. Literature is an antidote to the poison of the Russian imperialist way of thinking. The road to the Bucha massacre leads not through Russian literature, but through its suppression.

Mikhail Shishkin writing in The Atlantic

Older but not Wiser

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There are reasons why older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re twenty. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were twenty cause the aperture to slowly narrow.

By fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment.

George Packer, writing in The New Yorker

Balance

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Focusing on one goal at the expense of all other factors can distort a corporate mission or an individual life, says Christopher Kayes, an associate professor of management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Prof. Kayes, who has studied the "overpursuit" of goals, recalls a conversation with one executive who "told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of 40 … and he'd done it. [But] he was also divorced, and had health problems, and his kids didn't talk to him anymore." 

Oliver Burkeman

Mother Nature doesn’t care if you are happy

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Perhaps the greatest error people make about happiness is assuming it will come naturally if we follow our instincts—that is, If it feels good, do it. There’s a simplistic sort of logic here: Humans desire lots of worldly rewards, like money, power, pleasure, and admiration. We also want to be happy. Thus, if we get that worldly stuff, we will be happy. But this is nature’s cruelest hoax.These fall broadly into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor, which the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas called substitutes for God. Whether you buy Aquinas’s assessment or not, you can’t really argue with him that these rewards overpromise and underdeliver happiness. They simply don’t satisfy.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Lasting happiness comes from habits, not hacks

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For enduring happiness changes, you need habits, not hacks. And by habits, I don’t mean mindless routines; I mean mindful, daily practices to strengthen your relationships, deepen your wisdom, and uncover meaning in your life. Happiness hacking tends to trivialize happiness as little more than a feeling, but this is an error. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness, which is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic