In an earlier post I wrote about the distinctions between a job, a career, and a calling. In any given profession it is possible to find people evenly distributed among the three different classifications.

To summarise, if you see your work as a job, your focus is on financial rewards and necessity rather than pleasure or fulfilment. A job in itself is unlikely a major positive part of your life. If you consider yourself having a career, you are focused on advancement and what comes with it: power over others, status, higher paycheck, and other similar benefits. A calling, on the other hand, is characterised by work that you consider socially useful, and derive enjoyment and fulfilment from. (1)

In this post I want to focus specifically on the notion of careers. Open up Brazen Careerist – a website aimed at 20-somethings and recent graduates looking for career advice – and you see headlines like “Why Success Can be Dangerous for Your Career,” “Careers That Work Best If You Have Multiple Passions,” “Is Gen Y Delusional About How to Have a Successful Career,” “Why Being Selfish is the Best Way to Get Ahead in Your Career” etc.

If the website is to be believed, having a career is something good, something we all should aspire to. But why? I mean really; why should you concentrate on building a career in the first place?

The way I see it, a career is means to an end. Or at least it should be. But many people I know have turned their careers into end goals. They have bought into the notion that success and happiness in life is related to their ranking in an arbitrary man-made hierarchy: a CEO is better than a vice-president, a vice-president is better than a general manager, a general manager is better than a department lead, and so on. Not to forget that the one with the most toys in the end wins.

When you are single-mindedly focused on your career, the things that are more likely to actually make life worth living become secondary. Epicurus identified friendship, freedom (from the whims and requirements posed on us by others and the norms of the society), and thought (analysed life) to be the pillars of a life well lived. There are no luxuries or prestigious positions in that list: “…expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand. Objects mimic in material dimension what we require in psychological one. … We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends.” (2)

Now some 2200 years after the times of Epicurus, the positive psychology movement has come up with scientific evidence of what makes people flourish. The list includes things such as involvement in flow activities, experiencing mental pleasures, experiencing renewable physical pleasures, close social relationships, pursuing goals that are intrinsically motivated, and using and growing one’s character strengths. (3, 4)

These are not exactly new findings. Many of the questions concerning how to live a good life have been answered hundreds of years ago. What the scientific method is giving us now is validation. For example, the last two items on the above list can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, according to whom true happiness was identifying one’s virtues, cultivating them, and living in accordance with them. (5)

Advancement is an integral part in career-thinking. If you are not moving forward, you do not have a career. Most companies are pretty decent at estimating how well you can handle a higher-level job before giving you a promotion, but only you can tell whether or not you will actually enjoy it. It is not rare to hear of people who could have moved forward in their careers, but realised that it would come at a cost in their happiness. Pursuing a career is not the same as pursuing life satisfaction or subjective well-being, and we should stop pretending it is.

My intent with this article is not to say that all careers are automatically bad, but to get you question your assumptions about what a career is and why you should pursue one. It can be a source of great satisfaction, but also a source of great distress. To make it the former rather than the latter, it should be in accordance to the aspects of living a good life. Here are some helpful questions:

• Do you feel in flow (the state where you are so immersed in what you do that you lose sense of time, and even yourself) at work? How often?
• How often do you get positive feelings at work, compared to negative ones? The ratio should not be less than 3 positive feelings for each negative one, and the higher the better.
• Are you close with your coworkers? Do you also cultivate friendship outside the workplace?
• Are you able to use your strengths and pursue your interests in your work?

Lastly, there is ample evidence showing that those who enjoy extraordinary career success are usually the people who derive great life satisfaction from the work they do: “They willfully migrate toward positions that fit their natural strengths and passions and where they can work with people they like and respect.” (6) Overall psychological well-being has been found to be much better predictor of job performance than job satisfaction, and one should also consider the groundbreaking study lead by Sonja Lyubomirsky that showed that in the long-term, career success follows from happiness and well-being, but success alone is not enough to cause lasting happiness. (7, 8)

References:

(1) Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C. R., Rozin, P, & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work. Journal of Research in Personality, Vol. 31, 21-33.

(2) de Botton, Alain (2000) The Consolations of Philosophy. Penguin Books.

(3) Diener, Ed (2000). Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index. American Psychologist, Vol. 55, No. 1, 34-43.

(4) Hodges, T. D., & Clifton, D. O. (2004). Strengths-Based Development in Practice. In: Linley, P. A., Joseph, S., & Seligman, M. E. P., ed. (2004). Positive Psychology in Practice. Wiley, 1 edition. Ch. 16.

(5) Peterson, Christopher (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology. [Kindle edition] Oxford University Press.

(6) Citrin, J. M., & Smith, R. A. (2003). The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers. [Kindle edition] Crown Business; 1 edition.

(7) Wright, Thomas A., Cropanzano, R. (2000). Psychological Well-Being and Job Satisfaction as Predictors of Job Performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1, 84-94.

(8) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803– 855.

Fast Company published an article in November 2012 about today’s chaotic and paradoxical business environment, and the kind of leaders who best thrive there. It said:

Twenty years ago, a management professor by the name of Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science. It was prescient then; it is even more eye-opening now. Her premise: Organizations and society have been structured to match our understanding of the natural world, which goes back to the 17th-century ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton famously posited theories of cause and effect, and referred to our world as a machine – a closed system (set in place by the Great Watchmaker). In Newtonian physics, there is no greater goal than stability. That scientific conclusion helped us to embrace hierarchy and one-size-fits-all models. And our businesses have indeed been constructed for efficiency. Following the example of Henry Ford, we have extended our manufacturing prowess into shipping and logistics. We have used technology to enhance effectiveness, to track data and mine it for new refinements. (1)

Even though the focus areas of management have evolved during the past century from Taylor’s Scientific Management to Drucker’s refinement of the word ‘management’ itself, to the rise of business strategy, and to leadership development, we are still essentially operating under the same Newtonian worldview described in Wheatley’s book. Organizations strive to achieve stability. The cause-and-effect worldview implies that there are logical relationships between things that happen, relationships that can be studied, and as we understand them better, also predicted.

The famous Hawthorne studies and Henry Ford’s production line are great examples of Scientific Management in practice: Change working conditions, one small thing at a time, and measure changes in productivity. If productivity rises or falls, it can be assumed to do so because of the change that was done. Therefore, after many enough experiments it is theoretically possible to find what the optimal working conditions are. This reasoning makes logical sense, but only if we hold on to the Newtonian worldview of clear cause-and-effect relationships. And as it turned out also in the Hawthorne studies, when systems involving human actors are being investigated the arrows of causality tend to get complex and much less obvious than initially assumed: productivity increases did not happen because of dimmer or brighter lighting, but due to other less-obvious factors. (2)

It could be argued that the role of management – in a broad sense – is to optimize predictable factors affecting the company’s performance. Consequently, the most spectacular failures of management can be found wherever these predictions have failed. Examples include the domino effect that started from the US housing bubble and lead to the 2008 global financial crisis, and Nokia’s decline from the position of the world’s #1 mobile phone maker. (3)

Despite these occasional hurdles, the 20th century has seen management triumph. As organizations have optimized their production, logistics, billing etc., productivity and consequently GDP per capita has increased globally across the board. What has not increased, however, is people’s subjective well-being. We are more productive, more affluent, live longer lives and have more opportunities than ever before in history. Yet all of this has had little impact on how happy we are with our lives. (4)

The failure of management to increase the quality of subjective well-being is one thing, but the real reason I am predicting that the current paradigm of management practice has reached its end is this: unlimited optimization is not possible. This follows logically from the Newtonian worldview. You can only increase the speed of a production line so much. Sooner or later the limits of physics will create an insurmountable barrier. You can count the fastest route to transport goods from a factory to a store, but there are limits to the speed in which you can travel that distance.

The problem – or the opportunity – is that we have become very good at measuring things. Most large businesses with their armies of MBAs are perfectly capable of smart handling of all the essential functions of a business. They are following best practices, which devalues the best practice thinking itself. It’s difficult to claim to be “best” when every competitor is doing exactly what you are. Organizations are becoming more and more similar: they run the same enterprise resource planning systems, such as Oracle, SAP, or i2, use the same consultancies for advise, and outsource their non-core activities to the same service providers. Earlier it was relatively easy to compete by having e.g. superior logistics, marketing, production, and whatnot, but where does one find sustainable competitive advantage now that more or less all major companies are very good at all of these things?

So far technology has been the salvation for management. Faster computers, more sophisticated algorithms, new production methods and materials are making it possible to gain incremental benefits. Unfortunately the competition is always quick to catch up with these new developments. Being the first one to adopt a new technology is expensive and comes with certain risks. It might provide a fleeting competitive advantage, but is likely to evaporate when the technology comes more robust and affordable and gets adopted by other companies. When I was studying in Yonsei University, South Korea, the locals jokingly called Samsung’s strategy as “exploiting the second-mover advantage”. Let someone else carry the first-mover risks but be fast to follow.

The real challenge facing the management practice is to step away from the drag of pursuing never-ending incremental improvements. You might disagree with me about how this should be done, but I believe that the next logical place where significant competitive advantage can be found is within the individual employees of the organization. What this means in practice is getting people in the kind of positions where they can take full advantage of their strengths, talents, skills and interests. Organizations need to:

1. help employees know themselves better; what their strengths and interests are;
2. assist employees in crafting their jobs so as to take advantage of these strengths and interests, and;
3. focus on finding an answer to one particular question for each employee: “What is needed for work to be a fulfilling part of your life?”

Companies such as Valve, Netflix and SAS (the software company, not the airline) are great examples of this kind of thinking in practice, and the results speak for themselves. For example, the 13 000 employee SAS has had 37 consecutive years of record earnings. When the company stopped receiving orders as the 2008 financial crisis hit, its CEO announced that none of its employees was in risk of being laid off. People stopped worrying, got back to doing their jobs, and the company had record earnings again in 2009. How many companies you know that have done the same when things get tough? (5)

This, however, is only the starting point. The current management practice has its roots in getting uneducated people to work efficiently on a production-line driven organization. It was built on top of assumptions due to which it is inherently incapable of accounting for individual differences that we as people have. Same can be said about the way organizations are structured. What I call for is an organization model and management practice that is built with a focus on the individual at its heart. This does not make measures and traditional management approaches obsolete, but it will lead to the next growth spurt. Something the current management practice is unlikely to achieve. An individual-centric view provides fertile ground for creation of significant and sustainable competitive advantage.

There is of course also the human aspect of it. Simply put, helping people to know themselves better and take advantage of their individuality is the right thing to do… If we want to improve the human condition on this planet; not just material wealth but also subjective well-being. (6)

Besides anecdotal examples, research is starting to pile up showing that the companies adopting these approaches are leapfrogging ahead of their competitors. For example, in a study of 308 798 employees across 51 companies, work units scoring above the median on the statement “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day” have 44% higher probability of success on customer loyalty and employee retention, and 38% higher probability of success on productivity measures. In the UK it was found that each pound invested in employee well-being and motivation received a nine-fold return. This is in stark contrast with what seems to be considered normal today: over half of the Americans hating their jobs. (5, 7, 8)

What do you think?

References:

(1) Safian, Robert (2012). Secrets of the Flux Leader. Fast Company, November 2012, iPad Edition.

(2) Kiechel, Walter III (2012). The Management Century. Harvard Business Review, November 2012, 63-75.

(3) Silver, Nate (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t [Audio book]. Penguin Audio.

(4) Rosling, Hans (2007). New insights on poverty. Ted2007 [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html [Accessed 13 February 2013].

(5) Crowley, Mark C. (2013). How SAS Became The World’s Best Place To Work. Fast Company. Available at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3004953/how-sas-became-worlds-best-place-work [Accessed 13 February 2013].

(6) Hodges, T. D., & Clifton, D. O. (2004). Strengths-Based Development in Practice. In: Linley, P. A., Joseph, S., & Seligman, M. E. P., ed. (2004). Positive Psychology in Practice. Wiley, 1 edition. Ch. 16.

(7) Harter, J. K., Schmidt, E L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 87, No. 2, 268-279.

(8) Knapp, M., McDaid, D., & Parsonage, M. (Eds.). (2011). Mental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention: The Economic Case. London: Department of Health.

This is a topic I have been wanting to write about for a long time, but it has been difficult to gather my thoughts and more importantly find the resolve required. Perhaps because this is something that makes me want to scream inside. Here goes.

Do you feel unhappy about some aspect of your life? Not in the perfect relationship you dreamt about when you were young, but hey the guy/girl you’ve settled with is not that bad. Maybe you drift through workdays in a state of semi-consciousness, hoping to lay low enough not to raise any unwanted attention while browsing celebrity gossip sites. Sure, it’s not the job you wanted. Not even the profession you secretly desired, but your parents got you convinced that you’d be better off studying law instead of breeding miniature pigs. One day you realize that those love handles are starting to really show, but what’s a girl to do? After all, you spend good 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill in the local gym and always eat your vegetables.

Guess what, no one is going to solve those problems for you, or otherwise change your life for the better.

Step 1:
You have to take complete no-bullshit no-excuses ownership of who you are and where you are in your life. You have to man up. Not happy with the job? It’s your fault, your responsibility. You’ve made some bad decisions. Not happy with your guy? Nor the ones before him? You have bad taste. Your fault. Always turning off the lights when having sex because you don’t want him to see you naked? Your body, your fault, your responsibility.

You cannot change your life and fix things unless you are ready to take full, absolute, complete responsibility of your actions. The past and future ones alike. What you need is naked honesty. Because only by going through this necessary step will you be able to truly own your problems. Ownership leads to control, and control means you can finally start changing things.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this part. Stop. The. Fucking. Excuses. You don’t eat Ben & Jerry’s in evenings, slouched in front of the tv, because “it was a hard day at work.” You eat that shit because you choose to do so. Relationships, jobs, friends etc., they are all choices. If you are not satisfied with something, it’s time to choose again. If you are not the one who controls what those choices are, then who does? If you are not the one living your life, then who is? How can you call yourself a free individual if you won’t accept the responsibility that comes with freedom?

You can take control of your life if you want to, but before that you need to take responsibility of every single aspect of it; all the decisions, actions, and their outcomes. No one else can do that for you. To imagine otherwise is to be a puppet, a subject to other people’s machinations. Do you think the company you work for has your best interests in mind? Or your spouse? Or your parents? Fuck no. They may believe so and even get you convinced, but they are not you. They can’t possibly know what it’s like to wake up in your skin every day, or what really goes on inside your head.

Step 2:
Start making some decisions. After you have accepted raw, unfiltered, naked responsibility, it’s time to identify what you want to change. What aspect of your life is in most desperate need of improvement? Don’t try to do everything at once. This is big stuff, so it’s better to proceed one issue at a time.

After you’ve acquired your target, you need to decide how to tackle it. What will you start doing differently?

Don’t like your job? Start scouting for a new one, but this time actually spend some time figuring out what your heart desires to do. Unhappy in your relationship? You have two options: you can leave, or you can work on it and see if it can be turned into a happy one. What doesn’t work is sitting on your ass and expecting things to change on their own. Or repeat doing the same things that got you where you are now. This is about taking responsibility of your life, remember? And if you indeed eat your vegetables and spend 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill but are not getting the results you want, your method is obviously not working. As Einstein said; “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Step 3:
Do your research. I have to admit that this step might be something that is more suited to a geek like me. However, I have found it to be extremely effective in multiple domains. What it means is that instead of making just any decision, you strive to make an informed one. Not sure what you want to do for a living? Read a couple career guides, find out what your Myers-Briggs personality type is, and see if you can identify what your values are (you know, things like integrity, learning, love, joy, honesty etc. that guide your behaviour in both conscious and unconscious level).

I was never able to lose weight following the “eat less exercise more” adage, but after I eliminated sugar and grains from my diet and started lifting weights instead of spending endless hours doing cardio on the “fat burning zone”, I got in the best shape of my life in a matter of months. This probably would not have happened unless I had started questioning my assumptions and studying nutrition and exercise more in detail.

Change tends to be difficult as it is. Don’t make it more difficult by using inferior methods.

Step 4:
Act. Decisions alone are worth nothing unless they are followed by actual changes in your behaviour. This won’t be easy. The single best book I have read about the topic is Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. Read it if you are serious about improving your life. Nevertheless, here is a quick summary about how to improve the odds of succeeding in a behaviour change.

1. Make sure you really understand what your goal is, and more importantly why you want to achieve it. Is your goal really to hit the gym 4 times a week, or is there a deeper goal, e.g. the desire to lose weight, and you simply assume that going to the gym is the best strategy for achieving that goal? The goal should also be your own. Not something someone else tells you should do. Change is easier when you know where you’re going and why it’s worth it.
2. Knowing something isn’t enough to make change happen. Every single person knows that smoking is unhealthy, stupid, and pointless, yet they keep doing it. What you need is a catalyst that propels the change forward. This is not something you know or learn, but something you feel. Try to find the feeling that keeps you motivated to change.
3. In most cases it is easier to break down the change into small steps, and tackle one step at a time. This builds momentum and confidence that you can actually achieve what you set out to do. Want to eat healthier? Don’t overhaul your entire diet at once, but start by fixing your breakfast. After it has become a routine and takes no conscious effort, move on to the lunch, and so on.*
4. Behaviour is largely environmental. We see something that triggers a familiar thought process and we act automatically. The more often we repeat a behaviour, the more ingrained it becomes. For example, if you often buy some last-minute candy at a check-out counter in the local grocery, the script for that behaviour gets triggered every time you are at a check-out counter, and it takes willpower to overcome it. Willpower, as we know, is a limited resource and when it gets depleted the impulses take over. The trick is to tweak your environment in such a manner that it prevents undesired behaviour while supporting desired ones. Eating healthy is a lot easier when you don’t have cupboards full of beer, candy, cookies, and chips. Even small environmental changes can have a surprisingly large effect.
5. One way to create a trigger for the desired behaviour is to determine beforehand when, where, and how you will behave in the new way: “When I am in the coffee shop, sitting opposite to my date, I will smile a lot and be genuinely interested about his life. I will also listen to everything he says, giving my complete attention.” Visualising yourself behaving in a situation has a similar effect on your brain than if you actually did it in real life. This will make the desired behaviour more natural, familiar, and easier to trigger when the actual situation occurs.

* As I said, this works in most cases. If, for example, you have a gluten intolerance this kind of approach is just going to keep you feeling miserable. Sometimes a zero-tolerance approach is a necessity.

In the end, you decide. Do you want to cruise through your days more or less on an autopilot, as a bystander to whom life just happens, or do you have the guts to take control of it? Let me know in the comments.

One of my oldest friends turned 30 last weekend. As a happy coincidence, I met more than a few people in the birthday party who I have known for a long time, but haven’t seen in person for years. We are all in our late 20s, and one thing kept coming up again and again as we talked: almost everyone had changed – or was thinking of changing – the direction of their life.

A guy I hadn’t met in eight years had graduated with a Master’s Degree from a technical university, only to find out that working in front of a computer was not really suited for him. Now he is in medical school with a year and a half to go. Another friend had been doing odd jobs, even graduated as an electrician, but is now studying fish industry in a university.

I have a similar story. I spent 5 years (give or take, as some of that was part-time) as an IT consultant at Accenture, despite realizing after the first year or so that working on enterprise IT systems is not really what I would consider my calling. I didn’t even know what my calling was, just that it wasn’t IT. And by calling I mean what I find interesting enough to be intrinsically motivated to do in the long-term, preferably for a living.

It took me years to find something to do that I am genuinely excited about. The important point is, though, that I did not just stumble on it. I was purposefully searching for it and keeping my eyes open for anything that might hint me to the right direction.

I am a reader, so reading became my method of discovery. As I was trying to find out what it is that I want to do, I read career guides. I read books on personal development. I read books on business, entrepreneurship, philosophy… And I started to discover certain themes that interest me. I could not pinpoint one particular thing or profession I wanted to do, but I was able to identify elements that an ideal profession should largely consist of.

Some of these elements came from what I was reading and fascinated about, and some from my past experiences. For example, I don’t know why, but I am genuinely interested in the human aspects of business; organizational cultures, workplace dynamics, and entrepreneurship. I love to learn and get bored easily when the learning, or growth, stops. I get excited when I have a chance to speak in public, and doing something creative makes me feel alive.

During the process of discovery I also forayed into some entirely different directions. After having a minor role in the Korean TV drama Athena, and knowing my interest in photography, I entertained the possibility of making my way into film industry. However, before making any huge life-decisions I bought some books on cinematography, directing, and screenwriting to get an idea of what working in the film industry would be like. I still find certain aspects of it interesting, but eventually I decided it is not the best fit for me. I came to similar conclusions about designing videogames. Although, as a byproduct of learning more about how games work, I have become very much interested in gamification; especially how game mechanics could be used in management and business contexts.

One guy who was in the same class with me in elementary school told me in the party that he had been training to become a machinist. However, what he really wanted to do was to work with computers, and was trying to get into a university to study programming. The thing is though, as I explained to him, that in all but few cases you actually need a degree to do something. If programming is what you want to do, then what are you waiting for? You don’t need to study it in a university in order to get a permission to do it. If that’s what you really want, then search online for some programming tutorials and just start learning. Start a personal project that helps you learn and keeps you motivated, and just start doing.

As it is uncertain that my friend will get into the university, and considering the classes won’t start until fall, I asked him to imagine if he’d spend just couple hours every day learning to program. How much he would already know after a month, 6 months, a year..? He would have something as a proof of his skills and something concrete that would help him land a job.

Assuming of course that he actually wants to do what he told me. Maybe he is still somewhat uncertain. In that case getting into a university and graduating four years later into a wrong profession is a huge price to pay. A price that could have been avoided by experimenting the work beforehand. You can do this kind of experimentation as a purely mental exercise, visualizing different aspects of the work. Or even better, you can actually “simulate” the work – in this case by sitting in front of a computer and actually doing some programming.

There seems to be this quest that calls for many of my generation; we are trying to discover where our talents and interests meet, and how to make a living of it. For me it took over three years of active searching and in the end the answer was nothing I would have expected it to be. All I had was hope that someday I will find it, and the knowledge that at least I am constantly doing something about it, instead of just sitting on my ass hoping for something to happen.

No one else can figure out the answer for you. It is your life and your responsibility.

In the past couple years I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that the more you know about something, the more difficult it becomes to talk about it with people who are unfamiliar with the topic. Positive psychology is such a thing for me and so is nutrition. When talking about them I will easily go into the specifics – usually the ones I’ve studied most recently – and fail to communicate on the broader level that would make more sense to the person I’m talking with.

This problem is emphasized by the fact that usually the more you know about something, the less black and white your perception becomes. When it comes to complex systems like human behavior or metabolism I could have given you much clearer answers two or three years ago than I can now. Now it’s all entangled in ‘ifs’ and ‘on the other hands’ and ‘howevers’. Let’s take low-carbohydrate diet and weight loss as an example:

Low-carbohydrate diet will promote weight loss because 1) it reduces insulin secretion, and 2) it reduces the amount of triglycerides your body can produce. This leads to less storage of fat and fat tissue releasing fatty acids into bloodstream to be used for energy. Pretty clear so far. But now we forgot about gut health. Eating foods that irritate gut – and carbs have little to do with this – might lead to foreign molecules getting into bloodstream, causing an inflammatory response and in worst case some really nasty autoimmune problems. Inflammation also has an impact on metabolism. And we haven’t talked about leptins yet. Damn those pesky hormones… So it’s not just about insulin and its effects on fat storage, or the effects of systematic inflammation, but we also should consider the effect that leptins have on satiety. Leptin resistance leads you to feel hungry even though you just had a large meal…

The more you learn, the more mechanisms you identify that all play a role in a complex system, and the less certain you become about how the cause-and-effect chains actually work. It gets complicated quickly and makes accounting for every possible factor and variable a tough job. And when you are continuously learning new things, you are also coming up with more questions that remain unanswered. As a consequence the limits of your knowledge and understanding become painfully obvious.

It’s interesting to listen to the low-carbohydrate diet discussions in the locker room at my gym, or in a bus, or in a restaurant. It’s immediately evident that almost everyone has gotten their information from mainstream media. There’s no intelligent questioning of the principles behind the dietary approach, there’s no discussion about the underlying biological mechanisms or causality, and there definitely is no exploration of alternative explanations to why it works beyond “it’s the carbs, maaan.”

Here is my completely unscientific representation of how much you know about a topic is related to how convinced you are about the extent of your knowledge.

The biggest problem is that when your primary source of information is the highly digested piece in a newspaper, tabloid, or a women’s (or men’s) magazine, it’s easy to become disillusioned about the extent of your knowledge. After all, shouldn’t the newspaper article contain everything an average Joe needs to know about the topic? Isn’t it the job of the journalists to find and communicate the truth in any matter? (1)

If only it was so easy. Reality is always more complex than a newspaper article. It’s easy to blindly trust an expert who claims to know the true path, packages it in a simple and appealing box, and discredits anyone who is not a true believer. When asked for specifics or presented with contradictory evidence, the expert can always hide behind  complex jargon and confusion and smoke and mirrors. He knows the jargon so he must be credible, right? And his solution was so… reasonable and pretty and everything! (2)

In proper scientific inquiry there is always substantial disagreement amongst experts. Who do you trust? Who do you believe in? Even in scientific communities the elusive “truth” often becomes a matter of belief, not of knowledge or facts. Even Albert Einstein, one of the brightest minds of recent history, spent years and years during the later stages of his career trying to unsuccessfully refute some of the more disturbing aspects of quantum mechanics, simply because – and despite all evidence to the contrary – he refused to believe them to be true. (3)

Here is how you can identify someone who has actually taken the time to dive into a topic, and has the courage to tell the truth about the extent of her knowledge: She will not give you yes or no answers. That person operates in the gray area between yes and no, and is likely to start with “it depends” when you ask her something. Be vary of those who claim to have the definite answers and paint you a picture of black and white world, no matter how tempting that world might be in its beauty and simplicity. (3)

The black and white world is full of statements like:

• The fat you eat goes straight into your thighs/belly/wherever it is you don’t want it.
• If you eat cholesterol-rich foods, you will end up with high cholesterol.
• Human beings are rational decision-makers.

The real world is messy, ambiguous and sometimes counterintuitive. Welcome to the real world.

References:

(1) To get some idea about the “evidence” behind media headlines in the field of medicine, watch these TED talks:

Goldacre, Ben (2011). Battling bad science. TEDGlobal 2011, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html [Accessed 21 November 2012].

Goldacre, Ben (2012). What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe. TEDMED 2012, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html [Accessed 21 November 2012].

(2) For some hair-raising reading on this topic, check: Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2008). Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. Pinter & Martin Ltd. (Buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).

(3) Isaacson, Walter (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. [Audible edition, Unabridged] Simon & Schuster Audio.

In my previous life as a consultant I would often get to work, open my laptop, pour a cup of coffee and start thinking about what is that I should actually start doing. As I was slowly sipping the coffee I might have opened my email, browsed a few news sites or blogs, and by the time the coffee was getting cold I’d be nowhere nearer to getting any real work done. Sounds familiar?

It was a rare occasion when I had actually determined beforehand to dedicate the next morning for a particular task or achieving a goal. Even when I knew that one of the best things for productivity is to always have one important thing you want to get done for each day, and start working on it first thing in the morning. No email, no news sites, no distractions. That way you feel that at least you’ve accomplished something even if the rest of the day is completely unproductive.

So why was it so hard to do this? As it turns out, with an array of tasks which to choose from, I had hard time choosing anything. My experience of Paradox of Choice in action. Also, as I now know decision-making is depleting the same very limited mental resource that is needed to focus on a task and stick to it. So I was already shooting myself in the foot by leaving the decision-making for the morning. (1)

Another problem was that quite often I actually did not know what I should do. I had a list of deliverables, I knew the big picture project plan, and I knew what needed to happen at a given time. However, many times I wasn’t able to see the steps leading to those deliverables. And in face of uncertainty it often is easier to just read email and focus on the trivial stuff than to start thinking about how to deal with what is important.

Let the system guide you

A bit over a month ago Johnny B. Truant, one of my favorite bloggers, published a 116-page novel titled Fat Vampire (Yes, that’s an affiliate link. You should totally read the book. It’s hilarious.). It had taken him less than a month to get the idea for the book, write the whole thing, edit it, and publish it. By anyone’s standards I think that can be considered to be fairly productive. Shortly after the publication he shared some of his tips and tricks on how to do it. This article focuses on one of them: using a calendar.

I have known for quite some time that one good way to be productive is to schedule tasks that need to get done. In the same way you’d schedule a meeting from 9 to 11 am, you could reserve that time slot in your calendar for working on a particular task or project. One of the best ways to be productive is to work in 25 or 50 minute intervals, followed by 5-10 minute breaks, and having a longer 30 minute break every two hours. This way you won’t run out of steam mid-day, but also have energy left for personal stuff after you get home from work. In other words, you should schedule work in 30 and 60 minute blocks. (2)

Inspired by Johnny’s article I decided to experiment with combining these methods. Here’s my calendar from last week (the green color stands for personal stuff, blue is work/study related):

What’s going on here is that every night I check my to-do list and create a schedule for the next day. The tasks are scheduled for 30 or 60 minute time slots, which reminds me to take those 5-10 minute breaks. I use a timer when I work because skipping a break is detrimental for long-term productivity. Lastly, I schedule longer breaks such as playing on xbox, taking a nap or watching an episode of South Park (humor boosts creativity!).

The reason I do this for one day at a time –  as opposed to e.g. creating a schedule for the whole week at once – is that meetings are called, deadlines change, and so do my own energy levels. For example, besides writing this article and a mandatory class my schedule for today is almost empty. I have worked a lot during the past few days, including the weekend, and haven’t really had time to relax. Yesterday I noticed that my performance started to suffer because of it, so today is a take-it-easy day.

If you need to accomplish a task with a tight deadline, it makes sense to schedule time slots for that task for the whole week. This is to ensure that no one steals that time from you with (usually) pointless meetings – a common annoyance in corporate environments where people have access to your calendar.

The system is your friend

During the four weeks I have used this method my productivity has skyrocketed. It might be partly because having an hourly schedule is so similar to how all of us have lived our lives ever since the 1st grade. We already have a lot of conditioning to work this way. There are also more specific benefits and advantages:

1. Say goodbye to procrastination. When you have a schedule and you have already decided the day before that e.g. from 9 to 10am you will work on that sales pitch or that presentation, you don’t end up browsing email or checking facebook news feed. When the clock hits 9 you put a timer to alert at 9:50 and you get going.
2. Be meticulous when it comes to breaks. Like all the things that need to get done, you have also scheduled your downtime. It’s one thing to know on a conscious level that you should take breaks, but another to actually disconnect from work when you’re in a good flow. Having a break pre-scheduled removes the sense of guilt you might normally feel about “wasting” time, while also helping to maintain high-level performance in the long-term.
3. Stop wasting your willpower. Did you know that at work Barack Obama wears only blue or gray suits? He does this in order to conserve mental energy: “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make, … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” When you have a schedule you don’t need to decide what to do. You have already decided. (3)
4. Gain control of your time. A major cause of work-related stress is the feeling of not having control about how you spend your time. Creating a schedule is exactly the opposite of that. It is one example of a problem-based coping strategy, which can be very powerful when it comes to dealing with stress. Even if you keep getting e.g. many meeting invitations, this method allows you to grab some control back to yourself. And if you need to regain more time for actual work, you can schedule the work time in advance to ensure that no one steals it from you. No more working after-hours or when everyone else in the family has gone to sleep. (4)

Obviously every now and then something comes up during the day that causes changes to your beautifully crafted schedule. Life can’t be planned perfectly in advance. When this happens, you at least have a visual representation of what you intended to do with the rest of your day. It becomes easier to prioritize. You can quickly check what you can still do, and what you should move to the next day. This is more liberating than it is restricting, and most importantly it helps you stay in control in spite of surprises.

I mentioned earlier that one big problem used to be that sometimes I didn’t know exactly what to do, and that resulted in procrastination and postponing the important tasks. When it comes to dealing with ambiguity, one solution is to schedule time for simply sitting down with pen and paper, making plans, dividing the task into smaller components, creating a list of things you need to find out before proceeding, and planning on how you intent to gain that knowledge etc.

Lastly, by using this system it becomes surprisingly easy to make progress even when a goal seems huge, distant, and uncertain. Many times a project such as writing a novel or creating a new product causes the inner resistance to go on overdrive, filling your head with all the reasons why the project won’t succeed. As a result, you give up before even getting started. When you adapt to the approach of working towards a goal in predetermined slots of time, and measure progress by the amount of work done – as opposed to the amount of tasks finished – suddenly the goal doesn’t seem that hard anymore.

I for one will certainly continue working using this method. If you want to try it out, or have experience with something similar, I’d love to hear about it in the comments! :)

References:

(1) Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

(2) Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press; 1 edition.

(3) Vanity Fair: Barack Obama to Michael Lewis on a Presidential Loss of Freedom: “You Don’t Get Used to It—At Least, I Don’t” – online article.

(4) Drnovšek, M., Örtqvist, D., & Wincent, J. (2010). The effectiveness of coping strategies used by entrepreneurs and their impact on personal well-being and venture performance. Journal of Economics and Business, Vol. 28, 193-220.

My fiancee feeding the deer in Nara, Japan. Guaranteed to make anyone happy.

Money cannot buy happiness, says the old adage. Indeed, a study after another indicates that beyond a certain level of income, money stops being a predictor for happiness and overall well-being. What this means in practice is that money is something similar to a hygiene factor. After your basic monetary needs are met, the added value from having more money starts to diminish. Rapidly.

Similar conclusions can be drawn from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Money can be used to satisfy the physiological and safety needs, but the further up you go on the pyramid, the less benefit you get from having money. And if you think money will buy you, for example, the admiration of others, you clearly haven’t been to Finland where most likely all you’re going to get is envy and belittlement.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The basic premise of the hierarchy is that you need to first satisfy the lower level needs before moving up the pyramid.

You could argue that having a lot of money means you are successful in life, and being successful should at least make you confident. In a sense this holds true, but confidence is context-specific (1). Meaning that you might be highly confident, for example, as a salesman at work, but still utterly insecure about how you should go about raising your children or how to talk to the opposite sex. Money does not buy parenting skills.

There is a widespread myth in the western world that goes like this: If I’m successful then I’ll be happy. The problem with this approach is that “every time your brain has a success, you just change the goalpost of what success looks like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.” (2)

The obvious takeaway at this point is that if you want to pursue happiness, you need to focus on things, activities and people who actually make you happy. However, there’s more to this, and after this quite long introduction we are starting to get to the real point: what if happiness is actually a cause of success?

There starts to be plenty of scientific literature supporting the notion that happy individuals are successful in multiple life domains, including work, marriage, friendship, income, performance, health, income level etc., but are they happy because they are successful in those domains, or are they successful because they are happy?

First of all, there is some evidence that positive emotions make us push our cognitive boundaries. In the absence of fear, stress, or anxiety it is easier and safer to go toward and beyond the limits of our comfort zones. For example, interest creates the urge to explore, joy creates the urge to play – to experiment new things – and confidence gives courage to undertake more difficult challenges. The result of these experiences is personal growth. An increase in your cognitive, emotional and physical resources. (3)

When engaged in play, one may be doing something physical, building motor skills, or maybe something creative that strengthens the ability to see multiple solutions to problems. Interest will expand one’s general and specific knowledge. These resources are not fleeting, but build on top of each other and therefore continue expanding the self. However, if you are constantly stressed or anxious the last thing you probably want to do is try new things. To venture further outside your comfort zone.

Because happy people, by definition, experience frequent positive moods, they have a greater likelihood of working actively toward new goals while experiencing those moods. They are also in possession of past skills and resources, which have been built over time during previous pleasant moods. (4)

The important question still remains whether or not happiness actually precedes success, or have the happy individuals encountered first a period of successes which has then launched this upward spiral of happiness and the resulting expansion of personal resources?

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California and her colleagues set out to analyze 225 different studies in order to find out which comes first: happiness or success. The longitudinal evidence supporting the notion that happiness indeed is a cause of success includes findings such as happy people getting consistently better evaluations at work from their supervisors and being more likely to increase their income over time, among others.

More experimental evidence where subjects have been primed to feel happy show that happiness makes them more sociable, better at collaborating with others, more helpful towards others, and perform better at complex tasks that require decision-making, attention, or are complex by nature. Happiness also increases confidence, perseverance in difficult tasks, and helps to restore willpower after being depleted by temptation. For a comprehensive review of the evidence I recommend reading the whole study. (4)

For me at least this is a game-changer. We as a society have been operating under the wrong paradigm. Instead of focusing on and worrying about success, achievement and competition, we should be thinking about how to increase the number of times we feel positive moods in our daily lives. Success and achievement seem to follow naturally.

However, does this mean then that those of us who are naturally more disposed to negative emotions are lost causes? That we are doomed for eternity to be in the shadow of the happy people? Fortunately not. If you read my previous article you should know that there are fairly simple methods to boosting happiness and inducing positive moods in the short term. For example, just watching this video will have a positive impact on your mood. Not a bad way to spend a minute, considering the benefits.

There is also long-term evidence that interventions such as writing down three good things one is grateful for every day and why those things have happened, have provided lasting increases in happiness (5). So has meditation, using one’s character strengths in new ways, and displays of gratitude toward others.

References:

(1) Bandura, Albert (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 191-215.

(2) Achor, Shawn (2011). The happy secret to better work. TEDxBloomington, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html [Accessed 22 October 2012].

(3) Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, Vol. 56, No. 3, 218-226.

(4) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803– 855.

(5) Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, Vol. 60, No. 5, 410– 421.

Looking back the few years since I started getting interested in how to change human behavior, how to be productive, and in general how our brains work, I can confidently say that I have gotten the most done when I have used a method of working in focused and uninterrupted blocks of time. At first I experimented with working for 50 minutes at a time, followed by a 10 minute break, and a longer 30 minute break every 2 hours. Lately I’ve found the Pomodoro technique with its shorter 25 minute bursts of work, followed by 5 minute breaks, quite efficient. Especially when having to do something that is difficult to get started with.

However, one major difficulty with this kind of periodization is how to really detach yourself from the task at hand when it’s time for a break. How to, e.g., take your mind off cognitive work and do something else. I have tried listening to music, doing a few push-ups, a bit of housecleaning etc., but these activities tend to require so little attention that most of the time work creeps into consciousness anyway. This is not good, as it effectively diminishes the restorative power of the break.

Another issue is that 5-10 minutes is too short a time to really do much. Go to the toilet and drink a glass of water and the time’s pretty much up.

Luckily, I think I have found the solution to really improve the potential for recovery during those breaks, and it’s called Angry Birds*. Here’s why:

1) Angry Birds takes your mind off work

Brain is like a muscle. When extorted it gets fatigued. As with self-control and the ability to make decisions, there are limitations to the capacity to do demanding cognitive processing. Like a car using fuel to run, you also have limited resources that become depleted during intense concentration and thinking. (1, 3)

One way to ensure that you won’t run out of steam in the middle of a workday is to track your use of time, and within steady intervals switch from work-mode to recovery-mode. The most important thing in successfully doing this is to push all work and task-related thoughts away.

The beauty of Angry Birds is that even if you only have 5 minutes for a break, it’s enough to finish couple levels. More importantly,  Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Where’s My Water, Cut the Rope, and other similar mobile games, are quick to start and require just the right amount of thinking to take your conscious thoughts away from work, but not so much that they become a further drain to your limited mental resources.

2) Short breaks are equally, or more important for recovery, than long ones

There is some rather interesting evidence showing that even short breaks have significant positive effects when used in a way that takes your mind off the task at hand and make you feel good and, dare I say, happier.

Doctors who were primed to feel positive emotions  showed almost 3 times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state. They also made accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. (2)

In another study students were primed to feel stress by giving them a task to make a difficult speech under time-pressure, and told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated by their peers. The subjects were then shown one of three short films; a neutral, sad, or a positive film. Those who were shown the positive film for just couple minutes recovered from the physiological effects of stress 3 times faster than those who saw the sad film, and 2 times faster than those in the neural condition. (3)

One more argument in support of short breaks is the finding that if a resource becomes severely depleted, it falls to a so-called “Burnout Range.” When that happens, otherwise reliable restorative sources tend to provide significantly less restorative effect, and otherwise insignificant sources of depletion will cause significant resource losses. So take your short breaks now so you don’t end up completely non-functional in the long run. (4)

3) Your subconscious mind will not stop working

An article in Harvard Business Review reported couple weeks ago about a study where participants had to make a complex decision. There were four cars from which to choose from. Each was described by 12 different attributes, and participants had to pick one that was the best match for multiple specified wants and needs. Only one of the fours cars was the “right” choice, having twice as many positive than negative attributes.

As stated in the article: “One group had to make a choice immediately. These people didn’t do very well at optimizing their decision. A second group had time to try to consciously solve the problem. Their choices weren’t much better. A third group were told the problem, then given a distracter task to do first — something that lightly held their conscious attention but allowed their non-conscious to do more work. This group did significantly better than either of the other groups at selecting the optimum car for their overall needs.”

The real kicker was that the distracter task was no longer than two minutes, but it seems that even two minutes is enough to significantly boost your problem-solving skills.

There you go! Don’t worry about time wasted, but squeeze in a few minutes of Angry Birds once an hour and you’ll not only keep your cognitive performance at a higher level throughout the day, but also feel happier and more energized for it.

References:

(1) Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Self-Control as Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 3, 774-789.

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 5, 1252– 1265.

(2) Achor, Shawn (2011). The Happiness Advantage. [Kindle Edition] Virgin Digital.

(3) Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 3, 300-319.

(4) Greenblatt, Edy (2002). Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining. Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 31, No. 2, 177-193.

* None of the links in this article are affiliated. These referrals are my own recommendations, and I do not get any compensation for making them.

We have so much stuff that it is difficult recognize what actually matters.

Today I am launching a new project called One Thing Less. The way it works is that every week I will be either selling one thing that I own, give it away for free, or if there are no takers I will find a way to donate it to charity or, as a last option, throw it away. These items are announced in the One Thing Less website, and anyone can indicate interest for an item by leaving a comment.

I’m sure everyone has a lot of stuff they really don’t have any use for. Same with me, but not nearly as much as most of the people I know. The real challenge begins when I will actually have to make hard choices about what to keep and what to give away.

So why do this? Here’s some of my reasoning.

1) Freedom.

It is difficult to throw stuff away. After all, you don’t know when you might need something. Despite not remembering the last time you actually used any of the crap laying around. Yet there’s a barrier, a threshold you need to cross to discard a thing. After all, you wanted it at some point, or why else would you have bought it? And if it was a gift, then it came with that fucked up social spell that tells you to “respect” and treasure it.

“The things you own end up owning you.”
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club

The more stuff you have the more you sacrifice your freedom. Got a car? There are maintenance costs, insurance, gas… Got pets? Can’t go for a long holiday without having someone look after them. Want to move to a different area? Your options for an apartment are limited by how much stuff you will bring with you.

Your social mobility will also suffer. The more stuff you have, the fancier the car, the bigger the apartment, the better the lifestyle, the harder it becomes to do something, anything, that would mean a decrease in income. You will notice that you have become trapped by the “quality of life” that you have. You need to earn X amount of money just to maintain it. This is one of the big reasons why so many people stick with jobs they hate.

If you have no practice about giving things up and settling for less, you won’t have the balls to change your life.

2) Everything is temporary.

The Stoics use a technique called negative visualization. What it means is that you are supposed to imagine how your life would be if you didn’t have the things you have. What if your health was gone? What if you didn’t have a job? What if you couldn’t chew your food? What if you had to make ends meet by begging on the street?

The purpose of this exercise is to help you realize that you are actually doing pretty fucking well. We always have a tendency to focus on what is missing, but not on what we already have. Even when we get something we want, it won’t take long for us to take it for granted and start looking for the next fix. A search for ”Hedonistic Adaptation” on Google Scholar turned out 12 000 results. Read couple of the papers if you don’t believe me.

Another reason to practice negative visualization is that when you lose something, it will not have such a big impact on you and your tranquility (the state of being where strong negative feelings are largely absent, and what the Stoics tried to achieve). After all, you have already visualized life without it. Visualization is practice.

In the context of this project the goal is to recognize that nothing lasts. Everything you own will eventually turn to dust. You buy the best computer or TV on the market, and five years from now it has become an antiquated piece of crap. Even your body will eventually fail you.

The aim is not to become a pessimist or to succumb into an apathy and give up on everything, but to learn to appreciate the good in life as it happens, to be in the moment, and to train your mind to maintain tranquility when things eventually break and fall apart.

3) Focus.

While having a lot of stuff limits your physical freedom, it also comes with mental burdens and constraints. You need to spend time and energy to maintain and take care of the things you have. On top of that, if you have e.g. an expensive car and park it in a less than reputable neighborhood, it will be difficult to stop worrying about whether or not it will still be there and in the same condition you left it.

I for one want to spend my time and energy on things that make me truly happy. However, the more stuff there is the easier it is to become distracted. It takes discipline and a good understanding of who you are to determine what really matters and then consciously focus on it.

It’s the same thing with dieting. If you know you shouldn’t eat something then don’t fucking buy it and keep it in your cupboard. Because if you do, you end up wasting willpower and energy just to NOT think about eating it. If you want to do something, create conditions that support you doing it, or at least conditions that don’t actively fuck up your efforts.

4) George says so.

I’m not obviously saying that you should become some weird holy man who has nothing but the cloths he wears. What I consider unnecessary and want to give away might be very valuable and useful for someone else. That is the main lesson here. Focus on the essential.

I’d appreciate if you want to stay tuned with the project and what items will be given away, so please subscribe to the blog updates at one-thing-less.blogspot.com.

Cheers!

You can either have a job, a career, or a calling.

Fifty years ago a job would have been fine. You sell your time to an enterprise and get compensation for it. You can then spend the money in activities outside the workplace and find enjoyment and meaning for your life there.

For some it is not enough to have a job. They want a career. And by definition a career is something that is fluid. If it starts to stagnate it’s not a career anymore. Career and rat race are synonymous. They are both characterized by the endless pursuit of increased pay, prestige, status, and advancement within the corporate hierarchy. If you try to find meaning for your life through a career, it only works as long as you can do better than the people you compare yourself against. Good luck with that.

Then there is a calling. You work for the sake of fulfillment that the work itself brings. You are not after financial rewards or a promotion, but instead find meaning in the actual work itself. In the daily grind. In getting your hands dirty. In doing the work.

If you have a job, it is nothing but a means to an end. A way to make money. A career might make you more engaged with the work you do, but only as long as you are able to achieve the rewards, positions, power and status that may or may not come. There can only be so many people at the upper levels of a pyramid.

But if you have a calling, then the actual work itself is enriching and meaningful. It becomes your main focus instead of leisure or relationships outside the office.

The empowering thing is that at least to some extent you can create this meaning yourself. You can turn a job or a career into a calling. Think of a doctor who memorizes the names of every patient and shows care by paying them personal visits in the ward even when it’s not required. Or a manager who takes a different subordinate for a lunch every day to give some individual coaching.

A calling is not a job description. It is a deeper meaning that people can find or create, and then proceed to do despite what the job description says. It is a bout making a larger contribution to the wider world. A world that exists outside specific job roles, to-do lists or performance goals.

It is your job to turn work into a calling – if you so choose – but it is the job of the organization to support this behavior. It can either respond to it in positive ways, creating more possibilities, or inhibit such actions from occurring in the future.

And why wouldn’t an organization support it? There is scientific evidence that groups with more people who consider their work a calling perform better in multiple aspects, and even increase the performance of other individuals for whom the work necessarily is not a calling.

So what of groups where the majority consists of career-oriented people? The results are a complete opposite. Something to consider the next time you decide what kind of people to hire.