Prolog

Priya Raju had written 2 wonderful posts on Happiness Quotient part 1 and part 2. It may be worth your while to read them both, before reading this post.

Upside of Irrrationality

I wanted to add another dimension to the topic based on some recent learnings from Dan Ariely’s brilliant book Upside of Irrationality (I strongly recommend this book to all of you). Based on the book I and Priya Raju had some discussions and this post is an output of those discussions.

In the book, Dan has a chapter on a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation. Without giving away too much from his book, Hedonic Adaptation is the process by which our mind becomes accustomed to pleasure and pain.

Since happiness is associated mostly with pleasure, we will look into pleasure.

Diwali Dress

To illustrate Hedonic Adaptation, let me share a story. When I was a child, my parents used to buy us a new dress once a year during the festival of Diwali. The sheer anticipation of the new dress and the joy of wearing the new dress for Diwali still lingers in my memory.

Through the years I have bought so many clothes that, buying a new dress is more like a chore, these days. No more joy left in buying a new dress.

This is how we get accustomed to buying gadgets, cars or in general objects/things. This may also be the reason why our wise ancients have talked extensively about why material possessions don’t give us happiness.

Obviously, we can’t all renounce our livelihood and walk off to the Himalayas and become spiritual beings, whatever that means

How do we beat Hedonic Adaptation then?

One of the ways is to avoid the focus on buying things and focus on experiences like vacations (many researchers have pointed this out). Since we tend to go to different places every time we go on vacation, Hedonic Adaptation can be avoided.

One other way, self and Priya spotted is art – as Keats said long ago “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. Thanks to Priya, we have a collected a lot of art objects in our home. Every time I feel down, I look at them and feel instantly better. Even when I’m not feeling down these art objects give me happiness and inspiration. Hedonic Adaptation doesn’t seem to occur even though these are still objects.

I have been thinking and reading recently about Zen Buddhism and Mindfulness. I haven’t fully understood mindfulness to be able to practice it. But the emphasis on staying in the present and enjoying every moment might offer a way out of Hedonic Adaptation.

Epilog

What are your thoughts on Hedonic Adaptation? Are there other ways to beat Hedonic Adaptation that you have discovered?

Prolog

Happy new year to all that celebrate it today (Tamils, Malayalis, Assamese, Punjabis..). As always, thanks for the insightful comments on part 3  (here is part1, part2). Kumaran’s comment on Penicillin and Potato Chips , Nimmy’s comment on the invention of electric car being appreciated when fuel shortages occur, Ganesh’s comment about startups reinventing themselves  really got me into thinking about the role of luck.  In fact, Malcolm Gladwell’s dedicates most of his book Outliers to the concept of being in the right place at the right time, which is luck wearing fancy clothes. 

Extreme Luck

First, i wanted to look at Luck in the extreme. Someone who won a jackpot in the lottery is the best example i could think of. There is almost zero effort (if you don’t count driving to the lottery store) and marginal expense (cost of a few lottery tickets).  I am sure you will all agree that there is simply no explanation other than luck when someone wins a lottery ticket.  I am sure you will all agree that this luck doesn’t come to most people. 

Opportunity

Opportunity is a word that often goes with Luck.  There seems to be 4 kinds of opportunities:

1. When you are chasing a particular goal, you find opportunities that fit your goal, you execute and meet your goal. 

2. When you are chasing a particular goal, something else more promising happens, that forces you to look at the something else and make it your goal. Most serendipitous discoveries of the type Kumaran pointed out. 

3.  When you are chasing a particular goal,  after a lot of trying, you find out that the endevor is a failure and reinvent yourself.  This is the type that Ganesh pointed out. 

4. When you are chasing a goal, you make some mistakes, but you find out that due to mistakes that other people made, your mistakes didn’t affect you and you are able to chase your goal and succeed.  To quote an example from my life –  in my early days of being a leader, i didn’t know how to flex my style to work with my team mates. Some people who i found very difficult to work with due to style differences quit the company and that turned out to be my advantage because they were not around to spread negativity to the rest of my team. 

Are there other kinds of opportunities you can think of? 

Right Place at the Right Time

If you look at the list of opportunities again, it would be clear that none of those opportunities will be present if one is not at the right place at the right time. For example, if Alexander Fleming weren’t studying bacteria, he would not have observed the mold killing the bacteria.  Since we don’t control for the most part directly, where we are born, what exposure we get to have in our childhood and youth, being in the right place at the right time is critically important.  Malcom Gladwell, is right about that part.    I also firmly believe, from my experience, that being in the right place at the right time matters a lot. However, Gladwell missed one critical ingredient.

Luck Revisited

If you look at the opportunities list again, it would be clear that all these opportunities occur in most people’s lives. But then many of them don’t take advantage of it. Take the same Alexander Fleming example. I am sure there were several scientists who were studying bacteria during Fleming’s time but only he was able to discover penicillin.   Why is it that Fleming succeeded when the others didn’t even when presented with the same opportunity? 

In the same way, instead of asking whether we should recalibrate our goals, ask whether you have spotted a big possibly insurmountable reason to recalibrate, you may find the answer. 

Prof Richard Wiseman  , a psychologist from the UK,  has done extensive work on Luck.  Please make sure to  read this brilliant article titled “The Luck Factor” that covers his key research findings.  His interesting research proved this – that people who are seen as lucky are simply better at spotting opportunities. 

The Goal

From Wiseman’s research, it is clear that spotting opportunities is a mindset thing. How can we get that mindset?  In my view, it is focus. If we focus ourselves on the right set of goals, and our mind is in a prepared state to spot opportunities, that occur in all of our lives, we can succeed. 

I will give a trivial example of what focus can do. When was in the USA, we bought our first car – a Saturn. We bought a green car because my wife likes green. The salesman trying to do his bit said to us – you know what “green” is a rare colour in Saturn, very few people buy that color.  Once i started driving the car, i started focusing on green color Saturns and i found to my dismay that almost one in three Saturns were green in color.  Is this because, all of a sudden people started buying green Saturns? Absolutely not, it is simply due to the fact that until then, i had not noticed the color of  Saturns.  

Epilog

In sum, being in the right place at right time matters, but with a mindset that is focused on your goals, you can spot opportunities and be successful. Remember where we started – have the right goals – don’t chase money or fame as goals. 

As always please chime away with your views.

Notes & References:

1. Charlie Munger’s speech – f***ing brilliant speech that is one of the most insightful i have ever read about success. 

2. Steve Jobs’ brilliant speech at Stanford

Prolog

Please read the first 2 parts (part1, part2), please read the comments as well for a lot of wisdom has been collected.  While we may have reached some level of clarity on goals themselves,  we seem to have ways to go around recalibrating goals? Is recalibrating a cop out?

The Role of Failure in Success

We have all heard the maxim  ”aim for the stars and shoot the sky”. It has got a lot of truth in it.  While it may seem like a cop-out, i think it is worth keeping in the success playbook.

What is seldom discussed is, what happens when we end up shooting just the sky instead of the stars that we aimed for?

When we chase difficult goals, failure is inevitable.  What i observed in my experience is that when we fail massively or when massive failure looms large, we should do some deep soul searching. Maybe our methods are erroneous. We can try a different route and see if we can still hit the stars.

If  after that revamped attempt we fail yet again, is it reasonable to recalibrate the goal?  Or should we try again and again untill we succeed? 

Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her insightful book Confidence, talks about a doom loop setting in, if you fail more than once in a row.  

What do you all think?

“Confidence”  maybe a book worth reading to understand how to set the cycle of success going and how to prevent losing streaks and why Confidence is so important in success.

Po Branson’s Take

Po Branson talked to over 900 people from various walks of life to understand the real meaning of success. Fast Company carried some of Po Branson’s key findings in a brilliant article.  Don’t miss reading the article.

Po found 3 important lessons:

1. Timeframe -   persist over a long period of time. 

2. Backup plans – do not lead to different destinations, such as “If I don’t get into business school, I’ll be a schoolteacher.” His backup plans lead to the same destination, and if he has to arrive late by a back road, that’s fine.

3. Don’t get burnt out  – never let yourself get burnt out.

I am sure the book would have a lot more wisdom packed into it. If any of you have read it, please comment.  BTW, Po Branson may be familiar to some of you, since we covered his take on  Praising Talent Vs. Praising Effort.

Epilog

I would like to contemplate the role of luck next. What do you all think about luck? Is it a significant factor?

Prolog

Please read the first part before reading this one. What can i say about the comments? Thank you all. Wow! We are blessed to have such a wise community collected here, right? [On a side note, the post brought Kannan Nagarajan, a SAST wingee other than self and Ganesh, to the blog after a long time]  As i said, this question has been jostling in my head for a long time. However, in late Nov 2008, i decided to tweet the question . Within minutes both Priya Raju and Vivekananthan came out with a brilliant response. Ganesh came up with the same brilliant response in the last post - money/fame are just byproducts of success. Having either as goals will highly likely lead us astray.  Although this answer nails an important aspect of goal setting, it didn’t quite nail it for me, which is why i wrote it as a blog post. 

Wisdom of the Community

I decided to analyze the received wisdom from the previous post to show where we as a group stand.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Take on Success

I have tried to read on this subject quite a bit and as we have seen in this blog before, everyone talks about building expertise, being passionate etc. Malcolm Gladwell in his most recent book Outliers  analyzes success in his trademark style – lots of anecdotes. The book is  a good read but comes up  short. If  i were to summarize his book in one line –  you need to spend a lot of focused effort and hope that you are born at the right time. He proves this with anecdote after anecdote.  You can read this summary that captures the essence of Outliers quite well [If you all want to know why i disagree with Gladwell, please comment. i can do a separate post].

Black Swan

Although the book  is not technically about success, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)’s brilliant book Black Swan  gave me some crucial pointers.  It is a hard to read book, but may well be worth your time. i have already read it twice, but can’t say i have completely grasped it.  In that book, NNT outlines a major insight – the world of work is of 2 types – mediocristan and extremistan.  Mediocristan professions are the routine ones like accounting, medicine etc. Extremistan professions are the non-routine ones like Arts, Media, Professional Sports etc.  He gives lots of mathematical reasoning using Gaussian Curves, Mandelbrotian curves to prove his point. I tried to rephrase his thesis into this:

If what you do for a living has a recipe (a proven How To ), highly likely you are in a Mediocristan profession. On the other hand, if what you are doing does not have a recipe, you are highly likely in an Extremistan profession. 

Goal or Journey ? 

With that context, we are ready to tackle our core topic. To reemphasize, we can’t have money or fame as goals because they are byproducts of success. 

Let me take my famous example of this blog’s goal. By the definition above, blogging is an extremistan profession because the recipe of how to become a top blog on the internet doesn’t exist. Yes, i am aware of  the various How Tos and i have to tell you those don’t cut it, because i have tried following them. 

In an extremistan profession, if you want to rise to the top, you do need an ambitious goal,  and you have to firmly believe in that goal with as much attachment as possible.  Given that the failure rate is very high, you have to have an appetite for high risk, to try extremistan professions. If you succeed, money and/or fame are highly likely to follow. To illustrate, to play for the Indian Cricket XI maybe a great goal, but recognize that several million players are in the fray and only 13 players make it.  The recipe for making it to the Indian XI is not known. It is a high risk high reward scenario. You can’t succeed in cricket, if you are trying to make it a profession, by aspiring to play for the third division league!   

In a mediocristan profession, by contrast, since the recipe is well known, lot of people are in it already.  I would say most people  that serve as an employee of a company are in the mediocristan professions [with some exceptions like startups or executive management]. In these professions, being passionate, focusing on the journey and doing your best may be the best way. Lots of money/fame may not follow, but a reasonable level of success can be achieved.  Generic goals work best in the mediocristan profession.  One should also not be too attached to the goal and perhaps recalibrate over time. 

Where I disagree with NNT is that, all is not lost if you are in Mediocristan. If you are in a mediocristan profession, you can try to develop a new recipe to change the rules of the game.  For instance,  Dr. Christian Barnard developed a procedure to do heart transplants.  He definitely achieved fame (and money i hope).  Steve Jobs changed the rules of the game by introducing design-thinking led products in the Technology marketplace to win big. 

Epilog

I am not completely convinced with what i have said above.  What do you all think?

Updated 18 March 2009:  Please visit part 2 of this post for more info.

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We have had several discussions on this blog about Expertise, Passion , Talent , S Curve etc – what i would call Meta-Lifehacks. Although, these topics give us some ideas on what it takes to succeed, there is one aspect of success that has had me tortured for years (italicized for effect): 

How we think about our goals seem to make a big difference to whether we succeed or not.   

For example, when i started this blog i set out with the ambitious goal of becoming one of the top blogs on the Internet.  Today, it sounds ridiculous to me that i thought about our blog in that way.  God knows  what  i was smoking   Highly likely this blog will never achieve that goal.  And hence i did not succeed.  However, this blog has helped me in many ways beyond my wildest imagination.  It has taught me things that i would not have learnt in a million years and has had a significant impact on my career.   Still, per my goal  i didn’t succeed. 

How many times have we seen people that set out to make a lot of money but end up with a lot less money than they hoped? 

In the same way, i am sure we can all point to people that we know who wanted to become famous, but never achieved their goal. 

Does this mean that we should not have ambitious goals?  For example,  had i decided i want to be just another blog on the Internet, i would clearly have succeeded magnificently.  

Our ancient wisdom doesn’t seem to help either. If  I turn to the famous shloka from the Bhagavad Gita (One of Ancient India’s most cited religious scripture):

Same shloka transliterated for those that can’t read Sanskrit:

Translated into English:

In other words, your actions  cannot be dependent upon expected results. If the results don’t motivate us, what does? 

Does that mean that we should not have goals?  How can we do something without any goals?

I am happy to say I have found some answers to these questions and I will cover it in part 2 of this post.

Meanwhile, i want to know what you all think?