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by
Eric Barker
“When your head is in a refrigerator and your feet on a burner, the average temperature is okay. I am always cautious about averages.”
It’s the old joke that poor people are crazy and rich people are “eccentric.”
Make sure you have a path that works for you. People high in conscientiousness do great in school and in many areas of life where there are clear answers and a clear path. But when there aren’t, life is really hard for them. Research shows that when they’re unemployed, their happiness drops 120 percent more than those who aren’t as conscientious. Without a path to follow they’re lost.
You were successful because you happened to be in an environment where your biases and predispositions and talents and abilities all happened to align neatly with those things that would produce success in that environment.
According to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, managing what your boss thinks of you is far more important than actual hard work. A study shows that those who made a good impression got better performance reviews than those who worked harder but didn’t manage impressions as well.
The Harvard Business Review reports that men low in the personality trait “agreeableness” make as much as ten thousand dollars a year more than men high in agreeableness. Rude people also have better credit scores.
Why do jerks succeed? Sure, some of it’s duplicity and evil, but there’s something we can learn from them in good conscience: they’re assertive about what they want, and they’re not afraid to let others know about what they’ve achieved.
Income peaks among those who trust people more, not less. In a study titled “The
Researcher John Gottman realized that just hearing how the couple told the tale of their relationship together predicted with 94 percent accuracy whether or not they’d get divorced.
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” In other words: Fail fast, fail cheap.
I’m not telling you to marry a stranger. Stick with me for a second. Early on, “love marriages” are happier than arranged marriages, scoring a 70 out of 91 on an academic “love scale” vs. 58 out of 91. No surprise, right? But later something happens. A decade in, arranged marriages score a 68 and the ones based on love a lowly
On one occasion, Erdös met a mathematician and asked him where he was from. “Vancouver,” the mathematician replied. “Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson,” Erdös said. The reply was “I am your good friend Elliot Mendelson.”
MIT research showed “The more socially connected the IBM employees were, the better they performed. They could even quantify the difference: On average, every email contact was worth an added $948 in revenue.” It’s
How much more likely? Here’s a quote from a study for you: “Extraversion was negatively related to individual proficiency.” What’s that mean in English? The more extroverted you are, the worse you are at your job. As we saw, having lots of friends has clear benefits . . . but can also be an enormous distraction.
“Hundreds of kids have the natural ability to become great ballplayers but nothing except practice, practice, practice will bring out that ability.”
“People who wish to do so must organize their whole lives around a single enterprise. They must be monomaniacs, even megalomaniacs, about their pursuits.
“The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.”
great mentor’s “expectations and demands were constantly raised until they were at a point where the student was expected to do virtually all that was humanly possible.”
“Those who stayed very involved in meaningful careers and worked the hardest, lived the longest.”
“Ultimately, Dolores felt the source of Ted’s rage was his inability to satisfy the perfectionist ambitions that he set for himself.
“You know why? Because I’ve got to be good every day. You don’t have to be.”
“The people who survive stress the best are the ones who actually increase their social investments in the middle of stress, which is the opposite of what most of us do.
“Scientists rather quickly desist after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives.”
We all have limits, and for a well-rounded life, we need both a career that suits us as well as supportive loved ones. As writer Sam Harris said in an interview with The Atlantic:
The relevant question for me is how neurotic and unhappy and self-deceived do we have to be while living productive lives. I think the general answer
Productivity declines so steeply after fifty-five hours that “someone who puts in seventy hours produces nothing more
You’re like a drunk shouting they’re okay to drive. That’s the really sneaky thing about sleep deprivation:
and for a short time he came to believe he was an African American football player, despite being a Caucasian teenager.
When students were kept awake for thirty-five hours, fMRI analysis showed their amygdala response to bad things shot up to 60 percent higher than people who had slept normally. When we get our eight hours, our brains “reset” and we are on a more even keel. Without shut-eye, our brains overreact to bad stuff. Plain and simple: when you’re tired it’s harder to stay happy.
emphasized high expectations and following your dreams—things that feel good when you’re young. However, the average mature adult has realized that their dreams might not be fulfilled, and less happiness is the inevitable result. Mature adults in previous eras might not have expected so much, but expectations are now so high they can’t be met.
“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
We love choices and the twenty-first century has given us nearly infinite choices. With technology, we now always have the choice to be working. The office doors don’t close at five P.M. anymore. Every minute we spend with friends or playing with our kids is a minute we could be working. So every moment is a decision. That decision didn’t exist in the past. But having it in the back of our heads all the time is enormously stressful.
Here’s the problem: We love having choices. We hate making choices.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
Brace yourself. I’m going to say something unpleasant: You have to make a decision. The world will not draw a line. You must. You need to ask What do I want? Otherwise you’re only going to get what they want.
A picker selects from the options available, leading us into false dichotomies created by the options we see in front of us. But a chooser “is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, and that if he or she wants the right alternative, he or she may have to create it.”
The researchers realized multiple yardsticks for life were necessary. For instance, to have a good relationship with your family you need to spend time with them. So hours spent together is one way to measure. But if that time is spent screaming at each other, that’s not good either. So you need to measure quantity and quality.
HAPPINESS = ENJOYING 2. ACHIEVEMENT = WINNING
SIGNIFICANCE = COUNTING (TO OTHERS) 4. LEGACY = EXTENDING
always worry about people who say, ‘I’m going to do this for ten years; I really don’t like it very well. And then I’ll do this . . .’ That’s a lot like saving sex up for your old age. Not a very good idea.”
They make decisions easier. They make life simpler. They make it “not your fault.” So they make us happier. We
Nobel Prize–winner Herbert Simon, who created the idea of maximizing and satisficing, said that in the end, when you calculate all factors of stress, results, and effort, satisficing is actually the method that maximizes.
Without a plan, we do what’s passive and easy—not what is really fulfilling.
Peter Drucker cites a Swedish study of twelve executives that showed they literally could not work twenty minutes without being interrupted. The only one who was able to make thoughtful decisions was the one who spent ninety minutes working from home before entering the maelstrom of the office.
As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explains, when you’re concerned about something and your grey matter is afraid you may forget, it engages a cluster of brain regions referred to as the “rehearsal loop.” And you keep worrying and worrying. Writing your thoughts down and making a plan for tomorrow switches this off.
A story that connects you with the world in a way that keeps you going.
Data from the Journal of Socio-Economics says you’d have to earn an extra $121,000 a year. What happens when you look at the
“The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
