as gretchen explained her happiness project, she mentioned a framework that essentially sounds like a happiness range. it sounded like the premise was this: everyone’s happiness can be measured on scale from 1-10. maybe sheās made a test for this, maybe it came from somewhere else, maybe thereās nothing; i couldn’t really tell.
either way, the most interesting part of her thinking was that everyone has a natural happiness resting state and a range. so, for example, maybe my resting state of happiness is 7, but my full range might be 6-9. i might never be a 10, there are practical things i can do to keep me closer to 9. there are also things i can do that keep me closer to 6.
those things are my habits.
now, i can’t remember if this next conceptual leap was hers or mine, but either way, it’s important (i think).
humans are stasis machines (thereās an episode of onbeing about this, but i canāt find it…). we are incredible at returning to a balance point. there are many studies showing that even when traumatic things happen, the impact those events have on peopleās happiness over time doesnāt last (when i find that episode, iāll find the referenced studies). even from deaths in the family, major injuries, and worse, people return to their original state of happiness after a surprisingly short amount of time. crazy, right?
ok. last conceptual leap before tying it all together. in this other post, i wrote about gretchen’s thinking on how a surprising consistency among highly functioning was good habits. this was surprising because the researcherās hypothesis was that high-functioning people would stand apart because of strong self-control. turns out, those people actually exert less than the average person on a daily basis. :O
all of this evidence points to one conclusion (and these are gretchen’s words): what’s really important is what you do all the time, not what you do every once in a while.
the implications on happiness of this are really profound (and also zen in simplicity). it means that if you’re not regularly doing things that support your well-being and happiness, you’re unlikely to just arrive in a happy place someday.
this means that saving up all your vacation time so that you can have an awesome two week trip isnāt going to make you happier. the joy or happiness from that trip will fade because that’s how humans work.*
this also means that owning that perfect house in your dream location with a great family isnāt going to make you much happier in the long run. it’s way more important to have daily habits and practices that help you live a good life day to day.
and in a way, that’s pretty freeing, actually. cool stuff. thank you, gretchen!
* of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take vacations and there are many good reasons to do so. just donāt list happiness as one of them.
she mentioned a study that was aimed at finding out what made high-functioning people different from average people. the hypothesis: high functioning people exert more self-control daily than everyone else.
the findings, however, debunked that completely. turns out, high-functioning people actually exert less self-control daily than everyone else. the reason? habits!
gretchen went on to explain that the research showed people who were highly productive simply set their lives up to enable them to be productive. they removed as many decisions as possible from their day. this allowed them to do two things:
keep doing things that are good for them, even if they didnāt actively want to do them at the moment (for example, exercise).
save their decision-making energy for truly important things
in the research, the energy spent by the average person debating (i.e. what theyāre going to eat, if theyāre going to go to the gym, when theyāre going to get a haircut, etc.) takes away energy from actually getting stuff done. of course, not to mention the fact that you may often decide to not do things that are good for you because you just arenāt feeling it that day. in the long-run, that adds up.
this all lines up really well with many different lines of thinking iāve been having lately, but most directly it lines up with the cognitive budgets stuff. cool.
about a month ago i listened to an onbeing episode with david isay. among other things, david is the founder of storycorps. his interview, titled ‘listening as an act of love’ was super interesting and there are vast implications of his thinking about listening as core pillar of being loving, from the interpersonal scale to the societal and global scales. Ā
but all that aside for the moment, one line in his interview really stuck out to me:
āiām really good at collecting other peopleās deep thoughts.ā
because of what storycorps is, this was pretty tongue-in-cheek. that said, the reality of what it means to be a collector of deep thoughts is one that i feel like i live.
my whole life people have told me that i’m wise beyond my years. in some ways, i think this is mostly just a stance i take to the world. maybe it’s because it’s what comes naturally to me, but i think i do a really good job at cutting through the bs of daily life to identify and observe trends. i can recognize these trends over the course of a single friend’s life when i’ve known them for long enough, but also across different people’s lives. the combination of those two things enable me really latch on when someone is saying something deep.
sometimes the other person doesn’t even recognize the depth of what they’ve said. when i repeat it back to them, they’re often shocked at the gravity of their own statement (sidenote: is it the process of reflecting it back that adds gravity? who knows.)
anyways, these thoughts are a little all over the place, but one thing is for sure. i definitely feel similar to david in that i recognize that i’m a good collector of other people’s deep thoughts. does that in itself make me wise? i’m not sure. the dictionary definition of wisdom is about applying experience, knowledge, and good judgment. if the experience, knowledge etc is gathered from somewhere else, does that undermine my own wisdom? maybe. but maybe not. that said, if the knowledge gathered from other sources is invalid, what are books even for?
the other day ross said to me, āfunny how you define something Iāve never really thought about myself, but now know.ā
when he said that i realized yet another reason why relationships are so important. relationships teach us about ourselves in ways we could never learn without them. i wrote about several reasons yesterday, but the one i want to cover today is the johari window.
the johari window is a tool used to show groups and individuals how learning about the self and others happens over time. created by joseph luft and harrington ingham, the tool breaks down how we understand ourselves into four quadrants along two axes. the axes are ‘selfā vs āothersā and each axis moves from known to unknown. the quadrants of knowledge about ourselves are (clockwise from top left):Ā
open self: information known by you and others
blind self: info about you that others know, but you don’t
unknown self: information that you and others don’t know
hidden self:Ā information that you know and other don’t.
now, there’s a lot to say about this description model including how it helps individuals grow over time, how it can help teams work together more effectively, et cetera. what interests me about is it at the moment is it’s importance to relationships.
in theory, people who are strong leaders and partners actively work to minimize the size of the unknown self quadrant. this sounds like very much like the thinking on self-knowledge that gretchen rubin believes is part of the secrets to happiness. there are several ways to do shrink the size of this quadrant, but two of them involves others.
feedback is when people tell you things about yourself that they know and you don’t. being open to feedback is actually an uncomfortable and difficult thing. however, the more open you are to it (this takes practice and clear communication with others), the more likely it is that people will be willing to give you honest feedback and help uncover your blind spots.
shared discovery is when you and someone(s) else uncover something about you that neither of you knew. i have had this happen many times in work situations, especially when i’ve been on a team for a few months or years.
relationships matter because without them, there are some things about ourselves that we can never know. unsurprisingly, this thinking is consistent with many other parts of my thinking. having really thought through it, though, makes it concrete in ways that some of the quotes below reference more ethereally…
“Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.ā ā Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
last week, i wrote a post about sprinters and marathoners and how my friend ross and i fit into those roles. when i mentioned my think to him he said, …“funny how you define something Iāve never really thought about myself, but now know.”
when he said that i realized yet another reason why relationships are so important. relationships teach us about ourselves in ways we could never learn without them.
this fits into so many frames through which i’ve been thinking lately. it fits into bell hooks’ understanding of love and intimate relationship because being in a loving relationship with someone is actually a really hard thing to do [link to quote tumblr post]. though many of us are trained to want and seek love, most aren’t ready for it. hooks believes that being loved by someone means they are going to want you to grow [link to definition] and that means telling you things about yourself that they see as hinderances to your own progress.
and it also fits into my upbringing as a christian. love in christianity, at least in my understanding, is demonstrated primarily through relationships with people. love and relationship also show up in much of the christian writers i revered such as wendell berry, c.s. lewis, st. augustine, g.k. chesterton, and dietrich bonhoeffer.
finally, there’s this thing called the johari window which was going to be the full subject of todayās post, but i guess iāll have to write about tomorrow…
