Happiness Revisited: Try Mental Discipline

I wrote about Dan Gilbert's thoughts on Impact Bias in an earlier post.  Today I am revisiting it after I found his thought-provoking and quite insightful lecture on TED. 

So if you have watched the 20minute or so lecture, you would pretty much know what it is that makes some people worry, fret, moan and some other people smile, rave and be in a state of seemingly unreal contentment. Gilbert's claim is it's all in your mind, to put it crudely. The Buddha and many other wise people have already said it so I shall not go further into how to be happy.

Instead, my thoughts are on a related question: how should I spend my time in such a way that makes me happy, i.e. what sort of work should I do that puts me in a happy state without having to manufacture synthetic happiness? I ask this because it's the question that bothers most people, not how to banish irreverent negative thoughts and make the "most" out of a bad situation, but how to LIVE life in such a way that you feel no negative feeling state at all and in fact would be happy.

And no, I don't count drugs as the answer. The answer has already been found. I believe it is Mikail Csiksentmihalyi's idea of flow. 

Flow is a concept that refers to a state of ecstasy (out of the everyday routine, not the drug-adduced state), of utter and intense concentration that seems like an out-of-body experience. Prof Csiksentmihalyi explains that when we are in a state of such intense concentration, existence is temporarily suspended. It makes sense. Recall when you were so wrapped up in a task that "time just flew" by. Of course time also flies when one is stressed and doing 100 things at the same time, it doesn't mean we're in flow, or in some state of nirvana.

Flow is best experienced when we are doing something that requires a lot of skill and involves a high degree of challenge. Think musician, performer, athlete, even CEOs, all of these categories of people were researched by Prof C's team. All of them described experiences of flow. Now consider the following table:

I borrowed this from Prof C's lecture since it wasn't so hard to replicate with a little Paint and Powerpoint.

I've been trying to get into the yellow area for over a decade. It's the answer to the questions: what is my calling, where do I fit in, what should I do with my life (other than my job which gives me a mediocre mental challenge and sufficient remuneration to sustain my current standard of living)?

At least a half dozen people have discussed this dilemma with me over the past year. The dilemma being the choice between the status quo which gives them little personal life satisfaction and doing something that would be meaningful, rewarding and satisfying. Here's the problem with the second choice: it's iffy.

We tend to glorify the alternative life we could be living, much like how Dan Gilbert describes people who think that they would be happier if they had the freedom to choose among many options. We put it on a pedestal, this more meaningful work we should be doing and like a deity we worship it as the ultimate goal, like nirvana or God. I'm not saying it isn't worth aiming for, this other more meaningful work we ought to all be doing. I'm saying most of us fail to understand its true nature or properties. Hence, we all seem to chase an illusion, because happiness, like this mysterious "calling" which is our place in the sun, is a chimera.

I believe the properties of each of our calling is in Prof Csiksentmihalyi's diagram. Look at each of the 8 feeling states and you could identify yourself in one of them at some time of your day or week or period of life. Most of the day, I find myself at Boredom (low on skill and challenge), so to occupy my mind, I trawl the Internet for mental stimulation -- no not porn -- which leads me to sites like Big Think, TED, New York Times and the like.  If you asked me when I last felt like I was being mentally challenged, when I had to use a fair amount of skill, I will tell you without hesitation that it was when I was teaching a class of undergraduates Sociology or Psychology.  It wasn't only that I had the opportunity to stretch my intellect, use my knowledge and disseminate ideas in a creative manner, it had also a lot to do with the feedback I was getting from the students and those with whom I was interacting. It was a two-way street and I often felt I was in flow if the class was going well, our discussions were animated and students were challenging me and visibly enjoying or benefiting from my input.

Of course there are moments of Arousal when I have a heavy workload and deadlines to meet, papers to grade, a presentation to prepare. But that's to be expected because my time-management and stress-management skills are being worked!  Truth be told, I don't get that a lot now, but I am getting more rewards on a different front. I am mostly in Control segment at work and once in a while, at arousal when I am placed in a new and challenging situation.  But it's rarely Flow. And how can I blame the work or the organization that I chose to join? No one should if they had made their choice with wide open eyes.

Now I am going to posit an idea that is more extreme. I believe that to get into the yellow bit, you don't have to go searching the mountain ranges of the Himalayas or quit your job to be a do-gooder (but go ahead if you feel a real passion for it). There is something to be said about being in a state which requires a lot of skill and where you are highly challenged. Technical training. Lots of it.

According to the wise professor, you can't be creative, you cannot change something into something that is better than what it was before, unless you have at least 10 years of technical training. 10 years.

I can immediately think of a dozen people who spent the last ten years doing 10 different things, much less just one. I recall now Amy Chua's much-misunderstood ethos that children need to work, work, work until they're good at something. Only when they're finally good at it will they enjoy it. (I.e. nobody ever enjoys anything until they are good at it, that's why permissive American parents could never raise kids who are musical virtuosos). I now see her point.  I can recall the days when I spent hours each day labouring over a painting, barely aware of the pain in my shoulder blades as I hunched over my easel with my pastel-stained fingers. The more I did it, the better my technique became and the more I enjoyed it. It was the same for the piano, in which I received only a short two years of formal training.

Alas, I never took these hobbies further than the short amount of time I used to attain moderate ability and skill. I was never encouraged to continue, (if I had, I would have become more proficient and obviously, would have received more encouragement to persevere) I stumbled on art at the ripe old age of 17, right before I was about to enter University to earn a general degree that would qualify me for....well, general administration. There was no way that I would have or could have taken the thing that could have given me flow to the next level toward success.

A Case For Mental Discipline
So what I am essentially arguing is that in order to do the sort of work that would allow you to achieve flow, one must first put in the mental discipline required to become really good at something. Cos no successful (I am thinking wildly successful people like Buffet, Gates and Patricia Kuhl whose work I talked about recently) person ever got to the pinnacle of their success without working really hard at something until they were really good at it. This not only takes perseverance but a lot of self-belief.

Self-belief, also known as "passion", that cliched term that every career expert or some other person dishing out free advice would tell you about being successful. It makes a sense that to be free of self-doubt or doubters allows you to do the work you love and believe in unhampered. Not everybody who is good at something becomes successful and not every successful person can attribute said success to his own personal merit. The difference, I think, lies in how far you're willing to go with your work, and self-belief goes a long way to fuel that journey. As I said, I felt alive and sometimes in flow when I was teaching, sharing knowledge, interacting with people who wanted to learn. Why didn't I keep on at it, you wonder? Well, a lot of organizations have this evil, uncompassionate feature called bureaucracy. It kills passion, devours the innate goodness and potential of its members and pretty much destroys any possibility of a compromise between getting what you need and doing what you love.

Is it ever too late to go back to that thing that you love to do which allows you to go into the yellow zone and take it to the next level, or even better, make it your life's work? Pragmatic people will say it would cost too much once you are in your 30s, maybe 40s. Not surprising, as how many successful people you know started their technical training at age 35 or 40? Yes, the occasional grandmother graduates with a PhD at age 65, but you can be sure she isn't going to embark on a 20 year career in academia. That sort of thing is more like a wish-fulfilment for people, the goal of education they never achieved in their youth. I am talking about finding what you love and doing it because you're good at it -- financial success notwithstanding -- every day of your life because that is the place where you experience the yellow, the flow. Not the job you're currently doing because it pays well enough.

The Yellow is Right In Front of You
So is it ever too late? Many friends lament to me how they wish they could find their "calling", the job that really made them feel they were doing something meaningful. I believe they genuinely want that. Most are in their early 20s. Some already do things they love and are passionate about, but would face immense personal and social doubt and angst if they were to make that their day job. "Too much risk", is a common refrain.

I sympathise with that. We live in a culture that exhorts entrepreneurship but regards failure as a dirty linen best left in the closet. It is a society that holds up banners congratulating "winners" but does the minimum to cultivate and nurture those who are trying to live their dreams. I think there is a danger in putting up too many goal posts and believing that those goal posts are typical symbols of "success" -- a property, a car, an annual turnover of 100 million. These are the goals that would never put you in the yellow zone, you can drive for hours in your Ferrari, but the furthest you get is the next traffic light.

Byron Katie told someone who was fretting over this question that you can live up to your full potential every day. She does it when she washes the dishes for example. I'm not being facetious here. I took that advice very seriously. I can't say that I felt ecstatic each time I washed a pan or ironed Daniel's shirts but I can say that it helped me understand that you can be good at anything for it to be meaningful, not just the things that society labels as useful or laudable. Mother Teresa, for example, is one of the worst examples of human compassion in the history of mankind, her organization is rife with corruption and inefficacy, but still she has come to be a ubiquitous symbol of compassion and charity.  Go figure. The things or people that society at large regard as successes are like the book covers that hide the real contents of the pages. You have to read a long time before you can see for yourself if you had correctly judged it by its cover.

In sum, flow is not happiness, but many find happiness in doing the things that give them flow. I am in the lower end of the yellow whenever I am in the few moments of pure focus and attention on my son, when I lose consciousness of everything as my hands skim the keyboard as if they were being directly commandeered by the score of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and when I am piecing together multiple ideas  into a coherent  opinion on this blog. I don't experience this all the time, and I am unafraid to admit I grapple with the "what could I be doing that's more meaningful?" question every day. But understanding the nature of flow has helped me conclude that the only way to live in the yellow is to keep doing the things I am good at without hoping for some magical trophy that reads "success" at the end of my endeavours.

I am going to end with this tremendously funny speech by Sir Ken Robinson because he is just so RIGHT. He talks about some of the stuff I've just gone about, and after you've listened to him, if you haven't gone to search for his 2006 talk, you would sit back and think: that's absolutely right.