family friends career educational goals plans for time outside of work attention
to your mental and physical health etc like you don't need to have all these
things but you better have most of them that's what life is about and if you
don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and
suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you but once you set up
that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what
you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing
is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at
that and then use everything you learn as a means of building that person that
you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even
those things those things are gonna overlap specify your damn goals cuz how
are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to
happen and often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like
to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy
which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you
don't know when you fail and people might say well I really don't want to
know when I fail because that's painful so I'll keep myself blind about when I
fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it
until you've failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the
time you're 40 I would recommend that you don't let that happen
so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to
apparently Millennials are tough to manage and they're accused of being
entitled and are so cystic self-interested unfocused
but entitled is the big one and because they confound leadership so much leaders
are asking the Millennials what do you want and Millennials are saying we want
to work in a place with purpose love that we want to make an impact you know
whatever that means and yet for some reason they're still
not happy and that's because there's a missing piece I can break it down into
four pieces four characteristics one is parenting
the other one is technology third is impatience and the fourth is
environment the generation that we call the Millennials too many of them grew up
subject to failed parenting strategies where for example they were told that
they were special all the time they were told that they kept it anything they
wanted life just cuz they want it okay so once you get your goal structure set
up you think okay if I could have this life looks like that might be worth
living despite the fact that it's gonna be you know anxiety provoking and
threatening and there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved in all of
that obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all
things considered that justifies your effort at some point we all bought into
this lie that you got a feel ready in order to change we bought into this this
complete falsehood that at some point you're gonna have the courage at some
point you're gonna have the confidence and it's it's complete garbage and so
there are so many people in the world and and and you know you may be watching
this right now and you have these incredible ideas and what you think is
missing is motivation and that's not true because the way that our minds are
wired we are not designed to do things that
are uncomfortable or scary or difficult our brains are designed to protect us
from those things because our brains are trying to keep us alive we all do it we
do it subconsciously we're wired that way
we're actually looking for threats our ancestors many years ago weren't just
looking for the saber-toothed Tigers they were worried about who they
encountered and whether they would be friend or foe Joseph LeDoux from New
York University says if there's no evidence that our brains are hard-wired
for fear what he does say is that we have the circuitry that allows us detect
and respond in pre-program ways it's modifying the benefit of that is when
you get a bad email you don't have the same reaction as if you saw a
saber-toothed tiger and in order to change in order to build a business in
order to be the best parent of a spouse to do all those things that you know you
want to do with your life with your work with your dreams you're gonna have to do
things that are difficult uncertain or scary which sets up this problem
for all of us you're never gonna feel like it motivations garbage you you only
feel motivated to do the things that are easy why is it so hard to do the little
things that would improve my life what I've come to realize is that the way
that our minds are designed as our minds are designed to stop you at all costs
from doing anything that might hurt you and the way that this all happens is it
all starts with something super subtle that none of us ever catch and that is
with this habit that all of us have that nobody's talking about we all have a
habit of hesitating hmm we have an idea you're sitting in a meeting you have
this incredible idea instead of just you know saying it you stop and you hesitate
and what none of us realize is that when you hesitate just that moment that micro
moment that small hesitation it sends a stress signal to your brain it wakes
your brain up and your brain all of a sudden goes oh wait a minute wait why is
he hesitating he didn't hesitate when he put on his killer spiky sneakers he
didn't hesitate with the really cool track pants he didn't hesitate with the
NASA t-shirt now he's hesitating to talk something must be up so then your brain
goes to work to protect you then what do you do and you turn down to the micro
routines it's like okay well this is what I'm aiming for how does that
instantiate itself day to day week to week month to month and that's where
something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar it's
like make a damn schedule and stick to it
that's the first thing that people do wrong is say well I don't like to have
follow a schedule looks like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well
I should I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you
know and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things
that I have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up
so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay I've got
tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have
practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and
obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along
with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're going to
insist upon is that at the end of the des you're not in worse shape than at
the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day I was shocked when I met a
one-legged taxi driver in Kenya and I was shocked when I met a disabled
subsistence farmer in Mozambique what shocked me wasn't their poverty but
their happiness I found their happiness confronting far more confronting than
poverty of course what everyone was happy but if those above a basic
subsistence threshold level I was surprised at how genuinely content many
of them were and since then I've researched it I've worked on it I've
thought about it I'm interested in it from an economics perspective it's one
of the things that I research at Oxford because happiness is after all the
ultimate social outcome and I think it's particularly appropriate that we talk
about happiness today because we have with us the prime minister of Bhutan the
very man who introduced a new champion the idea of gross domestic happiness
rather than GDP as a way of tracking country's progress we're wealthier than
ever but unhappier than ever we're more prosperous the more depressed we're less
satisfied I mean we have faster and faster transport what we're faster and
faster to complain about it in many countries there are now more suicides
than homicides I will now have more goods and services than ever before we
have technology improving exponentially but we don't see a corresponding
increase in our life satisfaction in our happiness and perhaps one of the great
paradoxes of our time the thing the obvious question is why is it that
governments and individuals are such bad predictors of happiness why is that we
get it wrong so often and I think it's because we don't really understand why
it is that we're often unhappy I think there's one explanation that I find far
more compelling far more plausible far more persuasive than any other and that
explanation isn't we have so much choice that we get stressed it's not that were
economically worse off in many cases we're economically better off it's not
that we just have greater reporting of depression and suicide that's true but
it only explains a small portion of the data that's not due to family breakdowns
or reduce freedom no the reason why we unhappy the most compelling reason as
shown by the data as shown by research relates to expectations at a very basic
simple level we are unhappy when our expectations of reality exceed our
experiences of reality it's a very simple concept but it's a hugely
important concept to fully understand to fully get our head around and to help us
get our head around it I like to think in terms of three different types of
expectation gaps three different types of gaps based on the different ways in
which we form expectations you see when we choose to buy goods we choose from a
range of options how do we make that decision what we do is that we choose
the one that we think will be the best now the problem here is that the very
act of choosing the thing that we think will give us the greatest happiness is
the thing that actually undermines our happiness because what it means is that
we when we then see reality when we ven experience that it's highly likely that
that reality won't live up to our expectation and that leads to
disappointment you have to negotiate with yourself and
not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care
for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how
you make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and you think well
if I had that day that would be good great you know and you you're useless
and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about seventy percent accuracy
but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with fifty
percent accuracy another rule is well aim for 51 percent
the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're gonna
hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you
upward so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness it's a
plan of life you'd like to have you have to understand that you're not your own
servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and you're
someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to do
you know if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them
voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that
they know they need to overcome in order to me
their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the
face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know
what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if
for ten years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by your
own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the
degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are
remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are
people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they
were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they'd be
get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we
do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the
reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're
not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing
to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it
right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look
at the world in the number another way that you could act in the world so what
it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back
to you now imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human
beings we've done a lot of remarkable things today for example about 250,000
people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people
attached to the electrical power grid we're lifting people out of poverty
collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of
humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since
the year 2000 so there's inequality developing in many places and you hear
it lots of political agitation about that but overall the tide is lifting
everyone up and that's a great thing we have no idea how fast we could multiply
that if people got their act together and really aimed at it what would happen
if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you
you be who knows how much more efficient ten times more efficient twenty times
more efficient that's the Pareto distribution you have no idea how
efficient efficient people get it's off the charts
well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things
worse because that's another thing people do all the time
not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively
attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or all of
those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if
people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how
much better they would get just because of that you see it isn't merely that
your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree
you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only
your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know
you think well there's seven billion people in the world and who are you
you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really
doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the
wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network
you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll
know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million
and two persons away from a billion and the things you do they're like dropping
a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways
that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and
that you don't do are far more important than you think
of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter
what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless
existence I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I
pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I
have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious
to me that people would take the meaningful path if you live a
pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that
then it's hell really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the
fort it fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then
you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family
and friends because that's what happened in the twentieth century
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