I’ve been reflecting on how much the feeling of control influences happiness. It is really very difficult to get into a state of flow—to get engrossed in what you are doing—without feeling in control, and when you can’t get into that state of flow regularly, your satisfaction with life inevitably plummets.
I think that one of the qualities that makes the best tools is that they give the person using them a sense of control.
The German TV licensing agency has been missing some important details.
In October, they threatened the German poet Friedrich Schiller with legal action if he failed to pay his 17 euro TV license for the month. Sadly, Mr. Schiller was unable to settle his account, as he had been deceased since May 1805.
Following up on this questionable effort, the agency solicited television and radio dues from a cat, a beagle, and a mathematician by the name of Adam Ries, who passed away in 1559. Mr. Ries expressed bewilderment with the bill, as he had been dead for hundreds of years before either technology was invented. The cat and beagle declined to comment.
You might speculate that, in the throes of the economic crisis, their board figured this unusual fundraising scheme was worth a try.
The article in the Telegraph quotes the agency’s explanation: “We have to deal with such a huge amount of data,” the spokesperson says, “that something like this can happen.”
When you have such an overwhelming volume of information to process that one person can only handle a tiny fraction of it at a time, how can you possibly catch every obvious detail? How can you pay attention to any one person enough to know who they are?
If you have too much information to fit in one human brain, you’re bound to ask a few famous dead people for money.
It’s easy to laugh at the German licensing agency; we expect large bureaucracies to experience a database hiccup now and then. My question: how often do individual people do this? Like kids that insist on wearing adult-size shoes, we try on a daily basis to carry around more information than we can actually fit in our brains. How often do we lose touch with who people are as a result? How often do we miss the obvious details of other people’s lives, and end up, as far as they’re concerned, back in 1559?
How many times, in sifting through mounds of overwhelming thoughts, have you billed Adam Ries?
Everyone seems to have ideas and theories about the state of the world economy. Most of the discussions revolve around this notion of a downward spiral of decreasing spending—people are spending less, decreasing businesses’ revenue; in order to stay profitable, the businesses lay off employees, which makes people even more reluctant to spend.
The implicit goal is always increasing economic activity. It’s not that people argue that living with less is bad. The question never even comes up.
Leo Babauta of the exhilirating Zen Habits wrote an excellent article which is the first that I’ve seen to actually ask what would happen if we learned to consume less, and to point out that decreasing consumption is only a problem in a society rooted in the value of stuff.
When frustrated with our confusion, my high school physics teacher often liked to say, in a lilting accent with rolled r’s, that “there’s a difference between wrong and absolutely ridiculous.”
It may not be for the reasons that he had in mind, but I think there is definitely a difference: being wrong is boring.
Being absolutely ridiculous is interesting.
I’ve been reading a book called Intuition at Work, by Gary Klein. You can probably guess that it is about intuition. One of his major points is that there is no magical process for developing intuition. The way to build it is through enormous amounts of practice: through making lots of decisions and seeing which ones are right and which are wrong.
In other words, if you don’t make difficult, stimulating decisions or judgments about something, you have no way of developing an intuition for that area.
The lesson, to me, is this: find safe places to be wrong, so you can practice making challenging judgments. When you are wrong, don’t be cautiously, slightly wrong. Be flamboyantly wrong. Be absolutely ridiculous.
Language learning fascinates me. A while back, I heard about a website called Livemocha that takes a community-oriented approach to language learning. It’s a bit of a cross between Facebook, Wikipedia, and the much-acclaimed Rosetta Stone language tutoring software, which teaches with images rather than by association with your native tongue.
On Livemocha, you can take courses in a number of languages, and other people on the site can correct your answers or your pronunciation, help you with exercises that are confusing you, or chat with you in the language you’re trying to learn. The website prompts you to help correct others’ answers after you’ve just completed an exercise yourself.
What’s great is that this method actually works. I tried out the site yesterday, and within a couple of hours of filling out some of the exercises, I got comments and corrections from other people using the site.
I think Livemocha’s approach is ingenious. I feel like most people have a surplus of helpfulness, so to speak, that doesn’t have enough outlets in our very disconnected, compartmentalized modern society. A website like this gives people an easy way to help and connect with others in a common goal—in this case, learning a new language.
The effect is like plugging in your lamp to the electrical outlet, or turning on the sink faucet. You don’t need to pull the electricity out into the lamp with a crank or a rope, or squeeze the water out of the tap; as soon as you plug the cord in or turn the valve, it starts flowing freely.
How else could we tap this unused potential energy?
Here’s a story for you. Harold Hartley is a sales representative for a Detroit steel company. Every Monday, he catches the disastrously early 5:45am Northwest Airlines flight to Indianapolis to work with a major client there. Every Thursday, after three and a half long days of hard selling, he topples into his coach class seat on the 1:26pm back to his family in Detroit.
He’s been doing this for years; has it down to a routine. He goes to the airport with a tiny rolling bag and nothing in his pockets, wearing slip-on shoes so he can get through security in under 3 minutes.
One day, an account manager Harold sees every week misses an appointment about modifying some large orders. Harold waits at his office for half an hour, an hour, two hours—he never shows up. A few minutes into the third hour, the secretary approaches Harold, eyes wide, to tell him that the manager has been in a plane crash.
Shaken, Harold takes an overnight bus back to Detroit and never flies again.
A couple of months later, Harold is driving home from Indianapolis late at night after closing a difficult but successful deal. A few miles outside of Albion, MI on Interstate 94, a drunk driver heading home from the bar tries to change lanes and smashes into Harold’s car at 50mph. Both cars are totaled and Harold is rushed to the hospital.
According to transportation safety statistics, by switching to the car for his weekly trip to Indianapolis, Harold had dramatically increased his chance of injury and doubled his chance of death in a transportation accident.
This story, while fictional, is completely plausible. Even more plausible, and extremely common, is the situation where people skip out on something—eating raw-fish sushi, for example—because we’re anxious about a bad consequence that is actually vanishingly unlikely.
Harold’s mistake is called the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is a mental bias that makes us feel that something is more likely the more easily we can recall or imagine an example of it. It makes us massively overestimate the likelihood of very improbable events if we have a vivid, recent example of that event, often from a movie or the news.
Psychologists Tversky and Kahneman described the availability heuristic in a famous paper in Science called “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases”; Kahneman later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, despite being a psychologist with no economics training. The books Nudge and The Science of Fear talk about this universal mental quirk from different fascinating angles.
A couple things that might help with those skewed anxieties and prevent us from doing a Harold Hartley: comparing the actual probability of an event with something else that is concrete and easily imaginable (e.g.: “If I eat 20,000 eggs, only one of them is likely to have salmonella bacteria”) or flooding yourself with lots of examples of the danger you’re worried about NOT happening (e.g.: “My uncle is an airline pilot who spends 20 hours a week flying, and he’s never even had a single scare”).
Our pal Harold’s name, in case you’re wondering, came from a random name generator based on U.S. Census data.
The jaw muscle, or masseter, is one of the most powerful muscles in your body, and can apply enormous amounts of force when clenched. This is useful for chewing stale bagels, but inconvenient when chronic stress causes us to chew our own teeth.
I grind my teeth at night, and my dentist has made me wear a stylish little piece of plastic when sleeping to prevent me from wearing my teeth into a fine dust over the course of the next few decades. Frankly, though, I would rather just train myself to stop randomly clenching my jaw.
Here are a few tricks I’ve learned. Obviously none of this is medical advice, as I have no qualifications; it’s a combination of personal experience and suggestions from people with more expertise.
Every weekday at around 5:45pm, I ride the train home from work. Like everything that happens with such mind-numbing regularity, I have it reduced to a mostly unconscious routine: leave the office at a particular time, take the elevator downstairs, go out the north exit, walk through the alley, head up the stairs to the station, and walk to the northernmost edge of the platform.
People spread out on the platform while waiting for the train to arrive, but hardly anyone walks to the very end. When the train finally comes, I always get a seat.
Other things being equal, people tend to cluster around the middle in any situation: to do what takes the least effort or what other people seem to be doing.
There is much less competition and much more room to be flexible at the extremes.
Where there is a definite correct answer to be had, there is often wisdom in following precedent—check out James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Where things are more ambiguous or where, like the train platform, any position is as legitimate as any other, extremes can be the best places to hang out.
Naturally, there is a price for heading to the edges of the platform. Going to extremes often takes:
It’s worth the price.
Following on my post about nonchalance, a meditation on how we accidentally fence ourselves in:
This is not a gate. My soul
is passable; I keep control
of any blemish in my fate.
This is how I always dress
to show the absence of a mess:
a wall of iron lightly tressed,
but not a fence. I hate pretense.
This is not a carapace.
Avoid interpreting my face
for truths you could incriminate.
The best defense is making sense;
the gate you see is not a gate.
There are certain things you can’t do any faster. Sing faster and it will sound wrong. Breathe faster and you are hyperventilating. Laugh faster and you won’t enjoy the joke. Sleep faster and—that doesn’t even make any sense.
Actually, doing anything faster is like sleeping faster. It doesn’t even make any sense.
When we talk about doing something faster, what we usually have in mind is shortening the amount of time that we spend on that activity. The result, with sleep as with anything else: it’s not enough.
I’ve often puzzled over huge variations in efficiency from hour to hour. There are studies in the software industry that show ratios of as much as twenty times between the least efficient and most efficient producers, but I think that if you look at a day or a week of one person’s time, there will be even more variation than that. Totally unproductive, frustrating periods of work alternate with huge bursts of inspired activity from which you have to tear yourself away at the end of the day to catch your bus or train. How do you rig things so that you are in the super-productive mode all of the time?
You don’t.
There’s a good deal of research and experience suggesting that the “unproductive” periods are actually a sort of mental incubation process, wholly necessary to the creative process. And every activity is creative, more or less. The book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind is a fabulous source on the value of slower mental activity.
My feeling is that when we try to work faster, we give ourselves the illusion of increased activity by shoving a pile of busywork and random “interference” (like checking email) into the mix, turning work into the equivalent of restless sleep. It takes a lot longer to get what we need out of the process.
The real key to productivity is to master the switch from incubation to execution—the equivalent of waking up in the morning after a full night of sleep. I find those beginnings difficult. It seems to take a leap of faith every time you want to actually start something; you have to put up with a bit of feeling useless before you get into the flow. The more willing you are to jump headfirst into those tough beginnings, the more mileage you can get out of the potential you gather up in the slow periods.
It’s just like the willpower it takes to wake up. You have to drag yourself out of your comfortable bed, but once you actually get into the shower, the day starts rolling on its own.
