There's More to Life Than Being Happy - Emily Esfahani Smith "It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness." In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished -- but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, "Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation." Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, "Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?" Viktor Frankl [Herwig Prammer/Reuters] Peter Andrews/Reuters
Why We Struggle with Change By Leo Babauta We think we need to improve ourselves and our current situation, because we’re dissatisfied (at least a little bit) with how things are. We have a drive to improve, improve. So we strive for change — exercise more, eat better, read more, be more mindful, do more meaningful work, be more disciplined. And yet, we struggle with change. Why is that? The problem is that we are clinging to the illusion of solidity. Allow me to explain. We want everyone else around us to be solid, dependable, stable, the way we want them to be. Unfortunately, we are grasping for something solid … in a river. Think about yourself for a second: can you stick to a perfect routine, never changing, for an entire year? Well, what if we freeze the water to make it solid, you might ask? We are fluid, like water. And yet we want ourselves to be solid. Everything else around us is also nonsolid. So we struggle with this, because nothing is the way we want it to be. Letting Go of Solidity, Embracing Fluidity
Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness - Emily Esfahani Smith Health People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Of course, it’s important to first define happiness. It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote.
The Paradox of Behavior Change The natural tendency of life is to find stability. In biology we refer to this process as equilibrium or homeostasis. For example, consider your blood pressure. When it dips too low, your heart rate speeds up and nudges your blood pressure back into a healthy range. The human body employs hundreds of feedback loops to keep your blood pressure, body temperature, glucose levels, calcium levels, and many other processes at a stable equilibrium. In his book, Mastery, martial arts master George Leonard points out that our daily lives also develop their own levels of homeostasis. Like your body, there are many forces and feedback loops that moderate the particular equilibrium of your habits. That is, until we try to make a change. The Myth of Radical Change The myth of radical change and overnight success is pervasive in our culture. On the surface, these phrases sound inspiring. Nearly anyone who has tried to make a big change in their life has experienced some form of this.
What Writing Has in Common With Happiness By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. The final line of an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges poem became the title for Yasmina Reza's latest book, Happy Are the Happy. Happy Are the Happy features 18 different narrators, each of whom gets to command the reader's attention for at least one chapter. Reza’s books—novels, plays, and an unorthodox book-length profile of Nicolas Sarkozy—have been translated into more than 30 languages. She lives in Paris and spoke to me in New York City. Yasmina Reza: Late in the process of finishing my new book, Happy Are the Happy, I started looking for a title. I was on a plane when the French phrase heureux les heureux, happy are the happy, came to mind. So when I went home, I took all my Borges off the shelf. Happy are those who are beloved, and those who love, and those who are without love. And we can never know.
A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making Reprint: R0711C Many executives are surprised when previously successful leadership approaches fail in new situations, but different contexts call for different kinds of responses. Before addressing a situation, leaders need to recognize which... In January 1993, a gunman murdered seven people in a fast-food restaurant in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. In his dual roles as an administrative executive and spokesperson for the police department, Deputy Chief Walter Gasior suddenly had to cope with several different situations at once. He had to deal with the grieving families and a frightened community, help direct the operations of an extremely busy police department, and take questions from the media, which inundated the town with reporters and film crews. A version of this article appeared in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Kierkegaard on Our Greatest Source of Unhappiness by Maria Popova Hope, memory, and how our chronic compulsion to flee from our own lives robs us of living. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. “On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with overplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness. Kierkegaard, who was only thirty at the time, begins with an observation all the timelier today, amidst our culture of busy-as-a-badge-of-honor: Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. The unhappy one is absent. Consider first the hoping individual. Donating = Loving
death of expertise The United States has an expertise problem. It’s not that we don’t have plenty of experts in everything from technology to medicine to geopolitical relations — it’s that many of us are less inclined to trust what they know, and more inclined to believe we know better. This disconnect has led to the rise of an ill-informed, angry, and distrustful populace, public policy that is often nonsensical, and an education system veering away from objective knowledge and toward feelings-based learning. Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Nichols told the audience that while expertise isn’t technically “dead,” it certainly earns less respect than in past generations. Self-proclaimed expertise often is accompanied by an appalling lack of knowledge, he said. A 2015 poll he cited revealed a partisan split over the question of bombing Agrabah, with 30 percent of Republicans in support and 36 percent of Democrats opposed. Online discourse is especially problematic.
A Guide for the Perplexed: Mapping the Meaning of Life and the Four Levels of Being by Maria Popova How to harness the uniquely human power of “consciousness recoiling upon itself.” “Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her sublime meditation on how the art of getting lost helps us find ourselves, “and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.” But the maps we use to navigate that terra incognita — maps bequeathed to us by the dominant beliefs and standards of our culture — can often lead us further from ourselves rather than closer, leaving us discombobulated rather than oriented toward the true north of our true inner compass. Schumacher begins with an apt anecdotal metaphor for how these misleading maps are handed to us: On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. Map of Palmanova, from Umberto Eco's 'Legendary Lands.' 'Isle of Knowledge' by Marian Bantjes. We cannot say: “Hold it! Donating = Loving
What Is Leadership? What is leadership, anyway? Such a simple question, and yet it continues to vex popular consultants and lay people alike. I’ve now written several books on leadership for employee engagement, and yet it occurred to me that I never actually paused to define leadership. Let’s start with what leadership is not… Leadership has nothing to do with seniority or one’s position in the hierarchy of a company. Too many talk about a company’s leadership referring to the senior most executives in the organization. Leadership has nothing to do with titles. Leadership has nothing to do with personal attributes. Leadership isn’t management. So, again, what is Leadership? Let’s see how some of the most respected business thinkers of our time define leadership, and let’s consider what’s wrong with their definitions. Peter Drucker: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.” Really? Warren Bennis: “Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.”
Effort Is Not the Enemy of Compassion - Leslie Jamison My job title is medical actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. Medical acting works like this: You get a script and a paper gown. My specialty case is Stephanie Phillips, a 23-year-old who suffers from something called conversion disorder. STEPHANIE PHILLIPS Psychiatry SP Training Materials CASE SUMMARY: You are a 23-year-old female patient experiencing seizures with no identifiable neurological origin. We test second- and third-year medical students in topical rotations: pediatrics, surgery, psychiatry. A student might have to sit across from a delusional young lawyer and tell him that when he feels a writhing mass of worms in his small intestine, the feeling is probably coming from somewhere else. Once the 15-minute encounter has ended, the medical student leaves the room, and I fill out an evaluation of his/her performance. Some med students get nervous during our encounters. Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges.
What Makes a Leader? Executive Summary Reprint: R0401H When asked to define the ideal leader, many would emphasize traits such as intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision—the qualities traditionally associated with leadership. Such skills and smarts are necessary but insufficient qualities for the leader. Often left off the list are softer, more personal qualities—but they are also essential. Although a certain degree of analytical and technical skill is a minimum requirement for success, studies indicate that emotional intelligence may be the key attribute that distinguishes outstanding performers from those who are merely adequate. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman first brought the term “emotional intelligence” to a wide audience with his 1995 book of the same name, and Goleman first applied the concept to business with this 1998 classic HBR article. A version of this article appeared in the January 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Why 'Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things' Is So Satisfying Oh! Why, hello. I didn't see you there. Come, come—sit down by the warm glow of the computer and let me spin you a yarn. See, once upon a time, I had a raincoat. I was careless with my comfort; what comes unexpectedly can all too easily slip away. But why would it even be interesting—let alone soothing—that two random, unrelated items could be physically combined? “I think it has to do with a new way of putting things together in a surprising, novel, and exciting way. The unusualness of the combination might grab the attention, but it’s also how extreme the coincidence of a perfect fit is. It’s the sort of little joy that can’t be forced, only discovered. In its bringing of order to randomness, “Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things” is a spiritual sibling to another popular Tumblr, “Things Organized Neatly,” which specializes in photos of objects arranged in patterns by size, color, type, or shape, laid out in tidy rows and columns.
Character and Traits in Leadership Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing. — Warren Bennis, Ph.D. On Becoming a Leader Building Excellence Leaders do not command excellence, they build excellence. Excellence is “being all you can be” within the bounds of doing what is right for your organization. To reach excellence you must first be a leader of good character. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Character develops over time. A strong person can be good or bad. Courage — not complacency — is our need today. To be an effective leader, your followers must have trust in you and they need to be sold on your vision. Beliefs are what we hold dear to us and are rooted deeply within us. Values are attitudes about the worth of people, concepts, or things. Skills are the knowledge and abilities that a person gains throughout life. Traits are distinguishing qualities or characteristics of a person, while character is the sum total of these traits. Retreat Hell!