The Simplest of Life Hacks

The other day I was getting fish tacos at my favorite truck and 4 guys about 17 were doctoring their tacos at the same table. One of the guys admits to the other three - with some measure of guilt in his voice - "I really love fish tacos. I mean ... it's kind of stupid how much I love them." There is an awkward silence and I chime in.

"Old man life hack?" They look at me. "When I was your age I thought it showed sophistication to be hard to impress. Now? I have finally realized that easily made happy is like the coolest life hack around. Just think! It doesn't take that much and ... you're happy! Fish tacos! A pop song! A sunset. Delight in all of it and soon you'll realize that you're delighting in life. It can be that simple."

They are silent. They look at each other cautiously. One of the guys then says, "I will totally follow that advice." A murmur of "Yeahs!" followed. It made me happy. And then so did my taco.

What I Forgot to Tell my Son on His Wedding Day

I gave a toast to Blake on his wedding Friday but managed to lose my list of bullet points. I reconstructed them about ten minutes before the toast, pocketed them, and then spoke. But it was only after an evening of strong emotions and great conversations with  old friends and friends freshly made that I remembered my main point.

Meditation magnifies.

Joseph Campbell said that we don’t need to learn how to meditate. We meditate all the time. We meditate on how tight money is this month or why she said that or whether they think we were foolish to wear this outfit or which celebrities’ life we covet.

Consciousness is like a radio dial that broadcasts a mix of fact and fiction, fantasy and memory, hope and resentment, passing scenery and national news. We can scan the dial and bounce from one thought to this perception to that memory to another thought all day. We can scan but we tend to land on familiar thoughts, our favorite stations. Those are our meditations.

Be aware. Don’t become a martyr for your mate. Your job isn’t to dedicate your life to suffering for them. So when awful or even merely annoying things come up, face them and deal with them. But resolve them and move on. (Oh, and resolution may be realizing “that is part of the package of her.”) 

Don’t meditate on the things that eat at you. Don't plug your ears and chant "I can't hear you," to them either. Deal with bad things. Do meditate on what it is about her that you admire, adore, or aspire to for yourself. Keep coming back to that happy station. This is not meditation as escape from the world but, rather, focus on and amplification of what is best in it.

Because whatever it is that you meditate on, whatever it is that you come back to again and again, that will be magnified. If it is good, that will seem bigger. If it is bad, that will seem bigger. Regardless of how wonderful or terrible it is, whatever you meditate on will seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is. And that will change what you talk about, how you act, and the ripple effect of your influence in life.

Face reality and deal with issues - both delightful opportunities to seize and ugly issues to resolve. And in between, magnify what you want more of by meditating on what delights you.

Gradually Turning up the Heat on Frogs in Water: GOP Voters in 2016

In his book on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert points to a really fascinating thing about predicting our happiness: we're really bad at it.

Put simply, if you have a mouthful of liver you are incapable of imagining chocolate. Our current reality so colors our perception of future possibilities that we simply can't predict how we'll feel in those futures.

Ask someone, "How would you feel if you lost the use of your legs in an accident?" They'll answer that they'd be devastated, depressed, inconsolable. Ask them how they'd feel if the spouse they loved left them suddenly. Same sorts of answers. Well, a funny thing happens if you ask people who actually have gone through these experiences. As it turns out, after feeling initially about how they had imagined, they find a way to construct a new life that doesn't depend on their legs or spouse. Most people move on and many will even say things like, "It seemed like the worst thing to ever happen but now I realize it really was for the good." Or, "I have so much more compassion now and it forced me to become more spiritual, It really made me a better person," or "I feel so lucky because I never would have met Greg if my husband hadn't left me."

Predicting your emotions after something bad happens is tough. We find a way to justify, to adapt, to make the best of things.

Which brings me to this election and Donald's surprising performance. If you had asked evangelicals how they would feel about voting for Trump earlier in the primaries when they thought that Cruz could win, they'll tell you that they'd never do it. Ask a Bush supporter who thinks Trump not only treated Jeb crassly but even the Republican agenda (things like the invasion of Iraq) that they'd defended at family dinners. The Bush supporter will say, "Not going to happen. I won't vote for him." But as mentioned, we poorly predict our own futures.

Given enough time, people adapt. Republicans are more likely to be religious people and for them the GOP s as much a religion as a political party. Sure they're upset that the local priest molested those boys but that doesn't change the fact that they're Catholic. They're not becoming Baptists because one person acted so poorly. They're not happy with Trump but they've only been unhappy with the GOP candidate for months whereas they've vilified the Democratic Party for decades. And it's not like they haven't already publicly committed to hating Clintons already. The family at the Thanksgiving dinner will remind them of the times they've ranted about the Clintons. It would be terribly embarrassing to admit to anyone that they voted for one.

Ask a Republican this series of questions a year ago:
1. Would you vote for a candidate who praised a Russian dictator and suggested disbanding NATO?
2. Would you vote for a candidate who said he wouldn't accept the results of a democratic election?
3. Would you vote for a candidate who won the endorsement of only one major newspaper, no former presidents from either party, no former secretary of states of either party, and only one of six former presidential candidates from his / her own party?
4. Would you vote for a candidate who mandated a religious test for people entering this country?
5. Would you vote for a candidate who attacked the leaders in the Republican Party, lowering Republican's odds of winning the House and Senate?

An overwhelming majority would have said no to each of these questions. But instead of asking them all at once, what if you just incrementally revealed that this was a feature of the candidate - the GOP nominee - they'd already committed to? That would give voters a chance to rationalize his flaws, to make the best of them. Earlier in the year they'd be devastated by such a candidate; later in the year they think it might actually be the best thing to happen to their party. "I would have thought it a tragedy to lose legs but these new wheel chairs are so amazing! I actually get through malls faster than I used to!"

Trump is the tragedy that Republicans have had enough time to re-frame as actually being a good thing. Sure he's a dubious character and he might make the deficit huge again and who knows what all but he's a Republican. Isn't he?

Happiness like a Heartbeat

Gallup tracks happiness in the US. It doesn't seem to be moving in any particular direction but there is a lot of movement. To me it looks like a heartbeat. For some reason that seems fitting and makes me happy.

Happiness is no Photo Op

Saw this at Thomas's place

If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden… He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar stud that has rolled under the dressing table."
~W. Beran Wolfe

I was thinking about this very point recently, about how happiness doesn't always look happy. I laugh about as much as anyone I know and am genuinely happy when I do, but I suspect that most of the time I'm happy I am not laughing or even smiling. I'm engaged.

I wonder if one reason we have trouble with happiness is that it doesn't always make for good photo ops, doesn't make for exciting scenes in a movie. So we holler and act reckless, not because it makes us happy but because this is what happy is supposed to look like. Actually, one of the few things that we do know about happiness is that it is unaware of its own image.

Peace & Happiness

"I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."
- Kurt Vonnegut

O! Bam! Ahhh!

Well, it is official. Obama won!

I can't believe how relieved I feel. The 8 years of madness - the 8 years of "is this really my country?" feeling I had watching the Bush administration. For tonight, at least, it is gone.

About two weeks ago, I was at my wife Sandi's school visiting her second graders. As we were walking, I asked some of them if they had seen the debate the previous night. One, A'Lyn - a 7 year old African American - said, "Yes!" "Who did you like," I asked. "I like the bla-" and then he stopped himself. "I don't remember his name." "Barack Obama?" I asked. "Yes!" he said. And for him and his generation, the fact of a black being elected president will do more to change his casual notion of what is possible than any batch of policies.

I voted for Libertarians, Independents, and Citizen Party candidates. Before tonight, I had only voted for one candidate to actually win the presidency - Bill Clinton. That seemed to work out pretty well. I have as much confidence in Obama's ability to assemble a team and articulate strategies that will get us back on the right course.

Enough said. I am going to dance a for a little while now and hope that the person in room 213 below me isn't trying to sleep.

P.S. I just watched his speech. How brilliant. Finally, a leader who is thinking about how what we'll do will shape the next century - rather than reacting to the last year. The audacity of hope indeed.

As he took us back over the last century, I was reminded of a quote from Buckminster Fuller.
"Projection is like archery - the farther back you are able to draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot."

What if Money Weren't the Why?

One of the fascinating moments in Man on Wire was when Philippe Petit, who has been driven by a vision of walking between the Twin Towers since he first read of their construction, is asked "Why?" by the American press. He is at a loss and simply replies, "I have no why." [For a fascinating article and interview about Petit and his feat, read this in the Telegraph.]

Why do you like love making, eating, sleeping, the feel of water on your skin, conversation with good friends, or playing? Because we are human animals, we enjoy the first three on that previous sentence; because our humanity includes a mind, we love the last two in that sentence. I have no idea why we love the fourth - I just know that we do.

Why is such an odd question. There is, ultimately, no real why. Some things are simply intrinsic to our being.

Americans love the practical. They want this to lead to that and the "this" in question is most comprehensible when the "that" it produces is money. "I did it for money," can make sense of even murder, as countless TV shows, movies, and books testify.

But the really sublime things we do, the most human of our activities, have no why. Why does a toddler play? To be a toddler is to play. It is a doing that emerges from being. And in that pure expression is pure contentment.

Philippe Petit's story of his obsession with defying laws, logic, and gravity is at least in part so captivating because of the purity of his doing, something that seems to emanate from his being. There is no why. His quest emerged from some purity of being that audiences want in on.

For me, ideas are a why. More than once I've been at an utter loss to explain to a friend inquiring about why I would take such interest in something as arcane as social evolution or topics like religion, politics, and business. I've managed to parlay my interest in business into a career, but that is not why I find organizations, profits, and the clash of dynamics so fascinating. I can answer why I am interested in money from this interest - money is necessary. But money is not why I am interested in the topic.

One way to find your way is to ask, if money were not an issue, what would animate you? Once you find that, you should use money to help to fund your why rather than let money bribe you away from your why.

Americans are practical people. They also consume huge quantities of feel good therapy, therapist hours, and anti-depressants. I actually think that some of this is good because it shows that we've evolved the point of taking this matter of happiness seriously (or, could I say, proves that we've begun to take silliness seriously.) But some of it must surely trace back to the fact that we demand to know why, demand that pursuits offer some end.

It seems to me that it makes far more sense to learn what intrinsically motivates us and find some way to fund that. This intrinsic motivation can become our ordering principle - the answer we offer to the question of why we are doing what we do.

Remodeling the Cabinet for the 21st Century

Over the centuries, we've accumulated a number of cabinet positions at the highest levels of government: secretaries of state, treasury, defense, interior, agriculture, commerce, etc.

It’s time to update the cabinet for the 21st century.

1. Secretary of Happiness
It’s time to take happiness seriously. After all, what good is progress in any other domain if it doesn’t make us happier?

2. Minister of Getting Other People To Like Us
This position would replace commerce secretary and secretary of state and add responsibilities for tourism and foreign investment. This might be the equivalent of a Wal-Mart greeter at the level of international politics.

3. Minister of Getting Other People to Fear Us
Replaces defense and homeland security secretaries, in charge of intimidating would-be enemies. As with the above position, this person might collaborate with Hollywood and it might even be a suitable position for a former movie director or producer.

4. Secretary of Simplification
In charge of producing sound bites for policy, reducing clutter in closets and garages, and eliminating unnecessary meetings within communities and organizations.

5. Chair of Genetic Redesign
Ethics, economics, and technology behind the re-creation of creation. Genetics seems an important enough domain to warrant its own cabinet position. Stalin sponsored cross-breeding of gorillas and humans at one point (fortunately, the artificial insemination of women with primate sperm failed), hoping for a better soldier. It might be worth thinking long and hard about how we ought to approach this fairly foundational topic.

6. Dude for the Radicalization of All Things Boring
Could also be a sub-dude or, rather, under-Secretary to the Secretary of Happiness. Measure of success would be the extent to which even teenagers have to admit that it is pretty cool to live here. This might be an appropriate position for a former X-Games star.

7. New Technology Facilitator
Would replace agriculture, commerce, transportation, and energy secretaries, and adds capability to help establish standards in technologies as varied as photonics, nanotechnology, neuro-devices, hydrogen, solar power, and artificial intelligence.

8. Director of Esthetics
Drives architectural standards, billboard design, fashion, art, music videos and office interiors. Helps to remind everyone that what we see makes a difference in how we think and feel.

9. Facilitator of Learning, Self-Improvement, and Innovation
Replaces secretary of education and creates an infrastructure to support people as varied as boot camp drill instructors and self-help seminar leaders. Given that learning can no longer be neatly contained into the beginning of a career, completed upon the completion of a university degree, for instance, the definition of education and the infrastructure to support it needs a radical change. It might be worth facilitating this.

10. Minister of Complexity
Position designed to set up creative tension with the secretary of simplification, also responsible for urban development, financial markets, forests and other ecosystems, romance, and extended families (essentially, everything hopelessly complex) replacing secretaries of interior, housing and urban development, and treasury and the lords of chaos.

11. Guy Who Can Find Your Cousin a Job & Get You a Raise
Replaces the labor secretary and gives you a virtual Uncle Vinnie who looks out for your best interests in labor markets, working to ensure not only work safety standards and minimum wages, but angles to get you a company car, a cubicle designed and colored like a Fisher-Price toy instead of something colored to placate psychopaths, and a job title that will impress your relatives and even strangers you meet in bars.

12. Secretary of Blogging
Or, alternatively, we could call this SOB president of cyber-world, duties to include developing and making available more sophisticated filters for spam, ensuring high scores for on-line games like World of Warcraft, and finding some way to soften the blow for reporting down days for one’s portfolio. Oh, and of course, the SOB would work with us to raise the probability of bloggers creating provocative and influential content.

13. Secretary for Life
Replaces health and human services secretary and focuses on keeping us well by vetoing subsidies for products like corn syrup and ensuring funding for P.E. classes, and is measured by increases in median life expectancy.

14. Defender of Liberty
This will complete the set, giving us cabinet positions for life, liberty and happiness. It is this, after all, that we began fighting for in 1776. This position would work to ensure privacy and various freedoms to include rights of assembly, religion, speech, pet ownership, and freedom from silly regulations originating from the Secretary of Esthetics and the Radical Dude.

Thanks to Jennifer, whose comments and follow up to the Biden?! post prompted the idea of not just a cabinet position that we bloggers could hold (she also pointed out that it that the acronym would be SOB), but a full slate for the 21st century.

Obama and McCain's advisors are welcome to contact me for further details. Now that Obama has taken my advice on Biden as VP, perhaps he'll welcome these humble suggestions for a slight remodeling of the cabinet.

My New Hero

Life Ends Badly. So?

“It seems so unfair,” Bernard said.

I looked up from my breakfast burrito and was surprised by what I saw. Bernard looked disheveled, his wispy hair smudged up one side of his head and literally waving in the breeze on the other. His eyes were bleary.

“What?”

“This,” he gestured expansively. “All of this.”

I looked around. We were at one of our favorite spots; the patio at Kono’s in Pacific Beach is alongside the Crystal Pier, overlooking the beach dotted with brown bodies and the surf dotted with black wetsuits. We had only brought Maddie there once; after she expressed her surprise at how many “negroes” were surfing (her weak eye sight confusing the wetsuits for bare skin), Bernard insisted that we would never come here again with her. Sitting perched over the beach like this always left me feeling exquisitely alive. I thought it did the same for Bernard and expressed my surprise that he was feeling so down.

“This,” I gestured, “makes you feel like that?” I pointed at him.

“Not always,” he said. “But today it just seems like too much.”

I waited. He rubbed the back of his hand across his nose like a small child who had been crying. I looked again. He was crying.

“Bernard?”

“You finally get how amazing this all is, how precious this all is, and then …”

“Then …?”

“It’s like you’re halfway through the most amazing ride at the park before someone tells you that at the end of the ride your life is over. This life – it ends so abruptly. And it is not until you are well into it that you realize there is no other exit, no other alternative.”

We watched a wave pick up a couple of surfers. A seagull landed on the railing and eyed Bernard’s bagel. A gorgeous woman laid out her towel in preparation for sunning herself.

“You would have chosen to skip this ride if you knew how it ended? Really?”

Bernard began to laugh. He actually snorted. And then he shook his head. “No,” he laughed. “No I would not.” His laughter made him begin to wheeze and actually seemed to worry people at nearby tables. “I don’t know what got into me.”

“You had trouble sleeping again,” I asked.

He waved off my question. “Do you think that I’m too old to learn that surface boarding?” he pointed.

“I think that even with a surf board leashed to your leg, you’d sink like Jimmy Hoffa,” I told him. I didn’t think that I could feel any better that morning yet Bernard’s guffaw reminded me that good can always get better – even if the ride eventually ends badly.

As if Happiness Mattered

Today we learned that the economy grew at about 0.6% in the first quarter of 2008. About a century ago, policy makers decided that the national economy mattered and began the official measures of things like unemployment, inflation, and growth. This did not just happen. It took concerted effort - and swept up corporations, businesses, and even households who all suddenly needed to report incomes.

We measure the economy because we strongly suspect that it's tied to general levels of contentment. And it is, up to a point. Studies of happiness indicate that after about $20,000 per person, income increases happiness only to the extent that it increases one's relative status. Money matters because happiness matters and money influences happiness. (Not only is it difficult to stay happy without money, it is difficult to stay alive.)

All that to say, it is easy to imagine a parallel universe where today's news might have been reported somewhat differently. It might be reported as follows.

Today, the government announced that an additional 2.7 million Americans have lost their sense of meaning, but happiness among teenagers has spiked to an all time high, suggesting a general rise in meaningless behavior.

Reported levels of happiness rose by .6%, but psychologist Arnold Bernowitz at on-line happiness analysis firm eUdemonia says that this is no cause for happiness. "This is a time when winter is over, NBA and NHL playoffs are in full swing, MLB has begun, and the warm weather means that men are more likely to see cleavage," Bernowitz reported. "Usually, the seasonal upswing in happiness among males between 16 and 46 is enough to push happiness levels upwards by 5 points. The fact that it barely budged could have to do with a number of factors: election fatigue, the high price of gas and Barack Obama's reminder to middle-class Americans that they are bitter. By the time that summer turns from balmy to sweaty, we are likely to see happiness levels drop to below that of the late 1970s. I'm sad to say that things don't look so good for happiness."

Over at eCstacy Inc., analyst Digby Sauerbane seemed to corroborate this view. "Americans continue to find joy in shallow and ultimately futile things like love and celebrity gossip. But these are fragile things. All it takes is just one phone call from her, as she stands in an airport in Miami, about to leave the continent with Mario, and your happiness dissolves like cotton candy left out in the rain." As if to underscore his point, Digby himself burst into tears.

On the ground reporting uncovered a different mood. Terence Lewis, a 15 year old high school student from Ames Iowa, said that his own happiness had risen by at least 0.6% in just the last hour. Asked to explain why, he scratched his head and said, "Well, the spaghetti in the cafeteria didn't totally suck today."

President Bush's happiness secretary said that the new happiness stimulus package would likely avert widespread anomie. The stimulus package includes volunteering government bureaucrats to work school carnivals (crowds seem quite pleased when IRS officials work the dunk booth) and said that OSHA officials will be offering massages each day between 2 and 4. "We expect people to be giddy by fall," he promised, reiterating Bush's campaign promise that all Americans would share his general sense of clueless well being by the end of his term, captured in his inexplicably popular campaign motto: "giddy up!" If happiness levels remain on their current downward course, the happiness secretary continued, the administration will again consider temporarily lifting bans against glue sniffing, at least just before this fall's election.

What Happy Harvard Students Know

Last year, Harvard student's made Tal Ben-Shahar's happiness class the most popular on campus. And for good reason. His course (from what I got online before Harvard took down (or changed?) the link) synthesized some of the best and most important information about what research has revealed and confirmed about happiness. Here are a few quotes from his final lecture - some points to ponder.

There are some commitments you can make to happiness: Practice gratitude and experiencing nature, and make exercise and socializing regular parts of life.

The questions we ask determine the kind of quest that we take. What gives me meaning, pleasure, and strength?

“Self concept is destiny.” What we believe about ourselves is what becomes true. The mind wants there to be a match between the inside and the outside – we bring either positive or negative reality into being to match what we have in our mind. We see ourselves in a particular way and from that we conclude certain things about ourselves. “This is a person who believes in himself.”

“Learn to fail or fail to learn.” The most successful people in science and arts are people who have failed the most.

Our happiness is not contingent on our status or state of our bank account but on our state of mind. I don’t believe that everything works for the best but I do believe that there are people who make the best of what happens. We don’t have control about what happens but we do have control over what we make it mean and what we do about it.

Give yourself the permission to be human. This class is more about reality psychology than happiness psychology.

Post-peak experience order is the opposite of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is more likely after you have written about a peak event. This is particularly important for males.

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Life is too short to be in a hurry.
- Thoreau

Movies end where love begins. It’s like saying, I have found my calling, its teaching. So that’s it. I don’t need to do any more. Don’t need to prepare for lectures or anything.

Exercise, sleep, and hugs are the wonder drugs. We compromise on the ultimate currency when we are short on these things.

You need to differentiate yourself. How? Determine what you really, really want to do with your life, and then do it. Be respectful and then assertive.

People who enjoy lasting change introduce change immediately. We underestimate our capacity to effect change because we underestimate the growth of an exponential function.

Flow & The Pursuit of Happiness

My daughter recently wrote a paper for her humanities class, a paper about Freud, Kafka, and Happiness. This seemed to me rather like writing a paper on Stephen Hawking and athletic prowess. But as I tried to explain what little I knew of Freud and modern psychology, it made me aware that my favorite psychologist may actually be my favorite philosopher.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi popularized the notion of flow - the mental absorption that both makes us the happiest and the most productive. I've found this notion immensely helpful and still see his ideas as a starting point for making daily life happy.

Freud argued that much of our behavior is motivated by subconscious desires that we little understand. For him, sublimination of the sex drive explains the desire to paint, play guitar, or write poetry.

Skinner argued that we do things for hope of reward, or to avoid pain. By controlling rewards and punishment, we can control behavior, this behaviorist argued. Sadly, his philosophy of human behavior is still the most influential in the definition of businesses and schools.

Freud and Skinner's explanations of motivation seem so clumsy, like Rube Goldberg devices. It's hard to believe that Freud and Skinner are completely wrong. Motivations are complex. But these explanations seem more convoluted than complete.

Csikszentmihalyi observed that people engaged in tasks as varied as painting, rock climbing, novel reading, chess playing, and motorcycle riding didn't seem to be subverting sexual impulses into more socially acceptable behavior. Nor did the painters, for instance, seem motivated by the prospect of rewards: by a particular point in their career most had lost illusions about finding fame and fortune. Rather, he learned that the absorption in the task was, itself, the motivation.

We seem to be happiest when we lose self consciousness and are so absorbed in a task that we lose track of time. Additionally, this full engagement in an act that requires our complete attention generally leaves us more able, better equipped to face the next challenge. Flow is a path to development and improvement.

So, what makes Csikszentmihalyi a philosopher? The implications of his psychology suggest a different society. Rather than teach children to learn only as a means to rewards, we would coach children on how to find flow, how to find meaning. That is, we'd coach them in becoming absorbed in tasks that make a difference, that gives the tasks (and by extension their lives) meaning. Rather than focus on outside control - doing what leaders reward - we'd focus on internal control - doing what brings us flow.

This suggests a very different society, a place where the locus of control is with the individual and not outside of the individual in leaders or institutions who control or influence behavior.

Centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote about the pursuit of happiness. The notion that individual happiness might be a valid basis for governance was a revolutionary idea. Csikszentmihalyi has done as much as anyone to help us to better understand happiness. I find it fascinating that fully realizing this happiness ultimately rests on creating a society where the individual is the locus of control over the individual life. As it turns out, happiness and liberty really are intertwined. How we pursue happiness is our philosophy put into action. Offer a new psychology and you have effectively offered a new philosophy.

False Predecessors to Joy

Imagine how different Oprah Winfrey's life would have been if she had had this kind of conversation with herself at the start of her career.

Oprah 1: I feel like I can do so much in television. It's an exciting medium and I think that I have a gift when it comes to communicating to people.
Oprah 2: That's all true, honey, but you need to lose some weight before you get on television.
Oprah 1: I am heavier than most TV personalities.
Oprah 2: "Most?" Honey, the TV camera adds 20 pounds to everyone. You get on there and you'll be heavier than all of them.
Oprah 1: I could start jogging.
Oprah 2: That's a good idea.
Oprah 1: I'll lose 20 pounds and then I'll audition for TV.
Oprah 2: Maybe 25.

Fortunately for Oprah and her fans, her better self didn't give in to the lesser self's insistence that she check the box on a number of false predecessors before she could go live her life’s mission.

I work with project teams at large companies. When we make plans for developing a new product, one of my tasks is to challenge their thinking about predecessors. If you are going to do the laundry, washing is a predecessor to drying. It is the task that comes before. Sometimes predecessors are real; the team really does have to test the new drug on animals before testing on humans. Other times the predecessors are false; you don't have to wait for test results before ordering a half dozen relatively inexpensive materials. My work with these teams has helped me to realize how many times I create false predecessors to joy in my daily life.

It is good, useful, and gratifying to have goals. But if you live your life fully, you'll always have another goal before you. If you decide that joy is something to be deferred until you have achieved a goal, you'll find that you're continually deferring joy.

You have only to see a baby laugh to realize that there are very few predecessors to joy. And you have only to be honest about your avoidance of risk to realize that there are likely fewer predecessors to pursuing your goals than you imagine.

Do this exercise. Articulate a goal, something that you want. Don’t just say, “Get a degree,” for instance. Articulate why you want the degree, what it will do for you. What do you want the degree for? Now, think about who you would have to be right now in order to make that goal inevitable. Don't think about what you have to do and in what order. Just think about the kind of person who would have accomplished this goal. What kind of confidence, focus, and (yes) joy does this person exude? And ask yourself this: are there really any reasons why you couldn't be that person right now?

Challenge false predecessors to joy and accomplishment. You might be surprised at how many of them exist only in your thinking.

Secretary of Happiness

I have decided upon my criteria for the 2008 election: vote for the candidate who takes seriously our declaration of independence and, if elected, creates a new cabinet position: the secretary of happiness.

Since about 1950, income has more than doubled in this country and yet levels of happiness have not budged. This is not a strictly American issue; it is true of Europe and Canada as well. Oddly, no politician seem the least interested in this critical issue that, one might argue, is the only one that makes progress on any other issue meaningful.

The secretary of happiness (The official pursuer of happiness?) would be tasked with the most marvelously interesting responsibility - seeking to increase the level of happiness of the nation's population. Probably one of the first policies would be to institute classes on happiness as a fundamental part of education. [Note the psychology of happiness link to the right of this blog as a great example of what that might look like at the university level.] There is a great deal that we know about happiness but too much of it is stuffed into esoteric journals read by crowds of only five or six. It is difficult to think of a more important measure of welfare than the level of happiness, yet our society doesn't even make an attempt to measure it they way we do daily fluctuations in the stock market or quarterly movement of GDP.

We could have a healthy debate about whether the secretary of happiness ought to be a comedian like Robin Williams or a psychologist who has dedicated his life to studying happiness like Martin Seligman or Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. But surely, no one could debate the need for such a position, could they?

So, that is my criteria for judging a presidential candidate. Any candidate who wants my vote will have to take happiness seriously as a national goal. It has been 230 years since Jefferson and his peers dared to found a country on the notion that every individual has the right to pursue happiness. There is no need to delay any more in taking this seriously.