Another question that has terrorized my childhood. Right up there with “What do you want to be when you grow up”. You see, I didn’t have a role model, I still don’t and at some point I worried there was something wrong with me for not having one. I don’t know about you, my dear reader, but I can distinctly remember one of my teacher telling the class that we should have a role model.
Thinking back it’s stupid, of course. The whole idea of having a role model is stupid. What the heck is a role model anyway? According to the source of all digital knowledge – Wikipedia, role model is a "person who serves as an example, whose behavior is emulated by others".
Emulated? Like in trying to be somebody else? Like in being somebody you are not? Like in not feeling ok in your own skin? Well that just sounds wrong. That also is against everything I’ve learned so far in life, that it’s good to be yourself, to follow your dreams, to stand for what you believe.
Main words here: yourself, your, and you.
What my teacher (I believe that was in 8th grade) horribly missed is that there is nothing wrong in aspiring to be great, as some people are, and to be inspired by great people but it’s completely wrong to try to be like that person.
If you like Einstein, don’t try to prove that E=mc^2 is wrong and that it should be E=mc^3, try to do what he has done, and do it your way, revolutionize the way people see the universe. And you don’t have to grow the crazy hair either.
And if Superman is your role model, good luck with stopping bullets with your bare chest, If you want to be like Superman, just look at what the whole idea of Superman is- doing good, stopping bad guys. Who’s stopping you to do good, your way? Nobody! And you don’t even have to have x-ray vision to do that.
The whole role model philosophy is flawed in many ways and it’s one of the teachings of school and society that manages to put a big nail in the coffin of feeling good about who you are and, ultimately, of being happy. If I learned something over the years is that there is one way of doing things right and that way is your way.
I will end with an note of caution – if you feel like hitting somebody on the head with a lead pipe, please don’t do it, even if that is your way of showing sympathy. Working in the boundaries oh right and wrong is a must. Knowing when and where to push and shift those boundaries is an art that makes the artist who wields it one those people that are labeled as role models.
P.S. The previous two post had some clips that were supporting, in one way or the other, my arguments. This post, however, has none, because the ideas in this one are based on believes formed over the years. However, if what I said makes some sense to you, I do recommend reading two books by a person who I greatly admire and who has been an inspiration more than ones, Seth Godin. The first one is called Tribes, and it’s about learning how to become a leader and how communities grow, and the second one is Linchpin and it’s about being yourself in what you do, or so I see it.
Alright, so making decisions is hard, ignorance is bliss and thinking too much and having too much choices makes it even harder to decide.
The question, and real art is how to decide. To take a decision you must know what you want, what is your goal. Without a goal whatever you choose is pointless. A decision in itself must bring you closer to a goal.
Above: Unrelated photo of sunset taken out of my window in Arnhem
Therefore the art is to find out what you truly want or convince yourself that you want something, to set your goals. This is, probably, the most difficult thing you will ever do in you life. For me it still is. And I haven’t gotten there and I will probably never find an answer.
But it all gravitates around the question – why are we here, what is the purpose of life and what makes us happy.
Humans are mammals, animals, therefore the need to reproduce and find a partner cannot be taken out the picture but we have to go beyond that and figure out what else is there to life? What can we do to be happy?
Well, it turns out that happiness has two sides:
being happy in you life (the present)
being happy with you life (the past)
We might be happy now but we might be unhappy with how we lived our life.
I’m not smart enough to figure this out all by myself so watch this talk by Daniel Kahneman. Make sure to watch the very end too (around minute 18), when he talks about money and happiness.
So we need to figure out a way to be happy with our present and to fill in our brains with enough pleasant memories to feel good about our life. Family and friends are both present and past, they bring both strong experiences and enjoyable moments. Work, on the other hand, is what our present is mostly filled with. And new things we try and do might not be the most interesting or enjoyable thing in the present but these make a big part of our memories.
working with these three things will fix the following:
We are social animals and we need to love and to be loved, so learning to enjoy spending time with you parents, brothers, friends, parents is very important. Even if you don’t see eye to eye you must find a way to enjoy being around people you care about and who care about you
Work takes up most of our time. If we hate what we are doing, something is wrong. We either are not doing what we are supposed to do or we fail to set our expectations and experiences to such a level that we will actually enjoy ourselves at what we are doing. Seth Godin make some very good points of how important is to emotionally invest in your work, but not in the way of going mad and yelling at your boss or coworkers, but in the way of relating to your coworkers and learning how to enjoy being around them. I recommend Seth’s book Linchpin, Read it, it’s worth doing it.
When I’m in doubt about doing something or not I guide myself by the principle “better sorry about doing something than being sorry you never did it”. It is very difficult to get yourself moving, you are tired, it’s never the right time, it might be raining, but if you have to choose between sitting on the couch and experiencing something new never, ever choose the sitting on the couch.
In short these are the 3 things I believe that mix together into the magic thing that is the purpose of life. We have to reproduce, because we are mammals and our instincts tell us that we have to do with and we are rewarded with having to grow those extraordinary little things called babies. We must love our loved ones. We must learn to know how to make out of work an enjoyable challenge, not a job and we must learn how to never say no to new challenges.
In my next posts I will focus on the last two points, on how we can figure out what to do and how I approach new challenges and opportunities that come along the way.
I challenge you to tell me where you think I’m wrong, to tell me what is your secret mix that gives you the purpose of life, to rant, to cheer and to read on!
Before I end this post here are a few TED talks about happiness which are more than interesting and a real food for thought. They will make you think about what experiences make you happy and not and how too many options can make you unhappy.
Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?
A question that has tortured my childhood. Still have nightmares about it and is up there, in my top 5 of “stupidest question you can ask a human being”.
Why, you might ask. Simple, because the answer implies one of the following:
the kid being interrogated has no idea what to say and therefore answers with what she notices that amuses the grown-ups;
the kid has been brainwashed into thinking she wants to be something the grown-ups have told her she should be;
the kid clangs to some fantasy in which her heroes take part aka “I want to be an astronaut”.
Only the last one is, in my humble opinion, a valid answer, but really, how can you expect a 5 year old to be able to tell you what the heck she will be doing in 15 or so years when even the task of tying the shoe laces seems insurmountable? And why should kids even bother with such thoughts?
But this is not about kids and this is not about what you want to do when you grow up, this, my friends, this is about the art of making up your mind, taking a decision, pursuing it and, at the very end, being happy.
My modest brain came to the conclusion, by ways of analysis of empirical data, that there is a direct link between knowing what you want and happiness.
The trick is the knowing what you want part. Some of the most interesting people I have had the honor of meeting in my short and so far not very useful existence are plagued by thoughts in the lines of ‘what is life’, ‘what is the purpose of life’ and so on. A polite way of saying they have no damn clue what they want from life, most of the times. I say most of the times because it’s clear you want your children to be happy, your family to be healthy. But when it comes to their own selves and their own decisions, this incredible people have no clue.
Many times it pays to look at what others think about a subject, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, and therefore, my dear reader, let’s look at what the wise people from our past have said about the matter and at what’s been distilled down into bits of wisdom known as sayings. So, time for some cheesy quotes.
You got Socrates saying “I know that I know nothing”, There is the saying “The more you learn the more you realize how little you know”. And there is the “The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother to learn” by George Bernard Shaw. And my two favorites “Ignorance is bliss” and the Romanian version “Fericit cel s?rac cu duhul”.
Alright, cheesy quotes aside you can’t dismiss the fact that some of the happiest people I’ve seen live in complete brain-washed dumbness, complaisant of their own stupid condition. Ignorance is truly bliss.
However, considering that banging your head against the wall to shave off some vital IQ points is not an option for you, than what is there to do when in doubt and when you have to decide taking option A or B?
Well, I can’t tell you that, but I can tell you what are my thoughts about the subject. This post is an introduction in a series of 7 posts about decision making and the related happiness that will do just that. It’s a subject that fascinates me, I believe it is very important, as knowing how to make decisions should help you be more satisfied with yourself and it’s such a interesting subject that I can’t help but be fascinated by it.
Before finishing this first post let me give you some food for thought. Watch this fascinating TED talk by Barry Schwartz called “The paradox of choice”.
This is basically a scientific proof of “ignorance is bliss”. Enjoy and read on!
P.S. This series of posts is dedicated to a very special friend
