In Yes magazine’s “The Secret to Happiness,” Dr. David Myers, a social psychologist, attempted to answer this question.
Dr. Myers said that we’re fooling ourselves if we think that money is the answer. Rather, he said that
“the good life springs less from earning one’s first million than from loving and being loved, from developing the traits that mark happy lives, from finding connection and meaningful hope in faith communities, and from experiencing “flow” in work and recreation.”
In recent UCLA/American Council on Education (ACE) surveys of nearly a quarter million entering college students, “very well-off financially” were consistently the top ranked of 19 rated goals, outranking “becoming an authority in my own field,” “helping others in difficulty,” and “raising a family. When pollsters asked the average American what makes “the good life,” 38 percent in 1975 and 63 percent in 1996 chose “a lot of money.”
In affluent countries such as the U.S. Europe, and Japan, there is (surprisingly) a weak link between wealth and well-being (happiness). Blue collar workers are just as happy as white collar workers and vice versa.
“People who go to work in their overalls and on the bus are just as happy, on the average, as those in suits who drive to work in their own Mercedes,” observes David Lykken, summarizing his own studies of happiness.
Are we happier today than say back in 1957?
“Compared to then, today’s America is the doubly affluent society—with doubled real incomes (thanks partly to the doubling of married women’s employment) and double what money buys. Americans today own about twice as many cars per person, eat out more than twice as often, and commonly enjoy big screen color TVs, microwave ovens, home computers, air conditioning, Post-it notes, and gobs of other goodies. Materially, these are the best of times.”
Studies show that Americans are actually unhappier today than they were 50 years ago. “The number of Americans who say they are “very happy” has declined…from 35 to 30 percent.”
Dr. Myers calls this the “American paradox.”
“We at the end of the last century were finding ourselves with big houses and broken homes, high incomes and low morale, secured rights and diminished civility. We were excelling at making a living but too often failing at making a life. We celebrated our prosperity but yearned for purpose. We cherished our freedoms but longed for connection. In an age of plenty, we were feeling spiritual hunger.”
If materialism and wealth are not the answer to happiness then what is?
Studies point out several factors:
Close, supportive relationships. We humans have what today’s social psychologists call a deep “need to belong.” Those supported by intimate friendships or a committed marriage are much likelier to declare themselves “very happy.”
Faith communities. Connection, meaning, and deep hope are often nourished in congregations. In National Opinion Research Center surveys of 42,000 Americans since 1972, 26 percent of those rarely or never attending religious services declared themselves very happy, as did 47 percent of those attending multiple times weekly.
Positive traits. Optimism, self-esteem, and perceived control over one’s life are among the traits that mark happy experiences and happy lives. Happy people typically report feeling an “internal locus of control”—they feel empowered. When deprived of control over one’s life—an experience studied in prisoners, nursing home patients, and people living under totalitarian regimes—people suffer lower morale and worse health. Severe poverty demoralizes when it erodes people’s sense of control over their life circumstances.
Flow. Work and leisure experiences that engage one’s skills also enable the good life. Between the anxiety of being overwhelmed and stressed, and the apathy of being underwhelmed and bored, lies a zone in which people experience flow—an optimal state in which, absorbed in an activity, they lose consciousness of self and time. Flow theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found people reporting their greatest enjoyment not when mindlessly passive, but when unself-consciously absorbed in a mindful challenge. Most people are happier gardening than power-boating, talking to friends than watching TV. Low consumption recreations prove satisfying.
Thus, according to Dr. Myers and studies on happiness, those things which make for a “good life” and which will last are “close relationships, a hope-filled faith, positive traits, [and] engaging activity
Excerpt from Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, by Bill McKibben, New York: Times Books, 288 pages,
Environmentalist Bill McKibben has had enough, and he thinks you’ve had enough too. That’s why he wants to stop the development of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics in their tracks. McKibben fears that, if unchecked, these technologies will transform human life ruinously. “These are the most anti-choice technologies anyone’s ever thought of,” he insists (the emphasis is his). “In widespread use, they will first rob parents of their liberty, and then strip freedom from every generation that follows. In the end, they will destroy forever the possibility of meaningful choice.”
That claim is not only complete nonsense, it is exactly backward.
According to McKibben, science and technology have long been destroying human meaning. “Meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the start of civilization,” he asserts. In his neo-Romantic view, humanity once lived in an enchanted world in which every rock, tree, cloud, or bird was imbued with spirit and intention. Our ancestors’ theory of the natural world was that objects and creatures behaved much as they themselves did.
It turns out that such animism is wrong, but that hasn’t resulted in a world drained of meaning. It’s just that modern humanity has better explanations for why things do what they do. That’s not an absence of meaning; it’s different, better meanings. But for McKibben, ignorance of the natural world was, in some sense, bliss.
Ignorance also plays a big role in underwriting McKibben’s notion of human liberty. McKibben accepts that the fondest dreams of the proponents of human genetic engineering eventually could come to pass. Yes, he admits, advanced biomedical science could someday spare children from congenital diseases, cure cancers, correct disabilities, and lengthen the human life span.
But for McKibben, this is a dismal prospect. He argues that parents who choose to use genetic engineering will end up turning their children into “robots” and “automatons.” “Down that path,” he declared in a recent debate, “lies the death of what we call human meaning, the idea that people are in some way their own human beings and are not pre-programmed semi-robots.”
Liberty apparently lies in our ignorance of our genes. Human freedom, McKibben believes, depends in some profound sense on the random inheritance of the genes that are the recipes for our bodies and brains. As a result of this random genetic inheritance, he suggests, we have greater scope for freedom than if our genes had been chosen for us. It turns out that McKibben is indulging in genetic essentialism, the unwarranted idea that we are just meat puppets dangling from our strands of DNA.
Yet if he really believes that human freedom depends on inheriting a random selection of genes, his cause is already lost. Why? Genetic testing. Even McKibben recognizes that such testing will soon be here. “The biotech pioneer Craig Venter said in 2002 that within five years a personalized printout of an individual’s genetic code would be cheap enough for anyone to buy, so you’ll probably be able to afford it late next week or so,” he writes. Genetic testing will enable every one of us to know precisely our entire complement of randomly acquired genes. The good news is that we will then know our predispositions to various diseases, enabling us to take steps to delay their onset or even prevent them altogether.
McKibben, however, will not be pleased. To him, such knowledge must be a blow to our freedom because we will also know a lot more about how our particular sets of genes influence our temperaments, our intelligence, our abilities to form memories, and our physical capacities. Of course, that knowledge may well expand our freedom and our choices by making it possible for us to intervene by means of pharmaceuticals and optimized training to change our temperaments, improve our memories, or strengthen our bodies.
McKibben’s fears that genetic engineering will reduce human freedom are misplaced. To the extent that genes “program” us, we are already “pre-programmed” by our randomly conferred genes; we are just ignorant about which ones are doing what programming. But as even McKibben acknowledges, that won’t be the case in the near future. Will advances in genetic science destroy human freedom?
Quite the opposite. Providing children with such enhanced capacities as good health, stronger bodies, and cleverer brains, far from turning them into robots, would give them greater freedom and more choices. And any person would want to have these beneficial traits. Those of us who regard a poor immune system, a weaker body, or an IQ of 80 as privations likely will welcome the opportunity to help our children avoid such conditions, even as we try now to keep our children safe and healthy and to inspire and educate them.
McKibben objects that future gene-enhanced children will not have consented to receiving the genes selected by their parents. “The person left without any choice at all [emphasis his] is the one you’ve engineered,” he asserts. “You’ve decided, for once and for all, certain things about him: he’ll have genes expressing proteins that send extra dopamine to alter his mood; he’ll have genes expressing proteins to boost his memory; to shape his stature.”
To the extent that this is true at all, it is true for unengineered kids now. It’s just that parents don’t know which genes they’ve conferred on their children. Of course, they hope for the best — that their kids got the genes for good health, strong bodies, and sound brains. But there’s always a chance they ended up with Grandma’s genes for early heart disease or those that led to Uncle Jim’s schizophrenia. Genetic engineering could help parents in the future avoid some of those harmful outcomes.
McKibben is right that a gene-engineered child would have no choice about whether to express the proteins that lead to early onset Alzheimer’s disease, but it’s a pretty good bet that kids won’t regret their parents’ decision to eliminate those deleterious genes. Before we accept McKibben’s misleading concerns about a child’s informed consent, we should keep in mind that not one of us now living was asked our consent to be born, much less to be born with the complement of randomly conferred genes that we carry.
McKibben is obviously right when he declares, “genes do matter” (emphasis his). But they don’t matter as much as McKibben thinks they do. Take the case of monozygotic twins who share exactly the same genes and were formed in the same womb at the same time. They are certainly not identical people. In fact, traits such as intelligence, personality, and even weight correlate only 60 percent to 70 percent between identical twins. That’s much closer than with nonidentical siblings, but the variance is still quite a lot. Biology increasingly reveals that human individuality doesn’t depend just on having different genes; it is the result of the interplay between genes and environment.
Genes order the production of different proteins in response to environmental influences such as schooling, physical training, infections, and nutrition. Human genes are the necessary recipes for making human brains and bodies, but brains and bodies are manifestly shaped by their experiences. It might be possible someday, using genetic engineering, to give a child a brain smart enough to understand why Heidegger is wrong, but there is no getting around the fact that he will have to undergo the experience of learning about Heidegger first. There are no genes for Heidegger debunking.
McKibben worries that gene-enhanced people will not be challenged. This is nonsense. Genetic engineering may ease some of life’s burdens, much as electricity and indoor plumbing have, but it will by no means remove the bulk of the individual and social challenges humanity faces.
McKibben fears that our gene-enhanced progeny will know too much about themselves to stretch themselves to their limits and experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” “Just refer to your design specs,” he quips. Flow is that peak experience in which people lose themselves as they practice their hard-won skills in challenging activities such as chess, bond trading, or rock climbing.
Take the example of rock climbing. Would McKibben require that people free-climb Half Dome in Yosemite? Is their experience diminished because they are encumbered with technologies such as ropes, pitons, and freeze-dried foods? Similarly, a gene-enhanced climber would still find challenges that test her boosted physical capacities to their limits. Flow arises from internal challenges, being the best that you can be. This experience, along with the experiences of joy, hope, and love, will not cease because a person is genetically enhanced. However enhanced our descendants may become, there will remain no end of physical and mental challenges in the world against which they can test and measure themselves.
Human freedom cannot and does not rely on ignorance and randomness. Human freedom — the capacity to make choices based on reason — expands with knowledge. If you don’t believe it, think about how humanity’s greater knowledge of such things as the germ theory of disease and the atomic theory of matter have radically increased humankind’s choices and freedom during the last two centuries. Most of us would agree that there has certainly been an improvement over our ancestors’ world. That was a world filled with friendly and hostile animistic spirits, and one in which half of all children died before their first birthdays.
Similarly, knowledge about how our genes affect our behavior and how our brains are wired increases rather than limits our freedom. Prozac, for example, does not limit our choices; it gives depressed people the freedom to adjust their emotional state. Ignorance is not freedom. Knowledge is freedom; ignorance is slavery.
The alleged loss of meaning and the robotization of humanity are not McKibben’s only concerns. He fears that genetic engineering will exacerbate inequality, even as he worries about homogenization.
In his first scenario, the rich will get access to safe genetic enhancements first, dramatically widening the gap between the rich and the poor. “The political equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence can’t withstand the destruction of the idea that humans are in fact equal,” writes McKibben.
But hold on. Are people “in fact equal”? There is nothing at all self-evident about physical human equality or equality of status. Some people are short, some tall; some fat, others thin; some strong, others weak; some poor, others rich; some brilliant, others dim. In other words, what we see is not self-evident equality, but human particularity and human individuality.
In what relevant respect are people equal? The modern ideals of democracy and political equality are sustained chiefly by the insight, developed by Enlightenment thinkers, that people are responsible moral agents who can distinguish right from wrong and therefore deserve equal consideration before the law and a respected place in our political community. The broad ability to distinguish right from wrong does not depend on the genetics of IQ, skin color, or gender. With respect to political equality, genetic differences are already differences that make no difference. Having some citizens who take advantage of genetic technologies and others who do not will not alter that principle.
When he’s not propounding dystopian visions of genetically enhanced Übermenschen lording over poor naturals, McKibben is worried that genetic technologies will be adopted rapidly because they will become cheap and widely available. Given the rapid pace of technological change, the latter is more probable. Therefore, safe genetic engineering is much more likely to reduce inequality than exacerbate it. Parents will have the option of giving their children the same genes for good health and smarter brains that some children get randomly now. Is this homogenization? Perhaps in some sense it is, but a world in which more people are smarter and healthier could hardly be an ethical or social disaster.
But something worse than mere genetic engineering fills McKibben “with blackest foreboding”: the prospect of physical immortality. “It would represent, finally, the ultimate and irrevocable divorce between ourselves and everything else,” he asserts. “The divorce, first of all, between us and the rest of creation.”
McKibben would do better to ask why we would want to stay married to Nature anyway. She has certainly been an inconstant wife, liberally afflicting us with nasty surprises such as birth defects, diseases, earthquakes, hurricanes, and famines. An amicable separation might be good for both Nature and humanity. The less we depend on Nature for our sustenance, the less harm we do her.
Setting that aside, why does McKibben believe that death is good for us? “Without mortality, no time,” writes McKibben. “All moments would be equal; the deep, sad, human wisdom of Ecclesiastes would vanish. If for everything there is an endless season, then there is also no right season. The future stretches before you endlessly flat.”
If the endless future turns out to be as horrible as McKibben imagines it to be, then people will undoubtedly choose to give up their empty, meaningless lives. On the other hand, if people opt to live yet longer, wouldn’t that mean they had found sufficient pleasure, joy, love, and even meaning to keep them going? McKibben’s right: We don’t know what immortality would be like. But should that happy choice become available, we can still decide whether or not we want to enjoy it. Even if the ultimate goal of this technological quest is immortality, what will be immediately available is only longevity. The experience of longer lives will give humanity an opportunity to see how it works out. If immortality is a problem, it is a self-correcting problem. Death always remains an option.
Given all his worries, what does McKibben want us to do? He wants us to say “enough” along with him and reject the Promethean prospects before us. Humanity should decide collectively to limit its technological questing once and for all. This is not an impossible dream, he thinks, because some societies have, at times, chosen to relinquish some technologies. The examples he wants us to follow, however, involve a pair of backward autocracies — 15th-century Ming China and 17th-century Tokugawa Japan — and the contemporary Amish, an example that actually undermines his argument.
Here’s McKibben’s case for China. Between 1405 and 1430, the Chinese admiral Zheng He made at least seven major voyages with the largest fleet the world had ever seen. These “treasure fleets” consisted of 300 huge ships holding a troop of nearly 30,000 people. Zheng He’s fleets visited Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Arabia, and Somalia. McKibben praises the Chinese emperors who chose to burn the great treasure fleet and destroy all records of the voyages. To prevent further adventuring, these emperors made it a capital offense to build a boat with more than two masts. Thus, declares an approving McKibben, “a great people turned its back on a promising technology.” He adds, “The Chinese chose their definition of meaning — progress within tradition — over the pell-mell dynamism of the West.”
But did a “great people” really choose to forego the blessings of technology and trade? Isn’t a far more reasonable interpretation that the rulers of China, who wanted nothing to disrupt their iron hold over the lives of their subjects, made that decision, not Chinese “society”?
Next, McKibben describes Tokugawa Japan as “a highly advanced feudal society.” He praises it for outlawing firearms for two centuries. Why? Because “the samurai simply felt that guns were crude, that any peasant could use one,” explains McKibben. Which is precisely the point — naturally the beneficiaries of a warrior feudal society would want to make sure that the “peasants” didn’t get hold of such equalizers. The peasants didn’t relinquish firearms; their masters did it for them. But who cares about the meanings of the lives of Japanese peasants who were so downtrodden that they were forbidden the dignity of legal family names until after 1867? McKibben thus approves of two societies in which technological progress was stifled for the benefit of their absolute rulers.
The third case cited by McKibben, the Amish, is different and proves the opposite of what he thinks it does. The Amish live in an open society — ours — and can opt out of our society or theirs whenever they want. They have a system for voluntarily deciding among themselves what new technologies they will embrace. But the fact that they live as they wish and select only the technologies they want dramatically undercuts McKibben’s point. The Amish case shows that technological choices don’t have to involve everyone in a given society.
Like the Amish, technophobes such as McKibben are free to say no to whatever technologies concern them. They do not have to genetically engineer their children or choose to live longer lives. McKibben should be content to allow the rest of us to use those technologies we believe will enhance and improve our lives and the lives of our children. McKibben’s mantra is always, “More is not better.” That’s true, and it’s completely beside the point: Better is better. And better, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
McKibben eschews “hyperindividualism” in favor of one of the most destructive and oppressive political metaphors ever propounded. He wants us to think of “the human species as one large individual organism.” The individual meanings of our lives are to be subsumed into the larger meaning of the whole species. Never mind that in the last century ideologies founded on this organic principle of subordinating individual meaning to the good of the whole ended up killing tens of millions of people. It’s no wonder that he shows affection for despotic regimes like Ming China and Tokugawa Japan.
Of course, McKibben says he’s for democracy as a way of choosing which limits to put on technological progress. “Happily for us, we have a system for dealing with competing ideas,” he says. “It’s called politics. We will have to choose.” But we don’t have to choose; each one of us must be allowed to choose for himself.
No matter how advanced, technologies — including genetic enhancement — are not ends; they are means for individuals to build the best lives they can for themselves and their families.
Technological preferences, especially those that touch on the big issues of birth, disease, life, and death, are not democratic questions. They are personal questions. These private arenas should not be open to public decision making. For a man who says he favors human freedom and choice, McKibben is awfully eager to limit both.
A excerpt of an MSNBC Interview with Tiki Barber, retired All-Pro Running Back from the NY Giants (my team!)
I would never fool myself into believing I’ve done everything on my own. I’ve always had good people around me who believed in me, motivated out of love, or perhaps because it was in their best interest to make me better at what I was doing. Their motives didn’t really matter to me. They helped me.
As much as detailing the ins and outs of professional football, as much as taking you past the sidelines and onto the field to give you the view from inside the huddle, those two questions—how I did it, and who helped me—represent what this book is about.
How do we persevere in the face of adversity? How do we shut out the chorus of negativity and nastiness to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going?
We find a way to put our hearts into it.
It’s not as simple as it sounds, and success actually involves a lot of different elements. You can’t just say, “I’m going to put my heart into it,” and magically reach your goals. There’s a lot of work, discipline, and character that goes into the process. But I learned one thing for certain from my football career. Heart is an essential ingredient to success.
Success and happiness come into play when we perform a single act: stepping up. That’s it. That’s the marker for success and happiness that psychologists from Abraham Maslow on down have determined. I encountered Maslow in Psych 101 when I was at UVA. He was a groundbreaking American psychologist with the innovative idea to study not the lives of mentally ill people (as most psychologists did before him) but of success stories, people like Frederick Douglass, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Albert Einstein, finding out what made them tick. Maslow helped develop the theory of self-actualization, and he said that we’re most happy and successful when we progress, get better, move forward. When we step up.
The National Football League is a lot more bookish than one might imagine. Everyone is feverishly grasping for an edge, and a lot of people have come to recognize that the true edge in any sport comes not simply from physical conditioning. Being in top physical form is necessary but not sufficient in a professional football league where everyone, all 1,440 players who make up the active roster, is constantly working out, bulking up, and refining their already elite physical presences.
No, the true edge in the NFL comes not in the objective, statistical zone of the physical—What’s your time in the forty? What do you bench press?—but in the more slippery, more subjective realm of the mental.
That’s why a lot of people read, coaches especially. They are looking for hints, clues, secrets. The quest leads them into strange nooks and crannies of literature.
Coach Jimmy Johnson’s favorite book was Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. From it, Johnson took a lesson about the crucial difference between happiness and pleasure. I can get pleasure from eating a good veal scaloppine at Primola, for example, one of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan. But that pleasure doesn’t equal happiness, and it sure doesn’t mean success.
“To be happy,” Johnson says, “I’ve got to be challenged, I’ve got to accomplish things, I’ve got to have some sense of satisfaction and achievement.”
A business bestseller enjoying great currency around the NFL recently is called Good to Great, by Stanford University’s Jim Collins. The book’s three-word title encapsulates perfectly what I was trying to do for my whole NFL career. It expresses a goal that a lot of us have, not only NFL players, but everyone who is serious and ambitious about life.
If we want to be happy, if we want to be successful, we have to find a way to step up. And to do that, we have to find a way to go from merely being good—taking our place among the mass of people who do their jobs, proceed through their lives competently, and achieve acceptable results—to rise above that level and become truly great. As a friend of mine used to put it, to make a big splash, you can’t just tread water.
How do we achieve success and happiness?
By stepping up.
How do we step up?
By finding a way to go from good to great.
How do we do that?
That question has always been my central concern, on the football field or anywhere else. I was exposed to the whole idea of stepping up very early on. Two of the most important people in my life started me on my journey, one by her example and the other by his pure competitive spirit.
Excerpted from “Tiki: My Life in the Game and Beyond” by Tiki Barber Copyright 2007 Tiki Barber. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster. All rights reserved.
Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and Mihaly now at Claremont College, the founders of Positive Psychology, wrote that people do their best when they focus on “identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and…find niches in which they can best live out these strengths.” Success will come to us when we discover what we enjoy doing, what natural strengths we have, and what activities we find meaningful.
Seligman, and Positive Psychology researcher Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan conducted extensive research on strengths. They developed a scientifically validated and widely used assessment tool to help people discover and learn about their strengths. The assessment is called the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths Survey (VIA-IS). The VIA-IS helps people identify what strengths are most natural to them - the strengths they use most often in their lives. Over 600,000 people throughout the world have taken the assessment. You can find the VIA-IS on my leadership research site at Click here to find it (TAKE IT!)When you register to take the confidential survey, choose “other” in the dropdown box.
When you complete the VIA-IS, you will walk away with a greater awareness of your top five strengths. You should then ask yourself two powerful questions.
First, how do you use your top five strengths in some way every day, and how have you used them in the past? You’ll find out that you express your strengths in many areas of your life.
Second, when you look at your most significant accomplishments in your life, which of your top strengths did you use to help achieve these successes? You’ll begin to see a pattern in your life. The accomplishment of your goals will have come as a result of your tapping many of your top strengths.
Now that we’ve talked about your strengths, what about your weaknesses? Can you forget them? The answer is “no, but.” The “but” is that you no longer should focus your energies in trying to fix your weaknesses. There’s a better answer: Look for the people who have the strengths you lack and partner with them. Focus on what you do best, and then let others do the same.
I am fortunate to work with this physicist in a current exciting venture…when he sent to me the article below his cover note said “Every time I read an article about the following events I see something more.” Thanks Phil.
See what you think.
August 2006
This amazing article verifies that it is the state of the Healer that heals.
Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len has done significant work in Hawaii with the criminally insane using love, forgiveness and working on himself.
By Joe Vitale
“Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a
complete ward of criminally insane patients – without ever seeing any
of them. The psychologist would study an inmate’s chart and then look
within himself to see how he created that person’s illness. As he
improved himself, the patient improved.
“When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How
could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the
best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane? It didn’t
make any sense. It wasn’t logical, so I dismissed the story.
“However, I heard it again a year later I heard that the therapist had
used a Hawaiian healing process called ho ‘oponopono’. I had never heard
of it, yet I couldn’t let it leave my mind. If the story was at all
true, I had to know more. I had always understood “total
responsibility” to mean that I am responsible for what I think and do.
Beyond that, it’s out of my hands. I think that most people think of
total responsibility that way. We’re responsible for what we do, not
what anyone else does – but that’s wrong.
“The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would
teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility. His
name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on
our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his
work as a therapist.
He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years.
That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous.
Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot
or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs
against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a
pleasant place to live, work, or visit.
“Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an
office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he
would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to
heal.
“‘After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being
allowed to walk freely,’ he told me. ‘Others who had to be heavily
medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no
chance of ever being released were being freed.’ I was in awe. ‘Not
only that,’ he went on, ‘but the staff began to enjoy coming to work.
Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than
we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was
showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed.’
“This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: ‘What were
you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?’
“‘I was simply healing the part of me that created them,’ he said. I
didn’t understand. Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for
your life means that everything in your life – simply because it is in
your life – is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world
is your creation.
“Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or
do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says
or does is quite another. Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete
responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste,
touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is
in your life. This means that terrorist activity, the president, the
economy or anything you experience and don’t like – is up for you to
heal. They don’t exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections
from inside you. The problem isn’t with them, it’s with you, and to
change them, you have to change you.
“I know this is tough to grasp, let alone accept or actually live.
Blame is far easier than total responsibility, but as I spoke with Dr.
Len, I began to realize that healing for him, and in ho ‘oponopono,
means loving yourself.
“If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you
want to cure anyone, even a mentally ill criminal, you do it by healing
you.”
I asked Dr. Len how he went about healing himself. What was he doing,
exactly, when he looked at those patients’ files?
“I just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ over and over
again” he explained.
“That’s it?
“That’s it.
“Turns out that loving yourself is the greatest way to improve
yourself, and as you improve yourself, you improve your world.
“Let me give you a quick example of how this works: one day, someone
sent me an email message that upset me. In the past I would have handled it by
working on my emotional hot buttons or by trying to reason with the
person who sent the nasty message.
“This time, I decided to try Dr. Len’s method. I kept silently saying,
‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you,’ I didn’t say it to anyone in particular.
I was simply evoking the spirit of love to heal within me what was
creating the outer circumstance.
“Within an hour I got an e-mail from the same person. He apologized
for his previous message. Keep in mind that I didn’t take any outward
action to get that apology. I didn’t even write him back. Yet, by
saying ‘I love you,’ I somehow healed within me what was creating him.
“I later attended a ho’oponopono workshop run by Dr. Len. He is now 70
years old, considered a grandfatherly shaman, and is somewhat reclusive.
He praised my book, The Attractor Factor. He told me that as I improve
myself, my book’s vibration will rise, and everyone will feel it when
they read it. In short, as I improve, my readers will improve.
“‘What about the books that are already sold and out there?’ I asked.
“‘They aren’t out there,’ he explained, once again blowing my mind
with his mystic wisdom. ‘They are still in you.’ In short, there is no
out there. It would take a whole book to explain this advanced
technique with the depth it deserves.
“Suffice It to say that whenever you want to improve anything in your
life, there’s only one place to look: inside you. When you look, do it with love.”
Do you consider yourself to be a human being? Think again - are you sure?
Now let me rephrase my question: Are you a human BE-ing or a human DO-ing? In our hectic times, most businesspeople are doing-doing-doing something all the time. If you are a manager, every slot in your busy schedule is filled with many short-time activities and interruptions: meetings, phone calls, client luncheons, networking events, and countless small to-do items.
And of course, there are more than 50 e-mails in your inbox waiting for your review and - in some cases - your urgent response. Thanks to Research In Motion, some employees and managers now even rush into their lunch breaks with their BlackBerries, having become already well conditioned to stop their conversation (and their chewing) as soon as a new e-mail comes in. Sounds familiar?
Now, I have another question for you: Where are you and what are you doing when you get your best ideas? Please stop reading here and now, close your eyes for a brief moment and reflect on my question before you continue reading this article.
So what is your answer? If you’re like the vast majority of people, then you don’t get your best ideas when you are in the office. Am I right?
Without knowing your answer in detail, I am sure that you’ll find that you’ll have some of the typical responses to this question that I’ve heard over the last years in my workshops and university courses on Business Creativity.
Most people get their best ideas when they are doing some of the following things: resting in bed, taking a shower, having a bath, driving in their car, playing sports such as running, swimming, cycling, or exercising in the gym, reading an interesting book, having a meal, listening to music, relaxing on the sofa at home, playing golf, taking a break in a coffee shop - Starbucks positions itself as the “third place” apart from home and the office where you can be yourself.
You’ve got my intended message: People get their best ideas when they’re doing things that are fun and not when they’re slaving away in the office.
Many Asian companies have company cultures that require rigid adherence to fixed office hours and that also glorify those serious, hard-working employees who put in the longest hours.
However, the number of hours spent in the office does not necessarily equate with work productivity. Furthermore, spending too much time in the office seems to be a counter-productive strategy for producing novel ideas and creative responses to the multifold business challenges caused by fast changing market environments.
Creativity requires time. Research studies indicate that creativity is unlikely to occur in a company where overcrowded work schedules make employees feel they are on a treadmill. In a famous study on the connection between creativity and time pressure, Harvard professor Teresa Amabile discovered some stunning results: The more time-pressured people feel on a given day, the less likely they are to think creatively. This result holds true not only on that day, but also on the two subsequently following days (a phenomenon that she called “time pressure hangover” comparable to the hangover after a night out).
Moreover, the experts who judged the creative output of the group under severe time pressure and of the control group with sufficient time noticed that the drop in creativity was worst when time pressure was highest. Furthermore, the time-pressured people were under the impression that their unoriginal outputs were highly creative contributions.
In other words: The participants under time pressure in the study were not able to objectively judge the creative quality of their work, which in business may lead to a selection of an unoriginal business ideas for real-life implementation. It is worthwhile to remember Leonardo da Vinci, who developed the following work philosophy while working on his art paintings: “It is well that you should often leave off work and take a little relaxation because when you come back to it you are a better judge.”
What are the implications of these research findings and of the insights gained from our opening questions for companies that want to promote corporate creativity and produce innovation results? Here are three tips for your consideration:
- When reviewing staffing of your team, make sure that the headcount is not too tight. Plan to avoid the “work like being on the treadmill” trap when the daily schedules of your people are completely filled up with routine work or crisis management.
- Give your employees some space and time for coming up with creative results. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading researcher on creative genius and individual creativity, expressed the time dilemma as follows: “The important thing to remember is that creative energy, like any other form of psychic energy, only works over time. It takes a certain minimum amount of time to write a sonnet or to invent a new machine. People vary in the speed they work - Mozart wrote concerti much faster than Beethoven did - but even Mozart could not escape the tyranny of time. Therefore, every hour saved from drudgery and routine is an hour added to creativity.”
- Remember that productivity is fueled by results and not by the amount of hours spent behind a computer screen in the office.
- Call a meeting of your team and find out when and where they get their best ideas using the beginning question above. Then encourage your employees to spend some time each day on their individual “fun activities” that spur their creativity. Finally, make a credible statement that you will assess the performance of an employee based on the ends and not on the means. I count the hour for my daily run as work time as I get lots of great ideas while running.
- As a leader, don’t forget to live what you pray. “Learn to pause - or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you”, recommends the poet Doug King.
Make sure to find some time every day to “indulge yourself” in your favourite idea booster activities - and soon you will notice that you generate more and more meaningful ideas for your business and that your vision gets sharper.
Dr Detlef Reis is a university lecturer for Business Creativity and Innovation Leadership at the College of Management, Mahidol University. He is also the Founding Director of THINKERGY Limited, a business creativity and innovation consultancy. He can be reached at dr.d@thinkergy.com.
The Toronto Globe and Mail review of True North
HARVEY SCHACHTER
True North
By Bill George with Peter Sims
Below is the review which appears in today’s Toronto Globe and Mail. The principles are similar to Goleman’s: Self Awareness, Social Adaptability, Motivation, Empathy and Self-Regulation. I think you will find this interesting…
“Do you know what your life and leadership are all about? Do you know when you are being true to yourself - authentic - and when you are just giving in to outside forces and the seduction of power or money? Do you, in other words, know your True North?
“Just as a compass points toward a magnetic pole, your True North pulls you toward the purpose of your leadership. When you follow your internal compass, your leadership will be authentic, and people will naturally want to associate with you,” Bill George, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, advises in True North, written with consultant Peter Sims.
To help understand authentic leadership, he interviewed 125 leaders to learn the secrets of their development. Interestingly, he didn’t find any universal characteristics, traits, skills or styles that led to their success. “Rather, their leadership emerged from their life stories. By constantly testing themselves through real-world experiences and by reframing their life stories to understand who they are, these leaders unleashed their passions and discovered the purpose of their leadership,” observes Mr. George, the former chief executive officer of medical technology firm Medtronic Inc.
Those stories are sprinkled throughout the book and are delightful, showing how these individuals who rose to the top in fact struggled at various points, and the crucibles of experience that shaped them.
Their stories will resonate with readers, but are not meant to be a guidebook. “The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. There is no doubt you can learn from their experiences but there is no way you should try to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation,” he warns.
The compass to point you toward your own True North has five elements. It helps you to calibrate your life experiences, and get back on track when you are veering astray.
Self-awareness: You have to understand yourself, because the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself. “Once you have an understanding of your authentic self, you will find that leading others is much easier,” Mr. George says. Without self-awareness, it is easy to get caught up in chasing external symbols of success rather than becoming the person you want to be.
Values and Principles: In gaining a clear awareness of who you are, you must understand the values and principles that guide your leadership. What are your most deeply held values? What principles guide your leadership? What values will you cling to even if those seem to hurt you at that time in your career or life? When values conflict, which ones stand at the top of your hierarchy? The pressure to perform, our fear of failure, and the rewards of success can lead us to deviate from our values so it’s important you clearly understand those principles to help you get back on track.
Motivation: It’s vital to understand what motivates you as a leader and then seek a sweet spot where there is a balance between your motivations and your capabilities. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first identified the notion of “flow,” says you should find out what you are good at and what you like to do. “In those two simple dimensions, Csikszentmihalyi cut through the jargon and summed up what our interviewees learned through hundreds of years of experience,” Mr. George says.
Support team: You must build a support team of family, close friends, mentors and personal and professional support groups to keep you on track when outside forces are pressuring you. You will need one person in particular - a spouse, close friend, or trusted mentor - who offers unconditional love, allowing you to accept yourself for who you are.
Integrated Life: Authentic leaders stay grounded through spending time with their family, having spiritual practices, doing community service, and returning to the place where they grew up. They integrate all aspects of their life to find fulfilment.
It’s an interesting approach, but hardly novel or memorable. What makes the book work are the stories, built around those five themes, in which notable leaders, such as brokerage founder Charles Schwab, Starbucks dynamo Howard Schultz and Avon chief executive officer Andrea Jung, unburden themselves and share pivotal moments, helping us to better understand our own careers.
This website cites a study linking health to charity; take a look
“Why Giving is Good Medicine: Highlights of the New Science
Generous behavior shines a protective light over the entire lifespan. If you engage in helping activities as a teen, you will still be reaping health benefits fifty years later. And no matter when you adopt a giving lifestyle, your well-being will improve—even late in life. By learning to give, you become more effective at living itself.
Giving in high school predicts good physical and mental health in late adulthood, a time interval of over 50 years! Psychologist Paul Wink of Wellesley College studied nearly 200 individuals who have been followed closely since the 1920’s, when they were children, and found that giving protected longevity as well as mental health even half a century later.
Giving significantly reduces mortality in later life. In this new study from Doug Oman of the University of California at Berkeley, 2,000 individuals over age 55 were studied for five years. Those who volunteered for two or more organizations had an impressive 44% lower likelihood of dying. The only activity that had a slightly higher effect was to stop smoking. And sociologist Marc Musick of the University of Texas at Austin found that individuals over 65 who volunteer are significantly less likely to die over the next eight years than those who do no volunteer work.
Generous behavior reduces adolescent depression and suicide risk. The Institute sponsored four special studies on teens. Boys, in particular, benefit markedly from feelings of love and from generous behavior. Just as intriguing is a study from David Sloan Wilson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, showing that teen girls are more giving than teen boys, and that teens who are giving, hopeful, and socially effective, are also happier, more active, involved, excited, challenged, and engaged than their teen counterparts.
Giving quells anxiety. Neal Krause of the University of Michigan followed 976 churchgoing adults over a period of three years. Offering social support to others reduced their anxiety over their own economic situation when they were under economic stress.
Late in life, giving to others helps facilitate self-forgiveness. Krause also found that giving is a potent trigger for forgiveness, and particularly for African-Americans. He studied nearly 1,000 older adults and found that providing emotional support to others enhanced the ease with which African-Americans forgave themselves for their own mistakes.
Giving to others increases your longevity, although receiving the same kind of help did not. Psychologist Stephanie Brown of the University of Michigan spent five years studying 423 older couples. After adjusting for age, gender, and physical and emotional health, Brown found that those who provided significant support to others were more than twice as likely to remain alive in that five year period. These surprising findings ruled out other factors like personality, health, mental health and marital relationship variables.
Giving is so powerful that sometimes even just ‘thinking’ charitable thoughts helps us. The simple act of praying for others, Neal Krause found, reduces the harmful impact of health difficulties in old age for those doing the praying. A new study from the National Institutes of Health shows that merely making a decision to donate to a charity increases activity in parts of the brain that release our feel-good chemicals, dopamine and serotonin. And a new Harvard University study showed that just watching a movie of helping activity boosts the immune system.
Like a resonant bell, giving reverberates all the way through a lifetime”
My twelve year old daughter forwarded this to me via e-mail today…given the transition many you are readily making I thought I’d pass it on:
When things in your life seem almost too much to handle; when 24 hours in a day are not enough; remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 cups of coffee…
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him.
When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.
He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous “yes.”
The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand.
The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.
The golf balls are the important things –your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions— and if everything else was lost and only they remained; your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter; like your job, your house and your car.
The sand is everything else—the small stuff.
“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.
The same goes for life.
If you spend all your ti me and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.
“Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.
Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your spouse out to dinner.
Play another 18.
There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal.
Take care of the golf balls first –the things that really matter–
Set your priorities. “The rest is just sand.”
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.
The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked.”
“It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem; there’s always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend . ” Please share this with someone you care about.
Intuition is a mixture of ‘Executive Intelligence’ and knowledge
D. Murali & Raj Menon
Why are most leaders ineffective? Because skills that enable great leadership have been misunderstood far too long and as a result people have been put in positions of leadership that do not possess the essential capacities to be effective, reasons Justin Menkes, Managing Director of the Executive Intelligence Group. He is hopeful, however, that we can do a better job of identifying and developing the next generation of leaders.
Menkes is the author of ‘Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have’, acknowledged as a work of academic rigour, furnished with many insights. He consults with businesses around the world to help them identify, hire and promote exceptional leaders and managers.
Menkes, whose articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Chief Executive, and Leader to Leader, holds a PhD in organisational behaviour from Claremont Graduate University where he studied with Peter Drucker, Michael Scriven and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He has an MA in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Haverford College.
Here, Menkes takes on a few questions from Business Line.
How would you define ‘Executive Intelligence’?
Executive Intelligence is the ability to recognise what needs to get done and how best to get it done. It is the explicit set of skills that allow certain people to get to the right answer, be it about strategy, handling other people, or adapting themselves. No one can be a star executive without these skills.
Is Executive Intelligence measurable? How? Can it be useful in recruitment exercises?
Executive Intelligence is highly measurable. It is defined by a specific set of skills and questions can be created to test an individual’s performance in these skills. For instance, rather than asking a job candidate if they are capable of recognising unintended consequences, give them a situation that involves critical unintended consequences and see if they show a recognition of likely unintended consequences in their answer.
Does intuition have a place in Executive Intelligence?
Intuition is a mixture of Executive Intelligence and knowledge. But good intuition is always the skilful application of what one knows in order to identify the most sensible solution.
Which works of Peter Drucker and Jim Collins have you been influenced/inspired by?
Executive Intelligence comes as a result of my study under Peter Drucker while I was getting my doctorate. All of his work, as well as his classroom lectures and private counsel to me were essential in the discovery of the theory of Executive Intelligence. Jim Collins’ Good to Great was also very influential. He tells us that great Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) were more like Lincoln and Socrates than like General Patton. Executive Intelligence tells you how to identify who has the capacity to be great CEOs.
Do you think Executive Intelligence can be acquired? Can it be inspired by or drawn from others? Can it be taught?
Like any set of skills, Executive Intelligence is 50 per cent genetic, and 50 per cent taught. I’ve interviewed many of the greatest CEOs in the world and every single one of them points to a key mentor that taught them how to think with rigour. A part of learning these skills comes from working with others that have them. In a culture of highly skilled thinkers, there is no limit to what you can accomplish.
People around can, therefore, make the difference in Executive Intelligence?
The greatest strategy in the world will never work without a critical mass of talented people working together. It is not enough to simply have one great mind anymore. The world changes too fast. A company’s competitive edge comes largely from having highly skilled people throughout its ranks.
You’ve talked about the ‘charisma trap.’ Can you elaborate?
We are drawn in by first impressions, by larger than life figures that seem authoritative and decisive. But the best leaders tend to probe and dig for the truth. They are not impulsive. They are thoughtful, and are careful to solve the right problem, rather than running immediately, full speed, but in the wrong direction.
How big a role will Executive Intelligence have in running effective organisations in the future?
As the pace of change gets faster, the importance of having people with strong decision-making skills becomes more important. As Peter Drucker said, “Charisma matters little in tomorrow’s leader. He or she must be able to think through the fundamentals so that others can work effectively.” Executive Intelligence is getting more important every day.
Does it have a place in running governments too?
It’s hard not to look at world events and not see dramatic examples of government leaders failing because they could not ask good questions, were not skilled enough to think things through. In other words, they lack Executive Intelligence. As a result, their counties and the rest of the world suffer.
Are there situations where Executive Intelligence can be irrelevant?
Yes, there are situations where Executive Intelligence is less relevant. For instance, there is less relevance for it in a job that doesn’t require any decision-making.
What are you working on next?
I’m writing a book about great achievement and why certain human beings demonstrate an unquenchable appetite for excellence.