The Paradox of Our Pursuit
The Paradox of Our Pursuit
I hope you had a good week and that your blame radar was on high alert. If anyone had any interesting experiences relative to blame, please let me know. By the way, thank you to those who filled out the 30-second survey. I got many good ideas and as you will notice this week, I took one of them to heart. You can click HERE and listen to my first-ever audio version of this newsletter. For those that like it please let me know. Lastly, I would love to hear from more of you so for those that didn't click and fill out the survey, please click here. It only takes 30 seconds.
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Now to this week's reflection. I am thinking about happiness. Of course, I’d like to believe I think about happiness all the time. I mean, what else is there we are supposed to thrive for. Are you truly happy? How do we know? It’s annoyingly fleeting. Isn’t it? I mean I can feel I am on cloud nine when my body feels light, my head is filled with energy and positivity and love is all around only to instantly travel at light speed to a very different place that feels so....we'll opposite of happy. Often for reasons that I can't explain.
The point I want to make is that I believe we have gotten the idea of happiness wrong. Perhaps VERY wrong. Could it even be the source of some of our confusion, angst, and pain? I think it might. Hear me out.
Happiness plays such a central theme in our yearnings. It’s the feeling we all want. We are trained and reminded early and often that this is what we truly should aspire to. We have even written the pursuit of happiness as a key part of our constitution. As an inalienable right. We have created iconic proxies for what happiness looks like. Fame, fortune, results, status. Or think of them as evidence of achievement. But often when we are lucky enough to get those things happiness isn’t as automatically present as we expected. Is it? And disappointment and confusion set in. Sometimes we even form aspects of addictions to those outcomes as we keep believing that more is better. It’s an individual analogy to the “too big to fail” syndromes of institutional life. We end up pursuing quantities over qualities.
It might be one of the greatest and most important insights in life that what we want most cannot be pursued directly. Love is the best example of course. We all want to feel loved. But love is a verb. We have TO love in order to FEEL love. Love the feeling is a product of love the verb. And most things are like that. Golf is another example. If you try to shoot a low score you most often shoot a high one. But if you focus on the components of golf, like the basics of your feet, alignment, rhythm, putting stroke, and take one shot at a time and ignore the score, you will often do much better.
The same is true in life relative to happiness. Trust the process. Keep work on the components that you know will make you happy and happiness will ensue. Inputs dictate outputs. You simply can’t chase the output directly. Or as Victor Frankl so beautifully reminded us in one of the most important books I have ever read.
It was a stimulating interview I read with David Krakauer, the head of the Santa Fee Institute that triggered an elevated these thoughts. I subscribe to the beautiful magazine Maize and they asked David this question. His answer grabbed on to me.
MAIZE: In many written constitutions, one of the things that often recur is the pursuit of happiness. Do you share this goal?
DK: I actually don't. Santa Fe is a big center of Buddhism in America, and one of my good friends is a writer and a röshi (an honorific title used in Zen Buddhism, meaning "Old master) here. We've discussed this a lot; we would sit down, and he'd ask me how important happiness is to me. I told him that I've never pursued happiness. I've pursued hard problems straight. I've tried to remedy deficits. But not happiness, because I don't think happiness is a thing. It's an emergent phenomenon, and we study those. It arises from the confluence of a good life and meaning, the pursuit of worthy goals, taking pleasure in hard work, generosity towards other human beings…..which, taken together, generate this phenomenon called happiness. Whereas I get concerned that people who say that they are pursuing happiness are usually not very happy! It’s too vague. It’s the constituent parts that matter, and when you add them together, you reach this mental state that you might label as happiness. But I’m not sure it exists independently of that sum”
I love the phrasing “constituent parts that matter”. That is so true. Happiness is a tapestry we are weaving through life. It has many threads. And is the result of a web of contextual layers of time, experiences, feelings, and relationships. And the ultimate strength and beauty of that tapestry depend on the thickness, colors, and interplay between the different threads. And there are many threads through our lives and they all, in concert, contribute to our ultimate feeling of happiness. Like how we honor and understand our parents and those who came before us. What got us here. How we find, nurture and express love for others. How we make a living and make our time here on earth relevant and meaningful. And yes, how we make money. Enough to feel safe, valued, and resourceful in good times and bad. How we laugh. How we sleep. How we eat. I can go on. But I think you know what I am getting at. Life, and happiness, is a team sport. And like in sports you never win anything immediately. It takes time, patience, resilience, perseverance, luck, and lots of help from others.
To some, the difference between what we pursue directly vs indirectly might seem like semantics and splitting hairs. But I don’t think so. I think it might qualify as one of the most important distinctions we can make in our lives. Our intense desire and yearning for happiness often lead us to counterproductive decisions that make us less happy over time. That is the real paradox of our pursuit. We talk about YOLO and FOMO as two examples. You only live once and the fear of missing out. But if you double click on both those ideas you soon realize they live in the shallows. Yes, we only have one life. But that does not mean we only live one day (which the YOLO internalization often tends to imply). I learned this early from my son Theo when he demonstrated awareness of this important distinction at a very early age. The FOMO one is driving a lot of madness and suboptimal behavior. Fear of missing out from what? One experience won’t make us happy. So, ignore whatever it is you are worried about missing out on and trust the process.
Here are some sources of inspiration for this week:
I was proud to be included in my friend Daniel Lubetzky's great initiative Starts With US. It's very much along the lines of the spirit of this newsletter. He is recruiting YOU and many leaders to help us foster a better conversation. You can read the press release here, go to the website here, or Daniel's LN post here. Please sign up!
This article in Fast Company from LinkedIn’s head of Mindfulness and Compassion (LOVE THAT ROLE) is a good one on the limitations of pursuing happiness directly.
Emily Esfahani Smith gave a great TED talk a few years ago about the very topic of the problem with seeking happiness directly. Her answer, which in a way has been the pursuit in my life, is to find purpose beyond self.
We all want to be happy. Of course. But by focusing too much on what we want we end up getting less of what we want. It might sound counterintuitive but it happens to be very real. So let's focus on the work, the path, the process, the inputs. Not the outputs. Or as Tony Horton, the famous personal trainer often said: "Do your best and forget the rest".
Have a great week!
