On Work

Finished Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End.  It's his first novel, and it centers around a series of workplace dramas.  I've been thinking a lot about work, purpose, and happiness lately.

It's funny: happiness ends up depending on such a random mix of factors.  But, given how many hours we spend working, it's not surprising that how happy you are will partially depend on how satisfied you are by your work.

The following passage is taken from the novel and is a conversation between a partner at an advertising firm and her subordinate:

   He was silent.  "You've worked hard."
   "Yes," she agreed.  She had finished putting on her shoes and was now sitting perpendicular to the table with her hands holding her knees.  "Too hard?"
   There was a note of vulnerability in the question that he wasn't expecting.  But it was also clear, the way she was looking at him, that she wanted him to answer truthfully.  "I don't know," he said.  "What's too hard?"
   "All these other people have so much going on in their lives.  Their nights, their weekends.  Vacations, activities.  I've never been able to do that."
   "Which is why you're a partner."
   "But what am I missing?  What have I missed?"
   "Have you been happy doing it?"
   "Happy?"
   "Content.  Has it been worthwhile?  The work?"
   "Yes," she said.  "Maybe.  I suppose."
   "Then you may be better off than they are.  Many of them would prefer not to be here, and yet this is where they spend most of their time.  Percentagewise, maybe you're the happiest."

Ambition and Happiness

One more post on The Happiness Project. Going back to the idea of the relationship between happiness and work, how does ambition fit in? The author doesn't have any conclusion on the relationship between ambition and happiness, and discusses it briefly:

There's a common belief that happiness and ambition are incompatible. Many ambitious people I've known seem eager to claim that they aren't happy, almost as a way to emphasize their zeal, in echo of Andrew Carnegie's observation "Show me a contented man, and I'll show you a failure."

Studies show that many creative, influential people in the arts and public life score above average in "neuroticism" (i.e., they have a greater propensity to experience negative emotions); this discontent arguably urges them to higher achievement. Other studies, however, show that people tend to think more flexibly and with more complexity when they're feeling happy.

Quite frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about this. A number of my friends and peers are people that I would characterize as 'ambitious' (even if they wouldn't necessarily describe themselves that way). But does that mean that they'll always be unhappy, striving for something more?

Perhaps the key is to find happiness in the struggle for higher achievement?

The Happiness Project

I missed the boat on New Year's Resolutions this year. Normally, it's quite a production: I sit down and spend several hours of navel-gazing, trying to figure out what I learned over the past year and what I would like to change for the upcoming year. This year, I spent the holiday season traveling, and never had the opportunity for my annual journal entry.

Fast-forward two months, and I found myself at my local bookstore, searching for The Happiness Project. I had heard about the book courtesy of a few legal blogs: it's authored by a former lawyer, who left her law firm to become a writer. It was a little embarrassing to find myself in the Self-Help section, so I bought the book to read from the luxury of my couch.

And, in a way, it made me think of the 2011 resolutions that never happened. It might seem indulgent -- who spends a year devoted to the pursuit of happiness? -- but the author's journey made me think about my own, and what I can change to make myself, well, happier. It's also an amalgam of research studies; although, like Gladwell in Blink, she cherry-picks research studies that support her hypotheses.

One of the parts that resonated most, though, was when offered the following anecdote:

"Because work is so crucial to happiness, another person's happiness project might well focus on choosing the right work. I, however, had already been through a major happiness quest career shift. I'd started out in law, and I'd had a great experience. But when my clerkship with Justice O'Connor drew to a close, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next.

During this time, I visited the apartment of a friend who was in graduate school studying education, and I noticed several thick textbooks lying around her living room.

"Is this what they make you read for your program?" I asked, idly flipping through the dense, dull pages.

"Yes," she said, "but that's what I read in my spare time, anyhow."

For some reason, that casual answer shocked me to attention. What did I do in my spare time? I asked myself. As much as I liked clerking, I never spent one second more on legal subjects than I had to."

She later continues:

"My ambition, however, was also a factor in leaving the law. I'd become convinced that passion was a critical factor in professional success. People who love their work bring an intensity and enthusiasm that's impossible to match through sheer diligence. I could see that in my co-clerks at the Supreme Court: they read law journals for fun, they talked about cases during their lunch hours, they felt energized by their efforts. I didn't.

Enthusiasm is more important to master than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you're better off pursuing a profession that come easily and that you love, because that's where you'll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage."

It makes sense -- which then leads to the next question: How do you discover your passion?

This getting older business

... never seems to get easier. Questions abound as my head/heart grapples with questions about my life direction, career path, final destination. Why can't someone just tell me what to do with my life?

Value Systems

"My father's generation grew up with certain beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the amount of money one earns is a rough guide to one's contribution to the welfare and prosperity of our society. I grew up unusually close to my father. Each evening I would plop into a chair near him, sweaty from a game of baseball in the front yard, and listen to him explain why such and such was true and such and such was not. One thing that was almost always true was that people who made a lot of money were neat. Horatio Alger and all that. It took watching his son being paid 225 grand at the age of twenty-seven, only two years on the job, to shake his faith in money. He has only recently recovered from the shock.

I haven't. When you sit, as I did, at the center of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever and benefit out of all proportion to your value to society (as much as I'd like to think I got only what I deserved, I don't), when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are all raking in faster than they can count it, what happens to the money belief? Well, that depends. For some, good fortune simply reinforces the belief. They take the funny money seriously, as evidence that they are worthy citizens of the Republic. It becomes their guiding assumption -- for it couldn't possibly be clearly thought out -- that a talent for making money come out of a telephone is a reflection of merit on a grander scale. It is tempting to believe that people who think this way eventually suffer their comeuppance. They don't. They just get richer. I'm sure most of them die fat and happy.

For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled; the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. The funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished."