There is No Progress

"On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface, when one gives up the struggle, sinks and disappears from sight... There is no progress: there is perpetual movement, displacement, which is circular, spiral, endless. Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it lead him."-Henry Miller

Did You Go to College So You Wouldn't Have Regrets?

That may not have been the best plan. The journal Social Psychological and Personality Science has published the results of its study on regret. (No, I don't read psychological journals in my spare time. I read about it on Mind Hacks.)

Among their findings was this: "Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets. Apparently, the more education obtained, the more acute may be the sensitivity to aspiration and fulfillment."

Want to know what else people regret? Follow the link above.

More Support of a Less Goal Oriented Approach to Life

Two days ago I posted a video interview with Stephen Fry who made the bold declaration that people should not have goals. (I would love to hear him give a commencement speech on this topic.)

Today Idea Connection posted an article that takes a scientific approach to the same theme. If you haven't done so, watch the video above first. I'll wait...

Daniel Simons, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created this as a follow up to what is apparently a "classic video." I had not seen the original, but was tipped off to the "invisible gorilla" in advance by the article that pointed me to it. (Its title: "Invisible Gorilla Blindness.") So I did not miss the gorilla. I did, however, miss the new tricks Simons had in store.

Peter Lloyd writing at Idea Connection was fooled twice, "I'm twice convinced that we just don't see what we don't expect. It's not just difficult to see what we don't expect, we consistently see what we expect to see. In fact, it's unavoidably easy to see what we expect to see."

In a similar experiment I read about several years ago, subjects were asked to rate how lucky they were. Then they were given a task. They had to read a newspaper and count the number of times a particular word appeared. In big block lettering in the paper was a line saying "Congratulations! You have won $100, come up to the experimenter to collect your prize!"

Most of the subjects were so focused on their counting task that they did not even notice the message. There was a correlation, however, between calling yourself "lucky" and seeing the message. The self-described lucky spotted it and won. The self-described unlucky did not. The moral as I understood it was that being open to the unexpected makes you lucky.

Gordon MacKenzie wrote a wonderful little book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball. The titular “hairball” is the corporate group-think that grows in an organization over time. Corporations don’t begin as giant hairballs. They begin life as simple, effective concepts, one or two strands of the ideas that will produce success. As success builds on success, more and more strands of “things that have worked in the past” get woven together. Next thing you know, you’ve got a giant hairball.

“It is a common history of enterprises to begin in a state of naïve groping, stumble onto success, milk the success with a vengeance and, in the process, generate systems that arrogantly turn away from the source of their original success: groping,” MacKenzie wrote.

Picture Michael Douglas delivering this line: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that groping -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Groping is right. Groping works..."

Bringing this back to the theme of Broke is Beautiful (see, I am goal oriented enough to get back to my book), I put it to you that we are often so focused on counting our money, and on amassing the material wealth and objects we think will get us to our goals that we fail to see the opportunities standing in front of us in gorilla suits.

Portions of this article were excerpted from the book Broke is Beautiful by Running Press.

Heresy! Stephen Fry Says: Don't Set Goals. Cool!

Discovered today at Open Culture, which offers all manner of free courses, lessons, audio books and so on, this video. "What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18."

The British actor and writer Stephen Fry, now in his 50s, reflects on what he would tell his 18 year old self about life. Spoiler alert! He concludes that kindness will get you farther than talent or power.

He also says, "One of the worst things you can do in life is set yourself goals."

It occurred to me while watching that this is the equivalent of heresy in U.S. culture. Americans, as a group, have a more consistent belief in the importance of goals than we have in God. Even our atheists and agnostics share a faith in the importance of goal-setting, being ambitious and working towards something. (This could have something to do with our Calvinist history, but I'll leave the real historians and sociologists to speculate on that.) No one ever achieved anything (and achieving is what it's about, of course) without clearly defined goals.

Here's what Fry has to say: "Goal orientation is absolutely disastrous in life. Two things happen. One is that you fail to meet your goals so you call yourself a failure. Secondly you meet your goal and go, 'Well, I'm here now what.'... Because you're going for something outside yourself."

The whole interview (speech?) struck a chord that resonated well with what I was trying to articulate in Broke is Beautiful about working in flow, and valuing relationships and social capital over financial capital.

STEPHEN FRY: WHAT I WISH I'D KNOWN WHEN I WAS 18 from Peter Samuelson on Vimeo.

Dreams on Ice

“The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It’s scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less. This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren’t just putting our dreams on ice – we’re killing them.”-Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life? Fast Company.