Step back and smell the roses

You hear them say it, and you know you’d like to, but you just don’t have enough time. The next big project is just around the corner, and there’s another debate this weekend, and you already have 3 deadlines on the horizon and on and on and on… And so, when decisions come around, we sometimes don’t research them properly.

We feel smart. We feel like we know what we’re stepping into. Changing jobs? Buying a house? Furthering your studies? Getting married? Most people I know will research how to do it. I believe very few ever try to find out how it is to live in the shoes of someone who woks in that company. Or is a house owner at that location. Or is doing his post-graduate studies. Or is married. You get the picture.

I know the facts. I’ve got Wikipedia.

We’ve turned into a society of

I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions…

because with all the world at our fingertips, with all the articles and expertise of the world on the internet, we’ve started to feel like we know it all. Wikipedia has given us data and facts about every possible subject, and we’ve confused having the facts with being  smart and knowledgeable. We don’t bother reading the fine print to understand the consequences of our choices. Rather, we just press ‘NEXT’ and expect the world to have prepared a way for us. Newsflash: sometimes… there isn’t a way.

Sometimes, you step into your decision and only then realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. Well then, too late. You already agreed to them, didn’t you? The terms and conditions of making that decision in the first place.

It’s a wide world out there. Before I graduated and stepped into that wide, unforgiving world, I was lucky enough to have a sister who was candid enough to tell me how the world really was. Specifically, the working life. I’d heard stories before of people going back from the office late and having to work weekends, but they never really bothered me. After all, they were stories.

Thank God for my sister

But my sister made me understand what those stories really meant. It meant late nights pleasing a boss who couldn’t care less about you (seriously, if you were fired, do you think he’d keep your position empty in protest? Hah, good luck with that), weekends spent in a cold office, far away from the light of the sun, and 2 hours of commuting back and forth daily (that’s 2 hours out of 18 waking hours, thankyouverymuch. More than 10% of my valuable time). Lucky for her, she didn’t have to go through all that, but she told me stories of those who did. It’s a miserable existence, when the whole purpose of getting a job is to help you live a happier life in the first place.

So the question was, before I entered the workforce, did I read all the terms and conditions of my choice? Or would I join the industry expecting an ideal job, only to be rudely awakened by the harsh realities of life? I did my research. I didn’t ask about salaries and how fast I could get promoted (although that was important too). I asked about working hours and commuting distances and whether I could ever live with myself doing that job. It wasn’t for me. I read the terms and I didn’t like them. I just couldn’t see myself as a salesperson selling technical things or as a technician installing products at the client’s offices. I wanted to be an engineer dammit! I wanted to do research and make new inventions, I wanted to find problems in society and find new ways of solving them, I wanted to be an engineer!

Facing a decision

So, facing a decision, I made my choice. And it’s a choice I’m happy with so far. It let’s me do what makes me happy. And I’m glad for that.

Once you reach happiness, will it stay with you forever?

It’s impossible to be truly happy all the time. Honestly, that would be a bit psychotic. Can you imagine a person who was smiling all the time? Even when problems happened or someone close to them died? I’d want to put that person in a mental asylum. Life comes with it happiness and sadness, and it’s only human (and healthy) to feel the full spectrum of emotions rather than just being happy all the time. So then, is happiness a stupid goal?

Is happiness a stupid goal?

If happiness comes and goes, why then do we put happiness as our final goal in life?

We still want happiness anyway. And it’s actually fine. I’ve personally divided happiness into two: the feeling and the environment. Happiness is a worthy goal to have, but the goal shouldn’t be just to have that feeling. Rather, your pursuit of happiness should be a happiness of an environment where your innermost needs and desires are taken care of. You’ll still be sad when a loved one dies, but it’s not the sadness of living a life where you haven’t fulfilled your potential and made a difference.

So aim for a future where your inner needs are cared for: security, love, respect, health. Once those few needs are taken care of, everything else is just icing on the cake ( I don’t know why people say this, I like the icing more than the cake). Can’t go to Disneyland? You’d still be a bit sad, but life is still good. And when something truly wonderful happens, then you can freely be happy without feeling like there’s something missing in your life. THIS is the kind of happiness you want.

Why that kind of happiness?

Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It’s classic management theory that tells us that a person has to fulfill his basic needs of food and sleep before he can think of looking around for higher aims. It’s a little flawed here and there and doesn’t work perfectly all the time, but it’s a good rule of thumb that you can use.

And it does make sense to a point. When you still have to worry at the back of your head about your innermost needs, you can’t truly be happy because you haven’t achieved everything you truly need yet. Simple example: how can you celebrate a promotion and be happy when you haven’t eaten or slept in 3 days? It’s just not as important. Or when your son is hooked on drugs? Or when you have $300,000 of debt?

So how can I enjoy my happiness?

Tiny bursts of happiness pale in comparison when truly large problems exist in the background. And this is what I’m saying. The happiness we should be working towards isn’t those tiny bursts of happiness that come along from day to day. The happiness we should be working towards is the happiness of an environment free of major problems. Once you’ve cleared most of those problems, you’re free to not just be happy, but to truly enjoy that happiness when it comes.

Luckily there’s a third choice. Not as popular, but infinitely more productive. Where  you spend a short while on ‘research’ then make a decision based on whatever info you have.

Because the best decision you can make, is often the fastest one.

Actions always speak louder than words.

In the end, when you look back on life, you’ll reflect on the choices you made, not on the discussions you had about those choices. You won’t judge yourself and be proud that you took 2 years to come up with a decision.

Those same 2 years could’ve been put into trying out those choices instead of simply thinking about them.

Thinking about it for a long time probably won’t improve your decision.

In economics you call it decreasing utility. It means that as you spend more and go higher up the expensive scale, the returns you get become less and less per dollar. Example, spending 200 bucks on a phone gets you a phone. Add 200 more? The phone will be 3 times better. Add 200 more? It’ll only be twice better. Keep doing this and you’ll realize later that even adding 200 bucks more won’t improve the phone by any noticable amount.

In the same way, spending more time will not improve your decision much. Spending half an hour thinking on a problem will probably give you 90% of the choices you have. You’ll probably even know what you should do by the end of it. Or maybe it’s a decision that needs a few days of thought, where you need to also ask friends and family. That’s fine. Spending 3 weeks on it probably won’t improve the decision you will make. It might even make you more confused as you over-analyze it.

Spending 2 years? It’ll probably just destroy your self-esteem as someone who can’t even make up your mind. And you’ll never make a decision. So it’s a guarantee that you’re not making the ‘best’ decision.  As they say, “you can’t win unless you play the game“.

But most people never actually think about their futures?

You’ll probably misunderstand when I say this, because generally people DO think about their futures. In fact, a lot of people can’t stop thinking about it. But they only really worry about it. They don’t sit and think about what they really want in their futures, they only follow what society expects them to do and think about how to achieve what society wants from them.

Maybe my vision of life on earth is different from others but I can’t imagine having a job that eats up my nights and weekends, or to live in a house that’s so big that I never get to see my own kids, or to work in a place half an hour away (and that’s without traffic thankyouverymuch), or to be in debt (while the bank is charging interest!), or to while away my life listening to the latest and greatest tunes “because they describe my life so very well!”, or to follow the lives of such strangers on tv that you don’t follow the lives of your own friends and family, or to update my Facebook statuses and my Twitter in the hope somebody will notice me and retweet. But ohmygod, don’t you know it, I’ve just described 95% of the population.

And if I ask where they want to be 20 years from now, they don’t have an answer to give. After thinking a little, they’ll tell you that they want to be a manager, or earn 10 thousand a month. They never say that they want to be the best dad in the world.

It’s almost as if they don’t know what they will want in the future.

Do YOU know what you want in your future?

But once you know what you want, you’ll often have to make a choice on what to do to get there. And life unfortunately offers many choices. Which choice do you take?

I read once before (I forget who wrote it) that when you have a few business ideas in mind, you should always start with the one that fails the fastest. Time is money. Time is the resource that is most precious to you. So if the chances of them succeeding are all decent, choose the one which will fail the fastest. If it succeeds, all is well. But if it fails, at least it will fail fast and you can quickly move on to the next thing.

Faster! Faster!

You never want to try something that is slow in failing. Imagine trying something out where it will take you 5 years to see the result. What if it fails then? 5 years wasted. And if you had another business where you could see the results in 4 months instead? It would’ve failed and you could’ve moved on to the next thing.

I figure life choices can be made the same way. If you’re trying to figure out a new direction in life and you have the choice between an 18 month management program and a 3 month introductory course to PhotoShop skills, it’s probably better to take the 3 month course. If it’s bad for you, you’ve only lost 3 months instead of 18.

I guess that in the end it just means that if you have to make a mistake, start with the mistakes that aren’t so expensive. And expense is measured in terms of time.

So in the end there are two aspects to making fast decisions:

1. Don’t spend too much time making decisions. Often you’ll know what to do in the first 5 minutes anyway. It’s just about whether you can bring yourself to do it.
2. When torn between 2 decisions (because you’re not psychic and can’t predict what will happen in the future), choose the one that will fail the fastest.

If there were 100 ways to do a thing; 90 ways would be wrong and only 1 way would be right. Guess what? There are 9 other ways left.

These 9 other ways are the most efficient ways to do something. Even if they’re not “right”.

Cancel that: It’s because they’re not “right”.

What choices are “wrong” and “right”?

I’m going with a simple definition here. A “wrong” choice is a choice that goes against my core values. A “right” decision takes me closer to them.

Some choices in life are important enough that we have to make a “right” choice. Make a “right” choice when choosing beliefs, friends, attitudes and life goals. What I have to keep reminding myself is that most choices in life are trivial. It doesn’t matter if I don’t make a “right” choice. It’s more important (much more important) that I don’t make a “wrong” choice.

This tiny shift in perception can change your mindset completely.

It saves Time

It takes a long time to come up with the right choice. You have to look at all possibilities and find out how it’ll affect you in the future. The 9 other ways are much more time efficient. As long as they don’t go against your core values, then you’re good.

Prioritizing

With your time savings, you now have an appropriate amount of time to spend on the decisions that really do matter. Prioritizing here means that you prioritize your time wisely. Spend time pondering the big issues in life. Make snap decisions on things that don’t matter.

Regret

When you know that a choice doesn’t go against your core values, you have no reason to regret it later in your life, even if it isn’t the best possible decision you could have made. So even when you come across more information later, or suddenly think of a better way to do things, it won’t matter.

Knowing that your choice is in line with your core values means that you will never have a reason to regret it.

Consistency

In obsessing over making the right choice, we often forget to take into account our core values (that is, if you’ve actually taken time to figure out what they are) and instead end up making a wrong choice.

By ensuring that you don’t make a wrong choice, you put the focus on staying in line with your core values which helps you stay consistent. Which ensures you don’t regret that choice later. (Hmm, back to regret. Told you my words are coming out wrong. Oh well.)

Satisficing. Don’t spend forever choosing what to do. Choose one of the 9 other ways.

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Note: I can’t get the words out correctly in this post. Writer’s block I guess? Either way, the words came out all stilted, without the meaning their supposed to have. Please keep that in mind while reading. Thanks.

So to know if you’re happy or not, you would first have to know how much you want. To that end I’ve identified a few areas that need to be fulfilled to achieve an environment where happiness can thrive. This environment won’t give you happiness, but it will remove your worries so you have the chance to achieve that happiness.

It’s hard to define it all at once so I’ve divided it into sections that can be focused on one at a time.

1. Physical Environment

Inner. Body, health.

Outer. Where you live. Hills? City? Island? Big house? Small house? Mansion?

2. Social Environment

Inner. What kind of person you are. Do you enjoy having people over?

Outer. How many people do you meet everyday? How many friends do you invite over?

3. Emotional Environment

Inner. How you deal with your own emotions. Are you calm? Easily angered?

Outer. When you interact with your friends and family, what’s the level of emotional intimacy? Do you express everything loudly? Or do you tease each other a lot? Do you want to keep the parent-child divide?

4. Intellectual Environment

Inner. Do you challenge yourself intellectually? Always look for the meaning behind things?

Outer. Do situations arise that stimulate your mind?

5. Spiritual Environment

Inner. What level of awareness you’re at. How you feel spiritually.

Outer. What those around you are doing spiritually. The level of encouragement or discouragement from community.

I’ll spend some time writing up about each environment. What do I mean? How does it help us thrive?

And of course, where does money fit into this?

My internship was going on. My final year project (FYP) was due in 3 weeks. My debate team was heading off to a tournament in 5 weeks.

Each of these is enough to consume 50% of my time normally. (30% being for sleep and 20% for other stuff)

50% x 3 = 150%

Sounds like bad math to me coz it doesn’t add up. Where on earth could I find 36 hours in a day?

There just wasn’t enough time

So sleep had to go away. I would finish work everyday and do the 40 min drive back. I’d work on my FYP for a while, preparing the presentation and typing up the final thesis. Then I’d trudge to the university and have debate training every night until 11pm at least. Often till 1am.

Then back home I’d still have to work on my FYP or if I had time then I would read up on some news or other.

We won a trophy but that’s not the point

I finished my internship, successfully gave my FYP presentation and went to the tournament. We got the damned Australs trophy (ESL) and I could them finally get back home and SLEEP.

Not enough sleep makes you crazy

No wonder sleep deprivation can be torture. The happiest moments become pure pain if you have to keep fighting to stay awake.

All the stuff that happens to you everyday has no time to be sorted by your mind during normal sleep (this process is called dreaming). It makes the days just merge together, without a solid start or end to any day.

It makes you go crazy.

Happiness means getting enough sleep.

“That’s the silliest question in the world!!”

After all, how can you not know if you’re happy? But the fact is that you don’t. Not till you notice that you have a great family that supports you, or that you’re not living in the slums.

The fact is that we don’t normally know what we want and it’s only the moment it’s gone that we realize how good we had it! I can only imagine one reason for this. We don’t really know what makes us happy.

We chase other things

And so we chase other things, until family and friends are forgotten. Until we trade that job with a great boss for a job with a little higher pay that we hate.

Maybe, just maybe, we could sit down for a minute. And think about what we actually want in life. What would make us happy. The core values that we are really after.

Maybe we’re already happy?

And maybe, just maybe, we’ll find that a lot of what we’re after is already there around us. Sitting right there waiting for us to appreciate it.

So the question goes:

If you were happy, would you know it?