purpose

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Recap: Finding Meaning in Work

This week’s posts laid the groundwork for the productivity chapter of Supermorning. We discussed how essential meaning and purpose are for sustaining high levels of productivity. 

Let’s take a look.

The checklist

  1. Why do you work? There are two main pathways:
    • You work to earn money to build a good life.
    • You work towards an inspiring purpose doing something you would happily do for free. 
  2. Debt, work and consumption.
    • The first option typically gets people stuck in a vicious cycle between high consumption and stressful work.
    • Getting out of this cycle is challenging and should be done as early in life as possible. 
  3. Liberty, purpose and obsession. 
    • The alternative is a virtuous cycle between liberty, purpose and high life efficiency. 
    • This cycle easily leads to obsession, which could become unhealthy if left unchecked. 
  4. Life is long enough to do special things.
    • A truly worthwhile purpose is a multi-decade project.
    • Over such a time frame, the power of compounding can produce stunning results. 

In short, productivity becomes a whole lot easier if you’re inspired by what you do. Liberty and purpose are the keys to such inspiration. 

So, get yourself into the virtuous cycle with a multi-decade awe-inspiring purpose and see what happens 🙂 

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Plenty of Time to Write Your Own Story

Life is long.

If you look after yourself, it can be even longer.

And if technology comes through, who knows how many more decades can be added.

All this time makes it realistically possible to pursue some truly awe-inspiring purposes. And such a pursuit can unlock bountiful supplies of inspiration and meaning.  

Few would argue that an inspired and meaningful life is a life truly worth living. 

Your awe-inspiring purpose

A wise man once said that people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. 

Awe-inspiring purposes count in decades, not years. Chasing after overnight success does not work here. 

Accepting that your awe-inspiring purpose will take decades is quite liberating.

It takes the pressure off and makes it a whole lot easier to handle the countless setbacks that will inevitably come your way. 

This can give you the privilege of pursuing a truly inspirational purpose with very limited stress. Add in the lovely virtuous cycle we looked at yesterday, and you have yourself one fine life 🙂

The power of compounding

Another thing that works over decades instead of years is exponential growth.

A 7% improvement every year might not sound like much. But over a decade, such gains will double your fortunes. The next decade brings another doubling. And then another. 

I’m convinced that someone in pursuit of a truly inspirational purpose can achieve a considerably shorter doubling time than one decade. 

And if they can, they’re in for some pretty spectacular growth:

The power of compounding only works when investment returns are continuously reinvested. And this is what the pursuit of an awe-inspiring purpose is all about.

Such a purpose makes continuous reinvestment totally natural. I’m just at the start of this reinvestment journey now and I can tell you: it’s already way more exciting than typical consumer spending 🙂

Just start

The human mind finds it difficult to think in decades. We’re short-term thinkers, pursuing short-term pleasure and avoiding short-term pain. 

But long-term thinking is within our power. And when your purpose starts coming together, pursuing this long-term objective actually brings plenty of short-term pleasure. 

So, just start. The decades will pass anyway. Might as well spend them on a compounding journey in pursuit of your awe-inspiring purpose 🙂

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The Story of Liberty, Purpose and Obsession

The alternative to a life of debt, work and consumption is one of liberty, purpose and (hopefully healthy) obsession. 

Obsession is the tricky character in this trio. On the one hand, obsession can give you the focus and flow to accomplish great things. But on the other, it can also destroy health and relationships. 

Today’s post tries to find the right balance. But first, we need to understand the self-sustaining nature of this story. 

The virtuous cycle

Those who have built high life efficiency and financial resilience can transition from yesterday’s vicious cycle to this virtuous alternative: 

Those who manage to leverage their liberty to turn their purpose into their job are those who transcend work.

For these creators, work does not require willpower. Instead, it inspires and fills that hollowness inside that so many others can only fill through self-destructive consumption. 

The result is guaranteed stellar levels of life efficiency, granting even more liberty to pursue a chosen purpose. 

Obsession of the healthy kind

Self-earned freedom to pursue a truly inspiring purpose easily leads to obsessive behavior. This journey is just so remarkably interesting that it naturally starts to dominate thinking patterns.

All this thinking inevitably leads to even more interesting ways to pursue your purpose, leading to a self-strengthening cycle all by itself. 

As long as your purpose will contribute to society, this is certainly a good thing. But it can also be taken too far. 

Obsession of the unhealthy kind

An obsession becomes unhealthy when it starts to negatively affect your health and relationships. 

For me, avoiding health impacts is easy because of a deep understanding that excellent health is a prerequisite to pursuing my purpose. This effectively makes healthy living part of my purpose. 

Maintaining healthy professional relationships is relatively simple for the same reason as outlined above. But personal relationships run a bigger risk of being damaged by creative obsession. 

The best I’ve come up with to date is to massively prioritize quality over quantity. I spend relatively little time on personal relationships, but ensure that I’m all in and fully present for every interaction.

It also helps to recognize the long-term value of a few close personal relationships. We’ll return to this long-term view tomorrow.  

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Life Efficiency

Our final intangible asset is a little unconventional, but possibly the best investment of them all. 

Life efficiency is the ability to derive more life from fewer inputs. Put another way, it’s the art of enjoying life without having to try so hard. 

Trying too hard

Consumerism is a great example of low life efficiency.

People force themselves though tedious 9-5 jobs to earn the money consumerism promises them can be exchanged for happiness. 

But as we discussed earlier, happiness comes from a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. It cannot be bought.

Hence, all the effort invested in a consumerist lifestyle yields little more than environmental destruction: 

High inputs + low outputs = poor life efficiency. 

Self sabotage

Eliminating self sabotage is essential for high life efficiency. Here, we’re talking about things like empty calories and other addictions, negative self-talk, stress about things outside your control, binge-watching or binge-eating, and actions that harm your important relationships. 

Self sabotage means you invest effort to make your own life worse. In other words: 

Increased inputs + decreased outputs = negative life efficiency. 

Living lightly

An efficient life is one with low inputs and high outputs. It’s generally best to start with getting comfortable with the low inputs. 

The skill of living lightly makes life a whole lot easier. It hinges on three interconnected actions:

  1. Reduce consumption, thus increasing your financial freedom and allowing you to…
  2. Reduce pure willpower-driven effort, which will help a lot to…
  3. Reduce stress, which lowers your vulnerability to consumerism and self sabotage.

This virtuous cycle starts with step 1. Indeed, the ability to derive greater happiness from less consumption is an incredibly valuable intangible asset.  

Direct the resulting space to purpose

Living lightly will free up plenty of space in your life, manifested in the form of time, money, energy, motivation and peace of mind. 

Gradually filling this space with your purpose completes the picture of life efficiency: 

Low input + high output = high life efficiency 🙂

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Recap: The Pursuit of Happiness

People have been searching for the key to happiness for millennia. 

This week’s posts presented my take on this interesting subject. Given its complexity, the posts were a bit longer than usual, but they certainly were very interesting to research and write. 

Today’s post presents the more easily digestible summary.

The checklist

Here are the four key happiness insights shared this week:

  1. Directly chasing happiness is pointless.
    • The amount of time and money spent on instant pleasure activities is actually a good indicator of unhappiness.
    • Instead, we need to focus on things that give meaning to life.  
  2. Materialistic pursuits of happiness have their benefits, but also some serious drawbacks.
    • Although the pursuit of material success brings little lasting happiness, it has fueled great human progress.
    • But this motivation has a dark side in terms of environmental destruction, social injustice and self-destructive behaviors.
  3. The combination liberty and purpose offers an attractive solution.
    • This philosophy can further accelerate human progress without any of the downsides.
    • As an added bonus, it can actually bring genuine life satisfaction. 
  4. Informed gratefulness can make big contributions to happiness.
    • Gratitude increases happiness because it can reset our benchmarks to more reasonable levels. 
    • There are at least 6 big reasons to be grateful that most of us take for granted today. 

These insights won’t make you permanently happy. But they can certainly give much more meaning to the daily grind and create a more positive outlook on life. 

I really hope they work for you as they do for me! A happier world is a better world for all of us 🙂

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Liberty and Purpose

Yesterday’s post gave an interesting discussion about the implications of our natural tendency to link happiness to material success.

The main conclusion was that, for us lucky 20% who live in material comfort, this instinctive motivation has almost no upside, but huge downside. 

Today’s post will propose a much more attractive alternative philosophy. 

Personal liberty

Over the course of human history, millions of people have fought and died for personal liberty: the right to choose one’s own actions (as long as they don’t harm society). 

Today, most people enjoy this historically rare privilege. But for many, it’s only theoretical freedom. In practice, they’re economic slaves living paycheck-to-paycheck, working jobs they hate.

This economic slavery is maintained by a master called consumerism: the false promise of happiness from buying stuff we don’t really need.  

Breaking free of this economic slavery is one half of the key to overcoming the bad and the ugly aspects of our materialistic pursuit of happiness discussed yesterday. 

Purpose 

The other half of the key is having something truly meaningful to do with genuine personal liberty. Without this second half of the key, all the liberty in the world will bring no lasting happiness. 

Note that a purpose is not the same as a goal. It’s not something clearly quantifiable that can be ticked off a list one day. 

Instead, it’s a reason for getting up every morning that will always be there. For example, mine is contributing to solving the great global sustainability challenge. 

A key feature of a good purpose is that it motivates you to contribute to society with no expectation of a return.

If money is your primary motivation for working, it’s a clear sign that you are yet to find your true purpose. But don’t worry. You have time 🙂 

Liberty and purpose can change the world

As outlined in yesterday’s post, the good from our flawed material pursuit of happiness is the rapid economic progress enabled by capitalism. But this has truly ugly consequences in the form of environmental destruction, social injustice and self-destructive behaviors. 

Someone with a clear purpose and the freedom to pursue this purpose will probably create even more value for society, and do so without any of the ugly consequences. 

This philosophy shifts the target in the pursuit of happiness from maximum material consumption to free creative expression. Naturally, this leads to much less consumption and environmental impact.

It also halts the growing gap in living standards between the rich and the poor. Creators will often end up rich, but they do not display these riches, investing it in their purpose instead (which often involves the solution of key societal problems). 

A true purpose also reduces our tendency to self-destruct, much of which is fueled by instant-pleasure consumption and the disillusionment with the poor results of this direct pursuit of happiness. 

Earning freedom to pursue your purpose

The big challenge is that it mostly takes many years to earn genuine personal liberty. This will be the topic of the next chapter of the Supermorning series, starting next week. 

In the meantime, it’s important to realize that personal liberty is not binary. There is a broad spectrum between total slavery and true liberty. 

Gradually developing your life from slavery to liberty is an awesome journey, regardless of the final destination. 

Along this journey, you can work on finding and refining your purpose. Then, as your liberty gradually increases, you can pursue your purpose with increasing levels of freedom and focus. 

In my view, this journey towards liberty and purpose is the most efficient and socially responsible pursuit of happiness at our disposal. 

Tomorrow, we’ll put the cherry on top of this much more rational pursuit of happiness. See you then!

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Chasing Happiness

This final week of the psychology sub-chapter of Supermorning will tackle a very complicated subject: happiness. 

People have been chasing happiness for centuries. In this quest, we’ve built a world of riches beyond our forefathers’ wildest dreams. And yet, the search for happiness has grown more intense than ever. 

Will we ever find nirvana? Probably not.

Is it worth continuing the search? Definitely! 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the basics. 

For starters, let’s reduce global suffering

We may never find the key to everlasting happiness, but we can definitely do a lot to reduce global suffering.

About 70% of the global population still lives in conditions of material lack (<$20/day), and more than half of those in serious poverty (<$5/day). 

Aside from poverty, there remains a lot of exploitation and discrimination against those unlucky enough to be born into disadvantaged social classes. This only compounds the suffering brought by poverty.  

I maintain an extremely frugal lifestyle that costs me a little over $30/day (adjusted for purchasing power). It really pains me to see how many people still reside below this mark in the graph above. This is one of the key motivations behind my dedication to sustainable development. 

People reading this are probably with me safely above the $30/day mark (you can easily calculate your number by dividing your average daily living costs by the purchasing power of your country’s currency given here). 

Be very grateful for your good fortune of being born into affluence. 

Rich world problems

Us fortunate few who have enough income for a comfortable life (and don’t face serious exploitation or discrimination) can move on to the next step in the quest for happiness. 

And we do give this our very best shot, spending trillions on various happiness-on-demand activities like entertainment, sugary and fatty foods, alcohol and other drugs, luxurious treatments and holidays. Then we spend trillions more on status symbols like oversized houses, fancy cars and fashionable clothing.

But despite all this effort, that blissful state of happiness remains elusive. If anything, the rich world has a higher incidence of mental disorders than the developing world. 

This is not all that surprising, given that the three topics coming up most frequently in happiness studies have little to do with such direct pursuits of happiness: 

  1. Nourishing relationships
  2. Stimulating work 
  3. Physical and emotional health

In fact, keeping these elements of your life in good shape often requires plenty of effort and sacrifice. But they provide one decisive benefit: meaning. 

Those who find real meaning in caring for themselves (health), their friends and family (relationships) and their community/society (work), can find contentment in almost any situation.

Without such a clear sense of purpose, no amount of pleasure can ever bring lasting happiness. 

Chasing ghosts

Yep, the more directly you pursue happiness, the less likely you are to find it. In fact, the amount of time and money you spend on happiness-on-demand products and services is an excellent measure of unhappiness. 

This bring us to possibly the biggest fraud of our modern civilization: the false promise of happiness through consumption. But let’s leave that for tomorrow.  

See you then!