Author Archives: Ben Casnocha

Would You Rather Enjoy Today, or Have Great Memories Tomorrow and Forever?

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Would you rather enjoy today, or have great memories tomorrow and forever?

Should you optimize decision making in life to have great experiences in the moment or to create great memories to look back on later?

They are not the same thing; to get one you may have to trade off on the other. In other words, oftentimes if you want to maximize the likelihood of experiencing pleasure in the present means you minimize the likelihood of creating a great memory to look back on in the future.

Travel illustrates the choice. Sit on a beach in Mexico for a week and you’ll almost certainly enjoy a decent amount of experienced, in-the-moment pleasure. But it’s not likely to lead to many memories, especially if you’ve sat on a lot of beaches before. On the other hand, wind your way through the streets of Cairo for the first time and you’ll likely experience some harrowing and maybe not altogether very fun moments, but you’ll be telling stories about your journey years later.

There are merits to both styles of travel. The experiencing-self enjoys being able to be in the moment on the Mexico beach; to be mindful, meditative, and attentive; to feel each sensation. To have a great meal in a low-stress situation, say. The remembering-self (to use Daniel Kahneman’s terminology), on the other hand, wants memories. In an article about his trip to Tasmania, James Fallows said, “I judge travel by the density of the memories it creates.” Why? Because memories underpin meaning.

It’s when I take stock of my life as a whole — “as a whole” being a trigger phrase for memory — that I feel most deeply satisfied. It’s when I look back on all that I’ve experienced that my life feels most meaningful. I revel in the sweep of nostalgia. Ultimately, I think memories matter most. We are the stories we tell ourselves, says Joan Didion. Yet, unless we’re on a strong diet of self-delusion, we can only tell stories about things we remember.

Practically speaking, I’d argue most people underinvest in memories. Here some tips:

Prize novelty. Novelty leads to memories. Seek bulk, positive randomness. Mix things up. New food, new people, a new route home from work. Steven Johnson wrote about slowing down time by moving to California from New York. A new place forces you to pay attention and take in new complexity—denser memories result. As we get older, by default, people experience less and less novelty. I sometimes hear people who turn 50 remark that their 40 birthday felt like just yesterday. I’ve never heard somebody who turned 30 say the same about turning 20. We generate fewer and fewer memories in late age. Unless, that is, we do something about it, by prioritizing novelty. Here are 50 specific ways to invite newness into your life.

Take on challenges; endure struggle; feel intense lows and highs. You remember what you have to overcome. As Oliver Burkeman says, an awe-filled life is about feeling more intensely — experience lower lows, like during a mighty struggle where you’re totally exhausted, and revel in higher highs when you make it to the finish line.

Do things with people. And use people as a key variable. Great memories usually involve other people. Relationships matter. But think of people as a variable that can easily layer novelty on top of the tried-and-true. New people, old places. Or old people, new routines. Go to Mexico every year for Christmas, but with a different group of friends each time. Or go on a different hike every week, but with the same friend.

Seek novelty, yes, except when novelty itself becomes routine. Non-stop travelers no longer see a new hotel or city as new. Instead, they process the novelty in terms of their past experiences. The new hotel is worse/better/different than last night’s hotel, instead of being evaluated on its own terms. Meeting new people from different backgrounds becomes a chore instead of an exciting quest to understand the variety of human nature.

Review and re-live memories soon after the fact. Go to the Sunday brunch after the Saturday night wedding. Walk down memory lane with your colleagues after a big week at the office. As I’ve written, doing this systematically can significantly increase an experience’s meaningfulness – in part by solidifying the memory.

If you consciously focus on creating a great memory in the moment, it sticks. A friend writes: “I once had a passion fruit Pisco sour in Lima, Peru that was so great I quipped: “Just the memory of the drink would have been worth the $7.” Something about making that statement has made the memory of the drink stick much better in my mind. I can still almost taste it and I especially remember the thick, velvety texture. Perhaps just a coincidence, but I do see some potential in focusing consciously on how great certain memories will later be.”

You want to both enjoy today and have a rich memory?

The wise approach seems to be to optimize for both the experiencing-self and the remembering-self at the same time. You want both in-the-moment pleasure and memories.

Witness the balancing act in this regard at weddings. To create memories, couples spend a fortune on wedding photographers. The couple’s logic is, “In the end, all we’re left with are the photographs of the day.” At a recent wedding I attended, the photographers popped out of a curtain behind the couple as the couple was reading their vows. It was distracting; it hurt the moment that was being experienced by everyone at the time. But it no doubt led to some especially intimate photographs that will be enjoyed for years to come.

But elsewhere at the wedding, present-experience optimization prevailed. The couple didn’t stop during the vows and hold a pose for the photographer. They didn’t re-do certain lines for the benefit of the photographer to capture them at just the right angle with their mouth open just so. They selected the flowers, tables, and music primarily with the experience-self’s experience in mind, not caring what was going to show up best for the photographs and videos that the remembering-self would enjoy later.

Optimizing for both is good guidance for life decisions more generally. Thus, the bottom line…

Bottom Line: Have a few key areas of non-novelty; put everything else on the chopping block. Do have a long-term significant other. Do have a “home” that doesn’t change every year. Do maintain some traditions and routines. Cherish these routines. (Put them in a lockbox that only you and Al Gore have the key to.) Then, experiment widely, take chances, and kill your status quo everywhere else – you’ll be investing in your memory bank, slowing down time, and increasing the meaning you feel when you take stock of your life.

(Thanks to Stephen Dodson, Charlie Songhurst, Tyler Cowen, Nathan Labenz, Michael McCullough, David Zetland, and Brad & Amy Feld for their useful feedback on this topic.)

(Photo: Prathima Pingali. Originally published on LinkedIn.)

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What Questions Are You Thinking About?

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I like Robin Hanson’s advice to frame a conversation this way — it can be a telling litmus test:

I know many folks who consider themselves intellectuals. I guess they think that in part because if you asked them “What have you been up to lately?,” they’d tell you about books, articles, blogs, or twitter feeds that they’ve been reading. Or perhaps TED talks they’ve watched. This is why I prefer the question “What have you been thinking about lately?” And I’ll usually be a bit disappointed if the answer isn’t about a question they’ve been trying to answer.

Yes perhaps if they just mention a topic, that really stands for some questions about that topic. But often people thinking about a topic are mostly trying to find more supporting evidence for things they already believe. Less often are they taking what I consider the most productive intellectual strategy: focus on an important question where you don’t know the answer.

Once you start to think about a question, you’ll probably soon start to break it down into supporting sub-questions. Instead of asking “How can we get world peace?” you might ask “What most goes wrong when the United Nations intervenes?” or “Why do citizens on the losing sides of wars support them?” And hearing about your interesting sub-questions might just make my day. That is why I, like the Harvard admissions dean above, will be especially eager to hear that you’ve been thinking about interesting questions.

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What I’ve Been Reading

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Books, books, books.

1. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Few writers could produce brief character sketches of about a dozen or so people, break up each sketch into five or six different parts, and then spread those parts out across different Unknownchapters. Somehow, Packer manages to paint vivid pictures of his subjects — who range from a tobacco farmer to a Washington lobbyist to a Silicon Valley icon. Collectively, these portraits lead to a vivid image of what’s happening in America today. As David Brooks wrote in his thoughtful review of the book, the “unwinding” that Packer refers to has to do with three large transformations:

The first is the stagnation of middle-class wages and widening inequality. Depending on which analyst you read, this has to do with the changing nature of the information-age labor market, changing family structures, rising health care costs, the decline of unions or the failure of education levels to keep up with technology.

The second is the crushing recession that began in 2008. Depending on which analyst you read, this was caused by global capital imbalances, bad Federal Reserve policy, greed on Wall Street, faulty risk-assessment models or the insane belief that housing prices would go on rising forever.

The third transformation is the unraveling of the national fabric. Depending on which analyst you read, this is either a gigantic problem (marriage rates are collapsing; some measures of social connection are on the decline) or not a gigantic problem (crime rates are plummeting, some measures of social connection are improving).

2. Creamy & Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food by Jon Krampner. I love peanut butter. When I return home from trips, one of the first things I do is eat peanut butter. I eat it before going to bed. If that’s not comfort food, I don’t know what is. So skimming this history of Jif and Skippy and the other brands was fun. Hard core fans only. I did like these sentences: “More than Mom’s apple pie, peanut butter is the all-American food. With its rich, roasted-peanut aroma and flavor, caramel hue, and gooey, consoling texture, peanut butter is an enduring favorite, found in the pantries of at least 75% of American kitchens.”

3. How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell. This book is high end self-help — it asks “How to live?” and each chapter focuses on a different theme, with the insights all derived from Michel de Montaigne’s classic Essays. It’s a stimulating collection and an accessible introduction to Montaigne’s work.montainge

If you fail to grasp life, it will elude you. If you do grasp it, it will elude you anyway. So you must follow it — and “you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow.”

The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience — but, as Montaigne learned, one of the best techniques for doing this is to write about everything. Simply describing an object on your table, or the view from your window, opens your eyes to how marvelous such ordinary things are. To look insidey ourself is to open up an even more fantastical realm. The philosopher Maurice Merlau-Ponty called Montaigne a writer who put “a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.” More recently, the critic Colin Burrow has remarked that astonishment, together with Montaigne’s other key quality, fluidity, are what philosophy should be, but rarely has been, in the Western tradition.

4. Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop and Matthew Green. A solid introduction to the new generation of philanthrpists like Gates and the mega giving they are undergoing. Some good coverage of corporate philanthropy, too. Two random lessons:

  • People are motivated to give in large part due to religious faith; this explains why Americans are more charitable than Europeans (Americans are more religious) and why people on the political right give more than those on the political left.
  • Government aid usually requires broad consensus and adheres to political correctness; private philanthropy, Mike Bloomberg suggests, is unique in that it can pursue a diversity of agenda.

5. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant. A very short and simple book that has generated some buzz amongst some Silicon Valley insiders. How simple? The point of the book is to tell yourself “I love myself” over and over and over again. That’s it. It’s almost laughably simple and almost certainly narcissistic. And I’m not sure I’d recommend the book. Then again, I tried it, and with some sheepishness, I must admit it does make me feel better when I’m feeling blue….

6. Fuck It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way by John Parkin. “Fuck it” is the Western expression of the Eastern idea of “let it go.” Let it go. Fuck it. Move on. Another extremely simplistic book I’m not sure I’d recommend, but kind of amusing to read in parallel with Love Yourself.

7. Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia.

consciousThis is an important book. Mackey and Sisodia present a framework for thinking about capitalism that involves multiple stakeholders and a do-good mission embedded in a for-profit structure. Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, believes we need to “liberate the heroic spirit of business” by letting free market enterprise flourish, because the businesses that themselves flourish are the ones that maintain elevated values, pursue a noble mission, and satisfy a variety of stakeholders (not just the shareholders). I expect we’ll see more and more books that seek to explain the default moral arc of capitalism.

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The Power of the Word “Yet”

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Suppose your boss pulls you aside and tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project.”

Then suppose a different situation, where your boss tells you: “You don’t have the right skills for the project, yet” or “You don’t yet have the connections to make this deal happen.”

The word yet makes all the difference in the world. In the first example, you feel like a dud. In the examples with “yet,” you feel like you may not be ready now, but you could be in the future.

Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor who’s researched the idea of a “growth mindset,”elaborates:

By [using the word “yet”] we give people a time perspective. It creates the idea of learning over time. It puts the other person on that learning curve and says, “Well, maybe you’re not at the finish line but you’re on that learning curve and let’s go further.” It’s such a growth mindset word.

As Chris Yeh points out, when you’re mentoring or helping someone, you want to emphasize the idea of on-going improvement. He offers two more “yet” examples:

“You haven’t been able to find a replicable sales model…yet. But each program your startup tried has taught you something, and you’re refining your approach.”

“You haven’t been able to play that violin piece without mistakes…yet. But every time you practice, you’re getting a little better.”

Bottom Line: Next time you need to criticize or offer feedback to a colleague, add the word “yet” — and you’ll be encouraging a growth mindset.

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A single word can carry an entire thought. In a previous LinkedIn post, I noted that basketball coach Gregg Popovich inspired his players to work hard with the phrase “I want some nasty.” The word “nasty” brings the idea to life.

(Originally posted on LinkedIn)

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We Flit About Joyfully in the Light

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Imagine a vast hall in Anglo-Saxon England, not long after the passing of King Arthur. It is the dead of winter and a fierce snowstorm rages outside, but a great fire fills the space within the hall with warmth and light. Now and then, a sparrow darts in for refuge from the weather. It appears as if from nowhere, flits about joyfully in the light, and then disappears again, and where it comes from and where it goes next in that stormy darkness, we do not know.

Our lives are like that.

Those are the opening words of the introduction to The Upanishads as translated and collected by Eknath Easwaran, a classic of Indian / Hindu spiritually.

From where we came and to where we go afterwards — who knows — but for minuscule amount of time that we’re alive, we are like the sparrow that emerges and follows the light, darts around playfully, and then before long returns to the vast darkness outside, never to be seen again. I like this image.

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