Category Archives: Philosophy

This wise nugget courtesy of Kishore Mahbubani on page 67 of his new book which I will be reviewing shortly:

The simplest way of understanding the virtues of meritocracy is to ask the question: why is Brazil a soccer superpower and an economic middle power? The answer is that when it looks for soccer talent, it searches for it in all sectors of the population, from upper classes to the slums. A boy from the slums is not discriminated against if he has soccer talent. But in the economic field, Brazil looks for talent in a far smaller base of the population, primarily the upper and middle classes.

A similar point could be made around other types of discrimination (not just class based). With a seriously sexist business culture, Japan is effectively ignoring the potential creative contributions of 50% of its population.

And a corporate level…good companies cull ideas from all levels of the organization. Lou Gerstner at IBM famously encouraged employees at the bottom to submit ideas or proposals for corporate action. Let the best idea win, no matter who it comes from.

From the always-interesting Dan Pink, in an interview with Cal Newport:

What’s the biggest myth about the post-graduation search for a job that you would like to dispel?

That you need to have a carefully articulated plan.   Too many people make career decisions for instrumental reasons — because they think what they’re doing will lead to something else.  Not enough people make decisions for fundamental reasons — because of the value of the activity itself.

The dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons don’t work. It’s way too tumultuous out there. The people who really flourish are those who make decisions for fundamental reasons. They have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity about not knowing what’s going to happen next. But that keeps them alert to unexpected opportunities and the serendipity you talked about earlier.

Here’s E.B. White‘s take on “the meaning of democracy” as written in The New Yorker during the middle of World War II:

It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee.

(Hat tip to my Mom, who spotted this in a book she’s reading about Churchill and Roosevelt’s friendship.)

Happiness research is a crowded field. The world doesn’t need another book on happiness (well – except Gretchen Rubin’s forthcoming one). There are too many experts already. There even too many experts on the experts (those who make sense of the experts).

Still, I remain intrigued by it all in my endless quest to try to become even happier. As Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of How of Happiness, said last week during her talk at Claremont, everything in life takes effort — even your emotional life, even your happiness.

New insights on happiness are rare, but today Will Wilkinson reports on something I haven’t seen before:

A recent study by psychologists at the University of Edinburgh tracking 973 pairs of twins shows that the heritable differences in self-reported happiness are entirely accounted for by the genes that determine the Big Five personality traits. That is to say, differences of personality account for all the heritable difference in happiness. In particular, low neuroticism and high extraversion are strongly correlated with higher levels of happiness, high conscientiousness is a bit less strongly correlated, and high agreeableness and openness to experience are positive but not so important. Non-neurotic, conscientious extraverts are the winners in the genetic happiness lottery.

This is important stuff. It tells us that individual variability matters. Individual-level strategies for improving happiness depend a great deal on the art of self-management given the constraints of personality. For example, I am very low in neuroticism and mildly extraverted, which bodes very well for my baseline level of happiness, but I am also extremely low in conscientiousness (not unlike a lot of homeless people and inmates), which ends up creating a lot of internal struggle and anxiety. For me, the key to higher levels of happiness is the conscious development of the habits of self-discipline and time management that don’t come naturally. The highly introverted or neurotic face challenges unique to their types…

And at a more general theoretical level, it is crucial to understand there are differences in the degree to which people revert to their baseline levels of happiness after good or bad changes in circumstances, and in difference in the rate of reversion. That will prevent us from making silly, sweeping generalizations about the insignificance of new cars or a lost limbs. When there is a lot of non-random variation, averages can lie. Regarding my previous post, I think it is important to recognize that not everyone compares themselves strongly to other people. Much of Robert Frank’s body of work is based, I think, on assuming a false uniformity in people’s disposition to compare themselves to others. We can avoid that kind of mistake if we attend more closely to the way individual happiness is mediated by personality.

Great stuff. But I wonder how many people even know where they rank on the different aspects of personality? I, for one, have been embarrassingly delinquent in taking my Myers-Brigg.

Here’s Will’s commentary on Marketplace talking about the real connection between money and happiness. If there were a stock market for public intellectuals, I would buy Will’s stock now. He’s on the rise.

Charles Handy, one of the great living management thinkers today, is a visiting fellow here in Claremont at the Drucker School (named after its most famous professor – Peter Drucker). Rick Wartzman, head of attached think tank called The Drucker Institute, wrote in his recent newsletter about Charles Handy’s "Curve of Life." I found this a simple but powerful explanation for why people and organizations need to continually reinvent themselves.

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“This is the curve of life,” declared Charles Handy. “This is the curve of everything.” Indeed, this little wave can describe the life cycle of a product, the ups and downs of a political candidate, the ebb and flow of a business—even the story of one’s own life.

But all life need not be measured by a single rise and fall. “You can maybe have a second curve, and a third curve,” Handy explained. The trick, he said, is that “you have to choose the next curve before the first curve peaks so that you have enough resources coming in to experiment…because it always takes about two years from the beginning of a new curve until the point where it transcends the peak of the old."

Trouble is, too many people and organizations fail to seek new curves until it’s too late. As Handy put it: "They wait until they see death staring them in the face before they start trying to find their next curve."

The central dilemma of the curve of life is, in other words, is knowing when to get off in time to prepare for the second curve.