Recruiting Animal

Bad Work Habits Caused Depression

From: Brad Feld (edited)

I remember reading a book that said a great consultant spent 20% of their time on “overhead” and 80% of their time on substantive work for their clients.

As long as I was only spending 20% of my time on things I wasn’t interested in, I was fine.

However, I’d somehow gotten the ratios flipped – I was spending only 20% of my time on the stimulating stuff and 80% of my time on stuff I viewed as unimportant.

I was only stimulated by about 20% of the stuff I was doing. This led to a deep boredom that I didn’t realize, because I was so incredibly busy and tired from the amount of stuff I was doing.

While the 20/80 problem was the start, the real root cause of the depression was the boredom.

 

Everyone Makes Mistakes

From: Joshua Rothman

A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed.

There’s a tradition of physicians writing about their errors. “When the Air Hits Your Brain,” a neurosurgical memoir by Frank Vertosick, Jr., begins with a scene in which a resident, while drilling a hole in a man’s skull, accidentally goes too far, plunging the drill bit into the brain. “Oh, shit!” he exclaims. (An older doctor reassures him: “It’s just the lateral hemisphere.”)

Physician writers usually view such errors with a generous spirit. They point out that medicine is built on mistakes, because doctors, like the rest of us, learn by screwing up.

 

Nobody's Child

Seneca said:

We like to say that it we didn't choose our parents. They were given to us by luck. But, in fact, we can choose whose children we would like to be.

You can seek out families of the noblest minds: choose one into which you wish to be adopted and you will inherit not only their name but their property too.

Nor will this property need to be guarded. The more it is shared, the greater it will become.

My Comment: This is great because it declares your freedom to part ways with your inherited fate but it also implies that you sign on to someone else's ideas like you sign on to a religion, setting limits to your own intellectual independence and individuality and that's not what you want.

Make Your Mind a Happy Trap

From: John Keilman, Chicago Tribune, August 17, 2011

Ricky Hanson says you can produce happiness.

When you receive a compliment or taste a really good cup of coffee pay attention to it for longer than a few seconds.

When this becomes a habit it turns your mind into a happiness trap.

Then, your happiness becomes reflexive and free of the bad things around you.

Happiness and Genes

From: Bob Condor, Chicago Tribune, December 08, 1998 (edited)

Biography doesn't predict a happy life.

David Lykken and Auke Tellegen studied 120 identical twins who were raised apart.

After measuring the happiness level of one group of twins, they were able to predict with nearly 100% accuracy the happiness score of the other twins -- no matter how different their work, family or religious involvement, and even 10 years after the first measurement was taken.

 

Marriage, Friends and Happiness

From: Bob Condor, Chicago Tribune, December 09, 1998

David G. Myers: (edited)

The one question I would ask to make a guess about personal happiness is: Do you have soul-mate friends?

If someone is married, I would ask: Are you married to your best friend?

Answering yes to either question means the person's whole life is likely to be happy.

What's makes a happy marriage is `mutual self-disclosure,' or intimacy of feeling appreciated and heard.

Another factor is domestic equity, a term indicating the degree to which partners perceive over time that what they give and get when attending to household matters is in balance.

Feeling there is some equitable division of chores and responsibilities goes a long way toward a happy relationship.

 

Money, Friends and Happiness

From: Bob Condor, Chicago Tribune, December 09, 1998

People with 5 or more close friends (excluding family) are 50% more likely to describe themselves as very happy than people with fewer.
-- University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center

One survey of 800 college alumni showed that classmates who valued high income, job success and prestige more than close friends and a loving marriage were twice as likely to be fairly or very unhappy.

From: Bob Condor, Chicago Tribune, December 08, 1998

Mary Finneran is a Salomon Smith Barney stockbroker with a number of clients who make more money in an up market than many people earn over a lifetime.

Many of her clients are surprisingly calm as the market swings wildly up and down, she said, sometimes accepting even the lowest ebbs with cheer.

Still, "a few clients want every last morsel," said Finneran.

"It doesn't matter how much they make. Interestingly, those are the people in my work that seem most unhappy."

 

Intimacy and Happiness

Source: Bob Condor, Chicago Tribune, Dec 09, 1998

Sonja Lyubomirsky:

By far the greatest predictor of happiness in the literature is intimate relationships.

Dean Ornish:

There is an epidemic of isolation and unhappiness in our society.

If we grow up in a family in which intimacy feels dangerous, then we unconsciously choose people as we get older who mirror our timid approach to intimacy.

In our culture, we don't really learn the basic skills of how to be in intimate relationships.

We tend to disparage intimacy if it comes up at all, or we restrict it to certain people, such as spouses.

 

Time Management and Happiness

via David G. Meyers

Happy people feel in control of their lives.

To feel in control of your life you have to be in control of your time.

To master your use of time, set goals and break them into small daily aims.

Don't overestimate how much you can accomplish. This will make you frustrated.

If you progress slowly but steadily you will achieve more than you thought you could.

Psychology and Thanksgiving

Photo: Muhammad Ali talks a man off a ledge

Introduction: Recruiting Animal Show, Nov. 26, 2014 (3:15 min)

Thanksgiving and Positive Thinking