Read today about lies we tell ourselves and the plan for life. Reminded me of two things I read couple of weeks back.
First is an HBR article How will you measure your life?. Gist of it is – author advises to create strategy for life (find out the purpose of your life), allocate resources (time/energy) towards that strategy, create a culture which enforces that and avoid to deviate from that path 100% of the time. The author is someone who pledged never to play ball on Sunday and hence didn’t go to a college basketball final on Sunday. This is treating life as business or managing an enterprise. Food for thought at the very least.
I had reached to this article through NY Times column which is comparing Well-Planned Life described in above article to something the column author called Summoned Life – which flows according to the circumstances of a person. His conclusion is that both works – has to work anyway.
My take is – I admire someone who knows exactly what they want and what their priorities are. Of all the people I knew so far, very few knew what they wanted to do in life and proceeded to do it happily. Remaining takes life as it happens. My analogy for that is a pool game with unskilled players – opportunities come up randomly, some taken, some missed and all while keep moving it as best as they can.
Other one is also related to above – What makes us happy?. It explores "Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life?" through a study of set of Harvard students through a life over 72 years. Why I mentioned this is connected to the lies we tell ourselves. The article says we put up defenses (or (“adaptations”) to get through life’s pains. There are immature adaptations (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania), neurotic ones (intellectualization, disassociation and repression) and lastly mature ones (altruism, humor, anticipation/hope, suppression and sublimation). Having a mature adaptation as defense is key to good life as per this – along with education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. At one point in the article it says – “maturation makes liars of us all” – it may not exactly be a lie, but the version of reality we want to believe, a story we tell ourselves to get by every day – of good career, happy children, being an optimist, being a pessimist and so on.
First is an HBR article How will you measure your life?. Gist of it is – author advises to create strategy for life (find out the purpose of your life), allocate resources (time/energy) towards that strategy, create a culture which enforces that and avoid to deviate from that path 100% of the time. The author is someone who pledged never to play ball on Sunday and hence didn’t go to a college basketball final on Sunday. This is treating life as business or managing an enterprise. Food for thought at the very least.
I had reached to this article through NY Times column which is comparing Well-Planned Life described in above article to something the column author called Summoned Life – which flows according to the circumstances of a person. His conclusion is that both works – has to work anyway.
My take is – I admire someone who knows exactly what they want and what their priorities are. Of all the people I knew so far, very few knew what they wanted to do in life and proceeded to do it happily. Remaining takes life as it happens. My analogy for that is a pool game with unskilled players – opportunities come up randomly, some taken, some missed and all while keep moving it as best as they can.
Other one is also related to above – What makes us happy?. It explores "Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life?" through a study of set of Harvard students through a life over 72 years. Why I mentioned this is connected to the lies we tell ourselves. The article says we put up defenses (or (“adaptations”) to get through life’s pains. There are immature adaptations (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania), neurotic ones (intellectualization, disassociation and repression) and lastly mature ones (altruism, humor, anticipation/hope, suppression and sublimation). Having a mature adaptation as defense is key to good life as per this – along with education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. At one point in the article it says – “maturation makes liars of us all” – it may not exactly be a lie, but the version of reality we want to believe, a story we tell ourselves to get by every day – of good career, happy children, being an optimist, being a pessimist and so on.
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