Optimism vs. Innovation
One of the biggest and most important indicators of happiness is optimism.
So if you want to be happy, you should be optimistic and focus on the good.
But what if you want to be innovative? To be innovative, you have to make bad things better. To make bad things better, you have to first notice the bad.
And it’s not that easy to notice the bad. Our society pays people a lot of money who notice bad things that could be made better, so the low hanging fruit has already been eaten. If you want to be innovative, you have to have a keen eye for the bad.
The Top Idea
It might even be true that you have to be on a constant lookout. It probably has to be The Top Idea in Your Mind. Paul Graham talks about this:
I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.
He makes the points that:
- You probably have some sort of Top Idea background process running in your head at all times.
- If you want to be good at something, you probably need to run that Top Idea background process on it.
- You can’t really just pick and choose what this process does. It only works for things that are legitimately the top idea in your head. The thing that you care and think most about. And you can’t change the thing that you care and think most about so easily.
So, if you want to be innovative, it seems to me that you have to make “looking for the bad” the top idea in your head. And when you do, you’ll have a background process running that is constantly looking out for bad and inefficient things.
You might consider this anecdotal evidence, but I’ve noticed that truly innovative people seem to be obsessed with innovation. They don’t go about their days thinking “everything is great”, then flip a switch for a few hours at work, and then flip the switch off when they go home. They don’t spend their weekends and vacations thinking about sand and pina coladas. They’re obsessed with the problems they’re trying to solve and never stop thinking about them. It’s the top idea in their mind, and they constantly have that background process running.
Is It Worth It?
I’m a bit skeptical that obsessing over innovation is the best way to be happy. I’m confident that it’s the best way to be innovative, but I’m skeptical that it’s the best way to be happy.
So what is the best balance? How obsessed should you be? What do you do if you’re already obsessed? Can you get un-obsessed?
What about if you’re extremely altruistic? To what extent is it worth sacrificing your own happiness to be innovative?
Maybe we’re part of an extreme situation that needs to be taken into account? Maybe we have an unprecedented opportunity to be orders of magnitude more innovative than people were just 100 years ago (because we live in a big snowball)? Maybe the returns that the potential innovation would have are so large that it makes sense to sacrifice happiness in the short-run?