2016 Resolution: Lower The Stakes.
That’s my personal/family/parenting/career motto for the coming year. It’s gonna be great. No: it’s just gonna be something. (Already started! 🤘) Something I’m optimistic and curious about.
Some related hypotheses I’m looking forward to testing in the new year:
Satisfaction > Achievement
There’s a difference between getting A’s in something (literally or figuratively) and deriving genuine satisfaction from it. The latter needs no extrinsic argument, explanation, or reward to support it. It just is. Much simpler to recognize the presence or absence of.
Attention > Time
Jason Fried said it well. So did the “Wait but Why” guy. And David Foster Wallace.
Willingness > Control
Perfectionism and rigid plans can degrade my moment-to-moment experience of potentially satisfying things. Having an intuitive grasp on what I’m willing to do/accept in a particular situation is simpler and more flexible than plotting out and trying to maintain the integrity of detailed conditional scenarios. Maybe the world can be its own model more often than I admit.
Contentment > “Happiness”
“Fine” or “good” can (and will) be the case, by definition, more frequently than peak experiences. That’s a much easier baseline to maintain — and actually experience! — than constantly rotting my insides with FOMO. {See: “As Is”}
Under-promising > Over-delivering
People appreciate it when you simply do what you say. I know I do. I suspect it’s a much simpler, much more humane way of building goodwill than making claims about “giving 150%” and then failing because that was never realistic in the first place. Maybe “being a hero” (whatever that means) doesn’t really matter to other people (or myself) as much as I think it does.
Can > “Should”
As a product of strict Catholic education, I have approximately 20 years of programming about what I should do/think/feel in just about any situation. My parents would call this programming “character.” I’m not ungrateful for it. But like all programming, it’s rather brittle when applied to fuzzy, complicated, real-world situations. Taking my functioning moral compass for granted and asking “What’s possible?” might be a simpler, freer, and more generative approach to navigating life’s complexity in a satisfying way.