Embracing Change

Speaking about goals and ambitions this weekend has lead me nowhere. Goals themselves are just static points in a dynamic world, with the purpose to mark the beginning of the next journey. Nothing more. Many people can claim that “it is the journey and not the destination that matters”. But we need to settle this once and for all.

When you in complete honesty can say I live my life the way I do since it is the most enjoyable trip I can imagine at the moment then this is where you want to be. You have then found the ONLY goal that you need to take care of. Nurture it, share it, put it on trial.. but for god’s sake do not freeze on the spot and think you can remain in a static state. It is a feeling that moves along with you and changes shape every day. Instead of working in headwind, keep your compass steady towards the direction that reinforces the feeling in bold above.

Here Greek philosophers, Buddhism and the Western world agree, but why do we keep forgetting ourselves all over ?

” Nothing endures but change. “
- Heraclitus, 535 BC-475 BC

” Everything changes, nothing remains without change. ”
- Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 BC

” The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. ”
- Isaac Asimov, 1920-1992

This is amazing.

I just came across a paper entitled “The Origin of Behavior” by Thomas Brennan and Andrew Lo. It starts like this:

We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification. Given an initial population of individuals, each assigned a purely arbitrary behavior with respect to a binary choice problem, and assuming that offspring behave identically to their parents, only those behaviors linked to reproductive success will survive, and less reproductively successful behaviors will disappear at exponential rates. This framework generates a surprisingly rich set of behaviors, and the simplicity and generality of our model suggest that these behaviors are primitive and universal.

Download the whole thing for free from SSRN.

January has been good. It is more than the fresh feeling of 2010, it is being both
(1) productive and (2) subject to a few good events.

When many things happen to you like this all at once, it is not the same as being subject to a single change. With a single change you can always ask yourself now how did that feel? and adjust accordingly.

With a greater number of events, you at first just focus on coping with every change. Eventually however, your brain needs to merge those impressions to assess how they impact you altogether. This is when you need some time.

In organizational buzzwords they call this the unfreezing stage, a state of vunerability that is completely neccessary to absorb the change successfully. I just call it me, myself and a temporary loss of navigation.

Do you remember your first encounter with cold water? The first time you felt snow? The tip of a needle? An emotional kiss?

As we grow older and our attention begins to wander off — we develop a desire to return to those first impressions in life, when presence was absolute. Activities we perform, events we attend and performances we see are rated by their ability to revoke the emotions we experienced as children and make them as alive and authentic as possible today. In one sense, we are all longing to become an unprogrammed blank slate, activated by discoveries, immune to the world.

Newsweek’s Wray Herbert has written about How Kids See the World in his blog Mind Matters, presenting some further ideas on this topic.

This was a few thoughts on a Friday night. Now I’m off for a beer..

Merry Christmas!

In Sweden we start early and do most of our celebrations today, Christmas Day itself is saved for eating leftovers and meeting a second batch of relatives. I want to take this day to give just a single piece of advice. If there is ONE book you should read in the next five years then it is this one:

Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom

It is the non-fiction story of a young journalist (Mitch Albom himself) who goes back to see his dying professor every Tuesday to talk about life’s lessons. While many books encourage you to live meaningfully with inspirational catchlines and do-it-yourself recipes they just do not go deep enough, to the root of your values and priorities. This book will challenge you by being down-to-earth and concrete. If you have any interest whatsoever becoming more self-aware then this is your first buy.

Although the book was released already in 1997 (Swedish translation Tisdagarna med Morrie in 2000) I cannot enough emphasize this book TODAY in a world where we are over-exposed to the culture and values of OTHER people, where everyone wants to be a star and the confusion, sense of failure and unhappiness can be overwhelming unless you get your values right.

It’s funny how sometimes the discoveries that take time to realize for yourself are actually quite well-known in the world of science.

I present to you, the fundamental attribution error of social psychology. Or what I like to call, misjudging reality by underestimating the power of situational factors and thinking that personality has bigger impact on judgement than it does.