Human beings thirst for identification. Every day we wake up hoping to be seen by someone for something. We are so eager to be seen and understood that we accept messages that are vaguely communicated, often not even directed at us personally. We can watch a television show and become emotionally attached or we can listen to a song and identify ourselves with the lyrics. In these and many more cases consuming media can be strikingly satisfying.

Let’s now suppose that the love of your life suddenly breaks up with you under odd circumstances. You are devastated and run home to listen to that song about “losing love”. While listening to the song you begin to merge your specific circumstances with the image projected in the song. You begin to accept that your situation has logically turned out the only way it could (the song confirmed it, right?).

What you are missing here is that situations differ. While contexts remind of one another, they are seldom the same. In your case it might had been enough with taking action and communicating to resolve the issue that was oppressing your partner. Making your own interpretations is often far more empowering than relying on friends and stereotypes to understand what’s happening.

Everyone wants to be seen and recognized. This in itself is not a problem, it is a human attribute that we have to fuel in our social relationships, be it with friends and family, at work with colleagues or with strangers on the street.

The problem as I see it is the solution we apply. We think, at least some of us do, that making a name for ourself in the public arena will somehow lead to the sustainable recognition called success. We think this is the natural way of going in order to feel more “seen” and “appreciated” by people around us.

If success is being happy, such ambitions might instead be taking you away from your goal. Public recognition can increase the distance between you and your loved ones. It can make you feel unseen and alone when the limelight moves on to someone else. It can expose you to new needs and desires, raising complexity in your life. And then there is human envy.

If you want to be at success with yourself, settle for simple needs. Regular exercise, surrounding yourself with friends and family, never comparing yourself to others, finding something you are passionate about and earning enough to live without financial worries might be elements of this.

However you pursue it, be honest with the fact that also you need to be recognized and be aware that the actual output of your hard work might not be what you were aiming for.

At times I meet people who claim that they love being challenged and having to alter their beliefs. When I hear that statement I usually hold my enthusiasm.

You see there is one level of change that you can acquire by reading books and listening to people’s advice, but there is a more substantial level of change that you need to work with if you really want to revise who you are. That level requires a large amount of discipline and practice and involves the never-ending struggle with you, yourself and your stubbornness. And it’s painful.

There is a common test to exemplify this where one is asked to close both hands together as if to do a prayer. In this particular movement one of two thumbs is put on top of the other. This is a trained behaviour of the brain, and doing it differently usually feels odd. Studies show you would have to repeat putting the wrong thumb on top 200-300 times before it feels natural.

For me, challenging myself involves limiting focus to a few concrete points. These few characteristics of myself that I want to do something about I need to be able to work on every day. Every day involves dissolving the resistance barrier and introducing the revised behaviour by force. If this is not painful to you, perhaps you are not challenging yourself yet.

What about doing something different to help others? We often spend time worrying about our peers but somehow forget that we too are human beings in need of attention on a regular basis.

So for a change I would like to encourage you to be a little selfish. Give yourself undivided attention and listen to your needs. Act on them and allow yourself to feel good about listening.

And how would this help others? When you boost confidence and radiate self esteem, others will feel more comfortable in your presence. In the same way, if you are hesitant of your own needs and desires, those feelings infect others like a disease.

By investing time into understanding our feelings and how they effect us, other people will enjoy the fact that we seem happy and emotionally predictable. It’s a simple win-win that should be realized more often.

Borrowed from Tuesdays With Morrie here is a list of what a happy relationship requires:

• Having the same basic values in life
• Respecting each other
• Being able to talk about problems openly with each other
• Being able and willing to compromise

The book uses these arguments for a marriage, but I think it goes for less formal relationships as well. Without doubt I find respecting each other hardest, it sounds awfully easy but are you able to wholeheartedly consider and respect the advice of the other person when it concerns something personal?

Goals are overestimated. Sure, they mark achievements, sometimes significant ones. They can provide you with a sense of satisfaction in the short-term. But then it ends just about there. Goals are no safe harbor. If you work hard to reach a goal and settle down thinking this was it, you are likely to feel unease. Why is this so? I think the goal itself is not the problem, but the fact that the world around it changes. Important events of the past are forgotten as we are caught up in our everyday lives. Also, goals tend to be black and white (reached vs not reached) whereas in the real world we always operate in shades of gray.

Paths could provide greater satisfaction. Paths need to be defined by milestones, and these differ from individual goals since they are all interlinked. A single milestone could have status not reached while you are still travelling in the same path. This allows you to fail on certain points without losing the sense of direction.

Should you discover that one milestone is more fulfilling than another, you can add more of the same stuff. The important part is that if someone chops of the branch you are sitting on you will still know where your tree is standing. And if you understand that the milestones are all interlinked you realize that more of one thing requires doing less of the other. Then you understand that life is about priorities and that you can in fact prioritize to feel good.

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.

Merry Christmas!

I want to take this day to give 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 I often find they lack depth. This book goes to the root of your priorities and will challenge you by being down-to-earth and concrete. If you have interest in becoming more self-aware it is a must.

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 and sense of failure can be overwhelming unless you get your head straight.

Here I am trying to put words on something I just discovered that science already invented.

I present to you, the fundamental attribution error of social psychology — explaining reality based on the personality of people without taking in regard social context and situation.

Example:
Let’s say I am generally regarded as a person that is “open to new people”. Then I temporarily become upset for a week due to work-related problems. During this week I happen to meet a new person to whom I pay little attention. This person is unlikely to perceive me as a person that is “open to new people”, even though over time that statement is more true than false. The specific context and situation causes me to act in a way that I rarely do, but as this is all the person sees he or she will believe that I am in fact NOT “open to new people”. The behavior will be attributed to me as a person instead of the specific context in which it happened. The stronger the situational factors during which you meet a person the larger the number of attribution errors you are likely to make.

I just realized something today.

What would you be without the people close to you telling you how you appear in their eyes? I just realized the price one pays for being utterly dedicated and caught up in work, as I have been this autumn. I was tempted to believe that people would just see me as busy and understand my situation without second though.

How wrong I was.

When you are busy running past people, even those you know, it is not only busy that comes to their mind. In fact, many of them would say that you are an ignorant person. While you from your viewpoint might just experience better focus and results from the project that you put dedication in, there is the other side saying “hello, am i not important enough for you?”. Although I am still convinced energy is just wasted if attempting to befriend everyone I must learn to tread more softly on those I wish to call friend.