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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.