From an essay by Paul Graham titled “What you Can’t Say”:
…How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter– just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.
Thursday night a co-worker called at 9:30PM and asked if I wanted to drive three hours to Charlotte to see Armin Van Buuren, who was named Number 1 DJ in the world in the 2007 DJ Mag Top 100. This is not the first time I’ve been asked to do something spontaneous. I’ve come to believe that some of the best moments in life occur randomly, and that to best enjoy life, one has to learn to “run with it.”
The specific type opportunities I am talking about in this post are opportunities that require clearing of all (or most) scheduled and routine events in the immediate time period along with a significant short-term monetary and/or energy investment. Over the last couple years, opportunities of this type I’ve pursued included a one-night trip to NYC for the Livestrong.com party, a couple trips to the beach, and a Sigur Ros concert.
I’ve developed a simple decision making process anytime a unique opportunity presents itself. If the return on investment from pursuing the opportunity outweighs the cost of time and money invested along with any extra fallout (responsibilities and commitments to others), then jump.
The first question is whether the event is unique enough to warrant the investment of time, money, and energy. Armin Van Buuren is the number one DJ in the world, and he regularly sells out to crowds of thousands in Europe. He does not frequently come through North Carolina. Additionally, I’ve never seen one of the world’s best DJs live, so this would be a new experience for me.
After deciding that the opportunity warrants investment, the next step is to decide how participating will affect current responsibilities and commitments. These include monetary and time responsibilities (among others) at work, to friends and family, and to oneself. Even if pursuing the opportunity will significantly affect these responsibilities, there are ways to dampen the effect. For instance, when I decided to go to New York for the Livestrong.com launch party, I worked over the weekend and arrived at the office extra early on Monday to make sure my boss knew that the trip would not have too great an effect on my work.
If a given opportunity passes these tests , great — the decision is pretty cut and dry.
But if it doesn’t pass the tests, the process gets a bit sticky. At times, depending on the opportunity, it’s sometimes worth it to just say “fuck it… I’ll work it out” and figure out the details later. This shouldn’t happen too often, because it will piss people off and sometimes things will NOT work out as planned. But, if you have an opportunity available that is too rare to pass up, don’t sweat the details. Take the risk and work it out.
By “too rare to pass up,” I’m not talking about Armin Van Buuren. Rather, I’m talking about opportunities like the chance to hang out with Warren Buffett. Or, the chance to take a private jet, all expenses paid, to some remote resort for a couple days of relaxation — events that are so rare and are so far out of your typical day-to-day life experience that the “fuck it… I’ll work it out” response might be warranted.
I accepted the invitation to see Armin Van Buuren. I slept only 3 hours, woke up 30 minutes late, and rushed to pick up my boss before work that morning — but it was worth it. I worked hard on Friday and made sure I reached all of my deadlines. I even stayed after work a bit to complete some extra tasks. Then I came home and passed out with a very large smile on my face.
What a way to celebrate just being alive. Pay attention to how Armin builds tension with the repeating pattern and increasing pitch and melody line, then drops out, and follows with a full range of sound (including heavy bass) right at the end with the intense light.The energy in the room was incredible!
Below I’ve listed some key ideas and notes (along my thoughts and conclusions at the end) from Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
So how can we reach this elusive goal [happiness] that cannot be attained by a direct route? My studies of hte past quarter-century have convinced me that there is a way. It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness. (pg 2)
Yet we have all experience times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happense, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long charished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. (pg 3)
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable. (pg 7)
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interpret everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. (pg 9)
Though the evidence suggests that most people are caught up on this frustrating treadmill of rising expectations, many individuals have found ways to escape it. These are people who regardless of their material conditions, have been able to improve the quality of their lives, who are satisfied, and who have a way of making those around them also a bit more happy… …Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live… Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives.(pg 10)
…after each success it becomes clearer that money, power, status, and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add one iota to the quality of life. (pg 13)
There’s so much great content in this book. This particular passage highlights something I’ve slowly observed as I’ve entered and exited various kinds of societal systems ( schools, family, friend groups, athletic teams, etc.):
Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. IN a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictory goals. On the one hand, official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turns us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. ON the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is dialectically linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy dissipation–provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.
There is no question that to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own power. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.
Most entrepreneurial disruptions to economic and social systems occur because someone or something from outside a system makes a change that those within a given system cannot understand. There is an apparent corollation between entrepreneurial success and independence from economic and societal systems. Many aspiring entrepreneurs that I know understand this point.
But there is another closely related point that many aspiring entrepreneurs do not understand. Once a change is made, that change must fit back into the system. You built a cool widget — but will the masses actually use it? Because if you think your widget is the coolest thing on earth, but no one else does, you don’t have a business.
Entrepreneurs break the system in order to fix it, and often times they do it unintentionally.
I’m currently reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the book, Mihaly relates lessons he learned from studying states of “optimal experience” for over two decades. In the third or fourth chapter, Mihaly provides examples of various cultures that have developed practices and beliefs that are conducive or destructive to states of flow:
Another good example of how a culture can build flow into its life-style is given by the Canadian ethnographer Richard Kool, describing one of the Indian tribes of British Columbia:
The Shushap region was and is considered by the Inadian people to be a rich place: rich in salmon and game, rich in below-ground food resources such as tuers and roots–a pletiful land. In this region, the people would live in permanent village sites and exploit the envrons for needed resources. They had elaborate technologies for very effectively using the resources of hte environment, and percieved their lives as being good and rich. Yet, the elders said, at times the world bcame too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challegne, life had no meaning.
So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There wer enew streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy. Incidentally, it also allowed exploited resources in one area to recover after years of harvesting…
