The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less (33 page)

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions

This does not mean that we should discard earlier research about the importance of childhood experiences (or later misfortunes). We saw in Part One that chaos theory highlights “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This means that early in the life of any phenomenon, chance events and apparently small causes can cause a large deviation in the eventual outcome.

Something analogous appears to happen in childhood, producing beliefs about ourselves—that we are loved or unloved, intelligent or unintelligent, highly valued or of low worth, able to take risks or constrained to obey authority—that are then often played out through life. The initial belief, which may be arrived at with no objective foundation whatever, acquires a life of its own and becomes self-fulfilling. Later events—poor examination results, a lover who leaves, failure to get the job we want, a career that moves sideways, being fired, a setback in health—may blow us off course and reinforce negative views about ourselves.

Putting the clock back to find happiness

So, is this a chilling world where unhappiness is the path laid out for us? I do not think so.

The humanist Pico of Mirandola (1463–93) pointed out that human beings are not entirely like other animals.
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All other creatures have a definite nature that they cannot change. Humans have been given an indefinite nature and thus the ability to mold themselves. The rest of creation is passive; humans alone have an active nature. They were created; we could create.

When unhappiness strikes, we can recognize what is happening to us and refuse to accept it. We are free to change the way in which we think and act. To invert Jean-Jacques Rousseau, man is everywhere in chains yet everywhere can be free. We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy.

MAKING OURSELVES HAPPY BY STRENGTHENING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Daniel Goleman and other writers have contrasted academic intelligence or IQ with
emotional
intelligence: “abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and to keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.”
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Emotional intelligence is more crucial for happiness than intellectual intelligence, yet our society places little emphasis on the development of emotional intelligence. As Goleman aptly remarks:

Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits—some might call it character—that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.
⁶

The good news is that emotional intelligence can be cultivated and learned: certainly as a child, but also at any stage in life. In Goleman’s wonderful phrase, “Temperament is not destiny”: we can change our destiny by changing our temperament. Psychologist Martin Seligman points out that “moods like anxiety, sadness and anger don’t just descend on you without your having any control over them…you can change the way you feel by what you think.”
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There are proven techniques for exiting feelings of incipient sadness and depression before they become damaging to your health and happiness. Moreover, by cultivating habits of optimism you can help to prevent disease as well as have a happier life. Again, Goleman shows that happiness is related to neurological processes in the brain:

Among the main biological changes in happiness is an increased activity in a brain center that inhibits negative feelings and fosters an increase in available energy, and a quieting of those that generate worrisome thought…there is…a quiescence, which makes the body recover more quickly from the biological arousal of upsetting emotions.
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Identify personal levers that can magnify positive thoughts and cut off negative ones. In what circumstances are you at your most positive and most negative? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What is the weather like? Everyone has a wide range of emotional intelligence, depending on the circumstances. You can start to build up your emotional intelligence by giving yourself a break, by skewing the odds in your favor, by doing the things where you feel most in control and most benevolent. You can also avoid or minimize the circumstances where you are at your most emotionally stupid!

MAKING OURSELVES HAPPIER BY CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT EVENTS

We have all experienced the trap of self-reinforced depression, when we think in a gloomy and negative way and simply make things worse, so that we can imagine no way out of the box. When we come out of the depression, we see that the way out was always there. We can train ourselves to break the self-reinforcing pattern of depression by simple steps, such as seeking out company, changing our physical setting, or forcing ourselves to exercise.

There are many examples of people exposed to the worst misfortunes, like those in concentration camps or with fatal diseases, who react in a positive way that changes their perspective and strengthens their ability to survive.

According to Dr. Peter Fenwick, a consultant neuropsychiatrist, “The ability to see silver linings in clouds is not simply Pollyannaism; it is a healthy self-protective mechanism with a good biological basis.”
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Optimism, it seems, is a medically approved ingredient for both success and happiness, and the greatest motivator on earth. Hope has been defined specifically by C. R. Snyder, a psychologist at the University of Kansas, as “believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.”
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MAKING OURSELVES HAPPIER BY CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT OURSELVES

Do you think of yourself as successful or unsuccessful? If you opt for unsuccessful, you may be sure that there are many people who have achieved less than you have and would be described by most people as less successful than you are. Their perception of self-success contributes both to their success and their happiness. Your feeling of being unsuccessful limits your success and your happiness.

The same applies to whether you think you are happy or unhappy. Richard Nixon ended the Vietnam War by declaring that America’s objectives had been achieved. He was economical with the truth, but who cared? The rebuilding of America’s self-esteem could begin. Similarly, you can make yourself happy or unhappy just by the way that you decide to feel.

Make the choice that you want to be happy. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to other people too. Unless you are happy, you will make your partner and anyone else with prolonged exposure to you less happy. Therefore you have a positive duty to be happy.

Psychologists tell us that all perceptions about happiness relate to our sense of self-worth. A positive self-image is essential to happiness. A sense of self-worth can and should be cultivated. You know you can do it: give up guilt, forget about your weaknesses, focus and build on your strengths. Remember all the good things you have done, all the small and big achievements to your credit, all the positive feedback you have ever received. There is a lot to be said for yourself. Say it—or at least think it. You will be amazed at the difference it makes to your relationships, your achievements, and your happiness.

You may feel that you are deceiving yourself. But in fact, by having a negative perception of yourself you are guilty of self-deception. All the time we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. We have to: there is no objective truth. You might as well choose positive rather than negative stories. By doing so you will increase the sum of human happiness, starting with yourself and radiating out to others.

Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself—and believe them!

MAKING OURSELVES HAPPIER BY CHANGING EVENTS

A further route to superior happiness is to change the events you encounter in order to increase your happiness. None of us can ever have complete control over events but we can have much more control than we think.

If the best way to start being happy is to stop being unhappy, the first thing we should do is to avoid situations and people that tend to make us depressed or miserable.

Making ourselves happier by changing the people we see most

There is medical evidence that high levels of stress can be coped with provided that we have a few excellent personal relationships. But relationships of any kind that take up a large part of our time and are part of the daily fabric of our lives, whether at home, at work, or in our social lives, will powerfully influence both our happiness and our health. To quote John Cacioppo, an Ohio State University psychologist:

It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.
¹¹

Think about the people you see every day. Do they make you happier or less happy? Could you change the amount of time you spend with them accordingly?

Avoid the snake-pits

There are many situations with which each of us typically copes badly. I have never seen the point in training people not to be scared of snakes. The more sensible action is to avoid the jungle (or the pet shop).

What upsets us, of course, varies from person to person. I cannot stop myself getting angry when confronted with pointless bureaucracy. I can feel stress building up when exposed to lawyers for more than a few minutes. I am anxious in traffic jams. I often become mildly depressed when days go by without seeing the sun. I hate being jammed into the same space with too many of my fellow humans. I cannot abide listening to people making excuses and detailing problems beyond their control. If I were to become a rush-hour commuter, working with lawyers, and living in Sweden, I am sure I would become depressed and quite possibly do myself in. But I have learned to avoid, as far as practicable, such situations. I do not commute, avoid mass transit systems in the rush hour, spend at least a week a month in the sun, pay someone else to deal with bureaucracy, drive around jams even if it takes longer, avoid having anyone of a negative disposition report to me, and find that my telephones mysteriously disconnect five minutes after I am called by lawyers. As a result of all these actions, I am significantly happier.

No doubt you have your own pressure points. Write them down: now! Consciously engineer your life to avoid them; write down how: now! Check each month how far you are succeeding. Congratulate yourself on each small avoidance victory.

In Chapter 10 you identified your unhappiness islands. Analysis or reflection on when you have been least happy very often leads to obvious conclusions. You hate your job! You get depressed by your spouse! Or perhaps more precisely, you hate one-third of your job, you cannot abide being with your spouse’s friends or in-laws, you suffer mental torture from your boss, you detest housework. Great! You’ve finally had a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Now do something about it…

DAILY HAPPINESS HABITS

After you have removed—or at least set in motion plans to remove—the causes of unhappiness, concentrate most energy on the positive seeking of happiness. For this, there is no time like the present. Happiness is profoundly existential. Happiness only exists now. Past happiness may be remembered or future happiness planned, but the pleasure this gives can only be experienced in the “now.”

What we all need is a set of daily happiness habits, similar to (and in fact partially related to) our daily fitness or healthy eating regime. My seven daily happiness habits are summarized in Figure 38.

Figure 38 Seven daily happiness habits

One essential ingredient of a happy day is
physical exercise.
I always feel good after (even if not during) exercise. Apparently this is because exertion releases endorphins, natural antidepressants that are similar to certain exhilarating drugs (but with none of the dangers or expense!). Daily exercise is an essential habit: if you don’t make it a habit, you will do it far less often than you should. If it is a workday, I always exercise before going to work, to ensure that my exercise time is not blown away by unexpected work pressures. If you travel a lot, ensure that you plan when you will exercise at the same time that you order the tickets, if necessary changing the schedule to accommodate the exercise. If you are a high-powered executive, do not let your secretary put any meetings in the calendar before 10
A.M.,
so that you will have plenty of time to exercise and prepare yourself for the day ahead.