Future with no future experience

So many of our experiences deal with outcomes and expectation of a bright future. For example, we talk about education in a sense of its outcomes (skills, jobs, a better life). Another example is child raising.

But what to do when there is no future waiting at the end of these experiences. Emily Rapp recently wrote in the New York Times sharing her experience raising her son who has Tay-Sachs disease. Her son is 18 months old and very unlikely to live beyond his 3rd birthday. Here is the link to the full article.

She writes in a brave voice. She tells us that, at the end of the day, the best that you can do is living in the moment. In her case, loving her son in today moment and letting him go when the time comes. That is all you can do.

Horns and Cape (Collaborative version)

I have posted two versions of this story earlier, one is a concise version and another is an extended version. In this post, I am going to put out another version that extends from the extended version. This time, the extension comes from a very very dear friend.

Here again "Horns and Cape, the collaborative version"

One day, a creature woke up with two (ugly) horns growing on its head. Why in the world did someone do this to me?, the creature wondered. I was given two ugly horns on my head and the tribe leader said I can no longer live here. "Go find a new habitat." That is the command given to me.

Broken hearted, confused, depressed, the creature had no choice but to do what it was told (all in the while with two shiny ugly horns on its head.) The creature aimlessly walked, walked, and walked until it came across another promising habitat. It talked to the caretaker and the first thing the caretaker said is: "Why in the world did you have those two ugly horns on your head?" Although the creature wishes that nobody would notice the two ugly horns, the creature was compelled to be honest and answer the question. It said "I was told that I have not contributed enough to the tribe and I have not carried independent tribe building activities." "But look, I listed all the wonderful things I have done at that tribe ... look please and you will see that I am a good creature and worthy bringing in to your tribe."

Despite the begs and pleas, the caretaker finally said "No, I don't think I can. With those two ugly horns on your head, we will not be able to take you in." The creature sank deeper into its sorrow and helplessness. What if I cannot find a new habitat? What will happen to me?

Months have passed .... One day, the creature fell asleep under a big banyan tree. This time, it woke up with a beautiful cape with magical power growing on its back. The creature thought to itself... "Wow, I have been given magical power. I hope everybody can see it."

It looks around to see if there are other creatures around so it can show off its wonderful cape. Unfortunately, no one was around. So, it decided to take a walk. It came across one old creature resting near a big rock. The creature excitedly approached the old creature and asked: "Do you see the wonderful cape I have on my back?" The old creature replied "What cape? I only see your two shiny ugly horns on your head."

A creature is confused ... Has it become an ugly creature that nobody wants to welcome? OR Has it become a great creature with magical power to change the world?

What should it think of itself now?

The story continued ...

The caped creature roamed far and wide, crossing land and sea to find a habitat that could see the magical cape. One day, finally willing to risk sharing itself with another being, the creature approached the caretaker of a lovely, green habitat. “Look how I have contributed to the tribe that I came from. See my cape that gives me magical powers. And, please, I beg of you, do not mind my horns,” the creature said.

The caretaker looked at the creature with compassion and understanding and responded, “What you call horns are scars that every creature endures. Some creatures have horns; others have humps; still others have beards. In this land, we look upon such scars as building character—in much the same way that your cape builds character. Neither one is who you are, but they both contribute to who you will become. I sense great beauty and great potential inside you. I welcome you to leave your cape behind, and join us in this habitat.”

The creature has a choice to make. . . To believe in the power of the horns and the cape or to believe in its own power to forgive, to trust, and to shine?

Horns and Cape

One day, a creature woke up with two (ugly) horns growing on its head.

The next day, a creature woke up with a (beautiful) cape with magical power growing on its back.
...
A creature is confused ... Has it become an ugly creature that nobody wants to talk to? OR Has it become a great creature with magical power to change the world?

What should it think of itself now?

Vision of development from a quality of life perspective

Poverty has proved to be one of the most difficult social problems to solve. Of course, there are many different approaches to address this issue that plague the progress of our society. Some people believe in, what I call, "the economic" approach. This way of thinking addresses poverty by using whatever ways to help the impoverished increase their income. The underlying assumption is that higher income will bring purchasing power and lift people out of poverty. Others believe in ,what I call, "the quality of life" approach. This way of thinking generally believes that it is important to focus on well-being as an outcome. As such, ways to address poverty may not necessarily emphasize on growing income. Solutions may include quality education, affordable health care, good career path, etc.

For example, Charles Kenny, a development economist argued in the recent article in the NY Times (link to article) that "the biggest success in development has not been making people richer but, rather, has been making the things that really matter — things like health and education — cheaper and more widely available."

Here and Now

Breathing in ... Breathing out
Breathing in ... Breathing out
I am blooming as a flower
I am fresh as the dew
I am solid as a mountain
I am firm as the earth
I am free

Plum Village, France

Aristotle

Some words of wisdom from Aristotle:

• Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
  

• "Eudaimonia" -- Humans can attain eudaimonia by fulfilling their potential.
  

Managers and their influence on employee's quality of work life

What are the three main reasons people leave a workplace? According to this article in the Times, here they are:

1. They don't feel a connection to the mission of an organization or sense that their work matters.
2. They don't really like or respect their co-workers
   
3. They have a terrible boss

Some places could have all three of these issues. I would also add that, in some cases, people who face with these circumstances decide NOT to leave a workplace. Perhaps, this could be more detrimental to an organization as a whole.

It turns out Google has a project called "Oxygen". They have more than 100,000 observations about Google managers across more than 100 variables. More importantly, Google uses the results as a feedback to develop training modules for their worst-performing managers. In the end, Google came up with 8 good behaviors:

Conditions

Freedom is a basic condition of happiness.

The Buddha

Please call me by my true name

A beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Do not say I depart tomorrow,
for even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every moment,
to be a bud on a branch,
to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the hearth of a flower,
to be jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry
in order to fear and to hope.
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the may fly metamorphosing
on the surface of a river,
and I am the bird, which when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog, swimming happily
in the clear waters of my pond,
and I am the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly
weapons to Uganda.

I am the 12 year old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and and loving.

I am a member of the politburo
with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain like a river of tears, so full it
fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughs at once,
So that I can see that my joy and my pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
that so the doors of my heart can be left open,
the doors of compassion.

Argument about human motivation

An interesting argument from the New York Times reader:

"All pain caused by humanity can always be synthesized down to ego and greed.

There is no action taken by an individual, and thus collectively by civilization, that is leading us away from enlightenment that cannot be attributed to these two destructive motivations, ego and greed.

It is only by making choices that resist these temptations that humanity has a chance of survival, and any one of us has a chance of living a life of peace and joy."

Focusing on our commonalities

"No matter what part of the world we come from, we are all basically the same human beings. We all seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. We have the same basic human needs and is concerns. All of us human beings want freedom and the right to determine our own destiny as individuals and as peoples. That is human nature."

Nobel peace price acceptance speech by the Dalai Lama

Happiness: A holistic development paradigm

These few days, world leaders are gathered to discuss the progress and future plan of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. The important speech came from Bhutan's prime minister. Here are a few things that he said:

• "Since happiness is the ultimate desire of every citizen, it must be the purpose of development to create the conditions for happiness. This requires a proper balance of consumption, leisure, good governance, and attentiveness to nature, biodiversity, and environmental sustainability."
• Seeking a more holistic indicator of development that transcends the "materialism" of Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Happiness measures four criteria -- sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the environment, and good governance.
• "It does not demand much imagination intelligence," the prime minster told the summit, "to understand that endless pursuit of material growth in a world with limited natural resources within a delicately balanced ecology is just not sustainable -- that it is dangerous and stupid."

What is the meaning of rain?

What will you say if someone ask you a question: "what is the meaning of rain?"

Here is my answer:

Rain brings happiness on a hot and humid day.
Rain brings sadness on a cold and gray day.
I want a day that rain brings neither happiness nor sadness for me.

Will I ever have that day?

Delivering happiness: A Zappos' way

CBS News recently ran a story and a vdo interview of Tony Hsieh (Zappos' CEO). Here is the link to the article.

The bottom line is Zappos focuses on delivering happiness to customers, employees, and hopefully investors. Can they actually do that? Apparently so. I am an occasional Zappos' customer. I always had a pleasant experience with Zappos when I called their customer service. Zappos does not believe in outsourcing its call center. The call center is in Las Vegas. It does not have a script to talk to customers either. It also does not have time limit on customer calls.

The question is can every company follows this practice? Tony Hsieh thinks so. He has a book out this year. Here is the link to the book sold on amazon.com.

Books on Well-Being and Happiness

• Bok, D. (2010). The politics of happiness: What government can learn from the new research on well-being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Diener, E., Kahneman, D., & Helliwell, J. (2010). International differences in well-being. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  
• Rath, T., & Harter, J. K. (2010). Wellbeing: The five essential elements. New York, NY: Gallup Press.
• Sirgy, M.J. (2002). The psychology of quality of life. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  

GDP: A Misleading Measure of Prosperity

Here is a post from the NYTimes criticizing GDP as an inaccurate measure of well-being/prosperity. I am going to pick out a few interesting writings from this article. The full text of this article is available here:

This article raises several fundamental questions:

• Is growth and development the same thing?
• Is it valid to use GDP, a measure of economic output, to measure well-being?
• What are the best indicators beyond GDP?
• What is the goal of a society?
• How do we create measures on alteration of climate system, loss of species, consequences of man-made disasters (the recent oil spill in the gulf comes to mind)?
• How to measure social and emotional lives?
  

"The G.D.P. ... has not only failed to capture the well-being of a 21st-century society but has also skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth"

"With easy access to national information, Hoenig told me optimistically, Americans might soon be able “to shift the debate from opinions to more evidence-based discussions to ideally a discussion about what solutions are and are not working.”

"Those involved with the self-defined indicators movement ... argue that achieving a sustainable economy, and a sustainable society, may prove impossible without new ways to evaluate national progress"

Another good question is where did GDP come from?

"G.D.P. — the antecedents of which were developed in the early 1930s by an economist named Simon Kuznets at the federal government’s request"

Do you want to be a high-GDP person or a low-GDP person? This is my adaptation from the article:

High-GDP person's life:

• Has a long commute to work
• Drives an automobile that gets poor gas mileage, forcing her to spend a lot on fuel.
  
• Replaces her car every few years due to the morning traffic and its stresses
  
• Has problems with her cardiovascular health due to stress. She treats the conditions with expensive pharmaceuticals and medical procedures
• Gets in shape by joining a member-only gym club
  
• Overall, high-GDP person works hard and spends money. She loves going to bars and restaurants, likes her flat-screen televisions and adores her big house, which she keeps at 71 degrees year round and protects with a state-of-the-art security system. High-GDP family pays for a sitter (for their kids) and a nursing home (for their aging parents).
  
• Employs a full-time housekeeper because they do not have much time

Low-GDP person's life:

• Busy with cooking, cleaning, and home care
• Walks to work
  
• Grows vegetable in the garden instead of buying pre-wash salad mix from a grocery store
• Read books borrowed from a public library instead of buying them
• Gets in shape by running in the neighborhood

So from an economic point of view, a high-GDP person is more valuable to a country's economy. But the important question is "Does she have a better life?"

Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in Economics said "Americans would have had a much clearer picture of our progress over the past decade if we had focused on median income rather than G.D.P. per capita, which is distorted by top earners and corporate profits. When you have increasing inequality, median and average behave differently. Real median household income has actually dipped since 2000. But G.D.P. per capita, he noted, has gone up."

"Stiglitz and his fellow academics ultimately concluded that assessing a population’s quality of life will require metrics from at least seven categories: health, education, environment, employment, material well-being, interpersonal connectedness and political engagement. They also decided that any nation that was serious about progress should start measuring its equity — that is, the distribution of material wealth and other social goods — as well as its economic and environmental sustainability."

“You might say, If we have unemployment, don’t worry, we’ll just compensate the person. But that doesn’t fully compensate them. Stiglitz pointed to the work of the Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who served on the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission, which suggests that losing a job can have repercussions that affect a person’s social connections (one main driver of human happiness, regardless of country) for many years afterward."

Putnam from Princeton said “damage to this country’s social fabric from this economic crisis must have been huge, huge, huge. And yet, he noted, we have plenty of numbers about the economic consequences but none of the numbers about the social consequences.”

Here is his argument that is very interesting: “People will get sick and die, because they don’t know their neighbors,” Putnam told me. “And the health effects of social isolation are of the same magnitude as people smoking. If we can care about people smoking, because that reduces their life expectancy, then why not think about social isolation too?”

Here is a list of new measures proposed in various countries:

• Canadian index of well-being
• State of the USA
• United Nations' Human Development Index
  

Here is a list of people who have been working/supporting new measures of well-being:

• Alex Michalos, Canada
• Chris Hoenig, State of the USA
• Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (a.k.a. The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commision)
• Daniel Kahneman on Emotional well-being
• Angus Deaton, collaborative work with Kahneman

Here is a short list of articles by Deaton and Kahneman:

• Income, aging, health and well being around the world: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll
  

What is wealth?

While I was pondering on the question of "How should we think of wealth?", I came across writings by Professor Uwe E. Reinhardt from Princeton. Very interesting arguments. Here are a few that resonate with me.

"Human happiness or well being are the manifestation of wealth."

"Financial measures of wealth are always, at best, a very crude approximation of what we really try to measure."

"Measuring the economic welfare produced by a nation's economy in a given year simply by the one-dimensional index GDP is about as sensible as picking a mate from a group of candidates merely after seeing their feet. There is some information there, but not a whole lot."

"Properly defined, wealth is a summary of the future human happiness that a nation should be able to derived from the collection of land, structures, accumulated knowledge and human capital within its borders."

"The foundation of our nation's wealth turns out to be--you might never have guessed it--our mothers, our teachers in elementary and high school, and our government. ..... All of them play such an important (but uncelebrated) role in the formation of the nations' human capital--the ultimate source of any modern nation's wealth. Your Princeton (replace Princeton with any name of higher educational institution, my word) professors, for example, merely help you build some more on this human capital. We are not its chief creators."

Prof. Uwe E. Reinhart.
His writing is available on his web site