Drunkards Walk. Some of the concepts apply, obviously, or I wouldn't
have remembered the talks. Particularly, the theme that we are bad
predictors of success is of interest. From the audiobook, the thing I
find fascinating is that we should probably aim (and focus on) a mean as
opposed to any extreme, high or low. So rather than my best time on a
bike ride, I should focus on the mean time for similar trips.
Also striking, is that persistence plays a big role in success. Simply
because the more time you spend on something the greater the chance of
success. Of course, along the way, as you persist, you gain experience,
which only helps your chances at success. This is encouraging. It means
that we ought to "keep on keepin' on". The choice then becomes what we
will choose to persist in, given that we will have a reasonable chance
of being successful. I guess that it should be mentioned that my
intuition, along with what I remember of the "happiness" Ted Talks, that
it is not so much what we persist in, but that we persist that is
important. This may very well be true, but it apparently sidelines
contingency. What I mean here is that the specific events that lead to a
particular outcome may be predictable, but they are not the specific
events. Tricky to put this, but there is no story in predicting an
event's occurrence; there is, however, a story in the chance events, as
well as planned, that happen as a person strives, successfully or not,
for a particular outcome. That we populate Mars is in the end a matter
of yea or nay. But the particular events that lead to either the failure
or the success of such an outcome are what will keep us going; not that
there is some probability that we will populate Mars. I don't really
know what I'm getting at here, but it's along the lines of, probability,
like Darwin's principles of evolution, may well be true, but it makes
for boring guidelines for human existence.
"tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so" ~Shakespeare
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/what_makes_us_happy.html
"Our longings and our worries are both, to some degree, overblown,
because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity
we are constantly chasing when we choose experience." ~ Dan Gilbert, in
his Ted Talk
...which begs an answer to the question, what, then, is the value of the
passionate pursuit of anything?
I guess that there is no real value for the individual, except for the
personal benefits they may gain as a side effect of their pursuit (ie.
the inventor of toothpaste benefits not in that he is filthy rich, but
that he has clean teeth), but there is benefit to mankind both for the
reason that they now have clean teeth, and they have a good story to
tell. Actually we don't realize that this type of story hurts us. These
stories are the very thing that cause us to pursue something using an
extremity of exertion, when, according to Gilbert's research, that is
not necessary for happiness. No one would pursue hot dog eating unless
they heard that Jimmy Johnson ate 14 hot dogs, and they themselves
thought they could eat more. And so the record of 14 hot dogs is beat
time and time again, however, each time the level of effort required to
beat the record increases. As well, the level of effort required to
experience satisfaction increases, and yet that latter satisfaction is
no more profound than the former. But do we dare tell this tale, in a
convincing manner, to the world, at the peril of the disappearance of
great undertakings; at the peril of the disappearance of our stories of
human achievement?
