I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years thinking about how to be more productive. As a graduate student and freelancer, there’s no one telling me what to do, and no (immediate) consequences if I spend all day procrastinating. But gradually, through trying different techniques, tricks, and systems, I’ve found ways to procrastinate less and get more done.
For many of us, happiness is the ultimate goal in life, worth pursuing above all else. If you’d asked me a few months ago, I would have agreed. But recently, I’ve been thinking about the kinds of mistakes we make when pursuing happiness. I’ve been wondering whether the biggest mistake might be seeing happiness as something we should be aiming for at all.
How do you choose a career that’s worthwhile and fulfilling?
Throughout most of history, people basically just did what their parents did. “What should I do with my life?” wasn’t a question young people struggled with. These days, most of us have a huge range of possible careers before us. “What should I do with my life?” is one of the biggest and most challenging decisions we face in our lives.
To understand success, it’s natural to study successful people and organizations. Thousands of business books are published each year, claiming to have done this very thing, and distilled success into a set of practical principles.
Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He has been considered one of the most influential people in the world by various lists, and, with a net worth of $15.2 billion in October 2014, he is the 30th richest person in America. By any standards, Dalio is extraordinarily successful.
There’s a game I used to play as a kid that we called the “hotter, colder” game. One person would hide an object, which the other would then try to find. What made it interesting (for an 8-year-old, at least) was that as you looked for the hidden treasure, the person who had hidden it would give you clues: saying “hotter” when you got closer to the hiding place, and “colder” as you moved away.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but you know that New Year’s resolution you just made? You’re almost certainly going to break it.
