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If you achieve alone in a forest, have you really achieved?

I’ve been exploring ideas around self-promoting at work, being recognized, and motivation as it relates to recognition and achievement.

What is the relationship for you between achievement and recognition? How do you know you’ve achieved something? What forms of recognition do you want for your achievements (from self? others?)? Is there a relationship? If you achieve something alone in a forest and no one ever knows about it, is it still an achievment? Are you motivated by achieving, by recognition, a combination, or something else altogether (e.g. power or relationship or family or …)?

Can taxes buy happiness?

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In yesterday’s post Can money buy happiness, people seemed to agree that money doesn’t buy happiness directly, but it can buy choices, security, freedom, etc., which can help happiness.

This question isn’t for the book, but for my own curiosity. I was talking with several people from European countries this February. We compared tax rates, and when you add in state, federal, FICA, and sales taxes, I pay as much of each dollar in taxes as they do.

Among the things they get: national health insurance (or in some countries, national health care directly), guaranteed mortgage payments on their home made if they’re past retirement age so they know they’ll have a place to live, six to eight weeks a year of vacation, nanny care for new mothers, etc.

We don’t spend our tax dollars that way. We spend roughly 20% on military, 20% on interest payments on our national debt (increasing at record rates, by the way), and 20% on Medicare. Everything else (education, social programs) all squeezes into the remaining 40%. (See here for reference.)

Once we’re done paying our taxes, if we want any of the freedoms and choices that some other countries have, we must pay for them ourselves with after-tax dollars. (Security’s a fine example. 20% of tax dollars go to physical/military security, but not other forms of security like housing, food, or education/prep-for-future.)

In America, we’ve very successfully adopted the knee-jerk idea that “taxes are bad” so we never look at the other side of the equation: what our tax dollars actually provide.

So here’s the question: if we had social programs provided by or supervised by the government that provided things that gave you more time, choices, or freedoms, would you be willing to pay more in taxes? If so, which choices or freedoms would you want provided? If not, why not–are the choices/freedoms not important to you, are you already happy, etc.?

Oh, crap. Maybe money CAN buy happiness.

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Well, isn’t that just the cat’s pajamas. There’s a new study out that shows that happiness may be linked to absolute levels of income, after all. Of course, as the article states, it’s linked to other things as well, like time spent with friends. This may change part of my thesis for the book. …. pondering

In my life, money hasn’t bought happiness. In fact, regardless of how much I’ve had, made, or lost, I’ve pretty much always felt insecure and panicked, thanks to some early experiences involving not really being able to afford food. Only in the last year have I really sorted through the issues enough that they seem to have let go.

While lack of money is stressful for me, past a certain point, more doesn’t make me happier. Other things take over as the most important. Fun, community, challenge, meaning, and contribution all seem more important to me just now.

How ’bout for you? Is you life happier because of money? Is acquiring money sufficient for happiness? Is it necessary?

Don’t do too much at once!

One of my projects of the last year has been turning recordings of speeches and workshops I’ve given into products. I’ve got about 10 I want to produce.

I made the huge mistake of trying to work on several at once. My sound engineer returned to school halfway through. Now, I can’t even locate all the sound files. My brain is trying to focus on several different products at once with the result that I’m making no progress on any of them.

Take things one at a time. I’m going to be doing a section in the book, or at least a Get-it-Done Guy episode, on multitasking versus parallel processing (they’re different, at least as I use them) versus sequential.

  • Sequential’s best for the mind.
  • Parallel is best for getting things done, assuming you don’t overload yourself.
  • Multitasking doesn’t work.

What’s best: objective decisions or relationship-driven decisions?

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@stephenparker on Twitter asked an excellent question:

Is it better to be objective in our decision making, or should our relationships play a role? Is it better to be right or loyal?

What a great question. Here’s my answer:

I used to be very into “being right.” After many, many years, I reviewed it (as in my “review your decision-making” post) and and realized that it wasn’t working for me. Once I was out of school, no one cared if I was right, and right/wrong struggles destroy relationships. While I let go of the need to be right as much as possible, I still adhere strongly to my sense of ethics and integrity.

It’s also important to note that I was wrong once. I think it was in 3rd grade? Maybe 2nd? If I was wrong once, it could happen again. So even if I think something’s “right,” I might be wrong, right?

At some point, the notion of “right” got much richer for me. It’s no longer just “is it computationally correct that 4+4=8,” but it involves understanding the impact of my answers on everyone involved. Sometimes, the “right” answer is painful, awkward, or unkind in ways that trump being right. Sometimes, I may know I’m right(*), but someone else is so set in their world view that pushing it does nothing good for the relationship.

What good is being right if there’s no one else in the room who cares?

What do you think is best? Being right? Being loyal? Being kind? Being wise?

Do you improve your decision quality over time?

In my business blog today, I got a little, er, hot about tax season. In my footnote, I flamed on about the 2004 elections, noting:

One thing I’m sure of: none of you stopped to analyze the quality of your 2004 decision-making and explicitly change the criteria you used to make your bad decision. It may be 2008, but you’re about to use the same broken decision-making process in November and you’ll wonder why politics doesn’t change.

Political flaming aside, when you make a decision that turns out badly, do you explicitly learn from it? And if so, do you use an explicit “post mortem” process? And do you tend to learn about specifics of a situation (e.g. “I’m never voting for candidate Z again because they lie”), or do you actually change your decision-making process (e.g. “next time, I will look at voting records and read news articles on opposing web sites and supporting web sites before making my decision.”)?

Ten Cultural Career Lies revised

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Steve Mills pointed out that the Ten Cultural Career Lies handout was framed entirely in terms of limitations and negativity. I’ve revised it. See the attached ten-cultural-careers-and-success-lies-v3

See the article as a web page at: https://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/ten-career-lies.htm. If you like it, please digg it!

Please digg this!

Please use the above Digg link and not the below bookmark link. (The above link will digg the html version of the article, while the bookmark link below–which gets automatically added to every post–will digg this page, which doesn’t actually contain the article, just a link to the PDF.)