500 Words a Week - Recent Ramblings - Achievement & Fulfillment, Expectation & Appreciation

A reason why I like writing this blog every week is that it forces me to be clear and concise with certain thoughts I am having. This blog post is on some of my recent ramblings.

Achievement & Fulfillment

How many people do we know who are successful in our eyes, who are where we want to be, who have a significant financial worth? We could probably answer those questions with a relatively long list. Now, how many of these people do we know to be truly happy and fulfilled? Probably less than the first question. How many times have we told ourselves “I’ll be happy when I achieve …”. We often get lost chasing achievement, status, accolades, money (may be a stretch within S&C) at the expense of our fulfilment. I certainly did, in the past when I was an intern I told myself “I’ll be happy when I get a full time S&C role” or “I’ll be happy when I get control of a programme”, sure when I got these things they did bring some level of happiness but it was more fleeting than I thought it would have been. Now I am trying to detach my fulfillment from achievement and validation.

The 80-20 rule states that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of all causes for any given event. In S&C this looks like; 20% of your programme causes about 80% of your results. This can be applied to happiness or fulfillment, 20% of how you spend your time is responsible for providing you with 80% of your happiness. Through this lens I’ve been trying to identify what aspects add to my happiness, and do more of them, while trying to reduce (if possible) that which does not add to my happiness. (Read The 80-20 Principle by Richard Koch)

Expectation & Appreciation

As soon as we experience something, we expect it to continue. If it doesn’t continue we long for the next time we will experience it again. There is a parable, that if you give a monkey 2 oranges and then take 1 orange away, they will be angry despite the fact that they still have 1 more orange than they began with. I believe we should try change our outlook from constantly expecting what is given to us and expecting more, to appreciating what we have, what we experience, and what is given to us.

The following is adapted from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harris (p. 249-253, go back and re-read these pages if you have the book):

No matter what the mind experiences, it reacts with craving, and craving always involve dissatisfaction. Experience something distasteful, we crave for it to go away. Experience something pleasant, we crave the feeling will remain or intensify. Therefore, when we experience pleasant things we are never content as we fear it might disappear. To escape this when the mind experiences something pleasant, we must understand it for what it is at that moment, appreciate and remain present. If you experience joy without craving that it will linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing peace of mind.

Both parts above aren’t mutually exclusive, I’m not saying the other aspects should be completely avoided. We should still have things we want to achieve, but we shouldn’t base all of our fulfillment on whether we achieve what we set out to or not. We should still have some level of expectation, but this shouldn’t overpower our ability to appreciate what we have.