Happiness + Vision = Success. But happiness must come now.

[cjnolet]

I found the following quote from John D. Rockefeller:

I was early taught to work as well as play,

My life has been one long, happy holiday;

Full of work and full of play-

I dropped the worry on the way-

And God was good to me every day.

Just about every one of the most successful people I know seemed to have acheived their happiness before their success.

It seems there’s a couple rules at play here:

1. Happiness must come before success, not after it

2. The “vision of the future” must not be too rigid (as I have mentioned in a previous rant).

When I first began my career as a software engineer, I was in school full time working towards my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science while my girlfriend at the time (now wife) was pregnant with my oldest son and I was working an internship 12-hours a day being paid little to nothing. Within 2 months, I turned the internship into a full-time job, within 2 years doubled my salary 3 times. In the past 10 years since that time, I have acheived a master’s degree and am now more than halfway to a PhD.

Now after all of this, I’ve decided that just like some of the people in history that I idolize the most (Like Rockefeller, Edison, DaVinci, and Franklin, for instance), I would also like to aim higher and attempt to change the world. This seems like a rather numbingly large vision, doesn’t it? Changing the damn world?

The thing is, my visions of the world are already coming to be. A year ago, I began imagining the world with decentralized social media platforms that would undercut Facebook’s ability to exploit its users for money and I found out last week that this is already coming to fruition. As a visionary, I’ve been told by some very successful entrepreneurs I’m “wired properly”. As an engineer and scientist, I’ve put in my time and have the understanding and knowledge necessary to act on my visions and produce something tangible from them.

The problem is, of all the thoughts I have in my head, there’s an invisible barrier that stops my from communicating my visions to the world at large. Anxiety? ADHD? Lack of emotional intelligence? Whatever you want to call it, I believe the thing stopping me is that I’ve been living in a space where I’m either spending too much time focusing on, and postponing my happiness until, the successes of my visions or I’m living in a place where I’m so grounded in the “now” that my visions take a backseat and they feel so far out of reach. Both of these places are tangential to the space I need to be in for success, which is being happy NOW and allowing my visions to unfold, all the while not tying myself too rigidly to the outcome.

For instance. I have a vision of a hybrid board game & computer game that I’ve been wanting to build in order to engage both young kids and parents/adults in the pursuit of world history knowledge. My visions took me from a simple game called “time pickers” (a play on the general plot of American Pickers, except the “pickers” have a time machine and can go anywhere they want in time and space to build “the best museum in all of history) to a video game to a novel. My happiness was being tied so heavily to the goals set by my visions that I was no longer living in the now and I had created such an unobtainable mess of a world in my head that it would be close to impossible for me to bend my reality to it- almost exclusively because I had forgotten to be happy in the NOW.

An alternative example is the state when I flop to the other extreme. My vision of the future has become so overwheming that perhaps it’s better if I shut that off and decide to live only in the now moments. This becomes dull and lifeless because, as Victor Frankl theorized in his musings on Logotherapy, I now have no meaning or purpose and the happiness will again begin to subside in favor of wanting visions and goals in my life to pursue.

I believe the answer to this is strictly tied to the fact that I’ve been living in two extremes and not properly combining them into a healthy balance. In order for me to pursue those gigantic goals that I have for the future, I need to 1) enjoy the NOW so that I can start working towards them and this means I will need to 2) not formulate too rigid of an image of the outcomes such that course corrections can be made with more agility without trampling on the happiness of NOW. By coupling these two into a balance, I believe I’ll start finding the ways to pursue these higher goals AND live a fulfilled life along the way.

I’m writing this post from Jellystone Park in Luray, VA. I took my 2 boys here on Friday to give them some of my undivided time. Unfortunately, the trip was only supposed to be for a Saturday and Sunday, and I quickly found myself getting so anxious and stressed over my work (both day job, school, AND entrepreneurial ventures) that I spent those two days largely losing my temper, getting short with them, and generally not being very pleasant. You can blame my Vyvanse... blame ADHD... whatever... all you want but the reality is that my life has been imbalanced for far too long. I’m either 100% in the now and stressed because I see no future (and often that makes me resent my wife and kids) or I’m living 100% in the future and not enjoying the little things about the present (which makes me absent of my wife and kids).

So I made an impulse... probably one of the best I’ve made in a long time. I extended our stay by 2 days. I’ve apologized to my kids and told them that we’re starting the trip over again and from now on we’re going to have fun together. To be quite honest, I have never had so much fun with my kids. As an over-acheiver, it’s very easy for me to get stuck in crippling anxiety, for instance when I find my oldest son is very forgetful, that he doesn’t seem to be spelling as well as kids his age should, or that his verbal skills don’t seem on par with his age. Both of my kids show signs of ADHD and I often get so caught up in it that I break down and want to run away. But not this time... I’m practicing being happy NOW, not postponing that until they are grown up and have their families.

For the first time in 14 years, I took my shirt off in public today and I got in the pool with my 2 kids and played with them. We’ve made s’mores together for the past 4 days and I have not crippled myself with anxiety worrying about whether I’m ingesting too much sugar or giving too much to them. We’ve gone to the store and bought movies and toys just because we’re happy. We’ve done crafts together at the park & visited Luray Caverns. Tomorrow we’re going fishing and playing laser tag. These are the things that make life happy NOW. We’ve been playing board game after board game together.

And the irony is that my kids are going to be more likely to grow up being the wonderful successful individuals that I’d prefer to see them be when they’ve grown up in a happy home spending great time with parents that they know love them to death than when they grow up as I did- largely neglected and constantly reminded of the “stress” and “anxiety” that goes into “getting a good job and being successful”.

Why does that seem to be the norm for many parents? We teach our kids that life is so fucking hard and they grow up feeling that in order to be a good parent and adult, they MUST be stressed out all the time. No longer will I fall victim to that bullshit set of rules.

I feel like I’ve figured out an important key to life. Most of the worrying that I’ve done over the years has just wasted my time. I’ve worried like hell over my PhD and had professors asking me why the hell I’m wasting my time worrying? Now that I look back I realize it was just that- a waste of my fucking time! After all, when I waste my time worrying, I’m also wasting my family’s time because I’m not able to be in the picture when I’m stressed out and anxious.

It’s all connected- all of these dimensions. Emitting happiness through proper balance pulls my family into the proper alignment, which pulls my career and entrepreneurial success into proper alignment, which continues to motivate me to keep up with my wellness. I have a strong suspicion that I’m going to find, over the next coming months, that social and emotional intelligence are all about maintaining your own happiness in the NOW and getting rid of the anxieties that stem from rigid and over-detailed visions.

The moral? This all comes back to mindfulness. In fact- if you take a quick look at Julian Barbour or the Machian view of physics, you will find that not only is there “no time like the present”, it is actually quite heavily theorized that “the only time that has ever actually existed is the present”.

In fact, it is impossible to predict the future and so anticipation is only a waste of time. Our memory is also very limited. It dwindles with time and is, unfortunately, very noisy with our own perceptions and judgements. Thus, it is very true that the ONLY time that ever can exist is NOW, and if we’re ignoring the NOW, we’re never actually existing.

[Renoya]

Wow cjnolet ... I cannot agree more. Live the present and appreciate the so called small things in life.

It is also about balance and a good definition of success. You can set your success to be related to a successful father and a successful software engineer. The key is the balance and the mythologies that you use to achieve the goals in order to be successful. Maybe planning small steps will help. Maybe try to see where you want to be in 5 years and 2.5 years and one year and half a year and next month.

[cjnolet in reply to Renoya]

It's really inspiring that you point out the "good definition of success".

I've been reading lately about the different types of goals that we can set for ourselves. That is, we have means goals and we have end goals. I believe the end goals are the things that define success. The difference between the two is that one set of goals tend to be more material and less fulfilling (means goals) while the other tends to lead to our ultimate fulfilment (end goals).

For instance, I remember reading a really good book from the guy who created "The Secret" on how to be truly rich (the name of this book escapes me now but I'll come back here and update this post if I remember it). Contrary to what you might think, this book was not like Ben Franklin's "The Way to Wealth". It wasn't trying to say that money is the root of all evil. Instead, it was saying money is a means and we spend too much our time chasing means rather than ends.

When we crave money, what are we really craving? It's the things we can buy with it! In fact, this author posits that by focusing on the means instead of the end, we are likely never going to be fulfilled and will likely never even reach the goals, to begin with.

I 100% believe this- for me the PhD is not the end goal, it's the means to the end goal of solving a problem that interests me and contributing something wonderful to the field of science. Undergrad was a humorous experience for me because I saw all the kids who were treating the degree as their means to a high paycheck drop the program (or select an easier major). On the other hand, I loved tech, computers, and problem-solving and I spent most of my childhood learning everything I could about it. To me, getting the job in computers was an end goal.

I do agree- starting with the end goals gives a purpose for chasing something to begin with. Then walking back through the, more near-term, means goals and treating them as necessary tasks for achieving those end goals.

[cjnolet]

I would love to do your survey, especially since I'm a doctoral student myself (and I definitely know the value of getting published research). Looking through your consent form, however, I'm seeing that I need to live in the mid-west in order for my input to be useful. I live on the east coast. If You think that would still be useful, I'd be glad to take it.