Yesterday, David Brooks wrote a column on relationships and happiness that gave me a lot to think about yesterday. I was quite taken with it at first, but the more I thought about it, the less impressed I was. In it, he argues that a successful marriage trumps a successful career when it comes to the pursuit if happiness:
Nonetheless, if you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy. Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.
The question was, would Sandra Bullock have been better off with a happy marriage or her Oscar? But that’s really a stupid question, because clearly Sandra Bullock would have chosen the type of person to marry that she described in her acceptance speech rather than someone who pretended to be that type of person while cheating on her at every opportunity had she known better. To pretend that there was any kind of choice to make is silly.
I think the positive aspect of his column is that it serves to remind people that good relationships are a big part of being happy, and that the government should evaluate policy in terms of whether it encourages good relationships. (On that note, given that marriage is such a huge contributor to happiness, disallowing same-sex marriage seems even more inhumane than ever.) But I think that Brooks’ column sets up a false choice.
In some cases career advancement and personal relationships are in opposition, but in many cases they are not. Generally speaking, the best recipe for happiness is to have a fulfilling career and to have a fulfilling marriage. If one is unfulfilling, it tends to rub off on the other.
Every once in awhile it does come down to a tough choice between the two. Do you really want to take that job that is going to require you to travel 26 weeks a year? Is it worth taking a job that means you will often come home too late to have dinner with the family? More often than not, though, people make poor decisions when choosing between negative impulses and the goals they claim to have. And it’s those bad decisions that ruin their careers and their marriages.
Here’s Scott Berkun on The Cult of Busy:
The phrase “I don’t have time for” should never be said. We all get the same amount of time every day. If you can’t do something it’s not about the quantity of time. It’s really about how important the task is to you.
When I was in college around 20 years ago, I remember a friend telling me that he tried to read the Wall Street Journal every day. I told him I didn’t have time to read the newspaper, which was a ridiculous statement, because I always had plenty of time to play Tetris in the dorm or go out and eat cheap Tex-Mex. He told me that it wasn’t a question of time, but of priorities. I don’t know that I ever claimed not to do something because I didn’t have time again. This was one of the few really useful lessons that I really picked up early.
People should strive to be more interesting and more responsible. Happiness may result as a byproduct, but those are more important values.
Tyler Cowen discussing Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project.
Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s definition of a real conservative:
At the core of real conservatism is a distinction between theory and practice, a deep resistance to ideology, a respect for free inquiry and the philosophic spirit, a respect for social stability and coherence, a moderation in governance and a deliberation in action.
Humans have a strange obsession with purity — it’s often accepted that the more “pure” something is, the better it is. By way of Simon Willison, I saw this quotation from Mark Pilgrim about HTML:
Anyone who tells you that HTML should be kept “pure” (presumably by ignoring browser makers, or ignoring authors, or both) is simply misinformed. HTML has never been pure, and all attempts to purify it have been spectacular failures, matched only by the attempts to replace it.
It made me really think about the utility of the concept of purity. I think that placing a high value on purity is in nearly all cases a case of intellectual laziness. An obsession with purity allows you to avoid critically evaluating factors that might otherwise go into making the best decision. For example, let’s say I’m writing an application using Ruby on Rails and I need an XML parser. Some would argue that I should only use “pure Ruby” XML parsers and leave it at that, but that’s not helpful. Impure parsers may be faster, or offer more features. On the other hand, pure Ruby parser may be easier to deploy. But the discussion should center on those competing benefits, not on the abstract concept of purity.
If you look at the history of purity as a virtue over the course of human history, you will certainly find that any fixation on it has been unrealistic at best and disastrous at worst. Reject purity. It’s overrated.
One of my favorite old saws is the saying, “Half of life is just showing up.” I like it because it’s true — one of the keys to getting the most out of life is having a large number and variety of experience. Chris Dixon adds a key corollary to that point — don’t forget to ask questions.
In his post on migrating from Ruby on Rails to Expression Engine, Dan Benjamin references the following quotation from Jianzhi Sengcan:
The Path is not difficult for those who have no preferences.
I think I’m just going to sit and contemplate that for the rest of the day.
I really wish I’d gotten to attend Merlin Mann and John Gruber’s SXSW talk on blogging for a living. Mann posits that the successful formula is: obsession plus voice. It reminds me of what I usually tell people who are wondering what kind of career they pursue, which is: do the thing that you can’t not do.
There’s a lot of misguided career advice out there that suggests doing what you “love”. But there are a lot of people who love to do something but would no longer love it if they were forced to do it for 2,000 hours a year. Loving to cook and wanting to stand in a restaurant kitchen for 11 hours a day are two different things.
So my suggestion would be find a way to get paid to do the thing you can’t stop yourself from doing. The best programmers are people who can’t stop programming. The best writers are people who find themselves wanting to write when they’re doing other things. Do what comes naturally.
I can say for certain that it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning and go to work if what you do at work is what you gravitate toward regardless of whether or not you get paid to do it. That’s more likely to be driven by compulsion than love. Go with it.
Last week I posted about the dangers of giving advice. I’ll say flat out that I’m not a fan of advice, even though people ask for it all the time. As an alternative, I would recommend education.
The other day a client who’s building an application in Rails sort of apologized for using Subversion for version control and said they were looking at migrating to Git. Other Rails developers had apparently asked why they weren’t using Git, and he seemed a bit abashed by it. I could have advised him to migrate to Git, or that he should stick with Subversion, but instead I explained how Git differs from Subversion, and what people like about it. Given a better understanding of how they differ, he was able to make his own decision. (He stuck with Subversion.) In the end, it was consideration of his own circumstances that led to what was probably a good decision. Some people working on the project use Windows, and aren’t interested in the headaches of using Git on that platform.
To be honest, I only realized that I prefer educating to giving advice recently, but I have been explaining why I’m against giving advice for a long time now. Advice is cheap and rarely productive, and nobody ought to be taking it without understanding the thought process of the person giving it. That’s particularly important because for all the value of an independent perspective, the other side is that advice givers often lack key pieces of information. The reasoning behind the advice is where the value is, because it enables you to see how the advice may apply to your specific circumstances.
I suspect the motives of people who give advice. Nearly all advice boils down to “be more like me,” and many advice givers are interested in the ego boost that comes from having people listen to the advice they’re giving. Hearing the words, “If I were you,” I generally want to flee.
This year’s Edge Question is “What have you changed your mind about?” I’ll play along. This is a list of some things I changed my mind about in 2008.
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