Life is going
Life
Life is full of both joys and disasters. The ups and downs of life are what they're called. Without them, life is just a never-ending war that can be won at any time. To overcome one's grief, it is necessary to find happiness in one's life.
The Meaning of Life
Life is beautiful but not always easy, it has problems, too, and the challenge lies in facing them with courage, letting the beauty of life act like a balm, which makes the pain bearable, during trying times, by providing hope.
A Happy Life
Happiness, sorrow, victory, defeat, day-night are the two sides of the me coin. Similarly life is full of moments of joy, pleasure, success and comfort punctuated by misery, defeat, failures and problems. There is no human being on Earth, strong, powerful, wise or rich, who has not experienced, struggle, suffering or failure.
Everyone in this world craves for a happy life. It is difficult to define happiness as it is a state of the mind and it is subjective. Happiness is related to material glory and splendour by some. Some associate it with the health of a man while for some it lies in a sort of contentment with whatever one possesses.
People crave for happiness. Happiness to them is just a good and comfortable dream. The manner of living has various standards. Everyone, therefore, has his own concept of happiness. Most men are dissatisfied with their present state of affairs and condition. One always wants an increasing amount of materialistic assets. A poor man living on the roadside will be aspiring for a but while a hut-dweller will be aspiring for a house. A house owner may be aspiring for a beautiful bungalow and a bungalow-owner may be aspiring for a posh-residence.
Thus, the question arises where does real human happiness and solace lie? Generally speaking, material splendour and prosperity are considered to be the main factors leading to happiness. A wealthy man enjoys all the comforts, luxuries, amenities and facilities of life. But does he consider himself to be really happy? A rich man may be the master of millions but even then, he may be unhappy due to ill health. Being ill, he cannot enjoy all the pleasures of life. He considers himself to be a condemned and cursed man in this world. And when he finds himself amidst wealth, he is all the more troubled. His state of mind is not elevating. Rather, he is always in a mood of melancholy. We, thus, conclude that wealth is not the only criterion of a truly happy life.
Those, who are under the impression that life is a bed of roses are disillusioned soon and become victims of depression and frustration. One who faces difficulties with courage and accepts success without letting it go to its head is the one who experience real happiness, contentment and peace in life.
Those, who think, that good times last forever, easily succumb to pressure during difficulties. They do not put in required hard work and efforts because they break down easily.
You can take the example of a student, who burns the mid night oil, makes sacrifices and resists temptations so that he can perform well. Similarly, a successful executive has to face the ups and downs of life, not forgetting that life is a mix of success and failure, joy and sorrow.
If he loses hope during difficult times, he would not achieve success and would be replaced by others. Even the strongest Kings and Emperors have had their cup of woes.
Life has not been a bed of roses for them. The adage ‘Uneasy lays the head that wears the crown’ has been rightly used for people, who are successful and are enjoying power and authority.
To sum up, life is beautiful just as roses but it has challenges which are like thorns and have to be faced and overcome by all. Those, who accept these, challenges and succeed, are the ones, who know how to live life in its true sense. Thus, enjoy life but also be prepared to bear the pricks of pain.
The problem is that our experiential happiness is only loosely correlated with how happy we feel when thinking broadly about our lives.
Kahneman gives the example of a two week vacation. Assuming the vacation was equally enjoyable in every moment, then a two week vacation should be twice as good as a one week vacation. After all, there are twice as many moments of experiencing happiness.
However, from the standpoint of memory, a two-week vacation is barely better than a one-week vacation. This is because there are no new memories added in this time, so all the similar moments of happiness are simply forgotten.
Here we have the conflict. Say you’re about to decide your next vacation plans, which you’re reasonably confident will be satisfying. Should you go for one week or two?
Making the question more interesting, Kahneman asks, would you pick the same vacations if you knew that after, all the pictures would be destroyed and you’d take an amnesiac drug forcing you to forget ever having taken it?
When I talk about the pursuit of the ideal life here on this blog, this revelation asks the question, what constitutes the ideal life? Is it our moment-to-moment experiences or simply the narrative we weave afterward?
Should You Target the Minimums
Whenever you set a goal, create a new habit or make some plan for your life, there’s a few different ways you can go about it
The first way is to target the minimum output. The idea here is that you focus on always doing at least a little bit, so that overall, you’ll end up doing enough to make it count. Examples: meditating for ten minutes a day, taking the stairs at work to get in shape, learning a new word every day.
The second way is to target the average output. Here, you focus on setting a goal that you don’t always achieve, but if you reach it enough, you’ll end up making a big difference. Examples: write a new blog post every week, read two books a month, go to the gym 4x per week.
A final way is to focus on the maximum output. Invest your energy in surmounting a specific, intense threshold that will pull you to a new level. Examples: one-rep maximum, deliberate practice, aiming at setting a personal best.
A huge array of different suggestions from personal development flow into one of these three types, yet I’ve rarely seen them analyzed together. I’d like to do that, and try to see if there’s a way of thinking which can make sense of when you should expect each type to be more useful.
When Should You Focus on the Minimum?
To understand where each of these strategies succeeds (or underperforms) you need to compare them to the status-quo.
The status-quo in minimum-focused projects is zero. This is the default, and what will happen in the overwhelming majority of cases.
One habit I’ve focused on in this way was doing fifty push-ups every day. Some people critiqued this as not being ideal for fitness. But it ignores the alternative—usually I would do no push-ups in a day, so some is certainly better than none. Doing the push-ups hasn’t stopped me from going to the gym, but keeping the habit has made me stronger.
I set a goal to do ten minutes per day. Again, the default here was zero. Most days I did no practice, so a ten minute goal, even if I never do more than this, is going to be an improvement.
The other reason to focus on a minimum is that it assumes the difficulty is in starting. When initiating a behavior or effort is the hardest step in the process, you want to set lower thresholds for effort so that you can make starting as easy as possible.
Minimum-targeting works very well for establishing stable, long-term habits. It also works when the status-quo is very low or zero effort. Finally it makes sense when initiating effort is the hardest obstacle to overcome.
When Should You Focus on the Maximum?
Focusing on the maximum, has the advantage that it can expand your potential. Many areas of growth exhibit some elements of friction, that barring some kind of intense effort, planning and potential frustration, they won’t be realized.
Deliberate practice epitomizes this strategy. By putting in an uncomfortably high focus on quality, narrowing onto specific aspects of performance with clear feedback, you can get better. Such a peak learning state is less likely to occur if you don’t aim for this effort deliberately.
Aiming at one-rep maximums, or reaching personal bests in fitness, learning or life are also attempts to focus on a maximum. They too, are less likely to spontaneously come about without some conscious effort.
The downside of focusing on reaching a maximum is that it often isn’t sustainable. Bursts of high intensity rarely make for long-term, stable habits. Therefore, those who engage in routine exercises of maximum-targeting efforts often require continued obsession with performance. Maximum-targeting efforts require all your attention and energy, they can’t be engaged lightly in the background.
Maximum-targeting works well when there is an efficiency gain for reaching higher levels of intensity, or when other barriers impede progress without such intensity. They work well either with sustained obsession, or careful transition to average or minimum-tageted goals, once the burst has finished.
Concluding Thoughts
Minimum-targeting is the art of patience, endurance and small efforts accumulating into large gains. Average-targeting is the strategy of continuing what you have been doing, but expecting more from yourself and continuing it for longer. Maximum-targeting is a sprint, which can climb over mountains, but can’t be sustained perpetually.