One of my friend is highly successful in life. He is a big businessman, moves in VIP circle, a happy family and a great lifestyle. In short everything that I don’t have and others dream of. A few years back I met him. He was talking about going to the next level. I asked him what he meant by ‘next level’? He answered that he is not quite sure but he feels that something is missing. He needed a guide or a mentor or a coach or someone like that to help him out. I said what if you dont find a solution to this ‘next level’ problem that is bothering you or what if there is no such thing as next level.
You may be in that ‘next level’ now but you don’t realize it. You are always trying for the next level and keeping yourself with that uneasy feeling.
Pat Riley was a famous coach of NBA teams. He studied why a team which has won a major competition in a year lose out the next year to seemingly inferior teams. He called it disease of more. He said once a team wins a major competition that means more money, more endorsements, more TV shows, and more media attention for each player. What was once a collective achievement becomes an individual pursuit. Then ego comes in as to who is getting more limelight and money. The desire for more at an individual level ruins the cohesiveness of the team and it ends up losing.
Psychologists have studied success and happiness closely in the last 30 years. The market is flooded with such books and bored middle class people have bought these books making these ‘experts’ richer. You will find various surveys on this topic which are used to decide for yourself what your level of happiness is. And also compiled and analyzed to calculate the level of happiness for a particular group of people.
Answers of these surveys are in a range of 1 to 10 and you have to choose your answer as one of the numbers. Questions can be like how happy are you feeling now, how do you feel when in a supermarket, how do you feel attending to son’s football game, how happy do you feel clinching a big deal or making a big sale. The answer invariably ranged between 7 and 8.
On the downside when asked about how did you feel when you failed to repay an instalment of loan or when you came to know your mother has a serious illness or when you missed a big opportunity- the answer ranged between 2-4 .
If it is a very positive thing like you won a dream vacation or won a lottery the number will shoot up and for a very negative thing it will go down, but then it will return to the range between 3 and 7 after a short time. So no one is fully successful and unsuccessful, and happy or unhappy all the time. It is like, things are OK now, but could be better or worse. But it plays a trick on us. The brain will make you think that if you try a little more then you will reach 10 perhaps. And we fall for it. Our life becomes an effort to reach that elusive 10. So we try for a new house, a bigger house, a bigger car, a costly vacation, the next promotion, the next pay raise etc. to try to reach that 10.
It is like a treadmill, you are making a lot of effort but you are actually in the same place.
So should we not try for more?
It means we should strive for something other than success and happiness, looking for happiness is like a mirage in desert. When something can be improved does not mean that we rush towards it. There is no ‘applicable to all’ reason in it. If you don’t have a solid ‘why’ backing you then you are probably better off the way it is now. Self improvement should be used like a bandage, only to be applied when required and then taken off when the requirement ends.
Coming back to my dear friend, I told him that, don’t go for improvement just for the sake of improvement. He should not treat life as to do checklist. Life is after all not a game of improvement but a trade off. If you go for further improvement then you will have to trade it off with something which you value. In the race to reach 10, be careful what you are trading off and whether it is a winning deal or not.
it is always great to read your articles !