Most lives are lived by default

http://www.raptitude.com/2012/07/most-lives-are-lived-by-default/

Jamie lives in a large city in the midwest. He’s a copywriter for an advertising firm, and he’s good at it.

He’s also good at thinking of reasons why he ought to be happy with his life. He has health insurance, and now savings. A lot of his friends have neither. His girlfriend is pretty. They never fight. His boss has a sense of humor, doesn’t micromanage, and lets him go early most Fridays.

On most of those Fridays, including this one, instead of taking the train back to his suburban side-by-side, he walks to a downtown pub to meet his friends. He will have four beers. His friends always stay longer.

Jamie’s girlfriend Linda typically arrives on his third beer. She greets them all with polite hugs, Jamie with a kiss. He orders his final beer when she orders her only one. They take a taxi home, make dinner together, and watch a movie on Netflix. When it’s over they start a second one and don’t finish it. They have sex, then she goes to wash her face and brush her teeth. When she returns, he goes.

There was never a day Jamie sat down and decided to be a copywriter living in the midwest. A pair of lawyers at his ex-girlfriend’s firm took him out one night when he was freshly laid-off from writing for a tech magazine, bought him a hundred dollars worth of drinks and gave him the business card of his current boss. It was a great night. That was nine years ago.

His friends are from his old job. White collar, artsy and smart. If one of the five of them is missing at the pub on Friday, they’ll have lunch during the week.

Jamie isn’t unhappy. He’s bored, but doesn’t quite realize it. As he gets older his boredom is turning to fear. He has no health problems but he thinks about them all the time. Cancer. Arthritis. Alzheimer’s. He’s thirty-eight, fit, has no plans for children, and when he really thinks about the course of his life he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, except on Fridays.

In two months he and Linda are going to Cuba for ten days. He’s looking forward to that right now.

***

A few weeks ago I asked everyone reading to share their biggest problem in life in the comment section. I’ve done this before — ask about what’s going on with you — and every time I do I notice two things.

The first thing is that everyone has considerable problems. Not simply occasional tough spots, but the type of issue that persists for years or decades. The kind that becomes a theme in life, that feels like part of your identity. By the sounds of it, it’s typical among human beings to feel like something huge is missing.

The other thing is that they tend to be one of the same few problems: lack of human connection, lack of personal freedom (due to money or family situations), lack of confidence or self-esteem, or lack of self-control.

The day-to-day feel and quality of each of our lives sits on a few major structures: where we live, what we do for a living, what we do with ourselves when we’re not at work, and which people we spend most of our time with. 

Making a major change in just one of these areas will necessarily make a major change in the feel and quality of your day-to-day life. It simply can’t stay the same.

Stay in the same city, but start hanging out with a completely different crowd, and life will change significantly. You will change. Stay in the same career but move cities, and your life also will change in a major way.

It might get better, or it might get worse. You don’t know until the change is made. This uncertainty is enough to keep most people from bothering.

But they should bother, as a rule. Day to day life is more likely to get better than worse, because a deliberate change gives you a chance to see if your new situation resonates with you or not, and gives you a second angle of the old one. If the new situation does resonate, then you’re closer to finding what’s right for you, what’s optimal for your sense of well-being.

If it doesn’t resonate with you, then you have more perspective about what it is that you already do that you like so much. Your values become clearer, and you gravitate toward them more strongly. If you leave the countryside for the city and hate it, then you’ve definitely learned more about what it is about the countryside that really does something for you. That’s progress. That’s getting closer to what you want.

Living with the die roll

For Jamie, and for most of us, those four major structures were not decided consciously. The career you end up working in depends chiefly on what you saw as options when you were just starting to enter the workforce. That was a very narrow period of time, during which you were only aware of a limited number of options. You went with whatever made sense at that time. The result — what you do today — is more or less happenstance.

Friends too, are mostly in our lives as defaults. Most of us have found some incredible and inspiring people just by letting happenstance deliver them, but once we have some stable friendships we become complacent and stop actively looking for friends that really resonate with our values and interests, if we ever did at all.

Where you live is even more random, more difficult to change, and it may have the greatest effect of all the structures, because it determines the rest. You were born somewhere. If you moved, it was probably for work or for a relationship. A minority of people do move to a particular city because they think they’ll be happier there than anywhere else. They are seeking the optimum place to live for their values, or at least close to it. But most of us become too established in one place to seriously consider moving once we hit 30.

Friends, location and career tend to define the other one: what you do with your time. Your habits and your hobbies. Your routines, your typical saturday night activities, your wardrobe, your pursuits and personal projects are all suggested by (and constrained by) what your defaults are in the other categories. If you happened to grow up in Nebraska, you probably don’t surf. But surfing might just be the thing that really would turn your crank like nothing else, if you were lucky enough to discover that.

So much of our lives consists of conditions we’ve fallen into. We gravitate unwittingly to what works in the short term, in terms of what to do for work and what crowd to run with. There’s nothing wrong with living from defaults, necessarily, but think about it: what are the odds that the defaults delivered to you by happenstance are anywhere close to what’s really optimal for you?

In other words, we seldom consciously decide how we’re going to live our lives. We just end up living certain ways.

In all likelihood, what you’ve inherited is nowhere near what’s best for you. Chances are very slight that there isn’t a drastically better neighborhood for you out there, a more kindred circle of peers, a much better line of work, and a much more rewarding way to go about your day than the way you do. Your level of fulfillment and sense of peace with the world depend on how well-matched your values are to the life you’re actually living. There’s no reason to believe they’ll match well by accident.

The most natural-feeling course for your life is to do what you’re accustomed to doing, live where you’re accustomed to living, seek what you’re accustomed to seeking. So be careful. I’m convinced that all of my major problems — and many of the problems in the comment section of the What’s your problem post — are due to going with the defaults, either too afraid or too oblivious to make major changes to them.

As a culture, we do a whole lot of maintaining, rationalizing, procrastinating and reinforcing, and not very much thinking about what’s really best for us and the drastic changes we might need to make to get there.

So what does this mean? It means if you’re a normal person you can expect that a lot of categories of your life are set up in highly ineffecient ways, by default. Certain areas of life could be all wrong for you and you have no idea how good it could be on other side of the fence. It also means that wherever you recognize a persistent source of grief in your life, there is probably a different way to set up your life that could eliminate it or greatly reduce it. It could be a major change, like getting rid of your spouse, or it could just be moving to a different neighborhood in the same city.

Major changes are intimidating, but think about it — most of the time when you hear somebody talk about making a major change in their life, like changing cities or careers, a year later they’ll say it put them in a far better place. They tell you they don’t know how they lived before.

That’s a feeling worth seeking out. That specific feeling — which comes in the wake of a major change — of wondering how you ever got along before.

The bottom lines, if I haven’t been clear:

It is typical in human lives to feel like something huge is missing or unsettled.

It is typical for the major aspects of a human life (career, friends, habits and home) to be decided by happenstance, and not consciously.

The feeling of something huge being missing is probably often due to a serious mismatch between what you currently have in one of those aspects, and what is best for you in one of those aspects.

Making conscious changes to the aspects of life you’ve accepted by default can result in dramatic and immediate changes to quality of life.

Few people do this. Few people make a deliberate quest out of finding their perfect city or neighborhood, of seeking out their truly like-minded. Most of us live seventy or eight years defending what we’ve been given, because we think it’s who we are.

At any given time, the prospect of a major change will tend to seem out of the question. This is because you believe you are what you’ve been doing this whole time. From the other side of a major change, the thought of continuing the with way things were will seem absurd.

But identity is fluid. You’ve been becoming a different person this whole time, and after making a dramatic change, you might find you’re more yourself than you’ve ever been.

***

无题

首先,爱情给我带来的狂喜,这种狂喜竟如此有力, 以致使我常常会为了体验几小时爱的喜悦,而宁愿牺牲生命中的其他一切。其次, 爱情可以摆脱孤寂 – 身历那种可怕孤寂人的战栗意识,有时会由世界的边缘观察到冷酷无生命的无底深渊

 

—罗素 《我为何而生》

产品设计

产品设计的关键,不是使用最先进的技术,也不是开发最全面的功能,而是给客户最好的体验,即好产品就是起用起来简单、简单、再简单而又产生出蒙太奇般用户体验的产品

用户体验是一个复杂的问题,而且是一个越来越受到关注的问题,但是真正能做好这一点的企业并不多。用户体验不需要震撼性创新,而是把众多不被重视的细节做好,就是说“重要的不是你能实现什么, 而是你怎么实现

 

我们一直在使用别人的成果。使用人类的已有经验和知识来进行发明创建是一件很了不起的事情

不是因为失败太多,而是因为尝试太少

我在前些年看了央视的从国外引进的探索节目,其中有一集是讲人类的进化的,但是的那集的片段已经描述到了人类的进化史到了一百万年前,这个时候不光有我们的祖先,还有其他的旁系的类人猿,有一种叫做智人的类人猿,他们比我们的人类祖先有更多的先天优势,比如有很结实的牙齿足以去消化一些纤维很粗的球茎植物,所以他们可以不用去到处进行一些危险的觅食活动,满足于一直靠啃食球状食物为生,而我们的祖先没有这些先天的优势,只能不断进行一些危险的冒险尝试,比如偷袭食肉性猛兽,和它们搏斗,常常因此而丢掉自己的性命,但是我们的祖先从未停止过这些冒险探索,从一次又一次的成功和失败中积累知识和经验,而那些相对于人类有更多先天优势的旁系类人猿的智人一直未作其他尝试都是以球茎植物为生,地球上的环境变化了,球状植物大量减少,所以最后这种智人物种由于找不到充足的食物而逐渐消失,最后走到今天的是本来先天条件并不占优势的人类,并且发展壮大了起来。
我想说的最后解说员点评的一句话,非常的经典:
他们的消亡不是因为失败太多,而是因为尝试太少
这句话题说的太经典了,现在想想都是受益颇多,往往决定胜负的并不是我们的先天条件的优劣,知道自己的劣势,试图为这些做更多的改变和尝试来改变的现状是非常有必要的,不断的探索尝试,让我们不断的积累知识和经验,最后达到量变到质变产生质的飞跃

 

 

四个人进入一幢摩天大楼,要到达楼顶才算成功。
他们走进了同一部电梯。
第一个人开始跑步运动,一刻也不停止。
第二个人开始拿针扎自己,掐自己大腿。
第三个人跪拜、不停向他心中的神祈祷。
第四个人坐在角落一动不动,面无表情。
电梯到了楼顶,开门,四个人走了出来。
一大堆记者涌了上来,热情洋溢。
“请问,您是怎样取得成功的?”
第一个:“成功,就必须努力奋斗,坚持下去就能成功。”
第二个:“成功,就必须能吃苦,吃尽苦头就能成功。”
第三个:“成功,必须有信仰,向伟大的神祈祷,就能成功。”
第四个:“成功?只是运气好而已,没有成功的方法。”
于是,关于成功的故事传遍了全世界。
这是成功学的崩溃。
第二个故事,来自《老罗语录》。
科学家做了一个实验。
笼子里放五只猴子,笼子一角挂一串香蕉。
猴子看见香蕉,自然会过去吃。
它们一过去,就从上面浇滚烫的热水,修理它们。
吃了几次苦头以后,猴子再也不敢碰香蕉了。
接下来抽调出一只老猴子,放进一只新猴子。
新猴子看见香蕉,又过去吃。
这时科学家惊讶地发现。
来不及浇热水。
四只老猴子摁住新猴子一通暴打。
打得它死去活来。
几次之后,新猴子再也不去碰香蕉。
这时再抽调出一只老猴子,放进一只新猴子。
新猴子看见香蕉,又想去吃。
刚要去吃。
被其他四只猴子摁住,一通暴打。
打得最凶的,竟然是没被水浇过的。
它不知道为什么。
就知道谁要吃香蕉就得挨打。
下死手。
新猴子又被打得皮开肉绽,死去活来。
最后这个猴子也不碰香蕉了。
这时再抽调出一只老猴子,放进一只新猴子。
于是它又被其他四个打。
打得最凶的,是那两个没被水浇过的。
逐渐地换,逐渐地换。
笼子里五个猴子全换成了新猴子。
全都没被水浇过。
但是谁都不吃香蕉。
一个传统在笼子里形成了。
这是传统的崩溃。

 

 

谁终将声震人间,必长久深自缄默。
谁终将点燃闪电,必长久如云飘泊。

初心

初心来自日本禅者铃木俊隆的书,《禅者的初心》英文是“ Zen, Beginner’s Mind” 这本书当时在美国引起了很大的轰动,乔布斯深受这本书的影响。书中围绕初心有很多的解释,初心,即“初学者的心”, 修行的目的就是要始终保持这颗初心,其中举例假如你只读过一遍《心经》,可能会深受感动。但当你读两遍,三遍,四遍的时候,说不定你会失去对它最初的感动。
同样的情况也发生在生活中,当我们还是小孩子时,接触到的任何东西都是新的,对事物没有任何先入为主的概念,我们就可以以纯净的心去接触事物和问题。长大之后反而被各种名词和概念所禁锢,抓不到事物的本质。
从另一个角度,初心就是开放的心,而不是封闭的心,是颗空的心,是颗随时准备好去接受的心。初学者对一切持敞开的态度,初学者的心充满各种可能性,老手的心却没有多少可能性。如果用杯子来比喻,那么初心就相当于一个空杯子,随时可以接受新的事物。初心的作用就是教育人们以Beginner’s Mind 去看待事物。
乔布斯的伟大就是能够通过他个人以Beginner’s Mind来看透事物的本质,他将大家都认为理所应当的事情重新从本质上思考,颠覆了人们对音乐,娱乐和沟通的理解,创造出ipod, iphone和ipad。
当我们在做产品或者服务的时候,需要用初心去体会人到底需要什么,只有初心才能体会到本质的东西。如今媒体上铺天盖地的名词和概念,什么SOLOMO,什么O2O,什么Mobile-Commerce等等,伟大的企业家永远不会被这些概念所左右,乔布斯从来不会去讲我这个产品是结合了SOLOMO,而是用抓住人们对于娱乐或者生活的渴望。
所以初心对我的启示就是,不被名词或者概念所控制,从内心去思考这些人们行为背后隐藏的哲理。这也就解释了为什么抄袭来的idea并不会做的非常成功的原因,同样那些把玩概念和名词的,也就并不会做的长久。