Is Your Passion Making You Unhappy?

"Follow your passion," they say. It's one of those pieces of advice that sounds good. Obviously, nobody is actually going to tell you to do something you hate, right? Don't worry -- I'm not here to burst that bubble with some sort of counter-intuitive psychology research. Instead, I'm here to ask if you're approaching your passions in the right way. Robert Vallerand and his associates published a paper in 2007 that looks at the Dual Model of Passion and found some interesting results. The Dual Model of Passion essentially says there are two types of passion, harmonious passion and obsessive passion. As you might expect, people with harmonious passion seem to have better outcomes than those with obsessive passion. 

Passion, in general, is defined as a strong inclination toward an activity that you like (or love), find to be important, in which you spend time and energy, and which comes to be internalized as part of your identity. If you're passionate about playing guitar you're likely to define yourself as a "guitarist." Passionate video game players are "gamers" and people who feel passionately about dancing think of themselves as "dancers." That's what it means to internalize something as part of your identity. Passion is fine, as long as it develops in a healthy way.

 Obsessive passion results from what is called a "controlled internalization of the activity." Basically, you tie social acceptance ("I do this because other people like me more when I do it") or self-esteem ("I'm a better person when I do this") to the activity. What develops is an unhealthy obsession to execute the activity even at the expense of your social relationships or work commitments. The real kicker, however, is that you probably won't even feel very good while you're partaking in your passion if you have an obsessive orientation to it. You'll likely feel guilty while you're doing it ("I shouldn't be doing this right now") and have trouble engaging with the activity (or entering flow).

Harmonious passion, on the other hand, is marked by "autonomous internalization" of the activity into your identity. There are no contingencies on doing the activity and you're free to choose whether or not to do it. The activity still occupies a significant amount of time but it does not overpower your identity. The real bonus is that if you have a harmonious passion approach you're likely to feel happier when you're doing the activity and be more likely to become fully immersed in the activity.

Anders Ericsson's 10,000-hours-of-practice-makes-an-expert (deliberate practice, remember) research is pretty much accepted nowadays thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. To practice something so consistently, especially considering deliberate practice is rarely fun in itself, obviously requires passion. According to this paper, it looks like both obsessive and harmonious passion can result in performance attainment (being a master guitar player, artist, or athlete, for example). Both types of passion positively correlate with deliberate practice and that is the most important factor in reaching goals. However, the path from passion to actually achieving a concrete goal is much more direct with harmonious passion.

 If you care about something deeply, strive for harmonious passion. If you have this type of passion you focus almost exclusively on mastery goals (getting good at the activity itself -- not the results of being good at the activity). When you care about mastery goals, you focus your attention and time on activities that lead to performance improvement. For example, you practice guitar because you love playing the guitar and not because you want to be a rich rock star. Mastery goals lead to deliberate practice which eventually allows performance attainment to happen. As a nice added bonus, your subjective well-being (happiness) is likely to be high and you're likely to experience flow.

On the other hand, you can care deeply about something and have an obsessive passion toward it. In this case the path to your ultimate goal is not so straightforward. You pursue a variety of goals including mastery (like people with harmonious passion) but you also care about not appearing less capable as compared to other people (performance-avoidance goal). Your focus on mastery goals will help you in your quest for performance attainment but because you're also worried about not appearing less capable than the people around you, you progress more slowly in your development as an expert. You may eventually reach whatever your ultimate goal is, but it'll likely take you longer, you won't be very happy while you do it and you won't have fully enjoyed yourself in the process of becoming an expert.  

Think about the things you're passionate about. How do you feel when you can't partake in them? Do you feel lost and irritable or are you able to move on with your day and not let it bother you too much? Do you enjoy the time you spend in your passion or do you feel guilty when you're doing it because you should be doing something else? The sign of a healthy passion is something you love to do for the sake of doing it, not because you think it will provide the path to some kind of external goal later on.  

If you're concerned that your passion is perhaps entering the obsessive realm (or already has), it's worth thinking about how you can align it to be more harmonious with your life. Not only will you enjoy the time you spend doing it more, you're likely to reach your end goal of mastery quicker. A win-win situation if there ever was one.

Do you have any stories about a passion that ended up becoming obsessive and the effect it had on your life? Have you successfully navigated the path between obsessive and harmonious passion? I'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Reference

Vallerand, R. J., Salvy, S.-J., Mageau, G. A., Elliot, A. J., Denis, P. L., Grouzet, F. M. E. and Blanchard, C. (2007), On the Role of Passion in Performance. Journal of Personality, 75: 505–534. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2007.00447.x

The Simple Truths of Happiness from the Dalai Lama

I recently decided to wipe the slate and start my blog from scratch. However, there are some articles from my past that I'd like to update and reintroduce to the blog. For the next several weeks, I'll be sharing some of these articles. If you've been following my writing since the beginning of The Simpler Life, you may recognize some of them. More than likely, however, this will be brand new content to you.

There are few people in the world as qualified that people turn to for advice and insight on happiness than the Dalai Lama. As the living spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, the Dalai Lama has seen and lived through the dislocation of his country and people. Despite the difficult events he has lived through, most people would agree that it is impossible to not feel happier after being in his presence. He will tell you that happiness is the purpose of life and that "the very motion of our life is towards happiness." In this book, The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama expounds on day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, discouragement and other difficulties common to all human beings. In a series of conversations with Dr. Howard Cutler in Arizona and India as well as excerpts from a speaking engagement in Phoenix, the Dalai Lama provides interesting insights into the problems that we all face.

I read this book a long time ago and on top of simply recommending it, I thought I would pick and expand a few quotes from the text that spoke to me. Each of these ideas is resoundingly simple yet speaks volumes to attaining happiness. 

1. "I believe that happiness can be achieved through training the mind.": I think this quote is incredibly optimistic and hopeful. Many of us operate under the assumption that our happiness is dictated by outside circumstances; when I get the raise I'll be happy or when I get accepted into this top-ranked university I'll be happy. The beautiful thing about this quote is that if you believe it, you have complete control over your own level of happiness. It may not be particularly easy to develop that mental discipline or control, but it's attainable through practice and training. Removing the external control of our happiness and placing it within something we can control, our own mind, is absolutely huge to achieving lasting happiness.
2. "Unhappiness...comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity.": It is easy to shut the world out of our thoughts when we are unhappy. Our focus turns inward until we can only see our own sorrows and situation; our perspective narrows. If we can train ourselves to prevent this narrowing at times of difficulty our unhappiness will lose its acuteness. Most importantly, I think this quote speaks to the power of letting other people help us in times of sorrow and difficulty.
3. "It's the very struggle of life that makes us who we are. And it is our enemies that test us, provide us with the resistance necessary for growth.": If we lived in a world without difficulty, without enemies, nobody would grow. You can't grow your muscles without resistance-- that's why hockey players will skate with weights on their feet during practice. That's why you read difficult books and that's why difficult situations provide the greatest opportunity for growth. I like to interpret the "enemies" in the above quote in very broad terms. I don't really think I have any enemies in the true sense of the word but I do have plenty of goals, events, and situations that can provide the same resistance as enemies. They are enemies of my own choosing, but they still spur me toward growth. Cherish your enemies, your difficult tasks, and anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone.

The book continues to expound on these, and many other, ideas. As I read it, I think what struck me the most was that even though the Dalai Lama is a spiritual/religious leader, his advice on attaining happiness is rational and based on solid observation. As somebody who doesn't put much stock in any kind of organized religion, I wasn't sure if the Dalai Lama would have much to say that would resonate with me. However, there is nothing religious about training our minds to respond to stimuli in a positive manner, broadening our focus to other people in times of unhappiness and embracing the difficult aspects of life while using them as a basis for growth.

I did a little housekeeping over the weekend and updated the About, Coaching, and Books pages. Everything is fresh and ready for you to take a look. I also added buttons to sign up for the RSS feed and email subscription to the right sidebar. If you don't want to miss an article, signing up for one of those two options is a good idea.
 

I also started up my Weekly Video Update series again. Each weekend I record myself talking about what's on my mind the most for a couple minutes. You can watch this week's video and see all other recorded videos by clicking here. The latest video can always be found in the right sidebar on SamSpurlin.com as well.

Predictors of Success: Grit

Over the past couple of months I've become very interested in what factors predict success. Traditionally, and according to most public schools today, IQ is the primary predictor of success. If you have a high IQ you should be set up for success later in life, right? It doesn't take too much digging to find a boat load of anecdotal and empirical evidence to refute that, though. How many intellectually powerful people do you know that haven't really achieved any measure of success? Most of us have that one cousin that could do differential calculus in his sleep but fills his days with Cheetos and pot instead of solving complex problems for NASA. There's definitely more to success than being smart. Considering it appears that a large part of our IQ is genetic, the fact that it's not the primary predictor of success should make you pretty happy (unless you're a Cheeto eating pot head).

One of the predictors of success I was introduced to this year is "grit." Grit was developed by a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania named Angela Duckworth. She defined it as "perseverance and passion toward long-term goals." She developed a scale to measure this trait and has administered it to some interesting groups of people with fascinating results. For example, she gave incoming West Point freshmen her grit scale and then observed which of them made it through Beast Barracks (the mentally and physically exhausting summer training before freshman year begins). Obviously, West Point has a lot riding on selecting students that they think will do well in the unique military environment the school provides. Selecting students that end up dropping out of school because they can't handle the environment is a serious pain for the school. Now, back to Duckworth and her grit scale. Those students who scored high on her grit scale before Beast Barracks ended up being much more likely to not drop out during or immediately after the experience. Those who scored low on the scale were much more likely to bow out in the middle of that first summer. The most interesting aspect of this study, however, was that Duckworth's grit scale predicted success much more than any of the tests West Point administers. More than SAT score, more than any IQ test, and more than any proprietary test they've developed.

Interesting, eh? However, I understand you probably aren't going to be doing anything as strenuous as Beast Barracks any time soon. The grit scale has also been given to Ivy League undergraduates and high level spelling bee contestants. In both cases, the grit scale predicted success more than anything else. In the case of the Ivy League undergraduates, scoring high on the grit scale correlated with higher GPAs when they graduated than SAT scores and for the spelling bee contestants scoring high on the grit scale resulted in greater success than even a test of their verbal intelligence. Having a high level of perseverance and passion for long term goals seems to result in some pretty excellent results.

The next obvious question, then, is how do you develop grit? From my research experience, it doesn't look like there has been a lot of scientifically rigorous studies about how to systematically develop grit in a specific population. Logically, however, it seems like having an opportunity to experience failure and then bounce back from it is a good way to learn how to stick to a long-term goal. In fact, the New York Times recently published an article about a prestigious New York private school that has made the development of character strengths like grit a cornerstone of their philosophy. To encourage this, teachers have been encouraged to cut back on the amount of homework they assign and to provide students more experiential learning opportunities with legitimate chances of failure. This can be seriously uncomfortable for highly intelligent kids (and their parents) who are used to flying through homework assignments and dominating standardized tests. More work needs to be done on specific interventions and programs that directly develop grit, but this seems to be a step in the right direction.

Everyday life, however, doesn't necessarily promote the development of grit. One of the major barriers to developing this character strength is information overload. Our attention is under unprecedented siege right now. Considering it is truly our most valuable resource, it's in high demand by advertisers, entertainment outlets, and, hopefully, ourselves. The problem with this information overload is that it's incredibly difficult to keep our attention fixated on one task or project for very long. Nowadays, when things start to get difficult there is always a plethora of other options and activities we can undertake. Particularly in an economy centered on "knowledge work" it is incredibly easy to keep jumping from one project to another. I'm sure you're familiar with the rush of motivation and excitement that accompanies starting something new. While super helpful for getting new projects off the ground, that response isn't very helpful for developing grit.

Overall, grit is a relatively newly defined construct that is still in its formative years. More work needs to be done on learning how to measure it accurately, differentiating it from perseverance, and developing empirically validated ways to nurture it in various populations. If the early research is any marker, though, it appears to be an exciting way to predict success. If future research shows that grit is more a matter of learning and development instead of genetically set, schools, other youth institutions, and organizations committed to developing employees must take note. 

For now, I'll keep my nose to the grind stone and keep working on the projects that matter most to me even when things go poorly. With a name like "grit" the name itself precludes any expectation for it to be a smooth ride in development.

References:

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of personality and social psychology, 92(6), 1087-101.

Make Yourself Uncomfortable to Unlock Your Subconscious Mind

I recently decided to wipe the slate and start my blog from scratch. However, there are some articles from my past that I'd like to update and reintroduce to the blog. For the next several weeks, I'll be sharing some of these articles. If you've been following my writing since the beginning of The Simpler Life, you may recognize some of them. More than likely, however, this will be brand new content to you.

In The Talent Code, a book about figuring out how to become an expert at something, author Daniel Coyle discovered that many training facilities in talent hotbeds, geographic areas that produced an unusual number of people with world-class talent, tend to be run-down, shabby, and nearly dilapidated. He said that if all of the training grounds of all the talent hotbeds he visited were magically assembled into a single mega-hotbed facility it would "…resemble a shantytown. Its buildings would be makeshift, corrugated-roofed affairs, its walls paint-bald, its fields weedy and uneven."

What Coyle uncovered, according to John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University, is what's called the Scrooge Principle. It states that "our unconscious mind is a stingy banker of energy reserves, keeping its wealth locked in a vault. Direct pleas to open the vault don't work; Scrooge can't be fooled that easily. But when he's hit with the right combination of primal cues-- when he's visited by a series of primal-cue ghosts, you might say-- the tumblers click, the vault of energy flies open, and suddenly it's Christmas Day." Training in a gorgeous, state-of-the-art facility does not provide any of the primal cues needed to trick our subconscious into unlocking that energy vault. Bargh says, "If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort. Why work? But if people get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now-- of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it."

How can you make your environment more conducive to unlocking your energy vault? What can you learn from the Scrooge Principle?

1. Create adversity for yourself: The best talent hotbeds are not extremely pleasant places to be-- by design (sometimes). The mind is cued to work harder. What can you do to make your own working environment a little less luxurious? If you're a writer, is it possible to shut off the Internet and only access it for a short time each day? When I was Internet-less in my old apartment for about 6 months, I saw my creativity and production sky-rocket. Try working without the air-conditioning for a week or use a couple blankets to keep warm at night instead of a heater. It may seem silly or counter-intuitive but making your environment less comfortable might be a great first step toward developing your own talent.
2. Use the simplest tools available: Youth baseball in the Dominican Republic does not have the fancy equipment or specialized training tools that many elite baseball teams have in the United States. In the Dominican, athletes use the simplest equipment. I remember when I was 11 or 12 I played a couple exhibition games against a youth hockey team from Russia. They were all using wooden sticks (everybody on my team was using expensive composite sticks), and old equipment. My teammates and I thought we would dominate them. We quickly discovered that top of the line equipment was not needed to be a good hockey player and we were soundly beat several times. In your own work, what is the simplest tool that you can use and still be productive? If you're a writer, try writing with a piece of paper and a pen for awhile. Try running without your iPod or even shoes. Use the simplest tools available.
3. Focus on your core competency: At the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow, a club that produced more top-twenty-ranked women than the entire United States did from 2005-2007, students spend hours practicing without tennis balls. They call it itimitatsiya and it develops the core competency of every tennis player: their swing. If you are a writer, write. If you are a runner, run. If you are a painter, paint. It can be easy to get caught up in the related yet non-essential tasks that your work creates. If I'm not careful I can find myself spending my time researching an article much longer than is truly necessary. Formatting my writing is important; but, not nearly as important as actually writing. Connecting with other writers via Twitter may be mildly productive, but it's not writing. Reading about running may be inspirational, but it's not going to make you suddenly able to run a marathon. Mastering the component parts of your activity is what will make you improve just like the tennis players practicing their swing without balls. What distractions can you eliminate from your working environment. 

Your subconscious is an extremely powerful component of your mind. Learning to setup your own working environment like some of the greatest talent hotbeds in the world; the run-down baseball fields of the Dominican Republic or the dilapidated shack of the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow, can help unlock the energy you need to develop your own talent. Send yourself the primal cues that you haven't made it yet, you aren't living the high life, you aren't a master of all you do, and you will be closer to the world-class talent that you desire.

The Role of Curation in a True GTD System

Today's post is all about David Allen's personal management system called Getting Things Done. If you aren't familiar with it, you may want to read the book, or at least the Wikipedia article first.

I've seen a lot of chatter recently in the blogs I follow about whether GTD is "good" for creatives. As an ardent follower of David Allen's seminal personal management system, I must say I feel compelled to share my thoughts. If this little flare up had happened a couple of months ago, I probably would've been right in the thick of defending canonical GTD. I've had a lot of success using the system to help me manage my student teaching experience, my long-term substitute teaching experience, coaching a college hockey team, starting graduate school, starting a business and a multitude of small and medium-sized projects in between. GTD has been my stalwart companion during this entire time. However, I realized even though it may seem like a lot when it's all listed out like that, each of these times of my life usually featured one or two major projects that spawned smaller projects. I've always had a lot to do, but up until recently I've never felt that my ability to manage the sheer number of possibilities has been tested. Now? Things are different. 

Graduate school seems to have the unique property of providing exponentially more (quantitatively) and more interesting projects the better work you do. The more I buckled down on my rock solid implementation of GTD, the more opportunities I had for really interesting projects. It's cool to have things to choose from, but this pattern is not sustainable. Eventually something had to break; either me or my system (or both).

I became bogged down in the details of following up on my huge list of available projects. I spent more time making sure I had next actions defined than I did actually doing the work. Let me stop you right now if you're a GTD fan because I know what your counterargument is going to be. This isn't a failure of the system, it's a failure in my ability to be crystal clear about what's true for me right now in terms of how much I can really accept on my proverbial work plate. It's a failure of priority, not the system. However, being a staunch follower of GTD led me to feel I could accept anything and everything because I had become so good at handling the never-ending stream of information. I felt like I could take something else on because I had a very clear sense of what I've currently committed to. I just had a bad case of eyes-bigger-than-my-stomach syndrome. Because I always knew what the next action was for any of the projects in my system, every time I sat down to work on one project all I could think about was how I should be doing any number of other projects (and not on an amorphous level -- I knew what the next actions were for each of them). It resulted in me flitting from project to project on a typical day, knocking out next actions and slowly, achingly slowly, moving my entire retinue of projects toward completion.

Something needed to change and last week I made those changes. First, it was simply a matter of ending commitments to those activities and responsibilities that weren't fulfilling me in the way they should (beating them with my GTD club in MacSparky parlance). Then, it was committing to one area of responsibility, or even better, one project, for an entire day and scheduling out my week in advance. Immediately I stopped feeling like I needed to be working on projects X, Y, and Z every time I sat down to do A. I think my brain realized I had already slotted myself time to work on those projects later in the week so I was finally free to bring my mental power to bear on one project. I'm currently tweaking this approach as it turns out some areas of responsibility, while important, can't fill an entire day. For the upcoming week I'm trying breaking my day into two chunks, Morning and Afternoon. Each chunk gets an area of responsibility or a specific project. Friday is mostly for taking care of whatever is on my mind at the most at that time.

This may not work if you don't have the benefit of having some serious control over how you spend your time. Luckily, since I'm not currently in classes and I'm largely self-employed so I can decide what my days look like to a very large extent. Another test to this early modification of my GTD implementation will be when mission critical information for non-active projects enter my awareness (like an important email to move forward my TEDx planning that arrives on a non-TEDx work day). Will I be able to resist the urge to throw my plan to the wayside and dive back into a certain project? If that's on my mind should i even be trying to ignore it or save it for another day? I haven't figured it all out yet, but I feel better about where I am now as compared to a couple weeks ago.

And the ultimate conclusion from all of this, obviously, is that GTD really wasn't the problem. Losing the critical eye that helped me differentiate between "hell yeah!" and "eh, I guess," is what resulted in me resenting my GTD system. I don't use a canonical GTD system anymore. I can't remember the last time I used a context list and I can't tell you the natural planning model off the top of my head, but that's okay. GTD is much more a system of behaviors than it is an external "thing" that has to be maintained.

What it comes down to is that I became so good at keeping track of everything happening to me I stopped asking myself what was actually necessary to do my most important, and best, work. At some point I lost the curation process and turned my GTD system into a database of everything in my life, not a reflection of my true priorities and values.

This isn't a matter of a system that's good or bad for one type of person or another -- it's a matter of figuring out what matters for you and creating something that allows you to do more of it.

Distraction is Procrastination

I recently decided to wipe the slate and start my blog from scratch. However, there are some articles from my past that I'd like to update and reintroduce to the blog. For the next several weeks, I'll be sharing some of these articles. If you've been following my writing since the beginning of The Simpler Life, you may recognize some of them. More than likely, however, this will be brand new content to you. 

Procrastination is often more about distraction than anything else. When you are easily distracted, or there are many things that can distract you nearby, it is easy to procrastinate. With the new year I'm sure many people will be resolving to stop procrastinating. Whether that means your job, school work, or other tasks you need to get done but can't seem to sit down and do, procrastination is a killer. Instead of resolving to end your procrastination, try resolving to eliminate distractions instead. In my experience, distractions are the true culprit. If you've trained your mind and prepared your environment, the distractions are removed and the procrastination seems to fade away.

What distracts you? When you sit down to do some serious work, what do you find yourself doing instead? My biggest distractions come to the fore when I try to write. My biggest ones are:

• The need for order: If I sit down to do something that is not particularly easy (like write a blog post or prepare a lesson plan) I immediately seem to realize that my surroundings are out of order. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't bother me too much that my books are not in alphabetical order or my pens are not arranged in my drawer by level of remaining ink. As soon as I sit down to write, however, I have an incredible (and utterly useless) urge to clean, organize or put things in order. It never fails.

• Perfectionism: How can I expect to write an article when I haven't picked the perfect title?! How am I supposed to plan a lesson on World War II if I haven't found the perfect opening question or activity?! I can't use this PowerPoint presentation because all of the pictures are not perfectly aligned! That battle between attention to detail and perfectionism is one that quite often will stymie me from doing anything particularly productive. Breaking out of that commitment to perfectionism is incredibly important to getting anything done.

• My own inadequacies: Writing for this blog has made this a new distraction for me. I've always been pretty good at the things I try to do. I was a pretty good hockey player. I was an excellent student. However, I've never written for an audience (even the small one I've been able to accumulate at this blog). How can I sit down and write about this stuff when a.) I'm not very good at the stuff I write about (even though I think about it a lot and try to implement it) and b.) there are so many other blogs out there with huge readerships and really interesting things to say. 

• The need for constant new information: This might be the number one distraction that constantly begs for my attention. Checking email, checking my RSS feeds, Twitter, instant messaging, and news websites all provide little shots of stimulation that aren't particularly important but take up an disproportionate amount of my time. One of the biggest "tips" that I've discovered I need to do to do anything particularly productive or difficult is to turn all of that off. All of it. No texting, no Twitter, no email, nothing. Breaking the hold that these services have over my attention is something that I work on everyday. Anything that breaks up your attention is something that takes away from you doing truly great and important work. It's tough, but get rid of it as much as possible. 

Lastly, I realize the irony of writing an article about distraction when the chances are  I'm distracting you by writing this article.  Please forgive me for taking a few minutes of your time. However, if this has gotten you to think a little bit more about the role distractions play in your work, I think this initial time investment might be worth it. Now stop being distracted and go do what you know you're supposed to do!

The Science of Self Improvement

Steven Handel of the website The Emotion Machine has recently released his first e-book titled, The Science of Self Improvement. Knowing my proclivity for science and self improvement, he graciously forwarded me a copy for my own perusal. I think it's one of the better e-books I've had the good fortune to read and I'd like to share my thoughts.

First, The Emotion Machine was actually one of the first blogs I started to read. Steven started it 5 months before I started The Simpler Life and I remember being super impressed with the content and overall quality of the site. Steven seemed like a superstar to me and I can honestly say I used him as one of my role models when I began this whole writing on the Internet adventure. Steven has continued to keep up the great work and has turned to an even more scientific focus doing a great job breaking down and exploring ideas and articles that are normally locked up in academic circles. I think we have similar goals in making what can sometimes be difficult scientific writing and ideas more accessible to a greater number of people.

This e-book spans the gamut of what you might expect in a book about self improvement featuring chapters on beliefs, emotional intelligence, changing habits, work and leisure, relationships, and the ever important connection between physical and mental health. Nothing too out of the ordinary with that list of topics, except I rarely see people attacking the topic of beliefs and how they create our map of reality. It's an important concept that is a cornerstone of neurolinguistic programming (which many psychologists, although probably less than 10 years ago) might balk at seeing in a book with "science" in the title. Regardless, I really enjoyed that chapter and think Steven did a good job unpacking how important our beliefs are. Starting the book with this topic was a good idea because our beliefs form the bedrock of any self improvement effort.

More generally, the book is very well-written with minimal typos and grammatical errors (a feat that many e-books I read never accomplish). The design is understated and simple which keeps the focus on the writing and ideas instead of photographic distractions or silly design elements.

My primary point of criticism is that for a book with "science" in the title I'd like to see more focus on actual empirical studies and more diligent citation of where his information is coming from. The sections where he was able to point to specific psychologists or studies stand out as the strongest in the book. However, not all of the facts he presents in the book are accompanied by some kind of information where you could follow up their scientific validity. At the same time, I never read something and found myself thinking, "Well that's just not right," (again, a somewhat rare occurrence in most of the e-books I read). Of course, I'm not an expert on all of the topics Steven wrote about, either.

I'm comfortable admitting that my primary beef with the book probably comes from the fact that I'm currently in graduate school and I mostly read academic write-ups of studies or experiments. I understand that a book aimed at a general audience isn't going to have the same level of citation as an academic piece of writing. I just know that a lot of the ideas that get thrown around in general self improvement books sometimes seems to just seem like common sense and for whatever reason get bandied about without any sort of scientific basis. I can assume that most of what Steven writes in this book is correct (or close enough to correct as to not cause problems) but without better citations I can't be 100% certain. At any rate, I don't think there's anything in there that will assuredly mess you up, so you can mostly dismiss this part of the critique as the annoying rants of someone who gets chewed out by his professors for writing anything that can't be scientifically supported.

The e-book is on sale now and you can head over to The Emotion Machine to check it out. The full package is selling for $29.99 and includes the e-book (PDF, 112 pgs.), Meditation Guide: 8 Exercises for Improving Awareness in Your Everyday Life (PDF), a 1-month subscription to the Growing Minds Community and free lifetime updates to the e-book. Steven was kind enough to set up an affiliate program for his e-book, which means if you buy it using this link I receive a few bucks for sending you his way.

Developing an Autotelic Personality, Or, How to Enjoy Everything

I recently decided to wipe the slate and start my blog from scratch. However, there are some articles from my past that I'd like to update and reintroduce to the blog. For the next several weeks, I'll be sharing some of these articles. If you've been following my writing since the beginning of The Simpler Life, you may recognize some of them. More than likely, however, this will be brand new content to you.

Imagine deriving the utmost enjoyment and pleasure out of nearly every aspect of your life.  Listening to music, doing dishes, talking to a friend, cooking a meal, or doing errands--what if you looked forward to all of these activities equally? In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he describes a type of person with an "autotelic" personality.  According to Csikszentmihalyi, "The term "autotelic" derives from two Greek words, auto, meaning self, and telos meaning goal.  It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward." 

Engaging in autotelic activities is what many people describe as "flow."  Think back to a time you were doing something you loved and really got wrapped up in the project.  You probably lost sense of time and you felt challenged, yet capable, of handling whatever you faced.  This is the making of an autotelic experience and the more of these occurrences we can have, the greater enjoyment we can get out of life.

Finding the Flow State

Some activities are conducive to entering this flow state.  For example, athletes and surgeons both report high levels of autotelic experiences while they partake in their professions.  The true test of an autotelic personality, however, is being able to enter that state of flow even while doing things that many people consider boring.  A person with an autotelic personality can take something as mundane as mowing the lawn and turn it into an opportunity for growth.  Therefore, the argument that developing an autotelic personality will directly impact your quality of life is quite easy to make.  Deriving true enjoyment out of every aspect of is the key to separating the quality of our lives from external (and therefore uncontrollable) forces.

Becoming somebody with an autotelic personality is not something that can be done overnight.  It must be actively practiced until it becomes part of your personality.  The rules are very simple and can be broken down as follows:

1. Setting goals: To experience flow you have to have clear goals to strive for.  This includes massive lifelong goals to something as small as figuring out what to do this afternoon.  An autotelic personality can make these decisions with a minimum of extra effort which allows her to focus energy on attaining that goal.
2. Becoming immersed in the activity: An autotelic personality will give all of his or her attention directly to the task at hand.  Being in control of your own attention is one of the most powerful skills a person can develop.  A wandering or constantly distracted mind is a the mercy of every passing stimulus and therefore attention is spread and diluted.
3. Learning to enjoy immediate experience: Our bodies and minds have incredible capabilities of enjoyment.  Gaining control of your mind opens an individual to experience almost anything and derive joy.  Every taste, smell, sound, thought, and observation can be the anchor of immediate enjoyment if we take the time, focus, and effort to experience it.

We all have amazing capabilities to control our level of enjoyment in everything we do.  Practicing the steps to developing an autotelic personality is a very concrete way to improve the quality of your own life. As Csikszentmihalyi writes, "Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment." 

What can you do today to derive enjoyment in your life? 

Want to learn more about flow? Robert Wall of Untitled Minimalism interviewed me for his podcast and we spent most of the time talking about flow. Check it out here.

Attention to Detail vs. the Curse of Perfectionism

I recently decided to wipe the slate and start my blog from scratch. However, there are some articles from my past that I'd like to update and reintroduce to the blog. For the next several weeks, I'll be sharing some of these articles. If you've been following my writing since the beginning of The Simpler Life over two years ago, you may recognize some of them. More than likely, however, this will be brand new content to you. 

Originally I was going to write an article about how paying attention to detail and "going the extra mile" is a fairly simple way to make yourself stick out from the crowd. I still believe this, but I realized that it is a more complex issue than I initially thought. As with almost anything in life, there is a delicate balance between two extremes that must be negotiated. Attention to detail vs. the curse of perfectionism, a battle royale for information workers everywhere!

People like to be recognized for hard work. Everyone has their own reason for working hard, whether it be in the hopes of a promotion, to impress someone, or because of their own innate desire to do good work. Whatever the motivation, good work is the goal. In an environment where you might be vying for attention or prestige, taking the time to pay attention to the details of your work can be what separates you from the pack. When I student taught, I tried to make sure that all of the handouts I made for my students, all the presentations that I gave, and all the homework I assigned were free from grammatical and typographical errors and were very well formatted. When I was a student, I was always annoyed to receive a worksheet with a spelling error on it or when I had to look at a PowerPoint slide that looked like it was thrown together by a 2nd grader. I think these transgressions, albeit minor, really give off a sentiment of carelessness by the teacher. The last thing I want my students to think is that I'm careless or sloppy in my own preparation. How can I demand top-notch work from them if I can't demand top-notch work from myself?

However, this can be a dangerous and slippery slope. While attention to detail is important, obsession to detail is self-defeating. The saying, "The enemy of the good is the perfect," fits this concept very well. How many times have you been afraid to start a project because you got bogged down by the details? Have you ever had to write a paper and spent more than two seconds thinking about a title before having even typed a sentence? Or, on the flip side of that, have you ever felt like a project wasn't finished because you just had "one more little thing" to do to it?

I quickly discovered while I was student teaching that at some point I just had to admit to myself that my lesson might not be as perfect as I wanted it, but it would be suitable. I always wanted to add a couple more pictures to a slideshow, or look up a couple more facts for my lecture, or change the wording on my worksheets a little bit more. It was tough for me to admit that I would never create the perfect class materials, just like I would never be the perfect teacher or perfect anything else-- and that's OK.

So, how can I sit here in good conscience and tell you to pay attention to the details in order to stand out while simultaneously stating that striving for perfection is folly? I don't pretend to know where that equilibrium between the two extremes lies. I think I am constantly finding out for myself. Sometimes I feel like I should have spent more time on something, and sometimes I feel like I passed the "sweet spot" on a project several hours earlier. However, if you keep these two conflicting principles in mind I think you are much more likely to come closer to that ultimate balance.

My Intellectual Side: A Year of Graduate School Papers

I think a good place to begin my reentry into regularly scheduled writing is to show you guys what I've been up to since September. I wrote a fairly in-depth review of my first semester over at my other blog, process>product.  The latest semester featured three different classes including statistics (Applied Multiple Regression & Categorical Data Analysis), Applied Developmental Psychology, and Comparative Evaluation Theories and I'd like to think this semester was another positive step in my own development as a careful thinker and nuanced writer. I wasn't able to write for the blog very often because each semester featured several long writing assignments on top of the pages and pages of reading and other assignments I got to tackle each week. I'd like to share some of that writing with you. Here are the major papers (not including stats homework write-ups, which sometimes entered the realm of paper-length) from my first year of grad school. Feel free to download and read them at your leisure if you're curious:

1. Foundations of Positive Psychology - "The Rise of Coworking: Positive Psychology, Flow, and Meaningful Work" 

The capstone paper of my Foundations of Positive Psychology class was a 13-page effort investigating any concept we discussed in class and a proposal to do further research. I've been very interested in coworking for awhile now and have used it in several contexts (as you'll see) in my academic writing. In this paper I propose an introductory study to begin understanding why people seem to enjoy working in coworking spaces as opposed to home offices, libraries, or cafes. I look at the idea of cultivating flow in our work and how coworking spaces may facilitate that process. I also present an idea of thinking about coworking spaces as more than just places to work, but as hubs of positive psychology in the greater community. Looking back on the paper I realize my proposed research project is a little bit untenable, especially for an initial foray into the subject. It can be drastically improved by simplifying the overall approach and utilizing more of an exploratory method since it would be the first academic look at coworking. 

2. Introduction to Research Methods - "The Effects of Coworking on Subjective Well-Being"

This was kind of a strange paper. The final paper in this class was to simply write a research proposal on any topic we wished. However, this paper was kind of unique in that the actual content didn't matter (as long as it was fairly well-written and logical) because we were being graded on our ability to create a properly formatted APA-style paper. I write about the research proposal I discussed in the above paper in greater detail. Kind of a strange paper, but another example of how I'm using the idea of coworking and coworking spaces to advance positive psychology. BONUS: The Prezi for the presentation I gave to my class.

3. Foundations of Evaluation - "An Evaluation of American Development Model Implementation"

This class was my first foray into the science of evaluation. Our professor was possibly the most eminent evaluation scholar alive and his class was incredibly difficult to follow. Our final assignment was to describe the way we would evaluation a fictional or real program. I decided to look at the USA Hockey American Development Model which was a program to change the way U.S. youth hockey operates. I described a fictional evaluation in which a specific youth hockey organization is evaluated on how well they've implemented the ADM as it was intended. Even several short months beyond the completion of this paper my knowledge and understanding of evaluation is much better than it was when I wrote this. I see an almost never-ending list of ways I could improve this paper.

4. Comparative Evaluation Theories - "Theorist Papers: Carol Weiss, Michael Scriven, Michael Quinn Patton, Jennifer Greene"

In this class we had to write a series of small papers describing and critiquing various evaluation theorists. Each paper was relatively short and followed the same format. We had to look at each of these evaluators and be able to role-play their positions in an in-class debate. Each of these evaluators are known for something different within the field of evaluation. For example, Michael Quinn Patton developed Utilization-Focused Evaluation which is built around the idea that the only good evaluation is an evaluation that actually gets used by stakeholders. Carol Weiss is well-known for her work on evaluation at the policy level. Scriven is kind of like the Godfather of evaluation.

5. Applied Developmental Psychology - "Predictors of Success in the Knowledge Economy Other than IQ: Are Schools Preparing Students for Life in the Real World?"

This was the main intellectual baby I birthed this semester. I really respect the professor and wanted to make sure I turned in something that truly reflected my abilities. Of course, as I say that and look over the paper I see ways I could have made it better. In this paper I look at three characteristics that I think predict success in a typical knowledge-economy job (if there is such a thing) and propose a study to determine if these characteristics are being supported in schools. I look at the idea of grit (essentially sticking with something even when it gets difficult), initiative (the ability to set goals and start projects), and growth mindset (viewing failure as an opportunity to improve and not as something to be avoided at all costs). You'll be seeing more about these three ideas in the coming weeks on the blog because I think they're really important and represent some interesting work being done in positive psychology.

Final Thoughts

If you actually read all of those papers you're either a.) already in grad school and therefore a glutton for punishment, b.) really need something more exciting to do, or c.) need to apply to a graduate program in psychology because you evidently like this stuff more than most people. Those of you who may be graduate students or have experienced graduate school might be wondering if any of these were actual papers (i.e. published). I'm in an MA program that doesn't require me to publish or do research. All of these papers were just assignments done for class. One of my major projects this summer is to figure out if I'm going to apply to a PhD program or just stick with the MA program I'm currently in. If I end up going the PhD route I'll obviously be writing papers for publication and doing unique research. 

Does one of these papers or ideas resonate with you? Do you have any questions about these papers or want to know more about any of the ideas within them? Leave your thoughts in the comments below and I'd be happy to elaborate.

Hey There, Stranger

I've been trying to put my finger on the reason I haven't been putting my fingers to the keyboard. My last final was almost two weeks ago and the outpouring of writing that I assumed was sitting behind the wall of, "Once school is over…" has yet to appear. What's keeping me from seizing this newfound time and using it?

Part of it, undoubtedly, is the fact that I spent a lot of time writing this semester. There are two things you do a lot of in grad school, reading and writing. When I dotted the last I and crossed the last T on my final exam the last thing I wanted to do was dot more I's and cross more T's. I think that's a fair enough opinion to have after a pretty intense year of academia but I think I'm quickly closing in on the statute of limitations for that feeling. I've gotten away from Claremont, spent a week in a brand new place, and gave myself time to unwind. Hopefully, that means the ideas will start finding their ways back into my fingers and I can wiggle them into words that appear on your screen.

On a deeper level, I think I started to feel like an impostor when it came to my blog. What kind of writer let's his website (newly designed, too!) essentially lay dormant for weeks and weeks on end? Do I really think I can just sit down, tap out some sentences, and be back in the community? Intellectually, I know all it takes is to publish a new article and I'll be right back in the game. Emotionally, I feel like I need to craft something truly epic to make up for all the articles I've missed and time that has elapsed.

Lastly, I think I've been wrestling with what exactly I'm trying to do with this website. On a basic level, I know I want to use it as a platform to share positive psychology and personal development with a wide audience. My goal has always been to help as many people as I possibly can. However, the best way for me to go about doing this has always been an elusive beast. I know sitting on my butt and thinking about how to make my website and my business better doesn't actually do anything toward moving it in the right direction. I've mostly been sitting and thinking and now it's time to actually get doing again.

As I wrap up what has evidently turned into my "I'm back!" article, I'll see if I can translate this into something a little more general and possibly usable by you. In the past I've written about how figuring out what makes you feel good is a good starting point for improving your life. Instead of starting with ambiguous and ambitious "values" perhaps rooting your thoughts in concrete actions and activities will provide a more fruitful starting point. For me, I know when I'm writing regularly, even when it's difficult, I feel good. I feel best when I'm regularly putting my thoughts into writing and sharing it with my readers. I haven't been doing that for awhile now (for both good and bad reasons) but all of that can stop with a simple click of the "Publish" button. It's a simple step -- and now that I can look back on the several hundred words I just typed, I realize it was a pretty easy step as well.

It's good to be back. I have a lot of things planned, and I'm ready to take SamSpurlin.com healthily and boldly into the summer of 2012. As always, thanks for sticking around.

A Year Without Meat

Last year on April Fool’s day I did something that was not a practical joke -- I became a vegetarian. I did eventually feel like a fool but only because I realized a.) how much I was lying to myself in order to eat a “normal American diet” an b.) how easy it was to eat more in line with my values. When people ask me about what it’s like to make the switch to vegetarianism I always tell them it’s one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. I don’t say that to downplay others’ more difficult transitions or to somehow make myself look better. I’ve honestly found this change to be one of the easiest habit changes I’ve ever undertaken. I’m happy to share my experience with becoming a vegetarian in this article but I’d like to take a step back and try to suss out why this behavior change was so easy for me. There are lessons somewhere in my experience that I want to try my best to uncover. But first, a couple thoughts specific to becoming and being a vegetarian.

Limitations are not a problem

The obvious assumption is that by removing a whole class of food from my diet I was going to end up feeling deprived or limited in some way. As many people have described in their own switches to vegetarianism, I did not feel limited in any way. In fact, it was the complete opposite. By giving myself guidelines and restrictions I suddenly had to use more creativity to eat a diet I wouldn't get completely bored of. I started trying food that I never would have if I had been eating my normal diet. I realized there is a whole world of food out there beyond my normal rotation of meals.

You can be an unhealthy vegetarian

Being a vegetarian doesn't mean I'm automatically healthier. I've struggled with this at times because some of my favorite junk foods fit right in with my vegetarian diet. Huge muffins, donuts, bread -- I could eat all of this for days. They may lack meat but they definitely don't lack in empty calories. Being a vegetarian requires an increase in my mindfulness regarding food and being a healthy vegetarian requires even more.

Some people can be mean — most aren’t

I've answered the question, "Why?" a lot over the past year. At first I felt a little self-conscious while answering this question. I felt like I immediately had to defend myself from those who were looking to denigrate my decisions. Then, I realized that most people were just genuinely curious. Being a vegetarian seemed like a crazy thing to them and they wanted to know what it was like. I'm happy to share that I have a myriad of reasons for why I've become a vegetarian and much of the time it's a nice segue into a great conversation.

THE LARGER LESSONS BEYOND VEGETARIANISM

My specific experiences becoming and being a vegetarian aren’t much different from anyone else’s who have made this same change. What may be a little bit unique is how easily I made the change into this type of lifestyle. This is what truly fascinates me because generally habits are incredibly difficult to change. I’ve had success changing some, utter failure changing others, but changing my diet like this is arguably my largest yet most successful change. What can I learn from this experience?

Tying intellectual knowledge to values is power

When I was first becoming a vegetarian I spent a lot of time researching where most of our food comes from as Americans. I read about factory farms and the effect they have on the human workers who operate them, the environment we all live in, and obviously the animals that lose their lives there. I learned about the health benefits of a diet that features mostly plants and other whole foods. I discovered that being a vegetarian doesn't have to result in me being super skinny or frail. I then took all of this intellectual information that I learned through reading, watching documentaries, and talking to people and directly tied them to my values. I value Peace very highly and I could see that my normal diet was not particularly harmonious with that aim. I value Growth and I realized that challenging myself to undertake a diet that more closely aligned with what I believe would be a perfect avenue for growth. When I felt the urge to eat meat I didn't have to think only about the intellectual side of things (factory farms are terrible places, you can be healthy without meat, etc.) or only the values side of the equation (supporting the factory farm industry doesn't promote peace, etc.). Instead, I could think about both of these approaches and tie them together into a much more compelling reason to stick to my goals.

Public accountability is pretty huge

I've been writing online for well over 2 years. Over a year ago I wrote about my switch to vegetarianism and wrote about my plan to stick with it. I didn't want to bail on this life change and have to write about how I failed. An even more powerful component of accountability was with the people that I interacted with on a daily basis. My family quickly realized that I was serious about this life change and I didn't want them to think I was giving up by eating meat. Same with my friends and other people I hung out with regularly. I didn't want to slap a piece of meat on my plate and then explain that I had failed. I didn't have a good reason for reverting to my old diet other than enjoying the taste of meat. That wasn't reason enough for me to let down my commitment.

Stopping a habit = starting a new one

Changing my diet to a vegetarian one was the same as any other habit. It becomes much easier to stop doing something detrimental if you replace it with something positive. Instead of viewing my diet change as removing meat I tried to think of it as adding much more varied and interesting food. I tried to view it as an opportunity to practice mindfulness when I'm eating at a restaurant or catching a waft of barbecuing meat on a summer day. My diet change was growing a series of positive changes across my life, not just ending and removing something else.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Obviously, considering the tone of this article, I’m not going back to eating meat any time soon, if ever. In fact, the next inevitable step is going completely vegan. Considering the ethical and moral undertones of my reasons for being a vegetarian, I can’t continue participating in the dairy and egg industry with a clear conscience. I’ve already been moving in that direction for the last couple of months by removing most of the obvious sources of dairy and egg from my diet (like glasses of milk and hardboiled eggs). Once I’ve lived comfortably for awhile with these obvious sources removed I’ll then concentrate on those food items where they are somewhat hidden. I’ve been on the lookout for substitutes and have been trying various brands so when I do finally make the switch I’ll be used to what’s out there. Once I feel ready to make the final surge into full veganism I’ll probably spend some time doing additional research into the dairy and egg farming industry to make my commitment as real as possible.

Other than removing the last bit of incongruence from my diet I’d like to make a more concerted effort to just eat better. I can still fall into lapses where I eat lots of baked goods and crappy (yet vegetarian) food. I need to challenge myself in the kitchen more so I can continue to grow my skills in preparing food for myself. I don’t necessarily need to be eating new and exotic food all of the time since I’m pretty content with a couple staples, but it’s still nice to be pushing the boundaries with my cooking abilities. Lastly, I’ll soon spend a month or so recording everything I eat so I can make sure my macronutrient intake is where it should be. Even though protein suggestions seem to be overblown in our society, I am lifting weights regularly and I want to make sure I’m getting enough to make my time in the gym worth something. I also want to make sure I’m not somehow missing vital vitamins or minerals with what I’m currently eating (yes I am taking a multivitamin with B12).

If there’s any parting advice I can give you if you’re thinking about becoming a vegetarian it’s to just try it. This entire lifestyle change started with a 30 Day Challenge where I firmly intended to go back to the way I was eating before. If I hadn’t done that challenge just to see what it was like I probably would have never made the change. The other aspect is to focus on what you can eat — not what you can’t. If all you think about is what you can’t eat you’re setting yourself up for some serious mental anguish and likely failure. Instead, try to focus on the new things you’re trying and how much you enjoy them. Lastly, try to tie the behavior change to a deeply held belief or value. When you can do that it’s no longer a matter of “not eating meat” but “not participating in a cruel industry” or “not contributing to the environmental destruction that factory farms cause” or “not supporting an industry that mistreats its workers.” Those are powerful emotions and reasons that will help you get past the fact that hamburgers taste good.

Have you made the switch to vegetarianism or veganism? I’d love to hear your experience in the comments below.

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The Experimenting Self

One of the preeminent figures in the social sciences is an individual named Donald Campbell. His primary contribution to science was through methodology and epistemology. One of the phrases that is historically attached to his name is “the experimenting society.” Campbell’s idea of a utopian society was one where policy decisions were made based on actual experimental data. Therefore, those programs and activities that were shown, experimentally, to be beneficial would be funded and those that were not validated by good science would be left by the wayside. The experimenting society would constantly search to improve itself through the use of the scientific method. There would be no place for cronyism, shady business dealings, or bribery in the experimenting society because all decisions would be data based.

I like the idea of the experimental society and applying it to my own life. What would my life be like if I constantly challenged myself to improve and used experimental methods and data to drive that improvement? I don’t think there’s any reason we can’t follow in the footsteps of Campbell and institute our own experimenting society within the confines of our own lives. It’s really actually quite simple; identify areas of your life that you want to improve, measure you’re current state, try something different, measure yourself after doing the new behavior, and analyze the results. This is one of the simplest experimental designs (pre-test post-test) and yet, has powerful implications for figuring out what actually is capable of making a measurable change in your life.

Step 1: Identify areas where you'd like to change

This is the one step that I'm really, really, good at (probably too good). I always have an idea for something I can do to improve myself in some way. Whether it's an idea to make myself physically healthier, mentally stronger, a more caring person, or some other habit or quirk that could stand for improvement, I have a long list of possibilities to pursue.

A helpful starting point is to think about your values and ways in which you might make them a more prominent part of your life. For some people it's really easy to point out the handful of values that undergird and guide their actions. However, I don't think everybody always has success with this method. I recently wrote an article proposing an alternative method, which I'll summarize quickly here. Instead of trying to focus on values, think about times in your life where you felt "on top of your game" or "truly happy." Whatever you were doing to elicit these feelings in the past is probably a good candidate for something you should try to do more of in the future. Make a list of times where you felt awesome and what you were doing at that time. Those activities and actions are now on your list of things you'd like to change.

Step 2: Measure your current state

The basis of the experimenting society, and therefore the experimenting life, is making data driven decisions about what to do in the future. Campbell would design and implement research studies to generate the best data possible to answer questions about programs and policies. It's your job to collect the data on what you're currently doing so you can make your own decisions about how to best move forward.

In the academic world, there is a certain level of tension between the two major categories of data, qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative data is what you generate with words through observation and description. It generally takes the form of interviews, structured observations, case studies and other methods where the primary vehicle of information is the written word. Quantitative data, on the other hand, is based on numbers. Survey data, census information, and other techniques that generate numbers you can run statistical analyses on fall under the umbrella of quantitative.

We're going to combine the best of both worlds into what academics call "mixed methods." In my own data collection efforts, an example of qualitative data I collect on myself is through journal writing. I'll pay attention to the area of my life I want to improve and write down my observations. At this point I'm not consciously trying to make any changes. 

On the quantitative side of things, it depends on the type of improvement I'm trying to make. For example, in past efforts I've recorded the number of times I've meditated or bitten my fingernails. Right now I'm using the software program RescueTime to collect quantitative data about how I spend time on my computer. The nice thing about quantitative data is that it can be much more objective than qualitative data. As the cliche goes, "Numbers don't lie." (Although, if you're any good at statistics you can do some serious truth bending).

This step is all about figuring out the best way to measure the level of whatever you decided you'd like to improve in Step 1. For instance, if you looked at your life and decided that you wanted to try being a more outgoing person, for Step 2 you could measure the number of times you went out with friends (quantitative) and how you felt after each time you did or didn't accept (qualitative). A nice little bonus, however, is something called the Hawthorne Effect. Essentially, sometimes just observing something will actually cause it to improve. Several times I've ended up improving my area of concern from Step 1 just by becoming more aware of it.

Step 3: Do something different

This is the fun part. Now that you've decided what you want to change and recorded data about where you currently are, you get to change your behavior! For me, this usually takes the form of a 30 Day Challenge. I'll make a conscious and concerted effort to improve the area of concern I fleshed out in Step 1. In terms of specifically what I end up doing, I usually try to base it on some kind of research that has already been done. For example, there has been a lot of research into the benefit of cultivating gratitude. One of the habits the research supports is keeping a Gratitude Journal. For 30 days I'll make sure I write down a couple of things I'm grateful for at the end of the day. Presumably, I've done some kind of happiness measurement before beginning this behavior (see Step 2) so I'll have something to measure against at the end of the 30 days. Sometimes I'll get ideas from other bloggers or friends of mine who have done something interesting that I want to try as well. The cool thing is that this doesn't have o be a huge change in order to see pretty big results. Try to pick something small that you know you can stick with instead of a huge behavior change that you aren't likely to sustain.

Step 4: Measure again

This is basically the same as Step 2. Now that you have your baseline data and have changed your behavior for at least 30 days, it's time to see if there's any change in your outcome. Obviously, you need to collect data on the same issue (and using the same methods) that you did in Step 2. 

Step 5: Repeat

What do you find? Did 30 days of a behavior change create any difference in the area of your life you wanted to improve? What does the data say? If you found a positive difference -- great! Assuming the change you made in Step 3 was something you can sustain indefinitely, you've found a way to measurably improve your life. If your data doesn't show any difference, why might that be? Is it possible that the action you took in Step 3 actually affects something else? For instance, maybe you wanted to become happier so you decided to meditate every day for 30 days. You may feel that the experience was very worthwhile but the data doesn't support your gut feeling (you didn't score any higher on a happiness survey, for instance). Perhaps meditation tapped into something different? Perhaps meditating everyday made you more mindful but not any more happy. Still a worthwhile effect, just not the one you measured. Or, perhaps you didn't implement the change in Step 3 consistently enough to see any changes? Either way, you've now made a scientific and systematic approach to improving your life and you're ready to start your next attempt!

Conclusion

Campbell's utopia of the experimenting society never actually came to be. Political and corporate pressures proved to be too much for our politicians and policy makers to handle. Instead of letting science drive their policy decisions the sway of money, prestige, or other non-scientific forces end up playing a large role. While the experimenting society may be far from our current situation, there's no reason we can't create our own individual utopias through the experimenting self philosophy. The more mini-experiments you run on yourself the better you'll get at it and the more you'll learn about how to make your own experience as a human being a better one. Much of the research done in positive psychology has shown that happiness is not something that just randomly descends from the heavens to anoint the chosen few. Instead, there are actual steps and actions you can take to create happiness for yourself. Adopting the mindset of permanent curiosity and perpetual self-improvement will help you figure out what those activities are for yourself.

I always love to hear about others' experiments -- share yours in the comments below. If you enjoy this type of writing, I suggest you sign up for the RSS feed by copy and pasting www.samspurlin.com/blog into your RSS reader of choice or by clicking here.

Clutter and How It’s Ruining Your Life

A recent episode of Back to Work got me thinking about the larger relationship inherent in all of the possessions we own. I’ve been a fairly vocal proponent of minimalism for a long time — even to go as far as committing a year and a half of my life to writing and maintaining a blog exclusively about minimalism. While my relationship with minimalism has been fairly unflagging for the last five years, I’ve tried to figure out what it means on a deeper level. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the title of “minimalist” for awhile but my actions have always been firmly set within that camp. In the aforementioned episode of Back to Work, Merlin talks about the effect clutter has had on his life. It was refreshing to hear his take on this subject as he has been unabashedly the anti-minimalism guy for awhile. It always felt kind of weird that he was who I most closely emulated in my own online writing ventures but I was positive  he’d despise what I write about. I recently went through my apartment and took photographs of everything I own. I’m not really sure why I decided to do that — but I have some ideas. I don’t think it had anything to do with the minimalist pissing contest I’ve been critical of in the past. I didn’t count my possessions, only took pictures of them. Part of me has always been curious just what exactly I own. Taking pictures of everything made me actually think about my reasons for owning every item I touched. I’m fairly ruthless with how willing I am to let possessions go and yet I was still surprised by how much I had documented in my little photo shoot. It made me think about what it would have been like to do this activity if I wasn’t a minimalist and accumulated and retained items like a typical American. While I’m definitely a fan of minimal aesthetics that my lifestyle leans toward, it’s not the main reason I’m so ruthless about restricting the physical items I own. I’ve become aware that each item I own represents more than just the simple physical object that it appears. Everything I own carries emotional and psychological baggage that may or may not be a positive contribution to my life. Getting rid of everything I own that I don’t find useful or beautiful clears my environment not only of physical items, but clears my head and my life of emotional and psychological detritus. It’s a very interesting feeling to look around my living space and let my eyes fall on the various objects and know that I made the conscious decision to keep it in my life. That sounds simple but have you tried looking at the things you own and asking yourself why you’ve kept something? Even me, Mr. Minimalist Guy, finds things that have wormed their way into my life without me noticing and need to be removed every couple of months. Owning less makes me more aware and thankful for what I do own. I’m forced to take better care of my possessions because I most likely don’t have a backup if I break or lose something. At the same time, I can’t remember the last time I lost something. Considering I can fit nearly all of my worldly possessions into two duffel bags, it takes some major lack of awareness to lose something. My favorite part of living this way, however, is simply for the personal challenge. That is a bit of a misnomer because I no longer find it to be particularly challenging, but I do like testing myself to see what I really need in terms of possessions to live a happy life. Before I decided to try this whole minimalism thing, I would have thought you were nuts if you told me I’d be living with as many possessions as I have now. What about all my video games? What about the rest of my clothes? What’s the point of working hard and making money if I’m not going to buy lots of things? Those were the questions I would have asked myself and these are the questions that people still ask me. However, now I know I don’t need a lot of what other people consider necessities and I have more flexibility and faith in myself because of it. It’s fun to challenge myself to see if I really need what society says I need to live and be happy. I’d much rather find out for myself and so far minimalism has been one of those activities that society says is weird but I’ve discovered is extremely exciting and liberating at the same time. Living exactly like this isn’t for everybody, especially those of you with families. Being a student and unmarried definitely means I can make decisions about my environment that some of you don’t get to make. However, I don’t consider the end goal to be some magic number of things you should own. Instead, the metric should be whether you’ve consciously made the decision to keep something in your life. If you can look at something and immediately articulate why you have it (and are okay with those reasons) I think you should keep it. The problem arises when you begin looking at items you forgot you owned and/or aren’t sure why you even have in the first place. These are the items that represent a drain on your well-being and are prime candidates to make swift exits from your life. This criteria applies to me, the guy who owns almost nothing, and the most cluttered hoarder on the planet There are certainly much more difficult and important aspects of living a good life than worrying about what your living situation or office looks like. However, spending some time to think about your physical environment is one of those tasks that seems unimportant but can actually have pretty big ramifications down the road. It only makes sense that the places where you spend the majority of your time should be as energizing as possible. Creating positive relationships, doing great work, and making a difference in the world are all difficult enough. Don’t let your environment drain the precious energy you need to take care of the bigger things in life.  If you're interested in this topic, you may want to consider purchasing either of my two e-books. I go into much greater depth about how to declutter, what clutter represents in our lives, and how to take the minimalism mindset into the realm of mental clutter. You can purchase PDF versions in the Store or you can check out Amazon and Barnes and Noble for Kindle and Nook versions.

Beyond Task Management

I try to be a keen observer of the world around me. Not only is it a good exercise in mindfulness, but learning how to observe myself and the way I interact with my environment has led to a wide array of improvements in my life. For example, realizing that my energy waxed and waned throughout the day allowed me to restructure the way I work to utilize my time more efficiently. Another result of learning how to observe has been developing a new way to think about the way values impact my life. Recently, a new observation has fought its way to the forefront of my attention: installing a task management system and adopting a lifelong learning approach appear to be inextricably linked.

For me, that has manifested itself as the Getting Things Done (GTD) system popularized by David Allen in the book of the same name. While that is my specific example, I don't think my overall point is reliant on this specific system. Instead, the overall principles that installing a task management system require seem to be the same principles that predict a life full of learning.

A task management system, at it's simplest, is a way for us to keep track of the commitments, requirements, responsibilities, and various tasks that make up our lives. Our jobs, lives, hobbies, families, friends, and interests constantly serve as impetuses for things we have to do and remember. Usually, sometime during high school a teacher hands you some sort of agenda or day planner and for many people that's as close as they ever get to adopting a true task management system. I distinctly remember feverishly filling out my agenda with the previous day's to-dos before the teacher came around to check my diligence in tracking my tasks.  

In high school we can usually get by with just keeping track of everything in our heads with perhaps an occasional note written on our hands. It's not too difficult to keep everything straight when you visit the same set of classes everyday, have the same type of homework, and have people (e.g. teachers) constantly reminding you of everything you have to do. If the real world was like that, there'd be no need for anything more elaborate to keep track of everything. 

However, usually sometime in college, perhaps after the first nervous breakdown, we start to realize that our heads may not be the greatest place to keep everything. We sit down with a fresh piece of paper and crank out a massive list of everything on our mind. For a brief moment we feel better, relieved even, by seeing a clear list of all of our commitments and responsibilities. However, over time that list loses it's relevance and once again we have lapsed into a state of fogginess over what precisely we need to do.

This fogginess is where the connection to lifelong learning comes in. Operating in a fog means that we're always a little bit wary of taking on anything else. We realize that we've committed to a lot of tasks and many people are relying on us for various projects, but we're never quite sure what's on our plate. Instead of scanning the horizon for chances to take on new activities that align with our values, we scan the horizon in an effort to avoid additional requirements on our utterly taxed minds. This results in us staying in a narrow rut with our eyes down doing our best to get by. We're somewhat aware of the fact that we're missing out on excellent opportunities, but we're so caught in the fog that it doesn't seem important as merely staying the course and trying to stay afloat.

This is a problem of our own design and merely requires us snapping out of our teenage sensibilities and approach our work and our world with more than a seat-of-the-pants mindset. My experience is with GTD, so that's what I'll use to illustrate my points. In GTD, we create a system external of our own minds where we can place information about everything we've committed to on some level. Over time, we come to trust this system to hold everything so our minds are now free to do what they do best, think creatively and solve problems -- not remember things. 

The details of the system aren't important. If it allows us to place our commitments outside our own heads and to regularly see them in their entirety, then it will prove beneficial. It's only when we can see the boundaries around our work that we can make wise decisions about what else we undertake. Lifelong learning requires that we scan the horizon for opportunities to improve and grow. Knowing that we regularly analyze and assess our commitments allows us to know how much mental power and availability we have for new adventures, new ideas, and new projects.

Therein lies the greatest benefit I've received from seriously committing to a task management system. It has nothing to do with being able to get more done or being more efficient. While those are nice side effects of using GTD, what I'm most thankful for is the ability to always know, at a glance, what I need to do and whether I can commit to anything new. In the past I'd feel like I was drowning under the weight of everything I had to do. I eventually realized, however, that it wasn't because I really had that much to do -- it was because I hadn't clarified what I actually had to do. Once everything I'd committed to had been clarified and articulated, I actually had a lot more space in my life for new projects. Without GTD, or any other task management system, I'd still be slogging away on poorly defined projects, unclear tasks, and meaningless busywork.

I'm intrigued by the idea that task management systems or more than just a list of what you need to do. They seem to be the mature response to figuring out how to make the biggest impact in the world as possible. Gone are the days for most of us where tasks are laid out in front of us and someone else kept track of what you had to do. Knowledge work, creative work, whatever you want to call it, requires us to constantly determine what our jobs actually are. Our brains are pretty amazing organs, but asking them to simultaneously remember everything we need to do, decide if it's important, clarify what the actual task is, and search for new opportunities is a little ridiculous. Mindfully creating a system to alleviate some of that burden is the sign of someone who is serious about utilizing their abilities and opportunity.

My familiarity is with GTD, but it doesn't have to be the only way to keep track of your life. What is your task management system like? Have you noticed any changes in the way you interact with your environment since having implemented it? I'd love to hear your input in the comment section below.