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Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

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Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#301

Post by ajmurmann »

raxxorrax wrote: post #209
hyperman1 wrote: post #128

I had the chance to work with a few people I'd consider genius level. While I'm pretty smart myself, they all have something I don't always have: The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year. He checks it out, and…

Cannot really confirm this from my experience. Have worked with a lot of very unhappy geniuses. Perhaps not really unhappy, but not particularly happy either. But performance can mean something different. I think the study source is questionable as well. Perhaps the soldiers were happier because they got acknowledgement for their work? Most intellectuals don't get noticed because they are positively beaming, even if…

All the genius-level people over had the pleasure to work with had tremendous amounts of curiosity on common. They were having a lot of fun when they got to explore something new. I do know though that several of them also struggled with depression at the same time.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#302

Post by slothtrop »

0F wrote: post #214

Reading these comments is forehead slap inducing. People think that just because something is mental that it has to do with your mindset, your parents, your this your that. When a dude can run faster than other people, it’s written off as genetics. When someone is resilient to depression, it’s anything other than genetics. Both cases are the same: it’s just biological. I’ve been suffering super hard with depression r…

Some people are more susceptible to depression, that's clear. You mentioned mindset, but therapy approaches are not tantamount to just "rationalizing" your way out of depression. If it were that simple no one would be depressed. Interventions are a multi-pronged approach, but for those dealing with cognitive factors, they apply training with workbook exercises. The CBT way is to learn to recognize distorted unrealistic thinking, there are also approaches that attempt to mitigate automatic thinking or the emotional reaction to it. Bottom line is the research suggests this is generally effective.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#303

Post by robertlagrant »

vatican_banker wrote: post #84
robertlagrant wrote: post #44

This paper does seem a little dodgy in its assumptions. We shouldn't dismiss military-based studies? Okay, (ish), but then the study doesn't measure happiness vs performance, it measures "how do you rate yourself" vs "the army's selection process for awarding medals". Given medals at least partly exist to reward extremely optimistic behaviour at the expense of personal safety, shall we say, having an optimistic outlo…

> the study doesn't measure happiness vs performance, it measures "how do you rate yourself" vs "the army's selection process for awarding medals". The author explains that happiness is subjective: > The behavioral science literature often refers to happiness as subjective well-being because the meaning of happiness varies in different contexts ...and then proceeds to delineate how psychology defines happiness: 1. a…

> So yeah, self-rating is an important factor to measuring happiness

Well, it's the only measure. I wasn't saying self-rating is bad (although it, of course, is if you're trying to draw objective conclusions), I'm trying to say that performance doesn't equate strongly enough to medals and happiness doesn't relate strongly enough to how people self-report to make any conclusions particularly useful.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#304

Post by ajmurmann »

nine_k wrote: post #143
hyperman1 wrote: post #128

I had the chance to work with a few people I'd consider genius level. While I'm pretty smart myself, they all have something I don't always have: The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year. He checks it out, and…

I see it like this: A lot of resource —> happiness. A lot of resource —> energy for curiosity. A lot of resource —> energy and time for high achievement at work. So happiness is a correlate for staying in high-resource state in a stable manner, which correlates with high achievement, the quality employers seek. Immediately one can consider a trap of unhappiness, similar to the trap of poverty: being worried makes you…

I know plenty of curious and well-resourced people who are depressed.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#305

Post by mischmasch »

gashmol wrote: post #125

It reminds me of The Matrix. The machines tried at first to make humans always happy in the virtual world they've created. They did that not out of care for humans, but in order that they could peacefully harvest energy from the oblivious humans' bodies. As I remember it, it didn't go well in terms of production. So, the machines replicated the real not-always-so-happy world instead. I'm not trying to suggest anythin…

What a brilliant thought!

In a hypothetical pursuit of the definition of happiness, I tend to lean on an analogy in TCG's (trading cards, yes). Rarity.

The machines computed that happiness exists on a spectrum. As with TCG's, there must exist a high ratio of 'common' to feel the implication of pulling a 'mythic'.

To be happy, you must experience unhappy?

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#306

Post by soheil »

> In a recent study, the relationship between income and happiness was over four times greater for people who reported that money was important to them compared with those who cared much less about money.

In other words believe money can bring you happiness for money to bring you happiness.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#307

Post by PragmaticPulp »

suction wrote: post #150
hyperman1 wrote: post #128

I had the chance to work with a few people I'd consider genius level. While I'm pretty smart myself, they all have something I don't always have: The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year. He checks it out, and…

Well, having already made enough money to always be able to just say "you know what, I'm out" whenever you feel like it is necessary to be happy in any situation and interested in everything. Anyone who's not "secure for life" and has to keep the salaries coming in will have to deal with bad people, bad decisions, bad culture, etc. and become unhappy. I've sort of dabbled in that situation: I made and lost a fortune…

> Anyone who's not "secure for life" and has to keep the salaries coming in will have to deal with bad people, bad decisions, bad culture, etc. and become unhappy.

This is the myth that keeps people trapped in bad jobs, but it’s not true.

Yes, most of us have to continue working. But no, that doesn’t mean your job must be miserable and you must be surrounded by miserable people. Look around. Try something different. There are a lot of good jobs and teams out there.

Too many people in tech approach their careers as a simple compensation maximization problem and disregard everything else. They end up in companies that are happy to pay them 10-100% more but then demand they work 20-200% harder and deal with bad behavior and unrealistic expectations because the company knows they’re not going to leave behind that sweet total compensation to go somewhere less stressful.

You can have good pay and good working conditions, but you have to work to find it and keep it. The big company recruiters desperate to give you high total comp just to get you in the door (often to replace employees who turned over) aren’t necessarily the path to finding that optimal point, though.

I’ve taken a few salary down-steps in my career that felt scary at the time but ended up being well worth it for the increased quality of life.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#308

Post by nine_k »

lr4444lr wrote: post #241
nine_k wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it like this: A lot of resource —> happiness. A lot of resource —> energy for curiosity. A lot of resource —> energy and time for high achievement at work. So happiness is a correlate for staying in high-resource state in a stable manner, which correlates with high achievement, the quality employers seek. Immediately one can consider a trap of unhappiness, similar to the trap of poverty: being worried makes you…

You would think, reading what you wrote, that when we walk into ghetto elementary schools that we see little kids sitting there dull, insipid, and sullen who don't do well on basic tests of learning, (even if perhaps they aren't well taught how to read). This would be a completely false assumption. There are plenty of people with hereditary wealth who are otherwise very ordinary, and not particularly happy, too.

I never mentioned money / wealth.

Think about good health, no depression, loving parents and/or partners, no previous crippling / traumatic experience, absence of all these things that drain energy from a human being.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#309

Post by Kye »

gkop wrote: post #282
Kye wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only having people working for them who want to work for them seems like an easy way to be sure of certainty and compliance.

That doesn’t ring true in my decade of management. Some people are just incapable of doing a bad job, and others just incapable of doing a good job. Whether or not they want to work for you.

A decade of management under a system where people have to work whatever job is available to them just to survive. That's a huge, screaming confounding variable. If the people you've managed have a meaningful choice in where to work, then they aren't the primary target of UBI.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#310

Post by adwn »

tomc1985 wrote: post #271
adwn wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's an argument for a proper social safety net, as implemented in many European countries. Most fulltime jobs pay better than a UBI ever could, so if you have a job, a) either your standard of living is so high that a change to UBI-only would be very disruptive and you'd still be worried about losing your job, b) or your standard of living is so low that you'd quickly accumulate enough of a financial buffer th…

I think you are discounting the fact that in the second scenario you don't have to work . I don't know about y'all but that is my fantasy.

> I think you are discounting the fact that in the second scenario you don't have to work

*for a while. Only very few people are able to save enough to never have to work again, even with a low standard of living.

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