Category Archives: Happiness

The Beat

It’s (Not) Okay to Fail

Generation Y does not need permission to fail. We got medals and ribbons for that very reason as kids. Gen Y normalized failure. Failure is not scary. It means you get to stay in the status quo, which most of us are very comfortable in. You get to keep being who you are, and that isn’t all bad.

It’s success – that’s scary. Indeed, we’re not changing stuff up because we’re afraid to fail, but afraid to succeed. We need to let people know, “It’s okay to succeed.”

Part of the reason we are so obsessed with normalizing failure is that we want to feel good about ourselves. And that’s hard right now, no doubt. It’s hard to find a job, to get out of debt, to pursue meaningful work. It’s hard to make time for family, get away from our computers, and engage face-to-face. It’s hard not to compare our bottoms to everyone’s top on Facebook.

So, we embrace failure. In its call for speakers, the Dare Conference says, “If you’re willing to be vulnerable, admit your failures, and share what you learned from them, we want to hear from you.” Apparently people aren’t doing that enough on the Internet?

So, we court failure. This guy goes around trying to get rejected on a daily basis. He intentionally tries to fail as if that’s an accomplishment.

So, we sleep with failure. We dream of failure. We live with failure — as a point of pride.

I don’t want to fail. Failure is boring. Failure usually means you didn’t try something; you didn’t follow through; you didn’t finish. Most people don’t really fail. They succeed at being lazy, and call it failure. But at least they tried. Er, right?

Lazy is not failure, it’s just lazy. Practice moderation, instead of binging on inspiration. Practice patience, instead of quick wins.  Start something, but then finish it.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the modern web browser, Netscape and leading venture capitalist, said pivots used to be called fuck-ups and begged for the startup community to put a little more stigma back into failure.

“We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure,” Andreessen said. “You don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma. The entrepreneurs I admire — I admire the ones who pivot but I really admire the ones who have persisted.”

Persist. It’s okay to succeed.

3 Ways to Discover Your Dream Job

by Rebecca Thorman  /  comments

Finding your career purpose is tough. If you come up empty after journaling, quizzes and vision boards, it may be time to take real action. Over at US News and World Report today, I talk about the three steps you can take to gain immediate clarity around discovering your dream job. Read it here.

Why aren’t you happy, darn it?

Ah, happiness. It’s so elusive, right? My guess is that you spend the great majority of your time online reading and browsing aimlessly, seeking that secret to happiness, that thing that will make you motivated and feel happy for the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week if you’re lucky.

In fact, it seems that everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Seriously, how many times can you read about how to be creative or how to execute your idea? You probably would be great at doing what you love, but you are too afraid to do so because we’re stuck in society’s delusion – that is, what we really want to do we’re afraid won’t be acceptable in society or are told to stay in whatever place society has created for us (particularly true for women).

There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing what they want and living their highest values except most people try to live in other people’s values instead of their own, or they expect other people to live inside their values instead of recognizing they have their own as well.

Le sigh. I’d like to suggest two solutions:

1) Recognize that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. Struggle isn’t something to overcome then, but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Accept it and find a balance.

2) Dive deeper. Happiness is not the be all and end all. There’s a whole lot more going on in the world like energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy, technology, fashion, the food industry, political history. So, maybe stop reading so much about the processes of ideas, and start reading about actual ideas.

My guess is that by avoiding your pursuit of happiness for awhile, you’ll find more of it than you thought possible.

This was originally posted on Elysa Rice’s GenPink.

The Delusions of Happiness

by Rebecca Thorman  /  32 comments

Happiness is relative, but I’ve been really happy lately.  Secrets to happiness? Yes, I’ve got those. Try exercising, meditation, setting goals, spending time with friends and family, trying new things. Those should all sound familiar; people tell you those things all the time and they may or may not work for you. The real secret? I’ll get to that in a moment… (and it isn’t something foolish like follow-through).

Meditation, though. That’s something people are hot about lately. “It’s like a key that opens the door to the treasury within,” filmmaker David Lynch tells a New York Times columnist. “Here’s an experience — poooft! — total brain coherence. It’s what’s missing from life today: unbounded intelligence, creativity, bliss, love, energy, peace. Things like tension, anxieties, traumatic stress, sorrow, depression, hate, rage, need for revenge, fear — poooft! — all this starts to lift away. You see life getting better and better and better. Give the people that experience and — poooft. Man, it’s beautiful.”

This coming from the man who created Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive. The point of meditation isn’t bliss (as any earnest attempt to understand the practice will reveal), but let’s look at the delusions supported in Lynch’s statement – primarily, that meditation will bring you peace. While the practice certainly can do that for you momentarily, we are decidedly fooling ourselves if we think that we can rid ourselves of negative emotions all together.

A great many people try and fail in that pursuit of happiness. Blogger Jenny Blake wrote a book on the topic and shortly after its launch admitted that “The book is meant to be aspirational — even for me.” It’s aspirational, but is presented as realistic. No one could possibly do or be everything in Blake’s book, and yet, that is the ambition. Why is impossible the ideal?

Society gets off on when you compare yourself to others, when you try to live by other’s beliefs, or when you try to get others to live by yours, and so and so forth. Unconditional happiness is just as destructive as uncontrollable anger. But the happiness ideal states you should learn from failures (instead of feel upset) and find lessons in whatever goes wrong. Theoretically, these happy nuggets serve to make sense of your pain but in reality, all they do is suppress it which is exhausting.

“Those who keep a check on their frustrations are at least three times more likely to admit they have disappointing personal lives and have hit a glass ceiling in their career. But those who let their anger out in a constructive manner were more likely to be professionally well-established, as well as enjoy emotional and physical intimacy with loved ones,” reports a study by the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

“People think of anger as a terribly dangerous emotion and are encouraged to practise ‘positive thinking’, but we find that approach is self-defeating and ultimately a damaging denial of dreadful reality,” says Professor George Vaillant, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.

Let’s go back to meditation. One type of meditation is yoga, which is a study in the union of opposites (think Dog/Cat). In that vein, I’d like to suggest that happiness is not the end goal, but that you are always feeling happiness, and you are always feeling pain, in every moment. And that the union of these two emotions, and indeed many others, is the end goal, not the glorification of one over the other.

Struggle isn’t something to overcome then (and feel good about after), but just is. Some days things will go your way, and some days they won’t. Personal growth advocates assume you want to avoid those bad days whereas I don’t think that’s possible or necessary. In the moment you are failing, you are also succeeding.

Life is great and it sucks, always simultaneously. Most people can’t live in that environment so they live in delusions. Religion, personal development, companies – all are too eager to create those delusions for you. But life is a duality and I’m all for happiness, just not at the sacrifice of negativity, depression, anger, tension, anxiety, stress, hate, rage, or sorrow.

You Don’t Need To Settle

by Rebecca Thorman  /  17 comments

This is a guest post from my dear friend and change-maker Sam Davidson. Sam Davidson is a writer, entrepreneur, and dreamer who believes that the world needs more passionate people. To help people find and live their passion, he has written 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. He is the co-founder of Cool People Care and Proof Branding, and lives in Nashville with his wife and daughter.

50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need from Point House Films on Vimeo.

Finding and living your passion is a process. It’s not something you do once over the course of an afternoon at a coffee shop and are done with. It’s a journey you live deeply, repeating as necessary until you die. It’s a commitment, a lifelong pursuit, and a work of epic proportions. Once you decide that you must find your passion, you cannot settle until you do.

This is something I learned from Rebecca Thorman. She doesn’t settle. And neither can you when discovering what it is you love, who it is you’re becoming, and what it is you’re passionate about.

I’ve met Rebecca once. Nothing about her was second rate. The coffee shop where we met, the sushi place we grabbed dinner, the martini bar we went to after that – it was all top notch. Look at her blog design. Read about her boyfriend. Check out what she does for a living. Look at pictures of where she lives (or used to). What about this woman screams compromise?

Nothing.

Take heed: you can’t settle when you’re looking for your passion. You also can’t settle  – once you find it – as to where that passion takes you.

For some people, a passion becomes a profession. For others, it becomes a wonderful hobby to explore after work or on the weekends. Some become passionate about a cause and others about people. Be warned: when you decide that you can’t be anything but passionate, you are beginning the journey of a lifetime.

But, what a wonderful journey it is! I firmly believe that the world needs more passionate people. This is why I wrote 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need. Using the excuse to eliminate excess from our lives, I also detail how getting rid of what doesn’t matter can help you discover what does. The same is true in reverse: once we find what’s truly important, everything that isn’t can fade into the background.

Have you seen pictures of what Rebecca cooks? Doesn’t it want to make you do the same? Your passion will be similar. Once you find it, others will see the contagious fire within and want to find theirs. And when they do – when a friend or colleague tells you that they want to be as passionate about something as you are, make sure to warn them. Let them know that if they truly want to find that which makes them feel alive, they can’t compromise. They can’t settle. They’ve got to follow the journey until it’s logical and exciting conclusion. Your passion demands nothing less.

Serious applicants only.

Other things (actually in the book) that you don’t need:
#3: Untaken risks
#12: Pictures that don’t mean anything
#47: A job you hate

Contest:
Share your passionate story in the comments. What is it that you’re passionate about? How did you find it? How long did it take? Where has it taken you now? One lucky commenter will receive a signed copy of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need.

A New Residence for Home

by Rebecca Thorman  /  31 comments

Ryan is so very tall and my condo is so very small. So it was not without reservation that we recently moved in together.  We talked about it a lot – the important things, the mundane, the humdrum. In talking about moving in together, we broke our record in effective communication. And then we talked some more. “If we could communicate like this for the rest of our lives,” Ryan said, “we’d be the best couple ever.” And so it went… until.

You know, moving is very stressful, and moving in with someone you intend to spend your life with is this gigantic life decision, and somehow all of the pressure and insanity of it all got put into one question – did we need to buy another dresser?

Perhaps the most romantic notion I had of combining our belongings and everyday lives was that we would be able to use my library card file (currently in use as my sock drawers) as our dresser. But, no. No, no, no.  Ryan needed a place to store his t-shirts. All forty-six of them. And he didn’t find it at all romantic, never mind practical, to store a lone t-shirt per tiny drawer.

I won’t take this moment to comment on the romanticism or practicality of forty-six t-shirts, but I do recommend that you, my dear reader, come to your own conclusion on that point.

Besides his t-shirts, Ryan also likes to hang his towel on the closet door instead of the towel hook we bought specifically for the purpose. He takes out the trash and cleans if I cook. I don’t know when, but he watches ESPN because that’s the channel that appears when I turn on the TV. I am always on the computer and he is always on the phone. He leaves his eye glasses on the bathroom counter, but little else. His shoes are lined up across the top and bottom shelves of our closet, and underneath the bed. Waiting for Cribs, I guess.

He overtakes our small white couch like a dog. If Ryan could be animal, he has said that he would want to be a big, slow dog, so please don’t think I am insulting my incredibly sexy boyfriend publicly. Well, a dog or a lion, he said. There are a lot of similarities.

He has a repertoire of several particularly esteemed dishes that he can cook: pork chops, meat spaghetti – in which the spaghetti is actually egg noodles – and chicken and broccoli “stir-fry.”

He locks the door when he leaves in the morning and says to me when he’s home: “You know you don’t have to lock the door when I’m here, right? I will protect you.”

“It’s a habit,” I reply.

He opens the shower curtain from the wrong side, and never closes the blinds. If you touch him when he’s not expecting it, he will unreasonably flinch and exclaim “ow!” like he means it.

When we watch a movie, he will lie down and I will lie down, and we will spoon and watch the screen and out the sixth-story window. When I get too tired, I will turn around and settle into his chest, and he will kiss my forehead and I will go to sleep.

Ryan moved in on the anniversary of our first kiss.

This weekend, I think we’ll buy a dresser.

Good Hearts.

Understanding the Anxious Mind

by Rebecca Thorman  /  29 comments

For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.

Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.

And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.

“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”

For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.

Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.

No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.

I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.

Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.

My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.

Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”

The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”

But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.

September Goal Check-In and Thoughts on Happiness

by Rebecca Thorman  /  18 comments

It’s goal meet-up check-in time! This is your mid-month reminder to take a breath and see how you’re coming along. How are you all doing?

I’m not doing too badly, but the coming of Fall seems to be an unofficial New Year where all your dreams and thoughts and ideas bubble to the surface. So I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with not just my goals, but everything I want to do. Do you feel that way? Like, I’m walking against the wind, and try my darndest, I’m just not getting anywhere.

“That’s called the dip,” Ryan reminds me. “You’re trying to get to the other side. It’ll happen. Have you read The Dip?”

“No,” I pout. “Seth is overrated.”

“You should read The Dip. You’ll like it.”

“Hmph.”

“So, remember when we walked around New York City and you gazed wide-eyed at the sights like a newborn baby?”

“What?!”

The infuriating thing about Ryan is that when I’m trying to be in a bad mood he’ll make a funny face or say something so ridiculous or sweet or something that I am forced to stomp off.

“Stop trying to make me smile!” I say in between halting giggles. “I hate when you try to make me happy when I want to be angry!”

And it is in that maddening moment that Ryan laughs at my insistence to be cross. Which is quite unnecessary because clearly he has already won along with life. Despite my best efforts to control it, life wants me to be happy. Even during this stupid dip.

So, in the spirit of happiness, I’m sharing the photo below of the two greatest games ever: Skip-Bo and Rummy. Unfortunately, the photo is missing Yahtzee. Each of which I always win at.

Best Games Ever

Also, thank you to everyone who is participating or following along in the meet-up. Keep walking into the wind, my friends!

Gratitude is hard for me sometimes

by Rebecca Thorman  /  8 comments

Note: This was originally a guest post for Sam’s Appreciation Revolution. You should check it out.

I’m an extremely lucky person. Really. Sometimes I can’t even believe how lucky I am. I have the best mother, best job, best boyfriend, best condo, best everything.

And yet still, I want. I still have that hunger for more. Selfishly, I am often found in dark corners brooding over the infallibility of life, the unfairness, the annoyances, and over that stupid guy who cut me off this morning in the white Dodge Ram with a ladder strapped to the top and a license plate forever seared in my memory. I did not feel lucky that I didn’t skid off the road to my untimely death. I just wanted to hurt him.

In retrospect, I do feel grateful, immensely grateful, that when I sped up, tailed, and yelled obscenities at the man in the Dodge Ram, that we were going sixty-five miles per hour and there’s no way he could have heard me. I’m grateful that at the last moment I decided not to show him the slender nature of my middle finger. I’m grateful that my exit to work arrived before I really gave him a piece of my mind. I imagine – as he well should be – he was grateful as well.

This is the ugly side of appreciation, the not so fluffy and pillowy kind. There are chapters of my life when I am overcome with the sweet and sugary kind, when I am surrounded by rainbows and treats and sparkly revelations. But mostly, I have little patience for swaths of gratitude to envelop me.

Gratitude is hard for me sometimes.

I imagine it’s hard for most people, even the big teddy bears of appreciation. It means accepting a whole litany of injustices and bending your eyesight towards what is beating both in and outside of you simultaneously to which, I’m sure, only the heartfelt natures of Gandhi or Mother Theresa have fully mastered. It means not being afraid of the past, the future and the ever-so vast present, because really, gratitude is about living in the now.

So, you could write about the things you are happy for daily – which I do. Or, you could take a moment every Monday morning to reflect upon the previous week, which I do. Or, you could look up at the ceiling occasionally, through the drywall, up through the six floors above you and up to the roof, all the way through the clouds and at the sky and say, “thank you.” I do that too.

Or you could just drive to work like you do every day, embracing the good, the bad, and the dick in the Dodge Ram. Sometimes, that’s gratitude too.

Niceness is the new career trend

by Rebecca Thorman  /  35 comments

In what is arguably one of the worst times in American history since the Great Depression, the people of America have their chins decidedly up.

The sanguine mood is characterized by “an outbreak of niceness across the cultural landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere,” the New York Times reports.

Harvard MBA students are making a promise to be ethical in an age of immorality, young talent is shifting towards do-gooder jobs, and more people are holding the elevator door open for me daily.

Enron and Madoff are no match for the almost hermetic happiness that now protects the Nation. It’s not sugar-coated like the self-help decade of the nineties. Nor does it resemble the maudlin contentment of the shut-eyed fifties. Instead, it’s a cheerfulness that smiles next to adversity.

It’s nourished by President Obama himself, who has cottoned such unprecedented praise and agreement that the press can’t help but gush. That goodness has spread virally – as happiness has been proven to do – and companies and individuals are following suit.

“Companies that have the highest retention have the nicest atmospheres,” the New York Times reports. “And in a situation where people are losing their jobs and you have an option of whom to hire, you’re going to hire the person who is complimenting your tie. Nice becomes a competitive edge.”

Alice.com is a good example of this. It’s not just that we have a ping pong table and encouraged nap time, but that our co-founders consistently encourage and compliment employees, partners, customers, potential vendors, and others. I didn’t even know this was a viable way to do business. That is, our work is not predicated on fear, failure, politics, or manipulation.

Such plushy and persistently optimistic companies give power back to the employee, back to the customer, and back to the idea of social community where the greater good is served over the individualistic ambitions of wealth or influence.

Mean is out. Earnestness and altruism are in fashion. Humility is an aphrodisiac. The roof has caved in, and people are responding accordingly. Not by panicking, but pulling up their bootstraps and making lemonade. And giving their neighbor some. And the prostitute down the street. And the dog too.

Even hard-core adherents to darker fantasies like Eminem are “just coming clean and exhaling.” The rapper’s newest album ripostes on his drug addictions, and his subsequent challenges and triumphs more than women stuffed into trunks.

Because when you’ve hit bottom – and we all have now, whether rich and poor – a great opportunity exists to find commonality in the grace of our ascension.

And while our children will most certainly rebel against us, perhaps under the objectivism of Ayn Rand or the cynicism of Gen X, our optimism, vanilla, mediocre and conservative as it may be, is prevailing.

What is happening now is that glee is rising from collectively pushing forward at all costs, not knowing if it will work and accepting that there’s a good chance it won’t, and working towards something greater. All together. With differences of opinion, but with respect as well. With civility and common courtesy. And with confidence in humanity’s decency.

Good Works.