Comment by SiVal
15 years ago
Well said, neilk. I always have mixed feelings when reading about the wisdom of people who are dying. I don't doubt that they feel the way they say they feel at that point, but are their judgments relevant to how they WOULD HAVE felt for years, not weeks, back when they still had years to live? On their deathbeds, when they value family so much more than career, they wish they'd spent more time on the former, less on the latter. But if they had actually lived that way for decades, would they have been any happier? Can we know for sure? They might be romanticizing the time they could have spent with family, but didn't, and underestimating the discouragment of living with the professional consequences of "spending less time at the office," while successful coworkers were spending more.
I suspect that the real key to success in life over all is to carefully identify your priorities and to deliberately, passionately, and courageously pursue them, rather than being governed by accident, convenience, fear, and inertia.
Well, I wasn't talking about a career. I was talking about working harder, and having achievements you could be proud of. That's not the same thing.
I think it's been established beyond doubt that a successful career doesn't make you happy. Plenty of researchers have looked into the correlation of income to happiness, and above the poverty line it's pretty flat.
Reminds me of the BBC Radio 4 'Desert Island Discs' interview with Sir Tom Blundell. It was several years ago, and I don't have a transcript, so this is a vaguely remembered paraphrase ...
He was researching protein structure in an X-ray crystallography lab and was working long evenings and nights. Eventually his wife gave him the ultimatum to make a choice between his work and her. He chose work and got a divorce. He said he was incredibly relieved to be free of the guilt he felt neglecting her while he worked at the lab, and threw himself into the research with a new-found energy and determination. Shortly afterwards he he discovered the structure of insulin.
There are billions of mediocre marriages in the world, but structure of insulin is only discovered once.
In retrospect, he sounded like he thought he made the right decision to spend less time with his family.
Yes, and I wasn't talking about one's income, but success at one's "work". The "achievements you can be proud of" will mostly be in the area of what you "do" since most achievements you can be proud of take a great deal of time and, as you say, "working harder", or they wouldn't be a source of much pride. What you spend a great deal of time working hard at is, for the most part, your "work", what you "do" at that stage in your life.
>"I think it's been established beyond doubt that a successful career doesn't make you happy...[very limited] correlation of income to happiness...."
Dan Gilbert's work, applies to "achievements you can be proud of" in general, not just one's income, so if you think it's relevant, then you can stop worrying about working harder. It won't permanently raise your "baseline happiness". But Gilbert's work, and the work he cites, is only "established beyond doubt" in the popular press, not in cog sci, where there is still a lot of wiggle room left and a lot of debate going on.
I like Gilbert's work overall, though, and it is one of the reasons I am expressing skepticism about the validity of the deathbed wish for "less time at the office". It might depend on how narrowly one thinks of "career" or "at the office" or "working" (I mean it more broadly), but if Gilbert has shown anything, it is that we seldom know how a given change really would make (or have made) us feel after a while--we just think we know.
Having a successful career doesn't necessarily have to correlate with monotonically increasing income (although that's how most people perceive the phrase).