Color Your Life Happy

Of the many blogs I read daily, one recently stood out. 

Amy Palko, while researching for her thesis on Stephen King, discovered that there are great lessons writers can learn from Stephen King.  Although the lessons she lists are directed at writers, they can apply to all of our lives as well.

As a guest blogger on Write to Done, Amy shared some of the following examples of Stephen King’s bravery and willingness to tackle challenges

He has refused to stay true to his typecast, and has frequently published work which doesn’t belong to the genre he became famous for.

He stands up to the literary establishment and demands that his writing is taken seriously.

He experiments with new media.

He will try his hand at just about any kind of fiction: short stories, serial novels, comic books, screenplays, e-novels.

He offers his work up to others for their own creative interpretation.

As Amy points out in her article, Stephen King may be known for writing that strikes fear in his readers, but he is fearless.

I’d like to add to Amy’s observations. 

Stephen King is also generous. He was one of the first authors to make his work available free on the Internet. He also sends free copies to military personnel who request them.

Once someone achieves fame and fortune, the public seems to think it happened magically or overnight. There is nothing mysterious or scary about King’s path to success. He wrote in all his spare time while he worked as an industrial laborer and later as an English teacher. He passionately pursued his writing in spite of rejection and uncertainty.

King’s self-assurance and integrity he stays true to what he believes is right, even if it means refusing the riches folks may dangle in front of him.

It seems to me that we can learn a lot from King.  Even if he had never become a highly paid, respected and famous author, Stephen would still be passionately turning out compelling stories and novels.

I recently stumbled upon a goldmine called TED. 

No, not a new love interest.

TED started in 1984 and stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design as a conference to bring ideas from these three worlds together. Their site makes talks and performances on some of the world’s best thinkers, writers and notables available to the public for free.

I will proudly feature some of the talks here that will give you insight, food for thought and guidelines for enjoying a happier and more meaningful life.

When planning the 2004 Conference, Chris Anderson, TED Curator, said

A few years age I stumbled upon a question I found both shocking and exhilarating: Suppose our natural instincts about what we needed to make us happy were dead wrong?

That was what the latest scientific research on happiness seemed to suggest: that most of the things we spent our time striving for made almost zero difference to how happy we were. In other words, our minds were apparently engineered for self-deception.

If true, this appeared to destroy a key assumption underlying our economic and political systems — that “rational” consumers know how to act in their own best interests. Worse, t meant we could be doomed to spend our lives on a “happiness treadmill”; forever pursuing, never arriving.

The Conference then was planned around exploring the pursuit of happiness.  Over the next few weeks I will feature some of those talks here.  Enjoy the first talk featuring Dr. Malcolm Gladwell.

“A slow death comes for those who don’t revolt when they’re unhappy in their work or in love. Who don’t risk the certain for the uncertain in order to follow a dream. Who don’t allow themselves, at least once in their life, to disregard sensible advice.” –Pablo Neruda

Taking sensible advice is what most of us were raised to do.

• Finish your dinner
• Get a good job
• Don’t talk to strangers
• Be satisfied
• Don’t travel abroad, it’s not safe

Although good advice is well-intentioned, following it does not always lead to personal happiness.

• Finishing your dinner can lead to overeating, heartburn and obesity.
• Getting a good job that bores and stresses does not build character, just more upset.
• As for strangers, isn’t everyone except your mother a stranger until you meet them?
• Being satisfied would bring an abrupt halt to invention.
• It’s not safe to get on the freeway either, but we must do it to get where we’re going

When your heart and mind are longing to go in a new direction, disregard sensible advice. It’s not doing what you love that you will later regret.

Daniel Gilbert, author and Harvard psychology professor is reported , in a recent Time article, as saying that we can not predict how much we will like a future experience. That’s because
we use past experiences to try to imagine future experiences. Once we are actually having
an experience we forget about the alternatives we imagined.

Dr. Gilbert calls this “attentional collapse.” By this he means that once we are engaged in an experience it takes all our attention and makes our preconceptions irrelevant. So, if we take
the road less traveled, it makes all the difference because we don’t think any longer about the roads we didn’t take.

When contemplating future decisions, Dr. Gilbert says

“When looking into the future, never trust your gut. That doesn’t mean it’s always wrong, you should just never trust it. It never hurts to stop and ask.”

I’m not in complete agreement with Dr. Gilbert’s findings. I believe that many people do dwell on the paths they did not take, the person they did not marry, or the job they didn’t get. They can’t be sure they would be happier experiencing those missed opportunities, but I believe many people regret choices they made.

On the other hand, many people, including me, experience being happy with a choice and knowing that the alternative choice would have been an disappointing one.

What is your take on this? Do you think it’s possible to predict if an experience will be happy or not?