The Mick Morris Musing

Exploring Resilience via Lifes Burning Issues

Category: Patterns (Page 15 of 17)

What is the key to happiness?

November 15, 2009 /
(the Buddhist Path to Simplicity by Christina Feldman)
Happiness by sciondriver

Happiness by sciondriver

What is the key the happiness?

Wouldn’t most people pay millions for the answer to that question?

Quite a while ago I found this short story about the key happiness ( in the Buddhist Path to Simplicity by Christina Feldman).

A zen master was once asked “what is the key the happiness?” He answered “good judgement”, “How do I gain good judgement?” he was questioned, “experience” was the reply.

“How then do I get experience?” the student further probed, “Bad judgement” were his final words.

As happy as the next person

I like to be as happy as the next person, but this story has been running around in my head for a while and it quite often pops up again when I am thinking about what I am doing and why.

 Like most of us I’ve really excerised my “bad judgement” muscle and have definitely developed quite a portfolio of “experience”, and spent time wandering about some of this experience and what it means.

Which camp do you build with your experience?

When doing this we have a choice and people tend to broken into two camps. Those who look at their experiences and dwell on them worrying about what could have been, or what they think should have been and then expending a lot of unneccessary energy on regret or reliving the experience in a negative fasion.

The other camp is those who reflect on the experience, realise that nothing you can do is going to change the circumstances that led to the experience, nothing is going to change the actual experience but the experience contains a wealth of information that can help you make things different in the future.

I think the first camp is going to continue to experience “bad judgement”  and sell themselves short on finding the key to happiness because they continue to cling to the past and what was, whilst the second camp by focusing on the the lessons learned and the future,  focusing on what is, and what could be, are exercising their “good judgement” muscle and working hard on using the key to happiness.

Working out your happiness muscle

Like all muscles if we excercise them they get stronger, and more resilient over time. If we don’t excercise them they atrophy and lose mass, becoming less effective.

I try spend a good deal of my time working to exercise the “good judgement” muscle in order to experience more happiness.

What about you? what are/were the experiences that taught you good judgement, and which “muslce group” are you building up every day? and what are your tips for learning “good judgement”?

Let’s talk about it.

Quite a while ago I found this short story about the key happiness
A zen master was once asked “what is the key the happiness?” He answered “good judgement”,
“How do I gain good judgement?” he was questioned, “experience” was the reply. “How then
do I get experience?” the student further probed, “Bad judgement” were his final words.
I like to be as happy as the next person, but this story has been running around in my head
for a while and it quite often pops up again when I am thinking about what I am doing and why.
Like most of us I’ve really excerised by “bad judgement” muscle and have definitely developed quite
a portfolio of “experience”, and spent time wandering about some of this experience.
When doing this we have a choice and people tend to broken into two camps. Those who look at the
experience and dwell on it worrying about what could have been, or what should have been and then
expending a lot of unneccessary energy on regret or reliving the experience in a negative fasion.
The other camp is those who reflect on the experience, realise that nothing you can do is going
to change the circumstances that led to the experience, nothing is going to change the actual experience
but the experience contains a wealth of information that can make things different in the future.
I think the first camp is going to continue to experience “bad judgement” because they continue
to cling to the past and what was, whilst the second camp by focusing on the the lessons learned and the future
focusing on what is, and what could be, and they are exercising their “good judgement” muscle.
Like all muscles if we excercise them they get stronger, and more resilient over time. If we don’t excercise them
they atrophy and lose mass, becoming less effective.
I spend a good deal of my time working to exercise the “good judgement” muscle in order to experience
more happiness.
What about you? what are/were the experiences that taught you good judgement, and which “muslce group” are
you building up every day? and what are your tips for learning “good judgement”?
Let’s talk about it.

What are you afraid of?

November 12, 2009 /
Fear - by Mat Honan

Fear – by Mat Honan

That Creepy Feeling

You’re about to do something, or you think I really should be … and then that feeling starts.

You know that feeling……. hands a bit clammy, breathing slightly shallow, the little voice that starts talking about all the other things you could be doing.

What happens then? Yep you guessed it, you procrastinate, because all those other things are so much more interesting (or less scary)

You see one of the biggest triggers for procrastination is fear, whether that is a fear of failure or a fear of success (as crazy as that may sound).

Often what drives that fear is the inner perfectionist, you know that little voice that says it has to be just so.

It often means that things are put off until the last minute because everything isn’t quite right.. and the closer the deadline gets, the higher the anxiety and the less right things are. That deadline is a real FEAR producer.

Why…

because you really didn’t figure out how long it was going to take you to get there.  We do this in two ways.

1) assuming we have forever [or at least until forever becomes tommorrow]

2) simply not knowing how long each part of the job is going to take, either because we over guesstimate our ability or we under guesstimate how damn long it is really going to take to get that widget in shape before we can move on to doing the thingamebob.

So how do you fix it?

I’ve already talked about this in this post where there was some great practical advice from an old boss of mine, or you can get really practical and all project managementy (I’ll just make up words as we go) about it., and then Just F****N do it.

If you like the practical approach you could always apply this project management formula (and while you’re working it out it gives your brain another perfect reason for justifying why your not just F****N doing it), but I digress… the formula goes like this:

a= the best case estimate (you know.. when you think that will only take me a few hours to knock over)

m= the most likely estimate (you know.. how based on experience, you know it is more likely to take you a full day)

b= the worst case estimate (you know.. that offer of a few drinks, or doing something else means you really think it might take you two or three days to achieve)

then you use these magic numbers a, m and b to calculate E – which is a fair estimate of how long it really is likely to take you to do the task)….  and SD or a standard deviation yeah yeah I know…

But HOW do I calculate E and what is a Standard Deviation?

well, you do it like this.

E = a + (4*m) + b / 6

SD = (b – a)/6

So THEN WHAT… I hear you shout! (Patience, I’m getting there)

So (now that we have exercised a maths muscle that we haven’t used since school) We use those numbers to help us figure out a confidence level in our estimation…..

When you first calculate E we can rely on that figure at approximately 50% confidence level.

But when you start using your SD.. you can start to get REALLY reliable

So…

E + 1SD then gives you a confidence level of 70%

E+ 2 SD gives you a confidence level of 95 %, and

E+ 3 SD gives you a confidence level of 99.5%

Now that you know the chance of actually getting something done within a given time and with a degree of confidence (and let’s face it, it is up to you decide at what confidence level you want to be at you perfectionist) what is the solution…

maybe you saw it coming…. maybe you didn’t….. but the answer is… whether you implement it before you do the maths or after you do the maths ………….at the end of the day you have to

JUST F****N DO IT.

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