“Greatness Courts Failure.”

~Tin Cup

The Dalai Lama said he was counting on young people to create a “happier” century as he celebrated his 78th birthday on Saturday in southern India with tens of thousands of Tibetan exiles.

“The present-day generation can create better conditions and build a world where everyone can live in harmony and in a spirit of coexistence,” the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, told the crowd.

“Youngsters of today have an opportunity to build a happier century,” said the maroon-robed monk. “For those of us from the 20th century, there is nothing we can do now.”

The spiritual leader spoke to some 40,000 Tibetans who migrated from Tibet and settled in India.

In an hour-long speech, he urged people to “practice compassion” and not just think of themselves, adding that education only has value “when you are compassionate towards others.”

We think that happiness is something that you find or if you reach some level in a company or a school, then you’re happier.  And what we’re finding is that happiness is not something that happens to you.  Happiness is a work ethic.  It’s something that requires our brains to train just like an athlete has to train.

In order to become happier, we actually have to focus our brains down on things that actually move us forward instead of stressing about things that are outside of our control. That doesn’t move us forward at all.

We need to change the formula for success. If we prioritize happiness, it will then raise our success rates, but it’s also something that actually requires effort. It requires training and requires us to be able to focus our attention on this.

We often think that if people get happy, they’ll stop working hard or that happy people are unintelligent.  And what we’re finding is just the opposite.  I think it is the most counter-intuitive thing we’ve found, which is happiness actually raises an individual’s intelligence and their success rates.

We find that the happy people aren’t always the smartest people. I’ve met tons of people that are very successful and not happy, and people that are extremely intelligent and not happy.  So we might assume that those two things are divorced, but now what we really realize in the science is that both of those individuals are actually underperforming what their brain is actually capable of.

And if we have more role models in our companies and schools of individuals that are positive and infect other people with that positivity rippling out through those mirror neuron networks, not only can we raise the levels of happiness and engagement in our schools and companies again, but we’ll actually raise their levels of successes as well.

Via Shawn Achor 

I liked this Gladwell piece from The New Yorker profiling Albert O. Hirschman, an influential economist and author of several well known books.

Hirschman, an esoteric mind,  felt that people were more creative when they experienced failure. Then, he believed, people were forced to think.

Hirshman wrote, “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”

He went on, “Nietzsche’s famous maxim, ‘That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.’ This sentence admirably epitomizes several of the histories of economic development projects in recent decades.

He also believed in another theory LP has touched on, randomness. “While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian’s finding that we stumbled into the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede—in fact we find it intolerable to imagine—that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . . Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth.”

One thing that I loved about Hirshman was that he was an explorer. After working while being miserable at the Fed, he moved his family to Bogota, Columbia for four years to study emerging markets and development economics. He said that the four years living in Columbia, amid a war, were four of his favorite.

Interesting read if you have a few minutes today….