Could a simple five-minute interaction with another person dramatically increase your weekly productivity?

In some employment environments, the answer is yes, according to Wharton management professor Adam Grant. Grant has devoted significant chunks of his professional career to examining what motivates workers in settings that range from call centers and mail-order pharmacies to swimming pool lifeguard squads. In all these situations, Grant says, employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive, too.

That conclusion may sound touchy-feely, but Grant has documented it in a series of research papers. In one experiment, he studied paid employees at a public university’s call center who were asked to phone potential donors to the school. It can be grim work: Employees don’t get paid much and suffer frequent rejections from people unhappy about getting calls during dinner. Turnover is high and morale is often low. So how do you motivate workers to stay on the phone and bring in the donations?

One relatively easy answer: Introduce them to someone who is aided by those dollars.

In his 2007 study, Grant and a team of researchers — Elizabeth Campbell, Grace Chen, David Lapedis and Keenan Cottone from the University of Michigan — arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school’s fundraising largess. It wasn’t a long meeting — just a five-minute session where the workers were able to ask the student about his or her studies. But over the next month, that little chat made a big difference. The call center was able to monitor both the amount of time its employees spent on the phone and the amount of donation dollars they brought in. A month later, callers who had interacted with the scholarship student spent more than two times as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $503.22, up from $185.94.

“Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation,” the researchers write in their paper, titled ”Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior,” published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 

Motivated Lifeguards

Motivating workers is a topic that interested Grant long before he became a professional academic. Prior to graduate school, he worked as an advertising director for the Let’s Go line of travel guides. “We were producing travel guides and we had a couple of hundred people working in an office that would help travelers see foreign countries in a new way and travel safely,” he recalls. “None of the editors had any contact with any of the actual readers.” Grant suspected that the staffers would find more satisfaction in their work — and probably work even harder — if they could regularly interact with the readers whose globetrotting they enabled.

At the travel guide business, he never got a chance to put that hunch into practice. But as he moved towards his doctoral research at the University of Michigan, he returned to the subject, using call centers, sports facilities and classrooms as some of his early laboratories.

According to Grant, just being aware of the impact your job has on others can help with motivation. In a follow up study to the one he published in 2007, he focused on lifeguards at a community recreation center. Some of them were given stories to read about cases in which lifeguards had saved lives. A second group was given a different kind of reading material: testimonies from lifeguards about how they had personally benefitted from their work. The results: Those who had been reading about their ability to avert fatalities saw their measure of hours worked shoot up by more than 40%, whereas those who had merely learned that a lifeguard gig could be personally enriching kept working at the same clip. The results were published in a paper titled, “The Significance of Task Significance: Job Performance Effects, Relational Mechanisms, and Boundary Conditions,” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Seeing Is Believing

Beyond awareness of job impact, face-to-face meetings with individuals who benefit from a job well done can dramatically improve workers’ performance. In Grant’s 2007 study, a second experimentlooked at a group of students who were tasked with editing cover letters of fellow students who had contacted the university’s Career Center in order to help find a job. One group of the student editors had the opportunity to see a would-be beneficiary who stopped by to drop off his letters and made small talk, purportedly unaware that the people in the room were the ones who would be tuning up his writing. Another group of student editors dug into the identical cover letters without having laid eyes on their author. The result? The people who had met the job-seeking student — even for a brief, apparently superficial conversation as he dropped off his paperwork — spent significantly more time on the editing task than those who hadn’t.

However, there’s more to know about contact than the simple idea that it is worthwhile to plunk workers down next to someone their daily tasks have aided. In a second run of the Career Center experiment, for instance, the alleged student job-seeker’s biographical information was also manipulated. Again, both groups of editors worked on identical packets of cover letters. But they also saw a personal information sheet the student had submitted to the Career Center. On one sheet, the student wrote that he desperately needed a job, saying he was having a hard time paying bills. For the other group, the personal statement did not contain any such language. Again, one group of editors met the student for the same few minutes of small-talk, and another group had no contact with him.

As in Grant’s lifeguard experiment, reading the high-need personal statement — that is, learning that their work was very important — was crucial. But, the one-two punch of knowing the beneficiary’s needs and meeting him in person generated the largest impact on motivation. Editors who didn’t learn of the student’s dire financial straits put in an average of 27 minutes of work. Editors who read of the student’s money woes but never met him clocked 26 minutes apiece. Only those who had met the student and read of his worries worked significantly harder on the task of helping him,spending more than a half-hour on the task, or an average of 20% more time than the other editors.

Grant says this suggests that “task significance” is the key driver, and that face-to-face interactions, even seemingly superficial ones, can serve as a way of driving that significance home. In other studies, he has found that engineers, salespeople, managers, customer service representatives, doctors, nurses, medical technicians, security guards, police officers and firefighters who can directly see their impact on others all achieve higher job performance.

Over the course of several years’ worth of experiments and surveys, Grant and his colleagues have spotted a few other nuances in how meeting beneficiaries affects workers. For instance, workers with a strong set of “prosocial values” — determined by those who say they agree strongly with statements such as, “It is important to me to respond to the needs of others” — are much more likely to be affected by reminders of how significant their work is. By contrast, generally conscientious workers, who presumably work hard whether or not their labors are beneficial, don’t show nearly the same spike in performance upon being exposed to their beneficiaries.

Still, Grant says that in a wired economy where workers are increasingly likely to be physically isolated from end users, it’s important for employers to build in systems that reinforce employees’ awareness of whom they are helping. “Technology is this really fascinating double edged sword,” Grant says. “On one hand, we have more and more ability to connect employees to end users from a different geographic region…. But on the other hand, technology has also reduced the need for face-to-face interaction. A lot of organizations stop short of making this sort of connection because the work can get done without it.”

That’s a mistake, he says — one that many companies are now working to avoid. In fact, Grant is consulting with a number of organizations to establish these sorts of procedures on an ongoing basis. One of them, a pharmaceutical firm that does mail-order prescriptions, established a system where staff pharmacists occasionally rotate into regular pharmacies where they interact with customers. They also began attaching  photos of customers to their mail-order files, on the assumption that humanizing the names on all those medical forms would improve performance and minimize mistakes on the crucial, if sometimes mundane, work of pharmaceutical delivery.

Even in firms that are not focused on helping people as a core mission, managers might still look at increasing contact between workers and others in the organization who benefit from their labor, Grant says. “Everybody has an end user. In some cases, those end users are more inside the organization than outside. In some cases, the end users who managers want employees to focus on are coworkers, colleagues in other departments, or managers themselves.” The question, he says, is: “How do we establish that connection as a regular routine, whether it’s a weekly conference call with [co-workers] or a monthly check-in?”

Corporate charity might also have a productivity-boosting effect. “Some of my recent research on a Fortune 500 company suggests that, if you’ve got employees where the primary purpose of their job is not to help people, where there’s no clearly defined group of end users, we can think about corporate philanthropy as a substitute. One option is to give people the chance to take responsibility for personally meaningful, important community service that can be sponsored by the company [so that they think], ‘I make a difference by being here.’”

This article has been republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Adam Grant is a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. His research focuses on work motivation, job design, prosocial helping and giving behaviors, proactivity, and leadership.

Voluntary Simplicity has become a “modern classic” because it gives voice to ways of living that are vital for building a workable and meaningful future.  As we awaken to an endangered world, people are asking, “How can we live sustainably on the Earth when our actions are already producing dramatic climate change, species extinction, oil depletion, and more?”  For a generation, a diverse subculture has grappled with these concerns and, in the United States and a dozen or so other “postmodern” nations, this subculture has grown from a miniscule movement in the 1960s to a respected part of the mainstream culture in the early 2000s.  Glossy magazines now sell the simple life from the newsstands across the U.S. while it has become a popular theme on major television talk shows.  More significantly, surveys show that at least 10 percent of the U.S. adult population or 20 million people are consciously exploring various expressions of simplicity of living.

These changes are not confined to the U.S. and Europe.  Around the world, people are awakening to the sanity of simplicity as a path to sustainability.  A survey done by the Gallup organization in 1993 found virtually world-wide citizen awareness that our planet is indeed in poor health and great public concern for its future well-being.  The survey also found that it made little difference whether people lived in poorer and wealthier nations—they expressed nearly equal concern for the health of the planet.  Majorities in most nations gave environmental protection a higher priority than economic growth and said that they were willing to pay higher prices for that protection.

Another revealing survey was conducted in1998 for the International Environmental Monitor.  Involving more than 35,000 respondents in 30 countries, the survey report concludes by stating their “findings will serve as a wake-up call to national governments and private corporations to get moving on environmental issues or get bitten by their citizens and consumers who will not stand for inaction on what they see as key survival issues.”

The push toward simpler ways of living was clearly described in 1992 when over 1,600 of the world’s senior scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences, signed an unprecedented “Warning to Humanity.”  In this historic statement, they declared that: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”  Roughly a decade later came a related warning from 100 Nobel Prize winners who said that “The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed.”

As these two warnings by the world’s elder scientists indicate, powerful adversity trends are converging, creating the possibility of an evolutionary crash within this generation.  If we are to create instead an “evolutionary bounce” or leap forward, it will surely include a collective shift toward simpler, more sustainable and satisfying ways of living.  Simplicity is not an alternative lifestyle for a marginal few; it is a creative choice for the mainstream majority, particularly in developed nations.  If we are to pull together as a human community, it is crucial that people in affluent nations confront the choice of simplicity and sustainability head on.  Simplicity is simultaneously a personal choice, a civilizational choice, and a species choice.  Even with major technological innovations in energy and transportation, it will require dramatic changes in our overall patterns of living and consuming if we are to maintain the integrity of the Earth as a living system.  The coming era of constraint can bring focus and energy to crafting lives of elegant and creative simplicity.

Although the ecological pushes toward simpler ways of living are strong, the pulls toward this way of life seem equally compelling.  In reality, most people are not choosing to live more simply from a feeling of sacrifice; rather, they are seeking deeper sources of satisfaction than are being offered by a high stress, consumption-obsessed world.  To illustrate, while real incomes doubled in the U.S. in the past generation, the percentage of the population reporting they are very happy has remained unchanged (roughly one-third).  While happiness has not increased, during this same period divorce rates have doubled and teen suicide rates have tripled.  A whole generation has tasted the fruits of an affluent society and has discovered that money does not buy happiness.  In the search for satisfaction, millions of people are not only “downshifting”—or pulling back from the stress of the rat race—they are also “upshifting” or moving ahead into a life that is, though materially more modest, rich with family, friends, community, creative work in the world, and a soulful connection with the universe.

Although simplicity is intensely relevant to building a workable world, this approach to living is not a new idea.  Simplicity has deep roots in history and finds expression in all of the world’s wisdom traditions.  More than two thousand years ago, in the same historical period that Christians were saying “Give me neither poverty nor wealth,” (Proverbs 30:8), the Taoists were asserting “He who knows he has enough is rich” (Lao Tzu), Plato and Aristotle were proclaiming the importance of the “golden mean”—a path through life with neither excess nor deficit—and the Buddhists were encouraging a “middle way” between poverty and mindless accumulation.  Clearly, the wisdom of simplicity is not a recent revelation.

Although simplicity has a long history, we are now entering radically changing times—ecological, social, economic, and psycho-spiritual—and we should expect the worldly expressions of simplicity to evolve and grow in response. For more than thirty years I’ve explored the “simple life” and I’ve found that simplicity is not simple.  I’ve encountered such a diversity of expressions of the simple life that I find the most accurate way of describing this approach to living is with the metaphor of a garden.

A Garden of Simplicity

To portray the richness of simplicity, here are ten different flowerings of expression that I see growing in the “garden of simplicity.”  Although there is overlap among them, each expression of simplicity seems sufficiently distinct to warrant a separate category.  So there would be no favoritism in listing, they are placed in alphabetical order based on the brief name I associated with each.

1. Choiceful Simplicity: Simplicity means choosing our unique path through life consciously, deliberately, and of our own accord.  It means to live whole—to not live divided against ourselves.  This path emphasizes the challenges of freedom over the comfort of consumerism.  A choiceful simplicity means staying focused, diving deep, and not being distracted by consumer culture.  It means consciously organizing our lives so that we give our “true gifts” to the world—which is to give the essence of ourselves.  As Emerson said, “The only true gift is a portion of yourself.”

2. Compassionate Simplicity: Simplicity means to feel such a strong sense of kinship with others that, as Gandhi said, we “choose to live simply so that others may simply live.”  A compassionate simplicity means feeling a bond with the community of life and being drawn toward a path of reconciliation—with other species and future generations as well as, for example, between those with great differences of wealth and opportunity.  A compassionate simplicity is a path of cooperation and fairness that seeks a future of mutually assured development for all.

3. Ecological Simplicity: Simplicity means to choose ways of living that touch the Earth more lightly and that reduce our ecological impact. This life-path remembers our deep roots in the natural world.  It encourages us to connect with nature, the seasons, and the cosmos.  A natural simplicity feels a deep reverence for the community of life on Earth and accepts that the non-human realms of plants and animals have their dignity and rights as well the human.

4. Economic Simplicity: Simplicity means there are many forms of “right livelihood” in the rapidly growing market for healthy and sustainable products and services of all kinds—from home-building materials and energy systems to foods and transportation.  When the need for a sustainable infrastructure in developing nations is combined with the need to retrofit and redesign the homes, cities, workplaces, and transportation systems of “developed” nations, then it is clear that an enormous wave of highly purposeful economic activity can unfold.

5. Elegant Simplicity: Simplicity means that the way we live our lives represents a work of unfolding artistry.  As Gandhi said, “My life is my message.”  In this spirit, an elegant simplicity is an understated, organic aesthetic that contrasts with the excess of consumerist lifestyles.  Drawing from influences ranging from Zen to the Quakers, simplicity is a path of beauty that celebrates natural materials and clean, functional expressions.

6. Family Simplicity: Simplicity means that the balanced lives of children and families are of highest priority and that it is important not to get sidetracked by our consumer society.  In turn, a growing number of parents are opting out of consumerist lifestyles and seeking to bring enhancing values and experiences into the lives of their children and family.

7. Frugal Simplicity: Simplicity means that, by cutting back on spending that is not truly serving our lives, and by practicing skillful management of our personal finances, we can achieve greater financial independence.  Frugality and careful financial management bring increased financial freedom and the opportunity to more consciously choose our path through life.  Living with less also decreases the impact of our consumption upon the Earth and frees resources for others.

8. Political Simplicity: Simplicity means organizing our collective lives in ways that enable us to live more lightly and sustainably on the Earth which, in turn, involves changes in nearly every area of public life—from transportation and education to the design of our homes, cities, and workplaces.  The politics of simplicity is also a media politics as the mass media are the primary vehicle for reinforcing—or transforming—the mass consciousness of consumerism.  Political simplicity is a politics of conversation and community that builds from local, face-to-face connections to networks of relationships emerging around the world through the enabling power of television and the Internet.

9. Soulful Simplicity: Simplicity means to approach life as a meditation and to cultivate our experience of intimate connection with all that exists.  A spiritual presence infuses the world and, by living simply, we can more directly awaken to the living universe that surrounds and sustains us, moment by moment.  Soulful simplicity is more concerned with consciously tasting life in its unadorned richness than with a particular standard or manner of material living.  In cultivating a soulful connection with life, we tend to look beyond surface appearances and bring our interior aliveness into relationships of all kinds.

10. Uncluttered Simplicity: Simplicity means taking charge of lives that are too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented.  An uncluttered simplicity means cutting back on trivial distractions, both material and non-material, and focusing on the essentials—whatever those may be for each of our unique lives.  As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. . . Simplify, simplify.”  Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”

As these ten approaches illustrate, the growing culture of simplicity contains a flourishing garden of expressions whose great diversity—and intertwined unity—are creating a resilient and hardy ecology of learning about how to live more sustainable and meaningful lives.  As with other ecosystems, it is the diversity of expressions that fosters flexibility, adaptability, and resilience.  Because there are so many pathways of great relevance into the garden of simplicity, this cultural movement appears to have enormous potential to grow—particularly if it is nurtured and cultivated in the mass media as a legitimate, creative, and promising life-path for the future.  As the culture of simplicity develops, it will draw people toward it by demonstrating a more meaningful and fulfilling way of life beyond modern materialism.  In turn, a vital foundation for nurturing the garden of simplicity will be the flowering of new forms of human-scale community.

Simplicity and Community in a Stewardship Society

If given the choice, millions of people would choose new forms of community that support simpler, more sustainable ways of living.  However, our current patterns and scales of living do not suit these needs. The scale of the household is often too small and that of the city too large to realize many of the opportunities for sustainable living.  However, at the scale of a small village, the strength of one person or family meets the strength of others and, working together, something can be created that was not possible before.
Modern neighborhoods with isolated, single-family dwellings have been compared to tiny, underdeveloped nations where the potential for community and synergy has yet to be realized.  A new architecture of life is needed; one that integrates the physical as well as social and cultural/spiritual dimensions of our lives.  Taking a lesson from humanity’s past, it is important to look at the in-between scale of living—that of a small village consisting of a few hundred people or less.  Great opportunity exists for organizing into clusters of small ecovillages that are nested within a larger urban area.

To illustrate from my own life, my wife Coleen and I lived in an ecovillage/co-housing community in Northern California of roughly seventy people for a year and a half.  One of the three organizing principles for the community is “simplicity” (and the other two are ecology and family).  We experienced how easily and quickly activities could be organized.  From organizing fundraisers (such as a brunch for tsunami disaster relief), to arranging classes (such as yoga and dancing), planting the community landscape and garden, and creating community celebrations and events, we participated in several dozen gatherings that emerged with ease from the combined strengths and diverse talents of the community.

I imagine that, in a sustainable future, a family will live in an “eco-home” that is nested within an “ecovillage,” that, in turn, is nested within an “eco-city,” and so on up the scale to the bio-region, nation, and world.  Each ecovillage of several hundred persons would have a distinct character, architecture, and local economy.  Most would likely contain a child-care facility and play area, a common house for meetings, celebrations, and regular meals together, an organic community garden, a recycling and composting area, some revered open space, and a crafts and shop area. As well, each could offer a variety of types of work to the local economy—such as the arts, health care, child care, a non-profit learning center for gardening, green building, conflict resolution, and other skills—that provide fulfilling employment for many.  These micro-communities or modern villages could have the culture and cohesiveness of a small town and the sophistication of a big city, as virtually everyone will be immersed within a world that is rich with communications. Ecovillages create the possibility for meaningful work, raising healthy children, celebrating life in community with others, and living in a way that seeks to honor the Earth and future generations.

Ecovillages represent a healthy response to economic globalization as they create a strong, decentralized foundation for society and a way of living that has the potential for being sustainable for everyone on the planet. Because they may range in size from roughly one or two hundred people, they approximate the scale of a more traditional tribe. Consequently, ecovillages are compatible with both the village-based cultures of indigenous societies and with those of post-modern cultures.

With a social and physical architecture sensitive to the psychology of modern tribes, a flowering of diverse communities could replace the alienation of today’s massive cities. Ecovillages provide the practical scale and foundation for a sustainable future.  I believe they will become important islands of community, security, learning, and innovation in a world of sweeping change.  These smaller-scale, human-sized living and working environments will foster diverse experiments in community and cooperative living. Sustainability will be achieved through different designs that touch people and the Earth lightly and that are uniquely adapted to the culture, economy, interests and environment of each locale.

Simplicity and a Sustainable Species-Civilization

In a shift similar to that nature makes—for example, in the jump from simple atoms to complex molecules, or from complex molecules to living cells—humanity is being challenged to make a jump to a new kind of community and life-organization.  A robust garden of expressions will emerge from the combination of a culture of conscious simplicity with new forms of community adapted to the unique culture and ecology of different geographic regions.  The great diversity of approaches to sustainable and compassionate living that emerge in the context of new forms of community will foster flexibility, adaptability, and resilience at the local scale—qualities that will be profoundly tested in the decades ahead.

Although human societies have confronted major hurdles throughout history, the challenges of our era are unique. Never before has the human family been on the verge of devastating the Earth’s biosphere and crippling its ecological foundations for countless generations to come. Never before have so many people been called upon to make such sweeping changes in so little time. Never before has the entire human family been entrusted with the task of working together to imagine and consciously build a sustainable and compassionate future.  As we awaken to this new world, integrating life-ways of simplicity and new forms of community will be at the foundation of building a stewardship society and promising future.  Seeds of simplicity, growing quietly for the past generation, are now blossoming into a garden of expressions.  May the garden flourish!

This article is reprinted here with permission from the author. More from Duane Elgin, a speaker, author, and non-partisan activist for media accountability. He is the author of “Voluntary Simplicity,” “The Living Universe,” “Promise Ahead,” and other books. His website offers articles and videos on thriving in challenging times.

Jill Bolte Taylor, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy and Chef Grant Achatz are an unlikely trio. What do this brain scientist, late eye surgeon, and a leader of the molecular gastronomy movement [yes there is such a thing] have in common? At a takeoff point in their careers they were each dealt a sucker punch — one that robbed them of what was arguably their greatest gift. Yet none of them threw in the towel. And each would rise to greatness after mining their unthinkable experience of loss for deeper insight into the human experience.

Loss. Consider the paradox of how that one word, brief as a seed, can swallow our world whole. We’ve all experienced it, in ways that range from the mundane to the profound.

“Lose something every day,” the poet Elizabeth Bishop urged us perversely,

Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Except that it is. The experience of living is fraught with loss. And wrestling the thorny experience of it into an art form is not easy. But there are some rare individuals who’ve done it with inspired grace, and our world is the richer for it.

In the face of milder, more everyday losses what can the rest of us learn from what these three extraordinary people lost, and found?

The Chef Who Lost His Sense of Taste

In 2007 Grant Achatz’s star was on the rise. He’d been named one of the best new chefs in America and was running one of the country’s most wildly innovative restaurants. Just as the culinary spotlight hit him, so did the diagnosis: Stage four squamous cell carcinoma:  tongue cancer. Aggressive treatments followed. Achatz lost peeling layers of skin in his mouth and throat — and lost his sense of taste.

A cruel outcome for a man whose life’s work depended on perceiving the delicate nuance and shaded subtleties of flavor. And yet, “Tapping into the discipline, passion, and focus of being a chef, he rarely missed a day of work. He trained his chefs to mimic his palate and learned how to cook with his other senses. The food was never better.” Five months later Achatz was pronounced cancer-free and in the same year won one of the nation’s highest honors in the culinary arts.

When his radiation cycles ended, Achatz’ ability to taste did begin to come back. His perception of flavors returned literally one flavor at a time, first sweet, then salty, and finally bitter. “My palate developed just as a newborn — but I was 32 years old,” Achtaz says, “So I could understand how flavors were coming back and how they synergized together … It was very educational for me. I don’t recommend it, but I think it made me a better chef because now I really understand how flavor works.”

His loss and the subsequent slow recovery afforded Achtaz a chance to understand the evolution of taste and the chemistry of how different flavors interact, with a visceral purity that few, if any of us, will ever know. His initial loss through the radiation was accompanied by a total and complete annihilation of taste perception, followed by a very gradual relearning of it — this with a radical new self-awareness. Unlike a newborn, Achatz could actually consciously and proactively tune into the process of taste acquisition underway. He could observe it in ways that were previously indiscernible and that led to fresh insight.

Achatz’s experience shows us that with loss can come the opportunity to re-acquire and re-learn experience with greater consciousness and intention — in such a way that the inner logic and the natural laws of experience become deeply apparent to you for the first time.  Jill Bolte Taylor can vehemently attest to the truth of this.

A Brain Scientist’s Stroke of Insight

At 37, Jill Bolte Taylor was a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist with a promising career. Until one fateful morning, when a blood vessel detonated in her left hemisphere. With the dispassionate curiosity of a true scientist she bore incredible witness to the breakdown of her brain functions. [Her vivid description of the experience and what followed is now the second-most watched TED talk of all time].

The stroke left Taylor initially unable to talk, walk, read, write or recall her past. In her own words, “I didn’t even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was.” As her left-brain shut down she lost her processing capacity and all acquired language. Her mind was suspended in a newfound silence, and she experienced a simultaneous sense of deep peace along with an inability to distinguish edges and boundaries between her, and the rest of the world. It took eight dedicated years for Taylor to completely reclaim the normal functions of her mind and body. In the process she would become her own experimental subject, and arrive at many profound realizations.

One of her first, was the realization that every emotion has a physical component that we can learn to consciously feel. “Joy was a feeling in my body. Peace was a feeling in my body. I thought it was interesting that I could feel when a new emotion was triggered. I could feel new emotions flood through me and then release me,” says Taylor, “I had to learn new words to label these “feeling” experiences, and most remarkably, I learned that I had the power to choose whether to hook into a feeling and prolong its presence in my body, or just let it quickly flow right out of me.”

Imagine the freedom that accompanies the visceral (not merely intellectual) realization that you have the autonomy to choose your response to the onslaught of emotion. A newfound knowing that runs cell-deep.

“I made my decisions based upon how things felt inside. There were certain emotions like anger, frustration, or fear that felt uncomfortable when they surged through my body. So I told my brain that I didn’t like that feeling and didn’t want to hook into those neural loops. I learned that I could use my left mind, through language, to talk directly to my brain and tell it what I wanted and what I didn’t want. Upon this realization, I knew I would never return to the personality I had been before. I suddenly had much more to say about how I felt and for how long, and I was adamantly opposed to reactivating old painful emotional circuits,” writes Taylor in her best-selling book, My Stroke of Insight.

Her story demonstrates how loss can give us an opportunity to practice being present to the physical component of our emotions. And in practicing this, we can increasingly choose through the power of our awareness, to either strengthen an emotion’s hold on us — or gradually weaken it. Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy was someone who experimented extensively with his awareness this way, and in the wake of an extreme loss.

A Perfect Surgeon With Crippled Fingers

Born in a village of southern India, Govindappa Venkatswamy lost several cousins to complications during childbirth, all before his tenth birthday. There were no doctors in the village, and these early losses steeled his resolve to become a surgeon when he grew up. He steadily worked his way to and through medical school. Then in his early thirties, just as he was about to embark on his lifelong dream of specializing in obstetrics, he was struck by the dire symptoms of acute rheumatoid arthritis. A disease that drastically twisted and froze his fingers permanently out of shape, like the gnarled branches of an old tree.

Dr. V (as he would come to be better known) was bedridden for the better part of two years, and through it all his body was wracked by pain so intense that he could neither sit, walk, stand nor eat without assistance. When he recovered enough strength to return to medical school, he knew his dream of becoming an obstetrician had shattered. Someone recommended the field of eye surgery instead. Dr. V enrolled in the field of ophthalmology and trained those badly afflicted fingers to cut and operate the eye. In the course of his career he would perform well over 100,000 sight-restoring surgeries. How did he do it?

The force of his willpower had a role to play, but it wasn’t just sheer stamina, that allowed him to wield the surgical knife with such precision. There was more at play. His fingers were affected but his mind was clear, and he began to give it firm instructions. “You want your life to lose all hatred, jealousy and envy, and to look instead for courage and love. You want to surrender absolutely to the divine, to perfection, to whatever you may want to call it. You do not want anything egotistical within you. It is an experiment you are constantly conducting,” he said.

This man consciously and routinely attempted to put himself at the service of a higher force through deepening his inner awareness. “Once you separate your inner consciousness from your outer consciousness, you can contact a deeper reality than your reason can. We have the opportunity to do this all the time, every minute, every second,” said Dr. V.

His life and work reveal how the seeming limitations clamped down by loss can be eclipsed by the strength of the human spirit, and its capacity to put itself at the service of immutable values. When we work to expand selflessly beyond our loss, we can tap into a strength that far transcends our surface frailties. And we regularly grow our circle of care.

Sometimes, as the stories of these three extra ordinary individuals demonstrates, if we have enough resolve and bring a certain discipline of mind and heart to bear on our lives, then –

Loss is more.

This article is printed here with permission. Pavithra Mehta is the co-author of Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion.

Why prestige is the enemy of passion, or how to master the balance of setting boundaries and making friends.

“Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness,“and dedicate your life to it.” But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that make it easier. Gathered here are insights from seven thinkers who have contemplated the art-science of making your life’s calling a living.

PAUL GRAHAM ON HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE

Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love. It’s brilliant in its entirety, but the part I find of especial importance and urgency is his meditation on social validation and the false merit metric of “prestige”:

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.

[…]

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

[…]

Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.”

More of Graham’s wisdom on how to find meaning and make wealth can be found in Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age.

ALAIN DE BOTTON ON SUCCESS

Alain de Botton, modern philosopher and creator of the“literary self-help genre”, is a keen observer of the paradoxes and delusions of our cultural conceits.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, he takes his singular lens of wit and wisdom to the modern workplace and the ideological fallacies of “success.”

His terrific 2009 TED talk offers a taste:

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES

Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod is as well-known for his irreverent doodles as he is for his opinionated musings on creativity, culture, and the meaning of life. In Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, he gathers his most astute advice on the creative life. Particularly resonant with my own beliefs about the importance of choices is this insight about setting boundaries:

16. The most important thing a creative per­son can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.”

Later, MacLeod echoes Graham’s point about prestige above:

28. The best way to get approval is not to need it.

This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.”

LEWIS HYDE ON WORK VS. LABOR

After last year’s omnibus of 5 timeless books on fear and the creative process, a number of readers rightfully suggested an addition: Lewis Hyde’s 1979 classic, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, of which David Foster Wallace famously said, “No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged.”

In this excerpt, originally featured here in January, Hyde articulates the essential difference between work and creative labor, understanding which takes us a little closer to the holy grail of vocational fulfillment:

Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.

…

There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a term for the quality that sets labor apart from work: flow — a kind of intense focus and crisp sense of clarity where you forget yourself, lose track of time, and feel like you’re part of something larger. If you’ve ever pulled an all-nighter for a pet project, or even spent 20 consecutive hours composing a love letter, you’ve experienced flow and you know creative labor.

STEVE JOBS ON NOT SETTLING

In his now-legendary 2005 Stanford commencement address, an absolute treasure in its entirety, Steve Jobs makes an eloquent case for not settling in the quest for finding your calling — a case that rests largely on his insistence upon the power of intuition:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

ROBERT KRULWICH ON FRIENDS

Robert Krulwich, co-producer of WNYC’s fantastic Radiolab, author of the ever-illuminating Krulwich Wonders and winner of a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence, is one of the finest journalists working today. In another great commencement address, he articulates the infinitely important social aspect of loving what you do — a kind of social connectedness far more meaningful and genuine than those notions of prestige and peer validation.

You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places. The ones you meet now, who will notice you, challenge you, work with you, and watch your back. Maybe they will be your strength.

…

If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your dreams and their dreams. Whatever it was that got you to this school, don’t let it go. Whatever kept you here, don’t let that go. Believe in your friends. Believe that what you and your friends have to say… that the way you’re saying it — is something new in the world.”

THE HOLSTEE MANIFESTO

You might recall The Holstee Manifesto as one of our 5 favorite manifestos for the creative life, an eloquent and beautifully written love letter to the life of purpose. (So beloved is the manifesto around here that it has earned itself a permanent spot in the Brain Pickings sidebar, a daily reminder to both myself and you, dear reader, of what matters most.)

This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. If you don’t like something, change it. If you don’t like your job, quit. If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV. If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.”

The Holstee Manifesto is now available as a beautiful letterpress print, a 5×7greeting card printed on handmade paper derived from 50% elephant poo and 50% recycled paper, and even a baby bib — because it’s never too early to instill the values of living from passion.

This article is reprinted with permission from Maria Popova. She is a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, and is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings (which offers a free weekly newsletter). 

Action for Happiness has developed the 10 Keys to Happier Living based on a review of the latest scientific research relating to happiness.

Everyone’s path to happiness is different, but the research suggests these Ten Keys consistently tend to have a positive impact on people’s overall happiness and well-being. The first five (GREAT) relate to how we interact with the outside world in our daily activities*. The second five (DREAM) come more from inside us and depend on our attitude to life.