Posts tagged as:

distractions

Live life like a game

February 3, 2010

As I kid I loved Snakes and Lad­ders. I don’t even know if you can find that board game any­where any­more, but I enjoyed it. (Okay, I just found it on Ebay for $2).

It was pretty sim­ple. Basi­cally you roll the dice to see how many spaces you can move for­ward. The first per­son to the end wins. You hope to land on a lad­der (which lets you skip a bunch of steps). And you want to avoid the snakes (which make you slide back, giv­ing up a lot of your progress).

I real­ized today that I’ve been using Snakes and Lad­ders as a guid­ing alle­gory for my life. Since I was a kid I’ve been using this game to make tac­ti­cal deci­sions about my life.

Life isn’t slow and steady

Think of lad­ders as things that can rapidly advance you ahead of the crowd. These are things that help you to “arrive” faster –to be finan­cially secure, happy, suc­cess­ful, self-actualized ear­lier than you would otherwise.

You’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of our returns in life come from just 20% of our efforts. The 80/20 rule sug­gests that we should focus on the things that give us the most bang for our buck. The Snakes and Lad­ders idea is sim­i­lar to this: avoid unpro­duc­tive behav­ior and invest the time into build­ing your­self an advan­tage of some kind.

Exam­ples of Ladders:

Mak­ing prop­erty invest­ments made when you’re young. There are sev­eral invest­ment strate­gies you can use. Prop­erty is the one that’s always made the most sense to me. The key is start­ing early. (And I sup­pose the key to that is being dis­ci­plined about sav­ings from a young age).

Get­ting a uni­ver­sity degree. Aside from the increased feel­ings of per­sonal effec­tive­ness and being more inter­est­ing at par­ties, a col­lege master’s degree is worth $1.3 mil­lion more in life­time earn­ings than a high school diploma (and about another mil­lion on top of that if you get a PhD). (You could debate this, on the grounds of cor­re­la­tion ver­sus cau­sa­tion, but if you thought of that you prob­a­bly already have a degree and there­fore you don’t want to).

Hav­ing a trade. Very much like a degree, hav­ing an in-demand trade sets you up well to branch out on your own and really cash in. How­ever, it also seems like those who really ben­e­fit from hav­ing a trade are those with some busi­ness acu­men as well, so they can fully cash-in when the moment is right.

Being a well-known brand. Per­sonal brand­ing is one of the new next-big-things. I encour­age peo­ple to take some actions to dom­i­nant their ‘name space’ online, to make it so that when some­one types in their name in Google, they are the first one that comes up and that they’re happy with the infor­ma­tion being shared. (If you type in Tim Woods in Google you’ll find that I still come behind a Tim Woods who was also known as “Mr Wrestling” and Tim Woods, an Aus­tralian com­poser). But I’m get­ting there.  And, even at #3 in my name space, I’ve had a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back from my efforts online. (I got a job, was cho­sen to judge a national envi­ron­men­tal com­pe­ti­tion and become an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized expert on slang… don’t ask).

Being hap­pily mar­ried. Research shows being in a mar­riage that lasts cor­re­lates strongly with sus­tained career suc­cess and bet­ter health in old age. Also it’s nice to have some­one to share clean-up duties. Long-term, sta­ble friend­ships can have sim­i­lar benifits.

Under­stand­ing risk. Peo­ple have money per­son­al­i­ties. Some peo­ple avoid debt (even good-debt) like the plague. And those poor peo­ple don’t lever­age their money. So they miss-out on long-term benifits –such as being able to retire.

Learn­ing a lan­guage. This one is actu­ally more of an ‘alleged lad­der’. I don’t actu­ally know any bilin­gual peo­ple who credit their suc­cess to their bilin­gual­ism. How­ever, I’ve always sus­pected that if I spoke another lan­guage I’d be unstop­pable, so I’m keep­ing this one in the Lad­der category.

Exam­ples of Snakes:

Going bank­rupt. Even with bank­ruptcy pro­tec­tion, there can be lin­ger­ing effects from bank­ruptcy that will snake you back down a few steps.

Get­ting arrested. In these days of ubiq­ui­tous infor­ma­tion, it’s hard to hide mis­takes from your past.

Get­ting divorced. For some peo­ple divorce goes smoothly. But for oth­ers it can put an enor­mous emo­tional and finan­cial strain on your life for a very long time.

Can you think of any more snakes or lad­ders? Please add them in the comments.

(Update: Just before post­ing this, I’ve learned the game Snakes and Lad­ders was orig­i­nally called Moksha-Patamu. “Of Hindu ori­gin, it taught the play­ers that vir­tu­ous behav­ior would aid your pro­gres­sion to Nir­vana, but evil would make the jour­ney dif­fi­cult.” I told you this game was deep, didn’t I?)

Did you enjoy this arti­cle? Sub­scribe for free by RSS or email and you’ll always know when I pub­lish some­thing new.  (What’s RSS?)

{ 0 comments }

Dying for a Good Time

January 8, 2010

This is the third time I have sat down to write this post. I keep delet­ing it.

I watched a doc­u­men­tary this week in Swe­den and I can’t put it out of my head. It was about a group of moun­tain climbers attempt­ing to sum­mit the sec­ond high­est moun­tain after Ever­est (K2). I’m not going to ruin the story for you, but the doc­u­men­tary is called “Dis­as­ter on K2.” It didn’t go well.

Watch­ing this made me angry.

A lot of peo­ple (maybe most peo­ple?) say they would never sky­dive because it’s too dan­ger­ous. And yet, the casu­alty rate of sky dives is 0.001%. 1 death every 100,000 jumps. Climbing K2 is another level of risk entirely, 25% of those who climb K2 die. (Ever­est has a casu­alty rate of 9%). I just can’t under­stand an adult being pre­pared to risk so much to get to the top of a stu­pid mountain.

So, what is wrong with moun­tain climbers?! (There are those who cheer on all kinds of risk-taking, like Chris Guille­beau, but I’m not one of them).

Adven­ture hol­i­days have increased in pop­u­lar­ity by 17% in recent years.  So there is a trend here. Maybe we crave dan­ger the more we get the rest of our lives in order. Maybe we want to feel all-powerful. We want to be fearless. What both­ers me is that the climbers who died in this doc­u­men­tary were smart peo­ple. They weren’t kids. They had expe­ri­enced suc­cess in their lives. They should have known better.

This goes back to my the­ory that goals can ruin your life.  We don’t know our lim­its.

David Zald, at Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chol­ogy at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­sity, believes the rea­son is dopamine. “There appear to be fewer dopamine-inhibiting recep­tors,” he says, “— mean­ing that dare­dev­ils’ brains are more sat­u­rated with the chem­i­cal, pre­dis­pos­ing them to keep tak­ing risks and chas­ing the next high” (Source).

So there you have it, folks. Clear as day. Mountain-climbing is a men­tal problem.

{ 3 comments }

The Zen of Useful Distractions

May 25, 2009

Zen TreeInfor­ma­tion is empow­er­ing, but too much can it can also be debil­i­tat­ing.  Infor­ma­tion Over­load costs the U.S. econ­omy $900 bil­lion per year. In this inter­est­ing video a few of the world’s lead­ing man­agers dis­cuss the prob­lem.  In Defense of Dis­trac­tion dis­cusses how our brains are adapt­ing to make the most of the new information-rich envi­ron­ments we live in:

More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on expe­ri­ence, a fea­ture called neu­ro­plas­tic­ity. Lon­don taxi dri­vers, for instance, have enlarged hip­pocampi (the brain region for mem­ory and spa­tial processing)—a neural reward for pay­ing atten­tion to the tan­gle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flit­ting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more effi­ciently with more infor­ma­tion. The neu­ro­sci­en­tist Gary Small spec­u­lates that the human brain might be chang­ing faster today than it has since the pre­his­toric dis­cov­ery of tools. Research sug­gests we’re already pick­ing up new skills: bet­ter periph­eral vision, the abil­ity to sift infor­ma­tion rapidly.

How­ever, for those of us still strug­gling to keep up, the arti­cle sug­gests meditation:

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Bud­dhists, whose atten­tional dis­ci­pline can appar­ently con­fer all kinds of ben­e­fits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psy­chol­o­gists pre­dict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “sec­u­lar atten­tional work­outs.”) … atten­tion is a lim­ited resource…  our moment-by-moment choice of atten­tional tar­gets deter­mines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epi­graph comes from the psy­chol­o­gist and philoso­pher William James: “My expe­ri­ence is what I agree to attend to.”

{ 2 comments }