INNOVATION FOR HAPPINESS

INNOVATION FOR HAPPINESS

Mauricio Quiroga, Founder of Cognauta, Artificial Negotiations

This a very brief extract from my 2014 book?"Openpreneur: Felicidad Aplicada para Obtener Valor y Sentido" (Openpreneur: Applied Happiness for Value and Meaning). The complete book in English will be available soon.

OPENPRENEUR: A PERSON WHO USES INNOVATION TO GENERATE HAPPINESS AND MEANINGFUL VALUE

Being Openpreneur is a way of life involving all the perceived wellness creation domains such as happiness, meaning and value. Thus, an Openpreneur gives high value on being healthy, on family relationships, on feeling well with the path followed, on knowing to learn continuously and ACTING BASED ON JOY.

Getting my passion as the source of my happiness, meaning and livelihood requires a holistic approach where all dimensions of our lives converge towards that path. Being able to have this life attitude isn't like "clicking" on software that triggers this attitude, rather, is taking decisive action commitments to that end. ?

Joymmitment: The Openpreneur's Way of Life

?But those decisive action commitments that generate the openpreneur's way of life, aren't something that sound like "duty + effort + suffering + coercion." Quite the opposite, those commitments are more related to "love + passion + pleasure + meaning". This type of commitments are with us since we born, however with the passage of time, we lose the ability to see, to identify and to integrate those commitments in our daily lives.

Not being able to look "outside the box", to find the relationship?between happiness and income, leads to believe that, when we commit to a new life attitude, this action is necessarily "costly" and not an immediate gain of being happy in the doing.

The new word Joymmitment has two roots. The root "commitment" and the root "joy". Joymmitment is a self-commitment to do mainly activities that fulfill my permanently with high enjoyment and happiness in generating significant wellness.

The Joymmitment way has a central condition knowing thyself to follow what demand you low-effort and enjoyment while creating value and meaning.

"For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."

PLATO

Joymmitment as My Main Activity and Income Source?

The tool to trigger Joymmitment actions is inspired on?Tal Ben-Shahar's?work?on positive psychology and happiness. The following graph summaries this tool:

?The horizontal axis represents the present time and the vertical axis the future. In the future and in the past, we can take two elections. First, choose to be happy. Second, choose to have a detriment. Let’s explain each quadrant:

• Happiness Always as a Project: People who live in this lifestyle, are always sacrificing the present to have happiness in the future. For these people, happiness is a destination, not a journey. After they reach their goals, and have short happiness periods, they feel empty and create new goals for achieving happiness in the future. They aren't truly happy, and their lives are always full of new projects that will provide them with happiness in the future. Typically, these kind of people "sacrifice" themselves continuously and??believe that "rigor"?in life is a virtue. For example, "When I get that college degree, I will be happy." "When receive the salary increase, I will be happy."
• ?Negativity: These people are always in search for life’s complex sides. They never see, or don't want to see, the positive sides that are always rigged to such situations. These people become truly addicted to negativity and, as a prophecy, with this attitude they get to live a miserable life.
• Hedonism: These are people seeking immediate happiness regardless of the future consequences of their current actions. People with drug addiction fit this profile. They achieve instant, short term and meaningless happiness.
• Joymmitment is a way of life followed by Openpreneurs, people who had "committed" to find and made only activities that, while generating value and meaning, provide them present happiness and seed their future happiness.

To make an activity with Joymmitment, it must simultaneously satisfy three requirements:

Finding meaningful, enjoyable activities, for which you have strengths, isn't a trivial task that you will accomplish in few minutes. Rather, is maintaining child sensitivity while making a deep analysis of thyself and the world surrounding. It requires also having a constant process of taking new actions given a world that's changing faster and faster.

?High Performance Teams

The Joymmitment Based Management (JBM) is a powerful tool capable to lead teams to high performance. The JBM requires two characteristics.?First, everybody on the team have to know the other’s strengths, believes, tastes and feelings. Second, coordination must arise from the team enjoyment, play and meaning. These features will promote on the team members a high quality and energetic performance. To know more about this concept, please read more about the new concept/word “Perspectivaction” in my book “Openpreneur: Felicidad Aplicada para Generar Valor y Sentido” (Openpreneur: Applied Happiness to Generate Value and Meaning ”)

Design Thinking for Happiness

One way to speed up finding our joymmitment path is performing a Joymmitment Prototyping Process (JPP) by using "Minimum Viable Joymmitments" (MVJ). This technique is inspired by the lean startup principles, popularized by Eric Ries.

The JPP central concept is supporting the convergent discovery of our joymmitment path and how to evolve in light of the Universe's permanent??????? change. Since in discovering our joymmiment road, we'll experience failures and successes, the idea is to keep trying different ways with several low-cost-failure joymmiment prototypes. Indeed, the cost of implementing an entire joymmitment way in our lives, without a high security of its fit to our happiness, meaning and strengths, can be highly risky and costly. Thus, in order to reduce the costs of the unsuccessful joymmitments, its prototypes must be developed with the least resources possible given the fact that those around us could understand and experience our joymmitment. From the others feedback, we will be able to learn from the MVJ successes and mistakes, which will be?? the main raw material to go on developing new prototypes that we will be the main raw material to go on developing new prototypes that we will converge to our full Joymmitment.

When implementing MVJ, the articulated actions must generate wellness for others. Those people, our partners in wellness generation, will be called "Benessociates", a word that merges the Latin "bene", meaning something good, and "associate".

Each time I test a MVJ, I'm helping me to know thyself, I’m also helping others to know me in several domains and I’m also help me to understand others in those domains.

Our benessociates, must easily understand how the actions we propose to activate with them, generate wellness. In turn, such actions must be such that:

Joymmitment Prototyping Cycle

A MVJ is an action made with benessociates that that generates wellness for both parties. Therefore, before making an MVJ, we must define its attributes and how we will measure the wellness generation in our interactions with benessociates. Indeed, from these measurements, it's possible to define hypotheses that can be then corroborated or rejected.

These measurements have to be done together with high curiosity, intuition and high alert. This state of mind will allow us to perceive things that can help us articulating new ways to achieve joymmitment.

Joymmitment Prototyping Cycle Stages:

This tool is inspired in an innovation technique called Design Thinking. In summary, this technique uses empathy to understand the context of the dreams and needs of customers have in relation to a problem. Then, it uses creativity to generate solutions, discoveries, and the rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.

There are 3 Joymmitment Prototyping Stages:

1. Joymmitment Pattern: At this stage we are looking to find a joymmitment pattern to iterate several happiness options with meaning and value.
2. Creating Wellness in the Benessociates Relationship: The Joymmitment is generated in coordinating activities with bennessociates. Indeed, if others appreciate our actions, then these will agree to coordinate with us to produce wellness for both parties.
3. Prototyping: Once we have managed with potential benessociates the articulation of Joymmitments paths, we need to find in which quick implementation actions we can generate wealth. This finding is also developed in an iterative process consisting in presenting many Joymmitments prototypes to potential benessociates.

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