The Rugby Ball of Results

The options – let's think about the combinations of happiness and success

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We know that an obsession with success probably leads to very little happiness, and that prioritising short term happiness probably leads to very little success.? But what combinations of both are available to us?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The Rugby Ball of Results

(in the US it would be just a football, so maybe The Football of Your Future?)

Don't panic, it's not maths, but it IS incredibly important to get your head around this - the meaning of life and all future happiness is in here - I think!

Line A would be the case if there was a conflict between achievement and enjoyment – if you had to choose mainly one or the other.? For example if you go for medium achievement you get quite low enjoyment.? Some people believe this to be the case but I don’t.

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Line B would be the zero-sum line – if you gain on one you lose the same amount on the other.? Every bit of achievement you gain means a corresponding loss of enjoyment. Every gain in enjoyment means you have to give up the same amount of achievement.

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Line C would be a world where they enhance each other – if you have a bit of each you will be doing better than you would be by focusing on just one or the other.? You only have to pay a small price in happiness if you want to increase your achievement quite a bit, and you can get a large increase in happiness for only a small sacrifice of achievement.

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Line D is where there is positive synergy between Achievement and Enjoyment.? By achieving a little bit you can enjoy yourself more than if you ignored achievement and focussed only on enjoying yourself.? And by enjoying yourself a little bit you can achieve more than you could if you ignored enjoyment and focussed on 100% achievement. But there is still a point where increasing your achievement will reduce your happiness, and a point where increasing your happiness does mean you have to achieve less.

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I believe line D is how the world works.

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Important: not everybody is ON this line!? In fact very few people are, because this is the optimal line, the maximum combination of achievement and enjoyment we can achieve.? Most of us are somewhere in the space UNDER line D.? Some are not achieving much, for various reasons, maybe they haven’t yet found the right job.? Others are not very happy, for many other reasons.

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Our objective is to get to the line, and in fact, to be on the best point on the line.

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Where is that “best” point?

You could be an achievement maximiser, or get quite a bit of both, or you could be an enjoyment maximiser.

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But if you add the two together to get some sort of measure of total happiness in life, and I think the combination of a bit of both gets the best score.?

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Let’s put some numbers to this.? They are going to be quite arbitrary, just some sort of score for your perceived “achievement/happiness out of ten” but better than nothing, and maybe helpful for thinking about this tricky but incredibly important concept.

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Life Happiness = Enjoyment x Achievement

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With the numbers, since we instinctively want a balance of both achievement and enjoyment, I would like to suggest that life happiness is not just achievement PLUS enjoyment, it’s achievement TIMES enjoyment.

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If that’s the case then the balanced mixture of both is by far the best target to aim for.? (And incidentally the strategies of “all achievement” or “all happiness” both do really badly – as they should).

How to get to the ideal point, of a mixture of enjoyment and achievement in our lives?

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Would it be better to start on the achieve path and then, at a certain point, cut across horizontally towards happiness?

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Or maybe have fun first and then get around to achievement later…..

?“Enjoy now and achieve later” clearly has its risks (“jam tomorrow” which never comes) while “achieve now and enjoy later”, the idea that once we’ve made it we can sit back and enjoy ourselves, has the risk that we never make it “enough” and we get addicted to working.?

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Doing both, steadily at the same time, seems to be the best way, if you can do it.

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I call these three options Life Paths 1, 2 and 3 – I think there are some others too. More about them in a future newsletter.....!!

But in the mean time, which one are you on, is it the right one, and should you be doing something different??

CC

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