“The path to a passionate life is often way more complex than the simple advice ‘follow your passion’ would suggest.” You’ve been told you should follow your passion, to do what you love and the money will follow. But how sound is this advice? Cal Newport argues that it’s astonishingly wrong.
But if you do what you do with passion, it make all the difference.
He actually mentions Strengthsfinder as a tool, but is kind of dimissive of it. The stories he tells of people living their passions, however, he speaks of lifestyle traights they are cultivated through thir job which sounds suspiciously like people using their strengths in their work.
While she was denied at not one art school but six, she never let it discourage her as she spent the next 10 years painting. Janet Echelman has an extraordinary career:
Echelman first set out to be an artist after graduating college. She moved to Hong Kong in 1987 to study Chinese calligraphy and brush-painting. Later she moved to Bali, Indonesia, where she collaborated with artisans to combine traditional textile methods with contemporary painting.
When she lost her bamboo house in Bali to a fire, Echelman returned to the United States and began teaching at Harvard. After seven years as an Artist-in-Residence, she returned to Asia, embarking on a Fulbright lectureship in India.
Calvin and Hobbes launched in my senior year in high school. Never acused of being too cool for school, I adored the little man’s antics and philosophical queeries to his tiger. Bill celebrated the Child’s immagination before society has beaten it out of him, Character Building dad’s, brave mothers, teachers and babysitters who will have their revenge, slimy girls and deep friendships with tigers. He tooks us back to our day dreams and reminded us to invent our own rules because with out it how can you play Calvin Ball? Bill gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College back in 1995. Poignant. Inspired. A few months latter he retired Calvin and his world: “I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted, however, and I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises.”
Now, Cartoonist Gavin Aung Than, of Zen Pencils, hasn taken the key elements of that speech and set them to a Bill Waterson stylized comic strip complete with Dinosaurs, red wagons and otherwroldly landscapes (although lacking any tiger). This panel is a celebration that living life authentically, being true to your own values, is the path to happiness. From Gavin’s profile of Bill, we learn that Watterson is not just creative, but persistent and full of intergirty. His comic strips reveal his humor, curiosity and wisdom.
Check out this extraordinary set of videos from Think and Be Happy. It includes a couple of hundred videos featuring top psychologists, educators and buddhists monks.
Enjoy some past Happiness & Its Causes presentations – a fabulous mix of leaders in psychology, science, education, business, spirituality, the arts and more! Visit our Think & Be Happy YouTube channel here for more footage.
Our major findings in this investigation are as follows: Deliberate practice—operationally defined in the current investigation as the solitary study of word spellings and origins—was a better predictor of National Spelling Bee performance than either being quizzed by others or engaging in leisure reading. With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities. Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance.
You can here Duckworth talk about her research at this Ted X.
People have LOVED this concept. Her Ted X talk has been viewed 118,000 times. Her original Ted talk was viewed 255,00 times. Paul Tough’s excellent book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, profiling her research has been number 1 in Amazon’s Educational Psychology books (it is 271 overall). It has inspired a movement encouraging people to send in their own stories of Grit:
#ThisIsGRIT is a video campaign showcasing stories of people just like yourselves, who have faced hurdles, challenges and hardships in pursuing their collegiate, professional or development education. They all share something in common: they leveraged GRIT to press through their hard times and onward to success. Here is one of my alumni sharing his trials as he moved from one school to another.
Years of research show GRIT to be an absolute essential element in success. Do you have a GRIT story?
…if you are buying something for someone else. “Spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself.” So says Harvard Business School professor Michael I. Norton.
How generous are you? You can take an online survey at Give and Take (registration required, but free) that will analyze your responses and give you a rating in three domains: Giving, Taking and Matching.
How do people give?
It is still not too late to give this season; join the crowd:
“I share therefor I am” Shimi Cohen is a graphic artist who has struck a cord exploring loniness in the age of connection. Nearing a million views on You Tube, the Video addresses the connection between Social Networks and Being Lonely? Quoting the words of Sherry Turkle from her TED talk – Connected, But Alone and drawing inspiration from Dr. Yair Amichai-Hamburgers hebrew article -The Invention of Loneliness, Cohen’s senior project at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Cohen explores the paradoxical nature of becoming connected with technology which can isolate our natural social instincts. He spent 3 weeks sketching and translating the script into visuals, using Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D to create the 2-D animation.
What does positive psychology teach us about loneliness?
Leverage your strengths:
VIA has been researching the role using strengths in your life and how they impact your mental well being:
Using one’s signature strengths in a new way increased happiness and decreased depression for 6 months (Gander, Proyer, Ruch, & Wyss, 2012).
Using one’s signature strengths in a new way increased happiness for 6 months and decreased depression for 3 months (Mongrain & Anselmo-Matthews, 2012).
The use of one’s top strengths leads to a decreased likelihood of depression and stress and an increase in satisfaction in law students (Peterson & Peterson, 2008).
Using one’s signature strengths in a new and unique way is an effective intervention: it increased happiness and decreased depression for 6 months (Seligman, Steen, Park, Peterson, 2005).
Among high school students, other-oriented strengths (e.g., kindness, teamwork) predicted fewer depression symptoms while transcendence strengths (e.g., spirituality) predicted greater life satisfaction (Gillham et al., 2011).
Grateful individuals report higher positive mood, optimism, life satisfaction, vitality, religiousness and spirituality, and less depression and envy than less grateful individuals (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002).
While the above are not specific to loneliness, you can see the connection between depression and loneliness.
Make meaning in your life
Sam Mullins struggled with finding meaning. A few years ago, he moved to Vancouver to pursue his dream of being a big city writer and actor. So he poured his heart and soul into it. And failed. But one night at work he was challenged to make a tinfoil dinosaur and his life changed…because he shared something authentic with a stranger. It was not always that way:
I have a social anxiety disorder, and an increasingly large hunch-back. I write stories for CBC’s DNTO sometimes. I perform one-man shows sometimes. I have suicidal thoughts sometimes. And then I write one-man shows about said suicidal thoughts.
The backdrop to the story is fascinating as he reflects on it and where it has all led:
I felt like I was the poster boy for everything wrong with my generation. I felt foolish.
My sense of entitlement, my solipsism and my delusional belief that I was a unique and talented person led me to acting school. I had graduated four years later, at great expense to my parents, and then naively stepped out into the big wide world without having the slightest inkling of how to survive. And by the end of that year, I wasn’t against the ropes. I was on life-support.
So, just like that, I was back in my childhood bedroom. I was working a labour job. And I was eating a casserole prepared by my Mother every night. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt like I was lost in the universe.
Sam is doing what Victor Frankl calls making meaning:
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
For you see, you are always free to choose; perhaps not your experience, but the meaning you give that experience:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl goes on to explain the significance of love in our lives:
“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
By the way, NPR picked up Sam’s story for the Moth
“Without gratitude, life can be lonely, depressing and impoverished,” said Emmons. “Gratitude enriches human life. It elevates, energizes, inspires and transforms. People are moved, opened and humbled through expressions of gratitude.” —Dr. Robert Emmons
With US Thanksgiving on the horizon (and Canadian Thanksgiving long gone) we turn our attention to gratitude (and Turkey). Gratitude has been shown to have a very positive effect on our wellbeing:
Stronger immune systems and lower blood pressure;
Higher levels of positive emotions;
More joy, optimism, and happiness;
Acting with more generosity and compassion;
Feeling less lonely and isolated.
Have a look at the Happier Huamn for the source of the research, 26 studies and counting. Clearly experiencing and expressing gratitude is a good thing. How grateful are you? The Greater Good Society of UC Berkeley is offer up a gratitude survey:
2. I count my blessings for what I have in this world.
People have LOVED this concept. Her Ted X talk has been viewed 118,000 times. Her original Ted talk was viewed 255,00 times. Paul Tough’s excellent book, 
