Is Happiness always good for you?

In recent years, there has been an explosion of scientific research revealing precisely how positive feelings like happiness are good for us. We know that they motivate us to pursue important goals and overcome obstacles, protect us from some effects of stress, connect us closely with other people, and even stave off physical and mental ailments. Clearly, happiness is popular. But is happiness always good for you? Can feeling too good ever be too bad? 

Recent research in an article by June Gruber suggests that happiness is not always what it is cracked up to be! Too much of it is as bad as too little and being happy in all situations is not necessarily the right thing either.

1. Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe. Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely. For instance, while happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles but too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—can also make people inflexible in the face of new challenges. When we experience happiness, our attention turns toward exciting and positive things in our lives to help sustain the good feeling and  we also tend to feel less inhibited and more likely to explore new possibilities and take greater risks. People in this heightened ‘happiness overdrive’ mode engage in riskier behaviors and tend to disregard threats, including excessive alcohol consumption, binge eating, sexual promiscuity, and drug use. 

All these results point to one conclusion: Happiness may be best when experienced in moderation—not too little, but also not too much.

 2. Happiness is not suited to every situation. Our emotions help us adapt to new circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. Just as anger mobilizes us to overcome obstacles; fear alerts us to threats and engages our fight-or-flight preparation system; sadness signals loss, happiness helps us to pursue and attain important goals, and encourages us to cooperate with others. But just as we would not want to feel angry or sad in every context, we should not want to experience happiness in every context. Illuminating studies done by Maya Tamir found that people in a happy mood performed worse than people in an angry mood for example when playing a competitive computer game!

 Thus happiness has a time and a place—it’s not suited for every situation!

3. Not all types of happiness are good for you. “Happiness” is a single term, but it refers to a rainbow of different flavors of emotion: Some make us more energetic, some slow us down; some make us feel closer to other people, some make us more generous. But some forms of happiness may actually be a source of dysfunction. One example is pride, a pleasant feeling associated with achievement and elevated social rank or status. As such, it is often seen as a type of positive emotion that makes us focus more on ourselves. Pride can be good in certain contexts and forms, such as winning a difficult prize or receiving a job promotion. But when we experience too much pride or pride without genuine merit, it can lead to negative social outcomes, such as aggressiveness towards others, antisocial behavior, and even an increased risk of mood disorders such as mania. 

The bottom line: Certain kinds of happiness may at times hinder our ability to connect with those around us.

 4. Pursuing happiness may actually make you unhappy. Not surprisingly, most people want to be happy. We seem hardwired to pursue happiness, and this is especially true for Americans—it’s even ingrained in the Declaration of Independence. But the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they will be to set a high standard for happiness—then be disappointed when that standard is not met. It is as if the harder one tries to experience happiness, the more difficult it is to actually feel happy, even in otherwise pleasant situations.

It may be that striving for happiness is actually driving some of us crazy.

But how exactly can we attain a healthy dose of happiness? This is the million-dollar question.

First, it is important to experience happiness in the right amount. Too little happiness is just as problematic as too much. 

Second, happiness has a time and a place, and one must be mindful about the context or situation in which one experiences happiness. 

Third, it is important to strike an emotional balance. One cannot experience happiness at the cost or expense of negative emotions, such as sadness or anger or guilt.

Finally, it is important to pursue and experience happiness for the right reasons. Too much focus on striving for happiness as an end in itself can actually be self-defeating. 

True happiness, it seems, comes from fostering kindness toward others—and toward yourself!

Walk to bring smiles to the world

2012's Baccalaureate speaker at the University of Pennsylvania was an unconventional choice for an Ivy League school. To address their newly-minted graduates, aspiring to dazzling careers, they picked a man who has never in his adult life, applied for a job. A man who hasn't worked for pay in nearly a decade, and whose self-stated mission is simply "to bring smiles to the world and stillness to my heart". Nipul Mehta of his 1000 kilometer walk in India and the lessons he gleaned from his pilgrimage. (Here is the full text of his unconventional graduation speech.)

Soon after he ended the pilgrimage, his uncle casually popped the million dollar question at the dinner table: "So, Nipun, what did you learn from this WALK?"  

Here is his reply:

The W in WALK stands for Witness.  When you walk, you quite literally see more.  Your field of vision is nearly 180 degrees, compared to 40 degrees when you’re traveling at 62 mph.  Higher speeds smudge our peripheral vision, whereas walking actually broadens your canvas and dramatically shifts the objects of your attention. Instead of adding Facebook friends online, you actually make friends in person, often over a cup of hot “chai”.   Life comes alive in a new way.  A walking pace is the speed of community.  Where high speeds facilitate separation, a slower pace gifts us an opportunity to commune.  Life is simple again.  A farmer explained it to us this way: "You cannot make the clouds rain more, you cannot make the sun shine less.  They are just nature's gifts -- take it or leave it."  

The A in WALK stands for Accept.   When walking in this way, you place yourself in the palm of the universe, and face its realities head on. We walked at the peak of summer, in merciless temperatures hovering above 120 degrees.  Sometimes we were hungry, exhausted and even frustrated. Our bodies ached for just that extra drink of water, a few more moments in the shade, or just that little spark of human kindness. Many times we received that extra bit, and our hearts would overflow with gratitude.  But sometimes we were abruptly refused, and we had to cultivate the capacity to accept the gifts hidden in even the most challenging of moments. So cultivate equanimity and accept whatever life tosses into your laps -- when you do that, you will be blessed with the insight of an inner transformation that is yours to keep for all of time.

The L in WALK stands for Love.  The more we learned from nature, and built a kind of inner resilience to external circumstances, the more we fell into our natural state -- which was to be loving.  In our dominant paradigm, Hollywood has insidiously co-opted the word, but the love I’m talking about here is the kind of love that only knows one thing -- to give with no strings attached.  Purely.  Selflessly. When you come alive in this way, you'll realize that true generosity doesn’t start when you have some thing to give, but rather when there’s nothing in you that’s trying to take.  

And lastly, the K in WALK stands for Know Thyself.  Sages have long informed us that when we serve others unconditionally, we shift from the me-to-the-we and connect more deeply with the other.  That matrix of inter-connections allows for a profound quality of mental quietude.  Like a still lake undisturbed by waves or ripples, we are then able to see clearly into who we are and how we can live in deep harmony with the environment around us. When one foot walks, the other rests.  Doing and being have to be in balance. 

   

That’s W-A-L-K and remember the importance of traveling at the speed of thoughtfulness.  

How to stay young?

One of the dilemnas of aging is that everyone expects you to be sad and morose.So whenever someone sends me his or some receipe for happiness, i am delighted to publish it on my blog. Here is one from the grand old man of comedy- George Carlin. If you have any similar thoughts, send them on to me and I will be delighted to share them with my readers.

George Carlins receipe for staying young

1. Throw out nonessential numbers. This includes age, weight and height.  Let the doctors worry about them.  That is why you pay 'them.'

2. Keep only cheerful friends.  The grouches pull you down.

3. Keep learning. Learn more about the computer, crafts, gardening, whatever, even ham radio.  Never let the brain idle.   'An idle mind is the devil's workshop.'  And the devil's name is Alzheimer's.

4. Enjoy the simple things.

5. Laugh often, long and loud.  Laugh until you gasp for breath.

6. The tears happen.  Endure, grieve, and move on.  The only person, who is with us our entire life, is ourselves.  Be ALIVE while you are alive.

7. Surround yourself with what you love, whether it's family, pets, keepsakes, music, plants, hobbies, whatever.  Your home is your refuge.

8. Cherish your health:  If it is good, preserve it.  If it is unstable, improve it.  If it is beyond what you can improve, get help.

9. Don't take guilt trips.  Take a trip to the mall, even to the next county; to a foreign country but NOT to where the guilt is.

10. Tell the people you love that you love them, at every opportunity.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Should everything be for sale?

In modern day life, almost everything seems to be up for sale? There is nothing that money can't buy- from a vote in the legislation to the avoidance of jail time for criminal activity, from bribing a policeman on the street to a businessman avoiding penalties for selling illegal drugs. There is a price for everything. Many economists argue that in a free market that is as it should be and that price for any good or service is best arrived at between the buyer and the seller in a free and open negotiation and that this serves the public good most effectively. Or does it? But is the free market really free? Or does it come at the expense of civic values we neglect at our peril? Are there some goods and services that we should not barter in the market place?

Here is a book by Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" which challenges the conventional wisdom and is a timely reminder that while the market place can allocate resources optimally, not all things need to be in the market place in the first place. 

Sandel examines the implications of living in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold and when market values drive not just all economic decision-making, but all aspects of our individual and collective lives, crowding out civic values, and corrupting our democracy in the process.

• A prison-cell upgrade: $90 a night. In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for a clean, quiet jail cell, without any non-paying prisoners to disturb them.

• Access to the carpool lane while driving solo: $8. Minneapolis, San Diego, Houston, Seattle, and other cities have sought to ease traffic congestion by letting solo drivers pay to drive in carpool lanes, at rates that vary according to traffic.

• The services of an Indian surrogate mother: $8,000. Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States.

• The right to shoot an endangered black rhino: $250,000. South Africa has begun letting some ranchers sell hunters the right to kill a limited number of rhinos, to give the ranchers an incentive to raise and protect the endangered species.

• Your doctor’s cellphone number: $1,500 and up per year. A growing number of “concierge” doctors offer cellphone access and same-day appointments for patients willing to pay annual fees ranging from $1,500 to $25,000.

• The right to emit a metric ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere: $10.50. The European Union runs a carbon-dioxide-emissions market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to pollute.

• The right to immigrate to the United States: $500,000. Foreigners who invest $500,000 and create at least 10 full-time jobs in an area of high unemployment are eligible for a green card that entitles them to permanent residency.

What worries Mr. Sandel is that, over the past 30 years, economic imperatives have begun crowding out all other values. He argues that we are steadily moving toward a culture in which our ideals are being pushed aside in favor of the view that we ought to always be maximizing efficiency.  He looks around America and observes all sorts of situations where traditional mores have shifted in recent years, always in the direction of market morality. Today you can purchase your way out of waiting in line for rides at many amusement parks. There are express lanes that allow you to buy our way out of traffic. Many schools now "incentivize" performance, paying students if they read books or do well in school; some schools now sell ads on children's report cards. Cities routinely sell advertising space on public property, ranging from parks and municipal buildings to police cars.  In each of these cases, long-held ideas about inherent worth and common ownership have been displaced by the simple morality of the market.

And it is not just that market values crowd out other values—once introduced, they tend to expand to the horizon. Take the history of "naming rights," the practice of a sports team selling the name of its stadium. In 1988, only three stadiums in the U.S. bore the names of corporate sponsors. By 2010, more than 100 companies were paying to put their name on an American sports facility. Individuals can now "rent" out space on their foreheads to companies for ads!

It seems nothing is beyond the market- not even death. In a grimly entertaining chapter on the history of life insurance, Mr. Sandel shows how a product that was once meant as a safety net for families has become a ghoulish investment vehicle. For centuries, life insurance was prohibited in most of Europe on the grounds that death should not be subject to speculation. In America, it wasn't until the 1850s that it began to gain legitimacy and then only as a product designed to protect a man's family in the case of his untimely death. But the morals of the market slowly overcame the old objections, and today companies routinely take out life-insurance policies on their employees because the policies are an excellent revenue stream, whether traded or held until collection. In recent years there has arisen an entire "life settlement" industry in which investors buy life-insurance policies from the elderly. The quicker people kick the bucket, the higher the rate of return for the investor. Ironically some of the pension funds become unwittingly the buyer of these investment vehicles!

Yet why should life settlement, or other market strategies, bother us? After all such practices maximize social utility and are the ultimate expansion of individual freedom. Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core of your belief system is like choosing a guiding ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome. Is it efficient? Will it make money? That's all the market cares about. 

But the good society needs to care about more. Doesn't it? Here are a few interesting questions that he raises:

• How do you feel about paying children to read books, or to get good grades?


• What are the ethics of paying people to test risky new drugs — or to donate their organs?


• What about hiring mercenaries to fight America’s wars?


• Or allowing cash-strapped communities to sell ads on police cars and fire hydrants?


• How about outsourcing inmates to privately owned prisons because it’s more cost-effective?


• Or allowing those who can afford it to buy special access to doctors?


• Or buying admission to elite universities when students with better grades are rejected?


• How about selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay?


• Or allowing businesses to advertise inside our schools?


• Is it moral to put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow?


• What about buying other people’s life insurance policies to bet on when they’ll die — for profit?

These are all difficult questions and deserve to be disussed.  But the bigger question is why should we worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale? Is there anything inherently wrong about a purely market based society?

Underlying the unease with this concept of a society where everything is for sale are two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger and pervades all walks of life and living.

The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.

For in the final analysis, Sandel reminds us: “the question about the role of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets?”

Things to do before you die

In recent days, it has become popular to write about 100 things to do, or 100 places to visit, or 50 exotic foods to eat before you die. Facebook is full of individuals listing the countries they have visited or foods they have eaten as if that was really the end all of achievements. Look at lists of “100 Things to Do Before You Die,” and you’ll find them dominated by exotic sensations of one kind or another (“Skydive”; “Shower in a waterfall”; “Eat jellied eels from a stall in London”).

As you can see the emphasis is on the consumerist pleasures, high and low. Really? But is this the best we can do? Are these the pinnacle of our lives achievements? Would you be thinking about all these visits and foods when you are on your deathbed and contemplating the content of your life. Is this is what it’s all about? Are these things that really make our lives worth living?

When I think about what really makes me happy, what I really crave, I come up with a very different list as would you if you really sat down and thought about what life really means. Some of greatest pleasures in life come from concentrated, purposeful work, especially creative work. A new idea or concept brings far greater joy than eating a jellied eel. Is there a greater pleasure than being with people you love? Have you ever dandled your grandchild on your lap and not felt that there is no greater joy in the world? Or what about the feeling you get when you are part of something larger and are contributing, howsoever minutely, to the greater good.

A nurse who worked a lifetime in palliative care talked about the greatest regrets that men had towards the end of their lives. Here are the most common five:  “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I didn't work so hard. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier. “

As William Deresiewicz, an essayist and critic says “ meaning, connectedness, doing strenuously what you do well: not sights, not thrills, and not even pleasures, as welcome as they are. Not passivity, not letting the world come in and tickle you, but creativity, curiosity, altruism, engagement, craft. Raising children, or teaching students, or hanging out with friends. Playing music, not listening to it. Making things, or making them happen. Thinking hard and feeling deeply.” These are the things to aspire for.

And remember none of these involve spending money, except in an ancillary way. None of which, in other words, are consumer experiences. Our idea of the self has increasingly become a consumerist one, which means a passive and diminished one. But the pleasures of the body are as nothing to the joys of the soul.

So when you start making your lists of things to do before you die, think hard of what really gives you true and lasting joy.

Fighting negative campaigns

It is now conventional wisdom that the election of 2012 in the US will be nasty, negative and not short. Negative campaigning, say the experts, works and so all sides will employ it, even when denying it in public. According to Dean Michael Mezey of DePaul University, "... what negative advertising does is get your supporters committed and excited. Those who are indifferent are so turned off that they are less likely to vote, as are people who are for the other candidate--so not only does it help you, but it depresses turnout. The ideal, rational goal is to turn out your most committed supporters and make sure nobody else turns out."

The recent asinine Supreme court decision on Citizen United which permits private money to be spent without any accountability has made a bad situation worse. So the facts are that in the short term negative campaigns using anonymous donor money are going to be the norm. The real issue is how to fight back in the short term?

According to the same experts, the following are a few traditional strategies for dealing with negative attacks:

·        Admit it before the attack even comes. Jerry Ford was candid about the fact that he had started dating wife Betty before her divorce from her first husband was final, and Jimmy Carter's campaign could not make an issue of it in the 1976 presidential race.

·        Attack the attack, criticizing your opponent for negative campaigning, or you can respond with negative information about the opponent or the attack tactics as well--what lawyers call discrediting the witness. This is what the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign did with Gennifer Flowers. If possible, get a blue-ribbon source to refute the attack.

·        Turn the attack into a positive. President Harry Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had once been dumped from an economic advisory post by President Franklin Roosevelt. That could have been considered a negative among FDR supporters, but Acheson's disagreement with Roosevelt had been over devaluation of the dollar, which could have been played as a positive to sound-money advocates. 

·        Deflect it with humor. In 1988, Illinois Cook County Board President George Dunne was tainted by scandal when two women he had sexual relationships with were later hired for county jobs. Supporters defended him by arguing he was a widower and therefore single, stressing the jobs were extremely low-paying and not political plums, and marvelling that a man in his seventies could be involved with two women. Amazingly, this worked, as most of the media comments were jocular ones on the wow, what a man defense. Everyone had a good chuckle and the scandal disappeared.

·        Deflect it with sorrow. This is effective when the story is instinctively something that the public knows should have remained private, like the fact that the candidate's wife was pregnant when the couple married. Express your sorrow that the media or the opposition would bring up something so personal that is irrelevant to the campaign.

·        Stonewall citing higher motives. This seldom works because it makes the candidate look falsely pious. 

·        Admit the indiscretion and ask for forgiveness. Ask people to make their decision on more important issues. This is the strategy actor Hugh Grant employed to return to the public's good graces after he was caught with a prostitute.

·        Neither admit nor deny the allegation. Instead, release reams of pertinent information, financial documents, and other related items that are so difficult for the media and the public to wade through that they will forget the whole thing.

·        Deny the charge and demand proof. This works only if the charges actually are not true. Spiro Agnew did this and discovered that the media had rock-solid proof of his crimes.

·        Blame the media and demand they reveal the unidentified source. This seldom works, unless the voters in your district generally hate the media. Plus, it angers the media so that they go after your candidate with an even greater vigor.

·        Ignore it. If the charge is small or little-publicized, sometimes it will go away. 

Unfortunately in the present climate, none of these conventional strategies are likely to work especially in a presidential race in which each side has over $ 1 billion to spend. So how to approach this issue? What should the Obama campaign do and what should be its strategy to counter the oncoming mudslinging?

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that perhaps a more effective approach may be drawn from the medical profession when it confronts a possible contagion from a viral plague. Everyone knows it is coming, nobody is sure what type it is or how to contain it? So what do they do? People may recall the efforts of the CDC ( Center of Disease control) a few years back when there was a threat of contagion from “swine flu” and “Mad cow” disease. Their approach to tackling these threats to the country are very instructive and could well form the template for OCC ( Obama’s Chicago Center). (Some may say that the impending attacks from the right in the 2012 campaign may well be called the same names too.)

The first step that CDC took was to identify the various possible strains of the viruses threatening the country. OCC needs to do the same confronted with the impending negative onslaught. Is the focus of the virus going to be on “ he is a Muslim”, or “ he is a nice guy but out of his depth”, or his “ foreign affairs approach is naïve” or that his "economic policy is a failure"?

Once the viral strains were identified the CDC took steps to research and formulate remedies to counter these strains. OCC needs to do the same. In each case of a possible viral attack, they can formulate and compose a fitting reply. "Muslim". Not so says the Archbishop and other leaders of the church. "Naïve." He took us out of two wars, killed OBL, helped the Arab spring, got rid of the Libyan and Egyptian dictators, cornered Iran and restored American prestige around the world. "Out of his depth". He passed the most far reaching medical reform in a century, removed “don’t ask don’t tell”, ensured equal pay for women, had a record of achievements unsurpassed in five decades. "Economic policy a failure?" He saved the world from a great depression,  rescued the auto industry, Dow Jones is double what it was when he took over. For each possible viral attack, there is a now a remedy.

The next step that CDC took was to inoculate the public to the dangers of the viruses through public and private information. OCC needs to do the same. They must mobilize at all levels to counter the viral infections- be they the attempt to lower voter turnout, inflame social issues or spread lies through the snake oil salesmen so easily available for hire to the republicans.

CDC also was very vigilant in identifying the viruses in its initial stages. So must OCC. The moment a falsehood is spread in any regional or local market, they must take up cudgels and bludgeon them to death before they can go viral.

Finally, CDC  set out to identify the source of these viruses and take action. Thus cattle were culled, pigs were slaughtered and export of these meats banned. OCC needs to identify the source of these viral strains and to expose them. The wealthy donors hiding behind vaccous names like American Crossroads, Freedom Watch, all need to be made accountable by suing them in local courts of law. No radio or TV station should be permitted to air ads whose authors are anonymous. Donors to these shady groups need to be systematically confronted and the donees should not be allowed a pass in their interviews to the press. The courts should be challenged on all the major issues– perhaps a strip search , now permitted on the flimsiest of excuses , may help concentrate their minds as well, on what is required to preserve democracy in the country


There are strategies available. OCC only needs to act on them and not sit around bemoaning the state of the union and pundits need to stop wringing their hands at the vile nature of politics that they do so much to promote by trying to be objective.

The secret of innovation

We always wonder about the creative process. How do people come up with new ideas? How can we get our staff to come up with innovative products? What is the secret of the most innovative companies? What do people like Steve Jobs have to teach us about the nitty gritty of the creative product development?

For a long time, aside from the lone geniuses like Einstein, it was the received wisdom that the best way to come up with innovative ideas was brainstorming. Many a book was written on how to brainstorm. One of the earliest ones was by Osborne who based on his experience in the ad world , touted the success of the brainstorming approach to innovation and creativity.

His book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, —the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.” 

Brainstorming enshrined a no-judgments approach to holding a meeting. The underlying assumption of brainstorming was that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity.

But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t always work. 

Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas. And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. “Many of us can work much better creatively when teamed up,” he wrote, noting that the trend was particularly apparent in science labs.

Today scientific advances have led to a situation where all the remaining problems are incredibly hard. Researchers are forced to become increasingly specialized, because there’s only so much information one mind can handle. And they have to collaborate, because the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines. Advances in knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone.

But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?

Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley carried out a number of experiments to test various templates for creativity. In Nemeth’s view, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s work and a number of other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict.

According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.” Another of her experiments demonstrated that exposure to unfamiliar perspectives can foster creativity. Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating, because it wakes us right up. Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable. And recognizing the importance of conflicting perspectives in a group raises the issue of what kinds of people will work together best and how to ensure that they do.

A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine what effect physical proximity had on the quality of the research.  He found that if you want people to work together effectively, there is a need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions. Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it was still important to create intimate spaces.

One fanatical believer in the power of space to enhance the work of groups was Steve Jobs. When Jobs was planning Pixar’s headquarters, in 1999, he had the building arranged around a central atrium, so that Pixar’s diverse staff of artists, writers, and computer scientists would run into each other more often. Jobs soon realized that it wasn’t enough simply to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria, the coffee bar, and the gift shop. Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. He really believed that the best meetings happened by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. Jobs made it impossible for staff not to run into the rest of the company.

Another example of this grew entirely by accident. Building 20  at MIT became a strange, chaotic domain, full of groups who had been thrown together by chance and who knew little about one another’s work. And yet, by the time it was finally demolished, in 1998, Building 20 had become a legend of innovation, widely regarded as one of the most creative spaces in the world. In the postwar decades, scientists working there pioneered a stunning list of breakthroughs, from advances in high-speed photography to the development of the physics behind microwaves. Building 20 was full of knowledge spillovers.

Building 20 served as an incubator for the Bose Corporation.  Take the career of Amar Bose. In the spring of 1956, Bose, a music enthusiast, procrastinating in writing his dissertation, decided to buy a hi-fi. He chose the system with the best technical specs, but found that the speakers sounded terrible. Bose realized that the science of hi-fi needed help and began frequenting the Acoustics Lab, which was just down the hall. Before long, Bose was spending more time playing with tweeters than he was on his dissertation. Nobody minded the interloper in the lab, and, three years later, Bose produced a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers, a synthesis of his time among the engineers and his musical sensibility. The Bose Corporation was founded soon afterward.

 Building 20 ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as “the magical incubator.”

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming has been that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Steve Jobs and Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions will finally add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together and it is the human friction that makes the sparks.

The new loneliness

Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact with other even for a fraction of a moment. Iphones, Ipads, Facebook etc are all technological gifts of the last decade that have made this possible. The fact is that now almost everyone has an iphone or blackberry that they feel compelled to look at all the time lest they miss by a nano second some breaking news or an email. At how many parties do you see people looking down on their blackberries while trying to converse with some one standing or sitting next to them. When I questioned one who was listening to my diatribe on technology while simulaneously pecking on her blackberry, listening to her iphone  and having an ipad on her lap, and said that maybe they were insulting the speaker by looking down on their blackberries rather than at him, the response was that they could multitask!

But within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, it is clear that we are now suffering from an unprecedented alienation. We may be interconnected to a major degree yet it seems that we have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. Various studies have shown loneliness rising drastically over a very short period of recent history. A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to another major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. 

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. But it is clear that social interaction matters. Now we meet fewer people for we are interconnected and can read the facebook pages cant we? We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant. Steven March makes the same argument taking Facebook as an example in this article.  "A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. "


We now live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we seem to be becoming. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information. We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing. Solitude can be lovely. Crowded parties can be agony. We also know, thanks to a growing body of research on the topic, that loneliness is not a matter of external conditions; it is a psychological state.

We also know that being lonely is extremely bad for your health. If you’re lonely, you’re more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar person who isn’t lonely. You’re less likely to exercise. You’re more likely to be obese. You’re less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. You are at greater risk of inflammation. Your memory may be worse. You are more likely to be depressed, to sleep badly, and to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline.

And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs or, if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. You buy these gadgets like iphone and blackberry which further isolate you from direct human interactions. These omnipresent new technologies inevitably lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy.

It is time we understood that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. 

Sitting of the fence

In the past few weeks,  I have been disturbed by a number of my well meaning readers, expressing despair at Obama's record and saying that what he has done is not enough and that they were thinking of staying home in the November elections. For many of these so called progressives, the presidency of Barack Obama has been deeply disappointing. To hear some prominent lefties tell it, the New Jesus of the campaign trail has morphed into the New Judas of the Oval Office.

This hyperbole obscures real life: the facts are this president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 36 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."

As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.

Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.

On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He repealed the policy of "dont ask, dont tell."He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."

The historic progress that Obama has made is especially evident in eight key areas especially if you remember where the U.S was in 2008 before he took over: In 2008, just two years ago, the country faced a fiscal crisis and a second great depression, we were mired in two wars abroad , we were losing 750000 jobs per month,  Dow was at 6000, there were no investments in infrastructure or green technology, the American auto industry faced bankruptcy.......

And what has Obama managed to do in just three years:

1 | Averting a Depression: his economic team has helped prevent the collapse of the US into the second great depression and the world economy

2 | Sparking Recovery: US economy has shifted from a tailspin to some measure of stabilization and some prospect of job growth next year

3 | Saving Detroit: GM is now the largest and most profitable car company in the world

4 | Reforming Health Care: Universal health insurance (with promised deficit reduction!) is now law of the land providing coverage to over 20 million of our fellow citizens, covering pre existing conditions, allowing students to stay on their parents plans - a goal sought by Democrats for decades.

5 | Cutting Corporate Welfare

6 | Restoring America's Reputation:Equal pay for women has been passed into law.

7 | Protecting Consumers: The race to the top in education spending has created reform in a large number of states from the bottom up,.The size of Peace Corps has been doubled, Pell grants increased substantially and a major fillip given to Volunteerism. A new Consumer protection agency has been created.

8 | Launching a Clean-Energy MoonShot:Major investments have been made in green technology laying the foundation for the future.A stimulus package has helped undergird infrastructure and will probably do more to advance non-carbon energy than anything that might have emerged from Copenhagen.

To those sitting on the fence, I only want to remind them of what Dante said: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality” or sit on the fence waiting..