LIVING the DASH
Pursuit of happiness and happiness are not the same thing
Professionals working in oncology often discuss how people choose to “live their dash.” The dash represents the time and space between your year of birth and your year of death. You frequently see the dash on tombstones or obituaries. What counts is how you live that dash. The moment-to-moment choices you make, especially regarding how you interact with others. For the patients in oncology, the dash becomes even more important after diagnosis. With their mortality in the foreground, how they chose to live now becomes a vital consideration. We should not, however, wait until we are faced with our mortality to think about how we are living.
Some years ago, I was working with a very successful businessman who came to see me at his wife’s request. As he began telling me about his life he shared a series of successful achievements. He spoke of his success in school, his first job, his first promotion, his first car, his marriage, his first luxury car, his perfect house, his next promotion, his first million dollars, and so on. After this series of accomplishments, I asked him if he was happy.
Can you guess his answer? It was neither yes nor no. He said, “Well, I should be.” You see he came to see me because his wife threatened to leave and his daughter, when he came home early one day (a rare event for him), said to him “oh you came home early to see the new car, not us.” Ouch!
He had fallen into the trap many people do. He confused his goals with his life and financial success for happiness. The truth is that goals are essential and wealth is useful. Research, however, shows that it is not wealth that increases happiness but connection. What about achievement? This is more complicated in some ways because the problem isn’t in having goals or pursuing goals; it is the idea that our happiness is proportionally related to our success.
During the Olympics in 1996, there was a commercial billboard that said: “You Don’t Win Silver — You Lose Gold.” The idea that you are either first or lumped in with everyone else at the bottom persisted and this saying or its variations are still used today. In 2012 Australian Olympic silver medalist, Michell Watt, was asked about how disappointed he felt about coming short at the competition. His response was a challenge to the gold or bust, win at any cost mentality.
He said, “All the sports are becoming extremely competitive and more globalized. There are 210 countries here and if people can’t realize that a silver medal is a great achievement then there’s something wrong with them.”
Think about the effect of the win at any cost ideology for the Olympics and competitive sports in general, it often leads to athletes risking their lives to take performance-enhancing drugs.
This reference has also made it into other fields including business. For example, in a 2015 news conference the CEO of Oracle, Safra Catz, said, “This is how we feel: silver medal is the first loser” in referring to her company holding the number 2 slot in the business application market. If we take this mentality seriously then we are a planet of losers and the pursuit of absolute success can lead to all manner of sin. Do you remember the greed and shenanigans that led to the global financial crisis of 2008? With this philosophy, we focus less on how we get success and more on the ends justifying any means. Is it any surprise that in business, sports and academia there is all manner of cheating that occurs?
Don’t get me wrong. Goals are important. In a competition, you want to maintain a desire and a focus on winning. When I work with athletes our focus is on winning. When I help people create goals, I support them in shooting high, in succeeding; but not at any cost. Goals provide direction to life. Life, however, happens in the moments between our pursuits not just in the moments of accomplishment.
Think about this. How long do you celebrate a success? Does that last anywhere near the amount of time you spent pursuing the goal? Or do you, more or less quickly, move on to the next pursuit? Or perhaps life will move you quickly to your next responsibility. Indeed, neurological research shows that positive experiences don’t shape our brain unless we take time to really experience and absorb them.
The gold medal does not give you a life. Financial wealth does not give you a life. You can have a life with a gold medal and you can have a gold medal without a life. You can have financial wealth with a life and you can have financial wealth without a life.
When my client and I explored how much time he took to even enjoy his accomplishments, he realized that in his 40 plus years he had spent very little time living and a lot of time pursuing. I applauded his tenacity at achieving his goals; but what is the point of success if not for life — for living. His life was happening in the moments between his achievements and he was missing out. Indeed, he was at risk of losing it all.
Pursuit of happiness and happiness are not the same thing.
Check out some of my previous article focused on well-being:
