Grumbling, part 2: Until you walk a mile...

Two blogs ago, I talked about how grumbling and complaining can be poisonous. Today, I'm going to talk about how easy it is to complain, and how hard it is to do what you're complaining about.

The other day, my friend Jennifer was talking about her mother, and complained that "my mother is in her late 60s, and still trying to find herself. She's making these little sculptures in a desperate attempt to connect. It's pretty sad." It was easy for Jennifer to sit back and take pot shots at her mother's art, or her mother's attempts at self-expression. But when charged with the task of expressing herself through art, Jennifer freaked out. What if it looks stupid? What if people judge what I paint? What if it's not good enough? If the painting is supposed to be a self-expression, and it sucks, what does that say about me? Argh! She made that painting, and emerged with a newly-found appreciation for her mother's courage to express herself through art.

It's really easy to complain someone else who is putting themselves out there, but instead of criticizing, shouldn't we be admiring their courage? It's not as easy as it looks.

If you walk around with this mentality, it's a lot easier to fill you days with love and appreciation. That performer on the subway? Wow, what courage to play in front of a crowd of strangers. A less-than-eloquent Sarah Palin interview? Yes, maybe she should have reviewed her facts a bit more beforehand, but what guts it must take to go on national TV. How cool. How many of us have dared to be in her position?

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On work and quality

My bike Roland was stolen last year. I loved this bike: it was my mother's before me, older than I was, and four sizes too big, but I didn't care. He was a great bike.

In the past month, I decided that I wanted to get a new bike. And I started noticing that, seemingly everywhere I went, there were bikes parked on the street with "For Sale" signs on them. Some of them looked pretty good: nice bikes, reasonably priced. But I was reluctant to take the next step and contact the owners about the bikes. It was like pulling teeth, and made me feel all angsty. I tried wildly to find excuses for not pursuing the bikes: see that patch of rust on the wheel? The frame is probably a tad too small. The tires look flat. On and on.

So yesterday, after passing by yet another bike for sale, it hit me what was going on. I have a theory about the way the world works, that goes like this:

If you work hard, then you will reap nice rewards

That sounds like a pretty good theory to live by. The industrious ant storing up food for the winter, and such. But I have also developed a corollary to this theory:

If something comes to me with little work, it must be flawed.

Interesting. So I am essentially equating value with how much work I put in. This was why I didn't want to pursue the bikes for sale on the street, because what could be easier than just picking up a bike off the street on the way to the coffee shop? In order to find a quality bike, I felt I needed to search Craigslist, compare at least 10 bikes, visit them, negotiate, think about it... make the whole thing a huge ordeal. THEN I would find a quality bike. But picking one up off the street couldn't possibly result in my obtaining a quality bike.

Of course, this is a silly theory. There is no reason those bikes on the street couldn't be quality bikes. Who says I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find something great?

So the lesson I learned here is that I need to dump the theory that:

I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find quality

And replace it with a theory that works better for me. How about this one:

Quality isn't necessarily correlated with ordeal size.

So I tested out that last bike on the street, and guess what? Now I have a bike. No ordeal required :)

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Grumbling, part 1: How much do you grumble?

Grumbling. We all do it. The line at CVS is six-people-long, and to top it off, the customer at the front of the line wants a price check. Your friend doesn't ask about how your job search is going, even though she knows that you are anxious about it. Joan in accounting STILL hasn't processed your reimbursements from April. Your mom reminds you to get your flu shot-- does she still think you're 6? You don't have anything in your refrigerator for dinner; why did you spend that extra hour at work instead of going shopping? Your partner is in a bad mood, and you grumble about his moodiness.

Sometimes grumbling can be a red flag that indicates places where you might want to effect change in your life (e.g. leave work at a reasonable hour). But by and large we grumble without ever taking any action to fix the things we're grumbling about. These grumbles poison our mood, and slowly decay the relationships that we're grumbling about. Grumbles also consume mental energy that could be spent in happier, more productive and creative pursuits; we don't even have that many unique grumbles, but often play the same ones over and over again in our heads, on infinite repeat. Imagine what else we could be doing with that energy?

As a first step to appreciating the extent of grumbling in your life, keep a log of everything that you grumble about, complain about, or criticize over a 24-hour period. It may take a few days before you become aware enough of your thoughts to catch all of your grumbles, but keep it up.

Once you have a list of your grumbles, examine it. Are you surprised by how many grumbles you entertain? What are the themes of your grumbles--for example, many of my grumbles are about time, "poor" decisions about how to spend it, and the lack of it. What do you grumble about? How much mental space do you spend grumbling?

And most importantly, how much space do you want to spend grumbling? If it's less than you spend now, let's take down your inner grumbler.

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A world of Liquid Luck

Sometimes movies have beautiful life-philosophy moments, and I'd like to share with you one that I experienced recently in the new Harry Potter movie.

In the movie, Harry uses an elixir of liquid luck to convince Professor Slughorn to share a memory with him. It works like this: Harry fixes his mind on what he wants to accomplish (get the memory), drinks the elixir, and then follows his gut impulses. Instead of taking the logical step of going to Slughorn's office, Harry goes to see his friend Hagrid, and a series of seemingly coincidental events ensue, resulting in a night of drunk revelry and Harry finding just the right moment to ask for--and get--the memory. Impossible to design in advance, brilliant in hindsight.

This is probably one of my favorite Harry Potter moments. Wouldn't it be great if we all had little bottles of liquid luck, to direct at whatever purpose we wanted?

The thing is, though, I think we might. Have you ever wanted something really really badly, and then gotten it through the most random ways? Oftentimes if something comes our way not through hard work, but through a series of unplanned events, we call it coincidence or chance. But what if that whole process is really like Harry drinking liquid luck: you set your mind's eye on your goal, put the request out there, believe it'll come, and then watch it all unfold?

I've had several examples of liquid luck in my life, and the more I think about it, the more I find. Here's one of my favorites: when I first entered MIT, I attended a talk by Nobel Laureate and President of Cal Tech, David Baltimore. I stole a quick moment with him afterwards, and asked him which of two labs I should join. I followed his recommendation, and am happy I did. A few years later, we were both speaking at the same conference on the Berkeley campus, and I set my intention on pulling him aside and thanking him for the advice. The problem was that he was pretty much going to arrive, give his talk, and leave--not much time to pin him down. Glug glug liquid luck. The day of the conference, I was a ball of nerves about my talk, and so I went off into a remote building far from the conference, and found a quiet deserted corridor in which to practice my speech. I paced around, talking to myself, gesturing, etc. And then I heard someone behind me say "excuse me." Turning around, I saw none other than David Baltimore standing there! Just me and him in a deserted hallway far from the conference. He had gotten lost on the way to the conference, and was looking for directions. I could barely speak I was so stunned. Impossible to design in advance, brilliant in hindsight. Could that have been liquid luck?

That is a spine-tingley example. But I think there are other more ordinary ones in day-to-day life as well. For example, I was recently looking for a new artistic hobby, but hadn't found any of interest. So I set my intention on finding one, but did not design any concrete steps. Glug glug liquid luck. Meanwhile, I invited my friend Casey to hang out, we chose a weekend, and then he realized that that weekend was Somerville Open Studios, where artists open their homes to showcase their work. We picked out a few artists, none of whose crafts particularly interested me, nor was I particularly looking for a craft for myself, but on our way back to the car, we walked by a house with a terrific stained glass peacock in the window. We stopped to admire it, and Casey discovered that this house was actually part of SOS. We entered the house, and guess what, the stained glass artist, Emily Bhargava, offered classes. Bingo! I am now taking stained glass classes, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Hard to design in advance, brilliant in hindsight. Could that have been liquid luck?

Will I ever be able to prove that my intention caused all of these paths to unfold before me? Nope. I certainly couldn't get another Ph.D. from MIT on the subject. But how much fun is it to live in a world where every twist and turn is part of a brilliant path to get you to what you desire? I'm looking at my life through the liquid luck lens.

When was the last time you drank liquid luck?

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