Why I Made Myself Even Busier
Success can be about curiosity and purpose
“I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.”
― Haruki Murakami
Back when I was a newspaper reporter, my favorite part of working for a paper was that I had to learn new things that I might not necessarily delve into otherwise.
When I became a novelist, I still did a bit of that via research for stories and research into the craft of writing, but it always felt a bit suffocating.
Newspaper learning and reporting put me in random places that I’d never expect to be:
1. The deep northern Maine woods on a logging road with a small den of coyotes nearby, no cell phone reception, no light posts, just a lot of big trees and ancient moss? Check.
2. The floor of a packed auditorium for a championship high school basketball game? Check.
3. Chilling with a senator in D.C. rushing through the bowels of the U.S. Capitol and taking a deep dive into how U.S. oil reserves work? Check.
I missed that and this year I remembered that part of what makes me happy is learning random things and new experiences. So, I did the unthinkable and started a free news blog focusing on local news.
Did some of my friends scoff?
Yep.
Did one of my friends say, “What the hell are you doing, Carrie? You have conflict and politics”?
Yep.
Did it mean that I get up two hours earlier every day to get things done?
Yep.
But does it mean that part of me is happier?
Absolutely.
When I was trying to figure out why that was, I realized that it was about curiosity and purpose. Writing news gives me purpose because I believe that it’s important that people have free unbiased access to news.
And I just talked about the curiosity part.
Professor Ramya Ranganathan says in his course, “Crafting Realities: Work, Happiness and Meaning,”
“There is so much this world has to offer and we have barely scratched the surface. Curiosity has brought mankind to where we are now. However, sometimes our innate spirit of curiosity and adventure may face resistance due to reasons beyond comprehension. This resistance may arise from fear of uncertainty, or fear of change or unwillingness to move away from the comfort zone and some of these fears might have been passed on to us from our stakeholders.”
What reporting does is it pushes me out of my comfort zone and fosters that spirit of curiosity even though I’m super shy and have a cultural aspect of my personality that always wants to fade into the background instead of putting myself out there.
When I go to a meeting, even when people offer me a place at the table, my first instinct is to sit on the floor, put my back against the wall and watch.
Pretty much like this, but swap out the toy car for a laptop.
Ranganathan tells the story about some monkeys and bananas. That seems random, I know! But hold on. It relates, I promise.
“Researchers took a bunch of five or six monkeys and put them in a cage. In the centre of the cage, they had a bunch of bananas that they hung up and they had some ladders and stuff that monkeys could use to reach the bananas if they wanted.
What do you think was the natural instinct took the monkeys?
They tried to go for the bananas and when the monkeys tried to go for bananas the researchers shot at them from outside the cage not with guns, not to injure them but with water guns, to hurt them but not injure them badly and the monkeys were being fed any way at other times.
So over time, the monkeys' learnt that even though there were bananas hung up in the top of the cage near the roof, those bananas were out of bounce and they should not go for those bananas.
Here is what the researchers did after some time.
After a couple of weeks when the monkeys were completely conditioned they took one monkey out of the cage and they put a new monkey into the cage.
What do you think the new monkey did?
You are right. The new monkey tried to go for the bananas and what did the old monkeys do when the new monkey tried to go for the bananas. They tried to pull the old new monkey back not because they hated the old new monkey, but because they wanted to keep the old monkey safe and they wanted to keep all of them safe.
So over time the new monkey also learnt that okay we don't go for these particular bananas. By this time the experimenters had stop spraying the monkeys with water guns. But the conditioning was still present.
After some weeks, when the new monkey had also been conditioned
the experimenters took out one more old monkey and substituted that monkey with a new monkey.
What you think happened? The same process again.
Eventually, they allowed each monkey to get conditioned and eventually the cage only had new monkeys and none of these new monkeys had ever seen a water gun, so they did not know why they should not go for those bananas, but they all knew that they should not go for those bananas.”
So, this is how tradition and learning is passed down. That’s not bad. But it can sometimes be limiting, right?
Now, can you relate the story to your own life? To our own culture. To our society.
He says,
“Now, if you are a new monkey in the cage, you at any point in time you have to two choices. If you were a new monkey who entered the cage and you saw that there are all these monkeys around that are not going for the bananas you can either choose to go for those bananas and risk it, it is an unknown risk you don't know what's going to happen to you or you can choose to listen or to go with the wisdom of the old monkeys and not go for the bananas.
“What are the pros and cons if you choose to go for the bananas?
“The pro is that maybe those water guns don't exist anymore, and you are going to discover new territory, you are going to be the innovator, you are going to create new things in the world that never existed before, you are going to create a new way of living and working for yourself that you might not have thought was possible.”
And the risk is that you don’t know what happened before that’s keeping those old monkey from grabbing those bananas. You don’t know if they are poisonous. You don’t know if you’ll get hurt if you try to get those bananas.
You have safety and security for one choice.
But Ranganathan says, “The con is that you will never know what else was possible, you will never know how things could pan out if you chose to do something differently.”
Sometimes, I think that we are conditioned to see every change as a threat, as a risk. But that conditioning can really limit us. Our fear of failure, of financial loss, of rejection can stymie us. And the limits we’ve been taught, the responses that are meant to keep us safe and secure, might not be necessary anymore as society and culture change.
Life is full of possibilities. It’s full of things to explore. That even includes our careers.
As Laura Nash and Howard Stevenson write in Harvard Business Review:
“Many people assume success requires a winner-takes-all approach. They believe that success depends on putting all your energy into achieving one goal, be it a single-minded focus on your job or a commitment to being the best soccer mom in your community. But no matter how noble, one goal can’t satisfy all of a person’s complex needs and desires, as the examples at the beginning of the article demonstrate. The same holds true for the goals of a business.
“Fortunately, success doesn’t have to be seen as a one-dimensional tug-of-war between achievement and happiness.”
RESOURCES
Ranganathan, Ramya. “Crafting Realities: Work, Happiness, and Meaning,” IIMBx, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. 2023.
Nash, L., & Stevenson, H. (2004). Success that lasts. Harvard business review, 82(2), 102-9.
Schwartz, T., Gomes, J., & McCarthy, C. (2011). Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live. Simon and Schuster. (Chapter 18 - Who are you, and what do you really want?).
DeLong, T. (2011). Flying without a net: Turn fear of change into fuel for success. Harvard Business Press. (Chapter 7 – Comparing how to break your heart every time).
View TED Talk By Nigel Marsh titled, ‘How to Make Work-Life Balance Work’.
I love that you quote Murakami! Thanks for another fascinating article. :)