Pain or Pleasure?

Our motivations are governed by two things: Pain and Pleasure - we wish to avoid pain and we wish to attain pleasure. 

The thing to remember is: We fear pain more than we love pleasure.

Perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate this is with an addiction. The withdrawal symptoms of smoking are pretty nasty and cause a lot of pain and discomfort. A couple of smokers that I know have told me that they smoke because they "have to" (to avoid pain) and not because they "want to" (to attain pleasure). In fact, when probed further, they say that they derive less and less pleasure from smoking as time goes on but continue to do so in order to avoid the withdrawal symptoms. They are aware that they should stop and often want to stop but the pain is too great for them and they don't.

In our daily lives, we often encounter situations where these motivations come up and the desire to avoid pain seems greater: 

Should I stay back to help out? It will make my colleagues happy and grateful but I'm tired.

My friends want to go to that cafe there but I don't like the food they serve. I know I'll disappoint them, though.

I can help my boss with an errand since it's on my way home but I don't want my colleagues to think I'm a bootlicker.

In such situations, we weigh the pleasure we may get against the pain it may cause and often find the pain to be of greater weight.

However, our perceptions are ours and we can always associate more pain with NOT doing what we want to.

So these could be the scenarios:

Should I stay back to help out? It will make my colleagues happy and grateful but I'm tired. BUT if I don't help, they will stay back even longer and I will look like a bad team player.

My friends want to go to that cafe there but I don't like the food they serve. I know I'll disappoint them, though. BUT I could just go and just spend time with them so they don't think I'm a spoilsport. I can always order a drink and grab a bite to eat later.

I can help my boss with an errand since it's on my way home but I don't want my colleagues to think I'm a bootlicker. BUT if I don't help him out, one of my team members may be called away to do it and we have one less person to get this project done.

This is certainly not easy and it requires a fair bit of mental gymnastics. However, as with all things, practice makes perfect.

The Dip

I have to say that I enjoy reading Seth Godin's books. He centers upon a core idea and explores the concept from various angles.

The Dip is about the setbacks we face that we can overcome if we keep pushing. This is opposed to the Cul-de-Sac, which, no matter how hard we try, we cannot overcome. Seth says that the ability to know when to quit Cul-de-Sacs and when to stick with Dips is what sets the stars apart from the average.

It's certainly an interesting idea and one well worth exploring further.

Teachers have Three Loves:

Love of learning,  love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together.

The above is a quote attributed to Scott Hayden.

A succinct summary of what makes a teacher.

Revisiting the Passion Hypothesis

Having finished the book and having had more time to think about the Passion Hypothesis that I first mentioned on Jan 9, I thought I'd revisit the concept.

The author was firm on his stand on sticking with and acquiring a skill set and that, after the necessary effort and resources have been put in, it is this skill set that becomes the currency or "capital" with which you can acquire work that you enjoy.

He emphasises the importance of skill (the famous 10,000 hours to mastery), control (motivation and drive) and mission. It is the culmination of these three things that make a person excellent at what he/she does.

I certainly agree that it is much easier to be passionate about something we are good at than at something we are not. However, not everything we have spent a long time practising (effectively) elicits excitement even when we are good at it. Perhaps a personal example will come in useful:

In the course of being a teacher, I have, at innumerable points, needed to produce curriculum of various levels and on various topics. I know what is required to produce it and the steps needed to ensure that it is useful and understandable. Despite this, I find the process tedious and painful. There is little joy in it for me, however good at it I may be. I do it out of necessity and not out of desire.

On the other hand, I would gladly take a set of material and disseminate the information to a group of learners for no other reason than because it benefits them and brings me satisfaction.

Curriculum design, then, may not be my mission - something that I feel strongly about. Perhaps that is why I find it so difficult to motivate myself to get it done.

Perhaps the author is correct, though he does say somewhere in the beginning of his book that the advice "Follow your passion" is dangerous for MOST people.

Perhaps it is then safe for me to imagine that pre-skilled passion is an important factor for some people.

Perhaps it is neither truly one or the other but a spectrum upon which each of us finds a place and our lives go on from there, changing our positions on the spectrum as we acquire new skills or we discover new passions.