Two books that advise overachievers to do less.
I. The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success (2016) by Emma Seppälä
“…(T)ime is not the commodity we should be tracking and managing, Seppälä argues. Instead, we need to manage our energy” (Kira M. Newman, Greater Good.) In other words, many of us need to do less. “In Seppälä‘s formulation, we drain ourselves of energy anytime we experience intense negative emotions or thoughts, or struggle against our urges and desires. If we allow ourselves a walk during lunchtime but are consumed by worries about our afternoon workload, we’ve drained energy rather than gained it—yet the same amount of time has elapsed. If we have to peel ourselves out of bed morning after morning running a sleep deficit, it takes a toll on our vitality, even though we have more waking hours to get things done.”
Seppälä is science director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and author of The Happiness Track. Six qualities “will contribute to both our productivity and our happiness. In effect, they’re also ways to boost energy without making big changes to our schedules,” she states (Greater Good).
1. Full presence. “…(S)top multitasking and break free from our technological distractions, and incorporate the practices of meditation and savoring into our routine.”
2. Resilience. “…(W)e have to relearn the basics of taking care of ourselves: adequate sleep, healthy food, exercise, and deep breathing.”
3. Calm. “…(C)alm and energy are key to productive work and a happy life…”
4. Rest. “…Creativity…requires rest and free time for new ideas to bubble up, interlace, and recombine…”
5. Self-compassion. “…Self-compassion inspires us to learn from failures and try again, while self-criticism might lead to giving up or denying our failures…”
6. Compassion. “…’Givers’ are liked, appreciated, and influential, as long as they set boundaries and don’t get taken advantage of.”
II. The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less (2015) by Dr. Christine Carter
It’s right there in the subtitle: your goal may be to do less, says the author, “a chronic overachiever and a recovering perfectionist.”
This “sweet spot,” she says, is “where you have the greatest strength, but also the greatest ease.” It’s “about shifting the small gears, the ones that rotate relatively easily. And because all the gears are interlocking, when we tweak a small gear here, the large gears start to move—effortlessly—as well.”
Carter’s view is that the most important question one can ask oneself may be, What elephant are you riding on? As in the part of Jonathan Haidt‘s The Happiness Hypothesis (see my previous post) in which he explains the universal condition of “the divided self” by using a Buddhist metaphor of the rider and the elephant.
From a summary of this concept on his website: “The mind is divided in many ways, but the division that really matters is between conscious/reasoned processes and automatic/implicit processes. These two parts are like a rider on the back of an elephant. The rider’s inability to control the elephant by force explains many puzzles about our mental life, particularly why we have such trouble with weakness of will. Learning how to train the elephant is the secret of self-improvement.”
Carter’s suggestions for training the elephant include taking more breaks, being more attuned to which daily routines can be put “on autopilot,” engaging in “satisficing” (stopping at “good enough”), focusing on the positive, and saying yes only when you really want to.
