But as counter-cultural as it may be, I have serious misgivings about the pursuit of happiness. There is a massive, irreconcilable clash between our modern obsession with happiness and the lives of our cultural heroes like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Teresa — people who would have never inspired us had they simply taken the path of least resistance in order to achieve their own happiness. No, these individuals followed a trajectory set by a pursuit of meaning, justice and purpose. Values set their respective frameworks for making decisions (and significant sacrifices) in life.
Jonah Lehrer, on Steve Jobs’ use of anger as a leadership tool:
At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.
But maybe this is a big mistake. Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.
There are lots of things to think about between these two posts.