So You Made A Mistake, now what?


In mid-1990, Amy Edmondson, a doctoral student, had a hypothesis — the good and effective teams of doctors and nurses make fewer medication-related mistakes.

Her research was a part of a bigger project that aimed to reduce medicine-related errors in hospitals. 

To prove her point, she created a diagnostic survey. Over the next six months, she and many other medical researchers interviewed several hospital departments and logged their medical errors. 

After six months, when she ran her analysis, she found that her hypothesis was torn to shreds. The data showed that better teams made more errors.

Frustrated and second-guessing herself, she hired another researcher to dig in deeper. 

Do you know what they found? 

They found that better teams were not making more errors, they were just more open and unafraid to share their errors.

While ineffective teams were hiding their errors, better teams felt safe to share their errors. By sharing and learning from their errors, they were becoming even more effective.

Edmondson spent the next couple of decades researching the concept of psychological safety where organizations should create safe zones where employees could speak up without fear.


The same is true for people. 

The people who do well, whether it is in sports, work, business, profession, entrepreneurship, or life itself, are the people who acknowledge their mistakes, learn from them and become better as a consequence.

Successful people are not afraid of making mistakes. They realize mistakes are part of the learning process. 

Thomas Watson built IBM into a behemoth. Once, a subordinate of Watson had made a huge mistake. The mistake cost IBM $600,000. Watson was asked by the board if he would fire this person. And Watson famously replied: “Fire him? I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want anyone else to hire his experience?”

Life’s greatest lessons are usually learned from the worst mistakes.

I had a similar experience with an employee. Once during an interview, a candidate told me that when he just started his career he transferred thousands of dollars into various accounts thinking he was practicing in a test environment. Some of the money was never found. Since then he is very careful while working in the production environment.

The panel was horrified at his carelessness. Later, when we reflected on it, we realized two things. One, he owed his mistake and learned from it. Two, he was courageous enough to bring out in an interview, which meant he was honest, truthful, and not afraid of making mistakes. I hired him. He was one of my best employees. 

Our mistakes make us the person we become. Hide your mistakes or be afraid of the consequences, you will never become the person you can.


Keeping a log of mistakes.

Ray Dalio, a hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and author, created a mistake log at Bridgewater Associates. Every employee is required to log their mistakes so that other people can learn from them.

Making a mistake is not a fireable offense at Bridgewater Associates. But failing to log your mistakes is.

Creating a culture where everyone shares their mistakes accelerates the learning of the entire team. It’s one of the reasons why Bridgewater Associates is the biggest hedge fund in the world today.


Why are we reluctant to admit our mistakes?

Mistakes often put us in a disadvantageous position. They might lead us to physical or psychological danger. Many mistakes hurt our ego. How could I be so stupid to do this? 

We are afraid of the consequences. If I say I did it, they might fire me. Or I will never win the promotion.

Throughout human history, our errors have often been treated as dangerous for a variety of reasons. They expose society to real danger. Many societies punish those who do not conform to the prevailing doctrine. Some communities and families are the same. From an early age, people learn to hide their mistakes. 

Humans have a history of handling mistakes and failure unpleasantly. Since each of us carries unpleasant memories of whole human history with us, it can be challenging to overcome the fear of sharing mistakes.

If we can embrace the reality of mistakes, we can free ourselves to be more creative in our lives and dig up some interesting insights.


How to get over our mistakes?

The biggest problem with overcoming mistakes is the feeling of self-loathing.

Think back to the last mistake you made at work, even if it was a minor one, like showing up late at an important meeting or messing up a presentation or making a wrong assessment based on incomplete facts.

Once we realize our mistake, the disgust and contempt we feel break us into pieces. We can’t seem to overcome the fact how we could ever do that. 

The thing to remember in situations like these is — we are human after all. We can’t act all the time perfectly. We are bound to make mistakes. Admit you made a mistake. Think about what lesson it had for you. Make a note of that and then stop dwelling on it. 

Mistakes are not the same thing as failure. A failure results from doing a wrong action, whereas a mistake usually is just a wrong action. So, when you make a mistake, you can learn from it and fix it.


What to do when you make a mistake.

“When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don’t repeat it.” — Paul Bear Bryant.

Admit it.

Don’t hide it, ever.

Don’t be scared of the consequences. If you hide your mistake, you will miss learning from them and make bigger mistakes while covering them. 

If you own your mistake, chances are your superiors will regard you highly for your truthfulness and courage.

Learn from it.

When we refuse to learn from our mistakes, we inflict unnecessary stress on ourselves and others. Mistakes are the best teachers in the world.

If you want to make the learning process faster, go ahead and make mistakes. Then make sure to learn from them. 

The greatest mistake you can ever make is not to make mistakes. 

Maria Hill lists 40 invaluable lessons to harness your mistakes for your benefit.

  1. Point us to something we did not know.
  2. Reveal a nuance we missed.
  3. Deepen our knowledge.
  4. Tell us something about our skill levels.
  5. Help us see what matters and what does not.
  6. Inform us more about our values.
  7. Teach us more about others.
  8. Let us recognize changing circumstances.
  9. Show us when someone else has changed.
  10. Keep us connected to what works and what doesn’t work.
  11. Remind us of our humanity.
  12. Spur us to want to better work which helps us all.
  13. Promote compassion for ourselves and others.
  14. Teach us to value forgiveness.
  15. Help us to pace ourselves better.
  16. Invite us to better choices.
  17. Can teach us how to experiment.
  18. Can reveal new insight.
  19. Can suggest new options we had not considered.
  20. Can serve as a warning.
  21. Show us hidden fault lines in our lives, which can lead us to more productive arrangements.
  22. Point out structural problems in our lives.
  23. Prompt us to learn more about ourselves.
  24. Remind us how we are like others.
  25. Make us more humble.
  26. Help us rectify injustices in our lives.
  27. Show us where to create more balance in our lives.
  28. Tell us when the time to move on has occurred.
  29. Reveal where our passion is and where it is not.
  30. Expose our true feelings.
  31. Bring out problems in a relationship.
  32. Can be a red flag for our misjudgments.
  33. Point us in a more creative direction.
  34. Show us when we are not listening.
  35. Wake us up to our authentic selves.
  36. Can create distance with someone else.
  37. Slow us down when we need to.
  38. Can hasten change.
  39. Reveal our blind spots.
  40. Make invisible visible.

Don’t repeat it.

The last thing you need to do is make sure you don’t make the same mistake again. If you repeat the same mistake, it is no longer a mistake; it is a choice. 

Conclusion

We will continue to make mistakes. At work, in life, with parenting, with relationships—no need to be afraid of them. 

When you realize your mistake, figure out what lesson it had for you. Was it the lack of knowledge, skills, or something else? What led you to make that mistake? What were the emotions behind them?

Learning from mistakes is painful, but there is no other way.

If you are not making mistakes, that means you are not doing enough. 

Take chances, make mistakes. This is how you grow. 

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

100 Articles in 100 Days

Violinist Hilary Hahn started a 100 Days of Practice project. She posted a video of her practicing violin on Instagram for 100 days with #100daysofpractice and invited others to join her. That started a movement.

Austin Kleon (the writer of How To Steal Like an Artist) came up with a grid to log his progress for 100 days. He calls it PRACTICE to SUCK LESS grid. 

To get good, you first have to be willing to be bad. Don’t practice to get good, practice to suck less. — Austin Kleon.

I thought it was a brilliant idea. You can use it to improve your handwriting, sketching, writing, stamina, singing, or playing an instrument. I used it to get better at social media. 

I sucked at social media. My friends complained that I never posted anything or left comments on their posts. I used to think social media was for boring people who had nothing better to do with their time until I discovered its power to build your profile. 

At the start of 2021, I set myself a goal to publish on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. for 100 days consecutively. It was an extremely successful experiment. Not only, I built my profile and learned heaps about the platforms, but my follower number swelled as well. 

Today is the Day 96 of the experiment. Here is the scorecard.

Image by Author

I missed only two days. Those were busy days, but if I had planned, I would have been able to publish on those days as well.

So pleased I am with the growth that consistency brought that I decided to use it with writing articles.

I have wanted to write every day on Medium for some time now but wasn’t successful. The closest I have come to publishing 4 articles in a row.

My rational is, if I can do it on social media, I can do it on Medium too.

Each article doesn’t have to be 1000–1500 words long; it could be 300 words. All stories don’t have to be non-fiction, it could be fiction too.

“Lower your standards for what counts as progress and you will be less paralyzed by perfectionism.” — Adam Grant

What is the aim?

To get better. 

To bring the article writing time down from 5–6 hours to 1–2 hours.

To build a system to publish every day. 

Writing an article a week is harder than writing an article a day. 

Initially, I will not worry about whether my headlines are good enough or not, whether I need more research more or my article is plain right boring. Initially, I am going to aim at publishing every day.

I agree with Tim Denning when he wrote:

It frustrates me because so much time is spent agonizing over tiny grammar mistakes, whether a headline is clickbait, and the attributes of viral writing. All of it misses the point: who cares?

Write what you want to write. You do you.

Being yourself is the most profitable business idea I can think of when it comes to any form of online content creation.

I think the reason we don’t get out and achieve because we try to do what other people are doing. We forget to be us. To do what we do.

So I am going to write what I want to write, and in the process going to learn what works for me.

My strategy to succeed.

Build a system and hone it over next three months.

Desire is what gets you started; system is what makes you deliver.

Most of my articles come to me when I am reading other people’s articles. A single line might trigger a thought which becomes a full-blown article. I might agree with them or disagree with them.

I stop reading at that point and start jotting down my thoughts. If I am on the computer, I create a new draft on Medium; if not, I do it on the phone, notebook, or back of an envelope.

I write nonstop until I have penned down everything that comes to me without worrying about structuring them or even rationalizing them. Before leaving it, I make a note if I need to do any research for anything.

Each morning, after breakfast, I pick one of the drafts and start the research. While researching the angle and structure of the article start taking shape.

I work in several 15 minutes spurts, taking breaks to do housework in between. By lunchtime, my article is done. I leave it for two hours and cook lunch.

When I come back to it, I read it slowly, make final edits and publish it between four and five pm.

I write at least ten articles ideas a day in my Idea Journal; hence I am never short of ideas. My goal is to get to the point when I can write an article on any topic with little or no research.

I intent to publish at least one fictional story and one travel article each week giving enough variety to my readers.

I also intend to have a few articles as a backup for days when I can get to the computer (a lesson learned from publishing on social media).

And lastly I will do many things in bulk such as inserting the images, footer and sketches etc.

Where to publish?

My biggest challenge is how to get published the same day. Many publications take one to three weeks to publish stories.

The Ascent takes more than a week. World Travelers Blog takes 4–5 days. Data Driven Investor takes 1–2 days. Illumination has been the best so far. Dr Mehmet Yildiz has been publishing my stories within few hours of submission. 

While researching for it I found a brilliant article by Michael ‘Myk Eff’ Filimowicz, PhD. Michael suggests four ways to get your stories into Medium publications:

The Front Door: The Front Door is when a publication has a big sign hanging on their site basically saying, ‘Open for Business!’ it’s the easiest, most direct, clearest, and obvious method.

The Back Door: The Back Door is Smedian. Smedian is a publication created by Casey Botticello, a top Medium writer to demystify writing on Medium. It has a list of all Medium publications with the ‘Request to Contribute’ link. You can look for publications by using its search tool.

The Side Entrance: Believe it or not, some publications, particularly Medium’s own publication, do not a SUBMIT tab on its front end or a ‘Request to Contribute’ button on its Smedian back end. Literally Literary publication is like that. To submit to publications like it, you have to do a web search, and the submission guidelines will appear in one of their many past online stories. This might be irrelevant now as E V William has disbanded Medium publication. 

VIP Lane: This is when a publication owner invites you to submit your story to their publication. You receive a notification like this, “Hey, we love this story; we’d like to publish it.”

This is my favourite kind of publishing strategy. 

I am going to publish some of the stories on my profile and then wait for an invitation from the publications.

It gives you become-so-good-that-they-come-to-you kind of feeling.

In the end

Wish me luck and join the challenge if you wish.

How To Thrive Even If You Have Attention Span Of A Goldfish

“Humans are the new low-attention span goldfishes, thanks to smartphones.” wrote Tim Denning in one of his articles.

The advertisement industry figured it out long ago. That is why the TV ads are less than eleven seconds.

Now the publishing industry is finding that thicker books don’t sell. A four hundred-page novel is considered as long as War and Peace. I, too, put books back on the shelf if they are too thick, thinking I don’t have time to finish it.

Today we are taking in much more information than when there were no computers or smartphones.

Emails, blog posts, social media, articles, newsletters, and ebooks have turned us into binge readers. We jump from one thing to another all day long, hardly leaving us any time to read quality books for an extended length of time.

The same goes with our To-Do Lists. The sheer number of tasks we have on our To-Dp Lists means that while we are doing one thing, we are also worrying about ten other things.

Add to that the interruptions by social media. No wonder our attention spans are decreasing dramatically.

Short Attention Span is not just limited to some.

The ability to focusing on tasks for any length of time without being distracted is much more widespread.

And the main cause for it is the kind of society we live in. Here are some statistics:

In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986 — the equivalent of 174 newspapers.

Even during our leisure time, each of us processes 34 gigabytes, or 100,000 words, every day.

The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of five hours of television daily, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images.

That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour.

And computer gaming consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet.

Source: Why It’s So Hard To Pay Attention, Explained By Science

The situation is not going to change.

The data around us will continue to grow. We will continue to be bombarded by thousands of stimuli each day. The distractions we face every day while working are not going to go away. Instead, they are going to increase while we are doing one thing.

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.

Our brains are equipped to process the information, and it does so by separating the trivial from the important, but it happens at a cost. It makes us tired.

Tiredness leads to a shorter attention span.

So, what to do?

We need strategies to learn to survive.

Here is what you can do.

You don’t have to eat everything offered in the buffet.

We are living in times of excess. Unlimited food, unlimited clothes, unlimited books, unlimited movies, unlimited TV.

But you don’t have to consume everything.

Choose wisely.

Choose the books you want to read, clothes you want to wear, movies you want to watch and limit their consumption.

Limit your consumption by time.

Allocate 15 to 20 minutes to social media a day and don’t go over that. You will have to train yourself for that, but it is possible. The best way is to tag it to another activity that is limited.

I only check social media while having breakfast. When breakfast ends, so does my time to check social media apps. You might want to use your commute time or washroom time to check social media.

Set small goals

Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, using a simple strategy. He knew he could run a 400-meters race in under a minute. He just trained himself to run four 400-meters races consecutively.

You may not be able to focus on a task for twenty minutes straight. Start with five minutes of total concentration several times a day. Set a timer for 5 minutes, get a part of the task done, and take a break. Do another 5 minutes, Do another 5 minutes and build it to twenty minutes.

If you can’t find time to read books, read only ten pages a day. It takes only 10 minutes to read ten pages at average speed. If you can read for 10 minutes twice a day, you can finish a 300-page book in a fortnight.

Take a 30-day challenge.

When you do a task for 30 days in a row, your ability to do that task increases many folds.

Bodybuilders used this technique all the time. They do a small set of exercises every day to build specific muscles.

You, too, can develop your writing muscles by writing every day for a short period. That period could be as small as five minutes. Do it for 30 days in a row, and you will discover you can write much more in five minutes compared to when you started.

Meditate

The reason for a low attention span is distractions and a lack of practice to control our minds.

Meditation is the single most beneficial exercise to enhance concentration. Even a five-minute session is enough to calm the mind. Start and end your day with five minutes of guided or self-directed meditation, and watch your attention span improves tremendously.

Summary

Our attention span is decreasing due to the amount of information we are getting bombarded with. Unfortunately, the situation is not going to get better. Rather it will get worse.

Our brains can process only a limited amount of information before it gets tired. Since information overload is not going to decrease, we have to develop our own strategies to function at the optimum level. Some of the strategies are:

  1. You don’t have to take everything in. Choose what you want to consume and choose wisely.
  2. Put time restrictions on information consumption such as social media. Tie it with some other activity such as commuting or having breakfast.
  3. Build concentration in small steps. Start with five minutes and build it to twenty minutes.
  4. Increase your skills and productivity by doing a task every day for 30 days.
  5. Learn to control and focus your mind through meditation. Start with five-minute sessions.

Photo by Cici Hung on Unsplash

Why Building An Email List Is So Hard


When I started blogging two years ago, I was terrified of asking people to subscribe to my blog. I thought no one would want to read it, especially when many well-written blogs were available to choose from.

A year and a half later, when I started the newsletter A Whimsical Writer, with Substack, the same phobia gripped me. So many experienced writers have newsletters in Substack; why would anyone want to subscribe to mine?

I couldn’t have been wrong.

People subscribe to your newsletter because they like you, your story, your unique style of writing and want to stay in touch with you. They like the solution you are proposing to their problems.


To build an online business, the most intimidating thing to do, is to build an email list. How to find those people who should be on your email list? There are so many limited beliefs attached to this inhibition. 

Let’s have a look at a few of them.

I need thousands of subscribers on my mailing list.

When we look at the size of established writers and online business owners, we feel threatened and inadequate. 

I will never be able to get thousands of followers, we think, and we curl up and don’t even try.

Then came Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans concept, and people started feeling encouraged. 

But the truth is you don’t need even 1000 people to get started. You just need one. 

Yes, you heard me right. You need only one person to subscribe to your newsletter to get you started. 

That one person soon becomes ten, and then twenty, then fifty.

I started my mailing list with just ten people. Five of them were my family members and four my writing group buddies, and one my gym acquaintance. Now and then, he (my gym acquaintance) would leave encouraging comments on my articles, and that was enough to keep me going.

In fact, in the early days, when you are learning your craft, it is better to have only a handful of subscribers. That way, you are not paralyzed with fear whether your work is good enough to publish, which incidentally is the second limiting belief.


My work is not good enough to share.

Each writer, each content creator, and each creative person is gripped with this fear at some stage in their creative lives. Some, like me, are permanently plagued with it. 

At some stage, you have to learn that your work will never be good enough. It will be the best at that point-in-time. You will continue to get better, and that is the whole purpose of being creative. You are constantly learning and improving. That shouldn’t stop you from sharing what you are producing at that point in time. 

Think of your work as a gift to your subscribers when you create something with the intention to gift it to someone you do your best and without the fear of being judged on the quality of it. 


All this process to start a mailing list is too hard.

For every new starter establishing an online business is too hard. There is a lot of advice available, but rather than making it easier to follow, it makes it overwhelmingly hard.

Most people start an online business as a side hustle. They have too much to do. When they can’t fit everything, they have to let go of some things. Most of the time, it is building a mailing list. 

Why? Because it has got many ducks to align.

I stood found building a mailing list too complicated. 

Until I sat down and simplified it. 

Here is my three-step process to build a mailing list.


Step 1: Research

The first thing to determine is who your audience is. 

Not everybody is your audience. 

You will be wasting your time if you think you are writing for everybody. You are writing only for a small set of people. 

In my case, they are the new writers who are learning the art and craft of writing and trying to make a living from their writing. 

Once you figure out who your people are, find out what problems they are facing that you can help them solve. 

I was a new starter too, so I knew some of the problems new writers face. But what really helped me was actually talking to a few of my followers and finding out first-hand what problems they were facing that I could help solve. 

Step 2: Create a solution

Then pick just one of the problems, and think about what you can create to help solve that problem.

It could be a cheat sheet, a checklist, an ebook, a workbook, a newsletter. Anything that you can give your audience to have a quick and valuable win 

Whatever you might decide to create, keep it simple. 

It shouldn’t take you days or weeks to create. You can use some of your previous articles and create something useful out of that. 

Step 3: Share your solution with your people wherever they hang out.

This is the most important step, which many people don’t reach because they get overwhelmed either at step 2 or have no idea where their people hang out.

It took me a while to figure out that many new writers hang out at Medium. They also hang out on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Yours might hang out at Instagram (many artists do) or Twitter, or Quora or Reddit. 

Keep in mind that they will not be able to come to you to subscribe to your mailing list because they don’t even know you exist. You will have to go to them and offer them your solution for free in exchange for their mailing address.

And they will happily do so if your solution truly promises to address their problem. 

Tom Kugler’s tagline promises to solve the problem of infrequent writers on Medium. 

Tom Kugler’s Get my free 5-day Medium writing course right here. It’ll teach you how to write five posts per week and become a top writer on Medium.

My own tagline I hope attracts the new but hesitant writers.

Want to build a career in writing but don’t know how? Subscribe to my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer, and take tiny steps each week to get started.

Summary

Three myths associated with building a mailing list are:

  • I need thousands of subscribers on my mailing list to succeed.
  • My work is not good enough to publish.
  • All this process to start a mailing list is too hard.

The three simple steps to start a mailing list are:

  1. Find out who your people are and what problem they are facing.
  2. Solve one of those problems and create a freebie.
  3. Share your solution with your people wherever they hang out.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

How To Create Happiness


Aristippus, an ancient Greek philosopher of 4th century BC, was the first person who put forth the idea of living a life of happiness. The pursuit of pleasure. He advocated that the goal in life should be to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, maximize your gain.

Aristippus never understood the notion that you could be in pain and yet be happy. 

How can there be happiness in pain and misery? A woman who has just given birth. A struggling writer working on a minimum wage during the day to feed his family and his book at night to fulfill his dream. Imagine their pain and misery. And yet, they are the happiest they’ll ever be.

Many people think that chasing pleasure is happiness. They’ll chase better widgets, luxurious experiences, and comfortable life thinking it will provide them the happiness they are seeking. But there is no connection between pleasure and happiness. Like there is no connection between misery and happiness.

Pleasure doesn’t always make you happy. And pain doesn’t always make you unhappy.


There is a difference between pleasure and happiness.

Pleasure is a fleeting feeling. Happiness is longer lasting.

Pleasure is a reaction. Happiness is a state of being. It comes from within you.

Pleasure can be pursued, whereas happiness ensues. You need to have a reason to which happiness can be anchored.

The evidence behind anchoring happiness

Eva Telzer and her colleagues from the psychology department of the University of Illinois conducted an experiment on teenagers. 

They posed hypothetical situations to the teenagers while they were under an fMRI scanner. The participants were said to imagine that they were given money. In some instances, they could splurge the money on themselves. While in other instances, they had to give it away to someone else. Then they tracked their brain responses.

The teenagers who had a greater brain response when they imagined splurging the money on themselves were more likely to face the risk of depression than those whose brains fired more when they imagined giving the money away.


How To Ensue Happiness?

Let me tell you the story of Jaden Hades.

Six-year-old Jaden Hades went through a kid’s worst nightmare.

Not just once but twice.

He lost his dad when he was just four years old. 

Two years later, his mom died too. 

Jaden was heartbroken. His grief is unimaginable.

Yet Jaden let that grief pull him into depths of despair like most of us do. Instead, he told his aunt, now his guardian, that he was sick and tired of seeing everyone sad all the time, and he had a plan to fix it.

Jaden asked his aunt to buy a bunch of little toys — rubber duckies, dinosaurs, spinning wheel, etc. He then took them downtown Savannah, Georgia, near where he lives, and started handing them to random people. He said he was trying to make people smile.

Jaden targeted people who weren’t smiling and turned their day around. Everyone burst into a smile. Some even hugged him.

For some people, all this was so overwhelming that they burst into crying — a six-year-old orphan, giving them a toy, expecting nothing in return, except a smile.

Jaden created his happiness from his misery.

His aunt said the whole thing had done wonders for him. “I have seen shear joy come out of this child. The more people he makes smile, the more this light shows on his face.”

Jaden said he still felt sad that his mom passed away, but he has made nearly 500 people smile. He is counting on it to be 33,000.

Jaden was not chasing pleasure; he wanted to bring a smile to other people’s faces. In the process, he created happiness for himself.


Giving leads to happiness

Maria Pagano from Case Western Reserve University was curious about why Alcoholics Anonymous gives so much emphasis to “service.” So she started tracking them and found something astounding. 

40% of alcoholics who helped other alcoholics during their recovery were successful in remaining sober for a whole year.

In contrast, the number fell to almost half when people were not helpful. Only 22% of people who did not help other alcoholics managed to remain sober for a whole year.

The study also found that 94% of alcoholics who helped others experienced lower levels of depression. 

Even if they fell off the wagon, they were generally happier.

Most people believe that being selfish and hedonistic will lead to happiness. But the opposite is true. 

Selflessness and being helpful make you happy.


The science behind selflessness

Charles Darwin suggested that our evolution of emotions is an adaptive response. Emotions have changed over time to help us survive better in our surroundings. 

Being helpful increases our chances of survival as a group. And to reinforce this trait that improves our survival, our brains make us feel fulfilled and content when we help others. 

Neurotransmitters in the brain

Here is a simplified and incomplete snapshot of different neurotransmitters in our brains:

  • Endorphins: This is a neurotransmitter that is released to hide the pain. It leaves you feeling high.
  • Dopamine: It’s released in response to anything surprising. It acts as a reward system.
  • Serotonin: Contributes to the feeling of wellbeing and happiness.
  • Oxytocin: Builds bonds of trust and makes you feel loved.

Can you guess which neurotransmitters are released when you are feeling pleasure vs. when you are feeling happiness?

Dopamine is released when you help yourself. Oxytocin is released when you help someone else. Dopamine lasts for mere milliseconds. Oxytocin lasts much longer in your system!

But because dopamine makes us feel rewarded at the moment, we crave it. And that’s why, by default, we spend our time in the pursuit of pleasure!

“Giving back is as good for you as it is for those you are helping because giving gives you purpose. When you have a purpose-driven life, you’re a happier person.” — Goldie Hawn.

Create happiness instead

In his book “Being Mortal” Atul Gawande shares the story of a nursing home in New York. They arranged for kindergarten kids to come and visit the elderly residents regularly. They also got in 2 dogs and 4 cats, and 100 birds that the residents could help take care of.

It created magic. The elderly got a new sense of meaning from interacting with kids and animals. They were generally a lot more happier. But that’s not the surprising part. The surprising part is that the number of drugs prescribed to them reduced by 50%! And deaths fell by 15% annually!

In Summary

  • Pleasure and happiness are two distinct things. While both are good to have, pleasure is fleeting while happiness is longer lasting. 
  • Unlike pleasure, happiness cannot be directly pursued. It ensues from the act of doing something meaningful.
  • You gain pleasure by helping yourself. You gain happiness by helping others. So be of service to others.

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PS: Heartfelt thanks to Ankesh Kothari and his newsletter ZenStrategies.com for all the research mentioned in this article.

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Social Media Is A Double-Edged Sword

Social Media is a double-edged sword. On one side, it provides community and friends who might never have met in real life, people who “get you” even if they live on the other side of the world.

On the other side, it can be a toxic environment and a huge time-sucking black hole engulfing hours and hours from our day.

Love it or hate it, social media is a powerful tool to build your brand and organically grow your business.

Yesterday I wrote an article Should Social Media Be A Part of Your Authorpreneur Strategy. which evoked an interesting question from Dr. Preeti Singh. She asked, “Thank you for writing this wonderful post on social media and how it is useful to use for business. So you suggest that we should be socially active always.”

Since the response is not just a one-liner, I decided to write a post about it.

When telephones started going mainstream in the 1950s, some people wouldn’t use them. There were all kinds of stories associated with them, from ghosts to health hazards.

Then came TVs in the sixties, and people wouldn’t have them in their homes because they might be harmful to the eyes. They were called the ‘idiot box.’ My own father refused to buy one because he said it would interfere with my studies. My brother and I would go to neighbors’ houses to watch whenever they were showing good movies or serials like Star Trek or Six Million Dollar Man. We bought our TV only after I passed our matriculation exams in flying colors.

In the late eighties, microwaves came, and as a pregnant mother, I was advised to avoid them because waves generated by them could be harmful to the unborn baby.

In the nineties, when everyone was into mobile phones, the big scare was that too much use would cause brain cancer. Then they were associate with traffic accidents, sleep loss and child predators.

Yet all these technologies are here and have blended with our lives.

Social Media is going through the same early push-back phase. But one thing is for sure — it is here to stay.

We need to learn how to use it well and how not to let it take over our lives.

How should you use social media well?

Like a ballerina, I would say.

Walk lightly but leave your mark.

A ballerina performs on a vast but mostly bare stage, with a simple costume, balances herself on the tips of her toes as if walking on air, and yet she makes an everlasting mark on the hearts of her viewers.

This is how I want you to be on social media.

How can you do that?

Let’s have a look.

Limit the time to be on social media

If you are thinking of using ‘growing your brand’ as an excuse to be on social media all the time reading and responding to all the rubbish people put out there, you are missing the point.

Savvy businesspeople are not the consumers on social media; they are the creators.

I only go on social media for fifteen minutes towards the end of the day, and I wouldn’t recommend you being on it for any longer. At the most, make it 15 minutes twice a day. But no more than that. Quickly scan if there is anything worth your time, leave a few comments, and get out of it within the time limit.

Don’t forget social media apps are designed to be addictive. They are based on endless scrolling. It will take you hours to be up to date with the amount of content published on them each day.

And they are strewn with advertisements.

When you feel you are trapped in the cycle of endless scrolling, think about what your end goal is.

It is to tread lightly like a ballerina and make your mark.

Spend more time on developing content.

As an authorpreneur (or entrepreneur), keep in mind, your job is to provide value to your readers. That is the only reason they will remember you and follow you because you are either solving their problems or entertaining them.

When you are on social media to build your brand, you are a creator, not a consumer.

Concentrate on creating value with your content, and you will people will recognize you and want to engage with you.

Engage with other people.

Another reason people will recognize you when you either respond to their comments or leave them a comment. In both cases, you are engaging, which is the whole point of social media — engagement.

Not only the recipients like it but social media apps like it too. They will send more connections your way and circulate your post to more people with similar interests helping you grow your network.

Know what your ultimate goal is when you are on social media.

Your ultimate goal is not just building your brand but building your mailing list.

All those contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram are no good if one day those platforms decide that they don’t like the kind of content you produce and kick you out of it.

Like Facebook did in Australia just a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t able to send the link to my newsletter to my social media followers because it had the word “news.”

Your mailing list is your ultimate tool to grow your business. Fifty subscribers on your mailing list are better than 5000 on any of the social media platforms. Because you can write to them directly and offer them your products and services.

PS: I am concentrating all my efforts on LinkedIn. At the moment, its algorithm is allowing organic growth. However, it won’t last forever, and surely, in not so distant future, it will start urging users to advertise like Facebook and Google,

I think there is a small window of time to use it to build a healthy network. I am running a live webinar course to help develop a LinkedIn strategy for writers. Find the details here.

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Want to build a career in writing but don’t know how? Subscribe to my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer, and take tiny little steps each week to get started. And have some fun along the way too. Here, have a peek before you subscribe.

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