Today is my birthday and I feel excited. A major source of my excitement comes from having wrapped up an important phase in my life. The completion of NYSC, as a Nigerian graduate, pretty much signals closing an old life chapter and opening a new one.
On Sunday, I devoured content on the internet having even traces of someone I have absolute admiration for: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It was unsurprising to find out she knew her place as a writer as early as when she was six and had began honing her craft.
Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule on exceptionality provides a useful theory to explain her awesomeness. Outliers like Chimamanda shine due to the singularity of their interest (writing is the only thing she would rather do).
Like Paul Graham, I find inclinations like this a bit perplexing. A portion of my service year went into trying to unravel this perplexity and to untangle the grip of uncertainty that comes from important life changes - like ending school and starting out in the labour market. It seemed someone out there had answers. All I had to do was find this person so as to draw out the answers that would lift the veil, clear the uncertainty and quench the fear of walking into the big wide future. Alas, I found an answer (but it wasn't the kind I wanted). Leo Babatua put it in a recent post. Quote:
No one has the answers. No one knows the best path you should take. No one has figured out the ultimate answer to your problem of fearing the future.This answer, I think, is liberating. It leaves the one choice of embracing uncertainty, revealing opportunities that might lurk within. Important life changes, such as transitioning into the labour market or simply changing jobs, open gaps of uncertainty. But they also provide opportunities for reevaluation to synthesize what worked in the past (and what didn't) so as to make smarter choices.
One of the things I admire about Ms. Adichie is her disposition as an incredibly happy person. Happiness, I hear, is the pursuit of every man. If that is the case, then, I contend Ms. Adichie has struck gold and I can/should mirror my life accordingly to yield a similar result - having a role model is always a good idea. Also, Stephen Covey dedicates a whole chapter in his book to the benefit of beginning with the end in mind.
I'm drawn to two things in my encounter with Ms. Adichie which I am going to word as follows:
*Happiness is the most important. Begin from here. Make life choices keeping this end in mind.
*Do things that will make people take you seriously.
A common conception portrays happiness as a condition characterised by the perpetual existence of pleasant emotions within the pre-dominant experience of a human being. This is wrong. This misconception leads to the search of happiness as something to be found (rather than something lived).
I doubt the existence of perpetual happiness. One simply has to be able to do things that will make the condition of feeling pleasant emotions last for extended periods. A useful idea to achieve this is practicing what Ms Adichie terms "the ethics of delayed gratification". An ethic that must be valued.
A wikipedia excerpt on delayed gratification reads:
The seminal research [Stanford Marshmallow experiment] on delayed gratification [...] was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s and 1970s at Stanford University. [...] They presented four-year-olds with a marshmallow and told the children that they had two options:
- Ring a bell at any point to summon the experimenter and eat the marshmallow, or
- Wait until the experimenter returned (about 15 minutes later), and earn two marshmallows.
The message was: "small reward now, bigger reward later." Some children broke down and ate the marshmallow, whereas others were able to delay gratification and earn the coveted two marshmallows. [...]
The children who waited longer, when re-evaluated as teenagers and adults, demonstrated a striking array of advantages over their peers. As teenagers, they had higher SAT scores, social competence, self-assuredness and self-worth, and were rated by their parents as more mature, better able to cope with stress, more likely to plan ahead, and more likely to use reason. [...]
[...] These compelling longitudinal findings converge with other studies showing a similar pattern: The ability to resist temptation early in life translates to persistent benefits across settings.Paul Graham put it in simple terms:
It [staying happy] doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period.The ethics of delayed gratification is relevant to the lad who lacks sufficient work experience in his field(s) but craves the rewards that come with accomplishment. And accomplishment only comes from doing things that matter (things that will make people take you seriously).
A universal agreement points to doing what one loves as the elixir that blends happiness into the (sometimes difficult) journey to accomplishment. Finding what one loves is a difficult topic. I don't have sufficient experience (or know how) to delve into it.
However, I am interested in the role singularity of interest plays in people who reach elite levels - like found in Ms. Adichie. I'm inclined to think that cases like hers are the exception rather than the rule. So, the rest of us must somehow manage our interests and do a world-class job in the thing(s) we choose.
In the end, as I walk into another year and commence another phase in life, I close the previous year and take with me this note: the world is ill-concerned with how one deals with uncertainty (just embrace it) or how one manages interests (just thrive), what matters is the contribution one accords the world. No one notices the (small) rewards and set backs elite achievers forego to achieve bigger rewards later. All that matters is that they cope with uncertainty and enjoy the benefits of delayed gratification that enables them to continue winning big.
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Post Author: P. W. Uduk
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Photo Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
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