GMOs, complexity, and systemic risk

There has been some good debate in a Finnish GMO-Awareness facebook group recently regarding both the pros and cons of GMOs. This has prompted me to participate as well, because I feel I have something specific to contribute to the discussion: the explanation of systemic risk.

All living organisms are complex adaptive systems individually and also on an environmental and a species level. In other words, complex adaptive systems can be nested within larger systems, and also contain smaller systems within them. A cell in itself is such a system, but so is an organ consisting of multiple cells, and an individual body consisting of multiple organs and other tissues. A collection of bodies might be called a tribe, a pack, a clan, or an organisation. In an even larger scale we can talk about species and the entire biosphere of Earth.

What all these systems have in common, among other things, is non-linearity. This means that a small parameter change in one part of the system can have cascading effects and result in vastly different outcomes in other parts of the system, or in other connected systems. A classic example of this is the flap of a butterfly in Brazil causing a tornado in Texas, as shown by Lorentz [PDF] using computational weather simulations: a minuscule change in parameters resulted in a difference between sunshine and a tornado due to non-linearity. Another example would be the way genes work. The genetic instructions for building a human body instead of that of a chimpanzee has about 4% difference, yet the outcomes are very much unlike one another, and when searching for ultimate causes that 4% difference is also underlying everything man-made that has ever come to existence and will come in the future. After all, chimpanzees are not programming computers, designing airplanes, or composing symphonies.

So what's the problem? Thanks to their complexity, interrelations and links to other systems, and non-linearity, we are utterly incapable of accurately predicting system-level risks. I will use GMOs as an example in this article, but this issue is not limited to them. What I am talking about is a property of complex adaptive systems, and therefore the same reasoning applies to all other contexts where these systems are concerned.

Changing a parameter within a system - say for example, changing a gene in a tomato to make it more resistant to a pesticide - can have effects elsewhere in the same system (a tomato), or even in other related systems (a human being eating the tomato). In fact, we have evidence of this: Dwarf wheat is a result of selective breeding and has become the dominant species globally since 1970s, as it provides a better yield than traditional wheat strains. However, what made dwarf wheat dwarfish also had an effect on the genetic structure of the grains we eat, and dwarf wheat has been linked to the growing numbers of coeliac disease and various other autoimmune conditions.

These non-linear effects can also go a long way: a worm may eat the tomato, get eaten by a bird, the bird poops on the ground, and soil bacteria eats the poop and starts dying en masse. Sounds pretty far fetched? Indeed the probability for such a chain of events to take place is extremely small - but not impossible - and that is the entire point. To test for such an effect simply cannot be done using the scientific tools we have available today. Nor would it be a feasible investment of resources to test for every conceivable small probability outcome. However, if we calculate the impact of such an event, making a further assumption that the death of soil bacteria would result in severe nutrient depletion in the soil, we would be soon facing a global food crisis.

These kinds of high-impact system-level risks would not be so scary if they were contained locally, but unfortunately the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction; towards "optimised" laboratory-grown strains with a global reach. If we discover in, say, 40 years of time that a particular GMO crop causes birth defects in human babies, it would be a tragedy if the effect was local (e.g. within a country or a state), but on a global scale it would be a catastrophe. This brings us to why GMOs cannot be compared to naturally occurring mutations within a species: The natural ones are always locally contained, and it takes generations for a mutation (or an adaptation) to spread to a population, which gives other species and the environment (i.e. other systems) time to adapt.

In the end, due to the nature of complex adaptive systems the risks we are facing are huge and we have no means to predict them. What we are doing with GMOs is effectively playing a lottery: We are staking calculable short-term benefits against the incalculable probability of a devastating negative outcome.

Where this whole GMO debate goes to a morally shady ground can be explained with the agency effect: GMOs benefit first and foremost the corporations that develop, patent, and sell them for profit. Yet they do not carry any risk for these system-level negative effects. Instead, this risk is carried by us who buy their products, and largely by the environment (which should be of everyone's responsibility). If a serious system-level issue becomes visible after a few decades, and we can confidently say that a particular GMO is the underlying cause, the developer of the GMO (who also made the most profit out of it) will not be held liable, nor do they have responsibility to compensate for the damages (if such would even be possible). This kind of environment vastly rewards risk-taking at the expense of others, and we the people end up paying the price.

Update on May 27th, 2014:

I have been asked here in the comments and on facebook about why put GMOs to a pedestal? Why is it different when compared to e.g. traditional methods of guiding the development of a species, such as selective breeding? Also, mutations taking place in nature are much more imprecise and potentially more significant than the ones done with GM techniques, so why should they be considered any less risky?

First, let me address why the risk imposed by GM is statistically and categorically different from the risks inherent in e.g. selective breeding. Naturally occurring mutations have been around for millions of years, yet life continues and as far as we can tell, these mutations in various species have not had sudden dramatic effect in the environment. If there is a statistical possibility for a mutation that has such a radical impact, the time frame of natural evolution suggests that these kinds of events have likely already happened multiple times. However, so far the only drastic change we know of regarding life on Earth has been the death of dinosaurs, and to my knowledge a natural catastrophe was the cause, not evolutionary change in some species.

As for selective breeding, it has also been around at least for tens of thousands of years, and in that time no drastic changes to the environment caused by selective breeding have happened either. In other words, we have tens of thousands of years of empirical evidence stating that this method is safe. With GM our amount of evidence can only be measured in years or decades. This creates the statistical difference between GM and the naturally occurring methods of genetic change, which affect more genes (shotgun approach) instead of the selected few as in the case of GM (scalpel approach, as one commenter eloquently put it). There is much more historical evidence suggesting that selective breeding is safe than there is for GM.

However, for all fairness I must say that selective breeding may have also become more risky than what our tens of thousands of years of empirical evidence suggests. This is because for the majority of history selective breeding has had only local impact. Now with globalisation however, the scale of impact can be much larger and happen much faster than ever before.

References:

For understanding systemic risk I recommend the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. For a short version explaining risk and fragility there is this letter, which also explains how systemic risk is fundamentally different from the classical understanding of risk (classifiable outcomes and probabilities).

As for understanding "scientific" research and possible reported beneficial effects from GMOs (this also applies to all research on medical, nutritional, and public health issues), I recommend reading Richard Feinman here, here, and here.

On designing organisations

As I was doing the literature review for my MSc thesis this summer, reading about uncertainty, I got in my head the idea that I probably should check what has been written about complexity, as those two things seemed related. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. The result was some very exciting ideas and profound changes in my thinking.

Getting myself familiar with articles by various scholars, as well as books such as Margaret Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science and Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline brought forth the notion of complex adaptive systems, and I think within this concept lies the future of how organisations should be designed in order to thrive in a business environment that is constantly changing. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Even though the management and design of organisations have evolved from the days of Scientific Management, they are arguably still rooted in the same Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm that makes us see organisations essentially as mechanistic - as opposed to human - systems. A paradigm that assumes that systems can be understood by studying their constituent parts in isolation. This is exemplified in the methods and vocabulary of organisation design; how organisations are largely treated as a collection of functions, jobs, positions, departments, hierarchies, reporting relationships etc. Static pieces of machinery.

Management of organisations, when based on the Newtonian/Cartesian principles, is nothing but an attempt to create order from chaos with the end goal of improving the production of routine outputs. This form of thinking has its roots in the production line and has since crept upon all aspects of organisations. Efficiency is the ultimate goal. Not even innovation management has succeeded in escaping the organisation as a machine. In such a clockwork system stock arrives just-in-time and production can quickly adapt to changes in demand. And anything that can cause a disturbance in that system is seen as a threat that needs to be eliminated. (6)

What is especially disturbing about this belief system - and yes, it is a belief system, nothing more - is that when taken to its logical conclusion the end result is death: A perfect mechanistic organisation has reached the point where all variation is eliminated. It is a machine that happily does what it was set out to do, always in the same way, and always with the same results. And for this to happen the people within that organisation, within that machine, have to become equally invariable parts of it.

Imagine living every day of your (working) life exactly the same way. Same routines in the morning, same tasks performed always in the same way at work, same food for lunch, same activities in the evening after work. After all, we would not want to do anything that causes variance in behaviour and performance the following day. This is not a description of life, but of death. There is movement, like in the blowing of the wind, but that does not mean the wind is alive.

I wonder how many managers can actually identify the core assumptions that lie behind the way their organisations have been designed to operate...

Luckily, however, the reality of the world we live in makes a perfect mechanistic organisation practically impossible. Well, not exactly impossible but inefficient and a poor match to its environment, leading it to be destroyed by selection pressure. Chaos, uncertainty, and unpredictability are essential characteristics of life which ensure that we never reach the state of efficient stagnation that traditional management practice secretly desires. Life itself changes and evolves, and as a result nothing will remain the same. It's just that the speed of change may vary. Many  organisations built on mechanistic principles have learned this the hard way. They are either gone or in a state of permanent decline. Entrepreneurship, incidentally, is one of the many forces contributing to the chaos in the business environment, creating selection pressures to established organisations. (7, 8)

What emerges from this line of thinking is a worldview where organisations striving to reach stability - meaning efficient production of routine outputs - will not survive the next big change in the ever-evolving environment. And this brings us back to the concept of complex adaptive systems. Instead of being designed to create order from chaos, organisations need to be designed to thrive in chaos. Not just to withstand or tolerate changes, but to actually become stronger through them. The two perspectives are fundamentally different in how they affect management, business strategy, organisation design, and the process of organising itself. (9, 10)

This is a topic I intend to focus on more carefully in the coming months, in the writings in this blog, as well as in my research. Consider this article as a sort of an introduction, or an invitation, to a journey that aims to challenge some of the very basic assumptions we have about organisations, and to discover ways to make them truly fit for this complex and continuously changing world we live in.

References:

(1) Wheatley, Margaret J. (2006). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, 3rd edition.

(2) Anderson, Philip (1999). Complexity Theory and Organization Science. Organization Science, Vol. 10, No. 3, 216-232.

(3) Senge, Peter M. (2006). The Fifth Discipline (Revised Edition), London: Random House.

(4) Arthur, W. Brian (1999). Complexity and the Economy. Science, Vol. 284, 107-109.

(5) Gell-Mann, Murray (1994). Complex Adaptive Systems. In Cowan, G., Pines, D., & Meltzer, D. (Eds.) Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality, Addison-Wesley. 17-29.

(6) Cooke-Davies, T., Cicmil, S., Crawford, L., & Richardson, K. (2007). We're Not In Kansas Anymore, Toto: Mapping the Strange Landscape of Complexity Theory, and Its Relationship to Project Management. Project Management Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, 50-61.

(7) Sarasvathy, Saras D., Dew, N., Read, S., & Wiltbank, R. (2008). Designing Organizations that Design Environments: Lessons from Entrepreneurial Expertise. Organization Studies, 29(03), 331-350.

(8) Sarasvathy, S. D., & Dew, N. (2005). Entrepreneurial logics for a technology of foolishness. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 21, 385-406.

(9) Eisenhardt, K. M., & Brown, S. L. (1998). Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos. Long Range Planning, Vol. 31, No. 5, 786-789.

(10) Drazin, R., & Sandelands, L. (1992). Autogenesis: A Perspective on the Process of Organizing. Organization Science, Vol. 3, No. 2, 230-249.

How to manage uncertainty in innovative projects

A week ago I finished the first full draft of my MSc thesis. The title is Managing uncertainty in innovative projects: The experimentation-driven approach. My basic argument is that uncertainty is essential for innovation - the more uncertain your project outcome is from the get-go, the more chances you have for creating something truly novel. Contrast this to a project where the outcome is a predefined target of e.g. increasing production line energy efficiency by 10%. Unfortunately, the way most projects are managed - even those that aim for novelty and innovation - the focus is on eliminating uncertainty, or simply ignoring its existence in the first place. (1)

Perhaps most interestingly, however, my research shows that even seemingly simple and mundane projects may contain uncertainties that cannot be planned for (i.e. they cannot be predicted beforehand), and those uncertainties can be very significant for the outcome of the project. I studied how an experimentation-driven approach to managing innovative projects can be used to uncover these uncertainties, as well as validate our existing claims and assumptions regarding the idea we are pursuing. The result? It works very well indeed.

In short, the experimentation-driven approach starts with an idea you want to develop, identifying the key assumptions regarding that idea, and coming up with creative ways to test those assumptions in practice. Key assumptions are those that can either make or break the idea. In the case of Zappos, which has grown to become the largest online shoe store, the key assumption in the beginning was "are customers willing to buy shoes online, without seeing and trying them on before purchase?" Where a business school educated MBA graduate would have approached this topic by spending hour after hour doing market research, crafting a business plan - which in itself is a fictitious document describing a reality that is definitely not going to happen - and carefully calculating cash flow potential, the founder of Zappos did something else: He went to a local shoe store, asked the owner if he could photograph the shoes and put those for sale online. If someone would make a purchase, he would then buy the shoes himself from the store and ship them to the customer. No IT systems, no warehouses, no marketing. Just a rudimentary website that helped validate the key assumption, without which there would be no business. And in the process he also learned a thing or two about what kind of payment options to offer, how to handle returns, how to do customer service and so on. (2, 3)

The basic assumption behind experimentation-driven innovation is that uncertainties cannot be resolved by planning. As a method it shifts the focus to learning as much as possible about your idea, quickly, while keeping costs low. Furthermore, when experimentation is the main tool, what you learn will be based on experience, not on assumptions. In other words, you get actual proof about the validity of your idea. This is especially true when your idea has anything to do with human behaviour as opposed to something that is purely mechanistic. For example, in one of the cases I studied a simple idea aimed to increase motivation and decision-making of employees lead also to increases in productivity, teamwork, trust between workers and the supervisors, and perhaps most surprisingly got the workers to proactively start taking ownership of and improving the internal work processes in the team. It might be too far off to say that none of these effects could not have been seen beforehand by thorough planning, but even so, without actually experimenting the idea there would have been little proof about them.

In fact, quite often it is simply less costly and much faster to do a hands-on experiment to see what happens instead of planning all the possible scenarios inside one's head. As my boss in the MIND research group has a habit of saying; "show, don't tell."

Perhaps the most interesting thing that has happened in the field of entrepreneurship research in the past 15 years is the work done by Saras D Sarasvathy from University of Virginia and her colleagues. She studied how expert entrepreneurs - meaning people who have built businesses with annual sales between $200 million and $6.5 billion - approach starting a new venture. And guess what? They pretty much use approaches similar to the experimentation-driven method, focusing on what they can do with their existing means, using low-cost ways to validate their key assumptions, and getting the first customers and other stakeholders on-board. In other words, they focus on acting instead of planning, control instead of prediction, and without risking what they cannot afford to lose. (4, 5)

It is becoming something of a cliche to say that the world is getting more and more complex, and that uncertainty is similarly increasing as a result. However, the advent of Big Data has not made us much better at uncovering uncertainties, especially in emerging contexts where there might not exist any data. This calls for a model of rational decision-making that is not rooted in the Newtonian worldview of clear cause-and-effect relationships and linear thinking. When it comes to creating something innovative, the focus needs to shift from emphasis on prediction to emphasis on control - meaning that you put your energy into what you can do, here and now, to develop your ideas and keeping options open so when uncertainties inevitably do happen, you are able to learn from them and adapt your approach.

The future is constantly being created and shaped by human action. It does not exist 'out there' to be predicted. And this means it is up to you to help create the kind of future you want.

References:

(1) Kline S. J., & Rosenberg N. (1986). An Overview of Innovation. In Landau, R., & Rosenberg, N. (Eds.) The Positive Sum Strategy: Harnessing Technology for Economic Growth, Washington: National Academy Press, 275-305.

(2) Sykes, H. B., & Dunham, D. (1995). Critical assumption planning: A practical tool for managing business development risk. Journal of Business Venturing, 10, 413-424.

(3) Hsieh, Tony (2010). Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. New York: Business Plus.

(4) Sarasvathy, Saras D. (2008). Effectuation: elements of entrepreneurial expertise. Cheltenham (UK): Edward Elgar Publishing.

(5) Dew, N., Sarasvathy, S., Read, S., & Wiltbank, R. (2009). Affordable loss: behavioral economic aspects of the plunge decision. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 2, 105-126.

Positive psychology and public policy

In recent days there has been talk in Finland about whether or not the unemployed should be forced to take a 1.5 hour commute if that's what it takes to get a job. I find this to be a fantastic example of short-sightedness. It's hard to believe that those kinds of jobs would pay that well, which means that if this policy is adopted the resulting increase in GDP will be minuscule at best.

The article above highlights how much it would cost for a person to adopt that kind of commute; between 138-673 € a month in public transportation, depending on where you live. Assuming, of course, that public transportation is a viable option, which quite often might not be the case in such a vast and sparsely populated country. In the worst case you might end up with less money by having to carry the financial burdens of the long commute, than by staying at home and living on welfare.

And what about the secondary effects of long commutes? For example, there is ample evidence of the negative impact of a long commute when it comes to overall life satisfaction and well-being. We are not talking simply about the potential detrimental health effects of sitting in a car or train for 2-3 hours a day, but also the impact it has on psychological well-being. Assuming an 8-hour workday, 8 hours to get adequate sleep, and 3 hours a day spent commuting, it leaves 5 hours of time for oneself. 1-2 hours are easily spent in the morning routines and another hour for nighttime routines. That leaves 2-3 hours a day for hobbies, cooking, buying groceries, cleaning, spending time with the family etc., so is it a wonder that married couples in which one partner has a longer than 45 minute commute are 40% more likely to divorce?

Now imagine a family that also has small children. I seriously doubt that people who would be affected by this policy can afford a nanny, or a stay-at-home parent. So the end result would be a great number of children growing up mostly without their parents. Will a small increase in GDP be enough to cover the long term costs such a policy might create? There is enough talk about the alienation of the Finnish youth as it is, and this would simply create a new structure contributing to the problem.

So what has positive psychology to do with any of this?

In English the Scandinavian countries are called welfare states, but in the Finnish language we use the word hyvinvointi, which actually does not translate as welfare, but as well-being. The difference is profound. The idea of a welfare state is to provide basic necessities and opportunities for everyone, but a well-being state would ideally go deeper than that. Its guiding principle would be to increase the well-being of all the citizens of the nation.

Yet it seems to me that the way public policy is made in Finland is missing this point. The above example of long commutes is just one of many. It baffles me that despite there being extensive amounts of high-quality scientific research on human happiness and flourishing, it seems to be completely ignored by those responsible for creating policy.

Around 300 BC the Greek philosopher Epicurus proposed three items that form the basic conditions for a happy life: friendship, freedom, and thought. His argument was that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, even though we are financially poor, we will never be truly unhappy. (1)

The importance of social relationships shows time and again in modern scientific studies. It has become a cliche that money does not buy happiness, and it seems that even in the case of extremely poor individuals having good relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners predicts greater life satisfaction. The capacity of money to bring happiness is present already in small salaries, and it will not rise with the largest. Having more money does not, of course, in itself make us less happy or satisfied with our lives, but neither does it increase our potential to a happier life. (1, 2)

Other factors that have been found important for overall life satisfaction and well-being are also not far off from Epicurean thinking. For example; working for one's  goals, having frequent positive experiences, experiencing mental pleasures, and being involved in "flow" activities. (3)

We have the knowledge to create better and more meaningful lives in large scale. We know what the building blocks are. It is simply a matter of asking "what kind of impact will this have on happiness and well-being of people" when making policy - not just focusing on financial metrics - and letting the principle of maximising the potential for happiness for as many citizens as possible to guide the decision-making. This is not important simply because it would lead towards a better society, but it would also help capitalise on the benefits to productivity, health, and creativity that happiness can bring. For example, reducing or eliminating VAT* and making it affordable to eat out in restaurants would likely increase happiness, as eating out is a social activity and would lead not just to more people eating out, but also to more frequent social interactions with their friends. (4)

*This, by the way, is another thing I do not understand: Why is there a value-added tax on food? Does that mean there is some added value in simply being able to survive? That the basic condition of a human being is death, or non-existence?

References:

(1) De Botton, Alain (2000). The Consolations of Philosophy. London: Penguin Books.

(2) Diener, M. L., & McGavran, M. B. D. (2008). What Makes People Happy?In: Eid, M., & Larsen R. J. (Eds.) The Science of Subjective Well-Being, Guilford Press, Ch. 17.

(3) Diener, Ed (2000). Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index. American Psychologist, Vol. 55, No. 1, 34-43.

(4) Achor, Shawn (2011). The Happiness Advantage. [Kindle Edition] Virgin Digital.

What 12-year old kids can teach you about innovation

This spring I have been taking couple university courses on the Coursera online education platform. One was about gamification, or how to use concepts that are more familiar to us from different kinds of games in non-game contexts, in order to e.g. improve business performance or job satisfaction. The other course was about innovation, and one of the reading materials included this gem of a list of advise for aspiring innovators:

• Start simple

• Work on things that you like

• If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around

• Don't be afraid to experiment

• Find a friend to work with, share ideas!

• It's OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea)

• Keep your ideas in a sketch book

• Build, take apart, rebuild

• Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it

Local kids playing ball at Lake Toba, Indonesia.

The first two lines, "Start simple" & "Work on things that you like" serve one main purpose: minimising friction. Often the hardest part is to get going, and the simpler you can make a task appear the less internal resistance you will face. Also, when you get to work on something you enjoy, the more motivated you will be. It stops feeling like work and more like fun, and as you probably know you don't need to spend precious willpower to force yourself to have fun.

The next two lines are about finding direction and refining your goal. "If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around" is helpful to keep in mind when you have only a vague idea of what you want to reach. Or if you are trying to solve a problem, the solution might not make itself apparent at first. In that situation fiddling around, experimenting, and trying new things is essential to keep you moving. You can't stumble on new discoveries, solutions and ideas by standing still.

Creativity and innovation are inherently social activities. The myth of a lone genius has been crushed long since. Furthermore, if you "Find a friend to work with, share ideas!" you will not only learn from each other, but also have more fun in the process. Jon Krakauer had it right when he wrote in Into the Wild that "Happiness [is] only real when shared".

"It's OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea)" might sound deranged in this crazy CISPA and RIAA paranoia induced world we live in, but in reality not a single innovation has been born in isolation. We are unconsciously drawing knowledge from everything we see, hear, and touch. The Wright brothers wouldn't have created the first engine-powered airplane without learning from non-motored flyers as well as from the flight of birds. Google was not the first Internet search engine, but it improved upon the ones that came before and the world ended up better because of it.

"Keep your ideas in a sketch book" highlights the importance of documentation. Trying to remember everything is unreliable and inefficient. It takes away capacity from our already limited working memory, which can handle only a couple different simultaneous thoughts. By externalising the memory function you will have more brainpower for what matters; creative thinking. Furthermore, having your ideas outside your head helps tremendously with sharing and discussing them with others.

Innovation is, if anything, an iterative process. "Build, take apart, rebuild" and learn from your failures is the fastest way to move from an idea to the final solution. When each iteration contributes to the outcome by teaching you something new about your idea, your confidence about the final solution will also increase. Contrast this to an approach where you would come up with an idea that looks good on paper, and then implement it as-is without any testing or experimentation. Like communism.

Last but not least, innovation is about perseverance in the face of failure. As is said, it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. "Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it" and eventually you will come up with the winning concept. On the other hand, though, it is also vitally important to know when you should quit and change approach or work on another idea. Seth Godin wrote a whole book about this. However, more often people quit too early than too late.

You could read hundreds of research papers and books about innovation, but this list by 12-year old schoolchildren is easier to remember and already covers the most important parts. Do not overthink innovation. Just start doing and learn on the way.

References:

Resnick, Mitchel (2007). All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten. Presented at Creativity & Cognition conference, June 2007.

Maybe pursuing a career is not such a good idea after all

In an earlier post I wrote about the distinctions between a job, a career, and a calling. In any given profession it is possible to find people evenly distributed among the three different classifications.

To summarise, if you see your work as a job, your focus is on financial rewards and necessity rather than pleasure or fulfilment. A job in itself is unlikely a major positive part of your life. If you consider yourself having a career, you are focused on advancement and what comes with it: power over others, status, higher paycheck, and other similar benefits. A calling, on the other hand, is characterised by work that you consider socially useful, and derive enjoyment and fulfilment from. (1)

In this post I want to focus specifically on the notion of careers. Open up Brazen Careerist - a website aimed at 20-somethings and recent graduates looking for career advice - and you see headlines like "Why Success Can be Dangerous for Your Career," "Careers That Work Best If You Have Multiple Passions," "Is Gen Y Delusional About How to Have a Successful Career," "Why Being Selfish is the Best Way to Get Ahead in Your Career" etc.

If the website is to be believed, having a career is something good, something we all should aspire to. But why? I mean really; why should you concentrate on building a career in the first place?

The way I see it, a career is means to an end. Or at least it should be. But many people I know have turned their careers into end goals. They have bought into the notion that success and happiness in life is related to their ranking in an arbitrary man-made hierarchy: a CEO is better than a vice-president, a vice-president is better than a general manager, a general manager is better than a department lead, and so on. Not to forget that the one with the most toys in the end wins.

When you are single-mindedly focused on your career, the things that are more likely to actually make life worth living become secondary. Epicurus identified friendship, freedom (from the whims and requirements posed on us by others and the norms of the society), and thought (analysed life) to be the pillars of a life well lived. There are no luxuries or prestigious positions in that list: "...expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don't understand. Objects mimic in material dimension what we require in psychological one. ... We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends." (2)

Now some 2200 years after the times of Epicurus, the positive psychology movement has come up with scientific evidence of what makes people flourish. The list includes things such as involvement in flow activities, experiencing mental pleasures, experiencing renewable physical pleasures, close social relationships, pursuing goals that are intrinsically motivated, and using and growing one's character strengths. (3, 4)

These are not exactly new findings. Many of the questions concerning how to live a good life have been answered hundreds of years ago. What the scientific method is giving us now is validation. For example, the last two items on the above list can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, according to whom true happiness was identifying one's virtues, cultivating them, and living in accordance with them. (5)

Advancement is an integral part in career-thinking. If you are not moving forward, you do not have a career. Most companies are pretty decent at estimating how well you can handle a higher-level job before giving you a promotion, but only you can tell whether or not you will actually enjoy it. It is not rare to hear of people who could have moved forward in their careers, but realised that it would come at a cost in their happiness. Pursuing a career is not the same as pursuing life satisfaction or subjective well-being, and we should stop pretending it is.

My intent with this article is not to say that all careers are automatically bad, but to get you question your assumptions about what a career is and why you should pursue one. It can be a source of great satisfaction, but also a source of great distress. To make it the former rather than the latter, it should be in accordance to the aspects of living a good life. Here are some helpful questions:

• Do you feel in flow (the state where you are so immersed in what you do that you lose sense of time, and even yourself) at work? How often?

• How often do you get positive feelings at work, compared to negative ones? The ratio should not be less than 3 positive feelings for each negative one, and the higher the better.

• Are you close with your coworkers? Do you also cultivate friendship outside the workplace?

• Are you able to use your strengths and pursue your interests in your work?

Lastly, there is ample evidence showing that those who enjoy extraordinary career success are usually the people who derive great life satisfaction from the work they do: "They willfully migrate toward positions that fit their natural strengths and passions and where they can work with people they like and respect." (6) Overall psychological well-being has been found to be much better predictor of job performance than job satisfaction, and one should also consider the groundbreaking study lead by Sonja Lyubomirsky that showed that in the long-term, career success follows from happiness and well-being, but success alone is not enough to cause lasting happiness. (7, 8)

References:

(1) Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C. R., Rozin, P, & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work. Journal of Research in Personality, Vol. 31, 21-33.

(2) de Botton, Alain (2000) The Consolations of Philosophy. Penguin Books.

(3) Diener, Ed (2000). Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index. American Psychologist, Vol. 55, No. 1, 34-43.

(4) Hodges, T. D., & Clifton, D. O. (2004). Strengths-Based Development in Practice. In: Linley, P. A., Joseph, S., & Seligman, M. E. P., ed. (2004). Positive Psychology in Practice. Wiley, 1 edition. Ch. 16.

(5) Peterson, Christopher (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology. [Kindle edition] Oxford University Press.

(6) Citrin, J. M., & Smith, R. A. (2003). The Five Patterns of Extraordinary Careers. [Kindle edition] Crown Business; 1 edition.

(7) Wright, Thomas A., Cropanzano, R. (2000). Psychological Well-Being and Job Satisfaction as Predictors of Job Performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 1, 84-94.

(8) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803– 855.

The next management paradigm?

Fast Company published an article in November 2012 about today's chaotic and paradoxical business environment, and the kind of leaders who best thrive there. It said:

Twenty years ago, a management professor by the name of Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science. It was prescient then; it is even more eye-opening now. Her premise: Organizations and society have been structured to match our understanding of the natural world, which goes back to the 17th-century ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton famously posited theories of cause and effect, and referred to our world as a machine - a closed system (set in place by the Great Watchmaker). In Newtonian physics, there is no greater goal than stability. That scientific conclusion helped us to embrace hierarchy and one-size-fits-all models. And our businesses have indeed been constructed for efficiency. Following the example of Henry Ford, we have extended our manufacturing prowess into shipping and logistics. We have used technology to enhance effectiveness, to track data and mine it for new refinements. (1)

Even though the focus areas of management have evolved during the past century from Taylor's Scientific Management to Drucker's refinement of the word 'management' itself, to the rise of business strategy, and to leadership development, we are still essentially operating under the same Newtonian worldview described in Wheatley's book. Organizations strive to achieve stability. The cause-and-effect worldview implies that there are logical relationships between things that happen, relationships that can be studied, and as we understand them better, also predicted.

The famous Hawthorne studies and Henry Ford's production line are great examples of Scientific Management in practice: Change working conditions, one small thing at a time, and measure changes in productivity. If productivity rises or falls, it can be assumed to do so because of the change that was done. Therefore, after many enough experiments it is theoretically possible to find what the optimal working conditions are. This reasoning makes logical sense, but only if we hold on to the Newtonian worldview of clear cause-and-effect relationships. And as it turned out also in the Hawthorne studies, when systems involving human actors are being investigated the arrows of causality tend to get complex and much less obvious than initially assumed: productivity increases did not happen because of dimmer or brighter lighting, but due to other less-obvious factors. (2)

It could be argued that the role of management - in a broad sense - is to optimize predictable factors affecting the company's performance. Consequently, the most spectacular failures of management can be found wherever these predictions have failed. Examples include the domino effect that started from the US housing bubble and lead to the 2008 global financial crisis, and Nokia's decline from the position of the world's #1 mobile phone maker. (3)

Despite these occasional hurdles, the 20th century has seen management triumph. As organizations have optimized their production, logistics, billing etc., productivity and consequently GDP per capita has increased globally across the board. What has not increased, however, is people's subjective well-being. We are more productive, more affluent, live longer lives and have more opportunities than ever before in history. Yet all of this has had little impact on how happy we are with our lives. (4)

The failure of management to increase the quality of subjective well-being is one thing, but the real reason I am predicting that the current paradigm of management practice has reached its end is this: unlimited optimization is not possible. This follows logically from the Newtonian worldview. You can only increase the speed of a production line so much. Sooner or later the limits of physics will create an insurmountable barrier. You can count the fastest route to transport goods from a factory to a store, but there are limits to the speed in which you can travel that distance.

The problem - or the opportunity - is that we have become very good at measuring things. Most large businesses with their armies of MBAs are perfectly capable of smart handling of all the essential functions of a business. They are following best practices, which devalues the best practice thinking itself. It's difficult to claim to be "best" when every competitor is doing exactly what you are. Organizations are becoming more and more similar: they run the same enterprise resource planning systems, such as Oracle, SAP, or i2, use the same consultancies for advise, and outsource their non-core activities to the same service providers. Earlier it was relatively easy to compete by having e.g. superior logistics, marketing, production, and whatnot, but where does one find sustainable competitive advantage now that more or less all major companies are very good at all of these things?

So far technology has been the salvation for management. Faster computers, more sophisticated algorithms, new production methods and materials are making it possible to gain incremental benefits. Unfortunately the competition is always quick to catch up with these new developments. Being the first one to adopt a new technology is expensive and comes with certain risks. It might provide a fleeting competitive advantage, but is likely to evaporate when the technology comes more robust and affordable and gets adopted by other companies. When I was studying in Yonsei University, South Korea, the locals jokingly called Samsung's strategy as "exploiting the second-mover advantage". Let someone else carry the first-mover risks but be fast to follow.

The real challenge facing the management practice is to step away from the drag of pursuing never-ending incremental improvements. You might disagree with me about how this should be done, but I believe that the next logical place where significant competitive advantage can be found is within the individual employees of the organization. What this means in practice is getting people in the kind of positions where they can take full advantage of their strengths, talents, skills and interests. Organizations need to:

1. help employees know themselves better; what their strengths and interests are;

2. assist employees in crafting their jobs so as to take advantage of these strengths and interests, and;

3. focus on finding an answer to one particular question for each employee: "What is needed for work to be a fulfilling part of your life?"

Companies such as Valve, Netflix and SAS (the software company, not the airline) are great examples of this kind of thinking in practice, and the results speak for themselves. For example, the 13 000 employee SAS has had 37 consecutive years of record earnings. When the company stopped receiving orders as the 2008 financial crisis hit, its CEO announced that none of its employees was in risk of being laid off. People stopped worrying, got back to doing their jobs, and the company had record earnings again in 2009. How many companies you know that have done the same when things get tough? (5)

This, however, is only the starting point. The current management practice has its roots in getting uneducated people to work efficiently on a production-line driven organization. It was built on top of assumptions due to which it is inherently incapable of accounting for individual differences that we as people have. Same can be said about the way organizations are structured. What I call for is an organization model and management practice that is built with a focus on the individual at its heart. This does not make measures and traditional management approaches obsolete, but it will lead to the next growth spurt. Something the current management practice is unlikely to achieve. An individual-centric view provides fertile ground for creation of significant and sustainable competitive advantage.

There is of course also the human aspect of it. Simply put, helping people to know themselves better and take advantage of their individuality is the right thing to do... If we want to improve the human condition on this planet; not just material wealth but also subjective well-being. (6)

Besides anecdotal examples, research is starting to pile up showing that the companies adopting these approaches are leapfrogging ahead of their competitors. For example, in a study of 308 798 employees across 51 companies, work units scoring above the median on the statement "At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day" have 44% higher probability of success on customer loyalty and employee retention, and 38% higher probability of success on productivity measures. In the UK it was found that each pound invested in employee well-being and motivation received a nine-fold return. This is in stark contrast with what seems to be considered normal today: over half of the Americans hating their jobs. (5, 7, 8)

What do you think?

References:

(1) Safian, Robert (2012). Secrets of the Flux Leader. Fast Company, November 2012, iPad Edition.

(2) Kiechel, Walter III (2012). The Management Century. Harvard Business Review, November 2012, 63-75.

(3) Silver, Nate (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't [Audio book]. Penguin Audio.

(4) Rosling, Hans (2007). New insights on poverty. Ted2007 [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html [Accessed 13 February 2013].

(5) Crowley, Mark C. (2013). How SAS Became The World's Best Place To Work. Fast Company. Available at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3004953/how-sas-became-worlds-best-place-work [Accessed 13 February 2013].

(6) Hodges, T. D., & Clifton, D. O. (2004). Strengths-Based Development in Practice. In: Linley, P. A., Joseph, S., & Seligman, M. E. P., ed. (2004). Positive Psychology in Practice. Wiley, 1 edition. Ch. 16.

(7) Harter, J. K., Schmidt, E L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 87, No. 2, 268-279.

(8) Knapp, M., McDaid, D., & Parsonage, M. (Eds.). (2011). Mental Health Promotion and Mental Illness Prevention: The Economic Case. London: Department of Health.

Who controls your life?

This is a topic I have been wanting to write about for a long time, but it has been difficult to gather my thoughts and more importantly find the resolve required. Perhaps because this is something that makes me want to scream inside. Here goes.

Do you feel unhappy about some aspect of your life? Not in the perfect relationship you dreamt about when you were young, but hey the guy/girl you've settled with is not that bad. Maybe you drift through workdays in a state of semi-consciousness, hoping to lay low enough not to raise any unwanted attention while browsing celebrity gossip sites. Sure, it's not the job you wanted. Not even the profession you secretly desired, but your parents got you convinced that you'd be better off studying law instead of breeding miniature pigs. One day you realize that those love handles are starting to really show, but what's a girl to do? After all, you spend good 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill in the local gym and always eat your vegetables.

Guess what, no one is going to solve those problems for you, or otherwise change your life for the better.

Step 1

You have to take complete no-bullshit no-excuses ownership of who you are and where you are in your life. You have to man up. Not happy with the job? It's your fault, your responsibility. You've made some bad decisions. Not happy with your guy? Nor the ones before him? You have bad taste. Your fault. Always turning off the lights when having sex because you don't want him to see you naked? Your body, your fault, your responsibility.

You cannot change your life and fix things unless you are ready to take full, absolute, complete responsibility of your actions. The past and future ones alike. What you need is naked honesty. Because only by going through this necessary step will you be able to truly own your problems. Ownership leads to control, and control means you can finally start changing things.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this part. Stop. The. Fucking. Excuses. You don't eat Ben & Jerry's in evenings, slouched in front of the tv, because "it was a hard day at work." You eat that shit because you choose to do so. Relationships, jobs, friends etc., they are all choices. If you are not satisfied with something, it's time to choose again. If you are not the one who controls what those choices are, then who does? If you are not the one living your life, then who is? How can you call yourself a free individual if you won't accept the responsibility that comes with freedom?

You can take control of your life if you want to, but before that you need to take responsibility of every single aspect of it; all the decisions, actions, and their outcomes. No one else can do that for you. To imagine otherwise is to be a puppet, a subject to other people's machinations. Do you think the company you work for has your best interests in mind? Or your spouse? Or your parents? Fuck no. They may believe so and even get you convinced, but they are not you. They can't possibly know what it's like to wake up in your skin every day, or what really goes on inside your head.

Step 2

Start making some decisions. After you have accepted raw, unfiltered, naked responsibility, it's time to identify what you want to change. What aspect of your life is in most desperate need of improvement? Don't try to do everything at once. This is big stuff, so it's better to proceed one issue at a time.

After you've acquired your target, you need to decide how to tackle it. What will you start doing differently?

Don't like your job? Start scouting for a new one, but this time actually spend some time figuring out what your heart desires to do. Unhappy in your relationship? You have two options: you can leave, or you can work on it and see if it can be turned into a happy one. What doesn't work is sitting on your ass and expecting things to change on their own. Or repeat doing the same things that got you where you are now. This is about taking responsibility of your life, remember? And if you indeed eat your vegetables and spend 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill but are not getting the results you want, your method is obviously not working. As Einstein said; "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Step 3

Do your research. I have to admit that this step might be something that is more suited to a geek like me. However, I have found it to be extremely effective in multiple domains. What it means is that instead of making just any decision, you strive to make an informed one. Not sure what you want to do for a living? Read a couple career guides, find out what your Myers-Briggs personality type is, and see if you can identify what your values are (you know, things like integrity, learning, love, joy, honesty etc. that guide your behaviour in both conscious and unconscious level).

I was never able to lose weight following the "eat less exercise more" adage, but after I eliminated sugar and grains from my diet and started lifting weights instead of spending endless hours doing cardio on the "fat burning zone", I got in the best shape of my life in a matter of months. This probably would not have happened unless I had started questioning my assumptions and studying nutrition and exercise more in detail.

Change tends to be difficult as it is. Don't make it more difficult by using inferior methods.

Step 4

Act. Decisions alone are worth nothing unless they are followed by actual changes in your behaviour. This won't be easy. The single best book I have read about the topic is Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. Read it if you are serious about improving your life. Nevertheless, here is a quick summary about how to improve the odds of succeeding in a behaviour change.

1. Make sure you really understand what your goal is, and more importantly why you want to achieve it. Is your goal really to hit the gym 4 times a week, or is there a deeper goal, e.g. the desire to lose weight, and you simply assume that going to the gym is the best strategy for achieving that goal? The goal should also be your own. Not something someone else tells you should do. Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it.

2. Knowing something isn't enough to make change happen. Every single person knows that smoking is unhealthy, stupid, and pointless, yet they keep doing it. What you need is a catalyst that propels the change forward. This is not something you know or learn, but something you feel. Try to find the feeling that keeps you motivated to change.

3. In most cases it is easier to break down the change into small steps, and tackle one step at a time. This builds momentum and confidence that you can actually achieve what you set out to do. Want to eat healthier? Don't overhaul your entire diet at once, but start by fixing your breakfast. After it has become a routine and takes no conscious effort, move on to the lunch, and so on.*

4. Behaviour is largely environmental. We see something that triggers a familiar thought process and we act automatically. The more often we repeat a behaviour, the more ingrained it becomes. For example, if you often buy some last-minute candy at a check-out counter in the local grocery, the script for that behaviour gets triggered every time you are at a check-out counter, and it takes willpower to overcome it. Willpower, as we know, is a limited resource and when it gets depleted the impulses take over. The trick is to tweak your environment in such a manner that it prevents undesired behaviour while supporting desired ones. Eating healthy is a lot easier when you don't have cupboards full of beer, candy, cookies, and chips. Even small environmental changes can have a surprisingly large effect.

5. One way to create a trigger for the desired behaviour is to determine beforehand when, where, and how you will behave in the new way: "When I am in the coffee shop, sitting opposite to my date, I will smile a lot and be genuinely interested about his life. I will also listen to everything he says, giving my complete attention." Visualising yourself behaving in a situation has a similar effect on your brain than if you actually did it in real life. This will make the desired behaviour more natural, familiar, and easier to trigger when the actual situation occurs.

* As I said, this works in most cases. If, for example, you have a gluten intolerance this kind of approach is just going to keep you feeling miserable. Sometimes a zero-tolerance approach is a necessity. 

In the end, you decide. Do you want to cruise through your days more or less on an autopilot, as a bystander to whom life just happens, or do you have the guts to take control of it? Let me know in the comments.

How to find your calling

One of my oldest friends turned 30 last weekend. As a happy coincidence, I met more than a few people in the birthday party who I have known for a long time, but haven't seen in person for years. We are all in our late 20s, and one thing kept coming up again and again as we talked: almost everyone had changed - or was thinking of changing - the direction of their life.

A guy I hadn't met in eight years had graduated with a Master's Degree from a technical university, only to find out that working in front of a computer was not really suited for him. Now he is in medical school with a year and a half to go. Another friend had been doing odd jobs, even graduated as an electrician, but is now studying fish industry in a university.

I have a similar story. I spent 5 years (give or take, as some of that was part-time) as an IT consultant at Accenture, despite realizing after the first year or so that working on enterprise IT systems is not really what I would consider my calling. I didn't even know what my calling was, just that it wasn't IT. And by calling I mean what I find interesting enough to be intrinsically motivated to do in the long-term, preferably for a living.

It took me years to find something to do that I am genuinely excited about. The important point is, though, that I did not just stumble on it. I was purposefully searching for it and keeping my eyes open for anything that might hint me to the right direction.

I am a reader, so reading became my method of discovery. As I was trying to find out what it is that I want to do, I read career guides. I read books on personal development. I read books on business, entrepreneurship, philosophy... And I started to discover certain themes that interest me. I could not pinpoint one particular thing or profession I wanted to do, but I was able to identify elements that an ideal profession should largely consist of.

Some of these elements came from what I was reading and fascinated about, and some from my past experiences. For example, I don't know why, but I am genuinely interested in the human aspects of business; organizational cultures, workplace dynamics, and entrepreneurship. I love to learn and get bored easily when the learning, or growth, stops. I get excited when I have a chance to speak in public, and doing something creative makes me feel alive.

During the process of discovery I also forayed into some entirely different directions. After having a minor role in the Korean TV drama Athena, and knowing my interest in photography, I entertained the possibility of making my way into film industry. However, before making any huge life-decisions I bought some books on cinematography, directing, and screenwriting to get an idea of what working in the film industry would be like. I still find certain aspects of it interesting, but eventually I decided it is not the best fit for me. I came to similar conclusions about designing videogames. Although, as a byproduct of learning more about how games work, I have become very much interested in gamification; especially how game mechanics could be used in management and business contexts.

One guy who was in the same class with me in elementary school told me in the party that he had been training to become a machinist. However, what he really wanted to do was to work with computers, and was trying to get into a university to study programming. The thing is though, as I explained to him, that in all but few cases you actually need a degree to do something. If programming is what you want to do, then what are you waiting for? You don't need to study it in a university in order to get a permission to do it. If that's what you really want, then search online for some programming tutorials and just start learning. Start a personal project that helps you learn and keeps you motivated, and just start doing.

As it is uncertain that my friend will get into the university, and considering the classes won't start until fall, I asked him to imagine if he'd spend just couple hours every day learning to program. How much he would already know after a month, 6 months, a year..? He would have something as a proof of his skills and something concrete that would help him land a job.

Assuming of course that he actually wants to do what he told me. Maybe he is still somewhat uncertain. In that case getting into a university and graduating four years later into a wrong profession is a huge price to pay. A price that could have been avoided by experimenting the work beforehand. You can do this kind of experimentation as a purely mental exercise, visualizing different aspects of the work. Or even better, you can actually "simulate" the work - in this case by sitting in front of a computer and actually doing some programming.

There seems to be this quest that calls for many of my generation; we are trying to discover where our talents and interests meet, and how to make a living of it. For me it took over three years of active searching and in the end the answer was nothing I would have expected it to be. All I had was hope that someday I will find it, and the knowledge that at least I am constantly doing something about it, instead of just sitting on my ass hoping for something to happen.

No one else can figure out the answer for you. It is your life and your responsibility.

Knowledge and Conviction

In the past couple years I've slowly come to the conclusion that the more you know about something, the more difficult it becomes to talk about it with people who are unfamiliar with the topic. Positive psychology is such a thing for me and so is nutrition. When talking about them I will easily go into the specifics - usually the ones I've studied most recently - and fail to communicate on the broader level that would make more sense to the person I'm talking with.

This problem is emphasized by the fact that usually the more you know about something, the less black and white your perception becomes. When it comes to complex systems like human behavior or metabolism I could have given you much clearer answers two or three years ago than I can now. Now it's all entangled in 'ifs' and 'on the other hands' and 'howevers'. Let's take low-carbohydrate diet and weight loss as an example:

Low-carbohydrate diet will promote weight loss because 1) it reduces insulin secretion, and 2) it reduces the amount of triglycerides your body can produce. This leads to less storage of fat and fat tissue releasing fatty acids into bloodstream to be used for energy. Pretty clear so far. But now we forgot about gut health. Eating foods that irritate gut - and carbs have little to do with this - might lead to foreign molecules getting into bloodstream, causing an inflammatory response and in worst case some really nasty autoimmune problems. Inflammation also has an impact on metabolism. And we haven't talked about leptins yet. Damn those pesky hormones... So it's not just about insulin and its effects on fat storage, or the effects of systematic inflammation, but we also should consider the effect that leptins have on satiety. Leptin resistance leads you to feel hungry even though you just had a large meal...

Here is my completely unscientific representation of how much you know about a topic is related to how convinced you are about the extent of your knowledge.

The more you learn, the more mechanisms you identify that all play a role in a complex system, and the less certain you become about how the cause-and-effect chains actually work. It gets complicated quickly and makes accounting for every possible factor and variable a tough job. And when you are continuously learning new things, you are also coming up with more questions that remain unanswered. As a consequence the limits of your knowledge and understanding become painfully obvious.

It's interesting to listen to the low-carbohydrate diet discussions in the locker room at my gym, or in a bus, or in a restaurant. It's immediately evident that almost everyone has gotten their information from mainstream media. There's no intelligent questioning of the principles behind the dietary approach, there's no discussion about the underlying biological mechanisms or causality, and there definitely is no exploration of alternative explanations to why it works beyond "it's the carbs, maaan."

The biggest problem is that when your primary source of information is the highly digested piece in a newspaper, tabloid, or a women's (or men's) magazine, it's easy to become disillusioned about the extent of your knowledge. After all, shouldn't the newspaper article contain everything an average Joe needs to know about the topic? Isn't it the job of the journalists to find and communicate the truth in any matter? (1)

If only it was so easy. Reality is always more complex than a newspaper article. It's easy to blindly trust an expert who claims to know the true path, packages it in a simple and appealing box, and discredits anyone who is not a true believer. When asked for specifics or presented with contradictory evidence, the expert can always hide behind  complex jargon and confusion and smoke and mirrors. He knows the jargon so he must be credible, right? And his solution was so... reasonable and pretty and everything! (2)

In proper scientific inquiry there is always substantial disagreement amongst experts. Who do you trust? Who do you believe in? Even in scientific communities the elusive "truth" often becomes a matter of belief, not of knowledge or facts. Even Albert Einstein, one of the brightest minds of recent history, spent years and years during the later stages of his career trying to unsuccessfully refute some of the more disturbing aspects of quantum mechanics, simply because - and despite all evidence to the contrary - he refused to believe them to be true. (3)

Here is how you can identify someone who has actually taken the time to dive into a topic, and has the courage to tell the truth about the extent of her knowledge: She will not give you yes or no answers. That person operates in the gray area between yes and no, and is likely to start with "it depends" when you ask her something. Be vary of those who claim to have the definite answers and paint you a picture of black and white world, no matter how tempting that world might be in its beauty and simplicity. (3)

The black and white world is full of statements like:

• The fat you eat goes straight into your thighs/belly/wherever it is you don't want it.

• If you eat cholesterol-rich foods, you will end up with high cholesterol.

• Human beings are rational decision-makers.

The real world is messy, ambiguous and sometimes counterintuitive. Welcome to the real world.

References:

(1) To get some idea about the "evidence" behind media headlines in the field of medicine, watch these TED talks:

Goldacre, Ben (2011). Battling bad science. TEDGlobal 2011, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html [Accessed 21 November 2012].

Goldacre, Ben (2012). What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe. TEDMED 2012, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html [Accessed 21 November 2012].

(2) For some hair-raising reading on this topic, check: Tavris, C., & Aronson, E. (2008). Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. Pinter & Martin Ltd. (Buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk).

(3) Isaacson, Walter (2007). Einstein: His Life and Universe. [Audible edition, Unabridged] Simon & Schuster Audio. 

Give in to the system (and watch your productivity skyrocket)

In my previous life as a consultant I would often get to work, open my laptop, pour a cup of coffee and start thinking about what is that I should actually start doing. As I was slowly sipping the coffee I might have opened my email, browsed a few news sites or blogs, and by the time the coffee was getting cold I'd be nowhere nearer to getting any real work done. Sounds familiar?

It was a rare occasion when I had actually determined beforehand to dedicate the next morning for a particular task or achieving a goal. Even when I knew that one of the best things for productivity is to always have one important thing you want to get done for each day, and start working on it first thing in the morning. No email, no news sites, no distractions. That way you feel that at least you've accomplished something even if the rest of the day is completely unproductive.

So why was it so hard to do this? As it turns out, with an array of tasks which to choose from, I had hard time choosing anything. My experience of Paradox of Choice in action. Also, as I now know decision-making is depleting the same very limited mental resource that is needed to focus on a task and stick to it. So I was already shooting myself in the foot by leaving the decision-making for the morning. (1)

Another problem was that quite often I actually did not know what I should do. I had a list of deliverables, I knew the big picture project plan, and I knew what needed to happen at a given time. However, many times I wasn't able to see the steps leading to those deliverables. And in face of uncertainty it often is easier to just read email and focus on the trivial stuff than to start thinking about how to deal with what is important. 

Let the system guide you

A bit over a month ago Johnny B. Truant, one of my favorite bloggers, published a 116-page novel titled Fat Vampire (Yes, that's an affiliate link. You should totally read the book. It's hilarious.). It had taken him less than a month to get the idea for the book, write the whole thing, edit it, and publish it. By anyone's standards I think that can be considered to be fairly productive. Shortly after the publication he shared some of his tips and tricks on how to do it. This article focuses on one of them: using a calendar.

I have known for quite some time that one good way to be productive is to schedule tasks that need to get done. In the same way you'd schedule a meeting from 9 to 11 am, you could reserve that time slot in your calendar for working on a particular task or project. One of the best ways to be productive is to work in 25 or 50 minute intervals, followed by 5-10 minute breaks, and having a longer 30 minute break every two hours. This way you won't run out of steam mid-day, but also have energy left for personal stuff after you get home from work. In other words, you should schedule work in 30 and 60 minute blocks. (2)

Inspired by Johnny's article I decided to experiment with combining these methods. Here's my calendar from last week (the green color stands for personal stuff, blue is work/study related):

What's going on here is that every night I check my to-do list and create a schedule for the next day. The tasks are scheduled for 30 or 60 minute time slots, which reminds me to take those 5-10 minute breaks. I use a timer when I work because skipping a break is detrimental for long-term productivity. Lastly, I schedule longer breaks such as playing on xbox, taking a nap or watching an episode of South Park (humor boosts creativity!).

The reason I do this for one day at a time -  as opposed to e.g. creating a schedule for the whole week at once - is that meetings are called, deadlines change, and so do my own energy levels. For example, besides writing this article and a mandatory class my schedule for today is almost empty. I have worked a lot during the past few days, including the weekend, and haven't really had time to relax. Yesterday I noticed that my performance started to suffer because of it, so today is a take-it-easy day.

If you need to accomplish a task with a tight deadline, it makes sense to schedule time slots for that task for the whole week. This is to ensure that no one steals that time from you with (usually) pointless meetings - a common annoyance in corporate environments where people have access to your calendar. 

The system is your friend

During the four weeks I have used this method my productivity has skyrocketed. It might be partly because having an hourly schedule is so similar to how all of us have lived our lives ever since the 1st grade. We already have a lot of conditioning to work this way. There are also more specific benefits and advantages:

1. Say goodbye to procrastination. When you have a schedule and you have already decided the day before that e.g. from 9 to 10am you will work on that sales pitch or that presentation, you don't end up browsing email or checking facebook news feed. When the clock hits 9 you put a timer to alert at 9:50 and you get going.

2. Be meticulous when it comes to breaks. Like all the things that need to get done, you have also scheduled your downtime. It's one thing to know on a conscious level that you should take breaks, but another to actually disconnect from work when you're in a good flow. Having a break pre-scheduled removes the sense of guilt you might normally feel about "wasting" time, while also helping to maintain high-level performance in the long-term.

3. Stop wasting your willpower. Did you know that at work Barack Obama wears only blue or gray suits? He does this in order to conserve mental energy: “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make, … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” When you have a schedule you don't need to decide what to do. You have already decided. (3)

4. Gain control of your time. A major cause of work-related stress is the feeling of not having control about how you spend your time. Creating a schedule is exactly the opposite of that. It is one example of a problem-based coping strategy, which can be very powerful when it comes to dealing with stress. Even if you keep getting e.g. many meeting invitations, this method allows you to grab some control back to yourself. And if you need to regain more time for actual work, you can schedule the work time in advance to ensure that no one steals it from you. No more working after-hours or when everyone else in the family has gone to sleep. (4)

Obviously every now and then something comes up during the day that causes changes to your beautifully crafted schedule. Life can't be planned perfectly in advance. When this happens, you at least have a visual representation of what you intended to do with the rest of your day. It becomes easier to prioritize. You can quickly check what you can still do, and what you should move to the next day. This is more liberating than it is restricting, and most importantly it helps you stay in control in spite of surprises.

I mentioned earlier that one big problem used to be that sometimes I didn't know exactly what to do, and that resulted in procrastination and postponing the important tasks. When it comes to dealing with ambiguity, one solution is to schedule time for simply sitting down with pen and paper, making plans, dividing the task into smaller components, creating a list of things you need to find out before proceeding, and planning on how you intent to gain that knowledge etc.

Lastly, by using this system it becomes surprisingly easy to make progress even when a goal seems huge, distant, and uncertain. Many times a project such as writing a novel or creating a new product causes the inner resistance to go on overdrive, filling your head with all the reasons why the project won't succeed. As a result, you give up before even getting started. When you adapt to the approach of working towards a goal in predetermined slots of time, and measure progress by the amount of work done - as opposed to the amount of tasks finished - suddenly the goal doesn't seem that hard anymore.

I for one will certainly continue working using this method. If you want to try it out, or have experience with something similar, I'd love to hear about it in the comments! :)

References:

(1) Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

(2) Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press; 1 edition.

(3) Vanity Fair: Barack Obama to Michael Lewis on a Presidential Loss of Freedom: “You Don’t Get Used to It—At Least, I Don’t” - online article.

(4) Drnovšek, M., Örtqvist, D., & Wincent, J. (2010). The effectiveness of coping strategies used by entrepreneurs and their impact on personal well-being and venture performance. Journal of Economics and Business, Vol. 28, 193-220.

Happiness Now: Are successful people happier, or happy people more successful?

Money cannot buy happiness, says the old adage. Indeed, a study after another indicates that beyond a certain level of income, money stops being a predictor for happiness and overall well-being. What this means in practice is that money is something similar to a hygiene factor. After your basic monetary needs are met, the added value from having more money starts to diminish. Rapidly.

My fiancee feeding the deer in Nara, Japan. Guaranteed to make anyone happy.

Similar conclusions can be drawn from Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Money can be used to satisfy the physiological and safety needs, but the further up you go on the pyramid, the less benefit you get from having money. And if you think money will buy you, for example, the admiration of others, you clearly haven't been to Finland where most likely all you're going to get is envy and belittlement.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The basic premise of the hierarchy is that you need to first satisfy the lower level needs before moving up the pyramid.

You could argue that having a lot of money means you are successful in life, and being successful should at least make you confident. In a sense this holds true, but confidence is context-specific (1). Meaning that you might be highly confident, for example, as a salesman at work, but still utterly insecure about how you should go about raising your children or how to talk to the opposite sex. Money does not buy parenting skills.

There is a widespread myth in the western world that goes like this: If I'm successful then I'll be happy. The problem with this approach is that "every time your brain has a success, you just change the goalpost of what success looks like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we've done is we've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society." (2)

The obvious takeaway at this point is that if you want to pursue happiness, you need to focus on things, activities and people who actually make you happy. However, there's more to this, and after this quite long introduction we are starting to get to the real point: what if happiness is actually a cause of success?

There starts to be plenty of scientific literature supporting the notion that happy individuals are successful in multiple life domains, including work, marriage, friendship, income, performance, health, income level etc., but are they happy because they are successful in those domains, or are they successful because they are happy?

First of all, there is some evidence that positive emotions make us push our cognitive boundaries. In the absence of fear, stress, or anxiety it is easier and safer to go toward and beyond the limits of our comfort zones. For example, interest creates the urge to explore, joy creates the urge to play - to experiment new things - and confidence gives courage to undertake more difficult challenges. The result of these experiences is personal growth. An increase in your cognitive, emotional and physical resources. (3)

When engaged in play, one may be doing something physical, building motor skills, or maybe something creative that strengthens the ability to see multiple solutions to problems. Interest will expand one's general and specific knowledge. These resources are not fleeting, but build on top of each other and therefore continue expanding the self. However, if you are constantly stressed or anxious the last thing you probably want to do is try new things. To venture further outside your comfort zone.

Because happy people, by definition, experience frequent positive moods, they have a greater likelihood of working actively toward new goals while experiencing those moods. They are also in possession of past skills and resources, which have been built over time during previous pleasant moods. (4)

The important question still remains whether or not happiness actually precedes success, or have the happy individuals encountered first a period of successes which has then launched this upward spiral of happiness and the resulting expansion of personal resources?

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California and her colleagues set out to analyze 225 different studies in order to find out which comes first: happiness or success. The longitudinal evidence supporting the notion that happiness indeed is a cause of success includes findings such as happy people getting consistently better evaluations at work from their supervisors and being more likely to increase their income over time, among others.

More experimental evidence where subjects have been primed to feel happy show that happiness makes them more sociable, better at collaborating with others, more helpful towards others, and perform better at complex tasks that require decision-making, attention, or are complex by nature. Happiness also increases confidence, perseverance in difficult tasks, and helps to restore willpower after being depleted by temptation. For a comprehensive review of the evidence I recommend reading the whole study. (4)

For me at least this is a game-changer. We as a society have been operating under the wrong paradigm. Instead of focusing on and worrying about success, achievement and competition, we should be thinking about how to increase the number of times we feel positive moods in our daily lives. Success and achievement seem to follow naturally.

However, does this mean then that those of us who are naturally more disposed to negative emotions are lost causes? That we are doomed for eternity to be in the shadow of the happy people? Fortunately not. If you read my previous article you should know that there are fairly simple methods to boosting happiness and inducing positive moods in the short term. For example, just watching this video will have a positive impact on your mood. Not a bad way to spend a minute, considering the benefits.

There is also long-term evidence that interventions such as writing down three good things one is grateful for every day and why those things have happened, have provided lasting increases in happiness (5). So has meditation, using one's character strengths in new ways, and displays of gratitude toward others.

References:

(1) Bandura, Albert (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, Vol. 84, No. 2, 191-215.

(2) Achor, Shawn (2011). The happy secret to better work. TEDxBloomington, [video online]. Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html [Accessed 22 October 2012].

(3) Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, Vol. 56, No. 3, 218-226.

(4) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 131, No. 6, 803– 855.

(5) Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, Vol. 60, No. 5, 410– 421.

Increase your productivity... by playing Angry Birds!

Looking back the few years since I started getting interested in how to change human behavior, how to be productive, and in general how our brains work, I can confidently say that I have gotten the most done when I have used a method of working in focused and uninterrupted blocks of time. At first I experimented with working for 50 minutes at a time, followed by a 10 minute break, and a longer 30 minute break every 2 hours. Lately I've found the Pomodoro technique with its shorter 25 minute bursts of work, followed by 5 minute breaks, quite efficient. Especially when having to do something that is difficult to get started with.

However, one major difficulty with this kind of periodization is how to really detach yourself from the task at hand when it's time for a break. How to, e.g., take your mind off cognitive work and do something else. I have tried listening to music, doing a few push-ups, a bit of housecleaning etc., but these activities tend to require so little attention that most of the time work creeps into consciousness anyway. This is not good, as it effectively diminishes the restorative power of the break.

Another issue is that 5-10 minutes is too short a time to really do much. Go to the toilet and drink a glass of water and the time's pretty much up.

Luckily, I think I have found the solution to really improve the potential for recovery during those breaks, and it's called Angry Birds*. Here's why:

1) Angry Birds takes your mind off work

Brain is like a muscle. When extorted it gets fatigued. As with self-control and the ability to make decisions, there are limitations to the capacity to do demanding cognitive processing. Like a car using fuel to run, you also have limited resources that become depleted during intense concentration and thinking. (1, 3)

One way to ensure that you won't run out of steam in the middle of a workday is to track your use of time, and within steady intervals switch from work-mode to recovery-mode. The most important thing in successfully doing this is to push all work and task-related thoughts away.

The beauty of Angry Birds is that even if you only have 5 minutes for a break, it's enough to finish couple levels. More importantly,  Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Where's My Water, Cut the Rope, and other similar mobile games, are quick to start and require just the right amount of thinking to take your conscious thoughts away from work, but not so much that they become a further drain to your limited mental resources.

2) Short breaks are equally, or more important for recovery, than long ones

There is some rather interesting evidence showing that even short breaks have significant positive effects when used in a way that takes your mind off the task at hand and make you feel good and, dare I say, happier.

Doctors who were primed to feel positive emotions  showed almost 3 times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state. They also made accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. (2)

In another study students were primed to feel stress by giving them a task to make a difficult speech under time-pressure, and told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated by their peers. The subjects were then shown one of three short films; a neutral, sad, or a positive film. Those who were shown the positive film for just couple minutes recovered from the physiological effects of stress 3 times faster than those who saw the sad film, and 2 times faster than those in the neural condition. (3)

One more argument in support of short breaks is the finding that if a resource becomes severely depleted, it falls to a so-called "Burnout Range." When that happens, otherwise reliable restorative sources tend to provide significantly less restorative effect, and otherwise insignificant sources of depletion will cause significant resource losses. So take your short breaks now so you don't end up completely non-functional in the long run. (4)

3) Your subconscious mind will not stop working

An article in Harvard Business Review reported couple weeks ago about a study where participants had to make a complex decision. There were four cars from which to choose from. Each was described by 12 different attributes, and participants had to pick one that was the best match for multiple specified wants and needs. Only one of the fours cars was the "right" choice, having twice as many positive than negative attributes.

As stated in the article: "One group had to make a choice immediately. These people didn't do very well at optimizing their decision. A second group had time to try to consciously solve the problem. Their choices weren't much better. A third group were told the problem, then given a distracter task to do first — something that lightly held their conscious attention but allowed their non-conscious to do more work. This group did significantly better than either of the other groups at selecting the optimum car for their overall needs."

The real kicker was that the distracter task was no longer than two minutes, but it seems that even two minutes is enough to significantly boost your problem-solving skills.

There you go! Don't worry about time wasted, but squeeze in a few minutes of Angry Birds once an hour and you'll not only keep your cognitive performance at a higher level throughout the day, but also feel happier and more energized for it.

References:

(1) Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Self-Control as Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 3, 774-789.

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 5, 1252– 1265.

(2) Achor, Shawn (2011). The Happiness Advantage. [Kindle Edition] Virgin Digital.

(3) Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 3, 300-319.

(4) Greenblatt, Edy (2002). Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining. Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 31, No. 2, 177-193.

* None of the links in this article are affiliated. These referrals are my own recommendations, and I do not get any compensation for making them.

Create a calling, not a career

You can either have a job, a career, or a calling.

Fifty years ago a job would have been fine. You sell your time to an enterprise and get compensation for it. You can then spend the money in activities outside the workplace and find enjoyment and meaning for your life there.

For some it is not enough to have a job. They want a career. And by definition a career is something that is fluid. If it starts to stagnate it's not a career anymore. Career and rat race are synonymous. They are both characterized by the endless pursuit of increased pay, prestige, status, and advancement within the corporate hierarchy. If you try to find meaning for your life through a career, it only works as long as you can do better than the people you compare yourself against. Good luck with that.

Then there is a calling. You work for the sake of fulfillment that the work itself brings. You are not after financial rewards or a promotion, but instead find meaning in the actual work itself. In the daily grind. In getting your hands dirty. In doing the work.

If you have a job, it is nothing but a means to an end. A way to make money. A career might make you more engaged with the work you do, but only as long as you are able to achieve the rewards, positions, power and status that may or may not come. There can only be so many people at the upper levels of a pyramid.

But if you have a calling, then the actual work itself is enriching and meaningful. It becomes your main focus instead of leisure or relationships outside the office.

The empowering thing is that at least to some extent you can create this meaning yourself. You can turn a job or a career into a calling. Think of a doctor who memorizes the names of every patient and shows care by paying them personal visits in the ward even when it's not required. Or a manager who takes a different subordinate for a lunch every day to give some individual coaching.

A calling is not a job description. It is a deeper meaning that people can find or create, and then proceed to do despite what the job description says. It is a bout making a larger contribution to the wider world. A world that exists outside specific job roles, to-do lists or performance goals.

It is your job to turn work into a calling - if you so choose - but it is the job of the organization to support this behavior. It can either respond to it in positive ways, creating more possibilities, or inhibit such actions from occurring in the future.

And why wouldn't an organization support it? There is scientific evidence that groups with more people who consider their work a calling perform better in multiple aspects, and even increase the performance of other individuals for whom the work necessarily is not a calling.

So what of groups where the majority consists of career-oriented people? The results are a complete opposite. Something to consider the next time you decide what kind of people to hire.

Act the way you want to be

Sokcho - Shot with Nikon D90, 10mm, f8, 1/50, ISO 200

Here's a photo that I shot with my Nikon D90 and a wide-angle lens in January 2011. It was taken in a town called Sokcho, on the east coast of South Korea. Last night I spent a good 90 minutes or so working on it first in Lightroom, then in Photoshop. Why? I'm not making any money with it. It does not have a higher purpose. It's not going to make me famous. In fact, I'm fairly certain it will have no impact at all on my life - or yours - so why spend all that time? After all, I could have just posted it online as  it came out of the camera without any of this extra effort.

One answer to that question is that I am proud of my work. Granted, I'm not a professional but I hold myself to a certain quality, and if I don't live up to that expectation it is me who suffers the most. I can cheat others but never myself. I want to look at the picture I have created and say that it is done according to my best ability. If I publish something that I know I can improve with my current set of skills, it always comes back haunting me later.

Steven Pressfield, in his brilliant book The War of Art talks about becoming pro. He does not tell you how to do it, but he argues that if you don't first start acting and behaving like a pro, it's unlikely that you will ever become one. "Act the way you want to feel" said a happiness researcher.

Pressfield is an acclaimed author, so for him being a pro meant writing an hour after hour every single day, even when he hadn't yet published anything and there was no guarantee that he ever would. For me it means having certain standards when it comes to the photos I publish. More lately it has also started to mean that I rarely leave the house without a camera with me.

However, perhaps the most important reason for spending last night immersed in this image was that for those 90 minutes I was engaged, in a state of flow, and generally enjoying myself. I was creating and time lost its meaning. This, I think, is worth pursuing. What have you done to feel the same?

Left: after post-processing - Right: straight out of camera

A day in the life of...

Backstory: the Paleo movement is building its profile here in Finland as well. We have a new torchbearer in the form of Helsinki Paleo website, as well as a podcast run by the masterminds Jaakko Savolahti and Olli Sovijärvi. Comparisons to The Paleo Solution podcast by Robb Wolf are inevitable, and I'm quite sure it has been a significant force inspiring these two swashbucklers to start their own project :)

January kicked in with a lot of Paleo lifestyle challenges by Jaakko and Juha, and this article functions as my entry to the contest titled as "Päivän paleoruokavalio." We Finns love long, complex words (try pronouncing epäjärjestelmällisyydellänsäkäänköhän) but in short it means "Today's Paleo Diet."

So here goes; what went into my belly and when in the course of a cold Finnish Saturday on January 28th. 

The day starts at 11 am with a 4-egg omelet, as well as dates wrapped in bacon and roasted in 150 degrees for 8 minutes. I also had some halloum cheese as I'm not trying to be 100% dairy-free. Normally I fast about 16 hours between dinner and the first meal of the day, but today I broke my fast after mere 14 hours.

Since the "breakfast" came so late there's really no need for lunch. Instead, I have a bowl of chicken coconut soup with some tubers and cashew nuts around 4:45 pm. These are leftovers from Friday's dinner. Normally my snacks include e.g. boiled eggs, or apples covered in roasted pecans with a dash of coconut cream. However, this particular time I was fairly hungry after a push press and CrossFit Football workout.

In general my biggest meals are the combined breakfast/lunch and dinner. This time was no exception. My girlfriend baked a hefty cut of salmon, sprinkled with parmesan cheese. A green salad with cuts of seaweed and farmer's potatoes on the side, fruits for dessert. And what would life be without a few vices? Red wine, coffee, and dark chocolate are mine.

Yes, eating like this might take a bit more effort compared to munching on sandwiches, but the benefits to your health, wellbeing, overall energy levels, and performance far outweigh them. I have always been fairly resilient and able to eat pretty much anything without much problems (except for weight gain). However, since eliminating grains and legumes from her diet, my girlfriend has had a reduction in migraine attacks from 2-4 / week to 2-4 / month. Another friend's ulcerative colitis went into remission under the same protocol. Anecdotal? Yes, but also logical if you dig a bit deeper into the causes of autoimmune disease.

Oh, and let me know if you want some recipes :)

How to take advantage of your commutes and save dozens of days a year

I work wherever my clients are. This year I've had it easy: door-to-door commute takes about 30 minutes and I only have to take one subway. While working on my previous project it took easily 40-50 minutes by tram and train, as well as quite a bit of walking to get from home to the client office.

Let's do some math: Assuming I'd go to the office 5 days a week (hardly unrealistic for anyone with a regular job), 48 weeks a year (daddy needs his vacation!), and commute 60 minutes daily (30 minutes back and forth), that equals 240 hours of which about 1/3 is spent walking and the remaining sitting in a subway.

That equals 30 eight hour workdays wasted every year - if I didn't make use of that time.

I read. Since elementary school I have spent the bus drives nose glued to books. Granted, those books were mostly fiction. Yet I hated idle time. I kept reading all the way to my first couple years as a professional. At some point the Pratchett's and King's and Herbert's just changed to local newspapers.

That was until I figured out that reading those newspapers was almost complete waste of time. The problem with news is that 99% of the time they are not actionable; your life will be exactly the same before and after reading them. Another issue is that most news tend to be negative. If the first thing you do in the morning is read about war, famine and depression, what kind of mood do you think it sets for the rest of your day?

Before you panic and choke on your pretzel, let me assure you that avoiding news does not make you ignorant. If something really important is going on you WILL hear about it. Maybe from your friends or co-workers, or simply by looking at the headlines when passing a newsstand, or from Facebook statuses and Twitter feeds. Then you can act on that information if you want to.

So if you shouldn't read news during commutes, then what? I am by no means against reading a good book or informative blog posts so that the time is not completely wasted, but I think there's an even better way to take advantage of the void that would otherwise exist between work/school and home: educational audio.

Listening to something is obviously even more relevant to those of you who drive to work. Reading while driving is generally a bad idea. However, even if you walk or use public transportation this can save you a lot of time.

Remember when I mentioned in the beginning that of the 1 hour I spend commuting each day 2/3 are spent on subway. The remaining 20 minutes I am on my feet. Reading while walking is rather difficult, but listening while walking isn't.

Now that we have established that taking advantage of good audio content is one of the most effective ways to utilize the commuting time here are three ways to get you started. 

1. Audio books

A respectful number of books are already available in audio format and I don't think I know anyone who wouldn't be carrying a mobile phone or an MP3 player capable of playing them.

However, there is one caveat: audio seems to work more naturally with works of fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the storytelling traditions that have been part of humanity for thousands of years. On the other hand, I am currently listening to Wheat Belly and thanks to smooth writing and a very good narrator it has been a pure pleasure so far.

I'd also recommend taking advantage of sites like Audible where you can listen to a sample of each audio book before purchasing it. It's best to check for yourself whether or not a book is worthwhile getting as audio instead of text. 

2. Podcasts

Despite the name you don't need an iPod to enjoy audio podcasts. They are simply "radio shows" that can be downloaded and listened to whenever you want. iTunes Store is a great tool for searching and subscribing to podcasts but there are also many that accompany a blog or a website, and can be downloaded directly from there. Unlike most audio books, there is a great number of quality podcasts that are completely free of charge.

During the past few months I consumed about 100 episodes of The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf which has significantly increased my knowledge in nutrition, health, and exercise. That's more than 100 hours of free, effortless education on a subject that greatly interests me. Definitely not wasted time!

Another great show for the health nuts is The Healthy Skeptic (the show is currently ongoing a name change, so my apologies if it will be Skeptical Health Detective or something else by the time you are reading this) and there are podcasts on almost any subject imaginable, so I'm sure you will find something interesting! 

3. iTunesU

This might be a somewhat lesser known feature of iTunes Store, but there is a whole section devoted to lectures and other material published by top universities and educational institutions. And did I say that most, if not all, of it is free?

How are you taking advantage of time spent between home and work? Please share your tips in the comments! Also, if you know of good podcasts or non-fiction audio books - no matter what the topic is - let me know!

This is what we eat: 10 quick and easy Paleo meals plus two desserts!

WARNING: Reading this article may make you hungry!

Preparing meals that are both tasty and healthy is as easy as it gets. I definitely don't want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, so almost everything I make has to be ready fast. People who never cook think it takes a lot of time to prepare a meal, but that is not the case. Pretty much everything in this article takes less than 15 minutes to prepare - with the exception of e.g. oven-baked sweet potato that has to be cooked for about 45 minutes, but then again it takes only a minute to cut and season it, and then you can go watch an episode of House while waiting for it to cook.

These meals are something we normally eat for dinner. I rarely eat breakfast. For lunch I usually go to a restaurant but I try to make food choices that are compliant with the Paleo approach. The point is not to be neurotic about food, but to choose things that are nutritious and unlikely to irritate the gut.

I will not go into too much detail explaining how to cook these dishes. Let the pictures speak for themselves. If you are uncertain about how to prepare something, please leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

1. Turkey, Sweet Potato and Salad: Turkey was cooked in butter on a frying pan, and the sweet potato was cut in half, seasoned with pepper, chili and cinnamon, and put into a 200 degree (celsius) oven for 45 minutes. This makes the skin come off easy.

2. Salmon Omelet: I always cook the veggies first for a bit before adding the eggs into the mix. Smoked salmon and spices are added last.

3. Salmon and Veggies: This is probably one of the best meals you could eat when it comes to nutrition. Take or leave the cashew nuts. We have salmon, sweet potato, plenty of veggies, and salad to boot.

4. Salmon, Egg and Potato: I do love my salmon and eggs. This dish should be pretty self-explanatory :)

5. Paleo Feast: Occasionally we do cook something a bit more special. This time it was a fresh salad mixed with some cooked vegetables, sweet potato discs, and on the forefront you have roast lamb. And I have nothing against a glass of red wine every now and then.

6. Beef and tuna: I know this dish isn't much of a looker, but it's rather tasty nevertheless when seasoned smartly. I fried organic minced beef, canned tuna and red onion, and made a small fresh salad on the side.

7. Goat Cheese Steaks: This time the minced beef was mixed with a raw egg and some spices on a bowl, shaped into steaks and fried on butter. Goat cheese is a great addition and tends to be less problematic than regular cheese. Vegetables were steamed.

8. The mix-and-match meal: This meal is pretty much all over the place, and is probably following a heavy workout considering the amount of food on the plate: hamburger steaks, goat cheese, sweet potato, mushroom, eggs, avocado, and some salad.

9. Coconut Curry Chicken: One of my favorite meals! Coconut is just an awesome source of good fat, and combined with curry and chili makes a heavenly spice mix for chicken and turkey. Add that mixture on top of some steamed vegetables and you're good to go!

10. Chicken and Veggies: I think we used a sweet chili sauce with this one, which is tasty but not necessarily a good choice due to it containing vegetable oils. A better choice would be to make the sauce yourself using fresh ingredients. Chicken was baked in an oven and we added a few almonds for texture.

11. Berries and Dark Chocolate: This... is... delicious! Blueberries combined with melted dark chocolate is heavenly! We also added a layer of raspberries in the middle and some coconut flakes for color.

12. Baked fruit: You can use many different fruits with this dish, but our favorites are apples and pears, chopped to pieces and seasoned with cinnamon. Put all that on a ceramic bowl, add some almond crunch and honey, and bake for 20 minutes. Enjoy with coconut cream or vanilla sauce if you're feeling particularly decadent :)

That's it! I hope you enjoyed this article, and if you have any good recipes let me know about them!

The Supermarket Meditation

During the past week or so I have been entertaining the thought that if something requires industrial or chemical processing to make it edible, it simply will not be healthy nor nutritious. It is easy to say this of packaged foods, sweets, cookies, soft drinks etc. and it also applies well with things like soy products, cereal and margarine. So far I have not been able to think of anything that would contradict this "rule." Can you?

Photo by: Tara Whitsitt

On another note, I have been very eager to start reading more philosophy of late. I am currently finishing The Code of the Samurai with works of Seneca coming up next. I also happen to have a book called Less Is More which made it to my Best Books of 2009 list and contains hundreds of quotations and thoughts about simplicity, minimalism, and conscious living. I was leafing through it earlier today and discovered the following piece from 1972 called The Supermarket Meditation by Theodore Roszak. I think it rings very much true even today.

Those who anguish over a starving mankind on the easy assumption that there just is not enough land and resources to feed the hungry might do well to pay a special kind of visit to their local supermarket. Not to shop, but to observe and to meditate on what they see before them and have always taken for granted. How much of the world's land and labor was wasted producing the tobacco, the coffee, the tea, the refined cane sugars, the polished rice, the ice creams, the candies, the cookies, the soft drinks, the thousand and one non-nutritional luxuries one finds there? The grains that become liquor, the fruits and vegetables that lost all their food value going into cans and jars full of syrups and condiments, the potatoes and corn that became various kinds of chips, crackles, crunchies, and yum-yums, the cereals that became breakfast novelties less nourishing (as a matter of scientific fact) than the boxes they are packed in, the wheat that became white breads and pastry flours... How many forests perished to package these non-foods? How many resources went into transporting and processing them? (And the less nutrition, the more processing.) How much skilled energy went into advertising and merchandising them? There they stand in our markets, row upon row, aisle upon aisle of nutritional zero, gaily boxed and packed, and costing those fancy prices we then gripe about as the high cost of living.

It is out of such routine extravagances that the technocracy weaves its spell over our allegiance... and then assures us we are the hope of the world.

What do you think? Having to live without coffee and tea would make me a sad boy, but other than that I have to agree with Mr. Roszak. It is extremely ironic how much effort humankind has put into destroying itself. We do not call them diseases of civilization for no reason.

The short and sweet guide to cooking Paleo

This article is mainly aimed at my friends in Finland. For someone who wants to switch to Paleo style of eating it might be daunting at first to figure out what to prepare for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. In my kitchen we rarely use any recipes, but instead mix and match few basic ingredients to prepare multiple different kinds of dishes. Therefore this article will also focus on basic foods and how to prepare them.

Our formula for larger meals (lunch and dinner) is very simple. We typically take one major protein source and combine it with vegetables, tubers, and salad. Here's what you can do: 

Protein

Salmon is relatively inexpensive and tasty, so it is the fish we use the most. We cook our salmon fillets either in an oven (225 degrees Celsius, 12 minutes) or on a frying pan (2-3 minutes / side). Throw in salt and pepper for taste, and squeeze some lime juice for extra flavor.

Turkey salad. Now I got hungry. Photo by: FotoosVanRobin

Minced beef can be cooked as it is on a frying pan, or you can make meatballs and hamburger steaks. Just add 1 raw egg for each 300-400 grams of meat, mix it in a bowl, throw in some spices such as pepper and rosemary, and shape them as you like. Cook either in the oven or on the frying pan.

Chicken or turkey fillets are easily prepared on a frying pan with some spices. One of my favorite recipes is to chop the meat into pieces, fry it, and when it starts to get ready throw in lots of curry, chili, and coconut cream.

Lamb has become our favorite this summer. It is very tender, tastes awesome and costs less than good beef steak. Cook some roast lamb on a frying pan, 2-3 minutes on both sides, throw in salt and pepper, put the lamb on a ceramic skillet, cover with aluminum foil and put the skillet to an oven for 10-12 minutes. You can spend that time getting ready to have an orgasm in your mouth. 

Vegetables and tubers

We have two basic methods that we use 95% of the time when cooking veggies: steaming and baking. Most of the stuff can be cooked either way.

Sweet potatoes and yams are tasty and especially good when eaten after a workout since they contain quite a bit of starch and can therefore help in recovery. The quickest way to prepare them is to simply cut the whole thing in half so you end up with two "boats". Cook them for 40-45 minutes in a 200 degree oven and you'll find them soft, tasty, and the skin comes off easily.

Another, a little more laborious, way to cook them is to first peel the skin, then cut the it in slices, and throw the slices in an oven for about 20 minutes. Our go-to spice mix for these is pepper, chili, cinnamon and a bit of butter or olive oil.

As for the other tubers and veggies, we regularly eat mushrooms (fried), zucchini (steamed, fried, or baked), broccoli (steamed, fried, or baked), carrots (steamed, fried, or baked), tomatoes (fried or as-is), different leafy salads (as-is), cucumber (as-is), onions (fried or as-is) etc. I would recommend spending quite some time on the fresh produce section in your grocery and just experimenting with stuff. There's a world of taste waiting for you.'

And if you feel like a lazyboy, just grab a pack of frozen veggies and steam them. It won't get easier than that :)

By combining different vegetables and tubers with fish and meats you can create a variety of dishes. Experiment with different spices and sauces and you can easily have a unique meal every day of the week if you want to. 

Breakfast and snacks

When I switched to a low-carb diet in spring 2009 figuring out what to eat for breakfast and snacks was the most difficult thing to get my head around. In some ways this got even trickier when I started eliminating neolithic foods. However, I do have some tips:

This egg didn't turn so well.

Eggs are your friend. Period. I'm not a breakfast person so very often I just boil 2-4 eggs, eat them as they are and maybe throw in a fruit or some nuts.

Omelets make a kickass breakfast - or even a larger meal if you add e.g. some bacon or smoked salmon. One of the advantages of omelets is that you can throw pretty much anything on them; tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, carrots... So if you have some leftovers from last night's dinner you can use those as well.

Speaking of leftovers, there's no reason why you couldn't have the same food you had for dinner as breakfast the next day. Or as a snack.

And when it comes to snacks, I've found some nuts and fruit to work very well, but I also enjoy boiled eggs quite often if I feel like snacking. Another thing that works wonders is coconut water; just mix 1/3 or 1/4 coconut cream with cold water, stirr, and drink.

If you want to get a bit more fancy, try this Trail Mix by MDA. 

Desserts

Think you can't enjoy sweet stuff simply because you want to eat healthy? Bullshit! Here's something to get you started - although I don't recommend eating this stuff every single day, especially if you're trying to lose weight :-)

Blueberries, melted dark chocolate, strawberries and coconut flakes. You CAN have an orgy in your mouth without feeling like shit afterwards.

Peel some apples and pears, and then slice them. Grease a ceramic skillet with some butter and throw the sliced fruit in. Top with crushed almonds, add a bit of honey and bake for 30 minutes in 175 degrees Celsius. Enjoy with some coconut cream (or vanilla sauce if you're feeling super decadent).

In general I just love coconut cream. The easiest dessert ever is to get some fresh berries (blueberries, strawberries and raspberries are insanely tasty), put them in a bowl and top with coconut cream.

A bit more fancy version of the same recipe would have you cover the berries in melted dark chocolate. Add few coconut flakes for color. Just don't do what I did the first time I made that and have the dessert sit in a fridge for couple hours before eating. The chocolate had become completely solid.

To summarize, a load of different kinds of desserts can be made by mixing and matching fruit, berries, dark chocolate, and coconut.

I would love to hear what kind of dishes you have managed to come up with, so please share in the comments :) Also, if you feel completely lost and enjoy using recipes, here's something to get you started:

• Mark's Daily Apple

• Everyday Paleo

PS. I'll try to take photos of all the foods we make at home during one week so with that you'll get a pretty good idea about what we eat.