Actionable Takeways from Sweet Spot Interview
- How can you get closer to living in your sweet spot?
I call my book The Sweet Spot because we have to find the right balance between our competing motivations of pleasure, purpose, status, morality, and spiritual transcendence. Ultimately, someone who prioritizes and makes choices just based on maximizing pleasure won’t end up as happy about their choices. Finding your sweet spot typically involves trial and error. It’s what we do as teenagers, even as preschoolers. Sometimes we forget and we get locked into something that evolutionary biologists might call a local maximum, where what you’re doing is fine, and you feel as if every way you could change might drop you down in pleasure, comfort, happiness. A lot of what really is valuable in life isn’t immediately pleasant. But what if right next to you is something much better? A way to get around this stuck place is to explore different things. Try an exercise program, try travel, try an extended difficult project, try more pleasure in your life. Most of us have some wiggle room to try these things on. I’m a big fan of what people call self-experimentation in this way. Explore what kind of balance most fits with you.
- How can you find meaning in adversity and struggle?
A good life involves difficulty–extending yourself, and struggling, and choosing hard things. Finding your sweet spot requires suffering. Some of the goals that will lead you to a sweet spot will pose difficulty. Some roots to pleasure involve pain. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you want to run a triathlon, if that’s part of your sweet spot, you’re going to have to work your ass off for them. Suffering will be part and parcel of that project. The idea of a comfort zone, sitting in the same spot comfortably, I don’t think is realistic for a life well lived. When we live our lives, the balance of different priorities is fluid. You can’t really stand still. Say you have devoted your life to your work and then boom, you have triplets, and all of a sudden things shift. You move, you get sick. It’s going to happen to everybody. You can’t sit for too long in a sort of accepted balance of these different priorities. Somebody’s going to move you.
- How can you enable your colleagues to be more fulfilled?
People who are working with you don’t just want tangible things like money. They want other things. People want to be treated fairly and with respect, they want challenging and demanding work, they sometimes want variety. They want the sort of things that well-meaning managers might forget. They want things that aren’t in union negotiations and aren’t what people negotiate for when they get a job, but matter tremendously. Understanding what people want at this complexity, I think, is incredibly useful when figuring out how to deal with them and how to make their lives better.
These are the notes from the actionable interviews from joining YPO but there are other insights at my personal blog you can follow and read about.
The above was courtesy of 3 Actionable Takeaways from last week’s live session on how to master the search for meaning and happiness with world-renowned Yale psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Paul Bloom.