What Makes Me Happy

Garth Beyer

Those who say that you can’t find happiness, that it’s something that just happens to you in the moment, obviously were only listening to those before them, and who knows who those people were told by. Happiness can, indeed, be found absolutely anywhere.

When I look at my phone, I feel happy because I think about the conversation I had last night with a friend whom I trust, or the sweet text from my significant other that I read this morning when I woke up, or the hour long conversations I have with my mom. (Often one-sided conversations. She likes to talk.)

aLet’s look at this more broadly. Happiness is associated with two forms of events: new and old.

When I find myself wandering through an oddly lit alleyway in town, I feel adventurous, curious, and slightly anxious to discover what lies around – all feelings adding up to that of happiness. Then, at a later date, I find myself walking through that same alleyway remembering the picture I took of a toy sand shovel that I saw in the parking garage. Unexplainable, but oddly, made me happy to remember it.

See, we live in a world made up of little things, new and old. These little things come from experience and experience has as much to do with happiness as the flame does in a hot air balloon. So, what makes me (us!) happy is experience. There’s a problem with this though. You can have a bad customer experience, or a regrettable experience, or a poor vacation experience. Right? I would argue that you can’t.

Experience involves two variables: noticing and having interest.

Dictionary.com describes experience as “the process or fact of personally observing, the totality of the cognitions given by perception; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.” I believe that if you were to notice what is happening around you, if you truthfully and personally observe what is occurring, then without a single doubt in my mind, do I think you would feel happy.

The events that people often refer to as negative experiences are actually a subjective reaction to what is going on around them. This reaction is the result of shortened feedback and either always a misunderstanding or the mere inability to understand the situation enough to find the yin in the yang.

Following your attention to the moment, experience also comes from having an interest in something. In one sense, you can view this as the opposite of a negative reaction. Having interest involves reacting to an object or an event in a positive way.

“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people.” – Henry Miller

Just as you can always find good in the bad, you can always find an interest where you find the good. It’s our inherent responsibility to follow our hearts, to seek out our passion and then, once found, let it ignite our hot air balloons. The higher we go, the happier we are. All from seeing the good in things and having an interest.

I can’t help but end with the note that Abraham Lincoln is purported to have once said, “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” In short, it isn’t about what makes us happy, it’s what doesn’t make us happy. (In case you were wondering, the following does not make me happy: pickled eggs, when I fail to see the bigger picture, and the memory of playing hide-and-seek with my Dad in Gander Mountain, except he didn’t know he was playing.) Happiness is a choice that after you make often enough, it becomes a habit, a habit definitely worth having.

 

Stay Positive & Do More Of What Makes You Happy

Garth E. Beyer

Why Experience Matters When Creating

Garth Beyer

Yesterday I wrote about how difficult it is to actually create something. The reason being is that to create something that is valuable and successful, you have to think the unimaginable.

One important factor to this way of thinking is that what you create needs to be something that someone, somewhere has no clue they want or need. There are only two ways this can be done.

1. Observe. Obviously the hardest since you are busy, on the go, and trying to be creative. I tend to agree with people like Daniel Pink that before we can be creative, we have to notice others’ creativity.

2. Experience. Jump in the ocean of opportunities life presents you. The more you experience, the more likely a creative idea will hit you. Zipup laces would never have been created by someone who never wore shoes.

 

Stay Positive & Start Swimming, Whichever Direction You Want, Doesn’t Matter

Garth E. Beyer

 

The Filter Bubble

Garth Beyer

Barely eight months ago, I was on Facebook wanting to connect with an old friend that I was already a friend with on Facebook. I never saw her status updates, or profile picture changes on my news feed. I searched for her, wrote on her wall and then left. Later that day when I checked Facebook again, I saw her latest status update in my feed. Coincidence, I thought. Until I noticed it would happen every time that I would reach out to an old friend.

This is the Filter Bubble at it’s finest, but, also its worst. While I was seeing more content that I wanted to see the majority of the time, I was never  seeing the content that I want to see some of the time. The Filter Bubble is a way to describe websites efforts to analyze the signals you give off when on the web so that they can give you more of what you are (or may be) interested in and less (or in my case, none) of what you don’t want.

I bought a new pair of shoes roughly four months ago. Naturally, before my purchase, I visited a handful of websites, Zappos being one of the more prominent ones. After bookmarking a few pages to return to later, I carried on with the rest of my work. However, though I wasn’t focused on shoes anymore, I saw ads for the pairs of shoes I was interested in and other ones similar to them at every page I went to. Pandora, NYT, blogs – anywhere I went, the shoes followed. I was infiltrated and while I would like to think that I bought the shoes that showed most commonly on the ads because I simply liked them and cut the other options, I’m not so sure I can say that.

These two examples make me feel victimized by “behavioral retargeting” – persistent personalized advertising. Outside of the simply profound marketing tactic, the efforts to personalize everything you see on the web carries many significant problems.  Two in particular truly stick out to me.

Objectivity

A serious problem is that we are becoming less and less objective. And to think, it used to be a goal of journalists to be objective. Now, “for and against” articles have become harder to write because we are never exposed to views that oppose our actions. Nicholas Negroponte puts it perfectly, “on one end of the spectrum is sycophantic personalization – ‘you’re so great and wonderful, and I’m going to tell you exactly what you want to hear.’ On the other end is the parental approach: ‘I’m going to tell you this whether you want to hear this or not, because you need to know.” While the efforts to produce both content are there, the market is not. And that’s a serious problem.

Creativity

Pariser notes that “by definition, ingenuity comes form the juxtaposition of ideas that are far apart.” I agree with every note of Pariser’s that the Filter Bubble is crumbling creativity. Often times, the most creative content is produced in opposition to someone else’s idea, but if an artist never sees an opposing idea, the creative process is much more difficult to kick start. In essence, while the Filter Bubble can connect you with ideas to build on in a creative sense, it prevents you from reaching your fullest creative potential.

 

Personally

Do I believe that I live in a Filter Bubble? Yes, I have to. However, the real question lies in whether the Filter Bubble still exists if you are aware of it, observe the changes, stretch for objectivity in opposition to the specialization efforts of the web, and overall, attempt to control your Filter Bubble. It seems to me that Pariser says the Filter Bubble owns us, whereas, I would argue that. The world (and web!) may change, but we always have the power to leverage whatever it is we are faced with.

Something To Pin

Garth Beyer

I consider myself a fairly creative person. But then I go on Pinterest.

We can throw paint on a canvas, carve our names in a slab of wood, and fill up journals with ideas, rants, and realizations. While I consider these creations personally invaluable, they are far from being valued by others.

Respected, maybe. But not valued.

Creativity contains both the mindfulness and skill to combine two or more unimagined pieces. Remember, the melting crayon art? What happens when you cut a marker in half, pour the content into a nearly empty windex bottle, and spray onto the colored side of Tootsie pop wrappers? Just imagine what you can actually do with a slab of wood?

If you want something to pin, you’re going to have to strain your brain and go through the emotional labor it takes to create something, truly create something.

Creating something sounds easy. Give it a try, though, and you will see just how hard it is.

 

Stay Positive & Respect Is A Good Place To Start

Garth E. Beyer

A Decrease In Critics

Garth Beyer

Let me note real quick, there’s a heavy difference between a critic and a hyena. The critic has lived life to understand all aspects of a subject. The hyena just yelps at everything until the creator backs away.

2124282684_81ecf64191_z

Criticism used to be about showing that someone is wrong. Now, because everyone can be right, criticism is about guiding a person to become even more right – and to show others that they are right. This is tough work for the critic, extremely tough. The critic takes partial responsibility in making something work – so the critic sees it as this – if they don’t fully believe in the idea, they don’t criticize it.

In more simple terms. To critique means to discover a way to improve. Creators gather so much input before they launch products that it takes extreme talent to come up with a successful idea for improvement. Thus, there has been a serious decrease in those willing to critique any piece of work.

The reason to understand what a critic is and does is so you don’t confuse hyenas with critics. When creators do that, well, that’s when they get in trouble and the hyenas fill their stomachs.

 

Stay Positive & Keep Searching, There’s A Critic In The Group Of Hyenas

Garth E. Beyer

Photo credit

Changing The Air

Garth Beyer

Want to watch the air in the room shift to something really positive? Experience this.

Ask someone to say three things they are grateful for.

Then ask another person. Then ask another person. And if you haven’t already, ask yourself.

 

Stay Positive & Breathe It In

Garth E. Beyer