Date Posted: December 2nd, 2010
This is an update of a post I wrote 2 years ago. I keep wanting to link to it because the content is good, but since I’d just started writing for the blog the presentation was…uh… less than perfect. Below is an attempt to improve it.
Chapter 4 of Dan Airely’s Predictably Irrational
opens with the following paragraph:
You are at your mother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and what a sumptuous spread she has put on the table for you! The turkey is roasted to a golden brown; the stuffing is homemade and exactly the way you like it. Your kids are delighted: the sweet potatoes are crowned with marshmallows. And your wife is flattered: her favorite recipe for pumpkin pie has been chosen for dessert.
The festivities continue into the late afternoon. You loosen your belt and sip a glass of wine. Gazing fondly across the table at your mother-in-law, you rise to your feet and pull out your wallet. “Mom, for all the love you’ve put into this, how much do I owe you?” you say sincerely. As silence descends on the gathering, you have a handful of bills. “Do you think three hundred dollars will do it? No, wait, I should give you four hundred!”
This is not a picture that Norman Rockwell would have painted. A glass of wine falls over, your mother-in-law stands up red-faced; your sister-in-law shoots you an angry look; and your niece bursts into tears. Next year’s Thanksgiving celebration, it seems, may be a frozen dinner in front of the television set.
During the rest of the chapter he describes how “market forces”–using money to pay for the value of something–and “social norms”–acting out of love or honor–don’t mix. In this case, attempting to pay your mother-in-law for her socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.
This story struck a nerve. I could easily envision my family reacting this way, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. What’s inherently wrong with putting a price on Thanksgiving? Is it actually priceless? Why are we uncomfortable thinking about it? It doesn’t make any sense.
Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee
A few months years ago I read Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape
, which shows how apes exhibit many of the tendencies we think of as unique to modern humans, including reciprocity. According to the book, emotionally close chimps have a fluid relationship. Neither chimp keeps score. They help each other out when they can and don’t worry about what’s owed. Chimps that aren’t close to each other care about what’s owed. They expect payback for favors. If chimp A extends himself for chimp B who he is not close to, A expects B to help out when he needs it. If B doesn’t there will be problems.
We experience the same thing all the time. If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help you out. But if it’s your best friend or sibling it feels like a different situation. When you help them out, you aren’t thinking of it as insurance that you’ll get help later. You’re doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Because it feels right.
As a rule, these sort of evolutionarily acquired behaviors show up as instinctive feelings. Fight or flight is a good example. Parental attachment to children is another. So it makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when our close friends keep score of favors. It’s instinctive.
How does this relate to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s? I’m getting to that. First we have to talk about money.
What does Money Have to Do With it?
It’s just about impossible to fit money into social norms… for a number of reasons:
- It’s too neat. Reciprocity is instant. The score is always even.
- Most of us don’t have the means to pay for the gifts we are given. If you calculate how much you’d have to pay at a restaurant for the quality of a well cooked home-made meal… it’d be a lot. A multi-course holiday feast would be even more. Or how about getting help moving across town? Professional movers are expensive! If we had to pay for our friends’ services, many of us wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if you added to that a tip for them doing it without expecting to get paid… yeah.
- Putting a price on a gift given lovingly taints it. It’s gone from “gift” to “product to be purchased”. Doesn’t matter if you were generous with how much you thought it was worth, it’s still tainted. We don’t like it when someone tries to buy our love. It feels icky and wrong. You have to give a very convincing explanation to have money taken as a token of appreciation instead of a form of payment.
- Giving money says “You are a stranger.” When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for the service with money. The restaurant owner, presumably, provided you with the meal primarily so he could get paid. You paid for it so you could complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Money is how mutually beneficial transactions between strangers happen.
Going back to Thanksgiving at Mom-in-Law’s, she got pissed that you tried to pay her because she felt she was being treated as a stranger, someone who can be paid off and never thought of again. And she thought you were trying to buy the gift she gave you out of love. Sure, you didn’t mean it like that, but her flipping out was instinctive.
So that’s why no one pays for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving is a contrived example since most of us weren’t planning to pay Mom-in-Law in the first place, but this “you don’t pay family for favors” thing has other everyday implications…
Tags:
Family, Relationships, Subconscious.
Posted at
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Date Posted: November 4th, 2010
This post is part 3 of the “How to Find Your Right Business Idea and Not Hate the Process or What I’d Tell My 21-year-old Self” series, a follow-up to the Many Bad Business Ideas series. There are four posts planned for the series and new entries will be posted every Wednesday… or Thursday as the case may be.
There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete. We may try to fill the void through urgency addiction. Or we may become complacent, temporarily satisfied with partial fulfillment. … The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”
~Stephen Covey First Things First.
In last week’s post on things to consider when starting your business I mentioned in passing this thing called the “legacy project.” This week I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the term “legacy project” and why I think it’s important.
What is a Legacy Project
A common journaling exercise is to imagine your funeral (I know, morbid) and what you’d love people to say about you. Maybe it’s that you were the best parent to your kids or that your work helped change people’s lives for the better or that you always made people feel welcome. Your answer to this exercise is a clue as to what your legacy project should be.
A similar exercise is to imagine you’re nearing the end of your life and you’re looking back on what you’ve done. What things would leave you feeling satisfied. It could be that no one else values your rock collection, but if you made that rock collection as awesome as possible you’d consider that a life worth living. Again another clue as to what your legacy project.
Your legacy project is the project you work on to create your legacy–the things you’re remembered for–be it being the best parent you can be or creating the best rock collection you can.
How Legacy Applies to Business
When I started thinking about business, I didn’t make it a priority to figure out what my legacy should be. I just wanted a way to make money that wouldn’t make me feel sick. That’s it. So I picked ideas that seemed good (Great Lakes Early Music, Music Teaching, Small Business Web Marketing, etc.) only to find I’d get stuck. Sure some of the stuckness was from the specifics of that business (not wanting to be tied to a store, not wanting to be tied to Ann Arbor, etc.) but some of it was because of a deeper, fundamental problem. The businesses weren’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make.
If I had thought of Dragon Dormant 3 years ago, I would have dropped it. Sewing on its own isn’t enough of a motivator for me.
What I hadn’t realized was that I needed to have an outlet for creating my legacy. And not just that, I needed to feel content that I was spending enough time and energy on it before I could feel comfortable seriously pursuing other less-important-to-me projects… even if those “less important” projects were the ones bringing in the cash. I know, that sounds a bit crazy, but it was true for me.
The point here is that if you haven’t figured out what your legacy is or aren’t spending enough time on it to feel satisfied, you run the risk of major distraction during the start-up phase of your business and/or stuckness. Not good.
When you do have an outlet for creating your legacy, and feel content about how much time and energy you’re putting in, you’ll be able to put your all into your business and more business options will be open to you. Now that I have an outlet for my legacy project–this blog–I can pursue other money making avenues (Dragon Dormant, music teaching, tutoring) that wouldn’t have felt like “enough” before.
Signs You Need to Figure Out What Your Legacy Project Is
You may be thinking, “*Psh* Legacy? I’m too [young/worried about paying bills/whatever] to be thinking about that. It’s not an issue for me”. I say, hear me out. See if you’ve experienced any of these signs.
- You’re deeply unhappy with your career/major. People call you cynical. You feel like there are better ways for you to be spending your time than at the office or working on school work. There are things worth your time that you’d rather be doing.
- You feel guilty doing things that matter to you. Let’s say you love reading. If you guilty for the time you spend on it, that could be an indication that you aren’t spending enough energy on your legacy project. (“I should be working on my Project, not reading Dresden Files.”) It could also mean you have some belief that reading is a waste of time. Either way, if you’re feeling guilty you should try to determine where it’s coming from.
- You rarely/never experience flow. Flow is the state of intense focus where time passes differently and you get tons of stuff done. It’s an incredible feeling, and if you aren’t getting into it it could be because you don’t feel satisfied with how much energy you’re putting into your legacy project. (“I can’t afford to lose myself in music practice because I won’t have time for Project”)
If any of these characteristics apply to you, take a few minutes to do the following exercise. It won’t hurt, and you might learn something.
How to Find your Legacy Project
Let me start by saying that you won’t know what your legacy project is after one exercise. Finding your legacy project is an iterative process. Play with one idea for a while. After a few days/weeks ask yourself if it’s enough. If not, what is it missing? If it is enough, give it another few days/weeks and ask again. One exercise can’t tell you how you’ll feel about your idea two weeks from now. What it can do is give you some ideas to try.
Here’s an exercise to start with:
Answer these questions
- If you could only work on one project today, which one would leave you feeling the most satisfied?
- What’s important to you? Why? Think things like “being a good parent” or “creating the greatest rock collection”. Dig deep. No one has to see this but you.
- When’s the last time you experienced the flow state…. and felt like it was the most satisfying use of your time?
- What would you like to be remembered for?
- When you’re old and looking back on your life, what kind of life would like to see?
The answers to these questions will give you a glimpse of what your legacy should like like.
This isn’t the end, though because your answers will undoubtedly be too vague.
The next step,then, is to come up with some projects that are open enough to feel fulfilling and specific enough so that it’s not hard to see what the next steps are.
Example: Let’s say one of your answers was to be a great parent. That’s too vague. Being a great parent could mean lots of thing. What does that mean to you? What characteristics do you want your kids to have? Perhaps you want them to be really creative. That’s a project. It feels fulfilling and the next actions are clear. You could enroll them in an art class or schedule unstructured creative time at home or read books on how to inspire kids’ creativity. You get the idea.
Next, take the most exciting project you’ve come up with, and start working on it… or at least think about how you can start working on it. What can you cut from your schedule to make time for it? What mental blocks to you have to address?
Now you can start the iterative process, and I’ll get into that topic next week.
How This Would Have Helped My Younger Self
My 21-year-old self felt very uncomfortable contemplating her “legacy project”. She’d been told before that thinking about such things was a waste of time, and some part of her was afraid that that was true.
If she knew what I know now, she wouldn’t have listened to those people. She’d have tried more ideas, and thus would have stumbled on the right legacy project more quickly. All that angst was totally unnecessary.
Tags:
Business, Career, Purpose, Subconscious.
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