Your Sorting Hat: Dreams worth chasing, desire over depression and random acts of kindness
Career Tuesday
Careers, Life and Questions (Aug 16, 2022)
Wish you a Happy Career Tuesday!
3 Career Ideas
I.
"There are only 2 kinds of problems.
The ones that you solve.
Rest that you reframe and move on."
II.
"What takes effort may feel precious. What is easy may seem worthless.
But great value does not come from it being hard or easy.
Make sure that your dream is worth the while."
III.
"In negotiation - every decision to meet again is progress.
At work - every quiet day where you use your skills is progress."
2 Life Quotes from Books
I.
George Saunders, Man Booker prize winning writer, explores how the mind works and how desire and its corresponding drive for action is the opposite of depression, in his book - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life :
"Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom.
But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative.
To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)"
Source: Book: A Swim in a Pond by George Saunders
II.
Heather McGhee, political commentator, explains the surprising Last Place Aversion phenomenon in us that clashes with economic self interest, in her book - The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together :
"Norton and his colleagues would call the psychology behind DiAngelo’s mother’s warnings “last place aversion.” In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status.
Norton and his colleagues used games where they gave participants the option to give money to either people who had more money than they had, or those who had less. In general, people gave money to those who had less—except for people who were in the second-to-last place in the money distribution to begin with. These players more often gave their money to the people above them in the distribution so that they wouldn’t fall into last place themselves.
The study authors also looked at real-world behaviors and found that lower-income people are less supportive of redistributive policies that would help them than logic would suggest. Even though raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum “and thus those most likely to ‘drop’ into last place” alongside the workers at the bottom expressed less support. “Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior,” the study authors wrote."
Source: Book: The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
1 Question
When was your last impulsive act of kindness? What random act of kindness can you give the world today?
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Until next week,
Devashish Chakravarty
Author of YourSortingHat
Columnist for Careers at The Economic Times
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