Tropophilia

I know many of you are with me when I offer a big round of congratulations to Jarred on his upcoming journey to the west coast and his new post at Google. Oddly enough I had this piece in my backlog of half-written posts that you may see in the coming weeks and decided this might be a timely reminder for Jarred and others about the possible frustrations of change and how they may not matter as much as you think.

This is a blog — if you couldn’t tell from the banner above — about change. For the most part, change is seen for its positive characteristics. Change means progress, change means advancement, change means opportunity. Sometimes, however, change means severing bonds and losing out on things you had in the past.  This leads to frustration and sometimes unhappiness.

Earlier this year I had an opportunity to work with a sub-group within my department and bring it up to speed with the rest of the group. While I initially jumped at the opportunity, I hesitated when I realized that the switch meant I would have to move groups and physically move my desk away from the comfort of the small team that I had worked with for the previous five months. In those five months we carefully built a well oiled business machine that produced high quality work tailored to those above us. These bonds were forged over late nights and pressing deadlines that I was, in many ways, afraid of giving up.

While evaluating this opportunity I happened to be reading Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness.” The book, written after years of research, notes a number of interesting studies about the human mind and its ability to experience and judge “happiness.” One of his most interesting conclusions is that the human mind can create or, in Gilbert’s terms, “synthesize” happiness. (For an excellent and quick talk on synthetic happiness check out Gilbert’s talk at the TED conference from 2004.)

The night after being offered the opportunity, I sat down and started using my traditional decision-making system: a simple sheet of two columns listing pros and cons. It was interesting to note how little I wrote on the right side of the sheet. While I wouldn’t describe myself as a negative person, I can usually come up with a few negatives to any situation. This time was different. Each possible negative that popped into my head was preempted with a lesson taken away from the book.

• Would I be happy with the new position?
• What happens if the opportunity isn’t right for me?
• Will I enjoy my new teammates?
• Would I be comfortable with the new work load and skill set?
• What if I was just plain unhappy and wanted to go back and do what I was doing before?

According to Gilbert such thoughts shouldn’t take precedence in a decision-making process. The human mind is, as he argues, consistently proven to be a poor predictor of the impacts of various choices. While the mind is excellent at keeping us out of dangerous situations by helping to determine likely outcomes in situations, this very organ is awful at predicting how happy individual choices will actually make us.

In the end, I chose to take the new opportunity and I can say, without reservations, that it was an excellent decision. I learned a great deal and had the opportunity to work on some fascinating projects during my time in the group. It just goes to show how little we may actually know about change and what makes us happy. Might be worth a second thought should you be faced with change and its inevitable positive as well as negative effects.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user raptortheangel.