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Geese used to grow on trees. In medieval times people believed that driftwood in rivers that remotely resembled geese were half-finished birds that had fallen from the trees that produce them. It was one of those things that "everyone knows" – until science caught up with the goose trees.
We look back at our medieval ancestors and chuckle at their superstitious naiveté but we continue to commit the same logical fallacies that they did. Just not about geese. Anymore.
One common belief that seems to be accepted wisdom is that you should do what you love and chase your dreams to the perfect job. Science has tackled this notion too, and found some wooden water birds lurking within.
In his books You are not so smart and You are now less dumb author David McRaney exposes some of the misconceptions that have been generated by our human biases and trouble with logic.
The way things really work isn’t always as appealing as we’ve come to expect from pop culture and university commencement speeches. Things are usually more complicated than straight, black-or-white answers.
As McRaney says, the misconception regarding money and work is that, "There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love."
The truth is that getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
This sort of makes intuitive sense. When something becomes a job it soon seems less appealing. However, human behaviour isn’t always simple and our biases combine to make for some tricky situations, especially when it comes to money.
A closely related fallacy to the "do what you love" notion is the old chestnuts that money can – or can’t – buy you happiness. It turns out that both statements are true, depending on circumstances.
Science tackled the question of money buying happiness with a decisive study that was published in 2010.
McRaney explains that, "The research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the lives and incomes of nearly half-a-million randomly selected U.S. citizens."
He continues: "They dug through the subjects’ lives searching for indicators of something psychologists call 'emotional well being,' a clinical term for how often you feel peaks and valleys like 'joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection' and to what degree you feel those things daily".
"The researchers discovered money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that beyond a certain point your happiness levels off."
"The happiness money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent – it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect."
"If you don’t already have it, money can improve your life and make you happier, but once you have enough to go to Red Lobster on Tuesday night without worrying about paying the water bill that month, you’re good to go."
"Or, as Henry David Thoreau once said, 'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.' In the modern United States the ability to let most things alone, according to Kahneman and Deaton’s research, costs about $75,000 a year."
We all make up stories about our lives to help us deal with the chaos of the universe and our seemingly meaningless place within that chaos.
The problem is that when we make up these stories we usually start with the conclusion and then work backwards to try and explain how we ended up like this. When it comes to our jobs we put the loving before the doing when science is telling us that it often works the other way around.
Author Dan Pink wrote the book Drive that unpacks the science surrounding human motivation. Pink explains how traditional reward-based motivators just don’t work – at least not how we would expect them to.
Says Pink, "The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work."
"Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose."
We look back at our medieval ancestors and chuckle at their superstitious naiveté but we continue to commit the same logical fallacies that they did. Just not about geese. Anymore.
One common belief that seems to be accepted wisdom is that you should do what you love and chase your dreams to the perfect job. Science has tackled this notion too, and found some wooden water birds lurking within.
In his books You are not so smart and You are now less dumb author David McRaney exposes some of the misconceptions that have been generated by our human biases and trouble with logic.
The way things really work isn’t always as appealing as we’ve come to expect from pop culture and university commencement speeches. Things are usually more complicated than straight, black-or-white answers.
As McRaney says, the misconception regarding money and work is that, "There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love."
The truth is that getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
This sort of makes intuitive sense. When something becomes a job it soon seems less appealing. However, human behaviour isn’t always simple and our biases combine to make for some tricky situations, especially when it comes to money.
A closely related fallacy to the "do what you love" notion is the old chestnuts that money can – or can’t – buy you happiness. It turns out that both statements are true, depending on circumstances.
Science tackled the question of money buying happiness with a decisive study that was published in 2010.
McRaney explains that, "The research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the lives and incomes of nearly half-a-million randomly selected U.S. citizens."
He continues: "They dug through the subjects’ lives searching for indicators of something psychologists call 'emotional well being,' a clinical term for how often you feel peaks and valleys like 'joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection' and to what degree you feel those things daily".
"The researchers discovered money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that beyond a certain point your happiness levels off."
"The happiness money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent – it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect."
"If you don’t already have it, money can improve your life and make you happier, but once you have enough to go to Red Lobster on Tuesday night without worrying about paying the water bill that month, you’re good to go."
"Or, as Henry David Thoreau once said, 'A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.' In the modern United States the ability to let most things alone, according to Kahneman and Deaton’s research, costs about $75,000 a year."
We all make up stories about our lives to help us deal with the chaos of the universe and our seemingly meaningless place within that chaos.
The problem is that when we make up these stories we usually start with the conclusion and then work backwards to try and explain how we ended up like this. When it comes to our jobs we put the loving before the doing when science is telling us that it often works the other way around.
Author Dan Pink wrote the book Drive that unpacks the science surrounding human motivation. Pink explains how traditional reward-based motivators just don’t work – at least not how we would expect them to.
Says Pink, "The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work."
"Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose."
In a talk at TED Pink explains that true happiness from modern information-based – as opposed to mechanical – jobs comes from doing interesting things that we believe matter.
When pondering why we do what we do and how happy it makes us, money can be a wooden goose. The real considerations are the purpose of what you're doing, how free you are to do things on your own terms and your skills that align with the task.
Article by 22Seven.
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