On my Facebook profile, I state my religious beliefs as “The story of your life becomes your life.”

After my happiness post, I realized I didn’t comment on one of the key linchpins in happiness: storytelling.

Daniel Kahneman, in his excellent TED talk above, speaks to two different kinds of selves:

• The experiencing self, or the self that experiences things moment by moment
• The remembering self, or the self that tells stories about our lives and has a vision of who we are

Both Kahneman & Gilbert agree that the storytelling impetus is critical—because the story we choose to tell about our lives can very well overwrite our true, “real” experiences and create a new memory.

Here’s another passage from Stumbling on Happiness related to a research study:

Only 33% of the describers were able to accurately identify the original color. Apparently, the describers’ verbal descriptions of their experiences “overwrote” their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had SAID about what they experienced.

Our remembrance of things past is imperfect, thus comparing our new happiness with our memory of our old happiness is a risky way to determine whether two subjective experiences are really different.

Since reading Kahneman, I’ve become much more conscious of the stories I tell about my life … to everyone. If I tell a story about my past that is very sad or negative, I perpetuate the negativity. While I certainly wouldn’t advocate anyone putting on rose-colored glasses when evaluating the past to make a better decision for the future, I look for positive frameworks for my experiences—especially when it involves circumstances I could not have possibly changed. (E.g., you don’t choose your parents, you don’t control where you’re born and raised, etc.)

Telling Stories About What Has Not Yet Come to Pass
I’ve realized recently, when I’m waking up in the morning, and I’m writing the story in my head about how difficult or bad the upcoming day will be, I’ve already created unhappiness without giving myself a chance to enjoy what’s ahead without judgment or restriction. I’m trying to stop that behavior—it’s difficult. We live in a culture that adores the drama.

When Stories Are Co-Opted By Loved Ones
I had a rude awakening recently when I realized that the story or vision I have in my head about my life (and who I am) is not the same story that others tell.

What happens when a loved one tells your story in a way that you don’t like? Or even worse, what if their stories, which you may or may not agree with, make other people find you repulsive?

What if The Conductor doesn’t like how I tell stories about us on this blog? What if he told stories about me on HIS blog?

Our stories embody who we are. They are a component of our happiness. They are not to be treated lightly.

Jane - 1998 in Cambridge, England - maudlin and idealistic youth

My job as Writer’s Digest publisher often leads people to remark what a great life I have. So young, so accomplished, so happy!

Well, you know the old cliche about people who appear to be living the perfect, enviable life?

Right—well, I am thankful and lucky for what I have. I won’t go into the happiness question because as soon as you start to talk about it, it disappears.

But here’s the more interesting question: Is the life you lead the one you expected for yourself?

What if you knew that, at age 21, I envisioned this:

• Working in Peace Corps
• Getting a PhD and teaching/living abroad
• Marrying a man I’d spend the rest of my life with

If this is what’s supposed to make me happy, then I’d be living a nightmare right now—divorced in the Midwest with a corporate job in publishing.

We all have idealistic (perhaps misguided) dreams in our teens and twenties. I was supposed to stay at F+W for about 2 years, then get on with my “real” life. Obviously something else happened.

So what happens when we end up on a path we didn’t envision for ourselves?

It’s a question that Victoria Zackheim asked and edited an anthology on: The Face in the Mirror. I highly recommend it.

Back to the happiness question. I read a book, Stumbling on Happiness, that made a convincing argument that humans are very poor judges of what will make us happy. Malcolm Gladwell sums up the book on its Amazon page:

What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating—and in some ways troubling—facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We’re far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren’t particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren’t nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

And this in turn, reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Fear of Flying by Erica Jong:

I want, I want, I want, but you don’t know what you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.

Finally: The Abandoned Dreams Depot

And finally-finally: The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory (amazing TED talk on happiness)

Fitzgerald’s scripts were hobbled by the same quality that lifted his fiction above the superficial: the complicated nature of his mind.

Although he came to believe that “life is essentially a cheat … and that redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle,” he always remained someone who depended to an unhealthy extent on the good opinion of others. …

The warring impulses in him never really subsided. … In life, he simply wanted too much.

He wasn’t so much a walking contradiction as a quivering mass of dreams and ambitions that, depending on how he was feeling and whom he was talking to, created a dizzying array of impressions. …

Fitzgerald’s own schoolmaster at Princeton … said [Fitzgerald] reminded him of all the Karamazov brothers at once.

… what draws us powerfully to his work is the sensitive handling of emotional yearning and regret. When he was revising “Gatsby,” he characterized the burden of the novel as “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

… Fitzgerald was not one to give up on dreams; if he had, he could not have written so beautifully, so penetratingly, about their loss.

So on weekends when I’m home, I amble into Coffee Emporium well into the afternoon. During a recent visit, a musician began setting up his equipment not long after I arrived. I was annoyed and ready to leave. But then the lead singer greeted the crowd, “Good morning.” It was 2 in the afternoon. I stayed.

I figured out the musician’s name: Chico Futuracho. He later sent me a disc of his music since, in a show of poor self-promotion, he had NOTHING with him during the performance.

One of his songs speaks of life as a series of lonely drives. Actually, quite a few of his songs speak of driving. Here’s a sample of a favorite:

Notes on driving

If you want to hear more Chico Futuracho, he’ll be performing at Emporium again, and interrupting the half-asleep Sunday coffee drinkers, on March 21 at 2 p.m.

I don’t like receiving gifts. I don’t like shopping for them. On rare occasions, I enjoy giving them.

However, I do enjoy sharing them.

Ideal Gift-Giving Scenario #1



For The Conductor’s birthday, I made reservations at Local 127 for the chef’s table. Above is a video showing our view directly into the kitchen.

It was a decadent and unforgettable four-hour meal. His birthday was a good excuse and reminder to do something special together.

(For Cincinnatians & foodies, I highly recommend Local 127. They pride themselves on using local ingredients, and Chef Geddes is humble, generous, and friendly—as well as the only chef in the United States to also be a Master Sommelier.)

Ideal Gift-Giving Scenario #2
I was at Starbucks with a close friend. She wanted one of the notebooks on display but couldn’t bring herself to purchase it. So I went back later and got it for her, but there was no particular occasion involved.

My Proposal for Gift-Givers Everywhere
My gift-giving angst began sometime during my early teenage years. At some point you stop wanting the toys or games or typical stuff you ask for as a kid.

The problem was that the older I got, the less I wanted—except, perhaps, the means to get through school without being up to my ears in debt.

For gifts, let’s stop delivering more stuff (or monetary blessings) on proscribed occasions.

Rather let’s participate in experiential gift giving (share something together), or serendipitous gift giving. Let’s act in a way that shows our love, appreciation, or understanding for someone else. Or pushes us to grow.

With Close Friends & Romantic Partners
It’s such freedom to be able to say: Let’s stop with the gift-giving routine. Let’s do something fun together and also keep our lives possession-light.

With the romantic partners, it can take awhile to stop the madness. In my case especially, the obvious gifts appear until I’m ready to burn what I receive.

In one relationship, I always received a stuffed toy in a mug for about 2 years. In another, it was books-books-books—the worst possible gift for someone in publishing. Most recently, it was everything-and-anything New Yorker related. We had to have a discussion when the 10-pound hardcover coffee table book of covers arrived. Heavy gifts are the worst!

With Family
It’s tough. I have much older half-siblings who faithfully give cards and cash and other items on birthdays and Christmases.

And in return, I am horribly and terribly inconsistent. I’m tempted to save their cash or checks for when their birthdays come around, and return/recycle them, but that would look highly unappreciative.

But I have no idea what would be helpful or meaningful in their lives—just as they have no idea what would be helpful in mine.

The conundrum persists. Ideas, anyone?

Mourning Doves in Over the Rhine

Since returning from San Francisco last week, I’ve been enjoying the presence of two mourning doves outside my apartment.

There are very few trees where I live in Over the Rhine (downtown Cincinnati), so I’m surprised that any birds are nesting nearby. But this cute monogamous pair seems like they’ve settled in for the season since I keep hearing them each day.

To be clear, I am not a naturalist. I can’t identify even the most common trees or flowers, and my mother is frequently dumbfounded at my blatant ignorance of Midwestern flora and fauna.

I’ve also openly admitted in business meetings that I do not like flowers, puppies, or babies. People move a little further away from me after such statements—and I do of course exaggerate, but not by much.

So I don’t know why I’m charmed. I have no interest in birds. But every morning as I wake up, I wait to hear their little call outside my window. It’s an irrational comfort and friendly presence that feels like a blessing and hopeful sign—although of what I don’t know.

Synge's Chair (where Irish writer Synge would retreat & write, on Inis Meain)

I’ll start by saying that I have always advised writers in good faith. I would never suggest a writer undertake something harmful, obstructive, or a waste of time.

But lately I’ve started idly imagining how my favorite author, Alain de Botton, would react if he read advice on my professional blog. (Go follow Alain de Botton on Twitter.)

de Botton writes insightful books about big topics: love, work, travel, architecture, status. He expresses all the things that you’ve felt to be true but could never put into words.

When I imagined him reading my blog, I felt the criticism sharp and quick. Prescriptive, step-by-step advice delivers cheap comfort—that you can reach success systematically—and promotes Panglossian dreams. Such advice, especially when simplified, bulleted, and listed, pushes aside the complexity, difficulty and dilemma of what it means to undertake a writing life.

On the other hand, having read more annals of writing advice than anyone else on the planet, I’m intimate with all the repeated, universal mistakes and destructive attitudes. If you, too, internalized all the (sometimes conflicting) advice from Writer’s Digest, you would be a better writer for it, if only because you’d sooner recognize and maybe avoid the downfalls of every writer.

But the writing itself never gets any easier no matter how much you know or publish. The dilemmas never go away.

There are some technical things every writer should learn to do correctly. Formatting and submitting your manuscript is one thing. Queries might be another. There are lots of bad queries out there, but somehow the talented writers manage to break all the rules and charm agents anyway. That’s what a very talented writer does. But I can’t say that when I’m teaching how to write a great query. I can’t teach the exceptions or pleasing eccentricities (or what can boil down to a matter of confidence or nuance). I teach the rules, even though there aren’t any.

The Writing Advice Book That Would Never Sell
The book I really want to write would encompass the following dilemmas and contradictions:

• Talent vs. Practice (or Discipline). Some people are born to be writers. Others seem to be blessed with the discipline to get better. Can you succeed without any talent? Which quality is more important? And how do you know if you have any talent to begin with? Certainly those with talent need to practice, too—or not?

• Luck vs. Persistence. I’ve seen so many lucky writers—people who were at the right place at the right time. Yet the cliche is that luck favors the prepared. That feels true, though I’ve met a lot of prepared people who never seem to catch a break.

• Confidence/Ego vs. Doubt. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t have self-doubt, though not all will admit to it. We’re always waiting to be revealed as complete phonies. Yet without some measure of outrageous ego—a belief that you have something to say to the world—there’s no way you could justify writing. Writing is not for the weak. The weak ones give up easily, sometimes with the first rejection.

• Professionalism vs. Eccentricity. The writers who are business-savvy and have a flair for marketing & promotion almost always do well. Yet the writers we tend to fall in love with, and the ones we remember, can be the craziest, the most rude, or the most outrageous. Strong personalities sell, too.

• Extroversion vs. Introversion. Extroverts network better and find more people to help them. Introverts are naturally suited to writing and often notice all those wonderful details that extroverts miss. Horrible stereotyping here, but still.

No one really wants to read a heady book on these issues. People want the secrets to success and a positive spin. But the longer I’m in the business, the more slippery it all looks. I know what works for some, but it never works for all. Sometimes I wish I could sit down with each writer personally, and put together a specific plan of attack based on that writer’s talents and strengths.

But you know what? When I do that for some people, they ignore the advice anyway and do their own thing. Our innate (and learned) tendencies, inclinations, habits, and attitudes reign supreme.

Best Buds on Inis Meain (Ireland)

My recent post on romance inspired beautiful comments, both on this blog and on my Facebook page.

One of my favorite observations came from Beth Leslie: “The person who we choose to empathize with is the person we love … or the person who chooses to empathize with us. To sense true empathy from another is a rare and beautiful thing.”

This reminded me of a quote I agree with:

I don’t want to be loved. I want to be understood.

I googled the phrase and found an unreliable attribution to the film director Fassbinder.

In romantic relationships I observe, the love comes first—often irrationally and without asking your permission—and later you might understand the object of your love.

And so it’s ironic that love can be so counterproductive to greater understanding. You know the old ultimatum: “If you loved me, then you would … [insert expectation or demand here].”

Which is why I like Beth’s comment so much. When The Conductor and I first met, it was his deep empathy for me that attracted me and kept me around, not love.

This particular relationship has helped me realize more deeply what I want: I seek to deeply understand others (which only comes with observation and questioning) and also be understood—in work, service, love, play, family, friendship. I want to live around people with the potential for great empathy, and I want to exhibit more of that quality—which takes practice and training. More on that later.

My survey indicates that most of us think we want to be happy, successful, and stress-free at work, but we also know that such aspirations are wishful thinking. We all know that work offers both success and failure; happiness and angst. We know that work, indeed all of life, unavoidably presents both rewards and penalties; joys and disappointments. So, while most may wish to be happy and successful at work, what we really want, from my vantage point, is to be confident: confident that no matter what work offers up, we will remain self-confident and at our ease. … We awaken to a simple yet powerful fact of life: when we stop struggling, we are naturally confident and at our ease.

From “We Can Measure the Power of Charisma”, Q&A with Alex Pentland, Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 2010); read full article at HBR site.

The more successful people are more energetic. They talk more, but they also listen more. They spend more face-to-face time with others. They pick up cues from others, draw people out, and get them to be more outgoing. It’s not just what they project that makes them charismatic; it’s what they elicit. …

We think face time with colleagues is vital, as much as 2.5 times as important to success as additional access to information. …

We’re social creatures. When we see someone we are looking for those honest signals. Are they enthusiastic? Do they look like they know what they’re talking about? … Over the long term, the content matters more to success, obviously. But both are important. Positive, energetic people have higher performance.