Book Review: "Waking up. Spirituality without Religion" by Sam Harris

As usually, this is only partly a review and possibly for the larger part an account of the insights the book produced in myself.

What I really liked about the book:

• the best part was the chapter on split brain experiments and observations. People whose right and left brains are less connected (for instance, due to an accident or surgery) seem to have two different personalities depending on which part of their brain one is interacting with. I found this hugely inspiring in understanding how some people like myself have trouble forming a steady opinion on things or trouble doing things which they have (not so long ago) firmly decided to do. Harris mentions that speech (although probably generated in both halves of the brain) can in most people not function without the left half of the brain. So in experiments, researchers had to use other ways (such as pointing their finger) of communicating with the right half of their subject's brains. This instantly reminded me of how much of my inner wisdom seems to be inaccessible to the verbalized thinking which I use to take decisions and solve problems. Although Harris doesn't mention this aspect of using more of one's inner resources, I still find his descriptions a powerful motivator to listen more to my body and to make more use of images and feelings when thinking about what I want to do or what I need to be happy.
• another great motivator was his listing of many benefits of meditation (including some I didn't yet know). This is not a big part of the book and there is little advice on how to get those benefits if one doesn't want to spent entire weeks on silent retreats or travel the world to learn from dozens of spiritual teachers (such as Harris has done). The most practical manual which I can recommend for this is still "Search Inside Yourself". (And Harris' work motivated me to read SIY again! Or actually listen to it this time. I just bought the audiobook.)
• I actually listened to the Audiobook of Waking Up, read by Harris himself. His voice and intonation is just as great as his choice of words and telling things as a story! I wish more authors would read their own books or at least get a really good and passionate voice actor to do the job.

What I found interesting, but not great:

• Harris' view of what the purpose or end goal of Spirituality actually constitutes seems plausible and interesting to me, but not necessarily like something that would appeal to everybody. Just like all people share their very basic needs for food, air, sleep, socializing, and security, they diverge hugely on what they desire once the basics are met. One might see it as their goal to fly to Mars or at least prepare humanity to do this. Another might want to explore the ocean at thousands of meters of depth. Yet another might want to spread love and compassion to help the people around them, while again others (including some of my friends) see it as their goal to help as many people on earth as possible by earning a lot of money and wisely choosing to which altruist organisations to donate that. Similarly, Harris view of Spirituality (in a grossly abridged one-sentence summary) is that of an inquiry into the nature of consciousness and the self, followed (after long years of search) by the realization that consciousness is spotless like a mirror and there is no self. While I also find this realization quite comforting I am personally looking more towards how my meditation practice and my world view support my own well-being in the life outside the meditation hall. Others, again, are looking towards spirituality to find connection with other people or even with something that is more perpetual than us people.
  My own search is similar to Harris' in some regards. For instance, the importance of curiosity and inquiry and how I value teachers for the knowledge they share either with accessible explanations or by their good example. But as I see the differences between Harris' and my own goals, I see that many people will be even more different and maybe even unable to understand Harris' points. When it comes to their life's purpose, people are just incredibly different. For instance, while someone like Harris and (to some extend) myself is perfectly happy being the pilot of one's own life, many others simply seem to crave being led by someone who takes some (or more) responsibility off their shoulders. For some people this is so strong that they become devout followers of a guru. For others it is as simple as being one of the reasons (instead of having their own business) to work for a company large or small, where their boss takes some of the hard decisions. But this craving for leadership seems to be so basic, that there will always be some people who will not follow such a route of open-minded inquiry. 
• His experiences with psychedelic drugs sound really fascinating and since I have heard similar stories from friends the book actually made me decide to try out some things myself – but that was just before Harris recounted his extra-ordinarily bad experiences with just the same drugs and how (as I understood it) he wasn't able to influence the outcome of his trips into the positive direction. And that was deterrent enough for me!
  In the end he gave a wonderful picture comparing drug-induced with meditation-induced higher states of minds: the first is like being stripped to a rocket that goes off with a large fraction of light speed. It can be truly mind-boggling when it goes to some place nice, but a nightmare if it goes wrong. And it is unclear whether one can influence the direction. Meditation, on the other hand, is like sailing when you start with a raft on still water: you can raise and enlarge your sail very gradually and it takes a lot of time to reach the open ocean. You will face troubles one by one so that you can learn how to overcome the obstacles and keep learning and growing. I personally like this image a lot because it can explain how many people are satisfied using meditation on one level (for instance, to calm their minds, or to better understand other people), but are not motivated to sail further out. Again, this was a wonderful motivator for me to engage in meditation more seriously!

Finally one thing I found really annoying about the book: his harsh criticism of Religion. Although he is factually right with all his charges against all the large religions, small cults, and other forms of superstition and mysticism. And although religions really have created a lot of damage to humanity and will continue to do so if humanity doesn't transform them into more open, accepting, and compassionate organisations, I simply believe that as a matter of how psychological defenses in the human mind work, criticizing religion in such a harsh way will only make it stronger. I, too, believe that religion as it is now has to disappear, but that this has to happen as some kind of embrace and transform. Probably religions of the future will have much less followers than in societies where religion was a mandatory part of the culture. Hopefully they will be free from any unethical behavior and even encourage people to explore there own ethics and learn to be more aligned to what they think and feel is right. Probably some superstition will never be rooted out, simply because colorful and dramatic explanations and justifications for good rules of behavior just stick better in the human mind than the dry scientific explanation which will yield the same conclusion. (As I like to say: usefulness of knowledge often trumps truthfulness.) And finally, I can't see how to completely root out the phenomenon of obedience from the basic hard- and software of the human mind. All we can do is to make people more aware of it, less dependent of it, show them more choices, and finally, create better and more ethical leaders.

from better decisions to better motivation to a better life

To prepare a training session on Rational Decision Making (slides here, if you are curious) I read really quickly through half of the book The Three Secrets of Wise Decision Making and I also started applying it to my own decisions right away. To get more practice, I decided to also apply proper decision making to rather small decisions or things that one wouldn't normally call decisions -- I call it challenges to the status quo -- and I found something wonderful: there's a big flexibility in my life that I haven't seen before. Many things of which I thought they have to be this way or that are actually just decisions that I once made in a bad or biased way and if I look deeply at what I really want, I can choose to have it any way I want!

In the past, I often thought that I need to train my concentration or prop up my willpower to get things done that I had decided to do. But now I see that maybe all I was lacking was real deep motivation to do those things. Megan Hayes just wrote a piece that's talking about the same thing.

All to often we get our life goals (or nasty todo-items) just by looking at what others do (house, car, kids, career, ...) or by viewing ourselves as a specific type of person (hard-working, health-conscious, ...) or member of a specific group (vegans, bike fans, train spotters, ...) or we just internalize expectations that others (parents, bosses, spouses, ...) have for us.

I found that rational decision making helped to refocus on my values and what I really want. It helps me see objectively what is good for me individually. It helps gain perspective and set priorities better.

In a world where we have more and more options, more and more possible life styles, more and more choices, it's important to be able to sit back and find your own way. I have found that a certain mindfulness is important to become aware how things affect me and what influences me. And explicit, creative decision making is the perfect counterpoint to design my response to life.

inside intrinsic motivation

The distinction between so-called "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivation has been made in psychology several decades ago and the notions have become part of mainstream thinking. Especially as jobs become more demanding in creativity and flexibility of mind, often requiring some determination to overcome unexpected obstacles, it is a commonplace idea that money alone (the proverbial "extrinsic" reward for work) will not motivate people enough to achieve great things.

Companies from the smallest startup to large international cooperations are incorporating this knowledge into their staff management to make work more enjoyable and rewarding for their employees. Recently I have been thinking much about my spare-time activities and found that the different kinds of motivation apply here, too. Money is of course less important (unless I am building stuff for myself which I would otherwise have to pay), but that only makes it more evident how huge and diverse the other kinds of motivations are. For example, there is a social motivation which makes many kinds of activities fun as long as I do it with the right people. But more interestingly I found a distinction in the intrinsic motivation which seems to be very important.

I actually think that the term "intrinsic motivation" is quite misleading because it suggests that the activity itself is the reward and therefore just doing it will make the doer happy. Since I am using the word "happy" here, let's be conscious that "motivation" and "happiness" are intrinsically linked. Naively, people will be motivated to do things that make them happy either just by doing the thing or by the results it achieves. In practice, of course, there is the introspection illusion and there is miswanting. And that means that we might be motivated to do things which do not actually make us happy. This is why I think that learning more about motivation and choosing ones "wants" and "want to dos" wisely is the basis of a happy and deeply fulfilled life.

So, here are the two sides of intrinsic motivation which I found: one is doing the thing itself and it corresponds to what psychologists call "flow". The other is the intrinsic result of the thing itself and it is much harder to grasp. It can be meaning, it can be achievement, it can be doing something good, doing something useful, creating something that lasts. In my own life I just discovered that I was all too often looking for the flow as I knew it from childhood: playing with something or even programming something and forgetting about the rest of the world. In this mode of thinking, anything which interrupts the flow is a sign that what I am doing is maybe not the real thing, it's a sign that diminishes motivation and in the past often left me kind-of helpless, like a child whose favorite toy has been taken away.

It was only in the recent months, since I started meditation and while working at Google, that I learned to look for other, less child-like kinds of motivation. Meditation teaches to view distractions as positive challenges: an opportunity to notice the distraction and go back to the object of meditation. Likewise, if I have a higher goal (like programming a script or other program that I actually want to use) I can view a distraction (like some computer error or deficiency in the programming tool set) like just one piece that is part of the puzzle to be solved. Overcoming some pain can actually be a good experience if there is a clear gain. It then becomes a growing pain, that actually makes me stronger.

A great example for the two sides of intrinsic motivation is a recent lecture and exercise I prepared on the topic of "rational decision making" (based on Prof. Barry Anderson's free book) for Berlin's LessWrong fan club. My initial motivation was to contribute something to the group, so we can all learn a topic together and develop more of a practical common language. Later, when I started reading the book, preparing slides, making notes, I was in a great state of flow. But I also procrastinated on the design of the exercises, because I simply didn't have any ideas what to do. Had I done it all just for the fun, then I probably would have left it there and gone to work on something else. But instead, I had a set myself a deadline for doing the training with the group and I was convinced that the exercises were the most important part. (Otherwise we could just all read the book or watch lectures on the intertube.)

In the case of the lecture preparation, it was my results- or achievement motivation which first let me panic a bit because of the looming deadline and then let me to reserve a block of time to focus specifically on the exercises. Since my intuition didn't come up with anything by itself and so I took a moment to think about how to solve my dilemma. And I had a great idea: use the rational decision process itself to decide what exercise I want to do! And that worked: I got into flow again and felt even better than when doing the slides before.

I think that for living a fulfilled live, it is important to align the results one wants to achieve (in the above example: creating world peace and happiness) with skills that one has and enjoys doing (in the example: learning and teaching). Just "going with the flow" is not enough. Definitely isn't for me. But I have still a long way to go to discover my own skills and motivations and how they fit into the world.

Bottom line: the topic of motivation is much deeper than just intrinsic vs. extrinsic :-D

A stay at Plum Village, Mindfulness Practice Center, off-season

Already when I started meditating a little more than a year ago, I heard of the concept of "meditation retreat" or "going to a monastery" and I found it so fascinating that I also wanted to do it. Since I had hoped that my girl friend at the time would come with, I had delayed my trip, but this month I finally made it. During the last year, I had already found that meditation has helped me a lot, but I also sensed that there is a lot more there to attain. So I went to Plum Village very enthusiastically last week: to deepen my practice, to find fellow practitioners, to meet monks and nuns and generally see what it's like. And it was wonderful!

Since there’s a lot which happened inside and outside my mind, I’ll just focus on few topics here and describe them with a bit of detail. (The link above already contains a lot of the overall basic information…) One important thing to keep in mind is that during summer-retreat season there’s lot’s more people and also all the families with kids, so the atmosphere is probably quite different from what I experienced off-season: less people and more of them had previous experience with Plum Village or where staying for a longer period of time. 

Daily Activities: the sample schedule of a "normal day" applies only to three days out of four in the week, because 

• there is a reduced schedule on arrivals and departure day (the monks do "mindful work" either receiving or seeing off guests or doing stuff around the village), 
• there are two "Days of Mindfulness" (Thursday and Sunday when I was there) where monastics and visitors all gather in one of the hamlets to hear a lecture (see below) together, share a formal lunch, and have mixed Dharma sharing (also see below). On Sundays there are also a lot of visitors coming just for the day (which I think is a really good way to spend a Sunday) and to my surprise even Thursday had a lot of external visitors.
• and finally there is one lazy day.

First of all, why people go to retreats like this:

• to pick up positive energy from nature, the calm and silence, mindful being (eating, walking, rituals, simple work), and all the wonderful people around (lay and monastic alike).
• to deal with specific or unspecific problems in their lives. Buddhists would call it “deal with suffering”, but the term really doesn’t matter.
• to figure out what they want to do with their life. Instead of travelling around the world, travelling their inside world, so to say. Although I met several people who actually travelled Europe or the World and included one or more weeks at the monastery in their travels. Many of them had already done retreats in one of the Plum Village offspring practice centers (for example at EIAB in Germany, AIAB in Hongkong, or Plum Village Thailand) or retreats held by travelling monastics around the world (for example in Toronto or Malaysia).
• to develop their character, become more skillful, become a better person.
• and again, do all this learning and growing in an environment which is very relaxing, laid-back, and free from stress. Not just external big stress, but also all the small stresses of human interaction, especially if you decide to do it as a silent retreat.

During my last year of mindfulness I had known several “kinds” of meditation, but they were all basically sitting meditation only differing in what I do with my thoughts I what I focus my attention on. (Notable exception: cycling meditation where I focus on the movement of my feet in order to stop my thoughts going wild.)

At Plum Village I discovered a whole lot of new meditation practices:

• The first and most important practice is breathing with the mantra “I have arrived. I am truly home.” to remind ourselves to be in the present moment, to feel our feelings, whatever we do. This practice spans through all of our daily activities which we want to conduct mindfully, keeping in touch with our breathing.
• Walking meditation: appreciate nature, appreciate our breathing of fresh air in nature, imagine to walk with someone holding their hand (ex: someone who has died, someone who is far away, someone who is in difficulty).
• Sitting meditation: enjoy sitting there! enjoy your breath. watch your thoughts, watch your feelings and you impermanent they are and how they disappear.
• Working meditation: do simple tasks around the village (like cleaning, picking up fruit or nuts, making jam, carry things around, …) and do them mindfully, that is work silently and with your attention going to your work or your breath whenever you notice that you’re thinking of something else.
• Mindful eating: recite the five contemplations (or your own katha). eat in silence for at least the first 20 minutes. concentrate on the taste of the food. (even if it becomes boring! overcome the boredom and start sensing something deeper!)
• Listening meditation: one of the most important and difficult applications of mindfulness in practice! listen to someone without judging, without formulating your own answers, without reacting emotionally. instead just concentrate on listening. when you feel your own thoughts or feelings arising, just ask yourself: what kind of feeling is it? when did it start appearing? and then go back to listening. (or notice your breathing, if you need calming down.)
• Listening to the bell: whatever we are doing, the bell calls us back to feel our breath, our body, our feelings, and our purpose, so we don’t get distracted by what’s going on around us.

To close the circle, all those forms of meditation serve the purpose of bringing mindfulness from the pure (sitting) meditation sessions out into your life, especially when dealing with other people and the emotions caused by this.

I think that during the themed retreats (up to three or four weeks, dates announced each year), which are led personally by Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay”), all those kinds of meditations are explained in the Dharma talks. I came for stay in-between seasons and there was only short introduction to the village’s practices on Saturday morning (and a mini-short personal intro when I signed in on Friday). Those non-themed stays are thus more for people who have some previous experience with mindfulness and meditation. If you need more info just ask any monk (or if you are female, any nun) during the not-completely-silent times of the retreat. When I was there, many of the lay guests where long-term stays (many of them aspiring to become monks) so I could also ask them.

Dharma lectures (or Dharma talks) are giving by Thay himself when he is present at Plum Village. At my visit he was travelling on his North America Tour and holding a themed retreat on “Finding our true home”. I think the retreat had a Dharma talk or Q&A by Thay every day, while the ordinary (non-themed) retreats only have Dharma talks on the Days of Mindfulness, that is, every Thursday and Saturdays, when there are also guests coming for just this one day. So during my stay, we viewed video-recordings of Thay’s sessions given the same week at Deer Park Park Monastery: one lecture and one Q&A.

One of the most transforming aspects of the practice are the Dharma Sharing sessions. I don’t want to describe them in detail here and just say that they are a wonderful occasion to practice deep listening (or mindful listening meditation) and to connect profoundly with other participants of the retreat. (Links: Purpose of Dharma Sharing, Rules of Dharma Sharing, Another list of Guidelines for Dharma Sharing)

Finally, one aspect I want to shed more light on is the “Noble Silence” and the Silent Retreats. Generally, Plum Village is both a place to relax and have fun as well as practicing complete silence and I think that their house rules provide a very good compromise for that:

• Noble Silence for everybody is every day from the (silent) evening meditation (8pm in the Fall schedule) until after breakfast the next morning (7pm). This notably includes the morning meditation (except of course the chanting and reciting during the ceremony) and all the free time in between which people use to walk between meditation hall, bed room, wash room, and dining hall. Since the schedule is always quite stable there is really no need to talk to anybody else or even wait for anybody else. Everybody just silently goes their way. If you really want to say “Hello” or rather “Good Night” and “Good Morning” to someone then just silently fold your hands and bow. :-)
• I have to admit that I sometimes broke this noble silence in the evening to ask if any of my six room mates needs to go to the wash room before I take one of my rather long showers. But otherwise, it worked quite well and especially in the morning I found it awesomely refreshing to be awake for two hours (5:30 to about 7:30) and be around nice people without need to talk to anybody.
• Self-chosen Noble Silence was also practiced by some people to different degrees. For example, some people (including all the aspiring monks) did all their daily walking around as walking meditation in silence. If they wanted to talk to somebody on the way, they’d just stop walking and gave that person their full attention. Some others simply chose to not start conversations and stay away from group conversations so they’d get a lot of silence for themselves.
• One nice example was a long-term staying musician who answered all my questions on where to find the lines and notes of the breathing songs and then, when my questions became unspecific and chatty, he told me that he is “actually trying to do three months of silence”. (For the curious: the songbook is A Basket of Plums and you can listen to the songs online, too.)
• Dharma Sharing and communal singing or of course exempt from noble silence, although someone could of course choose just not say anything during Dharma sharing and just use it to practice listening meditation!

To sum up, my stay at Plum Village was awesome, relaxing, and inspiring. And I met some people for whom it was very healing, too! One thing the stay inspired me to do is to visit the German Plum Village spin-off before I start paid work again. The European Institute of Applied Buddhism also hosts some monastics and is located in an old hospital within a park in the small town of Waldbröl (which is between Cologne and Frankfurt, or in higher resolution for the Germans: between Bonn and Siegen). I also want to connect with Sanghas in Berlin and generally with practitioners in Germany. But I think that after a while I’ll probably enjoy going back to the original Plum Village because it still seems to be the original thing!

PS: Here's a very interesting report of Plum Village during Summer Camp time with 800 visitors staying there!

One Year of Meditation -- Accomplishments and the Road Ahead

It is just about one year now since I started to meditate regularly. My introduction and principal guide to the subject has been the Book Search Inside Yourself and it is also the intro book which I would most recommend to anybody curious about the subject.

I started meditation at a time where I suffered from some burnout and a short depression, so my initial goal was just to improve my mood, be more positive and less worked up about things. So during the first couple of months, I meditated with the mantra "calm and content", just repeating these words, as in "I am calm and content", because that's the state of mind I wanted to achieve. If you also want to try, just sit comfortably, close your eyes and thinking "calm" when breathing in, and "content" when breathing out. (If the phrase "I am calm and content" sounds like a lie to you, because your currently aren't, you can simply replace it with "I want to be calm and content". Whatever makes you not being calm might be truly unnerving, but it's the purpose of meditation to let go of such things for the moment of meditating and find the calm within yourself. Usually, when you open your eyes after that exercise, the outer non-calm will also have subsided a bit.)

After the first couple of months I stopped using my mantra and just meditated by concentrating on my breath or by "observing my thoughts" (a technique I learned from a fellow meditator in Berlin). Observing thoughts is very interesting, but it is also an invitation to get carried away by one's thoughts, so it's very important to notice this and go back to more basic forms of meditation where I just concentrate on breath and practice my focus on this.
Although I didn't use the mantra any more, it was still my motto and my main intention for meditation. That's why now, after one year of progress, I decided to focus on a new intention. But before telling you about it, I want to share some of the good outcomes I enjoyed.

First and foremost, meditation really helped me improve my mood. Depression went away, melancholy and lethargy have become far more seldom guests. And I think this worked for the following reasons:

• I am doing more things which I enjoy (and do them even if I have to overcome a little getting-off-my-butt resistance)
• I am doing less things which I don't enjoy
• if I have to do something which I don't enjoy, I am more conscious about my mood management, such as motivating myself (basically convince myself more deeply that I just have to get over it) and minimizing the pain by techniques such as breaking up bigger tasks, enjoy small successes, time-boxing work, and minimizing work to just what is necessary to get the job done. (for the last point, I 

Now, those are all techniques which I had known about before or they are so banal that you might wonder why it needs meditation to figure those things out? (Like, "do what you enjoy," haha, what else would one do?)

The answer to this is that meditation gives me a better self-awareness which means a much better knowledge of what exactly makes me feel good or feel bad. There's a whole science of "Miswanting" now (term coined by psychologist Daniel Gilbert, here's a paper about it, if you like to read science) and I think that meditation really helps to figure that stuff out. For one example, I don't like grocery shopping a lot and I often procrastinated doing it and tried to compensate by combining it with the pleasant activity of a bicycle tour, buying my groceries on the way back home. But as it turned out, this was a bad strategy: my biorhythm seems to prefer spending most of the day inside (reading, doing housework, cooking, and writing blog articles such as this one) and then go biking rather late in the evening, often coming back in the dark. Combining shopping with biking would mean that I can't bike at my preferred time (because shops will be closed on the way back and I don't want to shop on the way out and carry all my groceries through the summer heat for hours) and it also means that I can't go far away from the city, because I have to plan the route such that a store is on the way back. 

In the past, all those complications just demotivated me to go out at all and I didn't really know why. Now I know and I combine grocery shopping with other activities, such as grabbing a quick lunch outside. And for biking, I now more often invest some time on a train to go a little farther away from the city. Or I head directly towards the shortest and nicest way out of the city.

To conclude, I think that I am now somewhat more calm and definitely more positive and happy! Choosing my next meditation goal was very easy, because there are two other basic skills or attributes mentioned in the book, which seemed to be particularly lacking in my life. Therefore I decided to work during the next six months to improve my concentration and my resilience. But more on that in another post.

(By the way, I am planning this for six months because that's my preferred mid-term planning horizon ever since I read Tim Ferris' "Four-hour work-week". It's not that profound a book, but has some interesting tips nevertheless. So I try to plan almost nothing ahead of those six months, because I think when you do really adventurous and great things, they will change yourself so much that after six months, your priorities will be quite unpredictable from now. I find it quite funny to think that "agile software development" teaches something very similar: after each iteration delivered to the customers, you'll get new problems and desires which you couldn't have planned for at the beginning, that's why you should aim for short delivery cycles. But anyway, that's why just six months!)

how to set audacious goals and make everybody win

Actually I gave the solution away in the title already, but here's a little pre-story: Tim Ferris once stated (either in his book 4HWW or on his blog) that we should go ahead and choose very high goals, because nobody else dares to aim that high and we'll therefore have less competition. His canonical example is horny men trying to hook up with pretty girls, but not daring to approach the most stunning beauties of all. Therefore, he claims, anybody who seriously and competently hits on that person, will have higher than average success. But I think this is quite wrong, since the very definition of attractive appearance in those circles is that it attracts a lot of people, including unfortunately for everybody in the game some delusional losers who don't even know how to talk to other people and even less so when they are horny. As a consequence, the most desirable women can sometimes by quite annoyed by those people and therefore much more reserved and selective, which in turn makes them less fun to talk to. Additionally, since attraction is by definition hard to ignore, there are probably a few actually nice and very sociable men who set their eyes on the princesses of this world, so no matter how much competition there is, it will be much tougher.

But let's talk any further about the wrong approach to life, when the right one is so close. Like Tim Ferris, I believe that most people can actually aim much higher than they do and achieve their goals (without totally exhaust themselves in the process). The key is, in fact, very simple: don't choose competitive goals! Most people simply fall victim to the imitation bias and want things that other want, too, and if this thing happens to be a limited resource, then there will of course be competition and it will take much effort to win and with every winner, there will be losers, but losers might try again later, so more effort will be spent on all sides. A lot of books have been written about this, how to compete, how to convince, how to sell, and it will never be enough, since the competition obviously reads the same books, too.
On the other hand, if you and other people want something that you all can have and losslessly share, without anybody else losing it (or something else of similar value), then you'll probably get it pretty easily if you do it right and much importantly, it will get easier with time (because you improve) instead of harder (because their is no competition).

So the solution for the goal dilemma is simply this: choose altruistic goals and you can win really big without having to dispense superhuman effort. Creating win-win situation enables you to accomplish things that you will be really proud of, even surprised that you can do it.

Simplifying a theory by Martin Seligman, I think that human happiness is a combination of pleasure (think "sex on the beach", be it the cocktail or the real thing), flow (doing something really fun, which uses your skills and strengths, no matter if it's useful work or you do it just for fun), and finally accomplishment. The great thing about audacious goals is that they can focus your learning and doing in a way that creates flow and is also positively challenging, while at the same time, the accomplishment will be really meaningful and provide you with an emotional bonus that you can build on to do even more terrifying stuff (and have more fun in the process).

As the most basic example of win-win, consider investing more time into friendships and get less heated up about the dating game. Friendships (except for exclusive concepts like "one and only best friend for life forever") are win-win arrangements by their very nature. Friendships benefit you, your friends, and also your other friends and friends of friends because like-minded people tend to cluster together and thus meet more like-minded people.

Another basic example is to focus less on making money once you have enough to afford the basic necessities of life and all the simple pleasures. Think of mixing your cocktail yourself instead of buying it in an exclusive bar. Remember that making stuff is fun -- it creates happiness in and of itself.

Here's a stunning insight: Studies show that the happiness of people in developed nations did not increase in the last decades although their monetary wealth increased a lot. More intriguingly in another study, people in different countries were asked what level of income they thought would be sufficient for them to lead a happy, normal life, being able to afford all the things they really want (but not useless luxuries). The values seemed to be consistent in each countries, but different when comparing different countries, so the researchers concluded that this "happiness income" is probably influenced by culture. But there's one thing the researches didn't see: the happiness income was actually the same in all those countries after normalizing with the average income of each country. It turns out that people quite consistently think they will just need a little more than the average! And of course, this goal can never reached by all people! It is a win-loss game which makes us all work harder, pushes the economy forward, creates inflation, furthers consumerism and materialism... but it does not make people more happy.

Now, I don't want to talk anybody out of having a great career, especially in a field that creates a lot of value for humanity while still creating a big paycheck for you. But remember that your personal scale of accomplishment money-wise is anchored at the industrial average... which goes up just as you are trying to beat it. Surprise victories might happen, but they will not be big and maybe not lasting either. If, however, you focus on other goals, think win-win, you're much more likely to be surprised by your own success.

Emotionale Intelligenz trainieren!

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
-- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)

Herkömmliches Kommunikationstraining schult hauptsächlich den Verstand:

• Situationen anders wahrnehmen
• konstruktivere Verhaltensweisen üben

In kritischen Konfliktsituationen übernehmen aber oft die Emotionen die Kontrolle und man fällt in alte Wahrnehmungen und Verhaltensmuster zurück.

Das fehlende Glied, um in solchen Situationen einen kühlen Kopf zu bewahren ist die Achtsamkeit auf eigene Emotionen. Der bekannte Weg, um Achtsamkeit zu trainieren ist Meditation.

from the book Search Inside Yourself, Chapter Six: Riding your Emotions like a Horse.

Es gibt mittlerweile eine Deutsche Übersetzung des Buchs

See also this good video (60 minutes)

Notes on suicide

The recent case of Aaron Swartz brought a topic up into public discussion, which I have read and thought about quite a bit since my university times. It's an unfortunate property of public discussions on such topics that they become very emotional and come to quick conclusions. There are those who say: "what a cruel society which pressures bright young people like him into such terrible situations" while others say: "what a stupid guy who plays with fire, but is not willing to take the consequence of his actions". Some blame it on the circumstances, some blame it on the person. But I think that suicide is just a quirk of nature. Some psychological defenses that misfunction. And I think, we can easily prevent suicide by tricking around those defenses. Ready to hear the full story?

As far as I learned from Wikipedia, Aaron had an offer to go to jail for six months in order to avoid a trial for his alleged crime. (And, no matter what you or I think about whether information piracy should be a punishable crime and if yes how hard, this proposed sentence is comparable with previous cases which Aaron or at least his friends probably knew about...) My first thought was that six months of prison doesn't seem like such a bad deal. Many famous (and innocent) people have been in prison (I think especially of Nelson Mandela and Deng Xiaoping) and used the time well for reading and writing and strengthening their personality. But this was probably not the way, Aaron saw it.

So what was going on in the mind of Aaron Swartz? Since I don't know him, other than being a big fan of his study on Wikipedia editors, I will answer a more general question: what goes on in the mind of a person who decides to end their life? Here's the first misfunction of human brains: they don't take things at face value, but often add a ton of symbolic value and interpretation. For example, someone who's bound to go to jail might think about all kinds of awful things that happen in jail which can trigger a hugely exaggerated emotional reaction in that person. But what's worse, if you think you have to go to jail although you're innocent, you might lose faith in the entire system of justice and therefore (since the emotional part of the brain likes to exaggerate and generalize) the entire country and/or society. Following that logic, you might not see any reason to stay living in this country or this world. Trained minds can diffuse such logic by taking an outside view of the situation. To an outside observer, one case of unjust detention wouldn't seem to be a surprising (albeit still regrettable) event given a small percentage of every prison contains people who haven't deserved their sentence. (Just as there are a lot of uncaught criminals, too.) We already know that justice is imperfect. (And looking at cases like Guantanamo, we also know that US "justice" is sometimes genuinely evil.) I believe that a trained mind can notice when its emotions are overboiling and it can give itself a rest to try and take on a different viewpoint.

If it is so easy to work around this particular bug of the human brain, you might wonder why none of Aaron's friends and close ones noticed his precarious state and intervened to bring him back to the bright side? Now comes human brain bug number two: emotional arousal and the feeling to be betrayed makes people distrusting, which sometimes can even affect friends and close ones. How many times have you seen someone giving well-meant advice only to get this exact reply: "You don't understand!". Unfortunately, even the most well-meaning friends often give advice without listening enough and asking the right questions which will permit the affected person to speak their unspeakable fears. And also unfortunately, an affected state of mind will assume that "if you don't ask, you don't want to hear" and maybe even think "if you would hear, you wouldn't believe". It takes a little bit of psychological manipulation to make such an affected person feel at ease and be able to open up. And what's worse, someone trying to help must overcome their natural tendency to be offended by a harsh rebuke of "you don't understand" and instead recognize it as a signal, that something important is going on. I think that most people could -- by practicing meditation, empathy, and compassion -- at least recognize that something is wrong with someone and ask a mentally better trained friend for help. The thing we have to learn and accept is that our natural instincts and reactions sometimes make things worse and everybody who's interested in their own mental well-being (as well as that of their friends and family) should look into practicing self-awareness to better recognize their own mental state. We all have defective brainware -- and we all have the capacity to overcome our deficiencies and strive to become part of Humanity 2.0 where all people are well-intentioned and make the best out of their strengths and weaknesses...

PS: My condolences to all those who knew Aaron. With my post I certainly don't want to judge him or his close ones. All I am trying to achieve is to raise awareness that we might all fall victim to our brain bugs (although for most the results are not as severe) and that we should train and prepare ourselves to survive this life better. And I am sorry for not being able to give more precise advice. I am not an expert at all. Just a bystander who recognizes a certain pattern and tries to offer a more constructive point of view.

Relax and enjoy

"For many decisions that I've taken in my life I just know and feel inside that I've done the right thing for me," she said smilingly with her eyes bright as ever. "But for those two things I really think that everybody should do them." - "You mean quitting smoking and giving up full time work?" To which she nodded back at me.
"Maybe then" I wondered "many people just smoke so that they can stan the stresses of full-time work..."

growing pains -or- purchasing utilons and warm fuzzies separately

It is a principle of modern organized altruism that the things which makes an altruistic person feel good (like giving money to a beggar, or volunteering at a child care center) are often just not the best uses of one's time and resources to accomplish a given goal (like reducing poverty or fostering education). But if a person takes a totally rational mindset and does the objectively most useful thing, then this might in fact go against their instincts and not give them the good feeling that altruistic behavior normally gives. That's why charity experts advise to purchase utilons (objective usefulness, utility towards a cause) and fuzzies (good feelings) separately.

Now, what's interesting is that this concept which was developed for charity and altruism also seems to apply wonderfully for optimizing my hedonism and egoism! I find that sometimes when I do things that I know are good and important in the long term, they still “feel wrong” in the moment and drain my self-control to a very tiring level. So in fact, every time I do such a thing, I should reward myself with some other short-term pleasure thing that gives me good feelings and let's me be very lazy so self-control gets replenished. Insofar it's quite sad that things which I enjoy most (being creative) always need a minimum in self-control; I just don't know how I can relax well by being lazy!

Gosh, I thought I had found something really fundamental, but now that I am thinking about it, it's just the old known principle about rewarding oneself for doing things that drain a lot of self-control. Bah, never worked for me anyways. Much better for me is to have people around who believe in the same values and give me feedback about what I do. Then, when I feel exhausted, I can get some applause. Don't need anything more....

What's the next small thing?

Here's one small habit I adopted recently which had a big impact on my life in the area of procrastination versus getting things done. There's a lot of tasks --like repairing things in the home or doing one's tax declaration-- which linger on my To Do list way longer than needed. The longer things sit there, th harder I imagine them to be. Whenever I think of such an item on the list, the first thing that comes to my mind is "I don't even know how to start on this, how can I ever finish?"

Now the magic trick that helps me get unstuck in this situation is to simply ask myself the question: "What's the first small step that I need to do to advance this issue?" Here are some examples for simple steps: For the tax situation I might need to research a specific question on how to declare something. The small step could be to google it, or look it up in a book, or call the tax office. Or the small step could be to make an appointment with a tax consultant. In a home repair issue, the small step might be to buy a specific replacement part or to write down the exact measures of the part needed. Usually this small step seems minuscule and I might have avoided it because it seems like a lot of effort already just to make a small step. But if I verbalize this step and make it a To Do item of its own, then it will be easier to do, I will plan a time when to do it, and after doing it, I get the feeling of checking off an entire item from my list. After checking off this first small step, I'll feel more optimistic about the entire issue at all and might even be motivated to do some more work on it without planning the individual steps.

On issues that are truly hard, there will be several points at which I get stuck and won't get moving without some investment of self-control. In each case, I just ask: "What's the next small thing to get done?" and this item will provide me guidance on the larger part. It doesn't feel well to be driven by such small-scale To Do list items --I really would rather like to work freely and intuitively, which works really well for me, even on complex tasks. But for some issues, the intuitive way just doesn't work and then the small-scale items is exactly what's needed to get things done. It's not getting things done pleasantly, or creatively, or liberally, but it gets things done without the pain of high-fee overdue notices or looking at unfinished tasks for months. In fact, it is giving up a little bit of liberty ("Today I need to get this small thing done.") to gain a much larger liberty -- namely a life without big dreading unfinished items on one's lists, in one's life, and on one's mind.

I think the reason why this works so well is that it connects the benefits of the larger goal (getting rid of taxes, kitchen tap not dripping any more) with the small effort and quick accomplishing of the small step. I won't get done the large problem with a small step, but I can feel getting closer by my own effort. That feels good and is effective.

I have used this tactic several times in the past weeks after reading about it in the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard". It's a really good book, with many good lessons and I think this is only the first one with profound impact on my life.

is there anybody else out there who doesn't like Christmas presents?

I mean, I am not against the concept of Christmas as a family holiday per se. After all, there are so many things a family could do together: prepare meals together, bake cookies, play games, do handicrafts, make photo collages from the past year, or photo slide shows or photo books, go on a trip. make music together, or recite poetry. make travel plans by reading travel guides about a country or region and then synthesizing family member's “places to see” into a joint trip plan, doing puzzles, making pottery, draw or paint together, play role games, (or board games, or Wii games), go skiing (if you live in the northern hemisphere), go the beach (if you live in the southern hemisphere), ...
Psychological studies show clearly that fun activities bring much more happiness than any material things. Shared activities are best for forging social bonds.

So why all those gifts? Why don't we just have fun together? Preferably in a creative way...


(Incidentally, since I am not biking in winter and spend quite a bit of time in public transit, I have started to learn poetry again. Now I know a couple of really great poems, but I haven't found anybody yet, who'd care to listen...)

This has me add a bullet point to my last post:

• make a Kindle-ebook of my favorite poems.

TV-incited violence vs. Gross National Happiness (must-read for anybody with a social conscience!)

Four years ago, Bhutan, the fabled Himalayan Shangri-la, became the last nation on earth to introduce television. Suddenly a culture, barely changed in centuries, was bombarded by 46 cable channels. And all too soon came Bhutan's first crime wave - murder, fraud, drug offences. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report from a country crash-landing in the 21st century

Here are some excerpts from a 2003 Guardian article about the effects of TV in the country of Bhutan. It is impossible to imagine how a modern Western country would be without TV. Bhutan, however, was without TV until 1999 – it's introduction to the country provides an unprecedented and unique opportunity for study.
The article "Fast forward into trouble" is much longer and here are only some of the most interesting pieces.

April 2002 was a turbulent month for the people of Bhutan. One of the remotest nations in the world, perched high in the snowlines of the Himalayas, suffered a crime wave. The 700,000 inhabitants of a kingdom that calls itself the Land of the Thunder Dragon had never experienced serious law-breaking before. Yet now there were reports from many towns and villages of fraud, violence and even murder.
The Bhutanese had always been proud of their incorruptible officials - until Parop Tshering, the 42-year-old chief accountant of the State Trading Corporation, was charged on April 5 with embezzling 4.5m ngultrums (£70,000). Every aspect of Bhutanese life is steeped in Himalayan Buddhism, and yet on April 13 the Royal Bhutan police began searching the provincial town of Mongar for thieves who had vandalised and robbed three of the country's most ancient stupas. Three days later in Thimphu, Bhutan's sedate capital, where overindulgence in rice wine had been the only social vice, Dorje, a 37-year-old truck driver, bludgeoned his wife to death after she discovered he was addicted to heroin. In Bhutan, family welfare has always come first; then, on April 28, Sonam, a 42-year-old farmer, drove his terrified in-laws off a cliff in a drunken rage, killing his niece and injuring his sister.

Before 1999, Bhutan's society and politics was much different from every other country in the world:

"We wanted a goal different from the material concept of maximizing gross national product pursued by western governments," [Bhutan's foreign minister] says with a beatific smile. "His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state." And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation's guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

The marijuana that flourishes like a weed in every Bhutanese hedgerow was only ever used to feed pigs before the advent of TV, but police have arrested hundreds for smoking it in recent years. Six employees of the Bank of Bhutan have been sentenced for siphoning off 2.4m ngultrums (£40,000). Six weeks before we arrived, 18 people were jailed after a gang of drunken boys broke into houses to steal foreign currency and a 21-inch television set. During the holy Bishwa Karma Puja celebrations, a man was stabbed in the stomach in a fight over alcohol. A middle-class Thimphu boy is serving a sentence after putting on a bandanna and shooting up the ceiling of a local bar with his dad's new gun. Police can barely control the fights at the new hip-hop night on Saturdays.

While the government delays, an independent group of Bhutanese academics has carried out its own impact study and found that cable television has caused "dramatic changes" to society, being responsible for increasing crime, corruption, an uncontrolled desire for western products, and changing attitudes to love and relationships. Dorji Penjore, one of the researchers involved in the study, says: "Even my children are changing. They are fighting in the playground, imitating techniques they see on World Wrestling Federation. Some have already been injured, as they do not understand that what they see is not real. When I was growing up, WWF meant World Wide Fund for Nature."

It is so early in the morning that the birds are still asleep. But Sangay Ngedup, minister for health and education, has been on the path for hours. His gho is bunched beneath his backpack, and a badge with the king's smiling face is pinned on to his baseball hat. In the past 15 days, he has climbed and scrambled over some of the world's most extreme terrain, from sea level to a rarefied 13,500ft in the Bhutanese Himalayas. Is there anywhere else in the world where a cabinet minister would trek 560km to warn people against becoming a nation of couch potatoes? "We used to think nothing of walking three days to see our in-laws," he says. "Now we can't even be bothered to walk to the end of Norzin Lam high street."

For the first time, he says, children are confiding in their teachers of feeling manic, envious and stressed. Boys have been caught mugging for cash. A girl was discovered prostituting herself for pocket money in a hotel in the southern town of Phuents-holing. "We have had to send teachers to Canada to be trained as professional counsellors," says Sangay Ngedup. This march is not just against a sedentary lifestyle; it is a protest against the values of the cable channels. One child's placard proclaims, "Use dope, no hope." "Breast is best," a girl shouts. "Enjoy the gift of sex with condoms," reads a toddler's T-shirt.

Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerized by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle?
Everyone is as yet too polite to say it, but, like all of us, the Dragon King underestimated the power of TV, perceiving it as a benign and controllable force, allowing it free rein, believing that his kingdom's culture was strong enough to resist its messages. But television is a portal, and in Bhutan it is systematically replacing one culture with another, skewing the notion of Gross National Happiness, persuading a nation of novice Buddhist consumers to become preoccupied with themselves, rather than searching for their self.

In our Western culture it is only a recent trend introduced by a small elite to see happiness, not material wealth, as society's goal. Here are some of my earlier posts on happiness:

• happiness and new year's resolution (quoting psychologist Martin Seligman)
• on the fate of humanity (quoting economist Richard Layard)

Do what you love and starve?

Personal Prelude

A couple of years I ago, I read Steve Job's Stanford commencement address “You've got to find what you love”.
This inspired me to not give up my dreams and try to live my passion. Despite my parent's cautioning to get a simple and steady job, I worked for an IT consulting company after graduation and the loads of prestige and money of this profession kept me happy for a while. (I also have to admit that many of my job tasks were interesting and the climate at the company was also excellent.) But then things didn't go as well, a had an assignment that I didn't like, working all on my own. I felt very unhappy, so I decided to take on my old dream of revolutionizing computer programming and applied for grad school. I already had a plan for my research work and I applied directly to the professor who's theories I was going to use.

A year later I started grad school, I took interesting courses, did some TA'ing and most importantly worked on the research that I wanted to work on since my undergrad, but had previously never found anybody to work with. It was a flying start and me and my professor refined my idea into a blueprint for a programming tool that seemed really great. But just as all complicated projects, it had lots of corners and special cases which I couldn't all get into a single clean framework. I was quite disappointed because I had aspired to create a theory that was as simple and beautiful as the very foundational theories of Computer Science which had inspired me to work in research in the first place. Furthermore, although other students in my lab were quite enthusiastic about my research and eager to see my results, I couldn't manage to get any of them closer involved and collaborate with me. Frankly, I was not very open either and tried to find the perfect technical solution for every small subproblem in the way. I slowed down big time and probably seemed very closed and distracted to my lab mates, instead of open-minded and welcoming their collaboration.

How to do what you love

So I started to think about the “do what you love” idea again. At that time, I really loved my research ideas and I still think this project is a great thing to do and would be a great contribution to the world of research in general. But somehow I couldn't deal with the research world and I just couldn't get myself to write that Master's thesis that was the next step in my academic career. I thought about it a long time: how can I get myself to write? I know that rewards don't work for me. I know that getting rid of distraction doesn't work for me (because I will just fall asleep)... so I decided to give up. If I am that bad at what I am doing, it really only makes me depressed. So what does it mean to do what you love? And should one try to do it?

Good articles on the subject are very controversial:

• Paul Graham explains: How to Do What You Love
• Marty Nemko asks: Do What You Love and Starve?
• And Penelope Trunk argues that it's a Bad career advice [to] do what you love
• She instead tells us How to figure out what you should be doing with your life

I found it especially interesting that the latter two posts are from the same author and seem to be contradictory at first.

But after I thought about all those things, I think that the contradictions can be resolved. In brief, yes, you should like your work in the sense that you should like doing most of the things that your work requires you to do. But not everybody can make their favorite pass time into a job. There are simply many more people who like to make music (or other forms of art) than people who actually can make a living of it. There are also more amateur athletes than professional athletes, more cinema lovers than professional critics, more sport fans than professional sport reporters. Many people like photography, but very few can do it for money.
I personally like writing so much that I keep a public blog and don't expect to make money from it. They only thing I wish, is to get in touch with people who have similar ideas as I do. Connect, exchange, and communicate. It didn't happen much yet, but I am truly happy about every blog comment that I receive.

A job versus a hobby

Obviously, making money from you favorite pass-time can't work for everybody just because too many people share the same pass-time. Those who can make money from it, are either really good (rock stars), get only little money and possibly need other jobs to make a living (many of the artists in the Fringe festivals, for example), or they have a really hard job which drains a lot of time and energy, probably with most of the job tasks not being the one activity that they actually like. (See Nemko's piece about this.)

If you think about “doing what you love” in the sense that many people love the same things and only few people can do them, the world seems like a zero-sum game: only a few people get the great jobs as rock stars, movie critics, video game testers, photographs, or president of the United States, for that matter. All the others would lose out. But that's obviously not the best way to view things. There is, in fact, some distinction between work and play. And most importantly, the challenge to “find what you love” applies to both! As much as one can be stuck in a stupid and unfulfilling career that sounded great when one was young, one could be stuck with some stupid and unfulfilling hobby, such as golf, just because it's the thing people do, but one never took the time to actually find something interesting!

I think that it's indeed very important to experiment with new activities to find what one really likes to do. Having a truly interesting and satisfying hobby is important for one's happiness and life balance for many reasons. Nobody would stop doing a great activity just because they couldn't make money from it! New and interesting hobbies will not pay you in cash, but they make you happy and thus make you a better person, too! And if you develop a habit of experimenting with new things, this helps your professional life as much as your private life.

In reality, many people achieve a good work live balance by making at least some money from their hobby: I know a person who loves photographing and vowed to get at least enough photo jobs to pay for his camera. I also played at a volunteer theater company where we made just enough money to pay for all our costumes and props. And I know of a sailing school where some instructors teach for free; to them this is not working for free, but getting to sail without paying for the boat! Some people also do not make money by doing what they like, but they save money doing it: this is the case for people who do repairs on their own house, their own computer, their own bike; or those who love to cook and bake or knit and tailor. Those are all just hobbies, but they have an economic impact. For one thing, they encourage people to take a job that leaves them more free-time at the expense of less pay, because those people have inexpensive (or zero-cost) pass-times and all they need to be happy is to spend their time as they please.

And finding those hobbies that make you truly happy is as important a life-task as finding the right career.

Power and prestige

I hope I have convinced my readers now that your job doesn't need to be the thing that you love to do most! Once you assume that your job is mostly there to make money and leave you lots of free time, you might think that it would be best to go for a career with the highest hourly pay. Go for the money! But unfortunately it isn't that simple either. Besides taking your time, work also drains your energy and you don't want to be all drained out by the time you leave your workplace and head to your playground. I think there is still a fundamental problem with people having too little of a clue what different jobs are about and what skills and personality they need.

A large part of the problem is that some jobs are very well-known (and although most people wouldn't do them as a hobby) they are still very much sought-after. Some people call those the “prestigious” jobs which I think is entirely befitting. The prestigious jobs are usually what kids come up with when they have to pick a career. Lawyer, doctor, pilot, all those people you see on TV! Marty Nemko's post cited above makes a good point about how to avoid those jobs and instead going for something rather unknown, which most people wouldn't even think about as a career. As it turns out, if a job is both not well-known and not very easy, it often pays actually pretty well!

When it comes to jobs, prejudices go around just as much as they do about pass-times. Only that it is much harder to actually try something and find out what it really is like. If “doing what you love” and “finding meaning in life” are needs fulfilled by your pass-times, your family, volunteering, and your social life, what are the criteria left to find a job? Obviously, it should pay appropriately, also it should not burn you out or take too much time, furthermore it should not come with any cranky office politics or other inappropriate stress, also it should be legal and ethical. Finally for many people it's also good to have a bit of challenge on the job, but it doesn't need to be super-exciting, since that's what your hobbies are for.
A word about ethical jobs: what I mean is that it not should involve any semi-legal scams such as selling unnecessary stuff to senile old people. I don't mean that every job must work to make the world a better place, e.g. by saving the environment or making sick people well. This is too much asked of a job and better left to volunteering (except for the few who actually can make money that way). All I mean by ethical is ‘fair’.

Where am I going now?

I think that my first career choice as IT consultant was both driven by a desire for money and for prestige. The second one as an academic research was driven by making my pass-time “having ideas” into a career, and obviously by dreams of becoming a famous inventor/professor. Both times I was lucky enough to get just what I wanted (or desired): I got the job, a got admitted to grad school – but neither seemed to be the right thing. Now I hope that I am smart enough to make my next choice closer to what I actually need. In career just as in other parts of life, what we need to make us happy is not always what we think it is. The “need” can be just the opposite of the “desire”. That's why we have to experiment so much. That's why we have to question our believes and find out what part is just cultural perception and external pressure and who we are really on our inside. (Did I want to go consulting just to show my parents that I can do it? Are they right and I should rather take a simple and steady job? In any case I'd rather suffer all my life in bad jobs than admitting that my parents were right; ha!)
Our current culture does just not recognize enough how different people are and there is unfortunately almost no popular knowlegde on how exactly people are different. In our age people have a lot of useless knowledge (starting from things we learn in school and never need in our lives, going to a lot of pop culture and celebrity gossip). But, unfortunately, most people know much too little about themselves. Part of why I have this blog, is to learn more about myself.