Everyone knows that I like to read and occasionally I get book recommendations from friends and family. Typically these recommendations are for many different books from fiction to non-fiction. But in the past few weeks, I’ve had no less than five people mention or recommend The Shack to me, and they are usually astonished that I haven’t already read it.

Typically this would not be my kind of book for a number of reasons. 

The first reason is that it’s fiction and I try to limit the fiction that I read because a small part of me feels like fiction reading is a time-waster — because I’m not really “learning” anything. While it’s true that you can learn from fiction books, and there are some *really* amazing fiction books out there they are few and far between.

The second reason is that it’s a christian novel and these type of novels almost always strike me as trite and unrealistic. They try to tie up all the loose ends too perfectly as God becomes this great problem solver for everyone.

The last reason stopping me from reading this book was that the premise begins in a very dark manner basically have to do with a child and a killer. Some things I just don’t want to think about so I intentionally avoid. I don’t really like horror movies or true crime dramas on TV for the same reason.

But after finally seeing that it had roughly 1500 amazon reviews (mostly positive) and having yet another person recommend it to me, I decided to finally bite the bullet and start reading it. If for no other reason to say that I’ve read it and what I didn’t like about it.

I really went in expecting not to like it, but my feelings changed as I got deeper into it. The reason this book has everyone talking is because it tries to answer the question that most people have thought about at one time or another. What would it be like to really talk to God and be able to ask him any question you wanted? And I don’t mean talk to him through prayer and then be uncertain as to whether or not it was answered. I mean for God to physically appear before you and to spend a weekend with him.

Or what if you could listen in as someone else spent a weekend with God so that you could hear all the answers to the really tough questions. That’s what this book is about and that’s what makes it so compelling. It also helps that the answers God “gives” are unexpected and challenging. They aren’t just the same old thing you hear in Sunday school. 

I think all of this combines to make this one heckuva fiction book and helps describes all the buzz around it. It’s one fiction book that actually is worth reading. You will learn something from it and it will cause you to think about how you perceive God — whatever your religious beliefs might be.

So why haven’t you read it yet?

Mack, that’s because you’re only seeing the institution,  a man-made system. That’s not what I came to build. What I see are people and their lives, a living breathing community of all those who love me, not buildings and programs.

-God taken from The Shack (in response to a question about the church)

Most people live their lives feeling that if they only got one more thing or achieved one more goal then they would be happy. So they are always trying to get more money or bigger houses and chasing after the elusive feeling of happiness or contentment.

What if I told you that you were born happy or sad and it didn’t really matter what you did or what happened to you? Surely not, you’d say. What if I won the lottery, wouldn’t that make me happier? Or, what if I became a paraplegic wouldn’t that dramatically reduce my happiness?

Well, I was amazed to read the following in the The Happiness Hypothesis:

“In fact, happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality.   Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of  all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.”

And in regard to those lottery winners and paraplegics:

“Within a  year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness. “

It goes on to explain the reason for this is that the mind is very good at adapting to any circumstance. After time, being rich or paralyzed becomes normal and you return to whatever your baseline of happiness is.

Frankly, that’s what I’ve experienced in my life. As I’ve made more money and got more stuff, it has not dramatically increased my happiness. Similarly, as bad things have happened they general do not affect my level of happiness for long. For the most part, I stay pretty happy.

But what if you were one of those poor souls who was born to be unhappy? Well the good news is while genetics will exert a strong pull, there is still a remaining 50%-20% that is not controlled by genetics.

Research shows that the remaining percentage is controlled by relationships, finding meaning and our mental images. Let’s deal with each:

• Relationships: In most studies, married people are happier than single people. We are social beings and need others to be truly happy. Marriage is one way to achieve a deep connection with another.
• Finding Meaning: In most studies, religious people are happier than non-religious people. People need meaning in their life to be happy. They also need to be committed to something beyond themselves and religion provides this outlet.
• Mental Images: Negative thinking will make you unhappy. Some people have some real cognitive dissonance in their life and always see the glass half-empty. They beat themselves up for everything and feel like life is pointless. A good behavioral therapist can teach a person how to catch and break these negative cycles which in turn can lead a person to lasting happiness.

So were you born to be happy (or unhappy)? 

People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be

Abraham Lincoln

What if I told you that by doing a simple 5-minute test on a child, I could tell you what their likelihood of success in later life will be? Would you believe it and do you know what I’d test?

In the 1970s Walter Mischel of Stanford performed a series of tests on four-year-olds. The main test consisted of putting the child in a room with two plates, a bell and a nice man. One plate has one marshmallow on it and the other has two.  The child is told that the nice man is going to leave the room and come back. If the child can wait until the nice man returns then that child will get the two marshmallows. If the child doesn’t want to wait for the nice man anymore then the child can ring the bell and get one marshmallow.

After fifteen years Mischel follows up with the parents of those children in his initial study, and it’s amazing what can be predicted (as documented in the Happiness Hypothesis):

Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to  ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a  teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as  teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this in the “real” world. People that try for easy success usually don’t achieve it. Easy success in life is a myth. Sometimes people get lucky and stumble into something big without a lot of work, but that is much more the exception than the rule. To paraphrase Edison, success usually looks like dirty overalls because it’s a lot of hard work, and along the way there are many failures. The key is to be persistent. Time and again that is proven as the path to success. You’ve got to be able to wait and wait and not give up too soon.

How different this idea is from the world we live in. Everything is instant gratification. If I want a book, I can have it immediately on my kindle. If I want to watch a TV show, I can have it up immediately on hulu.com. If I want a song, I can have it immediately on iTunes. Delayed gratification is a tough skill to learn in a world of instant gratification, but it has great benefits.

For example, let’s look at how delayed gratification affects some areas of our life:

• Financial: Delayed gratification is probably most obvious in this area. Isn’t that what all Financial Planners preach in a nutshell: Put as much away now for your retirement so that you can actually enjoy it later. Don’t spend it all now or live paycheck to paycheck. If you wait, it will be worth so much more later. They even have a fancy phrase for it — the time value of money
• Marriage: In order to summarize his foundational studies on sex and marriage, Alfred Kinsey stated the most common sign that a marriage will be successful is that both parties have a “willingness for marriage to persist”. Even when times are hard, they don’t just give up because it’s convenient. They are willing to hang on and push through the difficulties. Now there are some marriages that should be given up on because they were based on false premises or there is abuse, but the vast majority give up too early because it’s not as fun as it was in the beginning.
• Business: Most businesses start out under-funded and overworked. They’re typically not thriving for the first five years. Often times, the owner of a new business plans to have a loss for the first few years in the hopes that down the road they will start making a profit. In fact, Walt Disney sold his car to make payroll in the early years. Even if you are not starting a business and are just starting a new job, there is a period in the beginning where everything is bad. You don’t know how their processes work; You don’t know who to talk to about what; Heck, you may not even be able to find your way back to your desk if you get too far away. The people that succeed in business are those that push through the lean and hard times.
• Health: If you haven’t work out for a while and you start a new workout routine, it’s not fun. In fact, it’s painful. But if you can push through the pain long enough, you can get to a point where you actually enjoy it and begin to look forward to the workouts. That’s been my experience with running. If you are training for an athletic goal, you know that you are going to go through a lot of hard practices, maybe for years, before finally reaching that goal.

Bloggers have to deal with delayed gratification. Most people do not start a blog and then immediately have a million readers. They write and write and write for many years often without anyone noticing. Then slowly but surely they begin to build up traffic based on the quality content they’ve been providing.

So it’s clear that being able to delay gratification is important for success in many areas of your life. The only problem is I’m not sure if it can be taught or if people are just born one way or the other. I imagine like most things it’s a combination of both. Even if it’s something that people are born with, everyone can still learn to enjoy the journey rather than getting too fixated on the end goal. Research has shown, that alone will make you happier.

I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

-Edison

In  the World is Flat, Thomas Friedman says that not so long ago if you were born outside of the US and you wanted a highly successful business or research career, your goal would be to get to the US as soon as possible. Nowadays, Friedman concludes, that’s no longer true. You can be highly successful wherever you’re at.

His example was India. Not that long ago an Indian who graduated from the top university would want to come to the US for the best jobs. Now they can do just as well (or better) staying in India. Much of this is due to the telecommunications boom which makes it trivial to communicate across large distances along with the rise of offshoring. In fact, I email or chat with co-workers in Pakistan almost daily.

The world is becoming a much smaller place. It’s relatively easy to hop on a plane and be anywhere in the world in less than 24 hrs. So that raises the question: In order to be successful, does it matter where you live anymore?

Many people say that if I only lived in this place or that place then I would be successful, but some of the most successful people have lived in the middle of nowhere and become the leader in their industry:

• Gates: When Bill Gates moved back home to Seattle to build Microsoft, it was a sleepy northwestern town. It was the rise of Microsoft that turned it into the thriving technology mecca that it is today.
• Buffet: To be successful in finance, the common wisdom is that you have to live in New York, yet Warren Buffet is the richest and best-known portfolio manager. He built his business far away from New York in the heartland of Omaha.
• Walton: You can’t get further out in the middle of nowhere than Bentonville, Arkansas, yet Sam Walton built his retailing empire from there.

So very successful people have built businesses out in the middle of nowhere, but what about the intangibles like the weather — don’t they contribute to your happiness and eventual success? I find myself falling into this trap sometimes. My thinking goes, if I lived somewhere like San Diego, I’d be happier due to the weather which would lead to more success in my life.

I lived out in San Diego for a year where it is always 70 degrees, sunny and rarely rains. In the Chicago area, we get weather like that about 2 weeks out of the year. Every other day is either too hot or too cold.

But the most recent research has dispelled the myth that your external environment makes you happier, as I learned while reading the Happiness Hypothesis:

People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong. People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong

He goes onto to say that studies have repeatedly shown that demographic and environmental factors have very little influence on happiness. People are happy based on the people around them and their internal goals.  Conveniently, these are also the things that make you successful in business. The most important factors are daily persistence toward a goal (achieving Everyday Excellence), and surrounding yourself with good people.

Now, an argument could be made that the best people when it comes to technology, for example, are in Silicon Valley. But remember it’s so easy to work together now from different locations. Many of my favorite web applications were built by teams scattered all over the world.

And not being in the same place as everyone else in your industry can be an advantage because it prevents group think. Buffet is able to be more independent in his stock choices because he’s not influenced by wall street.

There are some exceptions. As my relatives in Tanzania will tell you, it’s hard to become a huge business success in a third-world country with no access to markets, education or private property, but for most people your location should not restrict you.

I would concede that location is not irrelevant, it’s just not as big a factor as it used to be, and you shouldn’t let it be a barrier to your success. It doesn’t matter where you’re at as long as you’re the hardest worker.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

I didn’t feel like running tonight, but I went out and ran 5 miles anyway. Why would I do that? It all starts with a goal. One of my big goals is to run a marathon so I’ve signed up for the Disney Marathon in Jan 09.

But just because I have the goal of running a marathon, that’s not the real reason I ran tonight. Because a big goal (even an inspiring one) is not enough on its own especially when it’s still six months away.

The real reason why I went running tonight is because I have a plan — a running plan that is. Once I decided that I wanted to run a marathon the next step was to develop a plan of how many miles I need to run each month, week and day to be able to run a marathon in Jan.

Luckily, such plans already exist and I didn’t need to create one myself. I chose Hal Higdon’s Novice 2 plan which has been used by thousands of runners to successfully finish a marathon. So I know that if I can consistently stick to the plan then I can make it to the finish line.

That is the real reason I ran tonight. I wanted to stay consistent and follow my plan. And that’s why for any goal that you’re trying to hit, you need to develop a plan that you can commit to. A plan tells you how to get to your goal and breaks it up into bite-size chunks so you know that as long as you do the chunks then you will hit the goal.

It all sounds so simple…doesn’t it? Well not always. This works great for goals like marathons that can easily be planned, but what about goals like growing your business or creating a new product? How do you create a plan for those?

I think these things are harder to plan for because there are more moving parts and the path to the next step is not always clear (do I hire more? focus on sales? which product should I design?, etc). All that said, a basic plan can be developed such as I’ll take Tues and Thurs to make sales calls from 8-noon or 3 hrs on Fri to brainstorm a new product.

In these scenarios when it’s not clear if the plan will move you closer to your goal, you have to measure the results of your plan and then change it if necessary. But at the very least a plan forces you to think about achieving the goal, and gets you taking action in one direction. You shouldn’t wait for the perfect plan. A decent plan is better than no plan at all.

At the heart of many of the “success” books (like Covey’s 7 Habits) is setting up a Sunday planning session to design the week ahead and be sure it aligns to your goals. I think this is a great idea though it’s one plan that I’ve had trouble sticking to

A good plan, violently executed today, is far and away better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

-George S Patton