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The
Happiness Formula Newsletter August
23rd, 2005
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Kalmar jkalmar@thehappinessformula.com Contents > Happiness At Your Job Through A Higher Purpose by Julian Kalmar > Zelig’s Happiness Corner - Gratitude for when things do work well by Zelig Pliskin. > As A Man Thinketh – Chapter Six – Visions and Ideals by James Allen
Happiness At
Your Job Through A Higher Purpose Copyright 2005 by Julian
Kalmar. All rights reserved. Don’t like your job? Transform it using the magic of purpose. The results of a remarkable experiment demonstrate the power you hold to completely transform your job. The experiment is believed to have taken place during the Great Depression when many were unemployed, destitute, and purposeless. [Please forgive me if some of the details are wrong. I couldn’t find the source of this story.] As I understand the experiment, the U.S. Army employed two groups of previously unemployed men. The first group was taken out into the desert to dig holes. They worked very hard all day in the scorching sun, and every day was the same: Go to a new location in the desert, dig holes, and return exhausted. Amazingly, and in spite of the back-breaking work in the desert heat, the more they dug, the happier they got. They had a purpose even though they didn’t know why they were digging the holes. The second group of men had a different job. Every day they would go to a different location in the desert to fill holes. They didn't know about the first group of men. All they knew about their job was that they were being paid to fill holes. Like the first group, they labored all day in the hot desert. This went on day after day. At the end of each day they were exhausted but satisfied. Lo and behold, they became happier too. This hole digging and hole filling went on for some time and both groups of men had become significantly happier than before they started their work: They were productive and had found a purpose. Now watch carefully what happened next, because the experiment wasn’t over. One day the foreman of each group went to the men to tell them about the other group of men and what they did. When the men realized there was no real purpose to the jobs they were doing, they were devastated. Their purpose was destroyed. None-the-less, the experiment continued. For every single man without exception, the hole digging and hole filling was sheer misery. Both groups of men were extremely unhappy. Even though the pay and the work was exactly the same as it was before, they were miserable. Nothing had changed, except their sense of purpose was absent. This experiment reveals a great insight. If we can find genuine purpose we can gain tremendous job satisfaction. But any type of purpose won’t do. You have to know how to create the right kind of purpose. Let’s see how. Purpose is determined in two ways. Some are seemingly delivered to us by others, like our bosses. As employees we typically adopt the purpose our company needs. Those who are self-employed adopt the purpose of their clients. The second way purpose is determined is that you look beyond the immediate task to see its higher, more noble meaning. Rather than simply accepting your assigned tasks and adopting the task as your purpose, introduce an extra step of finding the higher purpose in your task. You’ll still do the same task in the same way physically, but now you’ll add the magic of a higher purpose.
Here are some examples. Say you’re a locksmith and your task is to install a lock on someone’s front door. If you only adopt the purpose of installing a lock successfully, you might be happy or miserable; gratified, or not, by your work. Instead, of accepting the lock installation as your purpose, look for the real significance of your task. Your purpose isn’t really to install a lock, is it? That’s just the task. Your purpose is to protect a family from criminals. You are a protector. Someone who saves people from violence, burglary, and even murder. As you install the lock, treat each step as if you will be stopping a murderer next week. Make it even more personal by imagining that you are stopping a murderer whose next victim would have been someone you love. Every step of the installation becomes like a karate block to thwart a thug. You are a hero, a savior. Or perhaps you work in an office and must prepare a report for your boss. If all you see in the task is that you must create a report, you won’t have much fun. Ask yourself, “What’s the higher purpose of this report?” Maybe your company is a pharmaceutical company and the report will permit your boss to ensure that new drug research is funded. That humble reporting task is about to save a lives. What if it were your child’s life, or your spouse’s life, or your parent’s life. As you begin pulling the data together for your report, keep your higher purpose in mind. Treat every detail as if one person would die if you got it wrong. Make it your highest work. Five years from now, compare the difference between these two outcomes. The research funding was approved and your parent’s life was saved. Or, your non-recognition of the higher purpose led to sloppiness that lost the funding and you caused your own child’s death. Or, maybe you work in a factory packaging food. You feel your job is monotonous. Would it be so monotonous if you mentally followed the food you’re packaging? Imagine it leaving the plant in a truck, arriving at a market, getting purchased, and then getting cooked and eaten by a family. Maybe that food is part of the only meal they’ll get that day. Or maybe it’s for your family a week from now. Your purpose isn’t really to put food in a package…is it? Isn’t the higher purpose to take away the pain of hunger? You are giving the kindness of pain relief to another. Never mind what your co-workers or society thinks of your job. Every morsel of food you treat with care and protect from spoiling is a noble, if not sacred act of kindness. It is a gift. Purpose is something you choose to apply to the tasks you do. You can be hero, a person of nobility, or a savior, even in tasks that others consider humble. One way of finding a higher purpose in your tasks is to think altruistically. For example, picking fruit may seem like hard physical labor. Yet if you treat each piece of fruit as a gift from nature (or God) that is going to remove someone’s hunger, the act of picking fruit becomes an almost holy task, an act of removing hunger. Likewise, mopping the floor or washing clothes can be transformed from a chore to a gift of cleanliness for your family, the same family you care for dearly. The true value of each task gives us purpose, a reason for caring about the quality of the outcome. If you are a spiritual person, higher purpose may be readily discovered according to your beliefs. Take purposeful action according to your faith. Your actions become a form of worship or communion in perfect alignment with your ideals and the Universe. Ask yourself how you can best help others. By thinking in terms of the good you can do, and reinforcing that to yourself as you work, your purpose brings peacefulness, good will, and satisfaction. Without such purpose, all you have are miserable, lowly, repetitive, unrewarding tasks. With purpose, you lead a high and noble life that is filled with meaning and purpose and value. Remember how miserable the men in the desert became without purpose? Had each one adopted the personal purpose of communing with the land, the soil, and nature, and had they taken interest in the rocks and things within the soil, they would have enjoyed every strike of the shovel. You can do the same with your job. More
happiness actions—like purpose—can be found in the award-winning
Gratitude
For When Things Do Work Well
Copyright 2005 by Zelig Pliskin. All rights reserved. Reprinted with kind permission.
Rabbi
Zelig Pliskin—one of the world’s foremost happiness experts—has graciously
allowed this excerpt from his book, “Thank You!” available from ArtScroll
($8.99). “Thank You!” was ArtScroll’s best-selling
book in May 2005.
As A Man
Thinketh – Chapter Six “Visions
and Ideals” by James
Allen The
dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by
the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid
vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers.
Humanity cannot forget its dreamers. It cannot let their ideals fade and die.
It lives in them. It knows them in the realities which it shall one
day see and know. Composer,
sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the afterworld,
the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived;
without them, laboring humanity would perish. He who
cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day
realize it. Cherish
your visions. Cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your
heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your
purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all
heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world
will at last be built. To
desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve. Shall man's basest desires
receive the fullest measure of gratification, and his purest aspirations
starve for lack of sustenance? Such is not the Law. Such a condition of
things can never obtain - "Ask and receive." Dream
lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the
promise of what you shall one day be. Your Ideal is the prophecy of what you
shall at last unveil. The greatest
achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn;
the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking
angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities. Your
circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you
but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within
and stand still without. Here is a youth hard pressed by poverty and
labor; confined long hours in an unhealthy workshop; unschooled, and lacking
all the arts of refinement. But he dreams of better things. He thinks of
intelligence, of refinement, of grace and beauty. He conceives of, mentally
builds up, an ideal condition of life. The vision of the wider liberty and a
larger scope takes possession of him; unrest urges him to action, and he
utilizes all his spare time and means, small though they are, to the
development of his latent powers and resources. Very
soon so altered has his mind become that the workshop can no longer hold him.
It has become so out of harmony with his mentality that it falls out of his
life as a garment is cast aside, and with the growth of opportunities which
fit the scope of his expanding powers, he passes out of it forever. Years
later we see this youth as a full-grown man. We find him a master of certain
forces of the mind which he wields with world-wide influence and almost
unequaled power. In his hands he holds the cords of gigantic
responsibilities. He speaks, and lo! lives are changed. Men and women hang
upon his words and remold their characters, and, sun-like, he becomes the
fixed and luminous center around which innumerable destinies revolve. He has
realized the Vision of his youth. He has become one with his Ideal. And
you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of
your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will
always gravitate toward that which you secretly most love. Into your hands
will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that
which you earn, no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be,
you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal.
You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your
dominant aspiration. In the
beautiful words of Stanton Kirkham Dave, "You may be keeping accounts,
and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to
you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience -
the pen still behind your ear, the ink stains on your fingers - and then and
there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. You may be driving
sheep, and you shall wander to the city - bucolic and open mouthed; shall
wander under the intrepid guidance of the spirit into the studio of the master,
and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now
you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while
driving sheep. You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself
the regeneration of the world." The
thoughtless, the ignorant, and the indolent, seeing only the apparent effects
of things and not the things themselves, talk of luck, of fortune, and
chance. See a man grow rich, they say, "How lucky he is!" Observing
another become intellectual, they exclaim, "How highly favored he
is!" And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, the
remark, "How chance aids him at every turn!" They do
not see the trials and failures and struggles which these men have
voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience. They have no
knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they
have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome
the apparently insurmountable, and realize the Vision of their heart. They do
not know the darkness and the heartaches; they only see the light and joy,
and call it "luck"; do not see the long and arduous journey, but
only behold the pleasant goal, and call it "good fortune"; do not
understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it
"chance." In all
human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the
strength of the effort is the measure of the result. Chance is not. "Gifts,"
powers, material, intellectual, and spiritual possessions are the fruits of
effort. They are thoughts completed, objects accomplished, visions realized. The
vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your
heart - this you will build your life by, this you will become. In the next
issue, you’ll find chapter seven – “Serenity”
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* Special thanks to Sid Madwed’s
website for ready access to these quotations. To
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