The Happiness Project - March - Aim Higher

One of my recent resolutions is to blog more frequently. The topics I want to write about are piling up, so I may end up interspersing the rest of the Happiness topics with others, but today I plan to summarize the "Aim Higher" chapter of the Happiness Project. As a reminder, this is the third part in a series, following January's "Boost Energy" and February's "Remember Love". I am summarizing the work of Gretchen Rubin in her book "The Happiness Project" and my reactions to it.

I think one of the reasons I've put off this blog is that this chapter mostly talks about work, and I don't have recent work experience to relate. But I'll do my best to share prior work experience and/or other life experiences to bring her lessons to life. As in prior blogs, I italicize text that is a direct quote from her book, and have normal text when I am talking about my experience or opinion. Hopefully that's not too distracting!

I do believe that it's important to enjoy the work you do. She makes many points about how people who are happy in their work are more successful:

• They work more hours and they work more in their free time. To be honest, I'm not sure that's a good thing. Early in my tenure at FICO I asked my boss how he enjoyed his vacation, and he said "I spent a lot of time thinking about fuzzy algorithms". I was kind of shocked, I NEVER spent vacation time thinking about work at that point in my career, and I kind of felt sorry for him. But on the other hand, if you're so passionate about something that you WANT to do it on your time off, I guess that's a good thing.

• They tend to be more cooperative, less self-centered, and more willing to help other people. I do believe this, I think happiness leads to these things and they are all good qualities of a colleague. She states that happy people work better with others, because people prefer to be around happier people, who are less likely to show counterproductive behaviors of burnout, absenteeism, work disputes, or retaliatory behavior.

• Happier people make more effective leaders. I believe this to be true, too. If a manager is unhappy in their work, they likely find it harder to inspire others to do a good job. Interestingly, she quotes a study that showed that students who were more happy as freshman were earning more money in their mid-thirties, without any wealth advantage to start. So there's motivation to be in a field that makes you happy!

• The author decided to leave the field of law, which was her educational background, to switch careers and become a writer. One of the reasons she decided to switch was she just didn't feel passionate about the work. She said that people who love their work bring an intensity and enthusiasm that's impossible to match through sheer diligence. Another quote that spoke to me was that enthusiasm is more important to master than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. I can see her point, but I don't think that's ALWAYS true. I have two experiences that speak to each side of this. One is that when I switched from my FICO job to my InfoCentricity job, I was DEFINITELY a happier person. There are many reasons for that, which I'll talk about in more depth in a future blog so I don't sidetrack this one. But I did enjoy my work at InfoCentricity much more, and I think that helped me be successful there. The other example on the opposite side is at one point as a manager, I had an internal applicant for a position but his experience did not qualify him to do the job, so he didn't get the position. He actually went to work learning more about how to do the job on his own time, and the next time he applied he got the position. But he was never really highly successful, I don't think he was actually qualified but I hired him because he showed initiative and work ethic. So enthusiasm isn't ALWAYS enough.

Start a blog

So here's where the authors experiences stop making sense for those of us who don't want to be writers. So rather than relate what I learned from reading this part of the book, I'll relate two of my experiences that I think helped me be successful at InfoCentricity.

When I started working there, it was November 15th, 2004. I had three weeks off between jobs, and in those days we still got a lot of catalogs delivered to our mailbox in the fall. One of the catalogs I had received was a Hershey catalog, and they offered CUSTOM chocolate creations. So my first week on the job, I went into the CEO's office with that catalog and suggested we create custom computer screens with our Xeno logo on them in chocolate, and send one to each of our customers as a holiday gift. And they only charged something like $25! He agreed! I learned several things from this experience:

1. It's a lot easier to get things done in a small company than a large company. I had just come from a job at FICO where I was frequently negotiating pricing with our customers, and I had to get 5 layers of approval every time before I could present the pricing to the customer. To get a "yes" answer just like that was a pleasant surprise.

2. Even when people sit right next to each other, they don't necessarily communicate. I went ahead and ordered the chocolate computers, and when the bill came in the CFO (who sits RIGHT next to the CEO) said "what's this"? Turned out I SHOULD have gotten his permission too.

3. The chocolate computers were a BIG HIT! It was a little challenging because some of our customers had employees in multiple offices, but we worked it out. And it gave me a good reason to learn who our customers were, who the main contact was, etc.

The other thing I did early on at InfoCentricity was interview my colleagues about how they used Xeno. One of my colleagues used it for his retail customers, and they would identify their "best" customers by assigning those that bought frequently or spent a lot a value of "1" in a variable, everyone else a value of "0", and use it as the performance outcome in a classing. This won't make any sense to those of you without InfoCentricity/FICO experience, but it was a brilliant use of the tool to do something many people had never thought of. Another colleague used it to investigate anomalies in the data. For instance, he saw a huge "jump" in the population distribution at a specific score, and by assigning those records with that score a "1" and everyone else a "0" and running a classing on it, he identified that those records had a long period of inactivity and therefore the score was a default score assigned at initiation that had never been recalculated.

By the time I was done interviewing people, I had a collection of ideas on "applications of the classer" and the idea of creating a User Exchange. Within short order, I had approval to arrange a conference and invite all our users, and the beginnings of a set of presentations. Within six months, we hosted our first User Exchange and it was a roaring success. And we used that presentation on "Applications of the Classer" many times over.

What these experiences taught me was that when I was in a position that enabled me to use initiative and collaboration, I could be successful AND add value to a company that needed employees who were comfortable in an customer-facing role.

Enjoy the fun of failure

This is another topic that I struggled to relate to. Basically, the concept the author relates is that if you don't try something new, you'll never learn what you CAN do. And though you will have lots of failures if you push yourself, you will also have a few successes.

To relate my own experiences and protect people's identities, I'll use initials instead of full names. The example that comes to mind for me was once, when I was fairly new in my tenure at FICO, I made a bad mistake on a project. I had created a complex spreadsheet to do score alignments for our customers, and in one case, I had the wrong reference buried deep in the spreadsheet, and I delivered the wrong alignment factors to a client. It caused them to automatically CLOSE a bunch of accounts, and when I found that out, I felt horrible. Luckily for me, the accounts were two cycles delinquent, and the customer wasn't that upset about closing them. When the person in charge of our division, LR, found out about it he said "if you don't make mistakes you aren't working", which was actually a huge comfort. I was worried I was going to get fired, and his response made me feel like it was acceptable to make a mistake once in awhile. But, boy did I learn from that and never made that mistake again. And believe it or not, some form of that spreadsheet was still in use when I left FICO in 2020, 34 years later!

Ask for help

The author gives an example of finding two friends who were in a similar profession and situation as she was, and meeting regularly to help each other be successful. She noted that like Weight Watchers and AA, it gave them a sense of accountability. I can definitely relate to that because at one point in my life I gained lifetime status as a Weight Watcher. Sadly, a change of jobs lost me the onsite WW meetings so I quit attending meetings, I started enjoying "Tuesday bagels" and "Friday donuts" and I lost my lifetime status! The lack of accountability has plagued me since in my efforts to lose weight.

I don't remember a time when I actually had to ask for help, because in my first job at FICO they were good about having newer employee's work reviewed by more experienced staff. But I do recall a specific instance where having my work reviewed was very effective. At the time, I reported to a manager who would look at my work, make a few "hmm's" and tell me what to fix. I had the occasion to need work reviewed when he was traveling and his boss was on vacation, so it fell to the head of the division (LR). He did such a good job "thinking out loud" that I learned more from that review session than I had in MONTHS of doing the work on my own. When I expressed my appreciation he stated he had almost taken a teaching job so he guessed he still enjoyed it. I felt like that got me off to a good start with a very senior person at the company, and that helped me in years to come.

Work smart

This section of the book also spoke to me. Like many working moms, there just wasn't enough hours in the day. I remember one time when we were trying to achieve revenue goals soon after we had gone public at FICO, LR said "work smarter not harder" and asked us all to think about ways we could get more done. Better tools? New computer? Faster support services? I think that's a good exercise for every employee to go through now and then.

The author relates several ways she found efficiencies. She tracked her work for several days and decided that she could be more effective if she split her writing work into 90 minute chunks, broken up by easier tasks like answering emails. So that helped her be more efficient in her work.

I went to a "stress reduction" seminar once and one of the tips I remembered was to study what work you did best at what times of day. For instance, they said many people find it hard to concentrate in the afternoons, so that might be a better time to answer emails than to try to do analysis work. For me, getting up early was a real win, especially when I had a family and needed to get kids out of the door before I could go to work. I usually woke up thinking about something, so rather than lay in bed trying to sleep, I would get up and get an hour or two of work done, usually in the wee hours of the morning. I could be SO PRODUCTIVE at that time, it was worth the lack of sleep.

Enjoy now

The author shared a tip in the prior section that I actually think fits better in this one. She said that she smelled a pleasant scent at a party and went around smelling everything until she realized it was a candle burning (I would have just asked the host!). She went home and ordered herself the same candle, and burned it in her home office and it brought a very pleasant sensation to her work environment. My version of that was a comfy blanket that I would put over my lap while working at home on cold days. I didn't often use that blanket because it was too small for a bed, but it was the perfect size to warm my lap on a cold day, and it made the work just a bit more pleasant.

One of the young women I worked with at FICO said her father once told her "you either need to enjoy the work you do or the people you work with, ideally both". I think that was wise advice. Almost always in my work life I have enjoyed the people I worked with, but sometimes the work was less enjoyable. When I had both in my InfoCentricity job, that was the best!

I had a very eye-opening experience along those lines in a non-work situation. When Katelyn was in 6th grade we decided to open a coffee store in Liberty's multi-purpose building's kitchen, to raise money for 6th grade camp. It was a pretty big success, but that was partly because two other Mom's and their kids and Katelyn and I would get up at 6 a.m. and head to school in order to get the coffee made and water heated for hot chocolate on time. One of the Moms was great at being outside convincing students and parents to stop by, and another Mom was great at customer service and teaching the kids how to wait on customers. I still remember we had to prompt them to ask "How can I help you?" when a customer walked up vs. just looking at them. After 7 months of running this the other two Moms had to bow out, and I ended up working with another parent. Boy, she was a pain to work with. I didn't last the month before closing down the operation. It's difficult enough to have to get up that early and head to school, but to do it with someone I didn't enjoy working with, not worth it!

To be honest, the remainder of this chapter wasn't that helpful to me, so I'm going to skip summarizing it for you! Up next in April, "Lighten Up" - Parenthood. That one's going to be fun!