Every few years, I review my activities. I mentally divide these into things I love (ward attending, writing this blog, participating in internal medicine leadership) and things I like (most committee work, clinic supervision, etc.). I then try very hard to focus my activities on the love list and exclude the like list. Apparently this strategy is unusual and desirable.
The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors
Or we can just try to do it on our own. Since conducting the door experiments, Dr. Ariely says, he has made a conscious effort to cancel projects and give away his ideas to colleagues. He urges the rest of us to resign from committees, prune holiday card lists, rethink hobbies and remember the lessons of door closers like Xiang Yu.
If the general’s tactics seem too crude, Dr. Ariely recommends another role model, Rhett Butler, for his supreme moment of unpredictable rationality at the end of his marriage. Scarlett, like the rest of us, can’t bear the pain of giving up an option, but Rhett recognizes the marriage’s futility and closes the door with astonishing elan. Frankly, he doesn’t give a damn.
bingo
February 27th, 2008 / 4:13 pm
DB:
On September 20, 2001 I joinded my Dad, brother, and brother-in-law for a golf weekend in Kiawah, S.C. Note the date. The resort had a 95% cancellation rate that weekend; we had the place to ourselves. I had a ball playing every course EXCEPT the Ocean Course, the signature course on the island. This led to an epiphany, a truly life-changing insight into myself: the things that make me feel badly make me feel worse than the things that make me feel good are able to make me happy. My sub-epiphany was that I can avoid things that I know make me feel badly, but it’s awfully hard in contrast to reliably find things that make me feel good.
The other men immediately jumped ugly: “That’s playing not to lose rather than playing to win.” “You’re just cranked because the course ate you up.” But of course that wasn’t the case at all. In a way I had simply taken the first step toward adapting your srategy.