Month: January 2024

What is the relationship between excellence and joy?

Is joy the reward for excellence achieved? Or is joy what fuels us on our path to excellence?

I like to play Irish music on the tin whistle. It brings me joy. The other night I decided to go to a traditional music session at a local Irish pub. A session is a kind of open night where anyone can show up and play tunes together. In theory, anyway. But I quickly learned I was in way over my head. The regulars there, some of them professional musicians, played tunes I didn’t know at a blistering speed. I smiled gamely and mostly listened, a mute whistle in my hand. It was painful. Compared to them, I was a crappy player. How ridiculous for me to think I could play with them! For that evening, at least, the joy drained away.

Image by Midjourney

Which would you rather have? Excellence without joy, or joy without excellence?

It seems like it should be an easy question, but it’s not, because humans are exquisitely tuned to social markers of achievement… subjective happiness be damned. Daniel Kahneman is a psychologist who has spent years studying happiness and reward. He has observed that, contrary to what you might think, people don’t seek happiness: “They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness. Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks—achieving goals, meeting expectations.”

Yardsticks and expectations. But according to whom? Who are these gatekeepers of excellence? The short, strange answer is that we often barely know or care. We want so badly to be scored and ranked that we are willing to cede this authority to almost anyone. This is bad news when it comes to joy.

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” goes the saying. Seeking excellence won’t make you happy in the short term, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. But you need to be suspicious of your gatekeepers. That’s the lesson I take away. Trust joy. Develop a sensitive nose for it. There are no gatekeepers for joy. The early signals are often weak, but they are vital. And when it’s time to compare, question the gatekeepers of excellence. Why do you care about what they care about? Why should their expectations be your expectations? When it comes to motivation, it’s remarkable how much of the heavy lifting is actually done by joy’s evil twin, shame. We often don’t pursue joy so much as seek to blot out shame. “I’ll show those bums in the Irish pub when I show up with my gold-plated whistle and my mad skills…” Shame aversion is a terrific way to reach that dubious double crown: joyless mediocrity. Joy is a weaker signal than shame, but a truer friend.

My wife Wendy loved to swim. She was part of a Masters swim team that practiced weekly and had regular competitions. Wendy worked hard at it and she was good. But even after a lifetime of swimming, she was never “great”, never super fast, never in the top ranks. Wendy’s sister Nancy was also a swimmer. When they were both young, Nancy was a state champ, a phenomenon. A paragon of excellence. She was the swimmer you would want to be. But by the time she left college, she was sick of it. Bad coaches had made her miserable. Too much work, not enough joy. Nancy gave up swimming. But Wendy swam for the rest of her life. With or without trophies, it was a source of the deepest joy for her.

That is excellence enough.

This is a picture of wind velocities around Massachusetts earlier today. What do you notice?

Image from Windy.com

If you answered “Gosh, Ned, it appears the wind blows faster over the ocean than it does over land,” then well done, and ten points for Gryffindor House! If I then asked you where you would want to put a wind turbine to cash in on some of that tasty wind, you might logically conclude “Why, in the ocean, of course.”

Except for the fact that everything is harder in the ocean. On account of all the water. Still, the ocean has a lot going for it. As mentioned, there’s boatloads of wind. Also, nobody lives there. Put it far enough offshore and nobody will even see that unsightly wind turbine (except for maybe rich senators on yachts — more on that later). Since a lot of people live near the shore, you’ll be making electricity satisfyingly close to where consumers will snarf it up. This is not always true for, say, a wind farm in western Iowa. And here’s a funny one: the United States has waited so freaking long to get into the offshore wind game that the technology is by now very mature. There are a lot of reasons for that delay, but for now we can be glad that the figurative winds are finally shifting.

Things don’t change until they do.

I like that quote, because it reminds cynics like me that events can always surprise you. It’s been obvious for a long time that the seafloor off Cape Cod is a good location for a wind farm. The first proposals date back to 2001. But they met with much opposition. Including from Senator Ted Kennedy, who, as luck would have it, happened to have a nice house on the Cape Cod shore. It was difficult to build something in Massachusetts that Ted Kennedy didn’t like. But since 2001, a number of things have changed. For one thing, the good senator is no longer with us. But beyond that, many regulatory issues and environmental concerns have been sorted out, and now the offshore wind industry in the United States is off to a good, if belated, start. It only took 23 years, but as of last Tuesday the Vineyard Wind project is delivering power to customers. Vineyard Wind 1 will eventually consist of 62 turbines, and it will supply power to some 400,000 homes.

First Power from Nation-Leading Vineyard Wind 1 Project.

I like to remind myself that there are a great many things like this. They’re moving forward slowly, and for a long time they’re hidden from view. Each one represents years of effort and planning and setbacks and determination. Wind farms, solar projects, grid-scale batteries, or maybe research in nuclear fusion.

Things don’t change until they do. But then they do. A few years ago I thought I’d never see a wind turbine off Massachusetts. But look!