Why How
A friend forwarded me one of those long internet essays on Viktor Frankl last week that made for interesting reading but I had to fact check it because it was mostly written by AI. I learned that Frankl did watch men in Auschwitz outlast stronger men because they had a wife waiting or a manuscript half-written. He was quoting Nietzsche when he wrote that a man with a why can bear almost any how, which the essay left out. Later, Eric Kim and colleagues, using the Health and Retirement Study, found people in the highest band of purpose had a 46 percent lower mortality risk over four years than those in the lowest band. The same study found high purpose also predicted higher optimism scores on follow-up, a beta of 0.41.
Purpose gives you a reason to keep going. Optimism gives you a plausible story for why the setback in front of you is temporary and fixable, not proof of something permanent and true about who you are. I also learned that Martin Seligman worked out that second half at MetLife, after the CEO asked why sales agents kept quitting. Agents who scored in the top half for optimism sold 37 percent more insurance over two years than the bottom half. Then MetLife hired a group who'd failed the standard aptitude test outright but scored as extreme optimists, over the objections of its own hiring criteria. That group outsold the regular hires by 21 percent in year one and 57 percent in year two. Nobody got smarter at selling insurance but what changed was how they explained a door slammed in their face.
I found myself connecting the dots to what I have seen in my professional life. Two people get handed the same broken data pipeline. One treats it as proof the whole function is doomed and starts polishing a resume. The other treats it as an annoying but solvable by Tueday and a story that will carry heft in a job interview. I've watched entire data teams fail for years at something that, with a different frame and an afternoon of poking at Gemini, turned out to take an afternoon. The tools weren't the variable, it was the story each person told themselves about whether the problem was fixable was the variable, and it compounded until one team looked competent and the other looked cursed.
My mother is one of the most optimistic people I know and I think I inherited some of it from her though I have my saturine moments. It was interesting to learn that Seligman's own later work found the effect of optimism on things like depression risk actually shrinks as people age, which nobody selling this idea online mentions either. That forwarded essay as terribly written as it was, got me learning about things I woldn't have otherwise.
Purpose gives you a reason to keep going. Optimism gives you a plausible story for why the setback in front of you is temporary and fixable, not proof of something permanent and true about who you are. I also learned that Martin Seligman worked out that second half at MetLife, after the CEO asked why sales agents kept quitting. Agents who scored in the top half for optimism sold 37 percent more insurance over two years than the bottom half. Then MetLife hired a group who'd failed the standard aptitude test outright but scored as extreme optimists, over the objections of its own hiring criteria. That group outsold the regular hires by 21 percent in year one and 57 percent in year two. Nobody got smarter at selling insurance but what changed was how they explained a door slammed in their face.
I found myself connecting the dots to what I have seen in my professional life. Two people get handed the same broken data pipeline. One treats it as proof the whole function is doomed and starts polishing a resume. The other treats it as an annoying but solvable by Tueday and a story that will carry heft in a job interview. I've watched entire data teams fail for years at something that, with a different frame and an afternoon of poking at Gemini, turned out to take an afternoon. The tools weren't the variable, it was the story each person told themselves about whether the problem was fixable was the variable, and it compounded until one team looked competent and the other looked cursed.
My mother is one of the most optimistic people I know and I think I inherited some of it from her though I have my saturine moments. It was interesting to learn that Seligman's own later work found the effect of optimism on things like depression risk actually shrinks as people age, which nobody selling this idea online mentions either. That forwarded essay as terribly written as it was, got me learning about things I woldn't have otherwise.
Filed under:
Reflections