satisfaction

Seek Perfection or Change Perception? What My Travels Taught Me

I had the great joy of heading on a trip south recently. Vacations can be tricky business, can’t they? Sometimes these breaks are a highlight for the whole family, a chance to reconnect with a partner, or a major outlay from the entertainment budget each year.

The meanings we bring to vacation can hoist the expectations. We might tell ourselves (and those around us), “You’re going to have fun whether you like it or not!”

So what did I learn on my winter vacation?

I stayed in a classic Florida hotel in a charming location, adjacent to a marina, on the water. Seeing the fish jumping and the birds fishing, feeling the sea breeze in my hair again and the sun on my face, it was lovely. Except.

Except the walls of the hotel room were quite thin. Conversation and TV sounds came through from one side, snoring from the other. It was hard not to focus on those noises. My perception was the hotel was not up to modern standards: it was not acceptable the way it was.

Then I downloaded an app for my phone, a white noise generator. In two minutes, it was as if those other noises weren’t getting in anymore. I only heard the soothing sounds of a waterfall coming from the phone.

I woke up well-rested and realized that the phone app had, for all practical purposes, thickened and insulated the walls of the hotel room. It turned a flawed vacation spot into a near-perfect one.

The lesson of the stay in the old hotel is that sometimes, we need to be intentional about changing our perception so we can change our reality. We didn’t choose the world we were born into, but we do choose how to focus our attention, where to direct our response, and thereby, how we experience and shape our world.

Clients, when you would like new ways to focus on your world, please email us or call.

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Play the audio version of this post below:

Seek Perfection or Change Perception? What My Travels Taught Me – 228Main.com Presents: The Best of Leibman Financial Services

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The Happiness Assassins

© Can Stock Photo / Feverpitched

A professor at the Harvard Business School studies the connections between happiness and wealth. Since our immediate business here at 228 Main is wealth, and our primary object as human beings is happiness, we are paying attention.

Michael Norton’s research says there are two main questions people with money ask themselves when thinking about their level of satisfaction or happiness. “Am I doing better than before?” and “Am I doing better than other people?”

We recognize the comparison to others as ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ don’t we? And always doing better than before implies a treadmill of constant improvement, ignoring the natural ebb and flow of markets, business and the economy. These are high hurdles to happiness.

Somebody somewhere is always doing better than us. And we can never have enough, if we always want more. Perhaps this is why researchers have found that people feel if only they had two or three times as much money as they had, then they would be perfectly happy.

Being the best clients in the world, you as a group are a little different. You possess a certain kind of common sense, a groundedness, that has you considering your happiness in connection with what you need and with your natural aspirations for the future. You understand the “two steps forward, one step back” nature of the markets and economy. (You don’t always like it, but you do understand it.)

One friend quotes her granny on this point: “I have enough, and enough is as good as a feast.” This is sheer genius.

Clients, it is unimaginably more satisfying for us to work with you, instead of the kind of people these researchers talk to. If you would like to talk about this or anything else, please email us or call.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.