After an investor’s recommendation recently, I stumbled on this question in an article in The Atlantic about the Grant Study. An incredible 80-year long longitudinal study following 268 Harvard-educated men and how they developed as adults. While most of the Grant Study men remain anonymous, some have publicly identified themselves, like Ben Bradlee and President John F. Kennedy. Simply put, it was history’s longest study on happiness. There were some fascinating discoveries in that study so far, like the six factors that acted leading indicators to healthy aging:
- Physical activity,
- A mature adaptive lifestyle to cope with ups and downs,
- Little use of alcohol,
- No smoking,
- Stable marriage, and
- Maintaining a normal weight.
I highly recommend reading George Vaillant’s Aging Well. If you’re short on time, Robert Waldinger’s TED talk. But I digress.
Despite always preaching to others that they should ask for help when they need it, I’m a terrible practitioner of my own advice. Sometimes I find it incredibly hard to ask for help from others. In situations I should be the expert in. In moments when I don’t think my problems are as big as others’. And in times when I don’t know what I want. While I hate to admit it, it’s often a problem attributed to my ego. And sometimes, unwittingly.
If you had to live your life over again, what problem would you have sought help for and whom would you have gone to?
The reason I love this question so much is that in asking it, we suspend our ego. It’s often easier to open up about the “[potholes] in the rearview mirror” than “[open] up about the potholes ahead” to use the words of Jeff Wald. It’s easier to answer What were you scared of as a child? than What are you scared of today?. I find it easier to:
- Reflect on what I should have asked for help in.
- Understand why I should have asked for help sooner in an empirical situation.
- Then use those first principles to inform me when I should ask for help now.
Your mileage may very much vary. But nevertheless, over the past week, I found it to be an interesting thought exercise to go through. At the very minimum, something to journal on.
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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