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What are the most useful gems of wisdom I can pass to my 10-year-old?
Here is the list I made up off the top of my head (along with some minor elaborations dug out from a few inches deeper in the brain):
Old Man by Rubens 1. Put one foot in front of the other. 
Old Man by Rubens
1. Put one foot in front of the other.
Several highly successful people have said this more eloquently: The great golfer Ben Hogan reportedly said: “Golf is a game of luck, the more I practice, the luckier I get.” And the brilliant inventor Thomas Edison said: “Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
In my business, as a professor at a “Research I” university, success is often defined as publishing papers that will get cited by other researchers. My most cited academic paper is one I did with David Funder (Kenrick & Funder, 1988). Funder, who was then an assistant professor at Harvard, had just gotten one of these new fangled “personal computers” (the kind that stored everything you wrote on 5 inch floppy disks). I had access to one in the psychology department (which wasn’t yet getting a lot of use, because professors still mostly had secretaries type their manuscripts from drafts handwritten on yellow legal pads). To work on the paper, we mailed a floppy disk back and forth every week or so, and simply promised one another to open up the file, add a little something, and send it back within a week. Funder came up with this plan because he had been making a lot of progress on several papers using a simple rule: Don’t set a goal of writing a whole paper (which can be daunting), just read what you’ve written yesterday, and set a small goal of adding just a few sentences. I tried that, and the results were amazing. Turns out, once you take the first small steps toward any goal, it’s easy to keep walking. That rule also works when you are trying to get into shape. I am often feeling too little energy to begin a big workout, so I tell myself to just take a short stroll or bike ride, or do a few sit-ups, just to remind my body that it may, some time in the future, be called on to exercise. More than half the time, I keep going for a full workout once my blood gets flowing.
2. Satisfice. There’s the rule that you can accomplish the most important 90% in 10% of the time it would take to get it perfect. Another bit of advice I got from my friend David Funder was to just write first, then edit later. If you try to perfect every sentence as you write, you’ll have a very hard time covering any distance. I see the importance of this rule whenever I work with a graduate student who is writing a comprehensive paper. This is supposed to be a review of the research literature on some big and important topic, leading to a productive line of new research questions. Graduate students are supposed to finish it in six months, but it more often takes a year, or two, or three. Students get stuck because they believe that to impress their faculty advisors, they have to review every single study that has ever been done on a topic (such as the social psychology of prejudice and discrimination, for instance, on which there have been thousands of papers written). And then they feel a need to include some discussion of every paper they read, even if it is a bit tangential to their main point. It turns out that the most interesting papers result when the student sets a goal of making a small point, and trying not to worry too much about whether someone else said something relevant in an obscure paper published in some journal over the last fifty years.
3. Go with the flow. Don’t always insist that things go your way, or any particular way. Last week my 10-year-old son got together with his 8-year-old nephew and 6-year-old niece. His older brother and I made the mistake of trying to be democratic, asking: “What do you kids want to do?” We gave 3 options, and got 3 different answers. Each time the parents tried to push for one, two of the three kids would start pouting and whining. We eventually decided on miniature golf, which is what my older son and I wanted to do anyway. The two kids who did not choose the mini-golf option then spent a lot of time sulking, ruining an experience they would have otherwise enjoyed. It’s not just kids who do this, of course. I’ve myself been part of groups of adults trying to decide on a restaurant or a movie, and occasionally been annoyed when things did not go my way. On the positive side, last night my 10-year-old got dragged along to an adult dinner party, an event I am sure he would have voted against if given the choice. On the way home, his mom commented on how well he behaved, and thanked him for not complaining the whole time. He responded that he had tried to focus in on the most interesting conversation at the table, and found that it wasn’t that bad at all!
4. Be courageous. Be willing to stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes going along is not the right thing, as when you see a weak kid being picked on in the schoolyard, or later in life when one of your friends encourages you to do something foolhardy and potentially dangerous, or still later when you are working for a businessman who cheats or shortchanges his customers. There are often strong temptations to do the wrong thing. This is a big theme in children’s literature and movies, in which the evil wizard offers great rewards to the young apprentice, and threatens him with pain and suffering if he tries to do the good thing. In real life, the choice isn’t always as clear as that between the Emperor Palpatine and Yoda. In the field of psychology, there was a lot of strong pressure against anyone who tried to adopt an evolutionary perspective in their research on human behavior. The opponents of an evolutionary perspective were not evil, but in fact thought they were doing the right thing, often fearing the power of the Naturalistic Fallacy (which is the tendency to conflate “natural” with “good”). The reasoning of the anti-evolutionary forces was that we should avoid considering human aggression or sex differences as part of nature, or the lay public will feel justified in opposing any attempts to reduce violence or group-based injustice. Some argued that evolutionary ideas were scientifically “bad” besides, in the sense of being “untestable.” For some different takes on this controversy, see Steven Pinker’s Blank Slate, Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truth, or my book Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life. Despite having to suffer a lot of hostility, or perhaps because of the open controversy, the evolutionary perspective has spawned a generation of brilliant researchers in several fields, and is yielding many insights into both the positive and negative aspects of human behavior. If you believe that knowledge is power, the perspective has empowered those who actually want to understand the causes of behavior, and use that understanding for the betterment of individual lives and the larger society (e.g. Griskevicius, Cantu, & Van Vugt, 2014).
5. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (plus 50% for self-serving bias). This is my distorted memory of something Linus Pauling said, which was actually: "Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you." … The twenty-five percent is for error.” When Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked men and women what percent of the housework they do, they found that adding the man’s and the woman’s totals usually summed to well over 100%. How did that work? Most people remember more of their own contributions than their spouses. Even outside marriage, it is clear that people generally overestimate their own inputs to the group welfare. As someone who has personally studied the biases in human judgment (Kenrick & Griskevicius, 2013), and who just finished revising a textbook that reviews the research on social cognition (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2015), I think it is safe to say that the evidence suggests we need a very strong correction for what my colleagues call “self-serving biases.”
6. Work in teams. When I was completing my Ph.D., my advisor, Bob Cialdini, gave me an incredibly useful bit of advice about the first thing I should do when I arrived at Montana State (where I had landed my first academic job): Set up a team of students to work with me. As Cialdini pointed out, it would keep me honest. If there is a team of graduate and undergraduate students signed up to work on your research, you need to come up with something for them to work on. In the decades since, I have worked with hundreds of brilliant and highly motivated undergraduates and dozens of brilliant and highly motivated graduate students. All sides profit from the teamwork: many of the students who have worked on my research team have gone on to become successful researchers on their own, for example, and several are now working at top flight universities around the world. I have also collaborated with dozens of other faculty members on research and writing projects. The truth is that I would not have published much without my collaborators, and would surely have perished, but instead, and despite my own numerous limitations, I’ve managed to have a very productive career.
Besides the fact that other team members keep you honest, they also typically have different skills. The grad students on my team know much more about statistics than I do, they are willing to do all the paperwork to get our studies past review panels, and are dedicated to bringing our papers into print, since they not only don’t have tenure, they will need a job next year. In turn, the faculty members on the team know a little about how to distinguish a potentially profitable line of research from a likely waste of time, how to structure an argument for a scientific journal, and how to read and respond to the reviews. One unfortunate aspect of academic assistant professorhood is that young faculty are strongly encouraged to be rugged individualists, when in the long run, most of us are a lot more rugged when we’re connected to a team.
7. Assume there is another side to every story. In your close relationships as well as your work life, some degree of disagreement is unavoidable. Given all those self-serving biases, it helps to remember that in a 2-person disagreement, you’re wrong half the time. Sometimes, simply considering the possibility that you’re mistaken can inspire you to stop talking and listen, which might in turn lead to the discovery that you actually understand the other person’s point.
8. Expect to eat a spoonful of shit everyday. I guess I should modify the language for my young son (because hell, he's never heard any profanity from my friggin' mouth), but one of my friends suggested this little anti-proverb as a way to stay in a marriage. He noted that some days you will only have to swallow a little demitasse spoonful of crap, whereas other days it will be a big soup ladle. You’ll do better if you don’t expect every moment of married life to be bliss. And the advice applies to life more generally. Everyday life always involves compromises, challenges, and obstacles. If you set your expectations for a life of unlimited joy, you’ll be highly disappointed. If, on the other hand, you expect that you’ll have to deal with some amount of crap everyday, you won’t continue to be surprised when tomorrow isn’t perfect either, and you might be less likely to take the occasional spoonful of honey for granted.
9. Don’t directly strive after happiness. Happiness will happen automatically if you are working hard and trying to make other people happy. As I reviewed in an earlier blog, Iris Mauss and others have found some negative consequences of consciously going out of your way to try to achieve bliss (see If You Pursue Happiness, You May Find Loneliness). Not only are there down sides to striving after unlimited bliss, Joe Forgas and his colleagues have even found a number of benefits of sadness (see 7 good things about feeling bad). This does not mean you need to go out of your way to avoid happiness, but other research suggests that it follows indirectly from nurturing your relationships with others, and from going out of your way to make others happy (e.g. Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008; Myers, 2000).
10. Embrace negative feedback. You can’t improve if you don’t listen to criticism. In an earlier blog post (Zen and the Art of Embracing Rejection), I compared the experience of getting a manuscript rejected to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s classical stages of facing death: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and Rebirth. David Myers pointed out that, way back in 1957, Benton Underwood said: “The rejection of my own manuscripts has a sordid aftermath: (a) one day of depression, (b) one day of utter contempt for the editor and his accomplices; (c) one day of decrying the conspiracy against letting Truth be published; (d) one day of fretful ideas about changing my profession; (e) one day of re-evaluating the manuscript in view of the editor’s comments followed by the conclusion that I was lucky it wasn’t accepted.”
Some qualifications
Alas, those of you who have been around for a while know that life is complex, and that the bits of proverbial wisdom I listed above all have some important qualifiers. Here are a few:
Qualification on number 1 (put one foot in front of the other): … unless you’re walking off a gangplank. This rule only applies if you’re working toward a worthwhile goal, and if that goal is in fact attainable. Otherwise, pick another goal.
Qualification on number 2 (satisfice): There are a small number of projects you want to perfect. Sometimes, as with computer programming, or faulty components on a space shuttle, small imperfections can make your product useless and even dangerous.
Qualification on number 3 (go with the flow). This refers to the flow of the people you value, your friends and family. It doesn’t apply to people who are going in a direction you think is wrong, in which case number 4 (be courageous) applies.
Qualification on number 4 (be courageous). You need to choose your battles, and not fight valiantly over things that are not truly important, or that are unwinnable. You want to be like Thomas Huxley (Darwin's bulldog), not like Don Quixote.
Qualification on number 5 (the golden rule plus 50 percent): This one does not apply when you are dealing with a psychopath. In that case, it’s better to take the game strategy studied by my colleague Athena Atkipis, called “walk away” (which turns out to be a robust defense against exploitation in economic games).
Stay tuned, and let me hear your grandmother’s advice
The gems of wisdom I listed above are those that occurred to me. But following number 6 above, I also asked for advice from some people who have lived more successful lives than I have, and also from Psychology Today readers (check out the great reader comments to What are the 3 most useful bits of wisdom for life, Part 1). After reading through all that, I discovered I had missed some critical things, and also that there were some important twists on what I said, twists my 10-year-old (and I) ought to keep in mind as we try to survive life on earth. I’ll pass those on in my next blog post!
Thanks to all of you who provided thoughtful advice in response to the last blog post. Meanwhile, I’d still love to hear any of your responses to the query I sent to my distinguished colleagues:
“If there were 2 or 3 kernels of wisdom you think a parent should pass on to his kid, what would they be?”
As I noted earlier, I don't need long or eloquent answers, and I would love to hear advice from people who are not American academic urban sophisticates, but maybe your wise old grandparent from a little farm or another country.
- Douglas Kenrick is author of The Rational Animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think and Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature.
Related blogs
7 good things about feeling bad: The bright sad of sadness.
What's so good about negative feedback? Zen and the Art of Embracing Rejection.
If You Pursue Happiness, You May Find Loneliness: Some Sad Facts About Happiness
Are you spending money in ways that make you unhappy?
What are the 3 most useful bits of wisdom for life, Part 1.
References
Aktipis, C. (2004). Know when to walk away: contingent movement and the evolution of cooperation. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 231(2), 249-260.
Dunn, E.W., Aknin, L., & Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319, 1687–1688.
Forgas, J.P. (2013). Don’t worry, be sad! On the cognitive, motivational, and interpersonal benefits of negative mood. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 225–232.
Gruber, J., Mauss, I. B., & Tamir, M. (2011). A dark side of happiness? How, when, and why happiness is not always good. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 222–233.
Griskevicius, V., Cantú, S. M., & Vugt, M. V. (2012). The evolutionary bases for sustainable behavior: Implications for marketing, policy, and social entrepreneurship. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 31(1), 115-128.
Kenrick, D.T. (2011). Sex, murder, and the meaning of life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. New York: Basic Books.
Kenrick, D.T., & Funder, D.C. (1988). Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate. American Psychologist, 43, 23-34.
Kenrick, D.T., & Griskevicius, V. (2013). The rational animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think. New York: Basic Books.
Kenrick, D.T., Neuberg, S.L., & Cialdini, R.B. (2015). Social psychology: Goals in interaction. 6th edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Myers, D. G. (2000). The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American Psychologist, 55, 56–67.
Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of personality and social psychology, 37, 322-336.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Elderly#mediaviewer/File:Rubens_old_m…
