Pleasure is fine, but satisfaction is what you should chase.

Issue #265 of the Better Humans Daily. Subscribe here for inspiration and knowledge.

#1. What was Steph Curry crying about?

I watched Steph Curry win the NBA championship yesterday and then start crying as the clock ran out. It’s probably the most I’ve ever seen a professional athlete cry. But this is his fourth time winning, so it’s not new and he didn’t cry like this for the previous wins.

It made me think about pleasure vs. satisfaction. This is partly why I am such a proponent of the concept of flow. Pleasure is when you procrastinate on work and go get a cookie. Yum. Satisfaction is when you put in one ultra-focused hour and then admire what you accomplished.

So, guessing about Steph, he was overwhelmed with satisfaction after a very difficult journey between this championship and the last one. They had many injuries, and the team had the worst record in the league two seasons ago.

People often frame chasing difficult things as a macho path. But it’s also a satisfying path and I think we should all chase these harder goals simply because success is so satisfying.

#2. Do you trust your coworkers easily?

This is a personality test question and doesn’t have a right answer. I’m thinking about it in relation to so much of the world moving to remote work and hybrid setups. Here’s a nugget:

Different people build trust in different ways. I’m going to simplify a bit here, but basically, some people assume trust in work relationships, while others look for coworkers to earn it. The first group assumes a level of trust at the outset and uses experiences together to build or diminish the pool of trust. The second group starts without an assumption of trust, and then observes over time whether others meet their expectations in critical areas — capability, reliability, honesty and commitment to the common good — to build up the pool of trust. In other words, some individuals have a greater propensity to trust others. Anecdotally, people with a higher propensity for trust are more likely than observe-firsters to be drawn to distributed teams.

That anecdote was from before the pandemic. So now I’m wondering if previous distributed teams worked because people self-selected into them because it fit their personality. But now many people are being forced to work remotely. So tell me: are you in the assume-trust group or the observe-trust group? And does that explain at all any of your work dynamics?

Source: Remote Work Insights You’ve Never Heard Before by Sarah Milstein.

#3. Are you a chaotic creative?

This quote hit me from The Dance of Decluttering by Erik Assadourian.

Vu Le, not a psychologist but an astute writer on nonprofit life (so perhaps an honorary organizational psychologist), points out that maybe messiness is simply a trait, and that the messy, or “Chaotic Creatives” as he calls them should embrace their “chaotic brilliance.”

I’m messy and creative. So I wondered if the mess serves my creativity? Personally, I’d say no. The mess reflects a mental prioritization. The creativity is that I’ve prioritized letting my mind wander over finishing the task at hand. For me, it’s the unfinished tasks that create clutter, i.e. a book that I pulled off the shelf to reference but then didn’t put back. Those add up.

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