Happiness, regrets and mixed reality
"I'd rather have a kid with nine fingers than one who's not resourceful" McKenzie Scott (formely Bezos)
Mixed reality
Just in the past month I’ve noticed some tentative — and selective — returns to face-to-face meetings amongst my clients. But I predict we won’t simply default to in-person meetings but, rather, to hybrids. And, I see that our standards for both have been raised: we expect digital to be time-efficient, with higher attendance; F2F we expect to be more engaging and involve greater participation.
But here’s a true hybrid (not just a choice between the two) that I can’t wait to see become common.
Microsoft has announced their shared holographic technology, Mesh, which they argue is the future of non-physical collaboration. Today, I use Zoom and Mural boards. Tomorrow, mixed reality technology like this will give us the ability to represent ourselves across experiences in a consistent way, by creating holographic avatars of ourselves and interacting with others in virtual space.
The applications are endless. Architects and designers can do physical walkthroughs of holographic models of their creations. Engineering and medical students can interact as a group with avatars of machines or human bodies. Teams of people can gather virtually for training or staff meetings.
Holograms were invented in the 1960s, and in the 1970s Star Trek famously had its ‘holodeck’, but real life has finally caught up. I for one can’t wait to try it.
Question: What immersive experiences can you see your people experiencing holographically?
Regret minimisation
Amazon delivered me some books this week, amongst them, “Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos”. If you’re like me, you’re thinking, “I didn’t know he was a writer”. The answer is he isn’t.
Bezos’s only written product is his annual shareholder letter (which I’ve quoted in previous 5MSMs). These are chock full of insights about mindset, growth, risk, innovation and culture, and this book contains all of them, from 1997 to 2019. They’re written in Bezos’s careful style: plain English, crisp and short.
One includes an explanation of a famous risk-calculation process that Bezos calls his “regret minimisation framework”. When faced with a big decision, he imagines what he would feel like at age 80 if he hadn’t tried it. Bezos says (of his attraction to founding an internet-based business), “I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried”.
Question: To what sorts of big decisions could you apply the regret minimisation strategy?
Money can buy happiness
My mother used to say “money doesn’t buy happiness”. I suspect that’s because we happened to be both happy and poor (she was on a ‘widows’ pension’ and cleaned houses on the side). Later, I heard of research that showed that this correlation tops out when earnings reach about US$75k a year - around the level of being able to take care of yourself without worrying excessively about money. It also turns out that number (a bit less than AUD$100k) is roughly what the average Australian full-time employee makes.
But, it turns out the correlation is wrong.
Happiness continues to increase as income rises. This is happiness both evaluated (“How do you assess your happiness overall?” and experienced (“How happy do you feel right now?”). But, look at the infographic below, and see what you notice around $250k. It DOES level off, it’s just a higher number than originally thought.
So what does an income of $250k buy you? The authors of this study argue that it buys two things: comfort and control. In fact, it’s mostly about the latter.
Control accounts for 75% of the correlation between happiness and wellbeing. Down the other end of the scale, you can see how important that is: earning half of average weekly earnings, takes a hit on your level of control, and the stressors you consequently face. My mother felt that she had little control over her finances when we were growing up, so why was she happy?
There’s a final vital factor: how much value people attach to money. She never did (and still doesn’t). This study also asked how much people care about money. It turns out lower income earners were happier if they didn’t value money, while higher income earners were happier if they thought money mattered.
Question: In your business, what range of happiness (or control) levels are you providing incomes for?
Thanks as always for reading. I hope you can use the questions above to either stimulate your own strategic insights, or those of your colleagues or teams.
Do drop me a line to let me know how you use these questions. And, of course, please click below to like or, even better, to pass on 5MSM to others in your network.
Have a great weekend, and see you next Friday,
Andrew