What two things do lifelong studies agree on when it comes to living a long, happy life?

I’ve posted a number of times about two nearly-lifelong studies: the Terman Study (covered in The Longevity Project) and the Grant Study (covered in Triumphs of Experience.)

While different in some respects, both followed a sample of people from youth until death and provided insights into what makes for a happy, healthy life.
What two big ideas do they both strongly agree on?

1) A Happy Childhood Matters More Than You Think

The Grant Study found being happy when you’re old is tied to having had a warm childhood:

Vaillant concludes that a loving childhood is one of the best predictors of mid and late-life riches: “We found that contentment in the late seventies was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man’s own income. What it was significantly associated with was warmth of childhood environment, and it was very significantly associated with a man’s closeness to his father.”

The Terman Study realized that “Parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death.”

Via The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study:

The long-term health effects of parental divorce were often devastating— it was indeed a risky circumstance that changed the pathways of many of the young Terman participants. Children from divorced families died almost five years earlier on average than children from intact families. Parental divorce, not parental death, was the risk. In fact, parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death, many years into the future.

Sadly, our own childhoods are not something we can change, but this is something to keep in mind if you are or will be raising kids.

2) Relationships are the Most Important Thing

What was the Terman study’s most important recommendation for a longer life?

…connecting with and helping others is more important than obsessing over a rigorous exercise program.

Read that sentence again. It wasn’t receiving help from others, it was giving it:

Via The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study:

We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live the longest. Surprise: our prediction was wrong… Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age.

The Grant Study found that “the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.”

Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:

Vaillant’s insight came from his seminal work on the Grant Study, an almost seventy-year (and ongoing) longitudinal investigation of the developmental trajectories of Harvard College graduates. (This study is also referred to as the Harvard Study.) In a study led by Derek Isaacowitz, we found that the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.

“Vaillant was asked, ‘What have you learned from the Grant Study men?’ Vaillant’s response: ‘That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.‘”

Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

The Grant Study realized there was a single yes/no question that could predict whether someone would be alive and happy at age 80:

“Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to?”

Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:

Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to? If your answer is yes, you will likely live longer than someone whose answer is no. For George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who discovered this fact, the master strength is the capacity to be loved. 

Source: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/03/lifelong-studies-agree-living-long-happy-life/

3 Paths Toward A More Creative Life

Want to be more creative? Sometimes it’s just a matter of giving yourself the space to think, writes Bruce Nussbaum.


Everyone can learn to be more creative, but to become very creative, I’ve come to believe you need to lead a creative life. In watching my best students, in examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs, and in seeing the process of the great Native American artists who I know, it is clear that how they live their daily lives is crucial to their success. I realize that it sounds very “zen-y” (which is OK by me), yet I come to this realization not through a search for spirituality or clarity but from simple observation.

Creativity is in such demand today that when we apply for jobs, when we join organizations, or when we just meet other people, we are asked to present our creative selves. But we can’t do that unless we understand the nature of our own creativity, locate the sources of our originality, and have a language that explains our work. If you are one of the growing number of “creatives,” or want to become one, you need to lead a creative life. This is what I talk about with my students. Through outside speakers, deep readings of key classics, and intense classwork, we explore the nature of leading a creative life and develop a series of concepts and a literacy that allows us to understand ourselves and communicate and convince others of the validity of our work and the resonance it has in society and the marketplace.

It’s a work in progress, of course, but here are three specific ways that can help you lead a creative life.

1. Be mindful--disconnect

As important as it is for you to lead a hyper-connected and super-stimulating life as a creative person circa 2013, it is just as crucial for you to be self-reflective and mindful. The last time I had dinner with Bill Moggridge, the father of interaction design, the cofounder of Ideo, and then head of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, I asked him where he went in New York to spark his creativity. He quickly said the High Line. Walking the High Line was where he would go to think and ponder. Steve Jobs was a walker. Mark Zuckerberg is a walker.

Walking alone is an excellent strategy for freeing your mind up to bring together different areas of knowledge.

For good reason. We are all so connected these days and distracted by constant interactions. Our time is spent responding, reacting to others or absorbing, taking in new information. But we often lack the space, the time, the moment to integrate that knowledge, connect those dots, generate that creativity.

Slowing down and disconnecting provides that space. That’s why showers or lingering over that cup of coffee before starting off to work are good places to start your creative life. Taking a walk is particularly good. Walking alone is an excellent strategy for freeing your mind up so that you’re able to bring together different areas of knowledge. Finding that neighborhood coffee shop to hang (not the one where you meet your friends) and just think can be important. You don’t need hours and hours of disconnection but just a few to be mindful of your challenges and how you might meet them. You need to allow your creativity to flow without interruption and to let your mind to fill up.

2. To create meaningful things, delve into the past

Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a polymath’s polymath (he was building a Cree birch canoe using traditional tools and techniques the last time I saw him in Toronto), says people spend more time learning about the music they love than the fields they work in--especially in high tech. Prospecting and mining the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist is hugely important to creating meaningful new things. Buxton points to the example of the 1993 IBM/Bell South touchscreen smartphone called the Simon that was a likely inspiration to Jony Ive for the wildly successful iPhone. Bob Dylan “mined” Woody Guthrie.

Van Gogh found inspiration in Jean-Francois Millet. Being mindful of the roots of your knowledge domain, your industry, your creative space can bring greater understanding--and more success--to your own creative efforts.

Mine the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist.

Being mindful also means understanding the intellectual context and history of key ideas. The UX (user experience) is perhaps the single-most important concept in business today, but our understanding of that experience is shallow. We know enough to be “user” focused but not enough to really know what that means. Read Walter Benjamin’s work on aura and fashion, and you realize that our most powerful attraction to things come from a dynamic engagement, not a passive experience. In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki describes a Japanese entrancing relationship to the smell and look and feel of cooking rice. Digging deep into meaning and understanding, you discover that some wonderful things “beckon” us, we interact with them emotionally, we want to stay engaged. In an era of social media where we all want to participate in the making of our lives, user engagement (UE) is more important than UX.

Being meaningful is important for leading a creative life because it allows you to understand the deeper meaning of relationships, outside and inside the marketplace. That includes our relationships to things and our relationship to one another. For example, we just celebrated Valentine’s Day. But do you really know what a gift is? We are mired in swag, “free” gifts we give away at nearly every event. But do you know the intense underlying psychology, social, political, and economic dynamic that goes with giving and receiving a gift? Knowing the anthropological and sociological literature on the gift--it is extensive because the gift is perhaps the most celebrated and common of all human rituals--provides meaning to your creativity. Kickstarter is all about the gift as a mechanism of patronage, art production, and, I would argue (and cofounder Charles Adler would disagree), shaping a new kind of capitalism.

3. Be masterful

We now know that we can all learn to be more creative. It’s not a rare “aha” moment that comes to a lucky few. To be very creative, however, requires a deep mastering of both knowledge and skills.

Creativity is mostly about two things--connecting different bodies of knowledge in new ways and seeing patterns where none existed before. Connecting dots of disparate information (shoes and the Internet, anyone?) usually involves “fresh eyes.” It plays to the strengths of the younger. Seeing things differently, often taking existing things and connecting them to new technologies, can be serendipitous. But we can train ourselves to look for serendipity constantly and everywhere. We can learn to play at connecting this and that to see what it creates. We can make serendipity work for us day to day.

Pattern sight is the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it.

Learning pattern recognition takes longer. Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it. That’s what good birders do. That’s what hunters, hikers, skiers, and all outdoors people do. It takes time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of time “in the field.” We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.

Leading a creative life is increasingly the path people are choosing, for good reason. In an era of volatility, uncertainty, chaos, and ambiguity, being creative is perhaps the best way to navigate your career and succeed. It gives you the right skill set and mindset. But a creative life can offer more than business success. Keith Richards perhaps says it best in his biography Life: “There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. . .When it works, baby, you’ve got wings.” Richards is a textbook example of leading a creative life, which is why his biography has become required reading in my classes. But you don’t have to be a rock star to tap into creative flow--just start by taking a walk.

Bruce Nussbaum

Bruce Nussbaum is the author of the forthcoming book Creative Intelligence (HarperBusiness, March 2013). The former assistant managing editor for Business ... Continued

The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013

Think 2013 will spell the end of good old analog and human interaction? Eh, not so fast.

Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the year. Working with dozens of clients who serve customers around the world, we designers spend a lot of time observing people as they interact with technology, services, and experiences, noticing how they seek solutions to everyday problems and make decisions. In the process, certain patterns emerge so forcefully that they’re practically unavoidable.

Meeting over three sessions spread out over a week, 23 Zibites (designers, researchers, and creative directors) discussed the patterns we’d seen, and distilled them down to the 12 insights we thought were most current and useful, to us and to our clients. Each one is presented here, as a brief essay that suggests how it will affect business practices in 2013, and as an illustration created by one of Ziba’s designers.

1. The mind is a competitive environment.

Our understanding of how we decide has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, and it paints a messy picture. Rather than logical conclusions based on clear needs and preferences, choices are often just the slim visible portion of a rowdy internal struggle, pitting conflicting ideas and beliefs against each other. Even our most certain conclusions turn out to be stories we create after the fact, convincing ourselves that we’ve preferred chocolate to vanilla all along.
Be okay with the chaos. The smartest organizations in 2013 will embrace this conflict, and acknowledge the complexity in their customers’ minds. This means services that let you be predictable one day and impulsive the next, and products that appeal to values that once seemed in tension: eco and luxury, traditional and playful, retro and hyper-modern.

2. Customer-facing employees are your brain and your backbone.

The crucial element in any customer experience is still people, no matter how much technology has transformed the landscape. The sales associate, the courier, the flight attendant, or the service agent--in many ways these are your most important, best-informed people. The larger an organization, the more it relies on the thousand tiny decisions its frontline employees make on a daily basis. And listening to their collective wisdom is more important than ever.
Listen, learn, and enable. Taking full advantage of that ground-level expertise means fostering better communication, and putting resources in the hands of those who face your customers. Technology in 2013 will focus on helping employees do more, more intelligently, and the wisest organizations will invest in this wholeheartedly.

3. Analog will never go away.

Sales of LP records have quadrupled since 2007. It’s a powerful reminder that convenience isn’t the only thing people care about. Music, like video and telecommunications, reached a digital/analog split long ago, and digital won because it’s cheaper, faster, and more convenient. But analog persists, in part because of nostalgia but also because formats like film, print, and vinyl reflect the people and processes that made them, forming an emotional connection that digital can’t match.
Stop worrying about the contradictions. 2013 will not be the year that analog displaces digital, nor will any other year. But it will be the year when mainstream consumers start to embrace “outdated” technologies along with cutting-edge ones. A brand that can seamlessly straddle the divide makes far more sense to them.

4. Worth is determined by philosophy, not price.

Freemium pricing models and digital services are detaching the price of things from the cost of producing them. And while this gives companies more leeway in their business models, it raises a question: How do you determine a product’s intrinsic worth? Increasingly, it’s the idea behind the product and the philosophy of the brand that created it. If two competitors spend equal amounts on production, the one whose ideals resonate with the target market is the more valuable.
Your values are a competitive advantage. 2013 is when mainstream brands start asking serious questions about their philosophy and values. Knowing what you stand for and conveying that to the world is no longer an intellectual exercise for the touchy-feely fringes. It’s a necessity.

5. Narrative is a delivery vehicle to make information stick.

More than just a means of entertaining ourselves, narrative is how we understand the world and make decisions. Each of us is the leading character in the stories we tell ourselves, and we use these as a framework for organizing the messages we receive. Narrative is also how we remember: A story out of chronological order is nearly impossible to remember, but information that has a beginning, a middle, and an end becomes something we can own, embrace, and share.
Start thinking in stories. 2013 is when brands start actively listening to their customers’ stories, and figuring out how they can play a supporting role. It’s also the year they begin to tell their own, linking together their most important messages to form a coherent, memorable whole.

6. Repair and repurpose are the new killer apps.

The typical early adopter cares about function and capability above all else. But what about the rest of us? As technology penetrates formerly closed markets around the world, the ability to fix and upgrade in the field is increasingly sought after. Even in tech-savvy urban centers, there’s a growing consumer subculture that sees hacking and repairing as an indicator of true ownership.
Show the tinkerers some love. The smartest technology companies in 2013 won’t make everything totally field serviceable, but they‘ll offer access to those who want it. Rather than just optimizing for speed, compactness or low-cost, they’ll offer products and services that invite users to actively maintain and modify, winning loyalty and love along the way.

7. Technology moves too fast to care about.

The 8 track, the CD, the Pentium chip, FireWire--people used to invest in products just to get their hands on these new technologies. They were a real differentiator, and a kind of magic. But it’s become too much, too fast. The Internet runs on an alphabet soup of languages and protocols, and only a slim population of early adopters counts pixels or processor speeds anymore. The rest of us just want to know what it’s like to use.
Talk about experiences, not features. Technology is there to enable an experience, and as long as it doesn’t get in the way, most consumers would rather not worry about it. The smartest brands in 2013 will follow suit, emphasizing the product or service, not the features that make it possible.

8. Flawless function is tomorrow’s great user experience.

Imagine if your washing machine gave you dirty clothes one time in five, or your alarm didn’t work on Tuesdays. You’d be indignant. Yet today’s tech-heavy gadgets and services can be that unreliable. Customers can handle a few kinks in new technology, but we expect that basic functions will be worked out. And despite the proliferation of features, more of us are realizing that what we really want is a phone that makes good calls, every single time.
Fill in the gaps. A few smart brands will seize on the opportunity to highlight reliability and function in 2013, and make it just as exciting as a new feature. Customers who want respite from the noise of newness are many and hungry for an elegant return to flawless basics.

9. Brand loyalty is how we escape decision fatigue.

Making choices is exhausting--mentally, emotionally, and even physically. With the proliferation of online services and globalizing markets, our options have multiplied rapidly, and it’s wearing us out. More than anything else, this is why we form brand loyalties. Once we believe that our values and choices align, we’re happy to leave choices to the brand that’s earned our trust, and shift some of the burden off our own shoulders.
Be trustworthy enough to take the load off. The brands that earn loyalty in 2013 are those that have earned it. By showing you’re aligned, and communicating in familiar language, you establish a trust that lets customers relax. “Go ahead,” you say, “we’ve got you covered.” If they can believe you, they’ll love you for it.

10. Human interaction has never been more precious.

There’s almost no transaction that can’t be automated today, from buying groceries to learning about health issues. And customers are starting to resist. With many technological obstacles out of the way, we have the luxury of being picky about automation. Sometimes we embrace it--when, say, we check our banking balance online--as a way of shifting mundane tasks off people’s shoulders. And sometimes, we long for a living, breathing person.

Look for places to act more human. The most successful brands understand when customers need to be listened to or expect the nuanced expertise that only a person can provide. 2013 reverses the trend toward automated everything, as humanity becomes the crucial differentiator between a beloved brand and a commodity.

11. Gen Y is creating its own service economy

An entire generation of young people has access to something unprecedented in history: a complete ecosystem of services provided by people their own age. When a startup run by three recent college grads can take on a century-old multinational, it transforms markets. Sometimes this means an age group split, like AirBnb vs. VRBO, or Etsy vs. eBay. And sometimes it means a Gen Y company like Facebook can leverage its enthusiastic peer group, and then grow to rule the world.
Take younger competitors seriously, and learn from them. Gen Y is defined by optimism, social engagement, and digital fluency, and these are attributes that can attract older customers as well. The key is to act as an enabler, not a controller: Give them a flexible platform and they’ll not only give you their business, they’ll bring Mom and Dad along too.

12. Everyone is a specialist.

Constant communication and social media are pushing us to show off our passion and specialized knowledge, as a way of standing out in the storm of mundane information that fills the air. Mom posts photos of Victorian furniture on Pinterest, while Dad’s Facebooking his latest cooking project, and your cousin tweets about nothing but Korean pop stars. We’ve always had these secret pools of expertise, but now they’ve got an outlet, and an appreciative audience.

You’re a specialist, too. Trying to be everything to everyone is a losing proposition. As customers embrace their connoisseurship, they seek out brands that match it. The success stories of 2013 are companies unafraid of putting a stake in the ground, to boldly indicate where their expertise and passion lie--and where they don’t.
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A recurring theme that connects these insights is tension--not in a negative or uncomfortable way, but a useful one that acknowledges the diversity of the modern marketplace, and the natural contradictions within individuals and organizations. Brand philosophy and narrative are crucial to winning customer loyalty, but not at the expense of basic function. People want to develop expertise and take ownership of their technology, but they also crave the advice and attention of another human.

Far from being at odds, these insights emphasize the complexity that we live in and the diversity of our needs, and brands ignore that fact at their peril. That, at least, is an insight that isn’t changing anytime soon.

Chris Butler

Chris Butler brings more than ten years of experience in design research to his role as director of Ziba’s Consumer Insights and Trends group. He has worked ... Continued

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