I did something really delicious today: I spent about an hour and a half just poking around the library.  I’m always amazed at the connections and insights my mind makes when I’m not working on anything specific, a good reminder for those of us with over-scheduled lives (think of that the next time you make a to-do list).

What I stumbled upon was Temple Grandin’s book Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals.  You see, my cat has been stressed due to a recent (bad) vet visit and the multiple house showings we’ve had in an effort to sell our house.  I was delighted to find Grandin not only had really good insights into what was going on with our cat, but terrific insights into people too.

The book discusses the neural connections between the four core emotional systems (fear, rage, panic, and seeking), as studied by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp.  You’re probably familiar with the first three, which originate from what Seth Godin and others refer to as the Lizard Brain.  Rebecca MacDonald, who also stumbled upon Grandin’s book, explains in her fantastic blog Serial Reinvention

Considering how powerful the other three emotions are, and how strongly they motivate us to act (or react), it’s startling to see “seeking” put on that same level. Grandin defines seeking as “the basic impulse to search, investigate, and make sense of the environment.” In fact, research shows that it might actually be a kind of umbrella emotion that affects all of the others.

MacDonald focuses her a-ha moment on that last sentence: if you don’t take care of your seeking, your other core emotions will get all out of whack.  This is, Grandin proposes, the root of most animal behavior problems.  Coop up an animal without stimulation day after day, and the animal is almost sure to act out in undesirable ways.  Thus the curious cat is also the happy cat.  As MacDonald suggests, this is true of people too.  If you allow yourself to get stuck in a career rut, you will notice your relationships and emotional well-being also suffer.

Grandin made another leap:

But as researchers understand dopamine and the seeking system better, the way we think about rewards is changing.  What’s rewarding about rewards isn’t so much the reward itself, but the time you look forward to it.  In some ways, chasing after things is more fun than actually getting them.

This is important, because as Scott Belsky discusses in his book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality (as well as my own elaboration of the point in this post), the pleasure one gets from seeking can easily get obscured in long-term projects.  For most, the fun is in the start of a project.  Novelty is intoxicating and it can help keep our fear, panic, and rage at bay.  But for most of my life, I’ve felt novelty wasn’t enough.  I wanted to make an impact, I needed meaning too.  What Grandin implies is that if we consider ourselves animals (and I do), happiness would tell us to follow the novelty and ditch those pesky long-term goals that demand completion.

Penelope Trunk has been saying this for a while and I didn’t want to believe it.  In her post Lessons from LeBron James, she talks about the dichotomy between happiness and ambition, saying “our toughest decisions are actually between contentment and interestingness.”  She goes on to say that those who chase the interesting life (interpreted by me to be the more difficult and far-term seeking), may not be content.  Ever.

Photo courtesy of DWRose on Flikr

Tagged as: ambition, contentment, Penelope Trunk, seeker, Temple Grandin