MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

This article combines the advice of The Atlantic’s David Brooks and Arthur C. Brooks to form a list of tactics for reengaging with our work– which can often present a daunting and emotionally-taxing challenge. These seven tactics are:

1. Attach Work to Ideals – While the repetition and apparent drudgery of work may rightfully wear on you, you can inject meaning into your work by actively pursuing a loftier goal in your work. Remember what your work is building towards over time.
2. Recognize Meaningful Moments– Get in touch with the processes that go into your job; the rituals or small moments that ground you in your work. For Brooks, this means the moment when he is on the ground, crawling across a floor sprawled with notecards and research. It is hard work, but it is a moment that cannot be replicated outside of your own process.
3. Serve others (Or Don’t) – People who view their jobs through a lens of service tend to have higher levels of enjoyment at work. Stop and think about the people your work helps, or the systems that it enables to function.
4. Ask Why You do What You Do – The article notes that the pursuit of money, power, pleasure, or fame are often deeply unsatisfying and can lead to unhappiness. Reconnect with the deeper value of your skills and growth.
5. Follow Fear – When looking at your future, ask yourself what you would do if you weren’t afraid. Then ask yourself what pains you would be willing to endure to gain stability in doing that thing. This will clarify your true desires for workplace happiness.
6. Be Conscious of Life Stages – Arthur Brooks notes that differences in the “cadence of careers” have consequences for people’s happiness, and that people who end up happy tend to make their big discoveries in their 20s and 30s, do their best expositional work in their 40s and 50s, and then become teachers and mentors in their 60s and beyond.
7. Don’t Invest Everything in Work – Arthur Brooks notes that the happiest people do not invest all of their time/energy in work. They keep a balanced life portfolio between the transcendental/spiritual, your family, your community, and your work. Keep them balanced in order to maintain happiness.

1. As this piece’s title might suggest, it argues that memory is a buildable skill. It starts with the story of an Atlantic reporter who covered a memory competition for his job, became inspired by speaking to the competitors, and went back to the competition a year later after practicing their memory-honing skills everyday.. and won the whole thing.
2. The technique is called ““elaborative encoding”— the act of “relating disconnected numbers, words, or facts to networks of existing memories and knowledge.” This involves giving the hard-to-remember things (like names or phone numbers) hooks that rely on our visual or spatial memory, which is much stronger.
3. For instance, competitive “memory athlete” remembers the milk and eggs on his grocery list by placing items in a “memory palace,” picturing himself pouring a gallon of milk over his head just outside his front door, then walking inside to see a chicken juggling some eggs.
4. In 2017, researchers found that learning to employ mnemonic devices when trying to build memory actually reorganized the connections in subjects’ brains. It showed that the act of memory actually lit up the brain’s nerve centers.
5. Importantly, memory training forces us to collect a bank of images to use as memory devices. It hones our attention, and our imaginations. This makes it a hugely valuable pastime in a chaotic world that tends to pull our attention in far too many directions.