Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
When you're there, be there
All-consuming years
The early days of Novazym were all-consuming, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The business had to succeed because the founder's children needed it to, and he was overwhelmed and really bad at putting that part of his life aside.
Making time first
What he learned is that hard work is the price of success and part of passion and purpose, and that it means missing time and events with children, family, and friends. The answer is to make the time first and prioritize it. Then, when you're there, shut off the iPhone, or the Blackberry back then, and be there.
Putting work out of mind
Even if you can't get whatever you're thinking about out of your head, at least pretend that it is out of your head. You enjoy life a lot more, and the people you love enjoy it a lot more too.
Why does a wandering mind lower happiness?
In a 2010 study in Science, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app that prompted 2,250 adults at random moments to report what they were doing and how they felt. Minds wandered 46.9 percent of the time, and people were less happy when their minds wandered than when they focused on the task. That held across nearly every activity they sampled.
Why do unfinished tasks linger in mind?
Psychologists have long observed that unfinished tasks stay easy to recall, a pattern called the Zeigarnik effect after Bluma Zeigarnik, a Soviet psychologist who studied it in the 1920s. In a 2011 study, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that people who made a specific plan for an unfinished goal were no longer distracted by it. The plan appeared to quiet the mental reminder even though the goal was still unmet.
More from Joys of Compounding
