Thursday, May 21, 2009

Psychology - Satisfaction

I had been discussing this thing with Noah about the psychology of success. How do we characterize success psychologically - Social or Personal? And the most logical conclusion that we can derive is that success is always social/professional and we should actually talk about satisfaction rather than success. And it really makes a lot more sense to discuss satisfaction on these lines - how do we define satisfaction - social or personal? If we really dig deep into this, it's always a mixture of both of these elements. To talk about extreme cases, imagine two contrasting persons given one hour to spend their time to derive as much satisfaction as they can. While one of them may choose to spend his time walking in a lonely place enjoying warm breezy weather, the other may chose to prepare for an exam or a speech or a report which will help him derive maximum social/professional satisfaction when he excels in exam or amaze audience with his speech or delivers an excellent report. These are extreme cases but in general in life we tend to have a combination of both of these types of satisfactions. Imagine you singing in a concert and you do really well. You get personal satisfaction while singing as that is something that you really like. At the same time, you get professional satisfaction when audiences clap at the end of your performance. It can also be a mix of -ve satisfaction (dissatisfaction) and +ve satisfaction. Like imagine you preparing for a history paper that you don't like but when you perform well in the exam then you get +ve social/professional satisfaction but -ve personal satisfaction. This is because good grades might mean a lot to you professionally but preparing for that really sucked you. Whoever is reading this blog, if you think of anything that you are doing or have done or planning to do, you will realize that its always a mix of social and personal +ve and -ve satisfaction. Think about it or may be I should say Forget about it!

No comments: