Are You Happy?

Are you happy? If so, what is making you happy? Are you always happy (or at least most of the time), and do you think everyone has the right to be happy?

I ask because I have recently finished reading Derren Brown's new book, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, which poses, and seeks to answer, the questions, "What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it?" I have actually been told that it is possible that I don't know how to be happy, and the question of happiness is one that has challenged scholars and the writers of my favourite sit-com alike (see the episode of Frasier:  Cranes Go Caribbean, in which Frasier asks his ex-wife Lilith, "Do you think I know how to be happy?"), so what does the state of happiness actually look like? Pinning down happiness is tricky; as Alan Watts writes in The Wisdom of Insecurity (which I am quoting not having read the book, but from seeing Derren Brown reference it), it is like trying to tie up water in a paper package. Most dictionaries define happy along the lines of "delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing," and happiness as the state of being happy, so happiness, or being happy is, on these terms, a quite transitory emotion. It's the emotion we feel when our sports team win - a feeling that may only last until their next match, especially if they lose that one - or after a particularly pleasant evening spent with friends, but is it really a lasting state of mind? Perhaps not; perhaps we need another term, but for the moment, happy will have to suffice.

"Do you think I know how to be happy?"

I approached Derren Brown's book with the expectation that it would be at least in part a self-help book, but this being written by a man who, in his most recent stage show ostensibly performed 'miracles' as a means of debunking the faith healers and their spectacular - and completely ineffective - cures for all manner of maladies, it was never going to be that straightforward. In fact, Brown is critical of the self-help manual, which in his opinion, "can be counter-productive and lead simply to more anxiety," so what help we are being offered in his book is less a 'get-happy-quick' scheme and more a method for identifying the things that are barriers to our happiness, and then removing them.

There is much in Derren Brown's book about stoicism, and if I had considered the subject before I read it, would have thought a stoic to be someone who bore hardships lightly and with fortitude, accepting the challenge they faced as inevitable and beyond their control, much like Londoners during The Blitz. In my ignorance, I was not aware - or perhaps had once known and later forgotten - that Stoicism is a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The first of Stoicism's basic tenets is that "If you are pained by external things, it is not that they disturb you, but your own  judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe that judgement now."[1] And how often do we react if we feel slighted by others by feeling hurt, when there was no intention to hurt us, where the slight was unintended and the pain we feel is solely a construct of our own mind? Oh yes, there will be times when events do hurt us and we are justified in feeling hurt, pained or disturbed; the key is identifying whether or not that is the case.

Stoicism's second basic tenet may be summed up by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's oft quoted Serenity Prayer; "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Or more pithily, don't worry about things you cannot change.

Now both of these tenets of Stoicism are possibly easier said than done. If, like me, you are a habitual worrier it is not easy to shake off the ingrained, entrenched behaviours that mean that I - and people like me, of whom I imagine there are millions - will worry about things I cannot alter, and will struggle to see the difference between an event and their reaction to it. Which is where I often find self-help books on many subjects to be ineffective; it is all very well saying that to conquer a fear, or to alter a pattern of behaviour one should do a certain thing, but without explaining how to do that thing, that advice is useless, a bit like the instruction manual for a music player that I had which genuinely said, "To increase the volume, increase the volume." And the funny thing is that Derren Brown's book seems to offer little practical instruction on how to stop worrying about the things one cannot change, yet for once, I find that I've read a book that tells me what to do, but not how, and that is still fine. It is perhaps that I have had the patterns of behaviour that cause me anxiety and make me worry pointed out to me and have realised that in many cases, worrying is futile and that sometimes, even when I am disturbed by events, I am looking at the wrong driver of that disturbance.

To give an example, when I retired at the end of 2012, I was happy to do so; it came at pretty much the age I had always wanted to retire at. Since then there have been times when I have been unhappy and thought that perhaps my retiring was a factor, or the cause of my unhappiness. Except it wasn't, other factors were to blame, factors which would have been in effect had I retired or not, and instead of blaming retirement for my unhappiness I ought to have identified the real cause and what - if anything - I could do about it. I have a lot to be grateful for, which I need to recognise and be content with. I also have a habit - one which I am strenuously fighting to break - of worrying on other people's behalf, perceiving them to have a problem and worrying how they will solve it, while all the while, they may not even consider whatever it is to be a problem!

And sometimes it is not practical to expect to be happy, because despite some people believing it to be so, is it really our birthright? Nor may it be desirable: sometimes, as Derren Brown says, 'good enough' is sufficient. If, as I would contend, happiness is a transitory emotion, then it must be so that whenever we consider ourselves happy, it is because we have been unhappy, and could be so again just as easily.

 If we desire to always be happy we are riding for a fall, perhaps we are better off being content. You may say that being happy or being content are the same thing, and that my belief that it is preferable to be content rather than happy is mere semantics, but I see contentment as being satisfied with what one has rather than continually aspiring to more - a 'more' that does not necessarily exist, to be content with 'good enough' and not to demand perfection. I'll settle for that...and being stoic.

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[1] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The Pragmatic Perfectionist

I used to think of myself as something of a perfectionist, and made a virtue of it; I wouldn't do that now. Increasingly, perfectionism - or at least considering oneself to be a perfectionist - is seen as a vice rather than a virtue. The somewhat disingenuous notion of claiming - in a job interview perhaps -that one of your faults is perfectionism, is now more commonly seen as exactly that - a fault - rather than a desirable quality. The impression that the so-called perfectionist is endeavouring to portray may be of the meticulous worker who shows incredible attention to detail, is diligent and will not settle for second best, and who is therefore a desirable asset for any employer; they may instead be creating an altogether different, and largely unfavourable, impression.

To many - and this is a feature of almost all articles about what not to put in your CV and what not to say at job interviews - the man or woman who claims to be a perfectionist is going to be labelled a nit-picking pain in the backside; annoying and obsessive and generally not good to work with. And to a large extent that is right, perfectionists are likely to be fixated by minutiae, unable to see the bigger picture and so focussed on getting everything just so that they are unable to finish tasks and thus risk missing deadlines.

There are some jobs in which being a perfectionist must be an asset. Given the choice I'd prefer to be operated on by a surgeon who was a perfectionist rather than one who went about his work with a "That's probably good enough," sort of attitude, but in many jobs and professions, there gets to a point where increasingly delving into detail and worrying at tasks adds little or nothing and can be detrimental. Often the point is reached when further tinkering and tampering actually impairs the process or product; a sort of diminishing return.

I once worked with someone whose role, among others, was helping to design process flows, and anyone who has done that sort of thing (and I have) knows that in analysing a process or activity, there comes a point where having covered all of the basics and important stuff, you reach a state where anything else that gets added merely makes the thing more complex and introduces potential failure points without adding value. And this person, in their eagerness to cover all the bases, in their quest for perfection, would frequently need extended deadlines and would often design processes that only they really understood, included unnecessary functionality and were impractical to build.

There is a fear of failure with some people that drives them to constantly refine, fiddle, and tamper to the point where their search for perfection actually contributes to their failure. Nowhere is this more evident than in sport, where teams - or individuals - may, when they are going through an indifferent spell, and are making simple mistakes, try to cut out those errors by getting everything 'just so' and make matters worse. The golfer, whose putting has gone to pot could be an example, or the footballer for whom the goals have dried up; both will over compensate and try too hard. The golfer gets the yips and three putts from a foot from the hole, and the striker takes an extra touch just to be sure and is tackled. Striving to be perfect and to eradicate mistakes sometimes achieves precisely the opposite. It is at times like these that the perfectionist needs to think of another word that begins with P, and that is pragmatism.

One of my many jobs working for HSBC was system testing, taking the application that the programmers had built and making sure it worked - or more precisely, trying to break it, trying to use it as it would actually be used in the real world and see what it did when things went slightly awry, or when the system was asked to do something that it had not really been designed to expect. With virtually everything we touch these days being based on one computer system or another, when we are all so reliant on our smartphones and the apps that they run, software and system testing is becoming more and more important. There are lots of tools for the tester, and testers themselves are highly skilled, sometimes as skilled or even more so than the people who wrote the code they are testing. But when I started testing it was in a quite informal environment and the way I learned to test was quite unstructured, albeit that it was taken seriously. What I quickly realised was that in most cases, when given something to test, covering every possible scenario was out of the question because it could not be done within the deadline- and anyway, my experience has been that you no matter how much you test, once a system or a program goes live, some user will do something you could not possibly have thought of!

That is where the pragmatism comes in, dealing with things realistically, making decisions based on practical rather than theoretical considerations, and accepting that sometimes perfection isn't possible. For instance, I once worked on a project for which the bank brought in a highly paid team (much more highly paid than us mere employees) of external testers to work on an automated process that was being developed. They spent about six months testing (with the team they had, this worked out at about three man-years of testing) this automated process, while I was tasked with testing the manual equivalent (that is, the exceptions that did not automate).  They tested every conceivable scenario - and some that I was at great pains to point out to them were not actually possible. As far as I remember, they never really finished the testing.

I was given two weeks to test my piece...on my own. I did it - it involved some very long days - and at the end of it, the manual process went live...and the automated process did not. The stuff I tested worked -with a few inevitable glitches, some of which were with the mainframe side of things rather than the user interface or the actual functionality that I had been responsible for testing. And the only reason that I managed to get it tested and the bugs fixed within the deadline was because, rather than insist on perfection, I was pragmatic. There was a point I reached when I had to chose between meeting the deadline with a product that worked well enough or missing the deadline to squeeze in a bit more testing...and missing the deadline wasn't an option.

There is a difference between attention to detail and perfection, and I'm a great believer in the Pareto principle; about 20% of your effort will cover about 80% of what you need to achieve, and the other 80% of your effort will be spent on the last 20%. Sometimes that extra effort brings such a marginal reward that it isn't worth the time. The pragmatic perfectionist who applies the Pareto principle allied to attention to detail will always be more effective than a straightforward perfectionist, because ultimately, the pragmatic perfectionist gets things finished.

Doing What's Best

It goes without saying that parents want what is best for their children (even if the children do not necessarily think it's what they want - or need), the general principle being that as parents we want our children to have opportunities that we did not have in order to be able to make the best of their lives. This does not mean giving in to the child's ever whim, it does not mean featherbedding them - and there are plenty of examples of the rich and famous declaring that they will not simply bankroll their offspring, but will make them work for their successes, although how much of that is simply said for publicity and how much of it is true is moot.

Giving your child the best start they can have and equipping them for their adult lives starts with education. Everyone will have a view on what constitutes the best form of education their child can receive, whether it is a private school or a state school, grammar school or comprehensive: even at primary school level, parents go to great lengths to ensure that their children get into their school of choice. So the news that Baroness Chakrabarti, former director of human rights group, Liberty and now the Labour shadow attorney general, is sending her son to Dulwich College, an independent school to whom she will pay £18,000 a year in fees for his education, ought to be no one's business but hers.  

Baroness Chakrabarti

Well it would not have been had not been for the fact that at the same time as Chakrabarti was revealing that her son would be attending what many regard to be an elitist school, she was voicing her opposition to grammar schools on the grounds that they are selective. Which of course is what Dulwich College is. Inevitably this has led to her being accused of hypocrisy, which as Alan Bennett once said, is something that Britain excels at - and, I would say, condemns in equal measure. But accusing a politician of being a hypocrite is a bit like accusing a bear of being hairy.  A sign saying, "Don't do as I do, do as I say," might as well be hanging over the door at Westminster, where it almost seems that hypocrisy is a prerequisite for political office.

I have no problem with the baroness wanting to give her child the best education she can. Just like Diane Abbott, whose son went to the private City of London school, or Emily Thornberry, whose child went to Dame Alice Owens School. They both also felt that they were sending their children to schools that would enable them to achieve the most. How can I object to Chakrabarti sending her son to a selective school if that is what she wants to do and can afford to do and while the option remains open to them? But Chakrabarti, Abbott and Thornberry all took the opportunity to send their offspring to selective, grammar type schools while arguing that grammar schools are socially divisive, elitist and perpetuate inequality. The argument that opponents of grammar schools use is often equality, that a school system that does not include grammar schools must be fairer, must promote equality. And because they believe that grammar schools sustain inequality and elitism, and that these twin evils must be eradicated, the manner in which they propose levelling the playing field is not to raise every other school to the standards of the schools they send their children too, but to reduce all other schools to the lowest common denominator. Naturally, this would not affect the selective, fee paying schools they favour with their custom; it speaks of an attitude summed up by Gore Vidal when he said, "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

Dulwich College

What idealists who imagine a grammar school-free world to be is some utopia where all children can thrive regardless of ability in environments that do not favour the more able at the expense of the less gifted. Have these people never been to a school of any kind recently? All schools, be they secondary-modern, comprehensive or grammar, will have children of varying abilities. In the interests of getting the best out of people, schools stream their pupils, even the non-grammar schools. And if they don't then the gifted get held back, but the less able are no better off.  And if the school isn't streaming, then an informal hierarchy will form itself because anyone who believes that children of secondary school age are all fair-minded, egalitarian and not at all prone to forming cliques or creating their own social rankings was presumably born middle-aged.

My alma mater, North Romford Comprehensive School - now closed and demolished.

As it happens, I am not a fervent supporter of grammar schools; I didn't go to one and neither did my wife or most of my friends, but I see no reason why they should not exist, nor why parents should not have the opportunity to send their children to them. My wife and I, and our children, went to various comprehensive schools, and while I can't say that my school days were the happiest of my life, I cannot fault the education I got at my school, which was what Alastair Campbell would have called a 'bog-standard comprehensive.' What I am a supporter of, however is freedom of choice, and if people want to send their children to fee-paying, selective schools, they should have the right to; if they want to send them to selective grammar schools, they should be able to. If they want to send them to comprehensive schools - and I reiterate, there is nothing wrong with the comprehensive school - they should be able to.

What they should not have to do is have their choice of school limited by people who make rules that they do not believe should apply to them.

A Midland Odyssey - Part Nine - Stranger In A Strange Land

In 1998 I was working in the Midas Team in St Magnus House, Lower Thames Street in London. Midas had been developed as a PC based query system for Multicurrency Payments Department (MPD), the area that processes all of the UK Bank's payments, home and abroad[1]. My role was to liaise with the business, gathering requirements, handling their questions and testing the application. It was hard work, but enjoyable, and I must have been pretty good at it, because when the Bank decided to install a version of the application in HSBC's Correspondent Banking Department in Hong Kong, I was chosen to not only test it, but also to travel to Hong Kong and help with the implementation in January 1999.

But as Christmas 1998 approached, my wife Val and I were plunged into a nightmare. Our daughter, Sarah - who was fifteen months old - fell ill. She was fractious and restless, cried all the time and was sleeping poorly. The doctor could not tell what was wrong, and when her condition failed to improve, we took her to the hospital. Again, the doctors were unsure what was the matter, but one of them said - and I will always thank him for this - that we were not taking her home until he had discovered what was wrong. Eventually he asked permission to perform a lumbar puncture - just to rule some things out, he said. When he came back he gave us the devastating news that Sarah had meningitis. I have never been so scared in my life, but fortunately the diagnosis was made in time to get her the treatment she needed and she ultimately made a full recovery, but while she was in hospital - and both Val and I spent nights there, sleeping in uneasy chairs - any thoughts of a trip to Hong Kong were far from my mind.

HSBC Headquarters, Queens Road Central, Hong Kong

Sarah's recovery meant that I was able to fly out to Hong Kong, but not without a sense of apprehension at leaving Val alone with her - and some trepidation at the prospect of two weeks in a strange place, together with the prospect of dealing with the Midas implementation alone, albeit with support from the UK - six thousand miles away and six hours behind.

As I was still a Grade 5 clerk at the time (I think that is GCB7 in the new structure), the Bank didn't exactly push the boat out when they booked my flight and I was shoehorned into Economy for the twelve hour flight, which left at 9pm instead of the scheduled 6pm and meant that I landed in Hong Kong at three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. And rather than stump up for a hotel, the Bank billeted me with Chris Doyle, a manager in the Correspondent Banking team at his flat in Happy Valley. I don't think that I properly thanked him for his hospitality; as a stranger in a strange land, not having to spend a fortnight in a lonely hotel room, but having some company and being included in the social life of Chris and his fellow ex-pats was something I was grateful for. Chris thoughtfully gave me a piece of paper with his address written in Cantonese and a phonetic English translation (something like "pow ma day surn gayling fong") that was of immense assistance the night I got a cab home alone with a driver who spoke little or no English.

View from The Peak

Hong Kong was a mixture of the familiar and the alien. Out for a walk one lunchtime, I passed well known stores and restaurants; Marks & Spencer, Louis Vuitton, McDonalds, and then, turning a corner into a less well trodden side street, I saw a man with a stick, driving a dozen chickens before him! And this contrast was apparent in the office too. One evening I was involved in a call with my manager in the UK, Raj Soni and the manager of Correspondent Banking in Hong Kong, Geoff Armstrong, who had been my boss at Threadneedle Street International Banking Centre. Having been in a meeting with people I had worked with at home, it seemed odd to walk out of the office that night into Queens Road Central rather than Lower Thames Street. That mixture of the recognisable and the unrecognisable is one thing that makes Hong Kong so alluring, and although I suffered some pangs of home-sickness, the familiar sights and the work made it less painful, even if I suffered chronic jet-lag. Many an evening I would doze off in an armchair, my book falling to the floor with a thud that woke me up, only to find myself unable to sleep once I got to bed, dozing fitfully until the alarm went off, by which point I felt exhausted.

Pictured on her visit to London some months later, Maria Ng from HSBC Hong Kong's Correspondent Banking Department and yours truly.

Although I was only there for two weeks, I saw enough to recognise a subtly different working culture. While in the UK I was used to people arriving at nine, working in a blur until five or five-thirty and then leaving, in Hong Kong I would get to the office just after eight in the morning to find most desks occupied, and leave at six in the evening with people still working. One evening I was still there at 8pm and hardly anyone had gone home. But between times, whereas my colleagues in MPD or the Midas Team would be flat out almost all day, in Hong Kong the daily grind was more laid back. I'm not saying they did less work, just that they seemed prepared to allow the work to progress at a more leisurely pace. Since I was there for two weeks, I had opportunities for sightseeing. I went to The Peak. The famous Peak Tram runs from Central to Peak where there are brilliant views of the city and harbour. I took the equally renowned Star Ferry to Kowloon and the bustling Wan Chai.

Looking across the harboir from Kowloon

Apart from Hong Kong, the furthest I ever had the chance to travel on bank business were Sheffield and Livingston in Scotland, and the trip to the former British colony (it was handed over to the People's Republic of China in July, 1997) was one I'll never forget. The implementation went as well as could be expected - a few minor glitches, but generally it was rated a success - and I had the chance to see a part of the world I might otherwise have not. I would recommend anyone who gets the opportunity to visit Hong Kong to go, it really is a different world.

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[1] See  http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/a-midland-odyssey-midas-touch.html