How To Achieve Forecast Happiness (Or Why Bagging That Whale Is Bad For You)

frequency beats intensity

I wonder if there’s a gender divide on this wisdom…?

When it comes to being ‘happy’, one flagstone finding of psychologist Ed Deiner suggests that how good is not as good as how many good.

That’s to say, as summarised by Harvard psychologist Professor Daniel Gilbert, someone who during one day had a dozen mildly good experiences would be happier than someone experiencing a single amazing one.

So it transpires that the science posits happiness is the sum of many small things. Not reliant upon one big one.

Spooky. How this sounds like a parallel for our Forecast.

Down the years I have often seen salespeople encouraged to go for the 'whale of a deal'. Nothing wrong with thinking big. I do catch myself saying every deal size is a little number, just with a varying amount of zeroes following.

I touched on this a few years back, from the world of skyscraper residents.

The Whale of a Deal, and its modernday startup equivalent of the Unicorn denoting private tech firms worth a billion, have a label sounding strangely mythical for a reason.

It's not the debate over their very existence. It's rather that they are pretty distracting. Usually to the point of becoming all-consuming. Preventing any time, effort or focus on anything else.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a moonshot.

Unless its pursuit stops you achieving anything else in the meantime.

Especially hitting your numbers.

A Whale can make a career.

Make sure the hazard of failing to land one won't derail yours. Make space for the daily catch.

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