Optimal thinking to improve Quality-of-Life...

The previous post on optimal thinking left a few very basic questions unanswered. Here is an attempt to solve some part of that mystery, though not quite there yet, but an attempt nevertheless.

I found one comment very interesting - will there be enough to look forward to in life if things were all perfect? Do we need to go through times when we feel “the entire world is against me” to appreciate the good side to life? Do we need to go into a shell of our own making to motivate ourselves? Frankly, I do not know that the answer to this riddle is, but my guess is that it probably gets down to individual personalities and what we expect out of life. The good thing about any argument around personalities is that there is no right or wrong answer!

So, I thought, before we get back to optimal thinking, may be it is important to know what is the eventual goal or the objective function here? To put in very philosophical words, what’s the eventual goal of life? I follow very little of philosophy or literature on this, but what I have observed, there are many ways that we as individuals could define the end-goal of life.

From what I have heard and read, most people look for happiness eventually. But, somehow I have found it a bit too abstract and difficult to comprehend, evaluate and measure. So, here is another attempt to define the eventual goal – must say it is still preliminary and based on feedback that I get to this post, I will continue to refine it.

I define the ultimate measure as “quality-of-life” – well, it sounds just as abstract as happiness! - Just that there is a bit more of thought behind this. My definition of ‘quality-of-life’ revolves around two key dimensions with one often a trade-off to the other:

1. Success – Sounds too measured and profession-related, but on the contrary, success here is how we measure on various dimensions of life that matter the most to us. Each one of us would have a unique definition to ‘success’ – probably, a weighted average of personal life, career, education, helping others and society, making an impact, etc, etc.


2. Stress – Not the exact word I wanted to use here, I thought of ‘input’, but then after a bit of thought, decided to stick with stress. Essentially, the factor that reduces the overall quality of life.

These 2 dimensions feed into the quality-of-life matrix as shown. Before going into the specific details of the matrix and the inferences, there are a few things to note here:

1. Measure of success should be very internal - it is a comparison to our ‘full potential’ as opposed to how we rate vs. others. It’s not about how I am vs. my neighbour, friend, etc


2. The matrix is not a comparison of individual A vs. B – the points are only for illustration and if we plot ourselves at different periods of time, that would somewhat fill the matrix up.

Okay, so what does the quality-of-life matrix have to say? Here are some of the key inferences from the matrix:

1. We all should strive for top left corner – high success, low stress would be the ideal thing to look for. The exact opposite is the bottom right corner.


2. The 7 quality-of-life indifference bands have a great message. Look at points A, B and C – essentially these have the same quality-of-life, with very different approaches and outcomes. Point A is someone who is striving for his full-potential; however the resulting stress is high. Point B, is the same individual, now having a balance between stress levels and ambitions/ success. Point C, is the chill dude, low success, but low stress as well – and all 3 points have the same quality-of-life.


3. At different times and different phases of our lives, we would have probably seen most parts of the matrix, reflecting very different quality-of-life.


4. Once we have identified where we stand, this is when optimal thinking steps in. “What’s the best I could do to improve my quality-of-life?”

Let us try applying optimal thinking to some of the points of the matrix:

1. If I am at point H, negative thinking would mean I say “My life is doomed, any sympathy please?” Positive thinking on the other hand would result in “I hope things will be fine”.


2. An optimal thinker however would attack the problem is two possible ways:
   One, how do I reduce my stress levels?
   Two, how do I then improve my success levels in order to have a better quality of life.


3. It’s perfectly fine to transform from H to C right away.

Well, that’s it for this post. I tried to connect two very different things – end-goal of life with optimal thinking as these are somewhat inter-related. I understand that the entire concept is still in the preliminary stage, so would appreciate comments and feedback.