Post #100 or Why We All Should Be Engineers

This is the one-hundredth post added to this blog. And it got me thinking about milestones. Why do people care so much about milestones?

I think the short answer is that we like the accomplishment associated with a given milestone. Agreeably, 100 blog posts is not the greatest achievement in history. But I think that is exactly why we should do it. Let me explain.

It sure seems to be the case that humans love to accomplish things. As mentioned, I believe achievement is a big part of why we pay so much attention to milestones. People like David McClelland have taught us about The Achieving Society. But, for a moment, I will speak about accomplish by revisiting Martin Seligman and his lovely theory on flourishing.

If you do not know, Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In the year 2000, professor Seligman, along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, launched a branch of psychology known as positive psychology. Here is a link to their seminal paper.

These days, some people refer to positive psychology as “happiness research,” a phrase Seligman does not support. Seligman thinks the word “happiness” has been so overused as to become virtually meaningless. Seligman prefers to use the word “flourish.” Indeed, that is the name of his most recent book.

When you read Flourish you will discover a wonderful acronym. To help us remember the path to flourishing, Seligman came up with the acronym PERMA. If you wish to learn a little more about PERMA, click here and read this post.

As you can see, from that post, the A in PERMA stands for “accomplishment.” We humans are hard-wired, to feel joy, when we accomplish things. And, what we need to remember, is that the accomplishment need not big astronomical. The A, in PERMA, is not reserved for winning an election, getting married, or being inducted into the Hall of Fame. Indeed, if we pay attention, we accomplish things every single day.

Accomplishment is what we make of it. It is for this reason that I have written this specific post. As I have already stated, one hundred blog posts will not win me a Nobel Prize. But it is an accomplishment. And, I believe, it is worth celebrating. The reality is, it is highly unlikely that I will ever win a Nobel Prize. And so, what I think we all know, is that accomplishment is where we find it.

In as much as accomplishment is subjective, I believe we all need to be engineers of sorts. Knowing that accomplishment is such an integral part of happiness behooves us to engineer a life of achievement.

Too many of us wait for a “real” accomplishment, something genuinely worth celebrating. As a result, we rarely make that trip to the party store. This is unfortunate. It causes us to miss out on a lot of opportunities to feel good and to do good work.

I am certainly not advocating naivety or that we all become pollyanna. I am more revealing the fact that my thinking has been influenced, lately, by Steven Kramer and Teresa Amabile. Amabile and Kramer wrote the book The Progress Principle and it is based on rather rigorous science. The findings of the book are well summarized by a descriptive subtitle which says, “Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work.” Though they happened to mention work, I believe the conclusions are equally applicable to life in general.

Now, while I do believe you should read Amabile and Kramer's book, I will give you one short cut. What the authors are saying, in The Progress Principle, is what I am saying in this blog post. Namely, it takes a little bit of effort to intentionally design a life of accomplish, of small wins. But, doing so will pay off with big psychological rewards.

I will end with the title. To repeat, I believe we should all be something of engineers. With just a little bit of effort with can engineers opportunities to achieve. Thus experiencing one of life's great joys.