Stefan Sagmeister is a
graphic designer and typographer who is best known for
his album covers for Lou
Reed, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith, and Pat Metheny. Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show is an
art exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Contemporary Art
that runs through August 12, 2012.
The exhibit is organized around statements taken from Sagmeister’s
diary; we have already in Part I of this blog post encountered one such
aphorism: “Everybody always thinks
they are right.”
Near the entrance is a
warning: “This exhibition will not
make you happier. Low expectations are a good strategy.” Danes always rank at the top of any survey
of the happiest people on earth, and some attribute this fact to following the
low expectations advice.
Over the past 30
years, in survey after survey, this nation of five and a half million people,
the land that produced Hans Christian Andersen, the people who consume herring
by the ton, consistently beat the rest of the world in the happiness stakes.
It's hard to figure: the weather is only so-so, they are heavy drinkers and
smokers, their neighbors, the Norwegians, are richer, and their other
neighbors, the Swedes, are healthier. (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-3833797.html)
In a 60 minutes episode, Professor Kaare
Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark stated “Although the Danes
were very happy with their life, when we looked at their expectations they were
pretty modest." (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-3833797.html)
Eric Weiner writing in The New York Times describes
Happiness equals Reality minus Expectations as a formula where most of us focus
on the Reality factor, not the Expectations factor. Danes, unlike most of us, have low expectations and so “year after
year they are pleasantly surprised to find out that not everything is rotten in
the state of Denmark,” says James W. Vaupel, a demographer who has investigated
Danish bliss. (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/lowered-expectations/)
Fortified by this wise advice and having low
expectations, I entered the first room of The Happy Show and encountered the
first Sagmeister statement:
It is pretty much impossible to please
everybody unless you are Maira Kalman.
Her blog for the New York Times is the only published venture I know
that seems to elicit only positive comments.
During my visit to the art museum I did not
recognize the name Maira Kalman.
It was only after googling her later at home that I realized I had seen
many of her New Yorker covers (http://www.mairakalman.com/newyorker/). The New York Times website revealed her
And the Pursuit of Happiness blog dated December 31, 2009, 9:32 PM.
Where
is happiness?
What
is happiness?
What
did Thomas Jefferson mean?
The
pursuit of happiness.
I
visited Dr. James Watson.
Maybe
there is a genetic explanation for happiness.
And
all we need to do is take a pill
That
puts it into action.
I
asked him.
He
could not tell me because no one really knows.
And
anyway, everyone has to be sad part of the time;
Otherwise
you would be insane.
I
looked at him.
He
takes walks. Plays tennis.
He
works.
He
looks at trees.
These
are good ways to find happiness.
To
find peace of mind.
Me?
I work and walk.
And
go to museums.
After hearing David
Eddy, MD, PhD, deliver a provocative lecture that challenged the conventional
wisdom of evidence based medicine experts, I wrote the following in a blog post
extolling those who do not strive to please everyone:
Eddy gives those of us in the evidence-based medicine world a lot to
think about. By making us at ICSI question how we develop guidelines, he
is challenging us to make sure that we stay on the cutting edge. He is
also proving the point made by Tim Ferriss in a recent blog entitled “The
Benefits of Pissing People Off” (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/11/25/the-benefits-of-pissing-people-off/).
Ferriss references a Scott Boras mentor saying, “If you are really
effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.
Keep your head on straight, don’t get emotional, take the heat, and just make
sure your clients are smiling.”
Colin Powell on leadership makes a similar point: “Trying to get
everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity: you’ll avoid the tough decisions,
you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted, and you’ll avoid
offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some
people might get upset. Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult
choices, by not trying to get anyone mad, and by treating everyone equally ‘nicely’
regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people
you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the
organization.”
The next organizing
quotation from Sagmeister’s diary was “Having guts always works out for
me.” This installation featured 12
minutes of an uncompleted film where Sagmeister forces himself to do things
that do not come naturally to him.
He tries to give away a flower to a stranger, and he attempts to obtain
the phone number of a woman he meets on the street. He describes the uncomfortable butterflies that he feels in
his stomach as he attempts to be gutsier, and he concludes they are necessary
to force oneself to grow.
When I mounted a
stationary bicycle and pushed the pedals hard enough I created enough
electricity to light up a huge neon sign in the museum gallery. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyemagazine/7073697645/)
I could not ride the bicycle
and take notes at the same time, but the writing on the wall next to the neon
sign stated:
Every
single time I think I should do this or I should try that and then don’t follow
through and actually do it, the uncompleted action creates a little nagging but
otherwise empty space in my mind.
I’m also missing out on the satisfying feeling that comes with completion
of a project.
Obviously, the Nike
slogan “just do it” came to mind, but I also thought immediately about how
Martin Seligman has expanded his definition of happiness in his new book
Flourish. Seligman, who teaches at
University of Pennsylvania, identifies five elements of well-being, each of
which exhibit the following properties:
the element contributes to well-being; people pursue the element for its
own sake; the element is well defined and measured independently of the other
elements. Seligman recommends the mnemonic PERMA to remember the five elements
of well-being: positive emotion,
engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. I was surprised that Seligman was not
mentioned anywhere in The Happy Show; maybe I just missed the reference to
him.
Part III of this blog
will continue our visit to Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show.
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