Invest in the process of something to get hapiness, rather than focussing on the outcome (which is likely to be disappointing in relation to your expectations). Seems  a very smart philosophy, from Srikumar Rao.

John Wooden never got his UCLA basketball team to focus on the winning, but on playing as well as they could. They’d find that more often than not the score fell in their favour, but the point was to invest in the process not the outcome. “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming”.

A baby doesnt give up when trying to learn to walk… they invest in the process of learning, and that makes them happy. The walking is a good outcome, and certianly it’s important to have a focus or goal to give direction, but more crucial is recognising that happiness comes through the process.

A new job, better salary, new car, better girlfriend… all seem like goals to make you happy, but you soon find that they havent really changed anything within yourself, right? You’re still probably as happy/unhappy as you were before.

It’s partly marketing’s fault, of course, in selling the outcomes to the people, but perhaps it’s time we started on realising what we’ve already got and enjoying the journey we take to the new goals.

Louis CK has some thoughts along this line – that we take too many things for granted. “Everything’s amazing, right now, and nobody’s happy.” He cites technology like telephones, planes and more, but he’s got a point.

“Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have.”
- ANON

Below is one of my favourite stories, best of all because I read it in The Economist:

A banker holidays each year in Mexico on the beach. Each morning he watches a local fisherman go out to sea, and each evening he watches the same man return with just one or two fish. He eventually asks him why he only catches so few to bring to his family. He’s out there all day, after all.

The banker explains to his eager pupil that if he brought home a 3-4 fish he could sell a couple at the market and get new clothes for his wife, books for his kids… if he took his brother or son out to fish with him they’d catch a great deal more fish to sell at the market and they could get a nicer house or even a bigger boat.

The fisherman’s enthralled – “Si Senor, and then what?!”

The Banker continues: he suggests the fisherman could employ a number of local men to help on the boat, thereby catching loads more fish, buy a second or third boat, start selling to major cities and even foreign markets, rather than just the local village…

“And then what?!”

More follows: cannerie, fishery, multinational fleet, riches upon riches!

“And then what?!”

“Why, then you could retire with your family on the beach, and go fishing every day…”

nice collection of graphis annuals on flickr.

found via wolffolins blog

Hyper local blogs, stories, are overlaid onto the maps, which can easily flip from a birds’ eye view to 45 degree Sim City style landscape, and then flow into a full 3D environment with their equivalent of street view. Immense.

It’s all a bit American, to be critical, but then again, no one’s complaining at a good issue of GQ… and that’s what this reads like. A good, modern, up to date, online GQ.

Whatever, it’s a good one for your bookmarks.

Nicholas Felton has released his newest Feltron Annual Report for 2009 which outlines all of the activities he participated in last year.

Normally it’s a very personal log of the year’s activities that documents things like distance travelled and by what means, animals eaten, books read, plants killed etc (see reports for 2008, 2007, 2006)… but for 2009 he decided to change things up a bit and asked people he met to log their encounters through an online survey he set up.

In an interview with Mike Arauz, Mr. Felton speaks about the benefits of opening up his data collection to social input:

There have always been questions about my behavior that I have felt unqualified to track. My mood is one of those qualitative traits that I would rather not judge for myself, and the reporting system I devised provided a less biased way of recording it. Overall I was interested in how others see me, and what is memorable about an encounter with me. Ultimately, we all have our own self-image, but your public persona is how other people see you, and what they remember and tell others. This was what I hoped to record, evaluate and communicate. Of course, it has it’s limitations. I didn’t find that anyone recorded their dissatisfaction. I presume that if we had a negative encounter, that person was not interested in telling me my faults.

Check out Information Is Beautiful for similar genius.

Chris Morris has made a film about a group of British suicide bombers. Four Lions, which was partially funded by Film4, was screened last night at the Sundance film festival in Utah, The Guardian reports.

Morris is known to have worked on little else over the last five years, apparently.

“Chris has spent an incredible amount of time immersing himself in Islam, terror and counter-terror,” a friend told the Observer. “He has toured Britain and met dozens of radicals, ex-radicals, academics, journalists and British Asians. He sat in on high-profile terror trials for weeks, read the key texts and recent books, has gone to innumerable ­public meetings, met community groups, and made it his business to educate himself on the nature of fundamentalism.”

In 2007, writing in the Observer, Morris took author Martin Amis to task for “railing” against Muslims and suggested that “the way out of this mess (and it is a mess, fuelled by ignorance, stupidity, prejudice and weapons) is to clarify and discriminate rather than hurl abuse at anything that goes near a mosque”.

A colleague of Morris said: “Its target is ideology, and what happens when people are gripped by something that they have debased and abstracted to the point of insanity. That’s when the trouble starts.”

Four Lions is released in Britain later this year.

Oh my. Terry Richardson’s directed and photographed the new Pirelli Calendar. Thank you High Snobiety for publishing all the pics.

Featuring Miranda Kerr, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Ana Beatriz Barros, Lily Cole, Daisy Lowe, Marloes Horst, Abbey Lee, Catherine McNeil, Eniko Mihalik, Georgina Stojiljkovic, and Gracie Carvalho. Biographies of all those involved are available at Pirelli.

Backstage videos here and here, and photos are here!

(By the way, critically speaking, my one comment is that the best Pirelli calendars have always had a theme running through them – whetehr that was artistic style or location or telling a story… Not that I’m bothered, but this one seems to be a little all over the place!)

Pop-up stores are passe. Hostage stores are more exciting.

Swedish designer Ann Sofie Back (and her ad team We Are Group) have launched this much more outlandish and provocative concept.

Society of the Spectacle report:

The stunt started with videos posted on YouTube showing Back has been kidnapped by a bunch of Anna Wintour look-alikes (the agency in drag – natch) for a crimes against fashion.

Posters (below) then appear on the street. All with the intention to drive people to the Ann-Sofie Back “Hostage Store” (ironically enough, very close to the birthplace of Stockholm Syndrome itself).

The space exhibited the Swedish designer’s current collection, as well as some rejected designs and garments, which provides an insight into her creative processes.

It’s more interesting than yet another pop-up store… Sounds like something Zoltar might have imagined back in the day.

The Geometry of Pasta from Amy Lines on Vimeo.

Great list from some of the UKs great chefs. I’ve always wondered what food these guys would be cooking at home, for their family. I can’t imagine that Heston whips up a quick bacon and eggs ice cream on a Saturday night to watch in front of X-Factor. Instead, he’d probably use one of these recipes.

Quick, simple, easy and damned tasty. Peach, tomato, basil salad… prawns, courgette and beans on toast…  red mullet with wilted lettuce and fresh peas… strawberries with almond creme anglaise… nachos….