Month: June 2007

Scott Adams’ Golden Happiness Ratio

Scott Adams has an interesting theory on how to be happy – something I totally agree with:

I have a theory that you can predict how happy people are and perhaps how successful by their ability to tolerate imperfection. The Golden Happiness Ratio is about 4/5ths right, also known as “good enough.

Once you achieve about 80% rightness, any extra effort is rarely worth the effort. People who can’t stop until they get to 100% are usually stressed to the point where they can barely function. And don’t expect them to do much multitasking.

See full article.

What makes a restaurant successful?

Scott Adams, who is a very smart guy, and who just happens to own a couple of restaurants, has spent some time analyzing what makes a restaurant successful and writes this post. Excerpt:

When asked about the most important factor for a restaurant’s success, experts often pick lighting. Your first inclination is to laugh that off as absurd, because you’ve probably never made a restaurant decision based on lighting. But if you look at the restaurants that are doing well without being Italian or Mexican or tax cheats or a chain, they generally have excellent lighting. Everything, including your date, looks better with the right lighting. And that can be enough to make you remember the food and service as being better than they were. I pay attention to restaurant lighting, and find it a far better predictor of success than food or service. (I’m working on my restaurant’s lighting too.)

I assume you are not going to start your own restaurant, but nevertheless, it is interesting to read what how that business works.

In Praise of Idleness By Bertrand Russell

Recently found this article by Bertrand Russell lamenting that modern society (the article was written in 1932) puts far too much emphasis on “work”. He makes an intriguing argument that everyone should do less “work” and should have more leisure to pursue other activities. Excerpt:

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

See full article. It is a long article, and a little slow in the beginning but it has lots of insightful snippets and is well worth the effort.