Taking risks, working for big goals can create success, joy, exhilaration

By David McElroy · July 15, 2015

I can’t stop looking at this photograph tonight. I don’t know a single person in the picture, but it represents much of what I want to experience in life.

When NASA’s New Horizons probe made contact with Earth Wednesday to say it had arrived on schedule at Pluto, the most excited people in the world were the men and women of the project staff in Maryland. This picture shows the jubilant reaction of the employees to the successful achievement of what some of them have worked for many years to achieve.

This picture of that moment captures something fundamental about the human experience — and it reminds me of things I still want in my own life.

It wasn’t that big a deal for me when New Horizons reached Pluto, but it was huge news to many scientists. I can’t imagine, though, that anyone on this planet felt the kind of joy and exhilaration the success brought to the project team. What I see in these people is the pure joy of being part of something big and feeling happy about being alive to be a part of it.

I wrote just a few days ago about my realization years ago that it was certain emotional or psychological states we really seem to want, rather than the actual goals we attach those feelings to. This is an example of that. In the practical sense, nothing that this probe accomplishes will changes the lives of these excited people at NASA. It might help the careers of a few of them, but most of these cheering people won’t be objectively changed by the discoveries.

But they will be forever changed in some fundamental way by the exhilaration of this experience — of the feeling they had of being part of something big and important.

Humans can be pretty risk-averse. Thousands and thousands of years have seen us evolve a need for safety and security. I think there’s always a tension in most of us between the need for safety and the need for some kind of tangible experience of the joy of life. And sometimes we choose so much safety that we live for decades with experiencing much of anything real.

Almost everything in life is a tradeoff. If you devote yourself to one thing, you don’t have the time and energy to devote to something else. You can’t have everything you want. But if you think through your tradeoffs, you can decide which things are most likely to bring you the sort of joy these people experienced — and which few people ever actually find.

I’ve experienced my own version of these joys. They’re addictive. When I was younger, I occasionally produced editions of newspapers that I felt were so good that I couldn’t go to sleep. Seriously. I just stayed up for hours looking at the wonder that I’d created. When I worked in politics, I felt this joy on a number of election nights — when my clients unexpectedly defeated entrenched incumbents and I felt about 10 feet tall from being part of making it happen. When I sat in a crowded auditorium 10 years ago and listened to hundreds of people laugh at all the right parts of my only short film — and applaud with vigor afterward — my heart swelled with the same kind of joy you see in that picture.

I’ve experienced that joy with romantic relationships at times, too. I miss that feeling more than I can say.

We can go through life in very safe ways — taking no risks and not pursuing our goals or the love we need — or we can take chances on finding ways to experience these deeply important emotions. The “lizard brain” in your head begs you not to take chances. The part of your brain that understands the joy of life urges you to at least try.

I can’t tell you which chances are worth taking for you. That’s a very personal decision and it involves your own values and your own understanding of life, not to mention which things in life are even capable of producing this sort of joy for you.

But this picture is a reminder to me that it’s worth arranging your life so you can experience as much of it as possible.

For some people, it might come from the joy of building a business. For others, it might be the joy of a happy marriage and raising happy children. For others, it might be the joy of taking time to experience nature or something beautiful in a special way. I can think of hundreds of ways it could play out for different people. There’s no one right way.

All I know is that most people drift through life — doing the same monotonous things and feeling bored with their lives — instead of finding ways to experience joy.

I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to feel the joy of knowing I’ve achieved things that matter to me, whether anyone else understands my exhilaration or not. For me, it’s a key part of experiencing a life worth living.

But I need to be reminded of it all the time.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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