psychology
How the 10-year rule brings more fulfillment into your life
© (JLco) Julia Amaral / Adobe Stock
Every person should change their life every ten years, says the renowned US professor of psychiatry Nassir Ghaemi. A plea for more mobility in life.
How many lives fit into one? Many! Childhood and youth can be followed by no or more training, you can live in the country, emigrate, settle in a metropolis, found a start-up or an association, become self-sufficient, have children, buy chickens, care for parents, partners of different genders – the possibilities that life offers are endless. And you should use them.
But many of us tend to pursue a straightforward biography and stick to what we have achieved because that is what is expected of us. Or because we are afraid that the next plan will fail miserably and jeopardize what we have already worked on.
The enemy of success is success
According to Nassir Ghaemi, US professor of psychiatry, this is a mistake. Because those who hold on to what they have achieved stagnate. If you succeed in something you strive for (the good job, the nice house, the marriage, the children), you can hold on to it forever. But then you don’t experience anything new and you’re basically just waiting for time to run out. In the magazine “Psychology Today” he advocates changing your life every ten years. “The biggest obstacle to greater success in life is not failure, but success,” he writes. Because success means that you don’t change anything, no matter how monotonous what you have already achieved. But those who are courageous gain happiness, expertise and life satisfaction.
Ghaemi cites Arthur C. Brooks in making his claim. Brooks was a musician for a decade, then earned a doctorate in economics and worked as a professor for 15 years. Next, he ran a think tank for ten years. He eventually wrote successful books and currently leads a life as a Harvard professor and “happiness guru.”
Change your life even when everything is good
Brooks could have remained a musician and become an even more accomplished musician; or he could have remained an economist and succeeded in this field or as president of other think tanks. But he changed his life again and again, and his influence and expertise grew with each change.
Usually we only want to make a change when things aren’t going as we hoped. With the ten-year rule, it doesn’t matter whether you succeed or fail. According to Ghaemi, we should change something about our lives even when everything seems to be going well. In fact, if you don’t stop pursuing the final plan, you never know what might happen next. So there is little harm in taking a small risk in order to set yourself up for even greater rewards in life.