The following essay was originally published on Medium.com on May 10th, 2021
Frisson, n. — a brief moment of emotional excitement: SHUDDER, THRILL.
A quick Google search for how to be more successful will net you a plethora of listicles about goal setting, visualization, networking, sleeping less, sleeping more, building better routines, dieting, etc. When it comes to success, it’s bullet points all the way down.
This isn’t that.
This is a short piece about one topic: frisson, which is a physical response to emotional excitement, often characterized by a shudder or thrill. Have you ever felt a shiver run up your spine during the key change of a song? Or gotten chills at the emotional climax of a good story? If so, you’ve experienced frisson. Good. That is a great first step to being more successful.
Unfortunately, if you are reading this, you probably have a vested interest in being more successful, which means you probably have already inadvertently reduced frisson in your life; be it by focusing intently on a single topic, cutting out pleasure and leisure, skipping on time with friends and family, etc. Your first lesson is this: That’s the wrong approach.
If you want to be more successful, you need to increase moments of frisson, not decrease them. Here’s why:
Frisson results from “openness,” which is highly correlated with success in business and science.
Frisson often results from an encounter with the arts — be that via music, painting, cinema, literature, or good old fashion orating (e.g., lunch with a friend). Therefore, to increase our moments of frisson, we should increase our openness to the arts. Such openness drives success in non-artistic fields such as science and business, in part because those who engage in the arts are often open to new perspectives and ideas, and because they tend to be better at representing their ideas in sounds, images, and words.
In fact, a 2008 study from the Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology entitled Arts Foster Scientific Success: Avocations of Nobel, National Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi Members found that Nobel Laureates were far more likely to engage in the arts than typical scientists. How much more likely? Nobel Prize winners were 12x more likely to be writers than typical scientists and 22x more likely to be a performer such as an amateur actor or dancer than their non-Nobel winning peers. Similar studies have found the same effect for entrepreneurs and inventors.
Experiencing frisson requires practicing empathy, which can help you build soft skills and a quality network.
Earlier I asked if you had ever experienced frisson. That was a bit of a trick question — most people have had the requisite emotional experiences to experience frisson, but somewhere from 10 to 45% of the population don’t experience the physiological effects of it (e.g., the goosebumps, shivers). Researchers aren’t sure why, but for the sake of this article, it’s immaterial. What matters is that you can experience frisson on an emotional level, not a physical one. That is to say, the extent to which you are empathetic matters.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another being. It is not just about knowing what someone or something is feeling, but literally feeling it yourself. It can help you make deeper relationships, which is an increasingly important skill in a digitally connected world of weak ties. Not only that, but empathy — and by extension frisson — is often experienced by listening, which has the added benefit of making you more likable. Lastly, shared moments of frisson can trigger the formation of lasting bonds. Seeking out emotional experiences with others — for instance, by watching a gripping movie together — can deepen a friendship or relationship.
In short, experiencing frisson requires practicing empathy, which in turn can help you build a strong, quality network and equip you with the skills to maintain it.
Frisson results from realizing intense emotions, and emotion is the next great competitive advantage.
Before the domestication of animals, human beings used their muscle and might to make things happen. But once we had oxen to tow the plow and horses to pull our wagons, we doubled down on our competitive advantages, which included non-standard movement, fine motor skills, cognitive processing power, cognitive flexibility, and creativity. Today, computers out-compete us in terms of processing power, and the assembly line has helped to make non-standard movement standard. Machines are also enhancing if not replacing our fine motor skills. Even cognitive flexibility and creativity are being replicated by A.I., and it’s only a matter of time until we have a weak competitive advantage there, if any at all.
Still, there is one area where human beings reign supreme: The ability to feel. There is no machine on Earth that can experience frisson, that can consume books and movies and songs and paintings and feel as a result. It is a great irony that throughout human history we have often imagined a tradeoff between intelligence and emotion. There are the Spocks of the world, who run things, and then there are the poets, who do not. That is a false dichotomy. What’s more, it’s about to be flipped on its head. In a world of superintelligence and automation, it isn’t regular intelligence that outcompetes, but emotion. That which has made us human for so long will continue to keep us human. Not only that, but it may be the thing which we prize most in the not-so-distance digital future.