Rules for Living a Happy Life

Image source: Forbes

Harvard Business School Professor Arthur Brooks writes a terrific column for The Atlantic about achieving happiness in life. He also teaches a course on this subject to MBA students, as described in this recent Wall Street Journal article. To celebrate his 100th column this weekend, Brooks highlighted his "three biggest happiness rules."

Maxim 1: Mother Nature doesn’t care if you are happy.

Brooks argues that we are wired to desire and pursue worldly rewards such as power and wealth. However, these materialist pursuits rarely lead to enduring happiness.

Maxim 2: Lasting happiness comes from habits, not hacks.

Books, social media, and television all love to proclaim the value of various "hacks" for increasing our happiness.  While these may provide a short-term boost for us, they also don't tend to lead to substantial and enduring increases in our happiness.  Instead, Brooks argues we should focus on cultivating good habits, rather than chasing the latest popular hacks.  

Maxim 3:  Happiness is love.

Brooks writes, "Research on people who wind up happy (and healthy) as they grow old shows that the most important part of life to cultivate is a series of stable, long-term love relationships...Here’s a handy formula to go by: Happy people love people and use things; unhappy people use people and love things."

'Tis Better to Give Than To Receive

We've always heard the wise old adage, "It is better to give than to receive." Scholars Ed O’Brien and Samantha Kassirer (from University of Chicago and Northwestern respectively) set out to test this piece of advice empirically.   The researchers designed a simple experiment.    They provided their research subjects (college students) $5 per day for five straigth days.  They told 50% of the students to spend the money on themselves.  They directed the others to give the money to others each day.  The scholars asked the students to respond to a questionnaire each night, evaluating their happiness.  As you can see in the chart below, the "givers" maintained a high level of happiness throughout the week.  Meanwhile, the "receivers" began the week almost equally as happy as the "givers" in this study.  However, the receivers experienced a substantial decline in happiness as the week progressed.  

Source:  Chicago Booth Review

How do the scholars explain the results displayed above?   Alice Walton summarizes one of their explanations in her article for Chicago Booth Review:

The phenomenon may have to do with someone’s vantage point, the researchers suggest. When we receive money or goods repeatedly, it’s easy to compare the results and become acclimated to them. In fact, research over several decades has explored “hedonic adaptation,” a theory of happiness that suggests people quickly become accustomed to good things and return to their original happiness level.   But giving seems to work differently, suggest O’Brien and Kassirer. When people give, the endpoint isn’t always apparent, therefore comparison—and acclimation—aren’t as likely. As they write, “The happiness we get from giving appears to sustain itself.”

Your Professional Decline & Your Happiness

Source:  Wikipedia

Arthur Brooks has written a thought-provoking article for The Atlantic titled, "Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think."  Brooks reviews the literature regarding the age at which professional productivity peaks in various fields, as well as some of the research on personal happiness.  He closes with some thoughts about how he will approach his work and life moving forward (Brooks has just stepped down as President of the American Enterprise Institute and will be joining the Harvard faculty this summer).   Here's an excerpt from Brooks' terrific essay:

What’s the difference between (Johann Sebastian) Bach and (Charles) Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respected.

The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.  How does one do that?  A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.

Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.

Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets—highly fluid in their creativity—tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians—who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge—don’t reach this milestone until about 60.

Here’s a practical lesson we can extract from all this: No matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life.  Like what? As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time.

Later in the article, Brooks (now in his early 50s) articulates four commitments he has made to himself as he enters the next stage of his career and life.  

1.  Jump:  Be ready to leave something you love and shift to something new that fits your stage of life more appropriately.  

2. Serve:  Brooks notes that, "An effort to serve others can play to our strengths as we age."

3.  Worship:  Brooks notes the importance of his spiritual life and how it need not be detached from his work life.  He intends to focus on his spiritual life even more moving forward.  

4.  Connect:  Brooks explains that healthy relationships are key to happiness in life, and that one can make time for those relationships without necessarily sacrificing achievement altogether.  

I have not done justice to the fascinating article in this short blog post.  I hope that I have intrigued you, though, and that you will read the entire essay.   

Five Essential Questions

My colleague Peter Nigro (finance professor here at Bryant University) gave me a little book to read this week:  "What, What?" by James Ryan, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  What a fantastic read!  I laughed, cried, and learned a great deal.   Ryan offers five essential questions that we should all ask ourselves (not just once, but throughout our daily lives).   Here are the five questions:

1.  Wait, what?   In other words, ask people for clarification.  Ask them to elaborate. Seek to understand them more clearly before jumping to conclusions.

2.  I wonder... Two types of "I wonder" questions actually: I wonder why and I wonder if.  I wonder why demonstrates intellectual curiosity.  You are trying to understand what's really going on.  Then, you can ask, "I wonder if..."  In other words, what might be possible?  How might we improve things?  You open up your mind to new opportunities for growth, development, and change.

3.  Couldn't we at least...?   Sometimes we disagree vehemently with others.  This question seeks to find some common ground.  It looks for some small first steps that can bring people together.  It propels us to take some action, rather than waiting for the perfect grandiose solution.  It invites us to find small wins.

4.  How can I help?  With this question, we reach out to others, but we don't simply offer our solutions to what we perceive to be their problems.  We let them drive the conversation.  What do they need from us?  How can we contribute most effectively?

5.  What truly matters to me?  This question pertains both to specific meetings, projects, and decisions as well as to your life overall.  For particular tasks, asking this question enables you to get to the heart of the issue.  Where should we really focus our attention?  What are the key issues, and what are the things that distract us?  At a broader level, this question enables us to consider our values and our priorities in life.

The video below provides a brief introduction to these ideas.  I highly recommend reading the entire book.  It's a quick read (just over 100 pages).  I promise that it will be thought-provoking.

Disturbing Finding on Happiness

Knowledge@Wharton reports on the intriguing, but perhaps rather disturbing, findings of Professor Maurice Schweitzer's latest research.   Schweitzer has studied how people perceive others who appear to be very happy people.  He explains the conclusions from the research:

The pursuit of happiness is deeply embedded in our national thinking. Yet sometimes people who are very happy are exactly the kinds of people who are exploited. That’s what we document in our research, where we look at people who are very happy. If they seem more happy than baseline happiness — people who are very happy, always chipper, always upbeat — they strike us as naive. We found that link consistently. One of the most robust findings in our research is that people see very happy individuals as naive, and in our last couple of studies we found that people are more likely to exploit those individuals.

I don't think the implication is that we should be less happy, or stop presenting ourselves as satisfied and content with our lives, jobs, etc.   However, perhaps we need to open our eyes a bit, and recognize that others may perceive us as naive at times.  Unfortunately, some people may try to take advantage of perceived naivete.  

Don't Try to Imagine the Future! Ask Others Before You Decide

You have to make a decision. Suppose you are trying to decide on whether London or Dublin is a better place to visit with small children. You read the travel guides and try to imagine what it will be like in each city. You envision what your daily experiences will be like. Will you make a decision that your family finds acceptable and enjoyable? Alternatively, you could ask others who have traveled to London and Dublin. What were their experiences like? Which did they prefer for their small children? You might hesitate to use the latter strategy of consulting others. After all, your family is rather unique. What if those other families are very different from yours? 

It turns out that consulting others makes much more sense than trying to envision the future, at least in most cases. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has studied this type of decision. Gilbert describes the strategy of consulting others as "surrogation" - i.e. you are using others' experiences as a surrogate for your own. Harvard Magazine described one experiment that Gilbert and his colleagues conducted and summarized their findings:

In one experiment to test surrogation, the psychologists asked a sample of women to predict how much they would enjoy a “speed date” with a particular man. Some women saw his personal profile and photograph; others learned nothing about him other than how much another woman (a stranger) had enjoyed her speed date with him. The second group predicted their enjoyment far more accurately than the first. Both groups had expected the reverse, and oddly enough, despite the outcome, both groups preferred to have the profile/photograph for their next date.

This suggests that ideas trump reality. But in predicting your likings, even someone else’s direct experience trumps mental hypotheses—which is why surrogation works. But to be helpful, the surrogate’s experience must be recent. “People are very poor at remembering how happy they were,” Gilbert says. “So it’s not very useful to ask, ‘How much did you like something you experienced last year?’ People get most questions about happiness wrong. But there is one question they get right: how happy are you right now?”

The Link Between a Happy Spouse and a Healthy You

Scholars William Chopik and Ed O'Brien have conducted some fascinating research on the link between your spouse's happiness and your health.  According to the Booth Review, 

A number of previous studies have linked a person’s own happiness to health and longevity, but the researchers wondered if being around “happy others” might have a similar effect. To test the theory, Chopik and O’Brien assessed the health and happiness of nearly 2,000 couples, ages 50 to 94, over a period of six years. Both partners rated their individual happiness and life satisfaction, and answered questions about their personal physical health, including their activity level and any chronic health problems.  It turned out that the happiness of a person’s spouse was strongly linked to how healthy the individual was—in measures of overall health, physical impairment, and activity level. And this seemed to work for both partners. Even more, the effects of a partner’s happiness on a person’s health were independent of the individual’s own happiness level. “The current study demonstrates that happy partners seem to substitute as proxies for a happy self,” write Chopik and O’Brien.

The study left me wondering... What about happy co-workers, and even happy bosses?  Does your work context have a substantial impact on your health too?  It seems to me that it should.  Perhaps Chopik and O'Brien will examine that link next.  

Does Variety Make Us Happier?

We have all heard the expression, "Variety is the spice of life."  Is it true?  Do we value variety highly?  Does it make us happier?  Years ago, social psychologists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham developed their now-famous job characteristics model.  They argued that five key characteristics affected outcomes such as job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and quality of work produced.  One of those job characteristics was skill variety.   If a job required employees to employ a variety of skills and capabilities, that had a positive effect on these key outcomes.   

New research by Jordan Etkin and Cassie Mogilner looks at variety in a slightly different context.  They conducted a series of experiments to explore whether engaging in a variety of activities increased happiness. They found that variety had a positive impact, but only if that variety did not occur in a very short period of time. Etkin explains in this article from Duke's Fuqua School of Business:

"It seems the pivot point is around a day," Etkin said. "We find that over longer periods of time — a day, a week or a month — spending time on more varied activities does lead people to feel happier afterwards. But over shorter time periods — an hour, 30 minutes or 15 minutes — people feel less happy after spending time on more varied things."

Etkin went on to explain why too much variety in a short period of time could have a negative effect on happiness:

"When people think about variety, they think it's exciting, stimulating and interesting. But we also derive a lot of happiness and satisfaction from feeling we accomplished something with our time. What we find is that shorter time periods really don't give people enough time to transition between varied activities and still feel productive."

Does Variety Make Us Happier at Work?

Knowledge@Wharton reports on some interesting research by Wharton Professor Cassie Mogilner and Duke Professor Jordan Etkin.  They studied the effect that variety in your work affects your happiness.  In other words, do people prefer to work on many different things vs. focusing on one task?  Mogilner summarized their findings as follows:

It depends on the time frame. In [our research], we looked at the effect of variety of our activities on overall happiness. We found that over a day or a week or a month, variety — perhaps consistent with people’s perceptions — leads to greater happiness. However, over shorter periods of time than a day, such as an hour, 15 minutes [or a] half-hour, when variety actually does get experienced as multitasking, it actually becomes fairly stressful, and instead of variety increasing my happiness, it makes me less happy.

Maximize vs. Satisfice: How Do You Decide?

What type of decision-maker are you? Do you examine all the options exhaustively, hoping to find the absolutely best alternative?  Do you carefully compare the pros and cons of a wide range of options before making a decision?  Or, do you search until you find an option that is satisfactory, and then choose that one even if it is not perfect or completely optimal?    Nobel winner Herbert Simon described these two patterns of decision-making decades ago.  He called them "maximizing" vs. "satisficing" behaviors.  

In today's Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein examines these two strategies.  She describes the research of Swarthmore Professor Barry Schwartz.  Here's an excerpt:

In a study published in 2006 in the journal Psychological Science, Dr. Schwartz and colleagues followed 548 job-seeking college seniors at 11 schools from October through their graduation in June.  Across the board, they found that the maximizers landed better jobs. Their starting salaries were, on average, 20% higher than those of the satisficers, but they felt worse about their jobs.

Bernstein describes how maximizers often find themselves less content than satisficers.  Why might that be?  The exhaustive search and comparison of many alternatives often opens the door for feelings of regret once a decision has been made.  Did I make the right call?  Should I have chosen another option?  Did I consider the right variables and attributes?   Satisficers may not experience those feelings to the same extent.  Does this mean that we should not examine options carefully? I don't think so, but it does mean that we have to watch out for feelings of discontent in the immediate aftermath of a tough decision.  Moreover, we have to be cognizant of the fact that we might be on a team with people how tend to have the opposite decision-making pattern.  

Do Good, Be Happy... with a Caveat

In this article, Stanford University reports on a stream of scholarly work that shows how acts of kindness toward others enhances personal happiness.  Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker calls it the "helper's high."  Her recent research, with Melanie Rudd and Michael Norton, examines how to optimize that "helper's high."  Their work shows that setting concrete philanthropic goals works much more effectively than establishing abstract objectives. Aaker explains, "This insight is important because nearly all of us are trying to make other people in our lives happy. Parents often say they just want their kids to be happy. Equally common is a desire to make our partners, family members, and friends happy, but few of us know exactly how to bring happiness to the people in our lives. Our new research sheds light on what we can do.”

The researchers examined this issue of concrete vs. abstract goals with a simple experiment.  They gave experimental subjects $5 Amazon gift cards in exchange for the performance of an act of kindness.  One-half of the subjects were asked to make someone else happy; the others were asked to try to make someone smile.  The former represents an abstract goal; the latter serves as a more concrete objective.  Those asked to make someone else smile indicated they experienced more personal happiness than those instructed to make someone happy. It did not matter what method any of the subjects used to try to make others happy or to make others smile. 

Speaking of how performing acts of kindness can make you happier, check out this story about "paying it forward" at Starbucks:

Attention Marketers: Consider How Age Affects What Makes People Happy

As companies look to market their goods and services, they should pay careful attention to how age affects happiness.  That's what a new study by Cassie Mogilner and Amit Bhattacharjee suggests.  These scholars examined how particular types of experiences affects our happiness.  Here's an excerpt from Knowledge @ Wharton that summarizes their findings:

After conducting eight different studies looking at a variety of influences and experiences, Mogilner and Bhattacharjee conclude that “younger people who view their future as extensive gain more happiness from extraordinary experiences.” As people get older, and more aware that their time on earth is finite, ordinary experiences become increasingly associated with happiness, and even begin to catch up to the extraordinary in the amount of joy and contentment they produce.

What's the break point in terms of age?  It appears to be the mid-30s (ouch, I'm in the older group!).  What do they define as ordinary vs. extraordinary?  Ordinary may be a wonderful meal shared between mother and daughter.  Extraordinary might be a trip to Paris or a weekend hiking in the Rocky Mountains.   

How can marketers capitalize on this research?  The scholars argue that firms can even tailor their advertising to account for these findings.  Featuring the extraordinary might be useful in an advertisement for a product aimed at teenagers.  Featuring a happy ordinary event might be best-suited for an advertisement targeted at Baby Boomers. 

Does Ambition Shorten Your Life?

Fortune reports about a new study conducted by Professor Timothy Judge of the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.   Judge examined 717 highly ambitious individuals born in the early 1900s.  They went to top schools, embarked on high-status careers, and made a great deal of money. 

He compared them to a control group of people who did not exhibit the same level of ambition.  Judge found that, "Despite their many accomplishments, ambitious people are only slightly happier than their less-ambitious counterparts, and they actually live somewhat shorter lives."  

Hmmm... food for thought indeed.  When we strive to accomplish great things, do we sometimes make lifestyle and health choices that may be detrimental to us?