Stumbling onto Happiness

Posted on by Myron Beard, PhD

High-achieving executives may wonder how well success correlates to happiness. We have been molded, especially in America, to believe that the more we have in terms of money, assets, position, power, or authority, the happier we will be. But what if the link between success and happiness is not as clear-cut as we have been taught to believe?

Research on Happiness

Positive psychology is a field that has emerged in the past 15 years that focuses on understanding and applying the key principles of happiness. So what do we know about the link between happiness and success? Most people operate under the following assumptions:

  • If I work harder, I will be more successful.
  • If I am more successful, I will have more external validation, including more money, a higher position, more status, and more things.
  • If I have these rewards of success, then I will be happier (a commonly held belief reinforcing parenting and management styles intended to motivate others to behave in specific manners).

According to Thomas Merton, a highly esteemed Catholic theologian, “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have—for their usefulness.” Research has found that the way the brain works keeps us in a constant state of seeking, whereby every time our brain experiences success, we simply move the goalposts of what success looks like in the future. Here are some typical examples of how goals can shift:

  • If I have a good job, I have to get a better one.
  • If I get good grades, I need to get better ones.
  • If I am in a good school, my next one needs to be better.
  • If I hit my sales target, I need to set a higher one next time.

But what often happens to us once we have the success we thought we wanted is we find that the happy feeling is fleeting. Very shortly after the success, we begin to focus on the complaints, the competition, the workload, and the stress. The joy of the success is soon lost on us as we quickly return to our previous state of happiness or unhappiness. In fact, researchers can predict only 10% of your happiness by knowing about your external conditions (e.g., the car you drive, the home you own, where you vacation, your family), while 90% of your happiness is created by your internal world. Let’s take a closer look at happiness.

Happiness and Generosity

A study of happiness that might surprise you was published in a 2008 article in Science. This experimental study concluded that money could buy happiness as long as the money is spent on someone else. Analysis of surveys and data led to the following findings:

  • For participants who disclosed personal spending data, the amount of money people spent on gifts to others or on charitable contributions was positively associated with general happiness, even when controlled for income variances.
  • For employees at a company who had received profit-sharing bonuses, the amount of the bonus the employees spent on others was a greater predictor of happiness six to eight weeks later, whereas the amount of the bonus spent on themselves was not.
  • For survey participants who were given either $5 or $20 and instructed to spend the money either on themselves or on others, those who spent the money on others were happier, and the amount of money did not matter.

This brings us to Conclusion #1 about happiness: Happiness and deep satisfaction are found when you extend yourself on behalf of another, either through acts of service or acts of generosity.

Happiness and Money

Surely having more money equates to happiness. Yet a survey of 43 countries by the Pew Research Center found that people in developing countries express nearly the same level of satisfaction with their lot as do people in wealthy countries. In 2007, 57% of respondents in rich countries counted themselves as happy, compared with 33% in emerging markets and only 16% in poor countries. However, in 2014, 54% of rich-country respondents said they were happy, but the share in emerging markets increased to 51%. Poor countries still lagged behind, with a share of 25%. The conclusion to draw here is that there must be some level of financial security to be happy, but after that threshold is crossed, additional wealth does not equate to additional happiness. As income increases, its added contribution to life satisfaction becomes smaller. The impact of additional income is greatest among those who have little money, but matters increasingly less once someone is able to meet basic needs.

This leads us to Conclusion #2: Greater happiness comes through maintaining an attitude of gratitude for what you already have and getting into the habit of noticing what you appreciate and why. Adopting this attitude strengthens your appreciation for what you have in your daily life and takes the focus away from things you want but do not have.

Happiness and Life Circumstances

You may be thinking that surely people with privilege, better circumstances, and more opportunities are happier than those without. But are they? Looking at happiness relative to life circumstances, we bump into what’s known as outcome bias, the idea that outcomes, even non-monetary ones, will have a greater positive or negative impact than they actually end up having. Examples of such circumstances include:

  • Winning or losing an election
  • Having or losing a romantic relationship
  • Gaining or losing weight
  • Moving to a more or less desirable place to live
  • Getting good or bad medical lab reports

The impact related to these events is often much less than you might expect. In fact, if something happened over three months ago, with very few exceptions, the outcome has very little impact on your happiness. In fact, people who have experienced negative outcomes tend to confirm this. In his 2004 TedTalk, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, considered these examples:

  • Lottery winners vs. paraplegics—Believe it or not, one year following either winning the lottery or receiving a diagnosis of being a paraplegic, the levels of happiness on a survey were exactly the same. Three examples of this phenomenon are Christopher Reeve (quadriplegic), Amy Van Dyken (paraplegic), and Stephen Hawking (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
  • Jim Wright (1989)—He resigned in disgrace after 34 years in Congress, ultimately as Speaker of the House of Representatives, when it was discovered that he had a shady book deal. As a result, he lost everything—money, power, etc. He said, “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally, and in almost every way.”
  • Harry Langerman—He could have purchased a McDonald’s franchise for $3,000, but was talked out of it by his investment banker brother-in-law. Instead, Ray Crock bought the franchise and became, for a while, the richest man in America. As Langerman said, “It worked out for the best.”
  • Moreese Bickham—He spent 37 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he did not commit and was exonerated, at age 78, through DNA evidence. Upon his release, he said, “I do not have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience!”
  • Pete Best—He was the original drummer for the Beatles before they became famous. After Best decided not to tour with the band, they found Ringo Starr. As Best said, “I am happier than I would have been with the Beatles.”

So, is the secret of happiness to:

  • Have a debilitating disease or physical problem?
  • Accrue power, wealth, and status and lose it all?
  • Make someone else really, really rich?
  • Spend as much time in prison as you possibly can?
  • Never join the Beatles?

  • Of course not!

Maintaining Happiness—and Success

So what do we make of all of this? How do we increase our happiness while also striving to attain more professionally? We must understand that happiness resides entirely in the internal world. Our longings and our worries are overblown because we have within us the ability to create for ourselves the very thing we are constantly chasing.

You have probably heard the Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Research in the field of positive psychology has determined that we can train our brains to become more positive—tapping into serenity—through the following activities:

  • Exercising—Exercise increases the level of dopamine in the brain. This increase in dopamine elevates the feeling of being content and teaches your brain that your behavior matters.
  • Meditating—Meditation allows the brain to focus and not try to do too many things at once, focusing on the issue at hand in the present.
  • Performing random acts of kindness—Write one email per day to affirm someone else. Even in the absence of an email, do not let a day go by without telling someone how important they are.
  • Keeping a gratitude journal—Create a journal in which you write three things you are grateful for every day for 21 days and record at least one positive experience that occurred within the past 24 hours. Recording such things will allow you to see the world in a more positive light, more optimistically, and more successfully.

Finally, this brings us to Conclusion #3: Real happiness is in accepting and appreciating the things and conditions we cannot change and working to make the most of them.