I informally replicated this experiment in my own class and found a similar result.
It's important to realize that happiness is not a state that we fall into.
Rather, evidence indicates that happiness can be a cultivated activity.
Where does happiness come from?
For that matter, is there a business case to be made for
the importance of happiness?
Let's first talk about the determinants of happiness.
I'm going to use a pie chart and give you the good and the bad news.
Okay, first the bad news.
By some accounts, 50% of your overall happiness is genetically determined.
Ugh.
That means if mom was a curmudgeon, than I'm likely to be a curmudgeon.
In other words, that means each of us may have a set point.
When I ask people to think about their set point,
I ask them to think about how they've been in the last 365 days.
Now the good news,
only about 10% of happiness is determined by life circumstances.
AKA, material wealth, marriage, employment status, income, and possessions.
Buying that new Tesla certainly does make us happy for about two weeks.
But then we quickly adjust and adapt.
Why?
It's because of something known as the hedonic treadmill,
meaning once we acquire a new salary or
a new possession, we experience a noticeable increase in pleasure.
We're thrilled.
We're excited.
However, very quickly, in about one to two weeks, we adapt to those new pleasures.
And then we feel like we need to capture the next car, the next house,
the next job.
Now the best news, 40% of our happiness is determined by intentional activity.
Behaviors and practices that we voluntarily pursue,
such as helping others, adopting a positive attitude.
Exercise and striving for goals.
These behaviors are strongly resistant to the effects of adaptation.
And this explains why the students who'd use their talents to help others
were still happy.
Now, some of you might be saying happiness is overrated.
Is there a reason to be happy?
You bet.
Let me make a business case for happiness.
Happy people perform better at work.
For example, happy physicians have better patient satisfaction scores,
and better treatment outcomes.
Happy people are less likely to get sick.
Happy people are less likely to suffer from debilitating diseases.
Happy people are better organizational citizens.
And, happy people have better social relationships.
Unhappy people are absent more often from work.
They change jobs more often.
They're less cooperative.
They're less helpful.
And they perform worse.
They negatively affect the loyalty of customers and clients.
My favorite study was done by Danner, Snowden, and Friesan.
And they found that happy people live longer.
This is a difficult type of study to do because you can't
assign people to be happy or not.
So, they looked at the diaries of nuns written in their 20s.
They chose nuns because they have a controlled lifestyle.
They surreptitiously coded these diaries for positive emotion words, love,
joy, bliss, versus negative emotion words, pain, suffering, unhappiness.
Over the following several decades, it was observed that the nuns who'd used more
positive emotion words in their 20s live longer, most of them well into their 90s.
In my own work, with Cameron Anderson of Berkley,
we found that leaders with positive moods were particularly contagious and
effected the positivity of others and their groups.
Okay, so what to do?
Treat happiness like your exercise routine.
Commit to it,
and work on it.
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