| Happiness at Work and Working at Happiness, Part 1 |
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During a business trip to Chicago many years ago I jumped into a cab early on a windy, cold morning. "Good morning sir!" the cabbie said, far too loudly, "my name's Eddie. There's some coffee back there for you."
Eddie's cab was chock-full of whimsical knickknacks. Eddie whistled along with his music, asked me questions about what I was doing "in the greatest city in the world," and regaled me with jokes. He steered his cab through the morning traffic gleefully, like a kid at the controls of a video game.
I had to know how he could be so happy at work. "How could you be so happy at work, Eddie?" I asked.
Eddie told me to turn and look behind me. In the little nook under the rear window he had placed framed photographs of his wife and two daughters, like a little shrine. "Those are Eddie's reasons," he said.
Eddie had hit the happiness trifecta: he took pleasure in his work, he was engaged in his work, and he found meaning in his work.
Happiness Is Serious
Why is it important to be happy, aside from the obvious? The list of reasons is long. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at UC Riverside, research shows that happy people live longer and are healthier.
At work, the benefits of happiness include higher income, more job satisfaction and better results.
Work is, for good or bad, a large part of our identity. Put differently, our happiness with what we do is to a large extent our happiness with what we are.
Money
Considering the central role played by work, it makes sense to ask whether happiness is about money. A paycheck is a fundamental reason most of us work, after all.
The debate about whether money makes us happier has been settled by research. It does. However, money does not make us significantly happier over time. It makes us a little bit happier temporarily. The rich are not happier than the middle class; those who live in developed countries are not happier than those who don't; and people who win the lottery end up no happier than they were before.
Wanting More
One reason for this is that people tend to become adapted to pleasurable experiences and positive changes in life circumstances, such as a raise. We all have experienced this - we want a nice car, but get tired of it, so we want a nicer car (I present Exhibit A: my wife).
This realization is not as bad as it seems, first of all because just as we adapt to positive events (a promotion) quickly, we also get over negative events (getting fired) quickly and remarkably completely.
More importantly, it turns out that the circumstances of our lives - whether we work in the executive suite or the mailroom, whether we are happily married or divorced, whether we are beautiful or not so much - account for only about ten percent of our level of happiness, according to Lyubomirsky.
Shakespeare Was Half Right
When Shakespeare said that our problems are not "in our stars but in ourselves," he got it half right. It turns out that fifty percent of our happiness is heritable. Our only strategy is to select happy parents. Still, some of us have been skinny since birth, and others must count every calorie lest we gain weight, but exercise works for everybody.
It is the same for happiness. Forty percent of our happiness, according to Lyubomirsky, is attributable to our intentional activity - how we behave and how we think. This portion of happiness does not have the tendency to return to a baseline level. However, disciplining ourselves to behave and think in constructive ways takes work.
Was Jefferson Wrong?
Thus, despite what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence it is not the pursuit of happiness that should be our goal, rather, it is the creation of happiness.
Eddie's Secret
Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and pioneer in the field, says we derive happiness from three sets of experiences in our lives: the pleasant life (experiencing, savoring and being grateful for life's good things), the engaged life (experiencing a high level of engagement in satisfying activities like work), and the meaningful life (connecting our life and work to something more than ourselves).
Eddie found the secret of how to be happy at work. We all can, but we have to apply ourselves, some more than others. The return on investment, as we business people like to say, is high.
In the next installment we will explore which investments in happiness provide the highest returns.
Dave Hinman is a software industry executive and business coach. He and his "reasons" - wife Margie and daughter Jessi - reside in San Jose California. Email: dave@dhinman.com.
Further Reading
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, and Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Martin Seligman.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, Mihaly Csíkszentmihalyi.
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, Sonja Lyubormirsky.
Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert.
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, Jonathan Haidt.
Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton.
Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, George Vaillant.
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