“Success is a moving goal post,” says Prof. Raj Raghunathan, University of Texas, Austin. “Happiness makes you successful and not the reverse.”
I WANT TO TODAY FOCUS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SMARTNESS AND HAPPINESS. I AM OBVIOUSLY INTERESTED IN THE TOPIC OF HAPPINESS BUT THE ANGLE THAT I TAKE IS NOT THE ANGLE THAT I ADOPTED WHEN I WAS A KID.
I loved the topic of happiness but more recently I have been reading on the topic and I have been researching on the articles of the topic and that is my USP, so to speak. So, there are spiritual leaders, religious leader etc, and they have a base, I appreciate what they do. My angle is more data-driven and scientific.
When we were young, we were fed a steady diet, especially in India, on how if you were successful you would be happy. A lot of emphasis was placed on being successful as we grew up. My mom used to tell me: ‘Work hard now because once you are successful, you can coast along and be happy for the rest of your life. But it is important to work hard now,’.
Success leads to happiness. The truth is that it is not clear if that is that case but if you do work hard and are successful, then you are definitely happy in the moment. However, your definition of success changes the whole time. I am sure you have experienced this in the context of money: you earn $5000 a month and then you go on to $7000 a month. You obviously feel happier but that happiness doesn’t last forever and you need another bump in your salary for you to feel just as happy again. That is true in terms of many other dimensions be it power, fame, status.
So, there is a moving goal post which means that if you do pursue success you have to be on a treadmill: you have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. This is the idea behind the concept of hedonic adaptation: we adapt to things that are external to us like wealth and fame and so on. They don’t provide sustainable happiness. On top of hedonic adaptation there are some other reasons why success might actually make you unhappy rather than happy and I want to dwell on those topics today.
Happiness is more reliable determinant of success than the other way. The basic idea is that if you are happier you tend to be healthier and you are more energetic; you are not self-centred and more collegial in getting things done better as a team. When you are happier you are more creative, some would ask what about Salvador Dali or David Ostrowski who used to be unhappy. Well, it is not to say that unhappy people are not creative but to say that you are more creative if you are happier and there are physiological reasons for this. There is a lot of research on this and I have some work myself in the area of happiness and objectivity. If you are objective, you are less likely to be diverted or distracted by peripheral issues and more likely to focus on the central aspects of the issue. So, if you combine all this, you may say that happier people make more money and they are more successful. So, the happiest 20% on average earn about 32% more money than the least happy.
A big message that emerges from this is that we worry a lot of what kind of degree our children should get, what college they should go and of course we want them to be happy. But we actually end up focussing more on effort and energy on sending them to the right college, asking them to pursue a degree when, in fact, if we rechannel that energy to give them the fundamentals of leading a happy and fulfilling life, we would actually be doing more for them in even conventional success, wealth and fame. We would actually put them on a path that will more reliably lead them towards the conventional yardsticks of success.
I would talk about the three big reasons why the yards-sticks of success tend to lower our happiness levels. I have already talked about why happiness promotes success: it gives you better health, makes you more collegial, and creative. This direction of causality, happiness leading to success is much more reliable than the reverse direction of causality. So, why might success undermine happiness?
The first reason is that if you are successful, the chances are high that the success will go to your head and you will get egoistical, and you are going to start chasing superiority. There are many sayings in English that actually suggest that. Such as, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; the idea is that if you get success then it feeds your ego and makes you more narcissistic and self-centred. There are many reasons why success makes you narcissistic and one of those has to do with how the external world starts treating you once you become successful. You become really famous, rich or powerful, and the external world starts treating you differently which starts making your ego a little bit bigger We have studies in which we have participants study a joke and rate its funniness. We give a relatively average joke and ask them to rate the funniness; in one condition we tell them that the author of the joke is a janitor in the same company. We want to see if a change in authorship of the joke has an effect on how the joke is rated and indeed that is what we find, that if the author of the joke is a CEO or in general a leader in status in fame or something then that same joke is perceived to be funnier than if the author is a janitor.
We have done parallel studies across contexts not just in terms of funniness but in terms of suggestions made to you and the suggestions would come from somebody who is higher up to lower down and how seriously you would take the suggestion etc.
This translates into – you get some information and if the source to the information is a powerful source then that is no longer a mere suggestion, it is perceived more like an order and it also means that if you are the more powerful person then people are going to find you more charismatic, people are going to perceive a halo around you.
If that keeps happening to you over time then that is going to feed your ego and you are going to think of yourself as better than others and will start chasing the superiority. It turns out, that chasing superiority is not good for happiness. One of the many reasons is that you also start attracting people who are superiority-seeking around you, you tend to cut corners and step on people’s toes a little bit more, you are more self-centred which other people don’t like and hedonic adaptation can accelerate and magnify the extent to which you become prone to hedonic adaptation. The yardsticks of superiority tend to be extrinsic. You might be good at what you do for a job but it is difficult for people to see how you are at doing your job unless it is like playing cricket or running.
People assess your job by the extrinsic yardsticks you have, how high up are you in hierarchy and so on and once you start tethering your happiness to the things that are extrinsic, you are setting up yourself for a roller-coaster ride. When things go well you may pat yourself on the back and feel proud but sooner or later you are going to fail and when that happens you are going to feel miserable so that is not good for your happiness. So, reason number one is that when you are successful, it will start feeding your ego and you might start chasing superiority which is not good.
In the happiness research, the one thing that emerges from this positive psychology field is that relationships for human beings are super important in being happy. One study looked at the top 10% happiest people and these people had variety of qualities, they were healthier, married rather than not married, extrovert, lived in small towns rather than the city but there was one characteristic which every person had which was that every person had one relationship that they could really count on. They had a shared sense of intimacy with at least one person and 80% of these people shared a sense of intimacy with a friend rather than their spouse and that, too, a same gender friend.
There is a solid foundation of trust and that is the quality of this intimacy. If you aspire to belong to the happiest people in the world then having a sense of intimacy is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity. That is how important relationships are. I am sure you have seen the Ted Talk by Robert Waldinger on brands where they call the same set of people, and they look at who tended to be happier, or less stressed. What they found was that happier people tended to be people with a great social life. You can have physical ailments but if you have good social relationships to lean on, then you are likely to be happier and might also live longer. It turns out that wealth can come in the way of social relationships.
The study shows that the wealthier you are, the meaner you are and meaner people end up being wealthier. Even temporary wealthiness inside a lab; for example, you are brought into a lab and asked to play a game of Monopoly. One participant ends up becoming richer and they find that the richer you are the meaner you become. So, there is a bowl of pretzel right between the participants and the richer you are, the more likely you are to grab it on your side and start eating more and make derogatory comments even though it is temporary and fake.
Other research talking about screen saver money. So, the screen saver comes up and some of the participants are exposed to symbols of wealth like 100 dollar bills as screen savers and others are exposed to more neutral stimuli like clouds and nature and then they are asked to go to another room in which they have to pull up a chair and they have to sit next to another participant. There is going to be a group activity there between the two and what they observe is how close or how far is this participant, either to 100 dollar bill or to nature, how close do they sit to the other participant and what they found is that if exposed to money, you sit further. So, when we get into money, the same goes if you used to fly economy and then go to business, then you look down to those in economy. So, the more the money, the meaner you become. That is very bad for your happiness because relationships are super critical for your wellbeing.
The third is overly control-seeking. It turns out that if you are more successful then you tend to seek more control over other people and outcomes. This also has to do with how the external world treats you. Now the fact that you are most successful means that other people have given you more resources, control and that is presumably because they have got to know that you are good in handling resources. That is why you are given access to the resources. The message in there is that you go and control those things but you take that as a signal and become more control-seeking and seek more control over other people and over resources. And if you are successful, one of the characteristics is that why don’t people listen? If they listen it can make them happier and that would allow us to seek freedom to have more control over people. This is true even in personal relationships. You have someone successful, they come home, and they try and start controlling their spouses or pets. On the face it may seem like a good thing that you are happier but because people don’t like control, we like ‘not being controlled’. So, if you are so powerful that they can’t do anything about it then they can be passive aggressive. But if they do have, then they can be overly aggressive and that is how psychology reacts.
I am sure that many of you would have heard that, ‘life is like Donald Trump’s head, very difficult to control’. So, if you find that things are turning exactly the way you want them to, you are not going to be happy. You are going to be miserable. There are other reasons too why control seeking will not lead to happiness, you will tend to be more persuasive rather than harmonious, you will have to sacrifice your health, relations and also tend to cut corners and take risks that in the long run will back fire.
So, how to avoid this health sabotage? When you are successful you don’t let it lower your happiness levels. Instead of chasing superiority, you can focus on the flow states that led you to be successful in the first place: that can be an antidote to chasing superiority. The single biggest determinant of success in any field is hard work, smart work. So, the more you practice, the more deliberately you practice. It is not just mere domain, it is what areas you identify to improve yourself and overcome them. So, you enjoy the process of doing something rather than the outcome, so, that is flow states.
The antidote to de-prioritizing relationships is re-prioritizing them, and the happiest people tend to recognise that you can’t do everything. As Henry Ford said, if you have more than three priorities in your life, you don’t have any priorities in life. So, prioritize relationships. You really need to block the time that nurtures your relations. Have the space when you have some alone time, spend it in some meaningful way. In our house, in the dining area we have a white board where every week, everyone has to write an activity not more than three hours long that all of us have to do enthusiastically, with 100% involvement. It can be anything, hiking, movie, scrabble and so on. With this we get to know each other’s tastes, interests and moods. It turns out that as human beings we are not only capable of deriving satisfaction or being close to friends and family but even to strangers or pets/strays.
The antidote for being overly control seeking is to seek internal control, over your mind, own thoughts and feelings. The basic idea is that our desire to control is not going to go, it is going to go one way or the other, the calmer you are the less external control you seek. The tools and techniques to achieve that are vast. So, we tend to think success leads to happiness when in fact it is the reverse. But if you watch out for the antidotes as you become successful, you can potentially have a win-win situation where not only you are successful but are on a higher level of happiness.
ROTARIANS ASK
Don’t you think expectations play an important role here?
Yes, we tend to expect more when good things happen to us and less when bad things happen to us, that is part of the adaptation, it is the reaction to non-fulfilment of the expectation. I think that if you are successful, even control of the discrepancies of expectations, poor or rich, it is going to hurt but if you are rich and successful, you are going to start to blame other people for that discrepancy or seek control over it. And that is where the control-seeking aspect comes.
How do you protect yourself when you are vulnerable from people who are dominant over you?
I think you have got to be assertive, learn to say no or not to say yes when you want to say no. If it is somebody not very important to you, you can just walk away from the relationship if you have the courage to do this, but you have to learn being assertive. Assertive is not aggressive.
