Facts About Happiness That May Surprise You

Today’s Friday Fun Fact…

At the end of this month, I will be speaking in Copenhagen at a Happiness at Work Conference.  This got me thinking about what it is that makes people truly joyous.

Business Insider gathered some research on this topic and amassed 36 Scientific Facts about happiness, some that may come as a surprise.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• You have to earn 2.5x as much money to be as happy working for someone else as you would be working for yourself:  Perhaps that is why Forbes reported that approximately 543,000 new U.S. businesses are started every month. This is one of the reasons I work for myself. If I don’t like my boss, I only have me to blame!
• Greater rewards mean less motivation and poorer performance:  “Researchers have found that people are sometimes happier and more effective when they do a task for no money at all than when they receive a small payment. If someone offers a good Samaritan $5 for helping with a flat tire, then he starts thinking about the actual market rate for tire-changing, so a fiver is now insufficient—when a minute ago, he’d have been perfectly content with $0.” I have written about this extensively in the past. See my article, I Won’t Work for Money.
• Happy people are lucky:  Lucky people tend to focus on the positive side of their ill fortune. They imagine how things could have been worse.  For example, an individual arrived to an interview with his leg in a cast and mentioned that he had fallen down a flight of stairs. When asked whether he still felt lucky, he cheerfully explained that he felt luckier than before as he could have broken his neck. This is absolutely how I live, maybe sometime to a fault. I do operate from the belief that everything happens for a reason – I learned this from my father.
• Happiness is not a destination:  I will be happy when I’m married, have more money, or move to a new location. This is what we tell ourselves.  But the reality is that while these things can contribute to happiness, it is not as much as you may think.  According to Web MD, achieving these milestones account for only about 10% of your whole happiness picture. “Lasting happiness has more to do with how you behave and think — things you control — than with many of life’s circumstances.” This is the essence of my Goal-Free Living book.

Other studies show that people with more money are happy. But what is intriguing is that the researchers found that money did not cause happiness.  Happiness was the creator of wealth.

What other things make you happy?

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Are Your Goals Negatively Impacting Your Relationships?

Today’s Friday Fun Fact…

Last week I briefly touched upon my perspective on goal setting. While they have been universally considered a magic bullet for success both personally and professionally, goals are not without their downsides.

Interestingly, the way in which you frame your goals can have a significant impact on your relationships.

This, according to the authors of a paper published in the Current Directions in Psychological Science that focused on whether people are open and straightforward when working with others.

The study noted that people who establish goals to improve themselves (“self-improvement goals”), like getting better grades, increasing sales numbers or nailing a perfect “10”, tend to be more cooperative in nature.

Whereas people who set goals that will enable them to perform better than others (“performance goals”) such as becoming Valedictorian or completing a task more quickly than a fellow co-worker, have more of a tendency to be “deceitful and less likely to share information with coworkers. The reason for this is fairly obvious – when you want to outperform others, it doesn’t make sense to be honest about information.”

The study suggests that those with self-improvement goals on the other hand tend to be quite open. “If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people…(however) they’re not really altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the ends of self-improvement.”

Other research shows that those with self-improvement goals are also more open to hearing different perspectives, while those with performance goals “would rather just say, ‘I’m just right and you are wrong.’”

According to the authors, both types of goal setting can be effective. However, their findings suggest that helping individuals frame their goals to focus on self-improvement instead of performance may foster a better overall team environment.

From my perspective, performance goals can be extremely useful for creating a powerful team when the objective is to be better than external competition.

Regardless, a good balance of goals creates a high-performance environment that also fosters collaboration. The key, as I have discussed before, is to not hyper-focus on the goal to the point where you miss the bigger picture and bigger opportunities.

P.S. For more on my goal-setting perspective, read Goal-Free Living.

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To Set Goals or Not Set Goals, That is the Question

Today’s Friday Fun Fact…

My Monday Morning Movie discussed some concepts from my book, Goal-Free Living.

I have long questioned the practice of goal setting.  My book (published in 2006) challenged traditional thinking about goal setting and discusses how we can not only succeed in business (and life) but to do so while achieving great happiness and satisfaction.

Due to its prevalence in business, this goal-free concept is often met with resistance.  But apparently there are others that have challenged this conventional wisdom as well.

In a Harvard Business School working paper, the authors of Goals Gone Wild reviewed a number of studies that indicate that the ”beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored.”  They state that the side-effects that goal-setting can have include a “narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. “

One such study is highlighted in a recent New York Times article:

Three groups of participants were asked to create as many words as possible using random letters – similar to the game, Boggle.  Two groups were given a specific goal to formulate at least 9 words.  One of the two teams was offered a financial incentive for hitting this goal, the other was not.  The third group of participants was simply told to do their best.

At the completion, the participants turned in only the answer sheets stating how many words they had created and had disposed of their worksheets.  “But the academic researchers running the experiment had a code to match the worksheets with the answer sheets and discovered that both groups that had been given a goal of creating a certain number of words — whether or not money was involved — cheated 8 to 13 percent of the time. Those in the third group rarely did.”

To set goals or not to set goals.  The debate continues.

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Meander With Purpose (transcript)

Here is the transcription for my Monday Morning Movie…

Back in 2003, I took a cross country trip that would forever change my life. On June 5th of that year I hopped into my car, and I drove 11,000 miles over the next 90 days without any plans at all.

It was totally unscripted. I had no idea where I was going, I had no idea where I was going to stay, and I had no idea who I was going to meet. I was doing this to meet some interesting people while working on my next book. I had no idea even what the book was going to be about. I knew it would be a little bit about creativity. But I wasn’t sure what the main theme would be.

After driving across the country and interviewing 150 really interesting, creative people, I determined that the common thread between the people who fascinated me the most, where that they were what I would call, ‘goal-free.’ That is, they didn’t have goals. They didn’t relate to their goals the way most people relate to them.

I want to just talk about a couple of key concepts that I learned that summer, when I met all these people, and how I’ve tried to incorporate them into my life.

One of the key principles I learned, was what I call, “use a compass, not a map.” Essentially what that means is, with most people, what we do is we have a specific destination of where we’re going, and then we set our plans, and we go forth and try to hit that destination. With Goal-Free Living, instead you meander with purpose. Instead of having a specific destination, you have a sense of direction that you want to take things, but then you meander with purpose, allowing things to unfold naturally. The way they’re supposed to unfold. Learn as you explore. Learn as you do.

I found this to be an incredible powerful way to live. And it’s an incredible powerful way to innovate. Because the reality is, we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what the world has in store for us when it comes to our personal lives. We don’t know what we’re inspired by, what we’re excited about, what we’re most interested in. Because the reality is we only know a very small percentage of what we could possibly do.

So by meandering with purpose, we allow things to unfold, and allow us to discover in the moment what actually works for us.

In business, this is important, because we know that most innovations fail. The reason why they fail, the number one reason, according to CEO’s, is that they failed to meet customer needs.

If you think that sitting in a back room and thinking about problems and studying things from the laboratory is going to give you any sense of what the real world wants, well, you’re fooling yourself. Meander with purpose. Sense of direction. And then explore. Meander. Learn as you do. This to me is an incredibly powerful concept for being able to live a powerful life and to innovate.

As part of that, one of the things I find very useful is the last tip in my Goal-Free Living book, which is called “remain detached.” And remaining detached doesn’t mean being ambivalent or not caring, but it actually means not being so attached to the outcome. I personally found this to be a really difficult concept. I know some people who might be more enlightened that I am could somehow not want what they want. I couldn’t do this.

I got this great advice from someone. He said, “If you want to detach yourself from the outcome, you have to attach yourself to something of a higher purpose.” Something that is in the moment, the present moment.

Because what we tend to attach ourselves to are things in the future. If I’m trying to sell someone something, I’m attached to a future outcome. The sale. As opposed to listening and serving that customer.

If I’m trying to get a job, instead of trying to convince them I’m the right person for the job, maybe I need to just sit there and listen. Maybe I need to be a better listener. Maybe I need to find out, are they the right company for me? We don’t do a great job of listening. We don’t do a great job of being in the present moment, because we’re so focused on what we want.

These two concepts together: “use a compass not a map,” which is about meandering with purpose; and “remaining detached,” which means you attach yourself to something of a higher purpose in the present moment.

I’ve found for myself and for my business, these are two very simple, yet powerful concepts that can change the way I work. Change my relationship to happiness. And it also changes my level of success. Because I’m better at listening. And better at being in the present moment and understanding what’s needed.

This is Steve Shapiro, I look forward to seeing you soon.

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Meander with Purpose

Today’s Monday Morning Movie…

Back in 2003 I drove across the country with no plans and no agenda. It turned out to be a life changing experience.

After that trip, I wrote Goal-Free Living.

In this video I discuss two concepts from the book: “Use a Compass, Not a Map” and “Remain Detached.”

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