by Jim McCarthy
You might have a meaningful conversation with a loved one or close friend as you fill in this matrix together. There are no right or wrong answers, of course. But you can discuss with the other person why they would find more or less pleasure or purpose in an activity.
Feeling Awe
Marveling at nature is also one of those “best things in life.” I don’t even consider myself very outdoorsy, but seeing the Iguazu Falls at the intersection of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had — feeling the roar of hundreds of waterfalls, 20 to 30 stories high, gushing through the jungle and blasting out warm mist. I was engulfed in the enormity of our planet’s glory.
Let’s look more closely at “awe.”
Nature’s magnificence literally inspires awe. University of California, Berkeley Psychology Professor Dacher Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”
This can come from nature, art, and individual feats or acts of great skill or virtue.8 Walking in a redwood forest can inspire awe. So can seeing Michelangelo’s “David.” Or witnessing the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry making a ridiculously long three-point shot in an NBA game. (Especially if they’re beating Cleveland.)
Keltner writes that “the science of awe suggests that opportunities for awe surround us, and their benefits are profound.” He cites research showing that awe increases cooperation and sacrifice for others, reduces the narcissistic instinct, increases kindness towards others, and may even boost your immune system. Perhaps best of all, one study found that people can experience awe through simply being mindful of their daily experiences.9
We explore this further in Chapters Twelve and Fourteen on Meditation and Gratitude later in this book.
Experiencing “Flow”
Awe fits nicely into the “High Pleasure and High Purpose” quadrant.
That same quadrant contains a similar but different experience, explained in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Claremont Graduate University Psychology Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (In case you’re wondering, his name is pronounced “Me high? Cheeks send me high!”) He describes “flow” as “the state in which you are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”10 You concentrate deeply, forget everything else, and lose track of yourself and time.11 In turn, you become extremely creative and effective at achieving whatever your goal may be 12 — with your performance simply “flowing” out of you.
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi concludes, “When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve, because … even the usually boring routines of work become purposeful and enjoyable.”13
Among the many possibilities, a person can experience flow while:
•working intensely on an important but fascinating marketing plan
•preparing for a major presentation
•coding software to develop a mobile phone app
•cooking in a restaurant kitchen at 8:00 p.m. on a busy Saturday night
•playing drums in a jam session in a Paris jazz club
•learning how to surf in Costa Rica
•having a real conversation in German for the first time after a few beers (The beers were, um, flowing …)
How do you get into a flow state? Dr. Csikszentmihalyi explains that flow is the optimal combination of the challenge and your skill: “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”14 If your skills are low and the challenge is low (such as watching TV all day), then you’ll feel apathy. If your skills are low and the challenge is high, then you’ll feel anxiety and most likely give up on the task. If your skills are high but the challenge is low, then you’ll feel bored. But if your skills and the challenge are commensurate, then you are in the “flow channel,” which can lead to ecstasy. (I’ll leave it up to you to draw another 2x2 matrix for this.)
Best of all, as you increase your skills, you can increase the challenge, so that you return again and again to the flow channel. You love what you’re doing, so you get better at it. You become great at something, so you love it more.15
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi advises that, to be happy, you should spend as much of your life as you can in the state of flow. Fitting his theory into my Happiness Matrix, the ecstasy of flow is intrinsically pleasurable. The purpose comes from being challenged while still seeing the opportunity to get better and better. As he states, “The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”16
As psychologist Gilbert Brim has said, “One of the important sources of human happiness is working on tasks at a suitable level of difficulty, neither too hard nor too easy.”17
It turns out that people who work “in flow” generally live longer. Interviewed for the Atlantic, Howard S. Friedman, co-author of The Longevity Project, said, “Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive are exactly what those heading to a long life tend to do. The long-lived didn’t shy away from hard work; the exact opposite seemed true.” He added, “On the other hand, if you hate your co-workers and have many job demands but inadequate resources to accomplish anything worthwhile, then it is time to look for new employment.”18
Writing Activity 17:
When have you ever experienced “flow”? What would it take for you to spend more of your time in a flow state?
In discussing this question with another, you might ask them, “When have you seen me at my happiest?” or, “What sorts of things do you think I’m absolutely great at?” It’s sometimes helpful to get this outside perspective. We also discuss this in the section, “Think Long Term So You Have No Regrets.”
Chapter Six:
How Much of Your Happiness Do You Really Control?
I don’t want to give you the impression that adopting these techniques — life-changing though they may be — will lead you to complete, uncomplicated happiness. It’s totally normal to be sad, frustrated, or disappointed from time to time. That’s part of living as a human being. Overall, however, happiness is a skill you can develop.
But just how much of your happiness is within your control, anyway?
How much is beyond your control?
Sonja Lyubomirsky addresses this question in The How of Happiness. She and her fellow researchers write that “an astounding 50 percent of the differences among people’s happiness levels can be accounted for by their genetically determined set points. This discovery comes from the growing research done with identical and fraternal twins that suggests that each of us is born with a particular happiness set point that originates from our biological mother or father or both, a baseline of potential for happiness to which we are bound to return, even after major setbacks or triumphs.”1
Your happiness set point is like an anchor that doesn’t let your boat stray too far. Harvard Psychology Professor Daniel Gilbert reinforces this finding, saying to The New York Times, “Things that happen to you or that you buy or own — as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you’re wrong by a certain amount. You’re overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that’s true of positive and negative events.”2
In Dr. Lyubomirsky’s research, she found that in addition to 50 percent of your happiness coming from your genetic set point, just 10 percent was attributed to “circumstances” such as “whether we are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or plain, married or divorced, etc.”3
The final part — the part that you control entirely — she calls “Intentional Activity.” She writes that “40 percent is that part of our happiness that [is] in our power to change through how we act and how we think, that portion representing the potential for increased lasting happiness that resides in all of us.”4
How we act.
How we think.
How you act.
How you think.
This controls 40 percent of your happiness. It may not be 100 percent, but it’s still the part you do control. It’s how you play the hand you were dealt in the card game of life.
So how do you control your happiness, exactly?
That’s the topic for the rest of this book!
PART THREE
Presence
Chapter Seven:
Serenity Prayer
Have you heard of the Serenity Prayer?
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.1
This prayer was originally formulated in the 1930s by Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Christian theologian who had graduated from Yale’s divinity school. Later, it gained wide use by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step recovery programs and has given solace and hope to many millions of people around the world.2
I first read a version of the Serenity Prayer in Kurt Vonnegut’s amazing novel Slaughterhouse Five, which deals with his witnessing of the Allies’ firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Over time, as I started to recite my daily affirmations (see Chapter Thirteen), I chose to use a nonreligious version:
May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
But it was only years later, after I had created my Happiness Framework, that I reviewed the original, full text, which I present below.
God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace.
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You [God] will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.
—Reinhold Niebuhr3
If you happen to be a Christian, then you might be thrilled with the full version. But the secular version of the first half should work well for you, whether you’re an atheist or deeply religious or spiritual. (Remember, I have no religious agenda here at all.) I’ve always found the Serenity Prayer very powerful, and now I realize that it supports my Pleasure and Purpose Happiness Framework. In fact, Niebuhr literally mentions “happy”!
In the feedback form from one of my workshops, one participant wrote, “the Serenity Prayer is passé. Can’t you find something more current?”
I can understand this feeling about any well-worn saying. Yet for me it has staying power. It might be old. But so is Shakespeare. And the Quran. And the Bhagavad Gita. I really don’t care how new or old it is, as long as it works well for me. I’ve recited the Serenity Prayer to myself every day for decades. I’ve found its wisdom not just comforting, but also practical and emboldening. Its message has given me courage to press onward when I failed to get jobs I wanted, was fired from work, got cancer, went through a tough divorce, or lost a lot of money through bad investments. It’s helped me deal with something as small as the frustration of missing an airline flight, and with something as enormous as the 9/11 attacks.
A friend of mine who was experiencing anxiety attacks sought mental health treatment through Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care plans in the U.S. What did I see, printed at the top of the course materials, on how to reduce stress? The Serenity Prayer!
The Serenity Prayer is a great framework for the lessons in the rest of this book. It speaks to living fully, deeply, and richly in the present moment. Next, let’s explore various ways to live with more presence.
Chapter Eight:
Beware the Comparing Mind
“CAMDEN, ME—Longtime acquaintances confirmed to reporters this week that local man Michael Husmer, an unambitious 29-year-old loser who leads an enjoyable and fulfilling life, still lives in his hometown and has no desire to leave.” The article goes on to mock this content person, because he is “perfectly comfortable being a nobody for the rest of his life.”1
I love this satire from The Onion, because it highlights how some people compare themselves to others and look down on those who might be totally happy, but not very ambitious.
On the other hand, many people compare themselves to very “successful” people. Do you compare yourself to Mark Zuckerberg, Michelle Obama, or Steve Jobs? Does doing so bring you happiness?
Most people compare themselves to others. All the time. It’s totally ingrained in how we go through life. Buddhist teachers such as Jack Kornfield call this “the Comparing Mind.” This is very similar to the American saying, “keeping up with the Joneses” — making sure that our house, car, education, career, power, image, smartphone, clothes, vacations, food, music, spouse, golf clubs, pets, children, cocktails, health, and handbags are at least as good as those of our neighbors. And in übercompetitive Silicon Valley, the Comparing Mind is everywhere.
You may feel frustrated when you look around and it seems like everyone else is “doing better” than you are — however you might define that. But research indicates that even comparing yourself to others who are “doing worse” than you can have negative effects. Psychologists Robert Emmons from the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough from the University of Miami have studied the benefits of gratitude. In a discussion of research on the subject, they say: “Because of its potential for eliciting pride and/or envy … we cannot recommend downward social comparison [comparing to those apparently less fortunate than you] as a general strategy for inducing feelings of gratitude when more direct routes are available. Downward social comparisons have also been shown to have negative implications for the self and to lead to negative affect.”2
People tend to compare on things an outsider can easily observe. About 95 percent of all postings on Facebook address the sorts of things we love to compare!
But in a Time magazine poll, 60 percent of respondents said they do not feel better about themselves after spending time on social media.3 A 2017 poll of teens and young adults in the U.K. gave negative marks to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram for their impact on sleep quality, bullying, body image, and “fear of missing out,” or FOMO. All of the social media outlets except YouTube increased depression and anxiety.4
No surprise here — your Facebook friends most likely share their lives’ highlights, not the lowlights. For example, after my separation, when I was newly single, I was very careful not to post anything on Facebook at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night, lest people realize that I was lonely at home at that time. Some time later, however, I made sure that all my Facebook friends saw when I was dancing the samba in Rio de Janeiro.
Why Don’t Comparisons Bring Happiness?
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a great recipe for unhappiness, no matter how hard you try to manage your “personal brand” to show off your fun life. It’s not that trying to keep up is ethically or morally wrong — it just
won’t bring you happiness. If you choose to play the comparison game, you’re choosing a game that you will always lose, as long as you play it long enough — which most of us do.
You will keep “raising the bar” for your comparison group. As USC economist Richard A. Easterlin explains, “When people think about the effect of having more money, they implicitly assume that their own income increases while everyone else’s stays the same, and hence conclude that they’ll be happier. What actually happens, of course, is that when their own income increases, so too does that of everyone else.”5
The comparisons you’re making are probably not even fair to yourself. I’m guilty of this as well — I don’t compare myself to my classmates from high school in Nebraska or college in Iowa. Or even the people I studied with at business school. No, I tend to compare myself to some of the most successful people who’ve ever attended Stanford’s business school. (Though to be really fair to myself, I am satisfied with my career.) Yes, amazingly successful businesspeople do exist, and I know seven billionaires personally, but it’s silly for me to feel inadequate because I have not created a global company worth billions.
It’s hard to compare on the criteria that really matter. If you’re going to compare yourself to someone else, at least compare on matters such as:
Is this person a “good human being”?
Are they happy?
Are they a loving spouse/parent/sibling/son or daughter?
Are they ethical in their business practices?
Is the world a better place because they are here?