Do you want to be more successful? This course was designed to help you define what success means to you, and to develop a plan for achieving it. Wharton Professor G. Richard Shell, an award-winning author and the creator of the popular Wharton School course on the meaning of success, created this course to help you answer the questions that arise when you consider how best to use your life. Drawing on his decades of research and mentoring, Shell offers personalized assessments to help you probe your past, imagine your future, and measure your strengths. He then combines these with the latest scientific insights on everything from self-confidence and happiness to relationships and careers. Throughout, he shares inspiring examples of people who found what they were meant to do by embracing their own true measure of success. Get ready for the journey of a lifetime—one that will help you reevaluate your future and envision success on your own terms. Students and executives say that Richard Shell’s courses and executive training programs have changed their lives. Let this course change yours.
Does Success Equal Happiness?
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Из курса от партнера University of Pennsylvania
Success
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University of Pennsylvania
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Курс 1 из 4 — Specialization Achieving Personal and Professional Success
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Week 3: Diving Deeper: What Research Tells Us About Achievement and Happiness
This module was created to give you an overview of the science of success so that you can use that knowledge to begin exploring the relationship between success and happiness. You'll learn the four traps of achievement, as well as the four reasons to worry about achievement-based success. Finally, you'll examine the question of whether or not success equals happiness. By the end of this module you'll be able to differentiate between success that is based on achievements, which can be unsatisfying, and success based on other metrics, that can bring deep satisfaction to your life.
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Richard ShellProfessor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management
The Wharton School
So, with the traps that I've just outlined for what can happen if you
put your chips on the achievement number on the Wheel of Fortune.
I want to conclude by giving you some positive advice,
because there's certainly are things well worth achieving.
I think you just have to reframe and reset what it is you're shooting for.
And you'll find it much more sustainable when you're going for
a worthy kind of achievement.
So for example, instead of untold wealth, seek financial security.
Look for the amount of wealth that will give security to your family,
to yourself, so that you can lead a fulfilling life.
Instead of fame, seek respect.
Seek people who know you well enough and who real judges of whether
you're excellent at what you do and can help you get better at it.
Basically, fame is being known by a lot of people who have very little knowledge of
what you are and who you are.
Respect comes from an inner circle that have reasons to judge
you in a positive way.
And so, keeping your goal on the search for
respect is more likely to lead you in a better direction.
Instead of status, worry about finding roles in the lives of others that
gives you a chance to contribute to them.
It could be the role of father, it could be the role of mother,
it could be the role of mentor.
Could be the roll of leader but
instead of getting fixated on a title, Chief Financial Officer.
Ask yourself, what are the actual roles that you're playing in the lives of
the people around you in the organization and tend to maximize on those roles
that will focus you on the contributions you're making.
And in these days is really tempting one instead of a vast social
network that follows you in Twitter or is the number of people
that you have in your Facebook page very relatively shallow
relationships base on very little, very episodic information.
Seek more true friends, friends who you can see, touch, know, feel, and
who can affect you and you can affect them, and you're part of their lives.
And at the end of the day, maybe some of those will turn into the friends in virtue
we've talked about that Aristotle thought so much of.
So, not wealth, financial security.
Not fame and recognition but rather respect.
Not status, but the worthy roles you plays in the lives of others.
And not shallow and numerous relationships but deeper and fewer true friends.
So, if we're going to leave achievement behind for a moment and
anchor on the other side of success, the inner life.
Let's just see whether when you really begin to think about happiness,
that's really got all the answers in it, or
if that turns out to be a little complicated as well.
And I'm trying to complicate this not to make your life difficult,
I'm trying to complicate it because if you have the wrong understanding of what
happiness is or what achievement means.
Then you'll chase the wrong goal and
you'll end up being unsatisfied by the kind of success that you've achieved.
So, we're looking here for the real deal, the success that feels deeply satisfiying.
Okay, so what about happiness?
Well again, I've been privilege to be here at the University of Pennsylvania.
I've been in relationship and interaction with our positive psychology center.
They are a disciplined social scientist who study happiness
all over the world [COUGH] and have programs and
projects that they are funded to measure happiness in many different ways.
What they've concluded is that
there's more than one kind of happiness and that it's funny.
The Inuit people who are the native people of Alaska live a life
that's surrounded by cold weather and they have many, many names for
what we call ice because in their world there are many different kinds of ice.
And they mean different things and
they have different roles in the lives of the Inuit people.
In the United States, in Western Europe,
in Western countries, we make a lot of this word happiness,
it's in the Declaration of Independence that we're supposed to pursue happiness.
But this one word can often be very confusing, and people think they're
chasing one thing and they don't get it, they think there is something wrong.
So, I think it's important to at least think about
three different kinds of happiness and the research helps us think about this.
If you want to read some more about these and some of these forms of happiness.
Daniel Kahneman, a Noble Prize winning psychologist from Princeton has
a wonderful book called, Thinking Fast and Slow, has a chapter or
two on happiness that distills a lot of this research into
a pretty efficient capsule but we're going to talk about it a little bit here.
So, the first kind of happiness that most people talk about
when they think about the word is what I call momentary happiness.
Now, momentary happiness is an emotion, it's a mood,
it's a moment that comes and where you having a positive feeling.
A good example might be you are at the beach, it's been a pretty hot day,
you go to the boardwalk, there's a soft serve ice cream vendor there.
They have your favorite flavor, you get into the shade, you've ordered
your soft serve ice cream, it's dipped in whatever it is that you love,
as a little covering chocolate or strawberries or something.
And you have that first bite of that ice cream cone and
it just tastes wonderful, that's momentary happiness.
To be the same thing if you're a fan of drinking beer and
it's the same kind of day and they have the favorite beer that you'd like and
you take that first sip of whatever the drink is that you find most enjoyable and
it's just fills you with these feeling of happiness.
So, momentary happiness is great I think the more
it you have, the better your days are but
there's some problems with momentary happiness as a measure of success in life.
The research shows that there are genetic set points that people have,
they go into their emotional make-ups and some people are kind of positive people
and some people are less positive and some people are kind of negative people.
And your mood states swings on a given day or during a given period of time sort of
above that genetic set point when you take that first bite of the ice cream cone.
But then somewhere little later, dips below that set point as you begin feeling
really hot and sweaty on the beach and you wish that the sun weren't so bright, and
now you're not in such a happy mood state.
Maybe somebody comes along, a dog comes along, and
puts sand in your drink on the beach.
Now you're really kind of upset and angry with somebody, so
your genetic set point just tells you, whoops, going down here.
But it is a range, and chances are you're not going to have too many moments when
you're above the highest point of that range, you're not going to have too
many moments when you're below the low point of that range.
And my range is different than yours, my best day,
may be just in the average domain for your day, and you get
to be a lot happier than me because your genetic set point is different.
So if happiness of this kind, this sort of aggregate number of mood states is
set by our genes, it seems sort of unfair to say that you're more successful
than me because you have more positive mood states than I do.
Because you're endowed with a different set of genes than I was.
So there's the problem of kind of
no free will when it comes to how many happiness moments you get.
And it seems like success ought to have something to do with choices we make.
And there are a lot of pretty intelligent people who have thought about
the question of happiness and kind of come to the conclusion that these positive
momentary mood states really don't rise to the level of kind of nobility or
purpose that you would want in a theory of success.
Albert Einstein once said that a theory of success,
it's built on momentary mood states,
was more like the happiness of a cow than something that humans ought to endorse.
Because if you kind of go by a farm and look out at a herd of cattle,
they're happily gracing out there, they're in the sun, they're are well-watered,
they're well-fed, everything is good, well, you have a pretty happy cow.
But would you really say that that's a successful life that would
be something you would be satisfied with at the end of your days?
I'm not sure.
So positive mood states, good, but
this is the only form of happiness that you might call success, maybe not.
So second kind of happiness, and this again is research based.
By the way,
the way they measure momentary happiness is with little beepers they put on people.
They'll put a little beeper like a cell phone or
a clip, and you walk around during the day, and the experimenters beep you, and
at the moment they beep you, you have to take off the little device, and
put how you feel, excellent, bad, terrible.
And you just put the moment when you feel it, and
at the end of a week, they measure how many positive moments you have.
And that's how they decide whether you're happier or not.
So that's the momentary happiness, now we go to the second one.
And I call this overall happiness.
And overall happiness is not an emotion, it's a thought.
It's an evaluation.
It's a critique.
And you may reach a point, either a progression in part of your life
or an anticipation of another part of your life, and look back.
If you're looking backwards at, say, your college experience, and someone asks you,
were you happy in college?
And you don't know whether you can really add up all the positive mood states.
But for some reason you feel like yeah, important things happened, I met my spouse
in college, I graduated, and so yeah, overall I was happy in college.
But actually if you go back and
you had that beeper all the way through college, you would find,
as often as not, that you were much more miserable in college than you remember.
And you only really remember the peak, the day you met your spouse-to-be,
and the ending, which was the graduation ceremony, when your family came and
everybody applauded you, and it was a great moment, you got a prize.
And all the rest of it, that whole miserable sophomore year,
all the hangovers and other disasters that occurred that made you miserable,
pretty much fade out of view and just disappear into the past.
So overall happiness is a moment
in time when you evaluate, but not always accurate.
In fact, the research seems to show that if you give someone a cookie or
some other thing that they like, and
they put them in a positive momentary mood state, their memories of the past
might actually be colored by the fact that they're in a good mood.
And they'll rate their overall happiness higher, and if you put them in a negative
mood state, their memories will cast back and select out more negative things,
and their overall happiness might be a little bit lower.
So it's not that hard to manipulate.
So we had the problem of selected memory.
We had the problem of easy manipulation.
And there's always a fundamental problem with any evaluation,
and that is it's always relative to some baseline expectation.
So if you thought college was going to be miserable and it turned out to be okay,
that's going to give you a feeling that you're happy.
If you thought college was going to be wonderful and it turned out to be okay,
then you're going to evaluate it more negatively.
So your overall experience is going to be cast in a frame,
manipulatable by what your expectations were.
And so again, it's just a cognitive phenomenon, almost a paradox,
that we can think about the past and even the future and our anticipation,
differently, depending on what our moods are, what our evaluative criteria are,
and that's all very interesting as a matter of sort of cognitive psychology.
My challenge to you is, is this really the way you want to measure success?
Is it just going to be all about some moment in time when you say my overall
happiness was x at time past, or I anticipate it to be y in time future?
And it seems like that's a pretty flimsy reed
to place the weight of your meaning in life on.
So overall happiness, interesting,
probably helps you get motivated, and helps you tell stories but
not necessarily the final story about how you'd measure success.
So the third kind of happiness is something quite different
than both momentary happiness and overall happiness.
Like momentary happiness, it's an emotion, but unlike momentary happiness,
it has a lot more resonance, it has a lot more depth, a lot more meaning
associated with it than eating an ice cream cone does on the hot summer day.
I call this deep happiness, but it comes with a lot of different names
that people have tried to give to it over the thousands of years that humans have
tried to grapple with the meaning of success.
Certainly one word in English that might have captured this is joy.
Joy is sort of the exaltation that you feel,
say on the birth of your first child or one of your children.
It might be a kind of feeling of connection when you are in
an amazing place in nature, and you simply feel the awe and
the inspiration of the vista that's in front of you.
It could be the feelings that you have when you fall in love, and
you just have this mysterious, new, amazing feeling of connection and
depth to the relationship that's suddenly blossomed.
So joy's a good word that might capture it.
The Greeks had a word for this, called Eudemonia.
It translates from the Greek as good spirit.
And Aristotle wrote about it in his book on ethics.
And it's an interesting Greek concept because it's not a state for
them, it's not an emotion for the Greeks,
it was a kind of thriving, a kind of flourishing,
a kind of activity in which your excellence is embodied
in an activity that gives meaning to those around you.
And that is an end of itself.
You're doing it because you love doing it.
You're not doing it for any other purpose.
So eudemonia is a Greek word that captures this sort of thriving sense
that I think deep happiness may be about.
There's a Hebrew word, one of my students pointed this out to me one semester.
Simcha is a Hebrew word that normally is more like momentary happiness,
it's a happiness that might be the case if you're celebrating a wedding or a birth.
But there was a rabbi that defined it especially in
a way that I resonated with, and he translated it as,
the feeling that comes when you're doing what you should be doing.
The feeling that comes when you're doing what you should be doing.
So this might be the kind of feeling when you're sitting with someone,
and you're comforting them.
Or you're being with them when they're in the hospital with an illness.
And your presence has given them a moment of relief
from the suffering that they're feeling.
I had a student once who came to me, and he said he was going to have to miss
the next class, because his grandfather had died, and
he had been asked by the family to speak at his grandfather's funeral.
And so this is always a good excuse in my world for
not being able to come to class as an event like that.
But we were talking about how he felt about it, and he felt nervous,
he felt the sadness that his grandfather, who he was close to, had passed.
But I predicted for him, I said when you're at this funeral, and
you're speaking about your grandfather,
I think you're going to have a moment of something like deep happiness.
Because you're going to be doing what you should be doing.
There won't be any other place on the planet
that you shouldn't be more than that place at that time.
So, this very special definition of simcha
might be another definition of deep happiness.
And then the positive psychology community scholar named Chic Sydney-High has
come up with a concept called flow, he's written a book called Flow.
And flow might be another dimension of this,
flow is the feeling that comes when you're engaged with an activity.
You're absorbed in it, it may be the feeling that sometimes comes to
runners when they kind of go into the zone.
It happens to me sometimes when I'm writing, and I just lose track of time and
completely absorbed in the words and where they're coming from,
where they're going, what I'm saying.
And time just stops, you wake up an hour later, and
you're not even, wow, where was I?
What was going on?
And that sense of engagement is also very important,
maybe component of this thought, what deep happiness means, this feeling.
So this seems like a worthy thing to be identifying with success.
Certainly, the more moments of thriving joy of being where you should be,
of flow that your life has, you'd count that as
a part of your definition of success, but here's the problem.
Are these moments really moments you can engineer?
Are they moments that you can create or seek, kind of wake up in the morning and
say, I think I'm going to go find a little deep happiness today?
I don't think so.
I think these are much more moments of grace, they're more like gifts to us.
And often, the most important thing is to be slowed down enough to experience them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American writer, had a wonderful image for this.
He said, if you try to catch a butterfly with your hands, it's very difficult.
But if you'll just sit still, sometimes a butterfly will come and
light on your shoulder, and I think that's the case with deep happiness.
Sometimes if you just sit still and
bring awareness to a moment, that's when deep happiness visits you.
And it's not really something that you can pursue in
the same way Thomas Jefferson might have been thinking about when he told us that
our Constitution would allow us to pursue happiness.
So happiness turns out to be a little more complicated than just one thing.
So let's conclude our discussion of happiness as a success factor by
just looking at a few of the things we think we know about what happiness is and
what its importance is based on the research.
And as I said, there's extensive research on this.
So in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow,
he makes this point really powerfully, and it's really kind of simple, what
matters most to your happiness is spending time with people you love who love you.
Being surrounded by the community of people who care the most about you,
who you care the most about is just more likely to end up giving you more of
all three of the kinds of happiness we talked about.
It's not always happy, it's not that being around people you love who love you
is a bed of roses all the time, but the odds are very high
that those moments will contain the moments of your most happiness.
So that's item number one, spend time with the people you love who love you.
Never underestimate the importance of that to your overall success.
Secondly, it turns out happiness much more often comes from experiences,
especially experiences you share with others than from material objects.
And oddly, the experience of shopping for
something that you are going to purchase with your loved one or your spouse and
bring back and bring into the home as one of the decorations may actually be
the shopping experience itself, the choice, the decision, the variety
of things you looked at, what was happening around you when you chose it.
Those actually sometimes become more important than the object itself.
So when it's sitting in your home, it's not the fact that the object is there,
it's the story behind the object that gives it meaning and
that brings happiness.
So think experiences more than material goods.
Third, it often comes from your willingness to be unhappy in the pursuit
of certain goals that are long term goals or difficult goals.
You think of an Olympic athlete, or
someone trying to get through a four year college experience or a graduate program.
These are difficult, long term commitments to a set of activities,
many of which are going to task you, going to require sacrifices.
They're going to mean you'd have to take risks.
There are uncertainties.
You may or may not achieve the goals.
You may have setbacks.
Lots of effort is going to be required for you to drill and practice and
exert efforts that aren't always the happiest moments of your life.
But the reward for having been willing to
endure some level of unhappiness turns out to be a much deeper and
more satisfying happiness when you finally come to achieve those goals.
When you come to the moments where there's a fulfilment of whatever
those efforts were directed toward.
So if you only seek happiness and unhappiness is your enemy, the chances
are pretty high that you're not going to risk the effort that it's going to take
because there's some unhappiness built in there, and you're trying to avoid that.
And then that just simply means that you're not going to have the depth
of satisfaction and fulfillment that could be yours if you didn't think so
simplistically about happiness good, unhappiness bad.
It's much more interesting than that, and I think your judgments and
decisions will be wiser.
If you consider the role of happiness, unhappiness,
effort, uncertainty, in your overall life satisfaction.
The fourth and final thing that we know about happiness is that you can
reframe your emotions by the way you set your own expectations and
bring more happiness into your life by having expectations more realistically set
then simply being over the top with expectations.
That a certain party or a certain event in the future is going
to bring the answer to all your life's woes and travails.
And moderate a little and when your expectations are set in a more accurate
way, the actual experience that comes, either meets or
exceeds more them often and then that becomes a moment when your emotions
fall in line with a positive set of emotions about what's happening,
instead of disappointment, didn't meet my expectations, not as good as I expected.
And then you're filled with negative emotions.
So in this part of the course, we looked at the two sides of happiness,
the inner life and the outer life, the inner life of happiness, and
the outer life of achievement.
And looked at some of the complications that
become apparent when you start looking a little more carefully at each of these
as a component of your theory of success.
It turns out that when it comes to achievement it's easy to fall into
one of several traps and end up achieving things that don't bring any fulfillment or
satisfaction.
Chasing other people's goals, chasing a kind of obsessive
form of achievement that never bring satisfaction.
And then, on the happiness side, turns out that there's more than one form of
happiness and that the single word carry some different meanings and
it's very important for you to articulate for yourself what it is you actually
are thinking about when you say I want a life that's going to bring more happiness.
It could be momentary happiness.
This concept of overall happiness and then this mysterious but
very important feeling of deep happiness.
So with all this new understanding in the final part of the course
we are going to look at how you can apply this knowledge that we've gained and
your own experiences and memories that you've accessed
to begin thinking about a success for yourself in a very concrete,
very actionable way, thinking about how you can apply these tools.
What are some steps you can take to make them concrete so that you can begin
advancing toward the values that you've identified in our work together.
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