The Happiness Advantage

I have a friend, extremely smart and experienced; she is an entrepreneur at heart. The reason I know this is because she has a good life and no monetary reasons for pursuing her current venture but she is pushing her knowledge and market understanding to start a business that can provide marginal profits at any margin of error. She is the founder of a social curation platform of therapy applicable Apps, and like most entrepreneurs she has her ups and downs. Grand Canyon University has recently joined a movement popularized by internet titan Google and later joined by many startups and built a custom complex for their employees that includes a gym, break rooms, yoga studio with lockers and showers, snack bars, Starbucks coffee, shuttles from parking lots to the main complex.  Departments have just merged and made this building their home but in their first day the negative comments began pouring, expectations were suddenly not met and the idea of being in this great new complex was suddenly not enough and made people unhappy. 

GCU has spent millions in this facility to make its employees happy, yet they already failed in their first day. Common mistake? Do you expect for external world to affect your overall happiness? Increase productivity by having nice reception area? Or having a yoga studio in your office? You would think so, but our long term happiness comes from inside and how we are trained to engage with the external world. Grand Canyon University should focus in establishing a new company culture and “train” their employees by Unthinking, or undoing their expectations and establishing new positive ones so that they truly enjoy what they have; after all most employees there will most likely not ever get a chance to work at such a place again. On the other hand the absence of complains doesn’t equal happiness, it simply means compliance and possibly fear of retribution.

So what does my friend and Grand Canyon University have in common? Although they are pursuing greater good they are trying to accomplish it expecting external factors to define what success is for their particular efforts and long term happiness. This is from the perception that our external worlds are depictive of our happiness levels when in reality when those of us who have researched our psychological patterns and market evolution know about your external world I can only predict about 10% of our happiness and overall productivity. 90% of our long term happiness is determined by how we engage and interpret the external world, if we can change this then we can change the way we manage and lead and expectation based on thresholds of happiness levels in ourselves as employees and as individuals. Managers who understand this can have a higher ROI due to long term happiness in employees; Shawn Achor calls this the “happiness advantage”.  Approximately 75% of employment success and professional development is determined by overall happiness and social support not by levels of IQ and relevant experience. Is those who are hungry for success and take an opportunity as god sent that are happy to be challenged and happy to be able to prove themselves; is them who are the common ladder climbers, not the grad students who have been trained to follow instructions and act only when instructed or given any sort of directions. Yes, there are exceptions to this, but in reality a Master’s Degree in business doesn’t make a leader or corporate CEO, especially not in today’s mass production era of MBAs. Seth Godin calls this self-driven, entrepreneurial minded individuals; Linchpins. Books and education mean nothing without insight, and hunger for success drives knowledge and hard work but is happiness that allows us to actually reach that success threshold.

We need to Unthink the formula for happiness and success... I have discovered that the underlined formula for success has been that if you work harder you will be more successful and when you’re successful then you will be happy. This formula couldn’t be more wrong.  The reality of this is that we never get to this “success” threshold because we as society expect more, always expect more.  When we get good grades, being successful changes to now getting better grades, having a good job is not good enough anymore because now we are expected an even better job and keep the momentum going in your career so this success point never arrives and we never get happy, we as society have moved happiness past the cognitive horizon of success. What we need to again is Unthink everything we know as presume to be normal or in our nature. We must realize that expectations and “order” is nothing more than a recent

man-made creation naturalized by those leading our country decades ago, business owners and officials who enforced needs and standards to continue to provide for their market needs that have forged a set of fears in everything we do and how we perceive our economy, it shapes our culture and is gradually deteriorating our country while others lacking this “synthetic nature” are thriving and growing their power as nation catching up to us. We depend on those who break the rules and those “weirdoes” to drive their happiness and promote innovation and a healthier economy. You set the bar for yourself and don’t let external forces push against you so that you too can be successful in anything you because you are happy with what you have and know that what you have in an opportunity to do something not a reason that holds you back due to fear of losing it. Unthink and be Dangerous. What are you doing to promote the happiness advantage?