All the things that are good in life - great relationships, thriving health, exceptional performance, happiness - are founded on what my professor Angela Duckworth called “the accretion of mundane acts.”
Eating your vegetables. Practicing kindness. Building the tiny components of a skill. Cultivating your mind to be resilient and optimistic.
Day in, day out. The accretion of mundane acts.
Read MoreThis week, the New York Times released a special magazine feature on The Future of Work, and one of the articles within the feature was titled America's Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful, and Miserable by Charles Duhigg.
Charles Duhigg describes going to his Harvard Business School reunion, fifteen years after graduating, and encountering his former classmates, many of whom are highly successful and acclaimed individuals. They are, with few exceptions, deeply unhappy.
He shares the example of a man who makes $1.2 million a year in a job that he hates, finds incredibly stressful and meaningless, and can’t figure out how to escape.
Read MoreWho can forget the epic scenes in Star Wars of Luke undergoing his training to become a Jedi?
Through his training, he learns that controlling his mind is the route to making a positive impact on the world; today, you’re going to learn the same thing! We’ll take a different path (unfortunately, there are no light sabers) but with the exact same goal: what are the steps you can take within you to help make the world a better place?
True flourishing, based on my research, comes from the conscious cultivation of one’s self into a loving, wise being, and from the application of that self to doing good in the world. Without the fulfillment of both sides, we are incomplete.
Read MoreWe’ll be picking up right where we left off: now that you know a bit more about how resilience works, how can you develop it?
Today, I’m going to be introducing you to a number of different tools that you can use, every day, in any combination, to help you develop more resilience. Some of these tools may resonate more with you than others; some may feel harder to grasp right now. That’s okay. My hope is that you keep this list handy when tough times arise and that it helps you to cope more effectively in that moment; this practice will also serve to build your resilience muscle over time, too, becoming an ingrained habit rather than a choice.
Read MoreIt’s inevitable that our future happy lives will include challenges that we cannot even imagine tackling right now. It’s also inevitable that to make positive changes in the world, we’ll have to push ourselves in ways that will be uncomfortable, as tackling hitherto-unsolved problems is far from easy.
That’s why resilience is the most important skill (yes, a skill!) that you can learn. And that’s why I want you to start practicing it and building it now. Don’t wait for a storm.
Read MoreAmelia is a professional skateboarder who regularly skates with Tony Hawk and other legends. But on her journey, she discovered that there was a lack of support and opportunity available to female skateboarders. Instead of accepting that, she decided to fix it.
Her nonprofit, Exposure, is devoted to empowering women through skateboarding, and they do it in such an innovative way. First, they create opportunities for female skateboarders by hosting the world’s premier female competition every year in California. Proceeds from the event are donated to survivors of domestic violence. The event also hosts a vendor village with women-focused, health and socially-conscious companies. Exposure also runs the Skate Rising program to instill confidence and encourage compassion in young women: they bring young girls together to participate in skate clinics and engage in different community service projects.
Read MoreI spent many years trying to figure out what happiness really was. It kicked off the journey that led me to be writing this newsletter to you today.
When I was younger, I believed that happiness alights upon you when you accumulate all of the external trappings of success: the perfect job, the perfect home, the perfect partner, the perfect hobbies, the perfect friends, the perfect hobbies, and most importantly, the perfect self. Now, I call this Old Happy; but back then, it was impossible to see, as it was a fundamental belief that underpinned my every action.
I valiantly strived towards this ideal for most of my life. I picked up on this misguided belief from… oh, absolutely every message we receive from our society and world. We are told, over and over again, that in order to be happy, we need to surround ourselves with the best and the most stuff, and to drape ourselves in the most prestigious accomplishments. Then we will be happy.
Read MoreIt’s the end of a year. That means that advice about how to be happier, more successful, more productive, more [fill-in-the-blank-here] is all around us.
For my last newsletter of 2018, I want to share a mental model that I use to evaluate advice about happiness and to help me see the world more clearly.
Maybe it’s a bit ironic for me to be saying this, but beware of listening to anyone’s advice without testing it for yourself first, whether it is practically or through your own mental models.
There are very few happiness ‘principles’ that can actually hold true for all individuals at all times within all contexts. That, combined with the proliferation of information out there, makes it hard to know what advice is useful and what should be avoided.
Read MoreSeven years ago, on December 4, 2012, I sent an email to my six closest college friends.
We were a year and a half out of college. In our senior year, we had started a Tumblr blog (that dates us!) that served as our virtual collective diary: a place to share our experiences as we pursued life post-NYU, scattered around the world; a safe harbor for venting about the challenges of adult life, expressing our learnings as we matured into adults, and to wonder at who we were slowly becoming, and how it dovetailed (or not) away from our expectations; and a way to stay connected across the various cities we had scattered to after New York City.
Read MoreThese are the words that, to me, sum up the absolute heart of the field of positive psychology, the underpinnings of every intervention and theory, and the true secret to personal happiness.
I first heard them in a classroom at Penn from Dr. Michael Baime MD, the founder of the Penn Program for Mindfulness. Dr. Baime has trained more than 10,000 people in mindfulness-based stress management, helping them to reduce their stress, cultivate growth, and bring more awareness to ways that they live their lives.
Attention is the single most powerful resource that each of us possesses.
Read MoreThis week, I traveled to Europe to meet up with a group of my coworkers from LinkedIn. A few months ago, we launched a new product called LinkedIn Talent Insights, which provides our clients with data and insights to make better talent decisions. It’s pretty amazing to be here celebrating this accomplishment with our team and meeting customers who are using it and loving it!
I love to travel because it’s such a fantastic way of throwing a bit of a shock to your system, breaking you out of your existing patterns and reminding you of how big the world is beyond your own personal little slice. It never fails to remind me of the narrowness of my views and experiences, and how much more I can learn about our big, beautiful world.
When I see new slices of the world, I’m filled with love for the people, cultures, and sights that I see. And that’s what I want to talk about today: the practice of love, why it leads to happiness, and how to bring it to your own life.
Read MoreDespite having a Masters degree in the topic, I have always been reluctant to join the well-being conversation on Instagram and other social media platforms because I felt that a lot of the conversation is unintentionally harmful, not helpful.
So much of it is about glorifying the self and the pursuit of it: you can’t flick a finger without seeing someone’s green juice, yoga pose, or exhortation to practice mindfulness. And if there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of from my research, it’s that pursuing your own self as your main focus is not the path to well-being.
Eventually, I realized that joining the conversation was important if I ever wanted to help shift it.
Read MoreJust 7% of people believe that they can be fulfilled in life without being fulfilled at work. People with a sense of purpose in life are at lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease. Purpose is good for employers, too: in 1992, researchers investigated purpose-driven organizations, and found that companies with a purpose and values-based culture achieved 400% higher revenues, 700% greater job growth and 1200% higher stock prices than those without.
People want purpose so badly that a recent study found that 9 out of 10 employees would take a pay cut to have a lifetime guarantee of meaningful work, foregoing up to 23% of their lifetime incomes.
But what is purpose, and how is it different than meaning? How does one find it? What happens when you don’t connect with your organization’s purpose? Is it really that important to find meaningful work? What if you think you have a purpose, but aren’t sure how to live it?
Read MoreToday, we interview Maya Appiah, who works at Microsoft, is a Leadership Council member at Upwardly Global, a nonprofit that has helped more than 6,000 refugees find their place in the U.S. workforce, and is the co-chair of the Immigrant and Refugee Commission of the City of Seattle.
Read MoreWelcome to the first edition of the New Happy newsletter, where I will cover the why and the how of this whole thing, and my hopes for what it will provide for you.
For most of my adult life, I’ve been studying happiness and well-being. And I’ve come to realize that we have an enormous problem to address. We live in a world that tells us that happiness comes from the acquisition of things that are outside of us: namely, that if we become wealthier, more beautiful, more successful, or more popular, we will be happy.
If you’ve given this approach a shot (like I have), you might have learned that it does not work; moreover, it often leads you down the opposite trail, towards unhappiness. And yet, the cultural and societal messages we receive about this form of happiness - what I call Old Happy - are so pervasive, insidious, and adept at penetrating their tentacles into our minds and hearts. It makes it very hard to find and follow a different path.
But there is another way. I call it New Happy. It is the pursuit of the greatest happiness for all beings everywhere (which includes you!)
Read More
