How to be successful at everything...

 

• 10-25-23
• how to be a success at everything

3 lessons from Harvard’s Happiness Lab that will transform your work and life

Alexa von Tobel explains how Harvard’s home to professors and academics who focus on the pursuit of happiness unpack what it is and how can we achieve it.

By Alexa von Tobel2 minute Read

Back in college, I (like so many undergraduates across the country) decided to major in psychology. I was incredibly lucky to study in Harvard’s “Happiness Lab,” which was home to professors and academics who focused on the pursuit of happiness. What is it and how can we achieve it? 

While my family wondered what on earth I was learning there, that period of study gave me a few critical lessons early on that have fully transformed my approach to work and life.

I credit much of this thinking to the Positive Psychology work of my TA, Shawn Achor, and my thesis advisor, Tal Ben-Shahar. Whenever I come across a roadblock at work or face a major life decision, I always come back to the principles I learned there.

So, what’s the secret to happiness?

Embrace daily routines

We all have simple rituals that ground our day-to-day life, like grabbing an iced coffee on the way to work and chatting with the barista, or walking your dog on a familiar neighborhood route. These small moments are actually what bring us happiness. They create an intangible sense of community and connectedness. This is one of the reasons the pandemic was so challenging for so many of us—it fully upended our daily routines. 

As a founder, I think about this all the time in terms of appreciating the journey. You aim to have great outcomes, from closing a dream partnership or landing a big hire, but those outcomes do not drive fulfillment. It’s all of the many small moments with your team or checking things off your to-do list that make us happy.

Fend off regret

Whenever we come to a pivot moment in our lives, we are usually swayed by what we think will make us happy. Should I move to a new city? Should I switch jobs? It’s natural to worry about what could go wrong if you take the riskier choice and may seem that happiness will come from picking the safer choice.

But one of the lessons I learned was that if you ask 90-year-olds, or people in the last chapter of their life, what they would have changed, they always regret the things they didn’t do (not the things they did).In retrospect, making the decision to drop out of business school to launch LearnVest seems like a great choice. In the moment, though, it was deeply scary. I used this framework: Would I regret it if I didn’t have the guts to go try this? And the answer was clearly yes.

 

Money can’t buy happiness

Yes, this is an old adage, but there’s some deep-rooted truth here. We get more happiness from intangibles—time with family and friends, a vacation exploring a new place, going to a concert—than we do from material things.

At LearnVest, we had Harvard Business professor Michael Norton speak on this topic. He has done deep research all around the relationship between money and happiness. One of his example’s that always stuck with me is that successful people keep upgrading their home to a bigger place, farther from where they work.

Instead of that being a positive, they are stuck in a longer commute and stressed out by the added responsibility of more space to manage. It was only once they “made it” that they realized the things they were aiming for did not make them happy.

Of course, our sense of happiness evolves over time, but if you can root yourself in these three principles, you’ll have a headstart on the path to building a joyful, fulfilled life.