Seppala - The Happiness Track

For my beloved
Pums & Dadda,
Andrew & Michael

CONTENTS

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Maya Angelou

One summer when I was in college, I interned for a major international newspaper in Paris, France. As the only intern there, I was very busy. From 2 to 11 P.M., I ran between the second floor and the basement delivering messages and documents. I interacted with nearly everyone, from the top editors to the printing staff. The second floor housed a handful of executives in their windowed offices and a large number of American writers and editors who sat bent over computers in cubicles. In the basement were the blue-collar French press workers who printed the newspapers.

The difference in atmosphere between the second floor and the basement was striking. On the second floor, you could feel the tension in the air. The floor was quiet except for the sounds of typing and printing. The editorsmost of them overweight with dark circles under their eyeswere huddled over their screens, keeping to themselves and eating pizza at their desks. But in the basement, the mood was downright festive. French wine, cheese, and bread were all laid out on a huge table. The printing staff laughed and joked; the atmosphere was vibrant. Whereas on the second floor no one talked to me unless they needed something, I was always loudly welcomed when I went into the printing room. Soon, I found myself wishing for more reasons to join that joyful atmosphere.

Working at the newspaper, going back and forth between these two groups got me thinking: Here was a team of peopleeditors, writers, and press workersworking through the night to finish and distribute a newspaper by dawn. Yes, its true that the two groups performed different tasks and came from different culturesbut they were both working to meet the same urgent deadline. One mistake from either group and the paper missed its morning delivery. Night after night, despite the challenges, both groups successfully completed their jobs. Yet they went about it in opposite ways: one group was stressed, burned out, and unhealthy looking; the other happy, energetic, and thriving.

I believe most of us want to be like the French press workers: we want to do a good joband we want to enjoy doing it. Everyone wants to be successful and happy. And yet achieving these two goals has never been more elusive.

Because of advances in technology, the pace of our lives is reaching overwhelming levels. Whether youre a CEO or a freelance art designer, you probably find yourself running from deadline to deadline, checking your mobile device for the latest e-mail or text, updating your social media status, and reading up on the latest blog or news; all while planning the dinner menu, navigating traffic, and anticipating an upcoming conference call. Projects need to be completed on shorter and shorter deadlines. With data and information readily available online, research needs to be in depth and rigorous. Customers need better service faster, not to mention cheaper. Your boss and colleagues expect immediate responses to their messages and requests.

To keep up with the demands of life, you probably sleep with your phone next to your bed and, more often than not, check e-mail first thing in the morning and right before going to bed. You also connect with your friends via social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, responding to incoming notifications, to that must-watch video someone sent you, and to the implicit obligation to post updates and photos to stay in touch with the world. Meanwhile, e-mail and message in-boxes fill up no matter how long or hard you work to stay on top of them. Your weekdays are an endless race to complete the never-ending to-do list before you collapse into bed, exhausted, getting to sleep at a much later hour than your body would like.

Your weekends arent much better. They are likely filled with domestic errands like laundry and grocery shopping, as well as work that has spilled over from the workweek. Vacations, few and far between, pack in stressful travel, visits with relatives, and maybe one or two days of extra sleep before you return to the grind. And even when you are on vacation, you find it hard to unplug from the world of workso you check your devices to keep up with your job while sitting by the pool.

We have simply accepted overextension as a way of life.

We want to be good employees, so we work hard; we want to be good parents, so we try to spend more time with our kids; we want to be good spouses, so we cook meals, go to the gym, plan a date night; we want to be good friends, so we attend social activitiesand we do all of this even though were exhausted.

When the speed of our lives makes us feel stressed, drained, and overextended, we blame ourselves. After all, everyone else seems to be keeping up. To succeed, we believe we just need to hang in there and keep goingpushing past the pain, past our limits, and past our well-being.

When we do achieve our goals by rushing, straining, and keeping up, we dont necessarily feel good; we might experience a sense of relief, but that relief comes with a high price tag: burnout, disconnection, stress. But isnt the point of all that hard work and suffering to be happy? Isnt the idea that success will bring happiness?

THE MYTHS OF SUCCESS

Over the last decade, I have spent time with highly successful people. I studied alongside them at Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. I worked with them in Paris, New York City, Shanghai, and Silicon Valley. While I have been inspired by my colleagues as they launch nonprofits, get voted into Congress, write bestselling novels, become successful Broadway actors, found innovative start-ups, play major roles in humanitarian efforts across the world, and attain billionaire status as Wall Street bankers, I have also been saddened to see so many of these outwardly successful people drive themselves into the ground and end up chronically stressed and unhealthy. These people are highly talented with huge potential, yet sadly, in the process of reaching their goals, many of them burn out their greatest asset: themselves. They often drive their employees into the ground as well, creating a culture of stress all around them.

While on the one hand I was observing this phenomenon among my friends and former classmates, I was, on the other, studying and researching the psychology of health and happiness as a doctoral student at Stanford University. The deeper I delved into that literature, the more I was stunned to discover that the way we are taught to seek successand what is culturally supported and encouragedis plain wrong. Study upon study confirmed that what my friends and colleagues were doingand what I was doingin our search for success and happiness was actually backfiring.

Since then, Ive come to appreciate that we are compromising our ability to be truly successful and happy because we are falling for common but outdated theories about success. We believe in these theories of success precisely because we see them play out routinely in the lives of successful people like my colleagues. From a young age we are taught that getting ahead means doing everything thats thrown at us (and then some) with razor-sharp focus and iron disciplineand at the expense of our happiness.

Here are the six major false theories that drive our current notions of success:

Never stop accomplishing. Stay continuously focused on getting things done. To achieve more and stay competitive, youve got to move quickly from one to-do to another, always keeping an eye on whats next.