This is a guest post by Daniel Wong. 

--

The Confusion About Happiness 

Do you want to be happy or “not unhappy”? These might sound like synonyms, but they’re really not. The difference between happiness and “not unhappiness” is really the difference between frustration and fulfillment.

All of us want to find happiness in our career, health, relationships and finances. If we’re not careful, however, we’ll discover how not to be unhappy in these areas, but we won’t learn how to find real happiness.

Take your career, for example. The factors that make you a “not unhappy” employee are very distinct from the factors that make you a happy employee.

Here are some "not unhappy" factors: a comfortable office chair, pleasant co-workers, a reasonable boss. Without these things, there’s no doubt that you'll be unhappy. For example, I can’t imagine how unbearable it would be if you had a horrible working relationship with your direct superior. 

But just because all the “not unhappy” factors are in place doesn’t guarantee that you'll be happy. No one goes to work thinking, "I'm SO happy that I get to spend eight hours sitting in my super comfortable chair today!"

It’s evident that being extremely “not unhappy” doesn’t result in you being happy. As an employee, you need “happy” factors in order to be happy. Here are a few of them: the belief that your work makes a real difference, the feeling that you're part of something greater than yourself, the fact that your work is appreciated.

The Happy Employee

It puzzles me that, in the business world, a vast majority of incentive schemes are geared toward making employees "not unhappy." These schemes are often related to pay, benefits and privileges. Many companies think that enabling their employees to be as “not unhappy” as possible is the key to building a happy and motivated workforce. 

Don’t get me wrong; higher salaries, pleasant working environments and other “not unhappy” factors are important, but companies should focus on “happy” factors if they want their employees to be engaged and productive. 

Can you imagine an employee who finds deep meaning and purpose in her work not giving her best for the company every single day?

As you’ve probably already realized, finding happiness in your career is a challenging task. But this quest becomes much simpler when you understand which factors—to you, personally—fall in the “not unhappy” category, and which factors fall in the “happy” category.

To help you in this process of discovering a career you love, I invite you to answer the questions below. 

1. If you’re currently working, what factors prevent you from quitting? If you’re not currently working, what factors are important to you in a career? Your answers can also be based on your previous work or internship experiences. List your top 15 factors.
2. Of these 15 factors, which ones give you a sense of comfort and peace of mind, but not fulfillment? These are some of your “not unhappy” factors.
3. Which aspects of your job frustrate you? These are probably areas where certain “not unhappy” factors are absent. From this list, derive the “not unhappy” factors that matter to you. 
4. Based on Steps 2 and 3, you now have a combined list of your “not unhappy” factors. 
5. Of the 15 factors you listed in Step 1, which ones give you a sense of excitement, enthusiasm and satisfaction? Which ones thrill your soul? It might be helpful for you to think of a few specific work tasks or projects. The factors you choose are your “happy” ones. 
6. Rank order your “not unhappy” factors based on how they will likely influence your levels of long-term job satisfaction. 
7. Repeat Step 6 for your “happy” factors. 
8. Looking at the lists you created in Steps 6 and 7, do you think they accurately represent what matters to you in your career?

All of us have blind spots, so you might miss out some factors. But I trust that this exercise has given you new insight into what you’re looking for in an ideal career. Keep in mind that, in general, “happy” factors are a lot harder to come by than “not unhappy” ones. No job is perfect, so seek to maximize your “happy” factors while setting reasonable standards for your “not unhappy” ones.

Is The Aim Of Life To Be Happy?

Despite all of this talk about happiness, you’d probably agree with me that the ultimate aim of life isn't merely to be happy. Developing traits such as kindness, courage, generosity, patience, integrity and commitment is more important than being happy. But in order to acquire those traits, you’ll inevitably need to go through moments of unhappiness.

If given the choice, however, between being happy and unhappy, all of us would choose to be happy. Since that's the case, it’s vital that we not confuse what makes us "not unhappy" with what makes us happy. 

This applies to your career—and also to every other area of your life. Don’t settle for “not unhappiness” when happiness is what you really want.

-- 

Daniel Wong is passionate about helping young adults to maximize their education, career and life. You can read his blog at Living Large and find him on Twitter.

I came across this article today, and had to share it with you. Many of us constantly compare ourselves to others, whether it be in careers, relationships or just happiness. Envy is something that is very hard to control, and hopefully this article will help shine some light on the subject. Enjoy.

--

"For much of my adult life, a subtle form of fear has been my constant companion.  Eventually, I found myself in the position where I could no longer attempt to ignore it. It had sufficiently eroded my health that I was forced to confront it.

From my own personal experience, (and this is by no means an academic definition) fear can be grouped in three areas of descending intensity: 1) the anticipation of direct danger to one’s being—the guy in the alley coming my way, to fight or give flight; 2) the fear that something I have will be taken away—my house, my job, my loved ones. (In this category, the Buddhist preaching of acceptance of life’s impermanence has helped me.) 3) The feeling that I am not enough, that I don’t measure up to some ever-moving standard of worthiness. This last category of fear is the one I will discuss tonight.

In this categorization, there exists a kind of anxiety gap between what is and what we think should be. “I should have a PhD like Rob Wolcott.” “I deserve to be as wealthy as Ben Elowitz, because I was instrumental in building the Blue Nile business.” This is the drama of comparative living. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness, calls it “worry fatigue.” He says, “Envy is a form of vice which consists of seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.” He had a great example: “Napoleon envied Caesar; Caesar envied Alexander; Alexander I daresay envied Hercules, who didn’t exist.”

I am fairly certain that the destructive emotion of envy has increased in the age in which we are living. Amidst all of the opulence we not face the alarming gap between the have and the have-nots, we now also have the ability, due to the opening up of the world through technology, to compare ourselves to others with just a few keystrokes. We all do this. Everyone in this room has done it. How many of us have gone on Zillow or another real estate site to check out the value of our neighbor’s house? How many of us, when perusing Facebook, have seen that one of our friends just dined with someone fancy, dined somewhere fancy or become downright fancy themselves? And then and felt…envious. Today we have the dubious “opportunity” to gauge our progress relative to just about everyone with an Internet connection. And we can gauge the progress of those without one too. Meet your new neighbor, commit to memory his name, and Google the guy when you get home…Only a few hundred years ago, we compared ourselves to the work product of the one other blacksmith in our village. Now we compare our work to all the blacksmiths in all the villages throughout the land…If our values aren’t strong and properly reinforced, we will feel envious. And if we don’t pay attention to this destructive emotion, it can spin out of control and turn into a deep-set fear that we just aren’t good enough.

If you think about it, this comparative frame of reference should only matter when we’re competing in a zero-sum situation. He gets it, I don’t. There’s a winner and a loser. Yet most of the situations we find ourselves in, on a daily basis, do not involve zero-sum outcomes. In most of our life experiences, we find ourselves working with others in situations where we all can benefit. Even in very complex negotiations, creative solutions exist that expand the pie and leave plenty of slices for everyone.

So in reality, in the vast majority of the many millions of discrete moments that make up our lives, we have the ability to choose not to participate in the drama of comparative living.  And that is my epiphany: that through awareness and discipline, I can choose to see things not in their relation to others, but only in their relation to myself—in relation to my own spiritual and intellectual development. Am I increasing in my capacity to show compassion to others? Am I increasing my business skills in order to be more useful to others? Now, at night, I reflect and remind myself that my development as a human being is relative to no one else, just myself and where I was at a prior state of development.

Everyone in this room is in the bonus scoring round of life. We’ve taken the tests and passed. We’ve auditioned and gotten the gig. We’ve made it—the degree, the car, the house. We have respect. Yet the only respect we really need is our own. We can choose keep trying to make it, over and over again, or we can realize we don’t have to live our lives in pursuit mode. We don’t have to keep trying to keep up with the beat of an imaginary metronome. We can say, “I am enough.” As Thomas Merton said, “We have what we seek.” Harmony, for me, lies in this thought."

The mission of TED (Technology Education Design) is to promote "ideas worth spreading."  It's one of our favourite websites simply because of the quality of content that is produced.  The video editors do an amazing job of making the speakers stand out and having their presentations come across with no distractions. The clarity of the speakers is remarkable.

We've gone through the archives and hand-picked some of our favorite TED talks for people who want to learn more about happiness and find their career calling. Granted, it's hard to select just ten to feature here out of the 700-some-odd videos available. There is a great section on their site called "What Makes Us Happy" so be sure to check that out. If you know a video that should be on here but isn't, be sure to leave us a comment. Enjoy!

1. Do What Makes You Happy - Chip Conley

2. Dan Gilbert Asks, Why Are We Happy?

3. John Wooden On True Success

4. Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

5. Martin Seligman On Positive Psychology

6. Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action

7. Tony Robbins Asks Why We Do What We Do

8. Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke Of Insight

9. Dan Pink On The Surprising Science Of Motivation

10. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring On The Learning Revolution!

--

Bonus - Jeff Bezos: What Matters More Than Your Talents (Not A TED Talk - But Worthwhile)

I am currently about a third of the way through the excellent book The Happiness Hypothesis. The book takes the reader through the different periods in time where people were trying to discover what happiness means.  Some amazing quotes from Bhudda and others really make you think (I am going to have to read it again and take notes). But the point of the book, and happiness study in general, is to find what it is that truly makes people happy.  And we have written previously about building your happiness framework and the difference between a job, career and calling. These both come from this book and its principles.  But the section I'm currently at is far more interesting.  The author actually reveals what is known as the happiness hypothesis, or formula.

Back in the day (not too long ago) happiness researchers believed that they had found not only the equation to happiness, but also to personality in general.  Previous to this discovery, psychologists believed that personality is shaped primarily by childhood environment.  Think back to when you were a child. Did you have CNBC on the TV during breakfast? Did you parents discuss finances in front of you, or did they keep it secret? Were your parents abusive and did they have an addiction that affected how they raised you? What kind of schools did you go to as a child? Were they rich, upper-class schools with top teachers and the best facilities? Or were they the forgotten schools, run-down and poverty stricken? 

Thinking about how you were brought up does make you realize that your environment has a massive impact on your personality, and ultimately, your happiness. But this can't be completely true in every case. I mean, look at the stories where an individual manages to rise from a poverty-stricken area to become a millionaire and blaze their own path. For a great example of this look up Dr. Farrah Gray (he was a millionaire at age 14).

Back to the research that I mentioned above. Their claim that was your environment in fact has very little to do with your personality, rather your genes have preset your personality from the moment that you are born. Imagine a personality preset being fixed into every brain, like a thermostat set forever to a certain temperature. Maybe unhappy people are set at 50 degrees and happy people are set at 70. In this case, the only way to change your level of happiness would be to change one's own internal setting instead of changing one's environment.  What do you think about this claim? Do you agree?

But as research progressed and the understanding of the human genome became more and more clear, a higher level of understanding between nature and nurture began to reveal itself. What researchers found was that genes did have a huge impact on your happiness, but they turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. And yes, each person may have a preset level of happiness, but it doesn't happen to be a fixed point, but rather a potential range.  How you operate within this range is up to something called external conditions.

Then along came a man named Martin Seligman, and as we known from our previous posts, he is the founder of positive psychology.  And Dr. Seligman was very good at bringing together groups of people that could tackle specific problems.  And the problem that they set out to solve was the external conditions that affect happiness.  And what they found was really interesting. There are two fundamental different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.  

Conditions are fact's about your life that you can't change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). These are constant over time, or at least during a certain period of your life (half of marriages end in divorce).

Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are things that you choose to do, like meditation, exercise, learning a new skill or taking a vacation.  Because such activities can be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can't just disappear from your awareness the way that conditions can. These activities, then, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects. 

Using this new idea, Seligman along with his team came up with something called the "happiness formula".

H = S + C + V

The level of happiness that you experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) that you do.

--

Now there is a lot more in terms of explanation behind how you can change your levels of (V) and (C) in order to get to the top of your "happiness range" but that is for another post. What I wanted to get across, with respect to Sokanu, is that we can use this formula in order to better understand how to find our passion in life.  Remember, we have the fortunate privilege of being able to choose our career path.  And for all the complaining that happens in today's world about the lack of teaching in higher education, the choice is ultimately yours.  You have the ability to choose your external conditions (C) by choosing where to live, what school to go to and who to marry.  

But the main point is that you can choose what career you want to pursue in life. You have the ability to set your happiness point by virtue of the choices that you make early on that affects the rest of your life. But don't worry, that's what Sokanu being built to do, after all.

What is happiness, and how can we all get some? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being, to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment.

After training in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur, Matthieu Ricard left science behind to move to the Himalayas and become a Buddhist monk -- and to pursue happiness, both at a basic human level and as a subject of inquiry. Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves.

His deep and scientifically tinged reflections on happiness and Buddhism have turned into several books, including The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet. At the same time, he also makes sensitive and jaw-droppingly gorgeous photographs of his beloved Tibet and the spiritual hermitage where he lives and works on humanitarian projects.

His latest book on happiness is Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill; his latest book of photographs is Tibet: An Inner Journey.

"Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world."

Robert Chalmers, The Independent

In reading Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness, one thing becomes clear: this is not an average book.  Most business books are the same, sticking in a generic biography with some copied Think and Grow Rich principles.  They then sell the book as new and revolutionary. These are average books. What Tony has created is a simple book; easy to read, yet really big on new content. Even though the first two sections were really interesting and educational, I am going to focus on the third section of the book in this blog post.  

The third section of the book focuses on something called the science of happiness.  The scientific field of positive psychology is dedicated to researching and learning more about this science, which is a relatively new branch of psychology.  Some of the current researchers in positive psychology include:  Martin Seligman, Ed Diener, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Christopher Peterson, Carol Dweck, Barbara Fredrickson, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, Jonathan Haidt, Shelley Taylor, C. R. Snyder, Robert Biswas-Diener, Donald Clifton, Albert Bandura, Charles S. Carver, Michael F. Scheier, and Ilona Boniwell.

But what good is this research if we don't have a framework to apply it to?  How can we, as average humans that don't have a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, relate positive psychology to our everyday lives?  Well, there is a fantastic framework presented by Tony in the third section of his book that does a great job of explaining this.  While you will see that Martin explains the same theory in the video below, the method I will write about is a little easier to understand.

The system revolves around understanding that happiness is not a singular object.  It is not a carrot on the end of stick that we attain.  This is the mistake that most people make.  They assume that if they attain a ton of money, a beautiful wife (or rich husband) and a Ferrari (or Tesla for the tech crowd) then they will be happy.  We begin this process by getting the right grades in high school, picking the correct college and then transitioning into the best job.  This is the apparent correct path to happiness.  I wish I could say the path to happiness were that easy, but we know that this is not true.  

Instead, we need to research what truly makes us happy.  What makes us tick?  What makes us get out of bed in the morning?  Well, we can best explain this by dividing happiness into three types: pleasure, passion and then purpose.  Let's go through each one in order to get a better understanding of what each means.

Pleasure

Pleasure is the most common form of happiness.  We all know what this means.  Pleasure is actually measurable via our emotions. We are all aware of what makes us happy and what makes us sad. If we interchange the word happy for pleasure we know what apply our experiences to this section. Many people derive pleasure from eating good food, spending time with friends and going out on a Friday night. These things make us smile, laugh and show noticeable happiness to others.  

So what is the problem with pleasure?  If we put ourselves in situations where we are always smiling and having a good time, haven't we figured out the secret to life?  What is the point of even going through the rest of this post?  Well, the problem comes when we analyze what people are feeling with the rest of their time. Humans, in general, tend to follow a simple graph. The graph spikes Friday afternoon around 5:00 and seems to drop Sunday night.  We have long periods of mediocre happiness during the business week (school or work) followed by high points on the weekend.  And this is not sustainable.  So while pleasure is great for short term moments, it is not going to give us the happiness that we as humans require for the rest of our lives. 

So what can we do to make sure that the graph does not dip every week?  Well, we must learn to master the second form of happiness, passion.

Passion

Passion is a tough thing to explain since it is unique to each individual.  While pleasure is easy to both detect in other people and in ourselves, passion is unfortunately not the same.  And this is because passion is not measurable by emotion like we stated before. The form of happiness involving passion is a state, not an emotion.  Finding this medium of happiness can also be called finding flow or the zone. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote explaining this phenomenon is his excellent book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  

Finding this state is the key to understanding this level of happiness.  And this involves finding your passion in life.  Sokanu's goal is to help people find their passion in life, in order to push people to achieve this second level of happiness.  Once you find something that you love to do, it doesn't feel like work anymore.  This is how you get the middle part of the graph to rise up to meet the level of the weekend.  If we can discover what we love to do as our career, life becomes much easier.  Finding the portion of happiness called passion is goal that most individuals work for a long time to achieve.  Unfortunately, most wait until too late to start discovering what makes them happy.  My advice?

While you are young, have no responsibilities and have time on your hands to figure out what you want to do (university), PLEASE find your passion. It doesn't matter if your friends think that it is not "cool" or lucrative.  If you know internally that the passion you have found is something that you love, start doing it.  And once you start doing it, work as hard as you possibly can in order to be the best in the world at it. Period. 

So how can there be a level past this?  Isn't finding your passion in life the ultimate goal?  Not only have you identified what makes your emotions happy with pleasure, but now you have found a career that you have a passion for.  What else can there be?  Well, we have been very selfish up until this point. In order to reach a point where we are truly and fully happy, we must find our purpose.

Purpose

Finding your purpose in life is a very personal subject.  I can't help you find this by giving you a guideline like we can with pleasure or passion. So where do we start?  Well, just remember this statement:

Finding your passion in life means that you are part of something bigger than yourself.

Something bigger than yourself can mean a variety of things.  Being involved with charity, politics or religion are the most common versions of this. Or it can be a part of a mission that involves a huge number of people, igniting a global movement.  

Some recent examples can be Al Gore advocating for the climate crisis, inspiring millions of people to make a change in their environmental lives.  In charity, Craig and Marc Keilburger and their charity Free The Children have done some amazing things trying to solve problems that are much bigger than themselves.  In religion, I can think of no-one happier than the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. He understands that he is a part of something much bigger than himself.

Another example that we may not think of are scientists and researchers.  So many people work tirelessly to solve huge medical problems like disease, scientific problems like where the universe comes from and understanding how the brain works.  These people are working on problems that have existed since the beginning of civilization. One person can not possibly understand how the brain or universe works, yet they realize that they are a small part of a much greater purpose.

This is the reason that you see wealthy individuals turn to charity full time later in their lives. Some of them realize at one point or another that making all of their money and buying nice cars gives them pleasure, but does nothing for their legacy.  They then turn to themselves and say, "what impact have I made on the world?"  And very often that impact is very minimal as selfishness has dominated their life previously. They then work to be a part of something much bigger.

--

So through these three words we can begin to understand how to build a happiness framework for ourselves. It is not an easy task, but it is easily the most important one that we have in our lives.  After all, what is the point of living if we are not happy?

If you have made it down to the bottom of this post, thank you.  I have embedded a video below from positive psychologist Martin Seligman explaining the framework above in proper terms (I am no psychologist). It is a fantastic watch and gives interesting insight into the world and work of positive psychology.