Shawn Achor, Macklemore, and happiness.

Alright, I'm back.

You know, I don't know who reads this, and in a way, I don't really care. This is just a way for some thoughts to escape my moleskin journal and onto the web (because I can post pretty pictures along with it). Anyways, I'm back. 

Harvard has this thing called the Bureau of Study Council. Here's how the BSC describe themselves:

"While being a student can be exciting and rewarding, it can also be stressful.  Students often encounter challenges that test the limits of their current understandings and coping strategies.  The Bureau can help students draw upon their existing strengths and develop new ones in their efforts to live a life that feels true to the whole of who they are and honors what matters to them in life."

 As of this fall, they started this little project called "Real Talk". The purpose of this project, as advertised, is for Harvard students to come together and engage in down to earth conversations about anything. So, being the conversationalist that I am (ha!) I had to check it out.

The first time we talked about creativity. We watched a TED talk by Ken Robinson who was arguing that schools kill creativity. After the talk, ideas started being tossed around the room about what creativity is and what we thought about Robinson's argument.

The second time (yesterday), the theme was happiness. The TED talk that we watched was one by Shawn Achor, "The Happy Secret to Better Work". If you're interested, here it is:

 The interesting thing is that he was discussing Harvard students in his talk. I mean the guy graduated from there then spent quite some time working for Harvard as a councilor, he's got to know his stuff right?

So according tho Achor, as a Harvard student, no matter how happy you were when you first came in, two weeks later, your brain shifts its focus on the competition, the workload, the hassles, and the complaints.  And for the most part, it stays that way.

It is interesting how outsiders cannot grasp why a Harvard student would be unhappy. I mean, a Harvard student has access to arguably the best university library in the world, unlimited meals as an undergrad, financial aid to anyone who needs it,  beautiful campus (take Annenberg for example), and a great institution overall. So why would someone at Harvard be unhappy?

As we were discussing this in the room, two things kept coming up. Benchmarks, and expectations (which could be just one, but whatever). 

I'm going to move away from Harvard students now and just talk about this in general. From personal experience, having benchmarks that control how you act or view the world in order to reach them is misery. Note that this is different from having a goal in the sense that a benchmark usually lacks passion.  It is a form of measurement, whether it is academic, athletic, or whatever. If you fail to reach that benchmark, then there's something wrong with you, or you didn't try hard enough, or you're not good enough. And, although you'll keep trying, this just depresses the heck out of you (again, personal experience).

Macklemore has this song, Vipassana, that I think captures this pretty well:
 

"Expectations are resentments awaiting to happen" 

Going back to Achor: you expect that if you work harder, you'll be more successful. You expect that if you're more successful, you'll be happier. But in this way, you're always putting happiness on the other side of the fence. It becomes a goal rather than a state with which you live your life. 

I slightly disagree with the dude about that 10% external influence thing. I think that in many cases, external influence plays a much bigger part, but the general idea is the same. Internal influence plays a bigger part than the external part, which, I guess, explains what a lot of people find appealing in religion and spirituality. 

I'm not trying to say that people should just switch their filter through which they view the world, because it is extremely difficult (trust me, I know). But what I'm saying is that thinking of happiness as a goal rather than a state has proven unsuccessful. 

Since this is my first post in a very, very long time, I'm just going to let Achor and Macklemore do most of the talking here. But I'll be back later. 

cheer,

A