The Pursuit of Happiness
After reading my friend Kat Wong’s blog on the TEDtalk “The Happy Secret to Better Work“, (check out her summary and thoughts here) I was inspired to check out the video. I was impressed with the speaker, Sean Achor, who was both funny and engaging, but I think that he misses a few key points in discussing the psychology behind productivity.
Achor posits that we need to “reverse the formula for success”, as our current understanding is hard work leads to productivity, which in turn leads to success, leading to happiness. Achor instead argues that employees that are happy in the first place will be more productive. In all honesty this seems like relatively simplistic reasoning to me which does not take in to account the complexity for human motivation.
Achor speaks to how, once we achieve the first ‘bar’ of success we set for ourselves, we tend to push expectations higher and remain unsatisfied. Though he may view this continuous goal setting negatively, I tend to consider this in a more positive light. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite movies, The Pursuit of Happyness:
“It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”It is impossible to define happiness, because it’s so specific to each individual. We can and should, as Kat points out, try and find happiness where we can in the little everyday things, but the bigger happinesses, especially in the workplace, are never truly satisfied.
What I would argue to Mr. Achor is this: Happiness can never fully be realized by anyone at any one moment in every sphere of their lives, and, if it is realized, that is no cause for joy. With the absence of something to strive for, we lose touch with the human condition of a constant struggle. For a company hoping to motivate employees, giving them comfort through things like benefits, positive office culture and incentives is a way to engender loyalty but, more than that, you need to give employees something to work for, whether it’s a social impact or a higher position.
To close, a quote from Sean Achor:
“If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average.”
Words to live by.