We start from a simple but delicate question: “What do we need to be happy, and how to become happy?“.
While I personally don’t have a perfect answer to this question, I’d like to share some thoughts on the link between happiness, work, goals and management. If you’re curious, read on.
Goals and happiness
What do we need to be truly happy? The first step on the road to happiness is to focus on goals. That is, what is it that can really bring us closer to happiness?
This is not a simple task, but it answers a universal question; you will have no trouble finding hundreds of manuals and gurus that try to simplify the task with different types of suggestions.
Personally, I found interesting the methodology described by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford professors, in their book “Designing Your Life – how to build a well-lived joyful life” (which I recommend reading).
The authors start with a couple of statements:
Only 27% of college graduates in the U.S. (but I don’t expect significant differences in Europe) pursue a career inherent in their college education.
Success is not synonymous with happiness
Many people who have achieved success according to the “classic” parameters (course of study, career progression, economic stability, etc…) are not really happy or fulfilled, even in their job.
31 million Americans between the ages of 44 and 70 are looking for a new career, and they are looking for one with specific characteristics: they would like something that has personal meaning, guarantees a stable income and has a social impact.
These preliminary observations make it immediately clear that happiness, erroneously identified with elements having to do with stability, is actually something much broader, involving not only the economic/work sphere, but also and above all the personal. It is also something that is not static, but is constantly evolving along with the person him/herself.
For this reason, the authors propose a method of “life planning” intended for anyone: those who have just entered the world of studies or work, but also those who – at any age – have realized that they need to start over.
The happiness approach
The proposed approach is particularly stimulating: design thinking applied to oneself. In practice, this means making an effort to adopt certain attitudes (“mindset”) that have been identified as constructive, for example:
- Being curious and willing to experiment, trying things out in practice;
- Rethinking problems, in order to identify which are the right problems to address and solve;
- Approach the path with the awareness that it is a process and therefore it is normal to encounter setbacks, but it is essential to persist, focus on the process itself and see what happens;
- ask for help: in a “radical collaboration” perspective, the best ideas can come from other people.
Following, in a very pragmatic way, the authors define a method for the “self-assessment” of one’s own situation in four relevant dimensions: work, play, love, health… But the rest I leave to your curiosity, you can buy the book or sign up for the course at Stanford where they teach their classes.
In any case, by following this or other methods, at some point you should have a better understanding of what happiness means to you and the goals you need to move towards to achieve it.
