WANT SUCCESS? START WITH HAPPINESS

“I felt like I’d entered an alternate universe when I read a lengthy research paper by three of positive psychology’s top luminaries—Ed Diener, Laura King, and Sonja Lyubomirksy—called ‘The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect.’ It was the fall of 2005 when I was in the MAPP program at Penn, and I was reading more and more research that helped me to understand exactly what it takes to flourish and succeed in life. This paper, though, was a doozy, and it upended all of my previous thinking. In one of the most profound, slam-dunk findings I’ve ever read, these three researchers had parsed and reviewed hundreds of studies on success in life to discover the exact opposite of what I and many others had mistakenly believed was true: we don’t become happy after we succeed at something, but rather we succeed at something because we are happy first. Their comprehensive overview of longitudinal, qualitative, correlational, and causal studies on success in friendship, health, finance, work, and all other aspects of life helped me understand why achieving certain external goals when I was younger never made me happy for long, and had instead left me emptier than before. The grades, the awards, the schools, the scores, and the right weight never brought me the lasting satisfaction I had thought they would, and now I could see why." - Caroline Adams Miller from Getting Grit