Can Work Make You Happy? Should It?
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People often ask me, does work make you happy? And the answer is it can, but we have to understand how. Itâs a real skill. The biggest mistake that people make about work and happiness is thinking that success in worldly terms is going to bring happiness, and itâs not true. The worldly success from work has to do with money and power and the admiration of other people and job titles, etc⌠A lot of people mistakenly think that those markers of success will bring happiness in its wake. In other words, be successful get happy automatically. Thatâs exactly wrong. Iâve done research for years as an economist on labor markets and the characterisctics of work and itâs true that you need to make an income where you can support yourself and your family. But that isnât happiness. Thatâs just eliminates the sources of unhappiness. To get actual happiness from work, you need to seek two things, and really two things only.
We called them earned success and service to others. Service to others is pretty self-explanatory. I can talk about that in a second. Earned success is not so much. Thatâs the opposite of what psychologists refer to as learned helplessness where nothing you do really matters, and so you kind of give up, also associated with depression, loneliness in the workplace, etc. You donât want learned helplessness. Thatâs for sure. You want earned success where you feel like youâre creating value with your life, value with you work, value in the lives of other people through your work. And itâs being knowledged and recognized. Thatâs how earned success works. Thatâs why itâs so critically important that that people who are bosses, people who are managers, that they help other people to earn their success, and they recognize the value that people are creating. Thatâs why meritocracy is so critically important for people to get actual joy from their work. The second is service to other people. You have to feel like your job matters to other people. Youâre lightening somebody elseâs load. Then youâll go to work with joy. Itâs weird that data are pretty clear that it doesnât actually matter.
To a certain extent, what the job is you know Iâve done experiments with people where they say, I feel like Iâm a drone, I feel like a cog and a machine. Theyâll do something like through the experimentation process. Theyâll start getting coffe for the people in the nuxt cubicle at two oâclock in the afternoon. You would like you could use a fresh cup of coffee. And misteriously, they start to like their jobs better. Why is that? Because weâre made to serve other people. If you can build your work into something, thatâs meaningful to you because youâre truly earning success and recognized for it and youâre serving other people. On top of that, youâre doing something youâre really good at. Workâs going to bring you joy. 100% guarantee.