ALJ Book Club: A Summary of Freedom to Be Happy

Phelan takes us through the history of happiness, citing the work and thoughts of great people;       

• Confucius, who suggested being a good person can make us happy.
• Aristotle believed happiness depends on ourselves.
• Stoics stressed the importance of focusing on what’s within our control and accepting that we can’t control much of what happens to us. And the only way to happiness is to cease worrying about things beyond our power and will.
• Freud believed that fundamentally humans strive for happiness by trying to avoid the negative and that there is no truer happiness than when feelings are reciprocated.

Martin E.P. Seligman, The Founder of Positive Psychology suggests there are three sources of happiness – flow, meaning, and pleasure.

• Flow happens when you are enjoying work and find yourself carried in the current of your tasks
• Meaning is building a life that takes your skills and beliefs and allows you to channel them
• Pleasure comes from experiences and people in the moment

According to neuroscience, Flow, meaning, and pleasure are associated with four happy chemicals secreted in our brains. Dopamine is associated with joy and reward,  Oxytocin is with relaxation, reproduction, and bonding with children. Serotonin helps stay calm, and Endorphins are key in socialization and regulating weight and pain.

What about extrinsic influences like money, career, power, position, marriage, love, etc.?

Phelan explains that money contributes to happiness when it meets basic needs. After a certain level, more money doesn’t yield to happiness but can decrease the impact of negative circumstances. How happy your money makes you is linked to what you do with it and how you got it. As humans, no matter how much more we earn, we believe we need a little more to be happy. 

Our minds are built to get used to stuff. You are happy when you buy a new car, a new house or a new gadget but because you get used to it quickly, it fails to give us sustained happiness. It is wise to spend money on things you cannot get used to, like experiences or spending on others, or time with family and friends.

So if money cannot make us entirely happy, Is happiness something we are born with, or is it something we can work on? According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a happiness scientist, around 50% of our happiness is genetic; that is to say, half of our happiness is decided by our nature. Our environment makes up 10% of our happiness, and how we think makes up the remaining 40%.

What does this mean? It means regardless of our environments and the way we think, there is a certain level of happiness to which we are always going to return. 50% of your happiness is influenced by the fact that your mind has certain genes and will release certain hormones to keep you at a specific level of happiness.

Now environmental factors like a bigger home, money, car, job, nice things, marital status, kids, etc., influence happiness only about 10%. The irony is we worry about these the most.

The crux is in the final 40%, which is how we think. This is where we have control and can improve our happiness. It is something we can work towards. 

Happiness is not a fluffy metric

According to Phelan, “Engineers were the unhappiest employees in the world, a miserable bunch until COVID came along, and that the isolation of home working turned them into jolly hermits.” On the other hand, Sigal Barsade, a professor at Wharton Business School, showed the importance of Emotional Contagion, where one person’s mood can affect the whole team and thereby impact everything from processes, outcomes, and customer attitudes. Happy employees are more productive and creative but what makes them happy are three components: motivation, speaking up & being included in decision-making, and advocacy. Barsade proved that making your employees happy can also make your customers happier.

As an entrepreneur, Matt Phelan offers to help anyone who needs to create a business case for happiness. He believes he has first-hand experience to say happiness isn't a fluffy metric and can drive a business and has successfully scaled it across 90+ countries. 

He challenges the famous quote, "If you can measure it, you can manage it," and calls out that it doesn't apply to people. Instead, he rewords it to, “If you can measure it, you can understand it and therefore make better decisions.”

Leadership has a role in building happy work cultures

“Happiness” is a ‘heart state and “meaning” is a brain or mind state. When they merge, we achieve a "thriving' state that’s far more superior than each by itself. Each employee in thriving states can create the thriving culture all want to be part of where there are guidelines not rules, learning, mutual respect and the freedom to be one’s own self. And the first step to increasing happiness of employees is to reflect on how happy you are yourself as a leader. 

Matt calls this the Quantum way. The central core concept is that we are all energetic beings who will connect with a purpose and channel our energies toward creating fields of meaning to achieve the purpose because we want to, not because we have to. Quantum organizations are built on talent and collaboration, where the structure is light and flexible to create agility and autonomy. And as leaders who are custodians of the vision and the nurturer of these values, can we prioritize the happiness of human beings and keep it at the front and center of workplaces?

There is enough evidence to support the idea that If we are willing to invest in humanizing our cultures by reuniting the heart and the brain, company growth and profit will be a definitive by-product. When people feel happy and safe, they can use their energies and commitment to find meaning, eventually increasing company profit. This has been proven by Alex Edmans, who studied the relative performance of the companies that invest in their workplaces versus those that do not. He looked at 100 best companies to work for in the US and found over a 28-year period, their stock returns beat their peers by 2.3 to 3.8% per year or 89 - 184% cumulative. This holds across industries and all levels and functions

Conclusion

Long-term, sustainable happiness can drive organizations forward, and hence happiness is not a fluffy metric. Leaders need to focus on their personal well-being, knowing that building happy cultures always starts with them, and with them — they can keep building on success.

Because happiness is intrinsic, each of you has a choice to be happy by thinking differently and leveraging neuroscience to your advantage. The happiness chemicals can be produced by spending time on activities that one enjoys, like art, music, and experiences; spending time in the sun (Vitamin D is called the Happy hormone for a reason); exercising, sleeping, and eating as healthy as possible. Practice self-care, mindfulness, savoring (reliving happy experiences repeatedly), and writing a gratitude journal. There is evidence that if you wrote down five things you are grateful for every day for four weeks, your happiness would improve by 50%. Build real connections with people — sharing, celebrating small wins, and helping others bring happiness into our lives.

Make everyday living a happy one. Be Happy; Stay Blessed.