Cultivate happiness

There have been a lot of studies over the past few years that conclude happiness can be learned, and that a happy, optimistic person (are you ready for this?) has a happier life. As a happy, optimistic person myself, I have noticed that many of the conclusions of the various studies are validated by my own life. My first response to a situation is a positive one, and I have cultivated this habit for years. For example, I was working as a consultant for a managed health care firm in the late 1990s. One of the other consultants and I were in a meeting where the firm’s Vice President said, “I’ll leave the production of the federal proposal entirely to Christie and Erica.” After the meeting, Christie was furious. “We have no support from top management here,” she said to our boss, who promptly asked me for my impression. “The Vice President has such confidence in us,” I replied. “That she is leaving the project to us to manage.” Who was right in their interpretation—me or Christie? And who cares? My interpretation was empowering, optimistic, and we wrote a winning proposal. If we’d succumbed to Christie’s view, both the process and outcome could have been miserable.

Another way I live my life in a happy state is that I learned from my parents to be nice to people. Richard Layard, a British economist, looked at the relationship of happiness to wealth, and concluded that “in rich societies [like the U.S. and the U.K.], what really affects happiness is the quality of personal relationships. Always at the top comes the quality of family life or other close personal relationships . . . and then comes relationships with friends and strangers in the street” (Setting Happiness as a National Goal,” The Futurist, July-August 2007). We have control over our relationships—over whether we are kind to our editor, over whether we are nice to our spouse/other, and over whether we treat the waitstaff as if they were our friends or as if they were robots not worthy of our smile. Marty Nemko, a columnist for Kiplinger’s, suggested that his readers be nice to others. Nemko wrote, “Thousands of scientists spend their entire lives in search of a cure for cancer to no avail. Thousands of social and government agencies try to make a dent in society's ills with little to show for their efforts. But simply being kind to as many people as possible guarantees that you will at least slightly improve the lives of everyone you meet (http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2007/01/nemko.html ). I will add that you will also be a happier person yourself.