A Harvard education. Thursday February 16, 2012

Daniel Gilbert wrote the rather good book 'Stumbling on Happiness' so I was intrigued to read an interview with him in the Harvard Business Review, (and thanks to Michael W for alerting me to it.)

In it, Gilbert talks about happiness research, but as access to it is somewhat limited I'll pass on Michael's helpful summary of his two key insights below. Here's the actual link, though:

http://bit.ly/ydoZnD

The first big observation is that being happy depends on having lots of small positive experiences, rather than a few big ones.

We tend to believe that if we won the lottery or got a great new job, our happiness quotient would leap off the scale overnight. Research suggests however that it's an aggregation of lots of smaller happy things which make us feel good.

And this is good news. It means you don't have to wait for your numbers to come up, nor for that mega-promotion. You can, instead, as Gilbert says: 'Wear comfortable shoes, give your wife (I think he means significant other) a big kiss, sneak a french fry.'

We could all do some of that today.

Michael's second nugget of wisdom is Gilbert's suggestion that mind-wandering, even onto happy subjects, is not a strictly positive thing. Most people are happiest when engaged in those activities in which their mind wanders the least.

I think it's a nice way of explaining Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of 'flow' - that an ideal state of mind occurs when we're completely immersed in some sort of enjoyable activity.

And that's another thing which, perhaps, you can do today.

Immerse yourself, avoid that wandering and sneak that french fry.

Just the one, mind you.

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