let’s look at happiness from a different perspective. most people see happiness as a response to good things happening; a natural assumption to make, considering that when good things happen, it makes us happy. but the evidence is piling up that happiness is also a cause of good things happening. and by ‘good thing’, i don’t mean that people smile at you more because you’re cheerful, or some other pleasant but ultimately feebly benefit. i mean a better career, more chance of finding love, better resistance to disease, and many other things.how is happiness supposed to bring success?

happiness is a signal that things are going well. you’re safe, you have access to the resources you need, and you’re making progress towards your goals - life is good. when things are good, it makes little sense to put walls around you and carefully guard everything you have (a hallmark of ‘negative’ emotions). it’s a better time to expand, take on new goals and challenges.

imagine you’re really rich. a multi-millionnaire if you like. someone comes to you with a proposal for an investment. it’ll cost you ￡10k, and it’s risky, but the return could be pretty good. do you do it? probably! ￡10k is small change to you, you wouldn’t even notice the loss. that’s an extreme example, but basically it’s a similar principle with happiness. it encourages a person to expand, because the mind thinks opportunity is knocking. therefore happy people should get more success, because their emotional state essentially makes trying to succeed more appealing.

now the researchers in this field aren’t saying that the direction of causality is only from happiness to success. this wouldn’t even logically follow. if you got some success, your resources and abundance would increase, which according to this theory is one of the reasons you get happy in the first place! so if it’s true that happiness contributes to success, it can only be true that success contributes to happiness as well. so you could get a kind of upward spiral (though other things, like adaptation, complicate the matter - see this post for more details).

this series of posts is based on a huge analysis done in 2005 (1), see the footnotes for more information on the researchers. they pulled together a huge amount of evidence together to see if this perspective on happiness holds up, and find that it does in three areas: work, love and relationships, and health. here we’ll look at work, but first let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about.what do they mean by ‘happiness’?

the definition of happiness in this study was slightly different to the one normally used in studies (life satisfaction or subjective well-being, see what is happiness?). the definition here, is the experience of frequent positive emotions, and less frequent (though not completely absent) negative emotions.

why this different definition? because in this framework, it’s positive emotion that leads us to pursue new goals and opportunities in the moment - rather than how pleased we are with life generally.

so technically they are saying that success comes from from a happy state, not a happy disposition, but, a person with a happy disposition will be in a happy state more of the time.what is success?

what do you think success is? you might see success as lots of money and a family. a man in the mursi tribe of ethiopia might see success as living to the age of thirty and marrying a woman with a 10″ ceramic plate in her lip. so success means to do well relative to the goals valued by the society you’re in.

as this study was done in the us, the researchers decided to use work, love and health as the markers of success.work

if you’re reading this from anywhere outside of a western culture, let me assure you, we love to work! well, most people complain about work, but they still get up at 7am every morning to do it. there’s very little i’d choose to get out of bed for at 7 in the morning, and yet i’ve woken up at that time and earlier, thousands of times, to go to work.