[MUSIC PLAYING] RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Thank you
very much for inviting me over to Google. This is like coming
back home for me because I got my PhD at
NYU, not so far from here. I used to come over to
Chelsea to go for a run and generally hang out. And I see that it's really
kind of different now. Lots of new things. But it's nice to come back. So I have about 50 minutes. And in these 50 minutes,
I want to really focus on three big questions,
which I think will be of interest to you guys. It's of interest to
most people in the world because most people are
interested in happiness. And after that, we'll
take the questions. The three topics I
want to talk about are-- one is something called
the functionality of happiness. And I'll define what that means
and talk a little bit about it. The second question is the
definition and measurement of happiness. And the third question
is, what does it take to lead a happy and
fulfilling life, which is, of course, the big question. Everyone's really interested
in knowing the answers to that. But I think it's important to
start with some setup topics, and one of those setup topics
is functionality of happiness. Most of us think of happiness
as being a very important goal. And there have been some
surveys done around the world. One survey looked at, I think,
about 10,000 respondents from 48 different countries. And these respondents had to
rate different life goals-- making money, being successful,
being smart, being close to god-- all right-- happiness. And happiness came out as
number one in the survey. More important than making
money, more important than being smart and
successful, et cetera. On par with it was
relationships-- maintaining good relationships. But it's very, very important. Happiness is important. And the reason
why it's important is because it just
feels good, right? I mean, you don't have to
explain why it's important. It's just nice to feel happy. It's axiomatic almost. But what the research in
the last about 15, 20 years has discovered is that it's
also useful to be happy. So I'm going to talk about
three ways in which it's useful to be happy. One way is that happier
people are healthier. Happier people have better
functioning immune systems, better functioning
cardiovascular systems, better functioning
respiratory systems. So you tend to live
longer if you're happier. In the context of
work, what that means is that you tend
to show up for work more often if you're happier. There was a study
done where they looked at happy and unhappy
employees in the United States. And the happier employees
showed up for work 16 more days in a year. I don't know how it's at Google. Maybe you guys get a
little more vacation time than most other people get. But on average, people get
about two weeks off in the US, which is 10 working days. If you are unhappy, you're
taking another 1 and 1/2 times that to be missing from work. That's a significant amount. I'll give you a synopsis
of a brief study done on happiness and longevity. This was done with nuns up in
a monastery in Massachusetts. This is a 100-year-old study. They looked at these
nuns' whole life. They categorized these nuns into
the happy nuns, medium happy nuns, and unhappy nuns. And the way they did it was by
looking at the journal entries that these nuns had made when
they entered the monastery. It was mandatory to
maintain a journal. And so everybody's
happiness was recorded when they entered the monastery. And the happy nuns had
written things like, oh, I'm so happy to be here. This is where I wanted
to be since there was an eight-year-old
girl, and I'm one with god, with my sisters,
doing the kinds of things I wanted to do,
eating healthy food, listening to these
spiritually uplifting talks, and so on and so forth. The unhappy nuns said
things like, this is kind of boring out here. Life out there is a
little more exciting. But I don't know,
I'm stuck here. I don't really know how to make
my way through life outside. It's too chaotic out there. But this is not nice. I mean this is boring. But anyway, I'll just bide
my time here-- that kind of a thing. Medium happy nuns
were in between. And they looked at how long
these nuns ended up living. On average, these nuns ended
up living about 85 years old. So that's a lot. That's six, seven,
eight years more than the average American lives. So if your only aim is to
live a really long life, then you might want to
consider becoming a nun. But the really big
theme-- interesting theme that emerged from this was
that the happiest group of nuns outlived the least happy group
of nuns by a whopping 11 years. 11 years-- that's a huge amount. If you think about
some things that have a negative effect
on our longevity like smoking a whole
pack of cigarettes a day is going to rob you of
three years of your life. Drinking a whole bottle of
whiskey every single day-- I don't know if
anyone does that. [LAUGHTER] Will kill you about
seven years earlier. So happiness is smoking plus
drinking plus another year. You can look at it that way. I know that one of you is from
the McCombs School of Business. And some of my
students there asked me at this point, Professor
Raj-- a tentative hand goes up and says, I derive
a lot of happiness from smoking and drinking. [LAUGHTER] I don't know if you can
really be sustainably happy drinking one whole bottle
of whiskey every day and smoking a whole
pack of cigarettes. The next day you do pay for it. That's been my
experience at least. So anyway, so it
doesn't work that way. But anyway, so the
idea is that happiness is important for
health, and that's important in
organizational contexts because that means
that you're going to show up for work more often. Happier people are
more collegial. That's another reason why
happiness is functional. If you ask yourself
this question, who would I rather
team up with, somebody who is happy, supportive,
optimistic, resilient, hopeful, sees the lighter side of
things, builds on your ideas rather than shooting it
down right off the bat, et cetera, or somebody who is a
wet blanket, who is pessimistic and is generally negative? Obviously, you'd rather team up
with somebody who's positive. And I think our instinct
is that that is going to be more productive for me. Not just it's going to be
more emotionally palatable. It's also going to be
professionally more productive to team
up with somebody who is positive and happy. And that's, in fact, being
shown in the research as well. Happier teams outperform less
happy teams, particularly in the long run. You might be able to rely
on some of the adrenaline, and insecurity and
negativity to get work done in the short term. But in the long
term, happier people, happier teams are
more productive. A third way in which
happiness is functional is that happier people
individually-- not in teams-- individually they're
more creative and they're more objective. I have a study on objectivity--
happiness and objectively. Happier people are more capable
of taking in negative feedback. And it makes sense. If you're unhappy,
your immediate concern is how do I get out of this? How do I-- I'm in a hole, how
do I get out of this? So they want to take care
of their own emotionality. They want to get to
a state of neutrality at least before they can
really look at the world and say, OK, what
are the problems? How can I tackle them? Their negativity is a big
problem for them at that point. But if you're happy,
you're much more likely to rise up, and
look at the long term, and look at what's good for
you, good for the planet, and so on and so forth. And that's been shown
in the research as well. There is a researcher,
in particular, at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by the name
of Barbara Fredrickson. She's got a theory called
broaden and build theory. Broaden and build theory. And what she argues is,
particularly in the long run, if you're consistently
happy, you're more likely to have a lot
more tools in your toolkit so to speak and you're
broader in your approach. And the way it
works is like this-- so imagine that
you're on vacation-- let's say you land
up in Mumbai, India. Anybody been to India? OK, lots of hands. You're there and let's say
that it's been a great flight, you got upgraded to business
class, you slept well, and you had a pleasant
conversation with the person next to you-- whatever. You're feeling fresh. You land in India and
you're not jet-lagged. That's one scenario. In another scenario,
everything went bad. You missed your flight. And you land in India,
and the bags got lost and you're now going to have
to wait for another half a day or something before the
bags show up at your hotel. And the hotel tells you,
no, we can't check you in because the
rooms are all gone. And you're feeling-- you have
a headache too on top of it. So in which of
these two scenarios are you more likely
to be exploratory? You look at a cute
little Queen Street and you look at all the shops. Oh, wow, they're selling
rugs, how beautiful. When are you more
likely to venture down that alley, and look at all
the things on offer and sample them? Obviously, when you're
in a positive mood. So that's what's called
a broadening aspect of positivity. When you are negative, you're
more narrow in your focus. There was a "Time" magazine
cover in 2003 or 2004 that had a side by side
picture of a happy brain and a stressed-out brain. An fMRI image of a happy brain
and a stressed-out brain. And the happy brain
was lit up all around. Lit up-- what I mean by that
is that all parts of the brain were active. Oxygen was flowing to
all parts of the brain. The unhappy brain-- only what's
called the limbic system, the oldest part of our
brain that we borrowed from our reptilian ancestors. The limbic system is
very good at making black or white decisions. Should I fight? Should I flee? Those kind of decisions
you're probably better off being stressed out. That's your job if
you're in the military and you have to figure out
should I fight, should I run. You're better off being
stressed out perhaps. But what this "Time"
magazine article-- what it talked about was
that when you're happier, all parts of your
brain are active. It's almost like a physical
metaphor for this idea that you're able to draw
from all your experiences in order to come to a decision
when you're in a happy mood. So if your job involves
making subtle decisions, making decisions in teams,
convincing other people, those are pretty creative tasks. They call for a lot in order
to persuade other people and so on. You're much better off
being a happier person than being an unhappy person. You're more creative and
you're more objective. So you put all this
together, happier people are more healthy, show
up for work more often. They're more collegial,
perform better in teams. They're more creative. They're more objective. You would expect that happier
people earn more money. Do you think that's true? Indeed, it turns out happier
people earn more money. On average, happier
people earn about 32% more than less happy people. There was a study done
in which they followed these undergraduate students
over a period of 60 years and they measured
their happiness first when they entered the
undergraduate college. And I'll talk about happiness
measurement in a little bit. And they looked at
how much they earned. They divided these students
based on their happiness levels into five quintiles--
five 20% groups. And the most happy quintile,
the most happy 20%, earned 32% more than the
least happy quintile. So those of you who
are parents, we often worry about this idea of we
want our kids to be successful. Of course, we want
them to be happy. But we want them
to be successful and we think that success is
going to lead to happiness. So that's why we want
them to be successful. In fact, I think
there's more evidence for the diverse
direction of causality. That happiness is a more
reliable determinant of success than is success a
determinant of happiness. In fact, success can often
undermine your happiness for a variety of reasons. And there's an excellent
book on the topic, happened to be written by me. [LAUGHTER] And the book is titled,
"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?" It's meant for people who are
achievement-oriented like you guys, but sometimes we let
our smartness and our success come in the way of our
own happiness, which is like shooting
ourselves in the foot. We want success because
it's going to make us happy, we think. But then we end up
adopting a certain set of mindsets and things like that
that undermine our happiness. So that's one big topic I wanted
to talk about-- functionality of happiness. If you have any questions,
if they are clarification questions, please ask them now. Otherwise, save
them till the end. I'd be happy to answer them. Second big topic-- measurement
and definition of happiness. So let me talk about
definition of happiness. A lot of people object
to the term happiness, including Barbara
Fredrickson that I talked about some time
back-- this broaden and build theory person. So she prefers the
word positivity because she thinks
happiness is too frivolous. It's that smiley face. That's like pretending
as if you're happy, or at best it's going
to be ephemeral, it's not going to last
for a very long time. She'd much rather
have something that's more long-lasting, like
fulfillment, or meaning, or peace, or tranquility,
contentment and so on. I'm using happiness
here as a short word to represent all
of these things. So think of happiness
in my parlance as an umbrella term that
captures not just pleasure, which we know is temporary. When you eat something good,
for example-- things like that. But also positivity--
all the positive emotions that you can think
of, like love, and tranquility, peace, humor,
laughter, interest, awe, gratitude, hope, serenity. There's like maybe 20 of those. So all of those but
also some things that are actually a
little more complex. So meaning-- let's talk about
this thing called meaning. What I refer to as meaning
is the satisfaction you derive from doing
good to other people. I think that everybody
in this world, most human beings, unless you're
a sociopath or a psychopath, actually, you're going
to derive positivity from helping other people. And we know this
from our experience with our own immediate kith
and kin, our own family, our own close friends. But our capacity to be
nice to other people is actually universal,
I would say. And it's partly because
of our hard-wiring. We have something
called mirror neurons which help us put ourselves
in other people's shoes. If you think about it,
it's actually strange that you walk into
a movie theater and you watch to people who
you did not know from Adam, who you know are acting out roles-- it's not even their real life. And you watch that and you
get so moved that you come out all teary-eyed. They are so much in love. They had so much opposition. But in the end, they
overcame all that. And now they're together. And you want to be that agent
of goodness and kindness after you see a movie like that. So that feeling of
love that you see is because of those
mirror neurons. It's an artificial setup. You know that going in and yet
you can't help but be moved. That's because of
mirror neurons. That's a hint at our capacity
for being loving, kind, generous, and so on. And that feeling
that you experience when you see two
other people being nice to each other and
that feeling of warmth-- warm, fuzzy feeling--
that's called elevation. It's called elevation. And often it's
associated with behaviors that you might think are not
really indicative of happiness. You might actually
be tearing up. You might actually have
a lump in your throat. You might be breathing
a little bit heavily. To an external observer, you
might not look very happy. But inside you know that
this is a nice feeling. It's a warm feeling. This is a feeling
of expansiveness. This is a feeling of wanting
to do good to the world. That's in a huge
category of happiness for us this thing
called meaning-- that I'm going to
call meaning-- which is being nice to
other people makes you feel really expansive,
makes you feel really good. And sometimes in the process
of being nice to other people, you might have to go through
displeasure or unhappiness or yourself. For example, there
was a time when this thing happened
that I was with my son at an airport in India. And it was 3:00 AM and
flights had gotten canceled. And we were both really hungry
and we went to this cafeteria. There was just one samosa left. And I was super hungry,
but he was hungry too. And I bought it and
I gave it to him. And I was actually happy
seeing him be happy. Even though I'd
extended my displeasure, it made me happier
at a higher level. So I'm deriving
meaning out of this act even though it's
prolonging my displeasure. There's also another
category called-- what I call purpose-- which is doing something that's
so intrinsically motivating for you that you
lose track of time. You get so involved in the
activity, so immersed in it, that you lose all
self-consciousness. That you and the
activity become one. You might look at the watch
after three hours of doing that and say, wow, like
three hours passed by. How did it-- how
did that happen? So these are called flow states. And they evoke a huge
sense of purpose in us. So when I talk
about happiness, I'm talking about not just
pleasure, not just positivity, I'm also talking about
meaning and purpose. And in particular, it turns
out meaning and purpose are super important if you
want to be happy at work. Obviously pleasure is
important, but pleasure can't last for a very long time. Positive emotions are
important, but they tend to have a
shorter shelf-life as well, especially things
like hubristic pride that you get from comparing
yourself to other people and thinking you're
superior to them. That doesn't last very long. But meaning and purpose
has the potential to last a really long time. And so if you are hoping to be
happy at work on a sustained basis, then you need to
focus on meaning and purpose, it turns out. So I talked about this
idea that I want to-- I'd like to cover a little bit
on the topic of measurement of happiness. So in the research,
people recognize the difference between
pleasure and positivity, which tends to not last very long,
and purpose and meaning that tends to be more
sustained, more long-lasting. And so they measured
two kinds of happiness. One is called
experienced happiness, which is what you're
going through right now. And they also measured what's
called reflective happiness, which is all things considered
if I were to take a step back on my life, even though I might
be suffering from a headache right now, somebody
might have shouted at me, I might be stressed out because
I missed a train or whatever, but overall, all
things considered, is my life going in
the right direction? Are my career prospects good? Do I have enough
of a bank balance? Do I have good relationships
with people who matter? That's called
experienced happiness. And it turns out it's
experienced happiness, which is a bigger predictor
of all these things that I talked about earlier-- better health, better
teamwork, and creativity, and objectivity and so on. So it's very important to focus
on both meaning and purpose, but not, of course, sacrifice
pleasure and positivity. Those are important too. But if you had to
choose between them, I'd rather that you choose
meaning and purpose rather than those two. All right. So with that setup, let me
talk about the big question, which is what does
it take to lead a happy and fulfilling life? And this is a question that
has, of course, been very, very important for eons. The Buddha famously
left his kingdom in order to search the
answer for this question. Aristotle has been
interested in it. You name it. Everyone's been
interested in it. I think we live in a
very, very lucky time now, because in the
last about 20 years, there's been concerted
effort to figure out the answer to that
question, particularly in this field called
positive psychology. Right now we have
over 100,000 papers that have been written
on the topic of what leads to happiness. And so we can say that we have
a lot of scientific evidence and backing for many of
the conclusions that have been derived from the research. So I have about 20 minutes
to talk to you about a topic that I spend typically
40 hours talking about in my regular
semester-long classes. So this is going to be a very
high level bird's eye picture that I'm going to give you. So I would say if you look
at the research on the topic and you take a step
back, you would conclude that five things are very,
very important if you want to be happy in life. The very first thing is that
your basic needs are met. This is a no-brainer, of course. That if you don't have an idea
of where your next meal is going to come from, if you
don't have enough money to pay for medical needs, if you
don't have money to buy a home or rent a home to have
a roof over your head, if you don't have
money for clothing, basic things,
transportation, education, you're not going to be happy. Lots of evidence for this. If you look at the poorest
countries in the world, they tend to be
countries in which a huge critical mass
of people are suffering from lack of basic needs. If you look at the happiest
countries in the world, which tend to be the Scandinavian
countries, most of the people there have access
to all basic needs. And that's a big reason why
they are the happiest countries in the world. I'm not necessarily
recommending that we move to a socialist system,
but if you can somehow cater to a large majority
of people's basic needs, then you'd boost the happiness
of the citizens of the country. The second thing that's
very, very important-- you all look like your basic
needs are more than covered. So I'm going to move on to
the other four determinants. The middle three determinants-- I refer to them with a mnemonic. I'm from the business
school, the McCombs School of Business in
University of Texas at Austin. So the mnemonic is MBA. I jokingly say you need
an MBA to be happy. [LAUGHTER] But here the MBA is not
what you think it is. The M refers to Mastery. It refers to this idea that
you can't really be happy-- solidly happy-- unless you feel, you
know what, I'm really good at doing this one thing. Maybe I'm not quite
a master at it, but I'm progressing
towards mastery. I'm making strides
on everyday basis. Slowly, but surely, I'm
becoming better and better at doing this one thing. Now, what that one
thing is, is going to differ by people
depending on your interests, depending on your education,
opportunities, and so on. But you need to have
something that you're good at. And I would say that it would
be a huge shame if you're not progressing towards
mastery at work. Why do I say this? I say this because we spend
about 80,000 to 100,000 of our life at
work, which is twice the amount of time
of our waking life that we spend in
our personal life. Think about it. We actually spend
more time-- twice more time with our
colleagues and co-workers, and yes, our bosses, than we do
with our family, and our pets and kids. So that's a huge amount of time. And this is the context--
work is the context in which you're actually incentivized
and given resources-- there's no conflict
of interest here-- to progress towards mastery. You're given money,
you're given training, you're given resources,
time, help, support, in order to become better at what you
do, more skilled at what you do. So if you're not progressing
towards mastery at work, then you are really sacrificing
a huge source of happiness. Why is this mastery important? It turns out it's important
for a variety of reasons. We get to experience
these flow states that I talked about where
we lose track of time and that turns out to be
very, very meaningful. One of the big reasons
why it's meaningful is because when you experience
flow states on a regular basis, you have the answer to one
of life's biggest questions, which is what is
my purpose in life? What is my purpose in life? Why was I put on Earth for, not
what is the purpose of life. That's a different question. But what is my purpose in life? You know the answer
to this question if you're progressing
towards mastery and if you're
experiencing flow states. Another reason flow states
and mastery is important is because other
people like you more when you're good
at doing something, particularly if
you're humble about it and you're not bragging, and
chest thumping and all that. So lots of reasons why mastery
is very, very important and lots of studies show that. That's M. B is Belonging. Belonging refers to this idea
that you have at least one really deep connection
with someone or the other. There was a study done
and the eventual paper was called "Very Happy People." So not a very scientific
name for a study. And they looked at the top
10% of the happiest people in the study among
the participants. And these people,
these happiest 10% had a variety of characteristics
that were highly correlated-- significantly
correlated, I should say. They tended to live in
smaller cities like Austin rather than bigger
cities like New York. They tended to be, believe
it or not, more religious than less religious. But they also tended to--
if they were religious, they tended to believe--
the happier people tended to believe in a loving god
as opposed to a punitive god. So maybe spiritual
is a better word. They tended to be more
extroverted rather than introverted. And so there were lots
of things that were correlated with being happier-- real correlations. But there was one trait
that every single last one of the top 10% of
the people had. So it is no longer now a
statistical correlation. It was 100%. You had to have this
quality if you belonged-- if you were to belong to the
top 10% of the happiest people. And this quality was that
every last one of them had at least one really
intimate relationship. Someone that they
could fully depend on, they could call this
person up if they ever ran into any emergency,
and that person would have no
hesitation in jumping to this person's rescue. They could let their hair
down, be themselves, not fear that they would
be judged, et cetera. So you need to
ask yourself, do I have such a person in my life? Again, I mean, maybe
it's ideal if that person were to be your spouse
given the amount of time that we spend with our spouses. But 80% of the people who
had that kind of relationship actually named a same-gender
friend rather than their spouse. So friends are very, very
important it turns out. There's a line from the
paper that I've actually memorized because I
think it really captures the essence of that finding. And the line is, "If you
aspire to belong to the very happiest group of people-- if you aspire to belong to the
very happiest group of people, then having a sense of
intimacy is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity." "Having a sense of intimacy
is no longer a luxury. It's a necessity." So you need to ask yourself,
is that true for me? And if you do want to be
in the happiest group, then you need to have
that sense of intimacy. The opposite of
that is loneliness. If you're lonely, you don't even
have even a single person to-- forget about intimacy--
to even understand you, to even hang out
with you, to go out and have a drink with you, to
go and share a dinner with you and so on. And loneliness is one of the
biggest epidemics in the United States right now. I don't know if
you guys know this. There's a very good book
that came out on the topic about four years back. If you think you
might be lonely or you know somebody who is
lonely, I would highly recommend this book. It's called "Loneliness,"
by a guy called Cacioppo-- John Cacioppo. All right. So I talked about M,
mastery, B, belonging. And before that, I
talked about basic needs. We want to think about happiness
as a mansion or a palace. You can think of basic
needs as the foundation. You need-- without that, forget
about building a mansion. You need that as a foundation. And then comes mastery
which is a pillar. Almost like a Greek,
Roman, or whatever. A big, fat pillar. And then the second
one is belonging, which I talked about. The third one is autonomy,
which is freedom, which is control, which is
leading the life that you want to lead. This is where money
comes in so handy, because if you have
a lot of money, then you can do the
things you want to do. You can live in the kind of
house you want to live in. You can decorate
like you want to. You can go on vacations. You can eat the kind
of food you want to, and so on and so forth. You can free up time too. You can outsource the chores
that you don't like to do. That's where money
comes in handy. But money only takes you so far. Now, I'll give you some evidence
of the importance of autonomy. I'm going to talk about two
studies, one done with rats. And this study-- in
this study, the rats were divided into three groups. Two groups of rats
got to do coke-- not Pepsi-Co Coke, cocaine coke. [LAUGHTER] And one group was
the control group of rats that did
not get to do coke. They were all lab rats
living out their lives in the cages in a lab. Now, I'm against animal
studies, by the way. But this study we learned
something important, which is why I am talking about it. So the two groups of
rats that got to do coke, they were different in one way. One group-- let's
call it group A-- had control over when and
how much coke they did. Group B, on the
other hand, did not have control over these things. So every rat in group B was
tethered to a rat in group A. And whenever the partner in
group A decided to do coke, at that very moment, this
rat which was paired up with this rat in
group B would also get the coke in
the same quantity. All right. So this rat in
group B might have been ready to go to sleep,
or have a chat with a friend, or eat, or what have
you, and all of a sudden it would be high
without knowing why, because its partner
in group A decided to get high at that point. All right. Was it clear? So they looked-- two themes
emerged from the study. The first theme is that
doing drugs is bad for you. [LAUGHTER] Doing hard drugs is bad for you. You're going to die
an earlier death. All right. So the control group
of rats outlived the experimental group. But the second
theme that emerged, which is the more important
one, the one which is more insightful is that
even if you do something that's bad for you, it's better to have
control over when and how much you do it. So the groups in-- the rats in group
A which had control over when and how
much coke they did, outlived the rats in group B. Another study that I want
to very quickly talk about was done with human beings. 1977 is when it came
out-- the paper. They went to his old
age home and they divided the residents of the
old age home into two groups. One group of these
old age home residents had control over seemingly
trivial decisions. What movies to watch
over the weekend? What plants to
grow in the rooms? Two very, very trivial
decisions you might think. Not to do-- nothing to do
with medical attention, and who gets to visit them,
and so on and so forth. Those are much more
important decisions. Very trivial decisions. So one group got control
over which movies to watch. And you have to remember,
the 1970s, there's no iPad. Things were in black
and white back then. People-- I'm just kidding
about the black and white. We still had color. But people would
watch these movies in a common room like this. It would be screened
on a big screen. Everybody would be together
in this big room and watch it. So you had to actually make
a choice of which movies to watch. It wasn't the case
that you had an iPad, you can just press the
movie and watch it. So it was in a group decision. And the group that got to
make the decision may choose, let's say, "Dumb and
Dumber" or some movie like that and the other--
everyone else had to watch it. And also, similarly, the plant. One group had a choice. I want to grow a cactus. I want to grow this or that. And the other group
was just given a plant. This is the plant
you're going to grow. They came back a
year and a half later and every three
months in between and measured the psychological
stress and happiness levels of these old
age home residents. And they were completely
taken aback by the results. The group that had control
over these trivial decisions reported significantly
higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress
than did the other group. And not just that. The mortality rate in the
group that did not have control was twice that of the
group that had control. Now, even in the group that
had control, 15% of them had passed away in
1 and 1/2 years, which you might think is high. Which is high really
for the average person, but remember this
was an old age home. They were living out the last
few years of their lives. But in the group that
did not have control, it was as high as 30%. And they were surprised
by these results so they replicated it in
another country-- in the United Kingdom-- and found
the same results. All right. So if you have old
people living with you, it's very important to give
them a sense of autonomy, a sense of freedom, because it
can be a huge source of stress. They are already losing autonomy
over their physical body. Incontinence and things
like that might happen. But on top of
that, if they don't have psychological
autonomy, that can really be really detrimental
to their psychological health. All right. So I talked about
basic needs, MBA. I want to talk about the
last thing for about five, seven minutes, and then I'm
going to take questions. I'm going to ask
Ahsan, my partner. We just launched a course
literally three days back on edX. Are you guys familiar with edX-- Coursera edX. It's a free course. It's called "Happier
Employees and Return On Investment" course. Because a lot of people
think happiness is a luxury, but it actually has huge
impact on your bottom line as well, which is why
we want to promote it. It's totally free for
you guys to take it, unless you want a certificate. If you want a certificate,
then you pay $49. But if you're really
interested in the topic, I really urge you to take it. Even if I say so myself, I think
it's a well-produced course. It's pretty good. And he's done an excellent
job with the website. He's going to show you a
couple of features of it in just a minute. All right. So let me talk about
the last thing. It's called abundance culture-- abundance mindset when it
comes to an individual, which is a huge determinant
of happiness. So I characterize the
mindset that people have as coming in two main flavors. I call it as abundance
mindset and scarcity mindset. A person with a scarcity
mindset believes deep down that life is a zero-sum game. For me to win, somebody
else has to lose. Because they operate
with that assumption, they tend to display
a few characteristics. They tend to be
more self-centered. They tend to be more vigilant,
untrusting of other people, a kind of holding mentality,
very vigilant, and so on and so forth. The person with an
abundance mindset, by contrast, feels
that everybody can win. My success doesn't have to
come at a cost to your success. In fact, if you're in
the same organization, then my success will actually
boost your chances of success. Everybody's boats gets
lifted up by the tide kind of an attitude. So an abundance-minded
person is like somebody who's going through life as
if it were a rock concert. Have you been to Austin
City Limits, anybody? If you've been to it,
then it's like being at Austin City Limits. If you're there, and you're
watching a band play, and you look at the other person
and they're going like yeah. You won't go like, how
come this person is happy? How come I'm not happy? You're going yeah,
yeah, that's awesome. I mean, so basically
it's a little bit of this emotional
contagion that goes on. That positivity flows
from other people to you rather than making
you feel threatened by other people's successes. So no prizes for guessing
which of these two mindsets is better for your happiness. Obviously, it's the
abundance mindset. But what's really
surprising to a lot of people is that the abundance
mindset is also better for you for your success-- your chances of
conventional success. You're not only
likely to be happier. You're likely to
earn more money, make more progress
in your career, and achieve more status,
and so on and so forth. Why is that? So if you want to
explore this topic, I recommend this book
called "Give and Take" by Adam Grant, who talks about
three categories of people-- givers, matchers, and takers. Givers are
abundance-minded people. Takers are
scarcity-minded people. Matchers are most of us most of
the time who are a mix of both. And what he finds is that
givers rise up to the top. There's a disproportional
representation of givers at the very
top of organizations. And we think that in order
to rise to the very top, you have to be a
bit of an asshole. You have to be willing to
tread on other people's toes, and be unethical, and cut
corners, and be self-centered, be a little bit
Machiavellian even, mean. But it turns out
that's not true. It might have been true in the
past, maybe in military setups and so on. But in the kind of
world we live in, we inhabit, in the kind
of jobs that we hold, it turns out that
you're much better off being an
abundance-minded giver than to be a
scarcity-minded taker. I can't walk you through all the
logic of why that's the case, but just to give you a short
synopsis of the reasons why it's because people
remember what you did and how you made them feel. And so you build for
yourself pools of goodwill if you're consistently
operating from abundance than if you're operating
from scarcity and people remember it. And so when it comes time for
you to be promoted, et cetera, they will come and support you. So it's because of that network
that you create for yourself in a highly
interconnected world, that abundance-minded
people have a higher chance of success. Two things that I'm going
end with-- actually, I'll end with one thing and then
I'll ask Ahsan to come over. And hopefully, the second
thing that I want to talk about will come up in the
Q&A. The one thing that I'll end with is that I
often get asked this question. Which of these five determinants
that you've talked about-- the basic needs, an MBA,
and then abundance mindset-- is the most important? And I say it's probably
the abundance mindset. I'll tell you why. Because you could
have everything that you ever needed in life. Basic needs are
more than fulfilled. Huge amounts of progression
towards mastery. You are an acknowledged leader
of your domain or your field. You have lots of fame. You have lots of belonging. You have autonomy,
everything going on. But if you have a scarcity
narrative in your head, you're not going to be happy. There was a study
that came out in 2014. It was summarized in
the "Atlantic Magazine." And you can Google it. It's called, "Secret
Fears of the Super Rich." "Secret Fears of
the Super Rich." In order to be a
participant in that study, you needed to have
$25 million invested in various financial
instruments, hedge funds, and so on and so forth. This is not counting your
mansion, and your yacht, and your car, and your
house, and everything. $25 million-- solid
money invested in things. And many of them had more. This was the minimum
qualification to enter as a
participant in the study. And they asked them, what
are your biggest fears? We all look at you and think
you must be supremely-- you can do whatever you want. You must be ecstatic. Every day must be like yay. [LAUGHTER] So they said, no, no,
no, to the contrary. And their two biggest fears--
one of them was justifiable, I think, is that
they were worried about what would
happen to the money when the children
took over the money. They thought that the children
were spoiled brats, which they probably were. But the second fear was
really mind-blowing is that they thought they
did not have enough money. They felt insecure about the
amount of money that they had. And it's easy for us to
point fingers at them and say, they're hugely selfish,
narcissistic, et cetera. But really, I mean,
they were people like us before they got-- had the money. And so something about
money makes you-- it corrupts you. So you got to be
watchful for it. And that's a huge topic. And the opposite of that
example is also true. These are people whose life
circumstances are characterized by huge amounts of abundance and
they have a scarcity narrative in their head. There's the other extreme,
which is nothing-- they have nothing and yet
have an abundance narrative in their head. This is-- there was
a movie called-- documentary called "Happy." I'd highly recommend it. I think it's
available on Netflix. You can watch it. It begins with
scenes from Kolkata where they're interviewing
these slum dwellers who are rickshaw pullers. They're not even like
rickshaw drivers with a cycle. They're actually
literally pulling people running around
the streets of Kolkata. They have blisters
on their feet, wearing tattered clothes,
blood, et cetera, sometimes on their feet. Very, very poor. And they still seem
to be quite happy. If not happy, at least content. So the researchers
are flummoxed. And they ask them, how can
you afford to be happy? We look at you and we think
you must be miserable, but you seem to be OK. And they say it's
because god is bountiful. Whenever we need anything,
we just go to our neighbors. We ask them for some
salt or sugar or whatever it is that we're missing. And if they have it,
they give it to us. And when they don't
have it, it's still OK. So what if you go
hungry for a meal. We know that we're going to
get another meal a little bit later down the road. So they have a narrative
of abundance in their head even though their
life circumstances are characterized by scarcity. So no prizes for guessing
which of these two groups needs antidepressants, sleeping
pills merely to fall asleep, and so on. So even if you have
everything, if you don't have an abundance
mindset, you're probably not going
to be very happy. So that's why I think that
the abundance mindset is more important than
the other things. Thank you very much guys. I really appreciate
you listening to me. [APPLAUSE] So we started about
five minutes late. Can we go five minutes over? So I'm going to invite
Ahsan over here, and he's going to
very quickly walk you through a couple of things on
the website that he's built. He's really a whiz kid, I think. And he's actually used a
Google platform, right? AHSAN VENCY: Yeah,
it's called Angular. So we used the
platform to develop the front end of the
website which is right here. So the website's called
A Heroic Journey, named after the course. The two main things that
you can do on the website are-- there are
different happiness activities you can do. And then there are different
scales you can take. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
And the reason why it's called
Heroic-- the course-- is because "Happier
Employees and Return On Investment Course." H-E-R-O-I-C. [LAUGHTER] AHSAN VENCY: So he's
a marketing professor, so he put that
together really well. So on the scales, you have these
different scales you can take. And here is what we
call the BAMBA elements that Raj talked about. And then you have the
happiness, SEM and productivity. And after you take scales,
you can see your results. And on this results graph,
you can see your happiness at work, SEM and
productivity over time over these different dates. So what I actually did is I did
an experiment with myself based off the research Raj had. And his research shows
that happiness at work leads to greater SEM. SEM is greater Satisfaction,
Engagement, and Morale. And greater SEM leads
to greater productivity. So this is a little
more concrete proof that happiness at work leads to
greater productivity overall. And you can see how your
different scores are fluctuating over time and how
they correlate with each other. Another cool feature is you
have these BAMBA pentagons. And you can see how you're
doing in the different domains. As you can see for me, autonomy
and mastery are really high, but belongingness is
actually pretty low. And one struggle that I had
there is I was too autonomous. I was wanting my freedom too
much that I was sacrificing intimate relationships. And these are all things you
can do with just analysis. And the website does it for you. It gives you a
chart, you see it, you see where the
results are lacking or where you're doing well. And then you can make
inferences from it yourself instead of having to
track everything on your own. So that's one feature
is the scales. After you take the scales,
you can see your results on a graph. Another feature is that we have
different various happiness activities. My personal favorite one is
the first one-- journaling-- which is the foundational
happiness activity. And what you can do is after
you set up your journal, you can make an entry and then
you can view your progress. Here you can see all
your previous entries that you've made, order them
by day or happiness score. Another thing you can do is you
can see your happiness graph. So when you make
an entry, you'll enter how happy you
were for that day. And then we will track it for
you and put it on a graph. My favorite thing to
do is looking at it on days of the week. So you can see Mondays
and Tuesdays are actually very high. And then there's just
a huge dip Wednesday. [LAUGHTER] So I was really wondering
why does this happen. If I go back to my entries
and I sort by happiness, I see productive, nonstop work. So I was just working
nonstop Mondays and Tuesdays and that's why I was so happy. I was really productive
Mondays and Tuesdays. The flip side to
that comes on you see Wednesdays are burned out,
drained, and stuff like that. Because I was working so
hard Mondays and Tuesdays, I was completely
drained Wednesdays. So really connecting my
happiness to something. Why am I happier certain days? Why am I not happy certain days? Helps me-- that reflection
helps me sustain my happiness. Because I'm knowing why
the results are happening the way they are, and that's
the best way to sustain anything is knowing why it
occurs the way it does. So all the happiness activities
are meant to do that. You can set up the
activity, make an entry, and then view your progress
to see how you're progressing in the various
domains of happiness and get real-time
feedback for yourself. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Thank you, Ahsan. It was awesome. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: So if you guys
have any questions, please put your hands up. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
This gentleman here. Oops. AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks for coming. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Yeah, of course. AUDIENCE: How would you
go about conditioning your abundance mindset? RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
So this is the topic that I wanted to cover. I'm really happy that you
asked me this question. AUDIENCE: And on a
daily basis, too. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Yes, of course. I see that you're carrying
a notebook with you. Is that a journal? AUDIENCE: Yes. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Great that you carry your journal with you,
because I carry a journal. Do you journal every day? AUDIENCE: Yeah. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Wonderful. So I don't know if you do
this too-- and if you do this, then you're already
doing one thing that's very, very important. It's called the three
good things exercise. And every single
day, if you just make a note of three
good things that happened to me in
the journal, that's going to instill a sense
of abundance in you. Obviously, if you're
doing it every day, then it's not going to be
big, good things like I got a raise today, I got
a job at Google today, I met my soulmate today. Hopefully that doesn't
happen every day, right? [LAUGHTER] So it's going to be
small, good things. Like I got a nice parking spot. And sometimes I
actually can flip it. Even if I did not get
a good parking spot-- I got a parking spot way away
from where I want to go-- I turn it into a good thing. Because then I say, oh, you know
what, I got a bad parking spot. But the good thing
out of it is that I managed to get a little
closer to my 10,000 steps goal for today. I just walked a little bit more. This is very, very
important to do because we are hardwired
to have what researchers call negativity dominance. We are hardwired to
pay more attention to negative things
that are happening in the environment because
of our genetic hard-wiring. Back in the savannas of
Africa, 2,000 years back, it was those people who noticed
the negative things that actually had a higher
chance of surviving. If you were positive,
and you only looked at juicy low-hanging
fruit and forgot to look at the tiger in
the corner of your eye, you might get eaten alive. Those people did not produce
kids because they died early. We are the offsprings
of people who had a survival mindset,
who were very negative, who paid attention. But now it's actually
working against us. The game has changed. We are not in the
game for surviving. Correct me if I'm
wrong, but none of you is being chased by
tigers and lions and bears-- whatever--
and marauding tribes waiting to kill you,
and take your grain and women. That's not happening
anymore-- or men. So in this new world,
what's important is to recognize that we are
in the game of not surviving. We are in the game of thriving. And when you want
to thrive, it's better to be happy,
positive, and have, in fact, a positivity dominance. Now, it's going to be
very difficult to get rid of the hard-wiring and replace
it with positivity dominance. But at the very least, if you
can have the pendulum swing from all the way negative
to being somewhat positive, then you'll see
a huge difference in your happiness levels and
your abundance orientation. That's one thing that
I would recommend. Second thing is to not
spend more than two hours on your social media every day. It's a huge source
of negativity, because everyone's putting
their best pictures and so on on social media. And you look at it and you think
your life sucks in comparison to their life. Even though consciously you
recognize that everyone's doing it, they're putting
their best pictures and so on, to your subconscious
mind, it looks at it and can't help but
compare and say that I don't look that good. That person's the same
age as me and they look far fitter or better, and they
have better spouses, more happy families or what have you. So that's the second thing
that I would recommend. The third thing-- which is
tough to do in New York, but you have Central
Park-- is to go out into nature, particularly
to cell phone dead zones and internet
dead zones if you can. Maybe once a month-- something like this-- just
go out into the wilderness. It turns out that it's
hugely reaffirming to be out in nature for
your abundance mindset. Don't spend too much time with
scarcity-oriented colleagues or people. Spend more time with
abundance-oriented stimuli. Watch movies that are more
uplifting and elevation evoking rather than
movies that stoke your desire for taking revenge. Stuff like that. It's really, I mean-- what you expose yourself to has
a huge impact on how you think. That's the crux of it. AUDIENCE: Thank you. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Yeah, of course. Yes, sir. AUDIENCE: Thank
you for the talk. So what I wanted to
ask about was related to happiness and success. Is there such a thing as
being too happy, in the sense that I mean I read maybe some
papers on and off about-- once you're really
happy and content, it's like you don't
really have that need to go out and find
something better. You're not like I'm not in
the place that I want to be, I want to be somewhere better. But maybe that-- it
can cause your drive. [INAUDIBLE] So what are your
thoughts on that? RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Right. So there is a paper on-- where they look at a range of
happiness from one to seven. And they looked at productivity
at various levels of happiness. And it is true that if you are-- I think that study, if
I remember correctly, they actually had
a nine-point scale. So all the way from
one to an eight, it actually increased,
increased, increased. And then maybe after seven, it
held steady-- seven and eight. But nine actually
went down a little bit in terms of productivity. So if you're ecstatic
every single day, maybe that's not super
good for your productivity. Not that it went down
such a low amount that you were now back to being
a one in terms of productivity. It was more like you were
at a level of six or a seven rather than at an
eight or a nine-- or an eight. But what they did also find
is that those very, very happy people still had very
good relationships. So if you look at productivity
in terms of work productivity, there was a little bit of a
dip at the very highest levels of happiness. But in terms of
your relationships, it was increasing all the way--
all the way to the very top. And that counts for something. So yeah, at very high
levels of ecstasy, it can come in the way. Yes. AUDIENCE: Hey. Great talk, by the way. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Thank you. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned that having control over small
things in your life makes you happy, right? So but what about the
decision-making fatigue? So sometimes it puts a lot of
stress making small decisions and you don't want-- figure out for me, please. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Yeah,
I mean, one thing to do is to decide, OK, which are
the big priorities in my life? And I'm not going to-- have you
read that book by Mark Manson, "The Subtle Art
of Not Giving a--" AUDIENCE: Yes. [LAUGHTER] And the other one is
"Stumbling on Happiness." RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
"Stumbling on Happiness." AUDIENCE: They actually
had a study on-- about art students. And they had to--
one of them had to keep the painting they draw. And one of them had a
choice to exchange it. And the ones that had the
choice to exchange it, they were not happy
because they were thinking, oh, maybe the other
one is better. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Right. So there is a concept
called hyper-choice. So if you have too many
choices, then it can actually lower your happiness levels
because you're not sure if you picked the right
one, the one that's closest to your ideal point, and so on. So in some ways, it can be a
curse to have too many choices. So you might want to
avoid that situation. I think the important
thing there is not to be what's called a maximizer
and be a satisficer instead. So maximizer is somebody
who in every situation is trying to improve
it even further. So it's good to be a maximizer
if you're in customer service or in marketing, and
you're constantly trying to come up with a
better product and so on, which might be your job. But if that maximizer
tendency is also something that manifests
itself in other contexts-- let's say that you
go to a wedding and you ask yourself, why
am I sitting at this table? Can I get a little bit
closer to the bride? Or why am I being served
a little bit later? There's a little bit of a spot
on this napkin here and so on. So in some situations,
it's better to be what's called
a satisficer. A satisficer is
somebody who sets up a certain level of
aspiration or wanting a goal. And then as soon as the first
option exceeds that level, they just say I'm
happy with this, I'll just take this,
rather than looking at further and
further improvements to every situation. So that's a good thing to adopt. I'm not saying that
you should get rid of the maximizer tendency. It's useful in some contexts. But you have to be in control
of which of these two tendencies you're displaying in any moment
rather than that tendency controlling you as a
default, if that makes sense. AUDIENCE: Yeah. Thank you. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Yes. AUDIENCE: Thanks. I was wondering for the
pillars that you mentioned, have there been findings on
maybe their relative importance for introverts versus
extroverts, maybe different prioritization. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
That's a good question. So I don't think that there is
a difference between introverts and extroverts-- not that
there's been a whole lot of study on that-- on the five BAMBA elements. I think it's equally
important for all of them. When it comes to
belonging, though, I think introverts and extroverts
require it to the same extent, I think. But they just require
it in different ways. For extroverts--
and one of the ways to think about the
difference is extroverts are people that actually
get energized when they're in the company of other people. I'm an extrovert. If I'm feeling low,
I would actually go out and seek out company. Introverts are the opposite. It drains them of
energy when they go out. But both sets of people need
at least one really intimate relationship. So that part is
the same for both. It's not as if the introverts
are happy just by themselves. They also need that. Just that maybe they need
it in smaller doses, or just a few people are good enough
for them rather than extroverts wanting a bigger circle. That would be the difference. Yes. This gentleman here. AUDIENCE: Do I need the
mic if I'm right here? RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
Yeah, sure. But the people in
the back-- yeah. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned at some point that very successful
people tend to be givers rather than takers. And I was just wondering-- you said that it also
it's counter-intuitive that very successful
people are givers. But does that hold true for
people at the very highest upper echelons of
society, like CEOs of super large online
retail stores where you can get two-day shipping and such? [LAUGHTER] Would you say that
they also abide-- are they also givers or does
it cut off at a certain point? RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
That's a good question. And I'm somewhat
surprised that you didn't mention orange-haired
gentlemen who fire people. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: He was next. [LAUGHTER] RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN:
He was next on your list. Yeah, so this is where
I think that you really need to think about--
the social sciences are a little bit different
from the natural sciences. Social sciences you're
going to get correlations. You're not going to get absolute
100% confirm relationships. Like in physics, if you throw
a stone at a certain rate, from a certain
height, and so on, you can predict its
trajectory and so on. With human beings,
you can't do that. So there will surely
be lots of examples that are counterexamples to
the things that I talked about. So you have to look
at the correlations and whether they are
statistically significant and so on. And I would say that even at
the level of the highest CEO levels, you will find that this
generally tends to hold true. This is Adam Grant's
thesis at least. And I'm not obviously as much
of an expert on this topic as he is. But I defer to him, and
you'd have to read the book. And he doesn't necessarily
only look at CEOs. He looks at relative success. People who are higher
versus lower at all levels. And what he finds is that
you're more likely to rise up if you're a giver than a taker. I'll just leave it at that. Thank you. All right. I think we are done, right? SPEAKER: Yeah, we're on time. Thank you so much,
Professor Raj for the talk. RAJAGOPAL RAGHUNATHAN: Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it, guys. Take care. Bye-bye. [APPLAUSE] SPEAKER: Thank you,
everyone, for coming.
