If you are smart, why aren't you happy? | Raj Raghunathan | TEDxDelhi

[Music] [Music] I'm going to start my talk on this to pedis happiness mistake by committing the stupidest presentation mistake which is trivially a punchline right away which is what I'm going to do I'm going to tell you right off the bat what is stupidest happiness mistake is it's not to value material things over experiences that's almost definitely going to bring your happiness down it's not even to value career success over relationships that's almost guaranteed to bring your happiness down it's not even to get a really bad haircut and a horrible orange tan and think that you look sexy that's not just going to bring your happiness down it is going to bring the happiness of everybody around you down ok the stupidest happiness mistake is this it's knowing what will make us happy and yet choosing not to do it what makes this mistake particularly stupid is that happiness is one of our most important goals if not the most important goal a worldwide survey of over 10,000 respondents from 48 different countries revealed that we value happiness more than we value success intelligence / knowledge or material wealth and yet we repeatedly sacrifice happiness for the sake of these very things time and time again and here's a real kicker we do this dozens if not hundreds of times every single day would you guys like to see an example of how we commit the stupidest happiness mistake okay imagine that you are in a wonderful relationship with a really great boyfriend who's nice he's smart he takes good care of you but there's one area in which you would like him to improve which is that you would like him to lose a little bit of weight okay just a little too plump for your tastes now you give them lots of advice on how to go about achieving his goal of weight loss you tell him to followers regimen of healthy eating and swimming etcetera body never listens to you right this goes on for a few months then one day he comes running home to you and tells you that he's met somebody else at the gym who's motivated him to adopt a new lifestyle that's going to enable him to lose weight okay turns out that that person he's met is good-looking and even sexy you could say in other words somebody else has convinced him to adopt a new lifestyle and as he tells you about this new lifestyle it turns out that it's very similar to the one that you've been recommending to him including swimming and eating healthy and so on okay somebody else has convinced him somebody who's pretty good-looking so what should you do if you were really interested in maximizing your happiness I'm going to give you two options okay should you point out angrily to him that the other person hasn't told him anything new or should you pick option B which is to pat him on the back and congratulate him for having figured out a way to achieve his weight loss goal okay all right so we asked a bunch of participants this very question and that group of participants indicated that the happiness happiness maximizing option is to pick option B to congratulate them they 86 percent of the respondents pick that option so these guys know something very important about relationships which is that in relationships you can often either be right or you can be happy you can't be both okay so if people were really interested in maximizing their happiness you would imagine that when they find themselves in this situation a huge majority right around 85 86 percent would pick option B right so we asked a separate group of participants to imagine that they were in this situation and rather than asking them what would you pick if you wanted to maximize your happiness we asked them to pick one of these two options what would you do what would you feel impelled to do and it turned out only 72 percent said they would pick option B so in other words 86 minus 72 which is 14 percent of 1 in 7 people seem willing to sacrifice happiness for the sake of being right ok now you might think that this is a one-off situation it's not that important you know who cares for relationships right what about career choice what about scenario which involves something serious like job choice so we conducted a study in which we asked participants to imagine that they had a choice between two kinds of jobs job a that's a meaningful job they're going to be surrounded by colleagues that they really like were very supportive but it doesn't pay a whole lot it not that it pays badly it doesn't pay you can't lead an extravagant lifestyle with that with that salary okay or job B which does pay you a lot but it's soul sapping work really horrible work and is surrounded by toxic colleagues who are out to stab you in the back okay so we ask them everything considered not just a short-term happiness but also long-term happiness your future plans retirement plan which job do you think will make you a happier person and a vast majority picked of the job a 78 percent pick this job okay only 22% pick job B and so you would imagine that if people were really interested in maximizing their happiness in the context of career choice a job choice they would pick job a if given a choice between these two kinds of jobs but these very same participants they were MBA students that are well reputed school when it came interview season they ended up being less likely to pick job a than they are indicated initially okay only 55% picked job a okay in other words 78 minus 55 which is 23 percent or one in four people roughly are willing to sacrifice happiness for the sake of a higher salary all right now we've noticed this tendency to sacrifice happiness for the sake of other things in a variety of different scenarios and this tendency is so common that even if you are given a golden opportunity to ask for happiness many of us fail to do so indeed many of you sitting in this crowd are guilty of this crime shall we say you might remember that a couple of weeks back I sent you an email with a link in it to something called the genie question it goes like this imagine that a genie appears in front of you and grant you three wishes what three wishes would you make right you'd think this is a golden opportunity to ask for the most important goal right happiness you would think happiness would be number one it turned out it wasn't even in the top three it wasn't even in the in the top five I'm not going to show you all top five wishes happiness came in as a distant sixth with only 12% of you asking for happiness hey why do we do this to ourselves why do we not prioritize happiness over other goals when in fact we think that it is the most important goal to us there are a few reasons one of these reasons has to do with the lack of clarity about what happiness means to us happiness is abstract it's not clear exactly what we mean when we say happens it's not it's not specific in concrete that's a big problem okay a lot of findings show that when something is not specific we tend to devalue it another reason is that we hold some negative misconceptions about happiness that happiness is going to make me lazy or that it's going to make me selfish it turns out in reality happier people are more productive happier people earn more money for example right organizations are not stupid to give you money just because you're happy happier people actually work more productively happier people are also more altruistic so you're less likely to come and shout at your kids or kick your dog when you've gotten a raise at work than when you've been reprimanded at work okay but nevertheless we hold these negative misconceptions a final reason has to do with something called a media maximization which is a very interesting phenomenon due to which we devalue happiness in simple terms it refers to seeking those things like money or fame or power that have long stopped providing happiness to us so let's take money as an example up to a certain point more money can make you happy but beyond that point money stops making you happy so for example when you transition from being a poor student into earning a lot of money right with your first paycheck let's say 50,000 rupees a month that's going to make you happy getting the first raise the second raise the third raise maybe all the way up to one lakh rupees a month is going to make you happy but there comes a point beyond which more money is not going to make you happier but nevertheless because money used to make us happy at one point we continued to chase it even beyond the point where it stopped contributing to happiness okay so what do we do about this problem right what do we do about this problem of committing this stupidest happiness mistake and prioritizing other things over happiness I'm going to outline a very childishly simple program okay three steps simple three steps okay the first step has to do with creating what I call your happy things list just a little list of things that make you happy on a regular basis for me it is to hang out with my friends and family and also be productive at work these things make me happy that's step number one step number two is to actually start doing those things on your happy things list on a more regular basis right just these two steps alone can vastly improve your chances of not committing the stupidest happiness mistake why because by making a happy things list happiness becomes less abstract you for me it's a sense of love or connection that I feel with my family members it's a sense of satisfaction and meaning that I get out of being productive at work it's no longer abstract the second reason is that when you make a happy things list you will likely discover that you no longer Harbor these misconceptions about happiness that happiness leads to selfishness it can't lead to selfishness if it means love right it can lead to laziness because happiness to you is being productive at work and a final reason is that when you start doing the things on your happy things list you are less likely to fall prey to medium maximization because you're prioritizing happiness now you're doing those things that directly lead you to happiness rather than to the means of mediums to happiness okay but these two steps alone may not solve the problem for you as I discovered three years back okay I've been working on the topic of happiness for over seven years at that point in time okay so I was a you know expert on happiness but um I found myself committing this mistake by the way the third step which is very very important is to ask yourself periodically am i prioritizing happiness okay the step is very important reason is I'm going to tell you a story I was at this glasses store looking for a pair of glasses to buy and I found this really wonderful pair for a hundred and twenty dollars okay and there was a deal going on that said that you can get another pair of equal or lower value for half off okay so I look at looked around and there was this wonderful pair for $120 and so I started looking around for another pair and I found this really wonderful pair and I was about to buy it when I is that it was only $70 right but it was the best of all the other pairs they were out there and I was in a bit of a quandary should I go for this really good-looking pair and you know even though it only cost $70 to me it felt like I was leaving $50 on the table you know I could buy another pair for $120 right for half off so to me it felt like a loss should I go for this good-looking pair or should I select the worst-looking pair just because it cost more money it gave me more value for money right as I was racking my brain with this a voice in my head popped up and it said Raj you are a happiness researcher you of all people shouldn't be committing the stupidest happiness mistake you should select the $70 pair because that's the best-looking one that's what is going to make you happy in the long run you know you won't remember how much it costs no one else is going to ask you that question right that is the happiness maximizing choice to make that's what I made in the end but it just goes to show how we can often be susceptible to committing the stupidest happiness mistake okay so it's very very important to also remind yourself of this step alright so I've told you what the stupidest happiness mistake is I've also told you why we commit it and finally I've told you how to overcome it and I started this presentation by making the stupidest presentation mistake and I'm not about to end it by committing this stupid s happiness mistake the happiness maximizing thing to do for me right now is to stand right here raise my hands and wait for a thunderous applause thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 66,056

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, India, Life, Cognitive science, Happiness, Humor, Life Development, Life Hack, Research, Science, Social Science

Id: KIp3rHn3PiI

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2017