What the Second-Happiest People Get Right
Five takeaways:
- This article proposes that more happiness is not always better than less– that overprioritizing happiness can detract from the drive that provides meaning.
- Researchers recently examined a data set from a study that rated incoming college freshmen’s “cheerfulness” and tracked their income nearly two decades later– and found that the “most cheerful in 1976” were not the highest earners in 1995. This distinction went to the second-highest group, which rated their cheerfulness as “above average” but not in the highest 10 percent.
- The article does not deny that happiness is good; rather, it urges readers to remember that a little bit of unhappiness has benefits. It breeds ambition and solution-based thinking.
- “An aversion to unhappiness can lead us to forgo a meaningful life.” – To avoid failure (and the feeling of failure) many will avoid taking the risks or putting out the effort required to find fulfillment.
- Those with the highest performance in life have been forced to make decisions that were unpleasant and scary.
From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
Read the whole story.
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