Vemuri Nithin Pramod

A series of explosions shook the city of St. Louis on March 16, 1972. The first building fell to the ground at 3 p.m. that afternoon. In the months that followed, more than 30 buildings would be turned to rubble.

The buildings that were destroyed were part of the now infamous housing project known as Pruitt-Igoe. When the Pruitt-Igoe housing project opened in 1954 it was believed to be a breakthrough in urban architecture. Spanning 57 acres across the north side of St. Louis, Pruitt-Igoe consisted of 33 high-rise buildings and provided nearly 3,000 new apartments to the surrounding population.

Pruitt-Igoe was designed with cutting-edge ideas from modern architecture. The designers emphasized green spaces and packed residents into high-rise towers with beautiful views of the surrounding city. The buildings employed skip-stop elevators, which only stopped at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors. (Architects believed that forcing people to use the stairs would lessen the foot traffic and congestion in the building.) The buildings were outfitted with “unbreakable” lights that were covered in metal mesh and intended to reduce vandalism. The floors featured communal garbage chutes and large windows to brighten the corridors with natural light.

On paper, Pruitt-Igoe was a testament to modern engineering. In practice, the project was a disaster.

The Pruitt-Igoe Failure

Once the troublemakers of the neighborhood heard that the light fixtures were supposedly unbreakable, they accepted the challenge and threw water on the lights until they overheated and burnt out. 1

Next, they busted the garbage chutes and shattered the windows. According to one report, the bright new corridors had so many broken windows that “it was possible to see straight through to the other side.” 2

The St. Louis Housing Authority had planned to use rental incomes to pay for the maintenance of the buildings. In the years after the massive project opened, the population of St. Louis began to drop as people moved out of the city. With fewer tenants than expected and increasing rates of vandalism, the buildings were left unfixed.

Soon the modern design of Pruitt-Igoe began to accelerate its downfall. Suddenly, the skip-stop elevators became a danger to well-behaved citizens who were forced to walk through additional corridors and risky stairways just to get into and out of their apartments. As criminal activity rose, more things were broken, more people moved away, and less money came in.

In 1972, less than 20 years after the project had opened, the St. Louis Housing Authority scheduled a demolition and blew up the entire $36 million complex. 3

Old Ideas Are Undervalued

The sprawling 33-building, 57-acre layout of Pruitt-Igoe ignored the traditional knowledge about how cities grow and develop. Nearly every thriving and successful city on our planet was built organically and unpredictably. Buildings popped up as needed. City blocks expanded gradually.

There is a reason we tend to undervalue old ideas:

At first glance, we just see an idea that has been around for a long time. We incorrectly assume that familiar ideas provide average results. “Everyone does it this way, so it can’t be that great … right?”

What we fail to understand is that the fundamentals are not merely a collection of good ideas. The fundamentals are a collection of good ideas that outlasted thousands of bad ideas.

For example:

• Fitness. Decades have seen the rise and fall of countless exercise fads. New training styles come into vogue, only to be replaced by another a few years later. In our quest to get fit we chase the latest and greatest offering even though boring fundamentals like lifting weights three times per week or going for a daily walk have outlasted all the previous fads.
• Entrepreneurship. Simple fundamentals like making more sales calls can be the difference between success and failure as an entrepreneur. As Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Starfighter, says “Our secret weapon is patient execution of what everyone knows they should be doing, because that actually is a competitive barrier.”
• Reading. Half of this year’s best-selling books are filled with ideas that may seem intelligent today, but will be proven wrong in the near future. Only a handful will still be read consistently a decade from now. These books—the ones that stand the test of time—are the ones you want to be reading because they are filled with ideas that last. This is why old books can provide incredible value.

The Power of Inherited Knowledge

Across the street from Pruitt-Igoe was more traditional housing complex named Carr Square Village. Unlike Pruitt-Igoe, Carr Square Village was a smaller, low-rise complex and featured more traditional designs. It was built 12 years before Pruitt-Igoe, but despite its older age, Carr Square Village outlasted Pruitt-Igoe and boasted lower crime and vacancy rates all while being in the same neighborhood.

Is this evidence that we should abandon creative thinking and innovation in the name of sticking to the fundamentals? Of course not. But I do believe the Pruitt-Igoe story is one example of our tendency to undervalue inherited knowledge.

Furthermore, I’d like to propose that sometimes the creative thing to do is to actually practice the fundamentals more consistently than everyone else. Most people don’t fully use the knowledge they already have. As I have written previously, “Everybody already knows that” is very different from “Everybody already does that.”

Does it ever feel like people are all self-absorbed jerks? Like they’re not listening? Only in it for themselves?

You’re not crazy. Empathy is declining.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

A recent study at the University of Michigan revealed a dramatic decline in empathy levels among young Americans between 1980 and today, with the steepest drop being in the last ten years. The shift, say researchers, is in part due to more people living alone and spending less time engaged in social and community activities that nurture empathic sensitivity. Psychologists have also noticed an “epidemic of narcissism”: one in ten Americans exhibit narcissistic personality traits that limit their interest in the lives of others. Many analysts believe that European countries are experiencing similar reductions in empathy and increases in narcissism as urbanization continues to fragment communities, civic engagement decreases, and free market ideologies deepen individualism.

It’s easy to believe that people are just selfish. That it’s human nature. There’s no denying we do think a lot about our own needs, and classical economics might lead you to believe that’s all there is.

But new research says there’s more to us than that.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

Neuroscientists have identified a ten-section “empathy circuit” in our brains which, if damaged, can curtail our ability to understand what others are feeling. Evolutionary biologists have shown we are social animals who have naturally evolved to to be empathic and cooperative, just like our primate cousins. And child psychologists have revealed that even three-year-olds are able to step outside themselves and see other people’s perspectives. It is now evident that we have an empathic side to our natures that is just as strong as our selfish inner drives.

Yes, there are zero-empathy psychopaths out there but they are a very, very small part of the population. The vast majority of us are wired to care.

(To learn which professions have the most psychopaths, click here.)

We all need empathy. Even selfish people do. Here’s how the power of empathy can improve your life, and how you can develop more of it.

 

How Empathy Brings Happiness (And Oscars)

Want to be happier? Be more empathetic.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

…the economist Richard Layard, who advocates “deliberate cultivation of the primitive instinct of empathy” because “if you care more about other people relative to yourself, you are more likely to be happy.”

Plain and simple: empathy is the cornerstone of good relationships and good relationships are the cornerstone of happiness.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

So many relationships fall apart because at least one person feels their needs and feelings are not being listened to and understood. A healthy dose of empathy, say couples counselors, is one of the best cures available. Empathy can also deepen our friendships and help create new ones — especially useful in a world where one in four people suffer from loneliness.

And the power of empathy is wired pretty deeply into us. How deep?

Want to know who your real friends are? Yawn. Really. Go ahead and yawn. We all know yawns are contagious but the more someone cares about you, the more contagious your yawns are:

As with other measures of empathy, the rate of contagion was greatest in response to kin, then friends, then acquaintances, and lastly strangers. Related individuals (r≥0.25) showed the greatest contagion, in terms of both occurrence of yawning and frequency of yawns. Strangers and acquaintances showed a longer delay in the yawn response (latency) compared to friends and kin.

But what about that Oscar? (C’mon, I know you’ve rehearsed your speech in the bathroom mirror.)

As a method actor, Academy Award Winner Daniel Day-Lewis goes beyond the pale to understand and relate to the characters he portrays.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

During the filming of My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the Irish artist and writer Christy Brown who had cerebral palsy, spent almost the entire shoot in a wheelchair, refusing to come out of character, even on tea breaks. He not only had to be pushed around the set, but insisted that everyone call him Christy and spoon-feed him at mealtime.

On the other hand, many doctors have less empathy than your average Starbucks barista. Seriously. (In fact, research shows medical school actually reduces empathy.)

But what happens when you make sure doctors are empathetic when they work? Their performance goes up — a lot. Here’s Wharton professor Adam Grant:

There is a great study of radiologists by Turner and colleagues showing that when radiologists just saw a photo of the patient whose x-ray they were about to scan, they empathized more with the person, seeing that person as more of a human being as opposed to just an x-ray. As a result, they wrote longer reports, and they had greater diagnostic accuracy, significantly.

And other research shows that doctors with empathy heal you faster.

So what are doctors doing to resolve their empathy deficit? They’re trying to win that Oscar: yes, some doctors are now using method acting techniques to show more empathy.

Via Impression Management in the Workplace: Research, Theory, and Practice:

Doctors, for instance, are using method acting to improve their unconscious signaling of attention and empathy, and hence, to improve patient care as well as reduce lawsuits.

You can be happier, improve your relationships, and maybe even be better at your job with empathy. (Plus win an Oscar.)

And when success does not end up bringing happiness, why might that be? Because those people are too busy and aren’t making empathy a priority.

Via Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us:

“One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they’re not having good relationships. They’re busy making money and attending to themselves and that means that there’s less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy and the things that truly count,” Ryan added.

(To learn the 8 things the happiest people do every day, click here.)

So empathy is a big deal. But what is it… really?

 

What Empathy Is

It’s using your imagination to step into someone else’s shoes.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

…empathy is the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions. So empathy is distinct from expressions of sympathy — such as pity or feeling sorry for somebody — because these do not involve trying to understand the other person’s emotions or point of view.

That’s pretty good. Want a great definiton of empathy? Check out this moving video explanation by Brene Brown:

Now empathy isn’t a cure-all. Researcher Paul Bloom has pointed out that we can overdo it. And he has a point. Our vision of empathy does need a software update. Let’s call it “Empathy 1.1.”

We all learned “The Golden Rule” growing up:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But again, this is still coming from you; what you want. That may not be what they want.

For true empathy, the focus needs to be on them. So golden ain’t good enough. Forget it. We’re going platinum.

Roman Krznaric suggests this for “The Platinum Rule.”

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

(For tips from Wharton professor Adam Grant on how to do good without exhausting yourself, click here.)

So what are the best ways to grow your empathy muscles? Here are 3:

 

1) Listen

Let’s look at an extreme example: hostage situations. You might think when someone kidnaps people the best thing to do is let the SWAT guys storm the place. Wrong.

Via Crisis Negotiations: Managing Critical Incidents and Hostage Situations in Law Enforcement and Corrections:

Schlossberg (1979a) established that in 78 percent of assaults, people were injured or killed. Police officers often sustained the casualties.

What really worked? Talking.

Via Crisis Negotiations: Managing Critical Incidents and Hostage Situations in Law Enforcement and Corrections:

Assaults result in a 78 percent injury or death rate (Strentz, 1979), sniper-fire in a 100 percent injury or death rate, while containment and negotiation have resulted in a 95 percent success rate (FBI, 1991).

And what was the key factor? Yeah, you guessed it: empathy. How does the FBI get there? Listening.

I doubt you’re dealing with anything as high stakes as hostage negotiation but listening is always good.

We can use FBI hostage negotiation techniques to learn how to be better listeners. But we need to add something to make sure they’re ready for regular old conversations. What’s that?

Vulnerability. How do you do that? I’m glad you asked.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

Doing something risky — like asking for help, sharing an unpopular opinion, falling in love, admitting to being unconfident or afraid — may make us feel vulnerable, but it can also result in deeper relationships, creative breakthroughs, heightened joy, release of anxiety, and greater empathic connection.

How do you know when you’re really opening up? The brilliant Brene Brown has a great idea: “vulnerability hangovers.”

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

On the one hand, she told me, we should not think that vulnerability is about “letting it all hang out” — we ought to avoid “over-sharing” and simply dumping all our emotions on others. On the other hand, our ambition should be to experience a “vulnerability hangover.” If you really take that big step and make yourself vulnerable in conversation with someone, then it is pretty likely that the next morning you will wake up thinking, “Why did I share that? What was I thinking?” But if you don’t feel any vulnerability hangover, then maybe you did not go far enough. When was the last time you felt one?

No, just connecting online doesn’t count. Too much computer time can hurt your social skills and communicating via email can turn you into a jerk.

Facebook makes you happier when you use it to plan face-to-face get togethers. When you use it to replace face-to-face meetings, it makes you miserable.

(To learn how to make difficult conversations easy, click here.)

Listening is powerful but dealing with people can be hard. What’s something you can do on your own?

 

2) Meditate

It’s not just for hippies anymore! Science shows meditation has many powerful effects including making you happier and increasing empathy.

A specific type is really good at increasing empathy: Loving-Kindness Meditation.

Yes, it sounds corny. And doing it is corny. But research from Stanford shows it works.

How do you feel when you think about loved ones? Warm and fuzzy. Why keep pictures of your kids or your partner on your desk or in your wallet? Even more fuzzies.

That’s the goal here, really. We want to broaden the fuzzy. Fuzzy momentum, if you will. Extend the fuzzy feelings from those you already are compassionate toward to neutral and even to difficult people.

The best instructions I’ve found (that have no scientific jargon or mentions of woodland spirits) come from 10% Happier, the great book by Dan Harris:

1. This practice involves picturing a series of people and sending them good vibes. Start with yourself. Generate as clear a mental image as possible.

2. Repeat the following phrases: May you be happy, May you be healthy, May you be safe, May you live with ease. Do this slowly. Let the sentiment land. You are not forcing your well-wishes on anyone; you’re just offering them up, just as you would a cool drink. Also, success is not measured by whether you generate any specific emotion. As Sharon says, you don’t need to feel “a surge of sentimental love accompanied by chirping birds.” The point is to try. Every time you do, you are exercising your compassion muscle. (By the way, if you don’t like the phrases above, you can make up your own.)

3. After you’ve sent the phrases to yourself, move on to: a benefactor (a teacher , mentor, relative), a close friend (can be a pet, too), a neutral person (someone you see often but don’t really ever notice), a difficult person, and, finally, “all beings.”

Don’t get too worried about details. It’s not a magic spell and this ain’t Hogwart’s. You can customize it. The important thing is wishing others well and expanding that feeling from those you feel strongly about to a wider and wider circle of people.

(For my interview with Good Morning America anchor and meditation-skeptic-turned-believer Dan Harris, click here.)

So you’re giving meditation a shot. What’s a fun way to develop empathy?

 

3) Expose Yourself To Different Ways Of Living

When we see people different from us we’re more likely to connect with them emotionally. Think of it as “mental diversity training.”

Hang out with those who are different from you. And then listen.

Via Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered:

Another important factor is ongoing exposure to different types of people. Diverse, multicultural schools and communities can help children become familiar with people of other races, socioeconomic classes, religions and cultures. Familiarity is a great way to increase empathy…

Spending time with people from other cultures doesn’t just increase empathy, it also makes you more creative.

Maybe you’re an introvert. (Me too!) Want to bolster empathy without leaving the house or talking to anyone? Yes, you can.

Reading fiction increases empathy and makes us more likely to do kind things for others:

In study 1, participants who were more transported into the story exhibited higher affective empathy and were more likely to engage in prosocial behavior. In study 2, reading-induced affective empathy was related to greater bias toward subtle, fearful facial expressions, decreased perceptual accuracy of fearful expressions, and a higher likelihood of engaging in prosocial behavior. These effects persisted after controlling for an individual’s dispositional empathy and general tendency to become absorbed in a story. This study provides an important initial step in empirically demonstrating the influence of reading fiction on empathy, emotional perception, and prosocial behavior.

Does this really work? Some researchers think reading helped end slavery. Seriously.

Via Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It:

One of its foundations was what is known as the “reading revolution.” The spread of literacy and the reading of novels and newspapers offered the growing middle classes a way of understanding what it might be like to be an orphaned child or a poor farm laborer or a suffering slave, which helped forge human solidarity across social divides.

Don’t like reading? Netflix binges can help too:

As the psychologist Raymond Mar writes, “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fictional] narrative.” For example, studies reliably show that when we watch a TV show that treats gay families nonjudgmentally (say, “Modern Family”), our own views on homosexuality are likely to move in the same nonjudgmental direction.

Want your kids to have empathy? Reading and the right TV shows are great but music lessons and playtime are important too. And get them that puppy they’re dying for.

Via 100 Simple Secrets Why Dogs Make Us Happy:

People who grew up with a dog were 24 percent more likely as adults to display empathy toward other humans as adults. (Vizek-Vidovic et al. 2001)

(To learn the secret to getting people to like you, click here.)

Okay, we’ve learned a lot. Time to round it up and get a few more insights with another awesome video…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to be more empathetic:

• Listen. And then open up until you have a “vulnerability hangover.”
• Try meditation. Broaden the loving fuzzy feelings past family and friends.
• Expose yourself to different ways of living. Hang out with different people. If it can end slavery, it can help you.

Empathy doesn’t just have the power to change our lives, it can also change the world:

 

As Roman Krznaic recounts in his book, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It, Muhammad Ali addressed the graduating class at Harvard in 1975. The champ was known for coming up with clever poems, so an audience member asked him to recite one.

At a length of exactly two words, what followed may very well be the shortest poem in recorded history. Ali said:

Me, We.

It’s a pithy reminder of the importance of empathy. Introspection only gets you so far. We need some “outrospection” to really live good lives.

If you learned something from this, share it with others and start a conversation. Let’s spread some empathy. The world needs it.  :)

Join over 205,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done – 5 Expert Tips

How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert

New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful

The post Power of Empathy: 3 Ways Empathy Can Improve Your Life appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

The new release includes new USB stack (USB4BSD), which supports USB3; updated video drivers for Intel and AMD cards (although latter are still disabled by default); binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, allowing for PAM and NSS. The HAMMER2 filesystem is also included, but not ready for general use just yet.

The post How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings appeared first on Mark Manson.

I’ve posted a lot about happiness. Looking back, what can we learn from the happiest people to make our own lives better?

 

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

What happens when you look at the happiest people and scientifically analyze what they have in common? Researchers did just that.

There was a clear answer to what differentiated these people from everyone else — and it wasn’t money, smarts, age, gender or race.

It was strong social relationships.

Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:

Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result—social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge—most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are.

The Grant Study (which followed a group of men for their entire life) found that “the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.”

Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being:

Vaillant’s insight came from his seminal work on the Grant Study, an almost seventy-year (and ongoing) longitudinal investigation of the developmental trajectories of Harvard College graduates. (This study is also referred to as the Harvard Study.) In a study led by Derek Isaacowitz, we found that the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.

If you do one thing today to be happier, spend time with friends. 

Not spending more time with people we love is something we regret the most.

(More on the power of relationships here.)

 

Do More, Not Less

The happiest people are those that are very busy but don’t feel rushed:

Who among us are the most happy? Newly published research suggests it is those fortunate folks who have little or no excess time, and yet seldom feel rushed.

I know, you’re tired. You want a break. But doing nothing is not the answer. Too much time is a burden:

…surveys “continue to show the least happy group to be those who quite often have excess time.” Boredom, it seems, is burdensome.

So what do you need to be doing?

Things you’re good at. 

“Signature strengths” are the things you are uniquely talented at — and using them brings you joy.

People who deliberately exercised their signature strengths on a daily basis became significantly happier for months.

Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work:

When 577 volunteers were encouraged to pick one of their signature strengths and use it in a new way each day for a week, they became significantly happier and less depressed than control groups. And these benefits lasted: Even after the experiment was over, their levels of happiness remained heightened a full month later. Studies have shown that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier you become.

Signature strengths are the secret to experiencing more “flow” at work and in life. Exercising them is why starving artists are happier with their jobs.

The old saw “those who do what they love never work a day in their life” seems true.

(More on the “more” theory of happiness here.)

 

Do Not Stay In A Job You Hate

Karl Pillemer of Cornell University interviewed nearly 1500 people age 70 to 100+ for his book “30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.”

What piece of advice were they more adamant about than any other? More adamant about than lessons regarding marriage, children and happiness?

Do not stay in a job you dislike.

Via 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans:

You know those nightmares where you are shouting a warning but no sound comes out? Well, that’s the intensity with which the experts wanted to tell younger people that spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake. There was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful. Over and over they prefaced their comments with, “If there’s one thing I want your readers to know it’s . . .” From the vantage point of looking back over long experience, wasting around two thousand hours of irretrievable lifetime each year is pure idiocy.

Take a lesson from people who have already seen most of what life has to offer: do not waste time in a job you hate.

(More on what you can learn about happiness from older, wiser folks here.)

 

Plan Your Happiness

It’s ironic that we treasure happiness so much yet often treat it as this random bit of alchemy we luck into. That’s silly.

Passively waiting for happiness is a losing proposition. Happiness needs regular appointments.

Schedule the things that make you happy.

Is this overly simple and obvious? Yes. Do you regularly do it? Probably not.

In my interview with Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker, author of The Dragonfly Effect, she explained:

…what is interesting is that there is often a gap between where people say they want to spend their time and how they actually spend their time… you find a large percentage know what projects and people energize them, but do not in fact spend much time on those projects and with those people. 

…once you identify the activities and people with whom you want to spend more time, calendaring your time thoughtfully becomes critical.  When you put something on a calendar, you’re more likely to actually do that activity – partly because you’re less likely to have to make an active decision whether you should do it – because it’s already on your calendar. 

Look at the things that make you happy and plan them into your calendar and schedule.

Do not wait for happiness. Game the system. Happiness card-counting. Happiness Moneyball. I refuse to leave it to chance.

(More on scheduling happiness here.)

 

Happiness Isn’t Everything

No one confuses the type of happiness ice cream brings with the positive feelings one gets from raising a good kid.

Happiness is a vague word. We need happy feelings but we also need meaning in our lives.

And research shows they are related but distinct:

Our findings suggest that happiness is mainly about getting what one wants and needs, including from other people or even just by using money. In contrast, meaningfulness was linked to doing things that express and reflect the self, and in particular to doing positive things for others. Meaningful involvements increase one’s stress, worries, arguments, and anxiety, which reduce happiness. (Spending money to get things went with happiness, but managing money was linked to meaningfulness.) Happiness went with being a taker more than a giver, while meaningfulness was associated with being a giver more than a taker.

Researchers at Tohoku University in Japan did a 7 year study of over 43,000 adults age 40 to 79 asking if they had ikigai (a Japanese term for meaning in life) and then tracked their health.

People with ikigai were much more likely to be alive 7 years later.

Via Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology:

Even when likely confounds were taken into account, ikigai predicted who was still alive after 7 years. Said another way, 95% of respondents who reported a sense of meaning in their lives were alive 7 years after the initial survey versus about 83% of those who reported no sense of meaning in their lives. The lack of ikigai was in particular associated with death due to cardiovascular disease (usually stroke), but not death due to cancer.

Running marathons is painful. Completing them is awesome. Studying is boring. Having a degree feels great.

Happiness in the moment is not everything.

In his TED talk, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow discussed two different types of happiness that sound very similar to the distinction between happiness and meaning.

The first is being happy in your life. It is happiness that you experience immediately and in the moment.

The second is being happy about your life. It is the happiness that exists in memory when we talk about the past and the big picture. Stories are key here. This is closer to “meaning.”

(More on how to lead a meaningful life here.)

 

Give — But *Not* Until It Hurts

Giving makes us happier than receiving. In fact, it can create a feedback loop of happiness in your life.

Helping others reach their goals brings joy. Doing nice things for others today can literally make you happier for the rest of the week.

However, being a martyr stresses you out and is bad for your health.

Via Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success:

Research shows that on the job, people who engage in selfless giving end up feeling overloaded and stressed, as well as experiencing conflict between work and family. This is even true in marriages: in one study of married couples, people who failed to maintain an equilibrium between their own needs and their partner’s needs became more depressed over the next six months.

What to do? Do all your giving one day a week.

Via Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success:

The chunkers achieved gains in happiness; the sprinklers didn’t. Happiness increased when people performed all five giving acts in a single day, rather than doing one a day. Lyubomirsky and colleagues speculate that “spreading them over the course of a week might have diminished salience and power or made them less distinguishable from participants habitual kind of behavior.”

How much should you give? Remember The 100 Hour Rule. One hundred hours a year — in other words, 2 hours per week.

Via Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success:

One hundred seems to be a magical number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than two thousand Australian adults in their mid-sixties, those who volunteered between one hundred and eight hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than one hundred or more than eight hundred hours annually. In another study, American adults who volunteered at least one hundred hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000. There were no benefits of volunteering more than one hundred hours. This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining.

A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week. Research shows that if people start volunteering two hours a week, their happiness, satisfaction and self-esteem go up a year later.

(More on the power of giving here.)

Want to be a giver and be happier? Share this post with a friend and spread some happiness.

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

Related posts:

What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?

Here are the things proven to make you happier

What are the three ways to train your brain to be happy?

The post 6 Secrets You Can Learn From The Happiest People On Earth appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.