Optimism Leads to Happiness

For over 3 years the American Dream Project has been asking the very simple, yet surprisingly difficult question, “Are you happy?” To help you take a closer, honest look at this question we have been conducting an online Dream Life Assessment. This questionnaire asks participants to grade themselves on key questions related to happiness. Over 10,000 people of all ages and walks of life have responded. For the next few weeks we’re going to be sending you the first series of blogs revealing findings from this research. If you have not taken the Dream Life Assessment yourself, please visit our website at http://americandreamproject.org and participate. You’ll find it very engaging and extremely helpful.

In the past few decades literally hundreds of studies have been conducted worldwide to determine what makes people feel happy. It has been found that one major element of happiness is positive emotions, and one of the strongest positive emotions is optimism. Optimism is the expec¬tation that tomorrow will be better than today, that I will be able to handle all chal¬lenges that life deals out and that the people I love will be okay. While optimism is a key element to happiness, so many of us find it difficult to achieve.

On the Dream Life Assessment 39.96% feel that that they usually have positive feelings about their life and their future, and 12.61% feel depressed and overwhelmed a lot and worry that their life isn’t going to turn out the way they wish it would.

While these results can be viewed pessimistically with less than half of the participants feeling optimistic, let’s take our own optimistic approach instead. 40% have positive feelings about their life and future. 40% are able to rise above the constant negative media bombarding our television sets and radio broadcasts. 40% are able to believe in a good future for themselves and their children. Great! But what about the rest?

It turns out that we are not naturally very good at being content and happy with our present life. We are bad at predicting what events will make us happy and also bad at predicting how long we’ll feel sad after a disappointment. For example, we are wrong at predicting just how happy a new house will make us or how long a job disappointment will make us sad. We constantly distract ourselves from what truly makes us happy.

But life is supposed to feel good. We are de¬signed to live in joy and contentment. Human beings are not designed to suffer. That’s simply our choice. We can find happy optimistic people in all of life’s situations from concentration camps to paraplegics to natural disaster victims. Very few of us will find ourselves in conditions that would lead us to permanently give up.

Research reveals a major key is gratitude. When we feel grateful for the good in our lives, it turbo charges positive feelings. When you focus on just one thing you are grateful for, you will begin to notice your soul bringing your attention to the many ways you might be grateful for even simple things. This is not trivial. Our minds are caught in the snares of a media culture driven to stimulate us to discontent. We must choose gratitude. One way to amplify gratitude is to tell others what we are grateful for. Make it a habit. Affirming your life to someone else creates a new emotional ecology within.

Finally, remember to smile. The physical act of smiling stimulates brain chemistry that elevates your mood. Grateful thoughts, plus a smile creates grateful feelings, which create optimism, creativity, and lowers stress. No, it’s not just sappy. It’s a fact.

So don’t get used to the good things in your life. Always treat them with awe and wonder. Of all the people who have ever lived, we are among the most fortunate. Amazing.

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Is This the Best We Can Do Mr. Greenspan?

Economists are more arrogant than weather reporters. They not only try to predict the future, they attempt to control it. But like all things humans try to control, the real world is far more complicated than our limited understanding of it. When their plans don’t work, they stand back, smoke a cigar and write a book.

Thank you, Alan Greenspan. After 18 years of expanding the money supply that recently financed the turn of the century tech bubble and the greatest housing inflation in history, you’re saying that we are all in for a prolonged recession with double-digit interest rates and no growth (USA Today). The main reason Greenspan gives is that Chinese labor is growing more expensive so (dangerous) stuff from China is going to cost more at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, I am not making this up. He said this is to Lesley Stahl in the interview for 60 Minutes (cbsnews.com).

It is time to break this economic myth that labor costs are the primary cause of rising prices. It’s become patriotic to restrain wages by any means. But it’s not. In fact, it makes us all weaker. This faulty thinking has led to a world of unrelenting economic insecurity for the typical American. Males between 25 and 34 earn 17% less than their fathers did. The average American household sees $2000 less in real income than they did in 1975 and that’s with more people per household working longer hours! (economy.com).

Meanwhile, low real inflation is a tragic myth. In the 1990’s budget pinheads in Washington decided to change the way we calculate inflation to avoid cost of living hikes in social security. This is a serious deception. They overweigh any price that declines and don’t count prices that rise on the most important things (financialsense.com). Just open your eyes. The inflationary price of assets has exploded on all the things that matter. The house I bought for $40,000 in 1975 sold recently for over $500,000. This is a three bedroom, two bath 1960’s tract house bomb with tar covered compressed cardboard sewer pipes. That’s a 350% increase in real dollars. College tuition is up 300% in 25 years. We spent $1.79 per gallon for gas 5 years ago. Is today’s $3.00/gallon gas any better? Or does it just cost more? Yes, inflation is really low for hamburgers and CD players because we use Illegals to make our food and Chinese peasants to make our electronics that keep our wages right where they need to be. Meanwhile real inflation is raging on all the things that matter, and we may be headed for a big fat recession. And we’re supposed to think this is the best we can do?

Much of this is unnecessary. Real inflation is mostly caused by bad economic policy, special interest tax and trade policy, and a host of other myopic leadership blunders. The biggest thinking error of all is to think the labor costs is the primary cause of inflation therefore it is a national goal to keep labor costs low. The real cost of goods and services is mostly driven by waste. It’s everywhere. All the non-added-value materials and effort that go into building, manufacturing, unnecessary shipping, inventorying, packaging, and handling only add cost. Eighty percent of the raw materials and energy consumed to make a car are not in the final product. A typical 3000 square foot home can easily be constructed in 30 days if the work and materials are organized. How many homes are built in 30 days? The music industry makes more profit per song (about 60 cents) from an itunes download than a CD that they manufacture, package, ship, unload, and stock, while another layer of retailers handle, sell and put it in a plastic bag so you can spend time and gas driving back and forth to the store. So why do music companies, and builders, and car manufacturers do what they do? Because they’ve built their business models on assumptions that are no longer sustainable. Every industry has its bad habits. But please don‘t blame inflation on labor. Inflation is the product of leadership. With new leadership and new thinking we can invent ways of making and consuming that lower costs and raise living standards everywhere.

In the meantime, we are not powerless. All of us have suffered from creeping inflation in our own lives. Our old habits may cause us to spend time and money on activities and stuff that no longer add value. We all know the greatest compensation in life is not money or stuff. It’s loving friends, enriching experiences and satisfying service. So the real question for each of us is, “What thinking habits are enticing me to waste time or money on things that don’t enrich me? What new priorities, activities and experiences would bring lasting satisfaction?” As we look to a bumpy future, these personal choices will have a lot more impact on our well-being than some arrogant economist who actually stimulated inflation and blames us for wanting a piece of our own productivity. Get even. Live well.

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Strong, Wise, and Good

This week super-smart General Patraeus has told Congress we need to keep up our efforts in Iraq. But over 60% of Americans say we need a timetable for a pullout (USA Today). Everyone seems confused. We seemed to have lost our “mojo”. We’ve degenerated from confidence to uncertainty. It’s time to find our way. It’s time to form a real foreign policy that will help create a future world we want our children to live in.

It’s a tragedy that our nation has wasted its leadership capital since we became the world’s only super power in 1989. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had defined our role in the world as the good warrior who opposed demon communism. Once we won that war, we lost our strategic compass and often behaved as a confused giant. Well, the world’s changed a lot in the past six years, mostly for the worse. Civil strife, genocides, pestilence, and poverty pummel Africa. The Middle East is violent and chaotic. Nuclear Pakistan is a staying area for Islamic fundamentalists. China has the largest army in the world and nuclear missiles capable of targeting any Starbuck’s in Western North America. Meanwhile, our armies are weary and our defense budget overdrawn. Our greatest enemies are not nations but quasi-religious groups and international gangsters who want to destroy both our peace and way of life. Other than that, everything’s dandy.

It’s time for more than a new set of tactics. It’s time for a major change in foreign policy strategy that is both grounded in values and anchored by common sense that can be our overarching theme for future decades.

In an effort to kick-start new thinking, I wonder if we might adopt a foreign policy that is strong, wise, and good.

This is a foreign policy that first focuses on self-defense with a clear definition of what “self” means. Our foreign policy should seek our well-being and safety, while making us invulnerable to the unilateral actions of untrustworthy tyrants. Our oil based economy and addiction to cheap labor have tied our national interest to unpredictable behavior of both the Middle and the Far East. This is not wise. It weakens us daily.

Second, we ought to be leaders of international legal legitimacy. We must have the moral authority to spread a civilized international rule of law we love to tout but appear to treat superficially whenever we just want to act tough. We’ve spent decades establishing broad agreement about what’s legally acceptable behavior for world leaders and their armies and now is not the time to abandon that effort into a geo-political every-man-for-himself free-for-all.

Third, we must put great effort in minimizing violence. Unfortunately there are times when force is necessary. Those times are far fewer than most of us rationalize. But without the strength of arms and a wise willingness to use them, the world will be run by despots and tyrants. That said, open democracies will not sustain wars that have ambiguous aims or are incompetently waged. This is not due to lack of patriotism but rather because of it. War is a blunt instrument with unimaginable unintended consequences. And often the threat of violence is more powerful than its exercise. Increasingly, violence is non-strategic except in the most obvious and extreme circumstances. Perhaps most importantly we need to focus on stopping the spread of war weapons, everything from weapons of mass destruction to AK47s. The terror achieved with automatic weapons and shouldered missiles are enough to bring a society to its knees. There will always be sociopathic villains. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Atilla will always be with us. We must, for our children’s sake, do more than we have to limit the weapons at their disposal.

And fourth, we need to emphasize on our humanitarianism. The Tsunami relief effort created more good will in Muslim Indonesia than diplomatic maneuvers ever could. The world agreed long ago what true humanitarianism is. It’s found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A declaration we had a major hand in authoring. These are the rights human civilization must foster for the whole world to thrive. They are necessary to create hope and tolerance among the hopeless and hateful.

This fourth dimension of foreign policy is vital to our future because right now middle eastern oil money funded by our insatiable need for gasoline is being spent by the tens of millions to relieve poverty and insecurity of the world’s Muslim children. Islamic fundamentalist schools teach their growing generation that the U.S. version of civilization is corrupt and must be overthrown. The values of our Bill of Rights and individual self-determination are skewered on a sword of violence. And we are letting it happen.

Our battle is the oldest in the world. It is the battle for people’s minds. The battle to spread the point of view through which all decisions, personal and political, are made. We cannot win that war with guns or sanctions. We must win it because our ideas are more noble, more just, more meaningful. Of course we can establish schools, social programs and T.V. stations in troubled countries. But most of all we must lead by doing. We must be the first to exhibit the values we espouse to relieve suffering and provide opportunity. This is tough sledding. We cannot be naive. We cannot expect that our money or resources filtered through corrupt governments will achieve any good. Nevertheless, we must persist and invent new ways to systematically spread the collective wisdom of civilization so that some day, maybe a century from now, everyone in the world will have more to gain by peace than to lose by violence.

Strong, wise, and good: self-defense, legal legitimacy, minimize violence, emphasize humanitarianism. What do you think?

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Above All…Be an Original

I recently returned from a trip visiting my son and daughter-in-law. They just had twin girls so life is good as well as chaotic. My son, otherwise known as “Fun Boy,” was asking for career advice. I reminded him of his college rock band days when he played bass for “Burley Paul” (the name of his band). Here’s the gyst of my advice.

A few years ago, Chris, a great friend of mine was attending a summer concert featuring a Beatles Tribute band. They were dressed up like 1965 version of John, Paul, George and Ringo. They had their accents and music down. They were an amazing group of musicians perfectly imitating genuine rock stars. And they were fake. After twenty minutes Chris couldn’t handle it. He actually left his family sitting on the grass and spent an hour walking home. He couldn’t stand listening to “fake Beatles.” To this day, Chris tells me that if were a musician, he would rather spend his life playing his music in small bars and clubs then playing someone else’s music to crowds of Baby Boomers’ trying to re-imagine their past. Chris is an original. He is not about to sing someone else’s song.

Turns out, this is great career advice. “Be the rock star of your own life!”

So, what if you were a rock star? What if you wrote your own music, sang your own songs, and enjoyed a unique identity that was the best expression of you at your core? “Remember,” I said to my son, “the people you most admire are all originals.”

Your career is not your job. Not the job you have now, nor your next job. Your career is your evolving means of self-expression, or better yet, soul expression. We are free to express our design and pursue our desires. We have permission to pursue our destiny. That’s the core idea of the American Dream. That’s what career should be all about.

Today, more than ever, it is crucial to be consciously aware of our unique design. As Americans, we don’t have the automatic job advantages we once had. We can no longer count on a safe thirty-year career at a booming American corporation. If we are going to succeed and be happy in the new millennium, we need to leverage our unique traits and talents to their highest potential. It’s our innate qualities that must be constantly expressed and developed throughout our careers. These are the qualities that turn out to be portable, that we take from job to job, that can’t be wiped out by a surprise new technology.

Over the past 25 years, corporate America has developed a new social contract with its employees. That is: no contract. We are on our own. So we need to figure out how to make ourselves indispensable. Otherwise, we are all just laboring in dead-end temp jobs with important-sounding titles. The key is to define and create Dream Jobs for ourselves. Jobs that fit our traits, talents and desires. Jobs where uniqueness creates value.

A lot of career counseling is lame. It’s based on trying to figure out where you fit into the world, rather than who you are. Fitting in will never make you outstandingly valuable. Rather, it is often where you don’t fit that you can create your highest value and reap your greatest success. It is called unconventional job fit.

If you took an assessment that revealed your personality and interests, most career centers would try to find you jobs that aligned with your test results. If you tested out as a math oriented, problem-solving introvert, for example, you might be told to become an accountant. But let’s look at the real world. The people who really put accounting firms on the map are gregarious, visionary and great at sales and client relationships. These are the kind of people that can add the greatest value to an accounting firm. They manage the mathematical introverts.

Flip it around – who is the most valued worker in Hollywood? Not the one with the big personality who can sing, dance and act. Those folks are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. The value worker is the quiet, organized one who shows up on time and can get projects completed. The one who takes care of the details. Are you getting the point here?

Look for a career where your particular traits and talents make you a stand out rather than a fit in. (If you want to get a clear idea of your core traits, go to the VIA Signature Strengths website and take the assessment. Get acquainted with yourself.)

Figuring out what brings us our greatest satisfaction, and how we must make a difference is not easy and it’s never ending. In fact, it’s the journey of life. Go on the journey and never settle for being a fake Beatle.

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