Happy Chats with Daniel Pink transcript

i think for me and for many people happiness is two components one of them is some degree of security am i healthy is my family healthy do i have enough money to pay the rent uh but at the same time i want to know am i using my strengths to do something that matters and that combination of both the physical security and kind of sense of meaningfulness and purpose on a day-to-day level is really what happiness is yeah i'm not sure what i'm not sure what the missing ingredient is i have a hunch uh and one of my hunches is that a lot of times these employee programs are very controlling that they don't have they don't allow a lot of autonomy on the part of the individuals participating in it so you have to do well-being a certain way you have to do well-being a certain time and that goes again as completely antithetical to notions of well-being because a lot of human flourishing is founded on a sense of self-direction so if i don't have some sovereignty over what i do how i do it when i do it where i do it who i do it with then my path toward well-being is going to be thwarted so that would be my hunch about why some of these wellness programs have those low levels of engagement yeah well i mean happiness is a very freighted word and a lot of times when people think about the word happiness they think about um smiling enjoyment at the beach kicking up sand running around and that's at some level that's not what happiness is i mean seligman's work shows that happiness is actually can be happiness in its true sense is often kind of it's quieter than that it's it's it's having a sense of meaning in your life having a sense of purpose in your life getting up in the morning and knowing why you're doing what you're doing and recognizing that what you're doing actually makes a small contribution to the world and so when we think about happiness we always end up being we always end up with these visions of kind of beaming smiles when in fact there's a broader you know there's a broader notion of happiness out there that is that is um a little bit more mellow which is about am i doing something that matters am i making a contribution to the world there's you know hedonic happiness and then there's actually a kind of a deeper sort of happiness and i i think that deeper sort of happiness is you know do i have people who love me do i have people i love am i doing something that matters am i using my strengths am i making a contribution is really what happiness is not so much um a day at the beach uh i'm not a big believer in passion uh for a couple of reasons number one is that you know i think that the um you know when you when you say to people you know what's your passion um i hate that question when it's asked to me because you always have to come up with a really really good answer you know and and for me i'm not sure what it is now i know i think it's it's clear to focus on like what what do you do when nobody's watching what do you do that where you have a flow experience and you lose a sense of time and lose a sense of self i think that that gives you some clues about what you should be doing the other thing about passion is that it's much more it's so inner directed it makes if you say what's your passion becomes all about me rather than about what is going on in the rest of the world and what i'm and what i'm contributing so um so i think that focus on focusing a little bit more in an outward way what contribution am i making whose lives am i affecting is better than say it's better than asking myself what's my passion as for purpose you know i mean i think that um that sometimes we get um diluted into believing that one's purpose is always perfectly stated at every time in one's life and fixed forever it's a moving target in many cases and so one's purpose at age 20 might be very different from one's purpose at age 50 which might be very different from one's purpose at age at age 80. and so i think we have to look at purpose as as an aspiration rather than the correct answer on a multiple choice test you know the whole field of academic psychology and academic social science um didn't even acknowledge happiness or flourishing until 15 20 years ago i mean it was all about dysfunction and disorder and so i think that academic psychology has really turned the corner and focused on what is it that makes people fulfilled and positive contributors so i think that's great and i think that as a consequence of that it's rippled into the it's rippled into the mainstream so you can have a conversation in mixed company about happiness you can have a conversation mixed company about purpose and i think that's nothing but i think that's nothing but healthy if you look at organizations and you look at the research on motivation and performance what it shows is that the the mainstay motivator that we use in organizations i call it an if-then motivator if you do this then you get that those are very effective for simple routine tasks with short time horizons but they're not very effective at all for more complex creative tasks with long time horizons and we use them for everything and so and as more of the workplace migrates toward doing things that require complexity judgment discernment what we're using is a set of motivational mechanisms that are literally from the wrong century and so if we upgrade our motivational techniques and focus more on paying people well and giving them autonomy mastery and purpose then i think we have will have done a huge world of good the other thing that i think is extraordinarily important for people to recognize is the research that shows that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work um and what we need to do is we need to re-architect our workplaces to some extent we architect our own lives so we can help people see the progress that we're making help people acknowledge the progress that people are making remove the barriers to progress and if we focus our individual lives and our organizations on helping people make progress then i think it's going to be down to the benefit of both the individuals and the organizations but right now we don't have that right now there a lot of people feel extraordinarily thwarted in their ability to make progress and the mechanisms inside of firms do very very little to encourage or promote progress i think that magazines like live happy do a great public service that is they take what scientists have found and translate it for regular people into ways that can actually improve their lives and so you know there's so many other magazines out there about about dieting and working out and all of these kinds of purely physical notions of well-being which we're just fine but there aren't that many magazines devoted to human flourishing and so i think the time is perfect for a magazine like this