Maybe human beings are just not destined to be happy; perhaps it’s just not in our genes. Hold on, hold on! You will be “happy” to know that this is not true. But why then do we have such a difficult time, despite a massive effort and life-long pursuit, finding that illusive experience called happiness? The answer to that question happens to be the purpose of this book and this essay.
Making the connection between our story (our worldview) and our behavior will explain why we are failing to find happiness and indeed failing to create healthy, sustainable behavior. In short, we can’t find happiness, because we don’t believe in it. Our story has come to embody Social Darwinism (scarcity, the other and survival of the fittest). Our identity is that of a fragile being in a hostile environment (chaos), and our behavior is an intermittent but continuous string of reactions (my evil or neurotic self gets out of control and I can’t help it). We will never experience much if any authentic happiness until we radically rewrite this P-B narrative.
We are learning in this chapter that we are not going to get much help from the institution of psychology as to how to create happiness for ourselves. Psychology as an institution, like all other P-B global village institutions, is infused with the self-limiting and neurosis-producing beliefs, attitudes and values that create and perpetuate our unsustainable and happiness-bereft experience. The good news is that we can rewrite our story any time we choose. We will probably have to go ahead and do that for ourselves expressing our self-reliance and hope that our loved ones (and we have roughly 7 billion loved ones) choose to follow our example. Once again, we will continue to make our case for absolute optimism.
There are a handful of psychologists leading the way toward the new paradigm, working in the early stages of rewriting the human narrative. We will look at one of these pioneers who is conducting research and at the same time embodying behaviors that relate directly to our topic of happiness. Take note how simple his research methods and conclusions are compared to the labyrinth-like complexity of mainstream psychology in P-B. The blessing of Simple Reality is that it is simple.
If compassion is not the ultimate destination on the map that we are using to find happiness, we have the wrong map and we will never find what we are looking for, therefore the fundamental connection that has to be made is between compassion and happiness. Can a psychologist do that? If he has found a way to live in the present moment he can.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant, 31, is the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Philadelphia’s Wharton School. Any professor in academia wishing to champion a paradigm shift will have to buck the system (the old paradigm) and at the same time do it in such a way so as not to lose his connection with the community he is attempting to transform. Has Adam Grant found a way to do this?
Traditionally, employers have tried to keep their employees “happy” by offering financial incentives, inherently interesting work or career advancement. In his new book, Give and Take, Grant “starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.” In his interview with Susan Dominus, Grant, will never use the word compassion but we will see that he connects our two key human behaviors – happiness and compassion.
If Grant succeeds in making compassion or service to others both pleasurable and profitable, he will have begun the all-important paradigm shift at the heart of Simple Reality. His book contains examples of C.E.O.’s who see the process of management as an opportunity to mentor and support their employees. “These generous professionals look at the world the way Grant does: an in-box filled with requests is not a task to be dispensed with perfunctorily (or worse, avoided); it’s an opportunity to help people, and therefore it’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself and your work.” Feeling good about yourself and your work is a way of describing not only happiness but also experiencing the “flow” of being in the present moment.
Does Grant walk his talk in his relationship with his students when they need his help? No question about it. “I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails as ‘answering e-mails.’ I have to look at it as, How is this task going to benefit the recipient?”
Do you need more proof that happiness is created by serving others, by being compassionate? Of course you do! Let’s go back to when this all began with Grant—his first insight. He worked selling ads for “Let’s Go,” a travel guide series while an undergrad at Harvard. Initially, he wasn’t making money for himself or the company. What was his insight? “Suddenly the impact of his role became clear to him: without advertising revenues, the company could not make money, which in turn meant it couldn’t provide jobs to students who needed them. With that in mind, he was willing to make a harder sell, to take a tougher line on negotiations. ‘When I was representing the interests of the students, I was willing to fight to protect them.’”
It is one thing to be compassionate in the business world but it has to work for the bottom line. “Grant eventually sold the largest advertising package in company history and less than a year later, at 19, was promoted to director of advertising sales, overseeing a budget of $1 million.”
Later, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan he proposed a study of a really gruesome job, that of a fund-raising call center at the University. This is very unsatisfying, repetitive work with a rejection rate of 93 percent and with occasional verbal abuse, and it can be emotionally stressful. Not a happiness-producing job.
Grant’s proposal stated that he would motivate the callers to work harder. The call center’s primary purpose was funding scholarships, so Grant’s idea was to bring in a student who had benefited from the fund-raising. The callers took a 10 minute break and the young man told them how he had benefited from the fund-raising and how excited he was to now be working as a teacher with Teach for America. Even Grant was shocked by the results.
“A month after the testimonial, the workers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone and bringing in 171 percent more revenue, even though they were using the same script.” Even showing the callers letters from grateful recipients had the effect of increasing their fund-raising results.
“Prosocial motivation” is obviously beginning to rewrite the workplace paradigm. What is this shift that we would all benefit from? The shift from P-B to P-A would change human behavior on the job from seeking meaningful and profitable work “out there” to being a meaningful person “in here,” that is, within our own “state of being.” This is another good definition of happiness. When we no longer need to seek happiness and instead “become” happiness it doesn’t matter what we do for a living or where we do it because we take our happiness with us along with our self-worth. Happiness is then a part of our identity, an inseparable part of who we are. As students of Simple Reality we already know that a profound worldview shift will also cause a shift in identity.
A case in point! Grant did a study of employees at Borders who contributed to an employee-beneficiary fund managed by the staff with Borders matching the donated funds. The money was given to employees in need. For example someone who was pregnant with strained finances or someone grieving the death of a loved one. “Grant found that it was not the beneficiaries who showed the most significant increase in their commitment to Borders; it was the donors, even those who gave just a few dollars a week. Through interviews and questionnaires, Grant determined that ‘as a result of gratitude to the company for the opportunity to affirm a valued aspect of their identities, they developed stronger affective commitment to the company.’”
We may not think of the workplace as providing an opportunity to systematically express compassion but perhaps we should. “In corporate America, people do sometimes feel that the work they do isn’t meaningful. And contributing to co-workers can be a substitute for that.” Giving workers in hospitals, students on campus or corporate employees the opportunity to choose response instead of reaction is a community-transforming opportunity as well as giving individuals a wholesome new way of beginning to create a new identity.
In the article by Susan Dominus we find “prosocial motivation” defined as “the desire to help others, independent of easily foreseeable payback.” What about the effect of prosocial motivation beyond the private sector and the academic setting? We all know how dangerous hospitals can be. “In one study, Grant put up two different signs at hand-washing stations in a hospital. One reminded doctors and nurses, ‘Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases;’ another read, ‘Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.’ Grant measured the amount of soap used at each station. Doctors and nurses at the station where the sign referred to their patients used 45 percent more soap or hand sanitizer.”
Just to revisit our claim that traditional psychological models tend to be out of touch with reality, we can look at Freud’s definition of mental health, certainly a component of happiness. He felt that we would be mentally healthy if our aggression, the energy behind our reactions, were sublimated into work. This is simply repressing more fear and anger into our shadow, programming an even more violent future explosion like those we all see occurring with ever greater frequency around our planet.
If we were to promote more compassion in the global village we would do well to have some idea what the movement from false-self behaviors to True-self behaviors would look like and where humanity is on this spectrum.
“Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of social-science research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category …”
The importance of beginning to create a P-A context is to get some momentum going as the global village begins to face ever-increasing breakdown in the efficacy of the old pseudo-solutions, the old “scientific approach” to staving off cultural collapse. Grant gives us several “hand-holds” by which we can begin the ascent toward more sustainable human behavior; for example, “consolidated giving.”
“Grant incorporates his field’s finding into his own life with methodical rigor: one reason he meets with students four and a half hours in one day rather than spreading it out over the week is that a study found that consolidating giving yields more happiness.” Another example of consolidated giving is Habitat for Humanity where volunteering a generous amount of time building houses for the poor can be a rewarding experience.
Self-transformation or the shift in identity is a long-term undertaking for most of us. It is a process of choosing response instead of reaction moment by moment, day after day over time. Our life becomes a meditation on producing compassion in the present moment. “By consistently overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, they had strengthened their psychological muscles, to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting.” This is Grant describing what we call the Point of Power Practice and the authentic power that such a practice promises.
What would life be like if we knew what life was like? This is where overall context is important. If we continue to believe in social Darwinism and that the real story is the other is out to “get us,” then all the momentarily successful programs and policies, peace treaties and technological breakthroughs will be irrelevant in humanity’s march to self-destruction. Grant’s research points out that the True-self exists but each of us must stop feeding the false self and nurture our naturally happy self.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
