Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

sloanreview.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 477 posts

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#41

Post by jonny_eh »

xmprt wrote: post #30
foo_barrio wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.

You're right but for the people who are confused, it's because of the semantics of the question. If you specify the question a little more and ask "What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg" then the question is how do you define a chicken egg. Is it the egg that comes from a chicken or the egg that a chicken hatches from. In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I t…

It's not even that simple. Evolution occurs gradually, so gradually in fact that there is no "first" chicken. Any given chicken/ancestor you pick will be so genetically close to its parents/children, that they're the same species by any definition.

Another way of putting the paradox is "Which chicken arrived first, the chicken or its parent"?

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#42

Post by robin_reala »

Bancakes wrote: post #31
avgcorrection wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fitter, happier, more productive Comfortable (Not drinking too much) Regular exercise at the gym (Three days a week) Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries At ease Eating well (No more microwave dinners and saturated fats) A patient, better driver A safer car (Baby smiling in back seat) Sleeping well (No bad dreams)

Exercise doesn't have to be at the gym. You can do fairly high level calisthenics with a weighed bag and/or Olympic rings Excellent books on the topic like Your Body is Your Gym, Overcoming Gravity, and Paul Wade's ultimate isometrics.

In case you missed GP’s sarcasm, this is the beginning of the lyrics to Radiohead’s Fitter Happier.[1] To give you the general tenor of the piece’s downwards spiral, the song finishes with:

Like a cat

Tied to a stick

That's driven into

Frozen winter shit (The ability to laugh at weakness)

Calm

Fitter, healthier and more productive

A pig

In a cage

On antibiotics

[1] https://genius.com/Radiohead-fitter-happier-lyrics

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#43

Post by coldtea »

foo_barrio wrote: post #24
rob74 wrote: post #21

> Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? Er, that sounds suspiciously like the eternal question "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". If you start off with a "happy" state of mind because of "external" reasons, you are probably more likely to succeed at work too, but of course your work also should contribute to maintaining your happiness. So it's either a virtu…

The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.

>Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs)

Which is neither here, nor there, and has little to do with the question, which is based on the paradox that you need a chicken egg to produce a chicken, and a chicken to produce a chicken egg.

It's not about whether some other random eggs existed before, but about when the cycle of chicken and chicken egg came to be, and how the vicious circle was resolved.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#44

Post by robertlagrant »

This paper does seem a little dodgy in its assumptions. We shouldn't dismiss military-based studies? Okay, (ish), but then the study doesn't measure happiness vs performance, it measures "how do you rate yourself" vs "the army's selection process for awarding medals".

Given medals at least partly exist to reward extremely optimistic behaviour at the expense of personal safety, shall we say, having an optimistic outlook could singularly apply to the field of warfare where individual optimism in the face of unlikely odds is a good thing.

This isn't sort of mindset we wouldn't want in our doctors or engineers or bankers, or almost anyone else.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#46

Post by coldtea »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #35
jesseendahl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conflating “unreasonable” with “unhappy”. It’s absolutely possible to have unreasonably high standards/expectations for “how things should be” and fight super hard for change/progress, while still being a happy person.

Fighting for change profits from desperation at the state of the world, which tends to be incompatible with happiness. It can work out, of course.

On the contary, it's people that have a purpose who are the happiest - and can shrug off almost anything that comes their way...

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#47

Post by robertlagrant »

endymi0n wrote: post #38
NalNezumi wrote: post #33

>You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later…

While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all. Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations. Some of them adapt and get cynical. Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part o…

I thought the study was saying you need to be happy first.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#48

Post by [deleted] »

endymi0n wrote: post #38
NalNezumi wrote: post #33

>You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later…

While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all. Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations. Some of them adapt and get cynical. Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part o…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN