Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

An old psych study claims that one year after some great or terrible event, winning the lottery, or breaking your back. People are roughly as happy on average as they were before the event. It makes sense in many ways, happiness does not seem to change much over life. To me it looks like happiness is regulated towards some fix point. This is often cited as a reason not to despair, which is nice, but for someone like me it is horrifying. Much like with weight, there is no reason to assume that you are being regulated towards a healthy state.

I am successful by most metrics, but I am so despite being miserable, and well aware of it. But it is also a question of what kinds of tasks I focus on, positivity and natural happiness is extremely important for most sales people, and beneficial for teamwork, especially high stress teamwork. But less so for solitary independent work like research, and too much positivity seems to make people easier to scam, and I would prefer a cynic as responsible for it sec (not that I have ever seen one that wasn't). Happiness has a wide range of other positive effects too, but it is difficult to decorrelate, and if I was optimistic Id say something like teamwork and sales are easy to measure, so anything which is positively correlated with work productivity will be biased due to selection bias. If I was pessimistic I think Id just say yeah its probably true, but hey, the world isn't fair, and while I am miserable, at least I'm not stupid, and I would not want those two reversed.

A lot of resource —> happiness.

A lot of resource —> energy for curiosity.

A lot of resource —> energy and time for high achievement at work.

So happiness is a correlate for staying in high-resource state in a stable manner, which correlates with high achievement, the quality employers seek.

Immediately one can consider a trap of unhappiness, similar to the trap of poverty: being worried makes you perform worse, which leads to problems with employers, which males you even more worried. Unlike poverty, this potentially could be countered by antidepressants.

It's usually something like "here's a link to a free one hour e-course on mindfulness". But do take it in your free time. Or the many internal emails from leaders about how they "appreciate" the difficulty of these times.

It's all performative, hollow and cheap.

If you really claim to care or appreciate it, walk the talk. Give people 1K out of the blue, for sticking to their performance despite enormous challenges. That's still really a pathetically low number.

Or...it looks like you're exhausted. Take a few days of on my expense.

Or...we normally produce 500 of whatever unit, given the incredibly hard balancing act of you managing your family at home whilst trying to get work done, we'll temporarily slow it down to 400 of whatever unit.

All of these are just examples of humane and simple signals to tell that you really do care. If you do none of these things, you don't care. So stop pretending.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026 | Good sleep, good learning, good life (supermemo.guru)