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Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#61

Post by paganel »

avgcorrection wrote: post #25
pella wrote: post #2

suggestions ( via MIT Sloan ) 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. 2. Develop happiness in your workforce. 3. Retain employees who are happy.

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)

No ofense to you in the slightest but your comment made me think of the darkest of dystopias. Re-reading it and getting to the "A patient, better driver" part I had to think of an un-patient, bad driver to sort of erase that feeling from my head, the best I could find was this scene with Harvey Keitel in "Bad Lieutenant" [1]. It also helps that I'm a Mets fan and, as such, we are almost never happy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir8Y4iFrWk8

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#62

Post by jevgeni »

montebicyclelo wrote: post #60

> we suggest that leaders follow the science and take a structured approach to hiring for, promoting, and developing employee happiness > Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. > we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important. Good luck getting a job, unhappy people… I don’t think the…

I feel this article is peak 2020s so far: super positive title with a utterly Orwellian conclusion.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#64

Post by allendoerfer »

coldtea wrote: post #43
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.

> 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 resol…

Your parent just explained, that there have been animals hatching from eggs before there were chicken. At some point some of those egg-hatching animals had mutated enough to be now called the first chicken. He thereby answered the chickend-egg-question through evolution.

Edit: Even if you specify, that it has to be a "chicken-egg" you just have to decide, whether an animal producing a chicken-egg is automatically a chicken. I would argue no, because you could then prove by induction that everything before has been a chicken.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#65

Post by DocTomoe »

vbezhenar wrote: post #58
martneumann wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard that Americans motivate themselves positively: If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen! ... while Germans motivate themselves negatively: If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.

That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.

Often, these thoughts are about worst cases, and imagined outcomes so much more than realistic ones. Germans do have a word for that: "Kopfkino" (literally translated to "cinema in the head"), a state of worrying about things that becomes more darkly fantastical with every second spent on it, playing through all the imaginable adverse outcomes.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#67

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#68

Post by lnsru »

neilv wrote: post #53

> 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. In many ways, “hiring the happy” requires a bit of perspective. While we do not believe that happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important. How is instit…

The funny thing is that I went to all job interviews, because I wasn’t happy with my job/unemployment at the time. I have no idea how to fake here more happiness. Currently I am unhappy with technical level at the company and future salary development, but I can’t tell this directly anyway. I guess I need to learn the ritual how to produce right answers.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#69

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #58
martneumann wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard that Americans motivate themselves positively: If I manage to finish this work today, great things will happen! ... while Germans motivate themselves negatively: If I don't finish this work today, I'll lose my job, home, family and cat.

That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.

Not entirely true. Outside of government workers who are set for life, getting fired in Germany is definitely possible for various reasons, I know many cases. There are legal processes the employer must follow in order to fire employees but nearly all companies have lawyers that take care of that process to let employees go without getting sued.

And you can fall on financial hardship if for example, you took massive loan for a house and you lost your job which happens to be in a low demand filed, making it hard to find another job quickly. You usually have your 1-3 months notice period as a buffer, but the unemployment you get after that might not cover your full expenses as that's usually around the 60% mark of your pay.

Sure, like in most of Europe, it's more difficult to become poor and homeless than in the US, but Germany doesn't give you some magic immunity talisman to never loosing your job.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#70

Post by endymi0n »

jesseendahl wrote: post #13
drewcoo wrote: post #5

Happy people don't change the world. They maintain the status quo. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Shaw https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...

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.

With everything I've learned so far, this perfectly describes the core struggle of success and entrepreneurship.

In order to have massive success, you need a constant state of both unreasonableness and optimism.

Unreasonableness drives results and change, optimism inspires people to rally around your cause.

If you're not unreasonable, chances are you aren't striving for more. There's lots of people out there living a perfectly happy, unremarkable life.

If you're unreasonable, that's by definition an unhappiness with the world, which creates a drive to change it.

If that unreasonableness creeps to much into your life, you get unhappy as well.

If the happiness creeps too much into your unreasonableness, you start losing your edge, the very drive that made all of it happen.

That's why you see so few truly happy billionaires and so many deeply happy people who are never even trying to make a larger impact on thousands.

It's certainly possible to balance both, but it's a very fine line to walk and constant personal development.

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