The Myths of Happiness with Jackson Kerchis

Hey, it’s Jackson here. I want to do a quick introduction because you’re about to be seeing a whole lot more of me here on this channel. My name is Jackson. I’m Paul’s business partner at Happiness Means Business. I’m a former Zen monk, management consultant, and startup executive, and now I work with Paul to deliver talks, training, and transformation at the intersection of happiness and work. So really nice to meet you. I’m excited to be here and be sharing with you. And what you’re about to watch is one of my favorite talks. It was sort of a TED Talk we called a “tide talk” from my time at the University of Alabama, where I explain some of the myths of happiness and success and why you should prioritize your happiness. So stick around and watch. It’s a little bit about me in my better days. I was born in San Jose, Costa Rica. I’m a proud pool citizen, grew up in the best town in the best state in the Union, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. I took this Gap year to live abroad and learn languages. Come back to UA majoring in economics and finance, and uh, pro tip, it makes the conversation with your parents a lot easier when you tell them about majoring in happiness if you also major in the evening. And so, I’m a member of some great groups on campus as well, including but not limited to the management consulting Academy. And, uh, you know, as I touched on, I may be the first person in history to graduate with a degree in happiness. So, I’ll tell you a little bit more about why I’m doing this, who knows what’s going on here, this is water, it was Oscar Wallace and a few people, great so you see, right? Um, how’s the water? What the heck is water? And the idea with this story is to say, “Hey, you know, so often the things that are right in front of us, the things that are the most important, are the things we overlooked.” And that was my experience as I obsessed over, you know, “what do I want to study?” And finally, I found the answer right in front of me: happiness. None of my knowledge, there’s never been another happiness major here at any other school. And I think that that speaks to the fact that, much like wolves as fish in their ignorance of water, our society is largely overlooked a subject matter which is at the very heart of our experience. And so, it’s not just about why I’m doing it, it’s about why it matters to you. And so, what I want you to do is take out your phone, take out something you can write with, and just take a few seconds and write down what your happy life looks like. You know, maybe 10 seconds, nothing crazy. If you’re not sure, that’s fine. That’ll make me look like I know what I’m talking about later. Alright, so who here was somewhat uncertain about what to put down for that, for you? Great. Let me ask another way: who was so certain about their definite clear picture of happiness that they were willing to bet their life on it, right? No one? Okay, well this is important, right? Because if a happy life is what we’re after, how you answer this question, that’s the wager you’re making. You’re betting your life on knowing how to do this. And so, it’s problematic that we really don’t know how to do this, but there’s also a bout of why it’s important for all of us because society does give us sort of a model or narrative to what a happy life looks like. And in my opinion, it looks something like this: you graduate high school, you leave the nest, make new friends, start on your life, then you get a career so you can make money, then you settle down, soulmate, American Dream, right? And then, finally, I guess you end up being successful, and then you can be happy. But what does the science have to say about this model? So, this first idea of fresh start, you know, make new friends, all that, Robert Wollinger and his colleagues at Harvard have been running the longest psychological study of its time, basically tracking every factor you can think of to determine what leads to life satisfaction and longevity. What they found far and away the biggest predictor to be is quality of relationships. And so, these aren’t, you know, Facebook friends, right? These are really time-intensive, deep meaningful connections that lead to health. We have this idea of money, right? So, what’s going on here? Every year, GDP per capita – that’s how much money we’re all making – it’s been increasing, but we see happiness has remained flat. And this is not just a problem here in China. We have huge increases in real income, but you see that dissatisfaction has risen and satisfaction has declined. So, we’re over two. Maybe we can turn it around with a soulmate. And so, what’s going on in this graph here? Zero, so you get married. On the left, you have life satisfaction, and so you see two years now, two years out, it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s pretty good. One year, things are really going well, you’re getting married, the best year ever, and then you start crashing back here. So, obviously, it’s not very sustainable. And so now, this is for German and women. My hypothesis is that for a few American girls, I met with something like this. You have to keep up with us guys. We’re not always the best here, and although I haven’t been married, we do have some actual data on how this looks. So, now getting back to this, we see this idea that you’ve seen, you’re successful, alright? And then you’re happy. Once again, people at Harvard, Sean Anchor, they studied this, and what they find is actually the reverse. It’s not successful unhappiness. It’s happiness, then success. Happy people more engaged, more effective, and more productive. And so, how we do right? Well, it seems like we underestimate long-term relationships. We overestimate money. Soulmate is not the answer, and success, we have it backwards. So, Houston can have a call, right? Because we don’t really know what makes us happy. And when we are looking for answers in society. So, where do we begin? What is happiness? How do we do it? And this is really the key thing I want to focus on, is this idea of going from what it is to how. And that’s because what implies something static, something fixed, the tree, whereas how implies something dynamic, skill, or practice. And if you survey every discipline – philosophy, religion, science – all of them, this is the common theme, that happiness is a lifelong practice.