Test yourself to find what you need to be happier

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Happiness is not really different in each person. In fact, science shows us happiness is basically the same for all of us. And our roadblocks to happiness are all basically the same as well — that we each think we are special and the research doesn’t apply to us, so we just keep trying to earn more accolades or more money.

That said, here are some checkup tests to take to see how you’re doing in the happiness department.

You were born with a genetic disposition to being happy (or not).
Scientific American writes about hedonic adaptation which is basically our ability to return to our regular level of happiness no matter how much money we have. (The classic study for this is from the 1970s which found that after two years, lottery winners were no more happy than they were before the big win.)

So instead of making the irrational assumption that you are different than the rest of the human race, try accepting that you aren’t, and look for happiness somewhere other than money.

In fact, your set point for happiness is mostly genetic – based on how optimistically you approach the world. But you can make a 40% impact on your optimism level by changing your daily routine in relatively small ways – like doing a bunch of random acts of kindness in one day, on a weekly basis.

Sonja Lyubomirsky’s new book, the How of Happiness is packaged to look like a sequel to Daniel Gilbert’s bestselling book, Stumbling on Happiness, and it sort of is a sequel. Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, and she describes twelve steps you can take to change your happiness set point – and the science behind those suggestions.

Wondering if you’re an optimistic thinker? Here’s the test. (middle of the page)

Burnout undermines your happiness, and it’s not about time.
Burnout has little to do with how many hours you work and a lot to do with the type of work you’re doing. Burnout comes from not being able to achieve what you want to achieve even though you are working hard to get it. It’s a situation where you have goals you can’t pin down (like if you work for four bosses) or goals you can’t meet (like if you have an impossible deadline).

People who are most susceptible to burnout are nurses in pediatric burn units because the goal is so clear and so urgent – stop the pain in small children – but it’s an impossible goal to meet.

Other people who are susceptible, though, are lawyers, who are at the beck and call of clients who generally cannot be pleased because they are in legal trouble and upset about it, and even if they are not in legal trouble, who likes spending money on a lawyer?

The thing is that a lot of lawyers make a lot of money. So the money part does not ward off against burnout and might even make you feel more compelled to stay in a bad situation.

Are you on the road to burnout? Here’s the test. (middle of the page)

Stop telling yourself it’s about your job.
One of the first things people think when they are unhappy is that they need to change their job. Maybe they’ll get a job that pays more, or that allows them to be their true self, or will be their dream job.

But you know what? A job does not make you happy, it only makes you unhappy. And forget about that raise, because the incremental happiness you get from earning more than, say, $100,000 is barely noticeable. (Yes, even if you have a family of four in San Francisco. Stop thinking you’re the exception to every rule. It’s a flaw that undermines your ability to change.)

The thing that increases our happiness is our relationships. A job cannot make those better. However a job can make you so unhappy that you can’t relish the relationships in your life.

Do you want to know if the problem is your job? It’s not likely, but here’s the test.

Align your goals with what really makes you happy.
A lot of you are probably incredulous. Maybe you think the American Dream is about getting a good job and earning more money than your parents. But the American Dream used to be about moving west and buying land, and now we see that as something for older generations that doesn’t apply to us. So maybe the idea of more money and better jobs is the new detritus of the American dream, and if you don’t believe me, maybe you have an outdated outlook.

Wondering if you think like your grandma? Here’s the test.

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Bad career advice: Do what you love

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One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to “do what you love.”

Forget that. It’s absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And you might not be in preschool, but if you are in touch with who you are, you are doing what you love, no matter what, because you love it.

So it’s preposterous that we need to get paid to do what we love because we do that stuff anyway. So you will say, “But look. Now you are getting paid to do what you love. You are so lucky.” But it’s not true. We are each multifaceted, multilayered, complicated people, and if you are reading this blog, you probably devote a large part of your life to learning about yourself and you know it’s a process. None of us loves just one thing.

I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex. In fact, as you might imagine, my sex life is really tanking right now. But I don’t sit up at night thinking, should I do writing or sex? Because career decisions are not decisions about “what do I love most?” Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?

So how could you possibly pick one thing you love to do? And what would be the point?

The world reveals to you all that you love by what you spend time on. Try stuff. If you like it, you’ll go back to it. I just tried Pilates last month. I didn’t want to try, but a friend said she loved the teacher, so I went. I loved it. I have taken it three times a week ever since. And it’s changed me. I stand up straighter. (I’d also have better sex, if I were having it. The Pilates world should advertise more that it improves your sex life: Totally untapped market.)

Often, the thing we should do for our career is something we would only do if we were getting a reward. If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you’d do even if you didn’t get paid, you’ll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money.

The pressure we feel to find a perfect career is insane. And, given that people are trying to find it before they are thirty, in order to avoid both a quarterlife crisis and a biological-clock crisis, the pressure is enough to push people over the edge. Which is why one of the highest risk times for depression in life is in one’s early twenties when people realize how totally impossible it is to simply “do what you love.”

Here’s some practical advice: Do not what you love; do what you are. It’s how I chose my career. I bought the book with that title – maybe my favorite career book of all time – and I took the quickie version of the Myers-Briggs test. The book gave me a list of my strengths, and a list of jobs where I would likely succeed based on those strengths.

Relationships make your life great, not jobs. But a job can ruin your life – make you feel out of control in terms of your time or your ability to accomplish goals – but no job will make your life complete. It’s a myth mostly propagated by people who tell you to do what you love. Doing what you love will make you feel fulfilled. But you don’t need to get paid for it.

A job can save your life, though. If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world. Take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves.

So if you are overwhelmed with the task of “doing what you love” you should recognize that you are totally normal, and maybe you should just forget it. Just do something that caters to your strengths. Do anything.

And if you are so overwhelmed that you feel depression coming on, consider that a job might save you. Take one. Doing work and being valued in the community is important. For better or worse, we value people with money. Earn some. Doing work you love is not so important. We value love in relationships. Make some.

 

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The end of work as we know it

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The New Year is a traditional time for predictions. So here are mine, for the workplace. I predict an end of work as we know it, of course. But don’t get jumpy – it’s not going to be here in 2008. It’s going to come sooner than later, as the next generation infiltrates the ranks of workers. The best way to be ready is to start adapting your thinking today, because the way we think about work now is going to become obsolete.

The end of gender disparity
Pay is equal for men and women until there are kids. This inequality will change when Generation Y starts having kids because the men are committed to being equal partners in child rearing. We see already that among Generation X men and women are willing to give up pay and prestige in order to get time with their families. Generation Y’s demographic power will provide critical mass for big change.

The end of the stay-at-home parent
Women have already widely rejected the idea of sacrificing their time with children to a relentless, high-powered, long-houred job, and men are following suit. Women have also found that staying at home with kids all day is boring. Institutions are responding — finally — to these trends. Parents will choose some form of shared care. Each parent will work part-time and take care of kids part time.

The end of the grind
People will choose to work as a way to keep the job of raising children from being dull and alienating. The Washington Post reported that given the choice, most women with kids would rather work part-time than either be with kids full-time or work in an office full-time. People will choose to work because they love what they do. Generation Y is more community oriented and team oriented than any preceding generation. These people will want to work to be part of something larger than themselves. Also, this generation sees work as a path to personal growth – something to look forward to.

The end of “work friends”
Peoples’ networks will be filled with close friends who do not distinguish between work/family/play. As people create more integrated lives, their friendships will also be more integrated. Peoples’ work habits and work connections will make daily life look more like a salon than an office.

The end of office life
People will work from home, from their friends’ homes, from the beach, all the time. The need to have a home office will decrease because Generation Y will never really learn how to work 9 to 5 in an office anyway. They grew up blending homework and friends while they multi-tasked in their bedroom, and once they enter the workforce, they extend this behavior to everywhere — work life and home life will be blended in a way that makes each more rewarding.

The end of consulting
Everyone will be a consultant so the term will be useless. Employers will decrease costs by making almost everyone a consultant. Employees will push for this to get more flexible hours. People already feel no long-term loyalty, and people are already project-focused instead of job-focused. On top of that, everyone wants to be a consultant “if they could just build up a clientele.” One of the best harbingers of this trend is Web Worker Daily – a blog aimed ostensibly at people who do not have cubicle jobs, but appears to apply to every worker in some way or another.

The end of hierarchy
Pecking order really only matters if you are hanging out at the office all day, reinforcing ranks. So the less time people spend at their desk, the less they will care about rank. And the more people are on their own, the more they will focus on their own skill set. There is little point in climbing ladders when you know they won’t be around at one place long enough to hit every rung. The question people will ask managers is not, “When can I get a promotion?” but rather, “What can you do to help me expand my skills set?”

So what does this mean for you? Don’t be constrained by old ways of thinking. And don’t be scared of big change. If you are honest with yourself about what you’d really like for your life, you’ll probably find that you fit in just fine with the future of the workplace. For most of us, it can’t come too soon.

The changes that are coming to the workplace reward people who have strong relationships, entrepreneurial spirit, and a talent to leverage. People who don’t love their work won’t get any. People who don’t have strong personal ties will have no idea what the point of work is. I think this is all good news, even for those who hate change.

But I wonder, what do you guys think of these predictions? Do they seem right to you? Am I missing something? Have some things already happened? Are some things so far off we shouldn’t even be talking about them? Tell me what you think.

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Don’t get too comfortable at home after work

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For those of you who graduated from college before happiness courses were available, you’ve got some reading to do. But luckily, almost all of the books I have seen on this topic are very interesting.

One of these books is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Burns, a professor of psychology at Emory. His research includes athletes, S/M practitioners, even sex with his own wife. And he concludes that doing something outside your comfort zone makes you happy — it can trigger a release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, a mood-lifter.

You already know this intuitively at work. You look for interesting, challenging projects, and you have a fit when work life becomes routine and your learning curve flattens. When someone asks you why you job hop, tell them about this research – about how it is abnormal NOT to job hop.

But what about at home? You watch TV, surf from your sofa, cook dinner but don’t venture past pasta. Instead, use the same standards at home that you have at work: If you are not challenging yourself and learning to do new things at home, Burns’ research suggests that satisfaction with your life will be elusive.

This conclusion is supported by the research that says we don’t get happiness from our jobs alone – it’s something bigger than that. I quote this research a lot when people tell me that they are unhappy and they think they would find happiness if they could just find that dream job: Think harder about what you do outside of your job.

When I graduated from college, I was really, really lost. I had strings of stupid jobs. I was in a new city. And I had no friends. It would have been a great time to watch TV after work, but I didn’t grow up with a TV, so it never occurred to me to buy one. Instead, I read books.

I read a book a night because I was so worried that I was wasting my life and I thought if I read a new book each night, something would happen. And it did. I felt satisfied with how I was spending my time. Sure, I was lonely, and scared that my life would never turn out to anything meaningful. But I learned a lot at night. I really stretched myself and read difficult novelists, big ideas, and non-fiction that was out of my comfort zone.

More recently, I found myself vegetating in front of my always-overflowing email during the nighttime. And I realized that I wasn’t feeling very good about it. So I switched everything up and started running at night. It is hard to motivate yourself to go running at 9pm after putting unruly kids to bed, but I did it, and I felt great. And I’m convinced that it’s partly because the run is challenging and, at some point, the email is mind-numbing.

So stop using work as an excuse to not do anything challenging after work. You grow when you challenge yourself, and you need to grow in ways that can only happen outside of work in order to be able to grow at work as well.

But this does not mean you have to go, go, go. In fact, I would guess that for many of us, sitting silently doing nothing would be very challenging. I actually know a bit about this because sports psychologists love meditation as a way to overcome obstacles.

When I was playing beach volleyball, I couldn’t get my jump serve to be consistent. So I spent twenty minutes each night imagining myself going through each step of my serve: Sitting on the floor, with my eyes closed, not moving. Some people learn to meditate by saying a mantra. I learned to meditate with a visual manta – my jump serve. And even now, when I imagine the serve in my head, I feel my body relax.

Visualizing my jump serve became my favorite part of my day. And one day I hope I can sit still for that long each day again. But for now, that’s an after-work challenge that is probably too much for me.

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Teaching old tropes new tricks: Community-building with a 21st-century twist

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During the middle of the 20th century, the social fabric of community unraveled. Families fled to the suburbs, where they lived isolated lives. Baby boomers became hyper competitive – almost a necessity of being part of such a huge generation – and then baby boomers raised latchkey kids, and Generation X felt so isolated from community that it actually defined the generation.

So it’s no surprise the pendulum is swinging the other way right now. Generation X is consumed with their families and integrating them into the community. Fund-raisers know that if you want to get money from Gen Xers, talk with them about local, grassroots action they can be a part of. (via Giving Back)

Generation Y is the teamwork generation. The majority of these young people did community service as a high school graduation requirement, or, for the overachievers, which is most of them, a way to spruce up their college application. But they discovered that community service is rewarding in itself. This is a group that is so team oriented that they are not comfortable doing things on their own. The teamwork in school means soccer, but in adult life it often means community.

It’s a great time for new ways of thinking about community and how to make life better for yourself and those around you. Here are five new ways to think about community:

1. Schedule community time because frequency matters.
This comes naturally to people in college. Daniell Ouellette, a junior at Northeastern University, and her friends live together, eat together, and even watch the World Series together. When college is over, people tend to separate from their friends and making new, close friends is very difficult.

But it’s worth it. When you belong to a group that meets each week, you are likely to live longer than people who don’t. And a Gallup poll, published in the book Vital Friends, found that if you have a few good friends at work it’s nearly impossible to not like your job, because a group of friends can absorb so many bad feelings about the office.

It’s a tall order to find these people, but remember the key is not picking the perfect friends, the key is getting together with them regularly.

2. Find your community first, then find a job.
Today, people place so much importance on community that Rebecca Ryan, a frequent consultant for city governments, finds that the best way to stem brain drain from midsize and smaller towns is to focus on the fabric of community. In her new book, Live First, Work Second, Ryan finds that people today want diversity, culture, and gathering places – the core community aspects we lost during the flight to the suburbs.

3. Become an influencer by growing a community.
Paul Gillin, author of the book, The New Influencers, describes how blogging has allowed leaders to emerge in communities that used to be closed to new leaders. Gillin marvels at the amount of influence a blogger can have by growing a large community of readers. What is remarkable, though, is that the premise is community. The influence brokers today trade on grassroots community building rather than power coming down from the top.

4. Get flexible work by leveraging your community.
Michelle Goodman, in her book The Anti 9 to 5 Guide, describes the steps people take to get out of cubicle life. She has handy chapters about negotiating and temping, but the biggest value of her book might be the underlying theme of community. The best way to get control of your life is to figure out how to integrate yourself into a community and get work and ideas from the people around you. The book is full of ways to learn from other people, help other people, and weave your own community fabric to meet your career goals.

5. Use community roots as a way to make a smooth transition.
One of the most stifling parts of college is that everyone you hang around is at the same place in life you are. And one of the hardest parts of making a life transition is trading one community for another. Northeastern addresses both these problems with the cooperative education program. Students take longer to finish school but they work intermittently during their stint at college. Ouellette is part of this program and she sees it as a way to get a foothold in the local marketing community before she goes out into the work world.

And this, perhaps, is the newest aspect of community: Community used to be a way to hold you back and enforce rules. But today it’s a way to create new roots, find freedom, and follow a dream. No wonder community is such a popular buzzword with young people.

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My 9/11 day. My husband. The meaning of my to-do list.

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I was standing at the bottom of the Word Trade Center when it fell. I was standing so close that I didn’t know it fell. I thought earthquake, until I couldn’t breathe. Then I thought nuclear bomb.

Now, when I let my head go back to that day, there are two moments I most easily go back to:

Moment 1: At one point I was with five men in dress shirts and ties totally covered with debris. We had each climbed into a bank next to the World Trade Center site. Debris coated our throats and we had all just fought over who got to drink water out of the toilet. When it turned out there was enough water, we went together to a hallway and sat on the floor. I started crying. The guys looked at me like I was going to be trouble and moved away. But one guy put his arm around me.

Moment 2: Minutes later. The men and I split up outside and lost each other quickly. None of us had any idea where we were. There was no one walking. I was all alone. I was still so disoriented that I didn’t know the building fell, even though I was walking at the site. Then some woman, wearing completely clean clothing, took my hand and told me to walk with her. She shepherded me nearly ten miles on foot, patiently waiting through my many screaming panic attacks, to her apartment on the Upper West Side.

Those are the two scenes I usually think about when I think about 9/11. But sometimes, if I am feeling like it might be an okay time to cry, I’ll let myself go to other stuff. Like, the part right before I heard someone break a window in that bank. The part when I thought I would die. I remember realizing my mouth was open but I was not taking in air. So I shut my mouth. I remember thinking I wish I had shut my mouth sooner so maybe I could have held air in my body a few seconds longer.

Then I accepted death. That does really happen. You quickly run through everything that matters. It is so fast how you do that. Because I know you know this: Not much matters. I had no kids. I thought of my brothers and my husband. I felt sad. Then I felt fine. And I waited to die. I could not find anything else to do. I could not see or breathe.

Then I did not die. Then I climbed in that bank window.

People wonder what the hell I’m still doing with my husband when things are so bad between us right now. But I have been one minute from death, and all I wanted in that moment was to see what life would be like with him. That’s what I wanted. I felt enormous disappointment that I would never know.

I just wanted to see things with us unfold. So I’m not giving that up. Not now.

And here’s what happened when I got to that Upper West Side apartment. My husband walked ten miles to pick me up. I told him I was fine and he took me straight to the hospital. He told me, later, that even though the woman put me in the shower, even though I did not say what happened, he could still see debris stuck deep in my ear and he knew that things had been bad.

Doctors bandaged my eyes shut. My husband held my arm for three days, showing me where to go. For a week, he stayed by my side every moment. I didn’t shower. I barely slept. My ability to stay in reality was limited. And he was there the whole time.

And then, months later, I went to trauma recovery group. A lot. And then I started reframing the story. I stopped blaming myself for walking toward the World Trade Center when I heard there was danger. I stopped thinking of the trauma as derailing my life and started thinking of it as a new path. And then, I started working. A little at first. But soon, at full-throttle.

So, look, it’s true that I know what it’s like to be on one’s death bed. That saying that you never say, “I wish I worked harder.” It’s absurd. You don’t have any thoughts like that at all. You just have your family in your heart. You see there is not a lot of room for stuff there. Your family takes up everything in those last seconds.

And then, you go back to work and it’s totally stupid. Right? What is more important than being with your family? That’s what you say to yourself.

But here’s what I am giving up. The idea that every second could be my last second. Because then you are not living life. Yes, it’s true, work is not as meaningful as family. And yes, it’s true, I did not think about my to-do list when I faced death. But if you’re not dead, your to-do list matters. Because that’s what life is. Life is getting up and going to work on things that are high on your list. Work in your pajamas, maybe, or in a corn field, or in the car to drive the kids to school. It’s all work. It’s what we’re doing here. And it’s a treat.

So what has changed? I appreciate kindness more. The kindness of an arm around my shoulder, the kindness of a warm shower from a stranger. The kindness of my husband. And I appreciate the daily routine of life. Waking up. Tending the to-do list. And not treating every moment like it’s my last. Because it’s not. This is my life, unfolding. It’s my dream come true. It’s not unfolding like I thought it would, but I’m getting to watch it. Thank god.

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Me and Stephanie, talking

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Stephanie Roberts and I hung out at the BlogHer conference, and she recently posted a recording of our conversation on her blog. She asks things people are scared to ask me in person, like how can I keep blogging about my husband? She asks me things no one ever asks, like how do I write a blog post? She also asks stuff people ask all the time that I never have a good answer for, like, how do I manage kids and a career? But this time I have a good answer.

Here’s the link to the interview.

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Twentysomething: Forget the big city, try middle America

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By Ryan Healy — Soaring education, housing and health care costs in recent years have made simply staying afloat in a large metropolis next to impossible without a huge salary and benefits package.

These rising costs are causing the well educated to “sell their souls” to law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms to maintain the upper middle class life most of our parents provided for us, According to social critic Daniel Brook, whose debut book is The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner Take-All America.

I know what you’re thinking: Those college grads making $80,000 bonuses on Wall Street do not deserve any sympathy; They made a choice to live in the most expensive city in the country and they made a choice to work like slaves for a few years until they can retire to their yachts and country clubs.

But if you really look into the situation, Brook has a point. Wall Street I-bankers are certainly earning more than enough to simply “stay afloat,” but the rest of us are selling out for the sole reason of living in a “cool” city.

Junior year of college, I realized my passion was to become an entrepreneur. It didn’t matter. I sold out. I moved to the big city with the enormous rent payments. I took the decent paying job to support my living and partying expenses. Most people I know did the same. Some are content, some are looking for a way out, some are happy.

Some of us grew up with dreams of becoming artists, musicians or non profit executives. Regardless of the dream, most of us settled for the same thing; a decent paying job in an overpriced city. What I now realize from first hand experience is unless you’re an investment banker with semi-realistic plans of retiring at 35 with a couple million; the big city is overrated.

Is it really imperative to live on New York’s Upper East Side, San Francisco’s Marina or Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle? Why not say “screw you” to the boring job in New York and take the exciting job in Cincinnati, Ohio?

My friends from college, Matt, Cole and Adam, knew from day one they didn’t want to work for a corporation. They came up with an idea, raised some money and toured the country to find the best place for their first in a chain of restaurants called Fat Sandwich Co.

They opened in Norman, Oklahoma. All three are from the Philadelphia/New Jersey
area and all of our friends told them they would hate living in Oklahoma. Last
week Cole told me that none of them even want to move back to the east coast.

From the outside, cities like Cincinnati, Ohio and Norman, Oklahoma aren’t nearly as exciting or trendy as New York or San Francisco. According to Brook, and I completely agree, chances are we will just be able to “stay afloat” either way. Since that is the case, I will not hesitate to choosethe fulfilling, under paying job in a small city rather than grind it out during the week to party until 4a.m. on Friday with the rest of the yuppies in the big city.

My lease is up in two months and it’s finally time to pursue my passion. I want a relatively inexpensive city with good entrepreneurial opportunities. I no longer care about trendy bars; I have no desire to eat at expensive restaurants. Some things are more important. It’s time for me to make a decision, because there is no reason to be bound by geography or the “coolness” factor of a city.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Choose a career path that makes you scared of failure

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It is clear from a wide range of polls that the majority of both men and women under 40 are willing to give up power and money to get flexible and interesting work. The problem is that this is not so simple. Taking a low-paying, unimpressive job is not going to give you flexibility. In fact it will probably put you on track to be serving fast-food on a schedule that is so inflexible you have to negotiate with six people to cover your shifts during vacation.

The best way to get flexible, interesting work is to be great at something, and let everyone know your focus, according to research by Ezra Zuckerman, professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This doesn’t mean being great at climbing the corporate ladder or great at working tons of hours to make partner at a law firm that will dump you. This means getting great at something because, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at Claremont University and author of the book Flow, we feel best when we are doing work at a high level of competence.

On top of that, though, employers give flexible deals to people who are in high demand. It’s fortunate that the best way to be in high demand is to do the work you’re great at. Theoretically everyone will be very happy with their flexible, interesting work life.

So, how do you get to that point where you’re great at something?

It’s hard. It’s all about risk, honesty, and, frankly, shattered dreams. Your parents tell you that you can be anything, but you know what? You can’t. If you’re tall you can’t be an Olympic gymnast, and if you’re short you can’t be a runway model. If you’re great with numbers you probably can’t be a talk show host – the skills of a mathematician and a crowd pleaser seldom overlap.

So one of the most important things you can do is come to terms with what you are uniquely suited to do , and what you’re not–and to understand which is which.

Once you admit that some things will suit you better than others, you have to start trying things. Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote a whole book – Stumbling on Happiness – about how terrible we are at predicting what we’ll like, and nowhere is this more salient a point than in the job world. So start trying things.

Most of what makes people great at something is not raw talent but how hard they work at it, according to research by Steven Levitt, economist at University of Chicago and author of the book Freakonomics. So choose to do something you are excited enough about to work very hard at it, and keep testing things until something grabs you.

Paul Hatziiliades went through this process of self-discovery by starting as an accountant at a kitchen remodeling store. The sales guy left, with no notice, and Hatziiliades found himself greeting customers. And making sales. And liking it.

Then he kept learning about other aspects of the business until he was essentially designing kitchens, which he turned out to have great talent for. He’d have never known this about himself if he had been rigid in what sorts of roles he was willing to take on.

Even when you find that thing, though, at some point you will get stuck. You will see that you are probably great at something, but still not be sure of it. Maybe it’s a startup that you think you can make a go of; maybe it’s a freelance career that is almost sustainable; maybe it’s a big project that could change your career but is very scary.

All these things approach what Seth Godin calls the Dip. In his new book, The Dip, Godin explains that the things that are really worth doing in life – the things that will get you the passion and competence necessary for flow – require getting through a dip. And it’s at the dip where you decide if you can actually get to greatness.

Hatziiliades saw his Dip when the store owners decided to sell. Hatziiliades bought it and turned it into a high-end kitchen design company, called Moda Cucina, that leveraged both his talent for putting together kitchens that customers loved, and his talent for sourcing the right products and materials from all over the world. He had no idea if this business model would work, and he put all his cash into the business. This was the Dip for him. Today, he is on the other side of the Dip, doing what he’s great at, and being recognized for owning that niche he risked everything to get: high-end kitchen design.

Not everyone has Hatziiliades’ experience, though. Sometimes you’ll find you can’t do it – you can’t get past the Dip. Maybe you are trying something that is not the best idea, or you need to shift. Maybe you had an impossible goal. It’s hard in the dip. It’s the time when you doubt yourself, or your ideas, or both. Or you fear failure or you fear success, or both, because both will change you. These are times when you really find out what you can do.

Godin says if you’re on a path worth pursuing, you will walk into the Dip. If there’s no Dip ahead then you are not challenging yourself. You already have accomplished what you will accomplish on that path. And if you never experience the challenge of that Dip then you’ll miss out on the interesting, flexible work, yes, but most of all, you’ll miss out on the great feeling Csikszentmihalyi describes when work is at a high level of competence and engagement.

Sure, sometimes your Dip will come in an area that is not work – for example if you are training for a marathon. Usually, though, the time and energy we spend on our work is so great that it behooves us to look for opportunities that have a dip in them.

With the goals of work changing – from power to personal growth – the process of work will change as well. Work used to be about safety and stability and the Dip was for the risk-loving mid-life-crisis-suffering entrepreneurs. Today a Dip is the necessary path to the dream career where you can control your time and you can be engaged in work at the same time.

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New research reveals some new ways to buy happiness, sort of

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It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.

But here’s a new way to look at the money and happiness equation, from a new study by Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London: If you make sure to see a friend or relative in person almost every day, that is like increasing your salary by $180,000 a year.

However buying incremental happiness with a six-figure income is very costly. For example, Powdthavee says if you are going to relocate from a city where your family and friends live to a city where you have no family or friends, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being far from those people.

Powdthavee drives home the importance of making a conscious choice about your time when he writes, “Since it normally requires both time and effort to achieve either higher income or a stable social relationship with someone, the weight attached to each individual’s investment decision thus depends upon the type of possession — money or friendship — that he or she believes will yield a larger impact on happiness than the other.”

It’s great that Powdthavee does the money vs. relationship math for us, because as humans we are absolutely terrible at predicting what will make us happy and maybe shouldn’t even bother. For one thing, we are all likely to tell ourselves we’re happy, whatever we are doing, in order to justify what we’re doing. This is a fine predisposition for maintaining our sanity, but it’s not a great attitude to have if you are trying to figure out how to change your life to be happier. Our judgment about our own happiness is so bad that Andrew Oswald, economist at the Warwick University has written a paper that to calls for researchers to stop drawing conclusions based on asking people if they are happy.

So I recommend believing that the research is right and your personal predictions are wrong. But the caveat with all this money research is that when we ditch our relatives to take a high paying job, we’re not actually interested in the money, per se. It’s something else.

In a study where people make decisions about sharing money, Harvard University economist Terry Bernham showed that when it comes to money, we don’t strive for some idea we have of what is “enough” but rather to have a little more than our friends. The Economist describes Burnham’s study and reports, “What people really strive for is relative rather than absolute prosperity. And this is likely to be particularly true in individuals with high testosterone levels.”

The Economist concludes that this is totally rational behavior, because while more money has not been shown to get more sex, more money does buy the social status to have more choices for sex partners. So money isn’t an end in itself, but social status is, whether we like it our not, because it has been our means to preserve our DNA.

This explains the study that blogger Gautam Ghosh quotes showing that someone who is a gatekeeper for a hospital can be happier in their work than a doctor based on their perceived contribution to the community. And it also explains the drive to forgo a big salary to make art: If your art hangs in the Guggenheim, you get your choice of girls to go home with, even if your home is sort of shoddy.

So what can we do?

1. Recognize that you should make relationships your top priority. Really. Most of us say we do this, but many of us could not actually point to a time when we took a big hit in the money department just so we could preserve regular date night with our significant other.

2.Admit it’s an uphill battle to care less about social standing. But it’s worth it. The more you care about where you stand in relation to others, the less happy you’ll be. Social standing can take so many forms. Instead of patting yourself on the back for not buying a McMansion, be honest about the fact that you didn’t want one anyway. Understand how you measure your social rank, and try to tame it. For my part, I tell myself that if I check compete.com fewer times a week, I’ll be a happier person. (Maybe true. But look, I still linked to it.)

3. Trust the research when you are faced with a tough decision. Yes, all research is like diet research — one decade cheese is bad, next decade cheese is good. But just because the research is not perfect doesn’t mean you should go off and do whatever your gut tells you. Your gut tells you pizza is great and so is grilled cheese. But duh, it isn’t. And your gut tells you that you will be happier with a little more money, and you could relocate from family if you make sure to visit a lot. But you know what? Duh. You know the truth.

Hat tip: Senia Maymin

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