Of the hundreds of people interviewed for the study, some mentioned family, friends, and church as factors in personal happiness. “But if you do it for too long, our study shows, it stops being satisfying.” And a new study, conducted by a Swedish university, concluded that, over the long run, “people who work hard get the most joy.”ĭr Bruelde, head of the Swedish study, told the BBC that most people imagine that happiness comes from relaxing on the beach. All sorts of smart and successful people, including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Warren Buffett, and Albert Einstein have commented on this connection. I’m not the only one who has noticed the relationship between work and happiness. To have that great feeling I had this morning, both factors must be in place: caring about what you do and doing what you care about well. And if you value what you do but do it poorly, you will be frustrated and upset. If you don’t believe that your work is valuable, you won’t feel good about it … even if you do it well. If either of these two conditions is absent, the work won’t make you happy. You work at a relatively high level of competency. The feeling of happiness I had this morning – the kind that is good while you are working and gives you energy when you stop – comes only when:Ģ. You won’t experience happiness if you work at a job you hate or if you do poor work on a project you like. Now let me try to answer both of those questions.ĭo I really believe that happiness comes from working? Yes – but only from a certain kind of working. If you make happiness your goal, you won’t get that either.ĭid you get all that? Good. If you make pleasure your goal, you’ll eventually sacrifice happiness. Pleasure is personal and temporary happiness is inclusive and enduring. There’s a difference between happiness and pleasure. Let’s start with some simple observations: The second one came from a colleague: “What do you do when the thing you are good at isn’t the thing that really turns you on?” The first, from an avid ETR reader, posed the question: “You have said in the past that happiness comes from work. Last week, I received two e-mails on this subject. I came into the office charged and ready to tackle my next priority – writing this ETR essay on, coincidentally, the relationship between work and happiness. It was still early … and yet I knew that if I did nothing else before bedtime, I’d accomplished something worthwhile. Three hours later, at nine o’clock, I had emended a thousand old words, written five hundred new ones, and felt good about what I had done. There, I put on a disc of Gregorian chants and began my daily work as a story writer, picking up the narrative thread I’d left yesterday and moving the action forward one sentence at a time. After stretching on my bedroom balcony as the sun came up, I made a pot of coffee and ambled to my writing studio above the garage.
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