If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?: How to Turn Career Success into Life Success

Perhaps the most important lesson we learn is that you can be hard-working and happy, rich and fulfilled, even though it's not guaranteed. Being successful doesn't mean sacrificing a happy life. We just need to approach things from the other way around, because what makes you happy can make you successful. So instead of prioritizing our careers and expecting happiness to follow, we should make happiness and a fulfilling life our highest goal, and let career success follow naturally from that.

Any book that identifies the ingredients of a happy life has to be worth a read. But this book goes further. It promises happiness both as an end in itself and as a route to career success. That might sound too good to be true, but the advice here is solidly rooted in research, and it's a breeze to follow. So, this is an easy book to recommend, particularly if you're already successful and are wondering how to bring more happiness into your life.

Raghunathan is professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. His work straddles psychology, marketing, behavioral sciences, and decision theory, and has been published in many academic journals. In 2015, he launched an online version of his happiness course. It reached over 100,000 students, and became a Top 10 program on the online course provider Coursera within six months.

So, keep listening to find out why it makes sense to prioritize but not pursue happiness, how to develop "smart trust," and why the "passionate pursuit of passion" is something to avoid!

"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?" comes in at 335 pages and is divided into eight chapters. It has an appendix, an extensive set of notes, some occasional self-assessments, and an accompanying website.

The first seven chapters are each split into two parts – A and B. Each "part A" deals with one "happiness sin" – a behavior, goal or value that diminishes our happiness – and each "part B" teaches us a corresponding "habit of the highly happy." The habits come with related exercises. You can find these in the appendix and on the website, along with a host of other relevant material.

Chapter one starts with the theme of devaluing happiness. Here, we learn about the Fundamental Happiness Paradox. This is the idea that, despite happiness being one of our most important goals, we often devalue it for the sake of other goals.

For example, "value for money" often trumps "happiness" when people make decisions. You may choose to grab a burger from a fast-food outlet, rather than pay more for a meal in your favorite restaurant. Even when we consider important decisions, like where to work, many of us place other considerations above our happiness. If we're lucky enough to have two job offers on the table, for instance, most of us will choose a higher salary over a more satisfying job.

We do this for several reasons. Raghunathan says chief amongst them is the abstract nature of happiness. We don't have a concrete idea of what it is. Status, fame and money are easier concepts for us to grasp and aim for.

The author's slightly surprising response to this paradox is to suggest that we prioritize – but don't pursue – happiness. If this sounds counterintuitive, bear with it. Pursuing happiness makes us unhappy, because we continually compare how happy we'd like to be with how happy we are. This reminds us that we're not happy enough.

So, how do we pull off the delicate balancing act of prioritizing, but not pursuing, happiness? The author proposes a two-step strategy: "defining happiness" and "incorporating happiness." Defining happiness makes it clearer and more tangible – less of an abstract concept. Incorporating it means identifying the experiences, objects, people, and activities that trigger those positive feelings, and keeping those things in your life. As elsewhere in the book, there's an exercise to help you with this.

First, you reflect on your feelings and experiences, and, through this process, define your own meaning of happiness. Then you can build reminders of what triggers these feelings into your everyday life. For example, you might identify that going for a run makes you really happy. Put a Post-it Note about running on your kitchen door so, every time you see it, you're reminded of those positive thoughts.

The following chapter looks at the "happiness sin" of chasing superiority. From childhood onward, we're conditioned to want to be better than others, and we get labeled as superior or inferior in all aspects of life. We're constantly measuring ourselves against our peers, and we tie our sense of self-worth to feeling superior.

This desire for status and power is deep-rooted. Almost all of us pursue it, whether through being selective about the photos we upload to Facebook or by climbing the corporate ladder. And when we think we've achieved superiority, it feels good. Our happiness levels shoot up – at least in the here and now. Give it a bit longer though, and the shine starts to wear off. Over time, you find that the more you pursue superiority, the lower your happiness levels sink.

We learn that this happens partly because humans always want more, and we have a tendency to adapt – whether to higher earnings, more power, or greater fame. It's this tendency that takes the shine off people's happiness so quickly after they win the lottery.

Other factors come into play, too. For example, chasing superiority involves more taking than giving, and "takers" tend to be less well-liked than "givers." So, a strong desire for superiority can have a negative impact on relationships.

Raghunathan's solution? We need to mitigate our urge for superiority without risking our chances of success.

There are several ways forward here, such as being less materialistic, avoiding situations where we feel insecure, and purging ourselves of the idea that superiority is necessary for success. The best strategy, though, is to pursue something called "flow."

You've almost certainly experienced flow at some point. It's the experience of being so immersed in what you're doing that you lose track of time. The author argues that because flow experiences are enjoyable and challenging, pursuing them is a more reliable way to build happiness – and by extension, success – than pursuing superiority. Anyone can achieve flow and it helps not just the person experiencing it but others around them too. Pursuing superiority, on the other hand, can result in various negative outcomes, including weaker self-esteem and poorer relationships.

The author suggests opening up to flow by reconnecting with a hobby, or nurturing your existing talents. You could also spend more time on things you enjoy, and even reconsider your position at work. This chapter makes plain what flow can do for you, whether you're a factory foreman or a CEO.

Raghunathan's fifth happiness sin is "distrusting others."

Trust is critical for happiness, and it's easy to see why. For one thing, it's infectious. We feel happier when we trust others and, because people tend to reward trust with trustworthy behavior, we create a virtuous circle. Trusting more not only makes us happier, but boosts the happiness of those around us.

Trust is so important that, without it, life can get pretty difficult. And yet for most of us, our default setting is to distrust others. The author reminds us, though, that this isn't entirely without good reason. We can all think of occasions when it was right to have distrusted someone.

The sad fact is that not everyone is trustworthy. The challenge, then, is to be more trusting, in order to maximize our happiness, but not so much that we make ourselves vulnerable. It's another balancing act.

The author's answer to this conundrum is something called "smart trust," a four-part strategy for finding the sweet spot between trust and distrust. To practice it, we need to remind ourselves that even complete strangers may be more trustworthy than we think, and that trusting can help build a wider culture of trust. We also need to minimize the pain we feel when someone does cheat us, and maximize the positive feelings we have when our trust in someone else is validated.

The fourth and final step in "smart trust" is to elicit trustworthiness from others. Raghunathan suggests working on our likeability and building mutually trusting relationships.

Further on in the book we learn about the "passionate pursuit of passion." It might come as a surprise that the author considers this a "happiness sin." After all, don't we often hear that following our passions is a good thing?

As it turns out, our passions themselves aren't the problem. It's that we hold such strong opinions about the expected outcomes. For example, you might passionately pursue a romance and assume that getting married will be a wonderful outcome. But it could soon feel like the worst thing you ever did, partly because of that massive build-up. Equally, something like divorce, which we'd expect to be a negative event, can turn into a hugely positive outcome.

So when we pursue our goals so passionately, we're linking our happiness to outcomes that are often outside our control. This is why Raghunathan believes the "passionate pursuit of passion" sets us up for unhappiness, and why the "dispassionate pursuit of passion" is a better way forward.

Being dispassionate about our goals doesn't mean we need to jettison them or be ambivalent toward them. It just means detaching our expected happiness from those outcomes. It means accepting that we're happier when we're busy and doing something meaningful, and that this happiness derives mostly from working toward outcomes.

For example, we should register the happiness that comes from planning a vacation or preparing for an exam, even if the holiday gets canceled or we flunk the exam.

The main body of the book closes by offering three strategies for sustaining our new approach to happiness: that we commit to doing the things that mitigate happiness sins and reinforce our happiness habits each day; that we expose ourselves to more situations that are likely to improve our happiness; and that we're open-minded about questioning our views. After all, the more flexible we are, the easier it will be to change whatever we need to change to lead a happier life.

So, what's our last word on "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?"

Although it falls squarely within the self-help category, this book manages to avoid some of the genre's more glib inclinations. It's firmly rooted in a huge amount of research and experimentation, and it's rigorously scientific. It also differs from many self-help books in that the author isn't a doctor or a psychologist. He's a business professor, so his insights are particularly suited to people interested in the crossover between our work and home lives.

It's also a pragmatic book. It accepts that some strategies will work better than others, depending on who you are. It even concedes that there are occasions when a happiness sin – like being controlling or distrustful – can be the smart thing to do. So, instead of being prescriptive, it's interactive. The author involves you; he doesn't lecture you.

One thing that this book isn't is groundbreaking or profound. Many of the solutions here are common sense, but that doesn't mean this book isn't worth reading. How often have you been so busy, distracted or low in mood that you haven't been able to see what's in front of your eyes? It's precisely because answers don't always occur to us that this book can be useful. And the research cited here gives validity to things we may have once dismissed – like mindfulness – because they seemed a little too fluffy or new-age.

This book is unusual because its main body of content is presented as supplementary. The author's upfront about this, saying that, although "the concepts in this book are interesting, they aren't all that useful for improving happiness levels. It's the happiness exercises that serve this purpose." To maximize the value of this book, it's crucial to spend time doing these exercises.

So, if you're smart and successful but struggling to translate your success into happiness, grab yourself a copy of this book. You might just find that elusive route to a more fulfilling life.

"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?," by Raj Raghunathan, is published by Portfolio.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.