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How is your weekend going?

If your Saturday somehow included accidentally subscribing to random newsletters, and you have no clue why you’re getting this email from me, you can fix that faster than a cat on a hot tin roof. Just hit the big ole button below. No judgment.

Here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. Success leads to happiness, right? A team of researchers wondered if this might work the other way around. 🔁

• You have to check this out. The ‘20-5-3’ rule for time outside and thoughts on late bloomers. 🌄

• Tools and tech. A better way to use an RV? 🚙

Let’s jump in. 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The success-happiness dilemma.

My friend Pam has always loved bridges.

She’s enamored by their blend of engineering and artistry.

When she started college at the University of Colorado, she dreamed of being the lead designer on a major new bridge in Denver. She knew that when that happened, she would be filled with pride and satisfaction.

Her goal fueled many late study nights. After landing her first job at a mid-sized engineering firm, she poured everything she had into her work. As her responsibilities grew, she suffered from anxiety and put her physical health on the back burner. Her work friends became her main friends.  

At 38, she was the lead designer for a gorgeous new pedestrian/bicycle bridge across the Platte River near downtown. At the ribbon cutting, she was elated. She felt pride, satisfaction, and joy, just as she had hoped.

But it didn’t last long. She experienced an odd sense of emptiness the week after the bridge opening. She was oddly disappointed but couldn’t quite pinpoint why.

She started to think, “What’s next?”.

The implied formula.

Pam's story probably sounds typical. It's a well-understood life formula, right?

Work toward something. Find success. Become happy.

You do this all the time. Perhaps you seek a loving relationship (and maybe get married), so you will be happier. You work toward a promotion to ease your financial struggles and be happier. You start a new fitness program to feel better and have more energy, imagining you will be happier once you do.

I mean, why would we pursue anything if we didn't think we'd be happier once we got it?

Kids don’t clamor for popsicles because they think getting one will overwhelm them with sadness.

But what if “success leads to happiness” wasn’t really the way this formula works.

What if happier people are more likely to be successful?

A team of university researchers decided to find out.

What they found might change how you think about success and happiness in your own life.

The happy chicken and the happy egg.

Sonja Lyubomirsky was born in Russia in 1966. She attended Harvard and then got her PhD from Stanford. Now a professor at the University of California-Riverside, she is the author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

Note the word scientific in her book title.

Lyubomirsky is not peddling tips to manifest abundance. She isn’t talking about turning your frown upside down or proposing you put on a happy face. This isn’t about blind optimism in the face of adversity.

Lyubomirsky wanted to test the statistical impact of “frequent positive affect” on people’s success in life.

What the heck is “positive affect”? It’s not a term that comes up in casual conversion.

The way it’s used in psychology, “affect” means the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. (It's a noun pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable.)

Lyubomirsky and her coauthors were interested in the proportion of time people feel positive, not the intensity of these feelings.

Think about everyone you know. Some people are usually happy, while the natural set point for others is… less than happy.

Ultimately, Lyubomirsky and her team were asking a chicken and an egg question.

Does success lead to happiness? 🐔

Or are happy people more successful? 🥚

The precursors of success.

Lyubomirsky didn’t believe happiness magically conjured success. It wasn’t I Dream of Jeannie nodding her head and blinking.

She built on the work of Barbara Fredrickson and others who documented the evolutionary advantages of positive mind states. While negative experiences such as hunger or danger may prompt more immediate forms of behavior, when all is going well, there are advantages to building future skills, investing in helpful friendships, or even resting to rebuild energy stores.

To understand how these can fuel success, consider the characteristics related to positive affect. Think about how you feel, and what do you do, when you are in a positive mindset for an extended period?

Chances are, you are more likely to feel confidence, optimism, and self-efficacy (ability to get things done). You tend to see others more favorably, making you more sociable and inclined to work together with others. You are likely to exhibit more resilience and better cope with challenges and stress. Positive mindsets often produce more flexible and original thinking.

In starting their research, Lyubomirsky and her team hypothesized that the success of happy people was based on two main factors:

1. Because happy people experience frequent positive moods, they are more likely to work actively toward new goals while experiencing those moods.

2. Happy people possess past skills and resources, which they have built up over time during previous pleasant moods.

To test their ideas, the researchers conducted a meta-analysis (a statistical process that combines results from multiple studies to obtain a more precise estimate of an effect).

They analyzed 225 papers containing 293 data sets on the relationships between happiness and success. This data included over 275,000 participants, and the team computed 313 independent effect sizes. There was a lot of math. Probably even spreadsheets and charts. 📊

What did they find?

Their statistical analysis documented that positive affect fosters the following resources, skills, and behaviors:

• Sociability and activity

• Altruism

• Liking of self and others

• Strong bodies and immune systems

• Effective conflict resolution skills

If you’re like me, the results above are a bit abstract.

Frequent positive affect fosters more sociability and activity? OK, cool. I guess?

Here are some of their more relatable findings across essential parts of our lives:

• Work life: “The cross-sectional evidence reveals that happy workers enjoy multiple advantages over their less happy peers. Individuals high in subjective well-being are more likely to secure job interviews, to be evaluated more positively by supervisors once they obtain a job, to show superior performance and productivity, and to handle managerial jobs better. They are also less likely to show counterproductive workplace behavior and job burnout.”

• Income: “In a meta-analysis of 286 empirical investigations of older adults, income was significantly correlated with happiness and life satisfaction, and, surprisingly, more so than with education." They mean happiness and life satisfaction predicted income, not vice versa.

• Relationships: “Do happy people have better social relationships than their less happy peers? Our review reveals this to be one of the most robust findings in the literature on well-being… Cross-sectional studies have documented an association between chronic happiness and the actual number of friends or companions people report they can rely on, as well as overall social support and perceived companionship… Happy individuals tend to have fulfilling marriages and to be more satisfied with their marriages.”

Hot shots! The happy chicken and the happy egg. Part deux.

As an alert reader, you might ask: Is this a case of correlation or causation?

Were the “frequently happy” research subjects just happy because of prior success?

Or even, as Lyubomirsky put it, “Could happy people be successful simply because they possess more resources in the first place, which is the reason they are happy?”

Lyubomirsky provides two ways to look at this:

1. While most of their analyses looked at correlations, Lyubomirsky notes their meta-analysis also contained many studies of people over time. For example, “in an 18-month longitudinal study that used causal modeling to test two competing models—that is, happiness as influencing five of its correlates versus the reverse—the results supported the happiness-as-cause model for 17 out of 18 predictions.”

2. Some people may start life with particular natural strengths (potentially augmented by other good fortune). “The possibility remains that individuals with certain personal resources such as good social skills, high activity levels, self-efficacy, and creativity are likely to be more successful at an early age, and, hence, to maintain and reinforce their success and happiness at a later age because they continue to have more personal resources and, therefore, more successes.”

To figure out the best way to use these radical research findings—that happiness can be a key driver of success in many of life’s contexts—let’s return to my friend Pam.

Cultivating versus chasing happiness.

Pam followed the well-known path most of us learned growing up. If you want something, set a goal, create a plan to achieve that goal, and then work hard on your plan.

She wanted to be a structural engineer. She set a goal to design a structurally and artistically gorgeous bridge that would be built. She created a plan: go to college, find a job at an engineering consultancy, and get promoted to lead designer. She worked hard and achieved success.

That sequence is, in fact, a solid approach to achieving a life goal—in Pam’s case, to one day be the lead designer of a wonderful bridge. Setting life goals, working tirelessly, pushing through challenges… this process is the stuff of life. Few things come easy. Pain and struggle are not things to avoid. They are part of the process, part of what makes life, well, life.

But this approach also sets an enticing trap. 🪤

It is a trap I bet you have experienced (or at least observed).

The trip is believing that achieving a long-term goal will make you happy.

Was Pam happy when she walked on her bridge for the first time? Of course.

But how long did her happiness last? A few days? Most likely, yes. A few weeks? Maybe.

Did her professional success transform her into someone who, from that day forward, felt a general sense of well-being more often than not?

When framed this way, most of us would say, “Well, of course not.”

But if you are like me, the idea that happiness may be just around the bend—once you reach a goal (a new job, new relationship, or even retirement)—is still a wildly seductive belief.

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar calls the short-lived nature of goal-based happiness the arrival fallacy. Instead of long-term happiness after achieving a big goal, he found people often experience an unexpected sense of emptiness. In response, they usually set new, bigger goals.

The trap here is confusing the WHY behind your goals. There are many fantastic reasons to get a job, get married, own a home, or retire.

“Because it will make me happy” isn’t one of them.

Cultivating happiness.

So what can you do?

In my newsletter, Living in the Gain, I discussed a good place to start—a way to shift how you measure progress in life. This is a simple idea with big impacts—a small hinge that swings a big door.

The newsletters What Is True Happiness? and The Distractions of Unhappiness cover the two sides of the happiness coin. These are also good places to start.

But the bigger idea is this:

Lyubomirsky showed us the “success leads to happiness” framework works best in reverse.

Cultivating happiness and well-being should be a life project in and of itself.

This pays twofold dividends:

1. Durably increasing your day-to-day well-being.

2. Enhancing your likelihood of success in many parts of life (as Lyubomirsky’s research found).

Can you measurably enhance your overall well-being? Heck yeah!

How? Well, you’re in the perfect place to learn the science-backed ways to do this.

Just like the old Hair Club for Men commercials from our childhood… I’m not just the author of Second Act Creator; I’m also a client.

I devour all the research I can find and distill the best ideas for you here every Sunday.

We’re in this together.

Thanks for reading this week.

See you next Sunday,

Kevin