A few weeks ago, I attended a leadership training conference for promising young professors at Yale University. We were a small group of 15 ambitious, driven faculty in various fields. This group had been hand-picked by our department chairs to attend an elitist consulting seminar by a firm specializing in helping professors launch our academic careers to change the world (or at least secure lucrative funding and publish a few papers along the way).
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At the end of the conference, we were asked to share openly our hopes, dreams, and visions—no matter how grandiose—for our careers. At first there was the usual humble hesitance. But then some of us started to open up. One woman aspired to win the Nobel Prize. Another wanted to become a university dean.
This led me to reflect on what leads us to do the things we do. Why are many of us so driven to achieve? There’s an assumption that, through accolades and achievement, we will experience a measure of reward and satisfaction. The problem is that our assumptions are sometimes faulty. In this context, there is a powerful but under-appreciated principle in psychology known as affective forecasting. This is the ability to predict how we will feel in a given situation. It turns out that humans are really terrible at this. Which means, unfortunately, that we are very bad at predicting what will make us happy.
A classic study from the 1970s—with the provocative title
On the face of it, the principle of hedonic adaptation can be discouraging. Mick Jagger wrote the song, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” As author and academic Arthur Brooks has
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Here’s another piece of good news. There’s one critical exception to the hedonic adaptation rule: relationships. A warm and nurturing relationship really can elevate the happiness setpoint in an enduring way. As, Martin Seligman, one of the pioneers of this area has
Not all relationships are created equal, however. In-person relationships seem to be the gold-standard. (Most of us remember from the days of pandemic lockdown that we yearned for in-person interaction in a way that we had never before experienced.) The reason why social media can be
So, for those who are driven to achieve, like my colleagues who aspire to win a Nobel Prize, it’s important to be realistic about how achievement will actually affect our happiness and well-being. Winning a big prize, or even the lottery, will elevate our happiness. But the effects wear off, usually in a few weeks or months. And if we’re not careful, the drive for achievement can hurt our personal relationships. “Striving for … status,” the late Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi once wrote, “ultimately proves empty and frustrating if gained at the sacrifice of these relationships.”