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What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness | Robert Waldinger | TED

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This is what makes employees happy at work | The Way We Work, a TED series

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Your job doesn't have to represent the most prestigious use of your potential. It just needs to be rewarding.

"How to Build a Life" is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
Every year, Gallup asks a sample of American adults what might seem to be a rather loaded question: How much do you like your job? The results may surprise you. The portion who say they are "completely satisfied" at work has risen dramatically over the past two decades, from 41 percent in 2001 to 55 percent in 2019. In 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, 89 percent said they were either "completely" or "somewhat" satisfied.

I teach graduate students who have carefully envisioned their ideal career, many of whom are training to enter jobs in business or government. They find this statistic surprising because, like so many of us, they generally assume that to be satisfied, you must hold your dream job-one where your skills meet your passions, you make good money, and you are excited to get to work each day. No way 89 percent of people have this, right?

But this belief is based on a misunderstanding of what brings job satisfaction. To be happy at work, you don't have to hold a fascinating job that represents the pinnacle of your educational achievement or the most prestigious use of your "potential," and you don't have to make a lot of money. What matters is not so much the "what" of a job, but more the "who" and the "why": Job satisfaction comes from people, values, and a sense of accomplishment.

No doubt a substantial chunk of the job-satisfaction percentage is due to the fact that having any job at all makes people happier. Unemployment is one of the biggest sources of unhappiness people can face. Using data from the General Social Survey, I found that American adults who reported that they were "very" or "fairly" likely to lose their job in 2018 were more than three times more likely to say they were "not too happy" with their life than people who felt they were "not likely" to be let go. Several studies have linked a country's unemployment level with suicide-rate increases. In 2014, economists found that a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment lowers national well-being by more than five times as much as a one-point increase in the inflation rate.
Read: The new economics of happiness
When one has a job, the factors that most affect satisfaction have little to do with the line of work. First, there are the uncontrollable variables: One study in the Journal of Applied Psychology of identical twins reared apart found that about 30 percent of job satisfaction is genetic. Then, there are the practical variables: Economists have found that wage increases raise job satisfaction, but only in the short term. The effect decays quickly as time passes. In all careers, regular wage increases are better for happiness than infrequent, larger raises.

Some of the squishiest aspects of a job are also the ones that make it most rewarding: the values held by your company and your co-workers. Research has shown, for example, that all over the world job satisfaction depends on a sense of accomplishment, recognition for a job well done, and work-life balance. Teamwork, too, has a strong influence in collectivist cultures, but less so in individualist ones. The late Harvard psychologist Richard Hackman found that job satisfaction was strongly, inversely tied to leader-centricity: In one of his studies, musicians who worked in symphony orchestras, where many conductors rule with an iron fist, were 21 percent less satisfied with their growth opportunities than players in leaderless string quartets.
Read: Four rules for identifying your life's work
Decades of studies have shown that the people most satisfied with their work are those who find a fundamental match between their employer's values and their own. This is especially true when the values have special moral, philosophical, or spiritual significance. For example, a 2012 study on Iranian nurses found that the happiest ones believed their work was "a divine profession and a tool by which they could gain spiritual pleasure and satisfaction." Many of my colleagues feel the same way about the vocation of higher education, and as the late philosopher Michael Novak wrote, that sense of a calling can be found in business as well.

Researchers who have looked for clear relationships between job satisfaction and the actual type of job one holds have overwhelmingly struck out. CareerBliss, a company dedicated to helping people find greater happiness at work, has published survey results of the "happiest jobs" and the "unhappiest jobs," as rated by those who hold them. Its most recent rankings, from 2018, show the happiest jobs to be quite disparate: teaching assistant, quality-assurance analyst, net developer, marketing specialist. The unhappiest jobs are similarly grab-baggy, and fairly unrelated to education and income: accountant, security guard, cashier, supervisor.

When my graduate students ask me for advice on choosing a job or career path, I don't tell them to find the best possible fit between their interests and specific job duties. Obviously, they shouldn't sign up for something they hate. But I tell them that satisfaction can be found in all sorts of vocations. After all, how many kids say, "When I grow up, I'm going to be a quality-assurance analyst"? Rather than relentlessly pursuing a "perfect match" career that they're sure will make them happy, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for the values and culture that fit with theirs.
Read: Are you dreaming too big?
Whatever job they end up in, finding a sense of accomplishment within it is crucial for job satisfaction. It helps to set goals in one's work, such as increasing skills or responsibility. Some goals lead to more happiness than others, however. While pay increases push up satisfaction temporarily, money as a career goal does not. Volumes of research show that pursuing extrinsic rewards for work, such as money, actually hurts your interest in that work. For real satisfaction, you should pursue intrinsic goals -two in particular.

The first is earned success. You can think of it as the opposite of learned helplessness, a term coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman to denote the resignation that people experience when they repeatedly endure unpleasant situations beyond their control. Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment (which Seligman has shown is a source of happiness, and which strongly predicts happiness at work) and professional efficacy (the idea that you are effective in your job, which pushes up commitment to your occupation, also a good measure of job satisfaction). Employers who give clear guidance and feedback, reward merit, and encourage their employees to develop new skills are the most likely to give you those feelings. Look for a boss who acts that way-and if you have the opportunity, be that kind of boss.

The second goal worth pursuing at work is service to others-the sense that your job is making the world a better place. That doesn't mean you need to volunteer or work for a charity to be happy (my own research has shown that nonprofit work is not more inherently satisfying than working for a for-profit or for the government). On the contrary, you can find service in almost any job. One of my students made this point better than I can, in an op-ed he wrote to explain why he had forgone jobs in his field of academic study to become a waiter in Barcelona. As he put it in Spanish, his customers "are all important and equal. They are the same at the table and must be the same in the eyes of the waiter ... It's great to be able to serve the politician on the front page of the newspaper just as well as the kid browsing the news while waiting for his girlfriend."
From the April 2016 issue: Quit your job
Given that job satisfaction depends on fairly amorphous criteria such as people and values instead of concrete characteristics such as job duties and money, it's worth noting that a good job can become a bad one without any changes that would be obvious to an outsider.

One of the most famous examples of this comes from the first story in the Bible. In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, God-who had recently created Adam and deemed his creation "very good"-gives Adam a blessed vocation that pleases both of them: He "put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." One chapter later, after the unpleasantness with the snake and the apple, God casts Adam and Eve out of Eden, cursing them: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground."
From the July 2019 issue: Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think
The research above sheds some light on all of this: Adam and Eve were still farmers in both cases, but you might say their relationship with the boss had soured, and they went from earning their success to dragging themselves to work to pay the bills.

Okay, saying that job dissatisfaction is the price of the fall of man might be a little much, but it is pretty bad. And while a good job might not be quite as idyllic as the Garden of Eden, when we know the secrets to a career that is truly satisfying, work really can be a joy.

When was the last time you remember being truly happy? Tell us in an audio clip, no longer than three minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com, or leave us a voicemail at 925-967-2091. Y our story could be featured on Arthur Brooks's upcoming podcast on how to build a meaningful life. Please include your name and location in the email and/or audio file. By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it-in part or in full-and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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late harvard psychologist richard hackman

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substantial chunk of the job-satisfaction

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leaderless string quartets.decades of studies

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new economics of happinesssome of the squishiest aspects

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Your job doesn't have to represent the most prestigious use of your potential. It just needs to be rewarding. "How to Build a Life " is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

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"How to Build a Life" is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
Commencement season is just around the corner. Whether in person or over a live-stream, graduates and their families will follow the long-honored tradition of listening to speeches studded with unoriginal chestnuts like following your dreams, shooting for the stars, and believing that you can do whatever you set out to do.

But that message doesn't seem appropriate at this moment. Our greatest ambitions, personal and professional, have been systematically frustrated by the pandemic, as the weeks have turned to months have turned to more than a year. Perhaps the words of the English satirical poet Alexander Pope are a better fit. In 1727, he gave his friend John Gay a piece of advice, in the form of a ninth beatitude: "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed."

Whether Pope was serious or not, there is some good sense in his counsel for times both normal and pandemic-stricken. Sure, audacious goals can be energizing. But a fixation on them can lead to big disappointments. Worse, when your eyes are constantly on the horizon, you can miss what is right in front of you. For happiness, we need a better approach to setting goals-one that sets us up for success in life and lets us enjoy the here and now.

For the most part, goal setting seems to raise our well-being modestly in the short run, by increasing our optimism and sense of direction. In a 2008 study, for example, researchers ran an experiment in which half of the participants set out goals for their lives and received training to bring them to fruition. The other half did not. After the three-week training, the researchers observed that the goal-setters were 8 percent happier than they had been before they started, and 12 percent happier than the control group.
Read: Are we trading our happiness for modern comforts?
That study mixed all sorts of aspirations together. But if you look closer, not all goals are associated with equal happiness. A 2008 analysis of German survey data, for example, showed that while goals involving family, friends, and social and political involvement promoted life satisfaction, goals focused on career success and material gains were detrimental. This is consistent with research on American college graduates: Aspirations for personal growth, close relationships, and community involvement (what most psychologists call "intrinsic goals") lead to increased well-being when those goals are attained; those for material possessions, fame, and attractiveness ("extrinsic goals") predict ill-being.

The magnitude of a dream matters, too. Setting short-term, realistic goals has been shown to start a reinforcing mechanism of success and happiness, provided these goals fit with our values and aren't imposed on us by others. For example, in one 2001 study, college students who set academic performance goals for the year that matched their intrinsic motivations were more successful than those who didn't, leading to higher well-being and confidence. This set them up for more goal setting, more success and happiness, and so on.
Read: 'Find your passion' is awful advice
Focusing on long-term, difficult-to-achieve goals, in contrast, is risky, because you're less likely to accomplish them. Disappointment creates pessimism and can provoke depressive symptoms. Therefore, goal setting-especially for audacious goals that are unlikely to be met, or even ordinary goals during times like the present-might lead to a lot more unhappiness than happiness. As the poet John Greenleaf Whittier so poignantly put it, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: 'It might have been!'"

This is a growing peril in our economy, which is becoming more and more characterized by what my former economics professor Robert Frank calls "winner-take-all markets," also known as "superstar markets." In winner-take-all markets, a few people get outsize rewards, and the rest are left by the wayside. Rarified zones such as Hollywood and the NBA are classic examples. But in the era of new media, people can be celebrities in more ordinary professions, such as law or academia. One can even become rich and famous-at least temporarily-as a YouTuber, which 29 percent of American 8-to-12-year-olds now say is their career goal. The paradox of superstar markets is that their very impenetrability makes them attractive, drawing in more and more aspirants, the vast majority of whom will be disappointed.

Fortunately, we don't have to swear off goal setting in order to protect and increase our happiness. On the contrary, a balanced strategy based on three lessons from the research can give us the benefits while mostly avoiding the costs.

1. Live in "day-tight compartments."
Read: The adults who treat reading like homework
The scientific literature is clear that goals can bring a lot of happiness when they are short term, achievable, and leading us toward ultimate success-in other words, when achieving them indicates that we are making progress. The self-improvement guru Tony Robbins has taught that progress toward a goal can even bring more happiness than its actual attainment, an idea that is supported by research. To build a happiness strategy around this principle, you should set an end goal, then break it into manageable steps: one year, one month, one week, one day.

The one-day goals are especially important. In his 1948 self-improvement classic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie recommended that readers resolve to live in "day-tight compartments." Take stock of long-term goals regularly, but not too often (for me, every six months does the trick); focus the rest of the time on what is to be done today that creates positive progress. Finish your work, set it aside, and relish the accomplishment. Then, start again tomorrow.

2. Focus on the journey.

The prospect of committing to a lifelong aspiration might unnerve you, since it's the type that's least likely to pan out. But long-term goals can be audacious and bold without inviting disappointment if they go unfulfilled. The secret is in a formula articulated by the writer Deepak Chopra: intention without attachment.
Read: The subtle mindset shift that could radically change the way you see the world
Being overly attached to anything in life invites suffering. The solution is to see major goals not as the only way to achieve happiness but as points of navigation that set a direction for your lifelong journey. That way, when storms arise and new opportunities present themselves, you can set a new goal and gracefully let go of your old one, thereby avoiding disappointment and missed opportunities.

When setting out your long-term goals, try writing them down followed by these words: or something better. This gives you explicit permission to diverge from these goals as life circumstances dictate-which you can and should do without disappointment if the original goals are no longer appropriate.

3. Set intrinsic goals.
Read: New Year's resolutions that will actually lead to happiness
Extrinsic goals-the worldly aspirations leading to money, power, and prestige-can be the hardest to achieve because they are inherently zero-sum: In the pursuit of scarce resources, we crowd one another out. By contrast, intrinsic goals-based on love and personal growth-are positive-sum, and thus more likely to lead to success: My efforts to love and grow as a person are not crowded by your efforts; on the contrary, they can be complementary. Furthermore, they are the goals most associated with happiness. As such, a proper bucket list should be heavily weighted toward these intrinsic aspirations.

Make a list of specific intrinsic goals and work to achieve them. If you need help coming up with some, remember that intrinsic goals are akin to what the writer David Brooks calls "eulogy virtues": the things you would want people to remember you for at the end of your life. As in, "loving mother," not "5-million-mile flier on United." You might resolve to develop your spirituality this summer through 30 minutes a day of reading and practice, to make a new personal friend (one you see outside work) before the end of the year, or to call your mother twice a week starting today.

For happiness, even during the pandemic, neither follow-your-dreams cheerleading nor Pope's passive shrug is the best approach. A better commencement speech might advise the following:

Dream of the person you want to be-not of how rich or powerful or famous that future self is, but about the life you will lead and work you will do to serve and enrich others maximally, leaving behind a world that is better than you found it. Then, consider what it will take for you to get there, and the happiness you will gain from the joyful journey of creating value and loving others with abundance. Finally, focus your attention on what you will do this day in your work, spiritual life, and relationships that keeps you on that path. Oh-and your diplomas will arrive in the mail in four to six weeks.

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"How to Build a Life " is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Commencement season is just around the corner. Whether in person or over a live-stream, graduates and their families will follow the long-honored tradition of listening to speeches studded with unoriginal chestnuts like following your dreams, shooting for the stars, and believing that you can do whatever you set out to do.

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It's a new year, and I've just started a new job. Since joining the team at RescueTime I've been researching and writing about how people work and how we can work more effectively.

This has all got me thinking about the inherent joy some people find at work, and the lack of it so many people feel these days.

What is it that makes us happy at work? And how can we make sure it happens more often?

Making progress in meaningful work

According to researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, "Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work."

Amabile and Kramer have spent nearly 15 years looking into what affects people's moods, motivation, and happiness at work. In all their work they found one particular element that made the biggest difference on how employees feel about their work (and in general): whether or not they feel like they made progress in meaningful work.

They call this the progress principle.

And the more often employees experience that feeling of progress, Amabile and Kramer have found, the more productive they'll be in the long term.

The progress principle hinges on two main findings: firstly that a central driver of productivity in creative work is the employee's inner work life-that is, the emotions, motivations and perceptions they experience throughout the workday. The second finding is that making progress in work we care about affects all three parts of our inner work life positively.

Amabile's and Kramer's research showed employees who made progress were happier, more intrinsically motivated, reported more positive interactions with colleagues, and perceived more positive challenges in their work.

Those who experienced setbacks, on the other hand, felt more frustration, fear, and sadness. They felt less intrinsically motivated, but also responded less to recognition from peers as extrinsic motivation, and perceived their colleagues as less supportive. They were also more likely to feel that they lacked the freedom and resources needed to succeed in their work.

Inner work life doesn't just affect how much work you get done today, either. It can affect your work performance the following day, too. But if your inner work life is good, you're not only more likely to be productive-you'll be more committed to work and more collegial to others, too.

The good news is you don't have to make huge strides for the progress principle to take effect. Amabile and Kramer say even small wins can boost your inner work life, so long as they're part of meaningful work. In fact, 28% of incidents reported in their research had a minor impact on the related project, but a major impact on how the reporting employee felt. We tend to have outsized reactions to small events, say Amabile and Kramer.

Which means focusing on making small gains in our most important work every day is a solid approach to improving our happiness, commitment, and productivity at work.

Feeling good about our company's mission

According to Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell University, one of the most important parts of job satisfaction is simply how an employee feels about the company's mission. This may relate to the progress principle, as mentioned above, since caring about our company's mission likely makes us feel like our work has meaning, and the progress principle only holds for meaningful work-making progress on work we perceive as menial doesn't make us feel good.

In a survey of Cornell senior students about to enter the job market, two hypothetical jobs were on offer. Both jobs had identical pay and working conditions. One was helping to discourage smoking at the American Cancer Society. The other was working with the tobacco industry to encourage smoking.

With all else being equal, 90% of the survey respondents chose the American Cancer Society job. That makes sense, right? If you're not losing anything, why not take the job that gives you warm fuzzies as well?

But even more than choosing that job, when asked how much higher the tobacco industry job salary would have to be to encourage them to change their answer, the average response was: 80% higher.

Gratitude

A much smaller, simpler aspect of our happiness at work is simply how appreciated we feel. Saying "thank you" to your employees might seem like a small thing, but it can have big effects. One study found people who were explicitly thanked for their work were 50% more productive afterwards-even if the gratitude came from a distant supervisor rather than their manager.

In a survey of 2,000 American workers, the results showed this isn't subconscious, either. We seem to know that gratitude makes us feel better, and desire more of it.

81% of the survey's respondents said they'd be willing to work harder for an appreciative boss, and 70% said a thankful boss would make them feel better about themselves and their work.

Sadly, only 10% of the survey respondents said they regularly show gratitude to their colleagues.

The good news is, it's easy to start showing gratitude to your employees or colleagues. And the effect should last longer than other rewards, according to Wharton professor Adam Grant:

Extrinsic motivators can stop having much meaning-your raise in pay feels like your just due, your bonus gets spent, your new title doesn't sound so important once you have it. But the sense that other people appreciate what you do sticks with you.

Not only will that feeling last, but it can affect that person's behavior into the future. An experiment that showed this effect had students send cover letters to people who were paid to offer feedback. After receiving feedback on their letters, some students replied with a simple email to acknowledge receipt of the feedback. The rest of the students sent very appreciative emails in response to the feedback they received.

The researchers had students send out a second cover letter and request for feedback later, and found that people who'd been thanked in the first round were twice as likely to help with the second round of letters.

But here's the best part: they weren't just twice as likely to help the same student. They were twice as likely to ask any student who asked for their feedback.

So while thanking someone could improve their productivity at work and how they feel, it could also increase the likelihood of them being helpful again in the future-and not just to you. Thanking people, then, is an easy way to make your entire office a better place for everyone.

Feeling good about our position in life

Sometimes, when you're trying to figure out what works, it helps to look at what doesn't work, too. In terms of happiness at work, this translates to looking at what makes people quit their jobs. Knowing when and why people leave can help us figure out how to improve the workplace so people won't quit.

Brian Kropp works for CEB, a best-practice insight and technology company that researches why employees leave their jobs. But the why isn't the most interesting part of Kropp's work. The why is fairly obvious, since the same reasons have held steady for years: not liking your boss, not perceiving any opportunities for growth, or being offered a better job or higher salary elsewhere are all common reasons to quit.

What's really interesting about Kropp's work is not the why but the when:

We've learned that what really affects people is their sense of how they're doing compared with other people in their peer group, or with where they thought they would be at a certain point in life.

So it's not always the job itself that triggers an employee to think about quitting-it's how they feel about their life as a whole.

Kropp says particular types of events trigger this kind of evaluative thinking in employees. Job hunting jumps 6%, for instance, after anniversaries of joining the company, and 9% after anniversaries of moving roles. Birthdays bring on the evaluations even stronger, with a 12% jump in job hunting just before birthday. And after class reunions we tend to job hunt 16% more.

The most important lesson from Kropp's work is that what happens at work isn't the only input into an employee's happiness with their career. How our jobs fit into our lives as a whole is a big concern when it comes to being ready to move on, which bad bosses or offers of more money giving us the final reason to take the leap.

Whether you're a manager responsible for other employees or not, it's useful to understand the underlying reasons we find meaning in our work (or not). Knowing that particular anniversaries or birthdays can trigger an evaluation of our circumstances and that simply saying thank you more often can make people feel better about their work can help us avoid surprise resignations-from our staff or ourselves.

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What makes us happy at work - RescueTime Blog

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It's a new year, and I've just started a new job. Since joining the team at RescueTime I've been researching and writing about how people work and how we can work more effectively. This has all got me thinking about the inherent joy some people find at work, and the lack of it so many people feel these days.

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©Darius Foroux

Stoic Letter 16

What does it take to be happy? Going out with friends? Hanging out at the beach, drinking a mojito? Earning a lot of money? Good health?

Our Stoic friend, Seneca, argued that it was something else. He said: "No one can live happily, or even bearably, without the pursuit of wisdom."

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What does it take to be happy? Going out with friends? Hanging out at the beach, drinking a mojito? Earning a lot of money? Good health? Our Stoic friend, Seneca, argued that it was something else. He said: "No one can live happily, or even bearably, without the pursuit of wisdom."

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Daniel H. Pink | The official site of author Daniel Pink

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Welcome to the latest edition of our irregular and irreverent newsletter. In this issue, we've got an interview with mega-popular author Tom Rath, a list of 3 daily newsletters I can't live without, and our usual collection of intriguing articles.

Let's get started . . .
THE 3 SURPRISING KEYS TO WELL-BEING: AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM RATH
Tom Rath is a writer who changes lives. His books - which have sold more than 6 million copies and spent more than 300(!) weeks on Wall Street Journal bestseller lists - have had a massive influence on both individuals and organizations (If you haven't read StrengthsFinder 2.0 and taken the StrengthsFinder assessment, you owe it to yourself to do it now).

This week, Tom is out with a new book, published through the innovative Silicon Guild. It's called Are You Fully Charged? The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life and it looks at the science of daily experience - the day-to-day steps we can take to lead happier, healthier, and more meaningful lives. Like his previous books, this one comes packed with the latest behavioral and medical research along with an array of practical tips to put those findings into action.

I asked Tom to answer a few questions about the book exclusively for newsletter readers. Here's an excerpt of our conversation.
Pink: What are the three keys you've identified - and why do they matter?
Rath: This new book focuses almost exclusively on daily well-being - things people can do today and tomorrow - versus the typical focus on all the things that are important over decades or a lifetime. What's remarkable about this new research on daily well-being is that it tells a very different story (compared to decades of research on long term life evaluation) and is infinitely more practical.
Pink: As you analyze daily well-being, you emphasize that pursuing happiness and pursuing meaningfulness are two distinct notions. What's the difference?
Rath: I'm increasingly convinced that the "pursuit of happiness" is not only misguided, but potentially damaging. Most people should stop chasing their own happiness today and do something that improves the life of another human being instead. This is simply a much faster path to well-being for yourself and others. That is my basic distinction: improving the life of another person is inherent in meaning, but not happiness. This is why every hour invested in meaningful work has a greater return.
Pink: You write "[I]n most cases, what you will be most proud of a decade from now will not be anything that was the result of you simply responding." Yet most of us spend our days in response mode - replying to emails, answering phone calls, going to meetings. What are some suggestions for eluding that trap?
Rath: I would start by asking, "What truly needs to interrupt me if I am in the midst of something important?" There is really no reason that every text message, phone call, email, Facebook notification, tweet, and breaking news alert deserves your attention the minute it arrives. Start by turning almost all notifications "off" by default. Then ask which ones truly deserve to break into the flow of an important conversation with a loved one or disrupt meaningful work.

Pink: The research you look at in Are You Fully Charged? also reveals the right balance between focusing intensely and taking a break. What does that balance look like?

Rath: Top performers work in bursts. This applies to athletes, teachers, and those of us who spend our days in front of a computer screen. As a general guideline, taking a 10-minute break every hour is a good idea for your productivity and creativity. But if you spend your day sitting in a chair, it may be a better idea to take very brief breaks every 20 minutes. Essentially, the more you move the better you think.
Pink: I was surprised by the evidence showing how dramatically interactions with others affect our well-being and our performance. Any advice on improving our daily interactions?
Rath: One of the most valuable things you can do is to ask someone a question and genuinely listen to their response. Close your mouth, keep your devices stowed away, and give that person your undivided attention. Also, simply being aware of whether an interaction carries a positive or negative charge can help. At least 80% of your daily interactions need to produce a positive charge. Basically, each negative interaction requires a huge offset just to get your day back to neutral.
Pink: In the final section of the book, you write, "Sitting may be the most underrated health threat of this generation." Yet I'd bet that most people reading this right now are on their butts. What can we do to sit less and move more? 3 FREE DAILY NEWSLETTERS I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT
Rath: Stop worrying about exercise. Sitting less and taking a few more steps each day is a better place to start. It can be as simple as pacing around whenever you are on the phone, finding ways to work on a laptop while you stand occasionally, or settling for a parking spot that adds a few extra steps instead of circling the lot to minimize activity. Once you have added enough activity to hit 10,000 steps a day, then worry about the (more intimidating) thought of daily cardiovascular exercise.

It's a very compelling book, folks. You can find more information here: Are You Fully Charged? The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life

I subscribe to lots of email newsletters. Most of them arrive weekly or monthly, because - for me, at least - the bar for daily dispatches is very high. Indeed, if a weekly or monthly newsletter is like a pal you see from time to time, a daily one is more like a spouse. (Of course, extending this analogy further means that the Pink Newsletter is your disheveled college buddy who shows up on your porch unannounced looking for a place to crash.) That's why I subscribe to very few daily newsletters and why these three have become must-reads:
10 ARTICLES WORTH READING
The inimitable Dave Pell scans what seems to be the entire Internet to find the most fascinating articles, which he then distills to a pithy, provocative, and punchline-packed read. I stop nearly every afternoon to give this newsletter a look. The mobile version is also excellent.

Quartz Daily Brief
Lots of publications offer daily newsletters letting people know what's happening in the world of business. This is one of the few worth reading.

From my Instapaper account to your email inbox comes our most popular feature. Here are 10 articles that caught my attention, made me think, and might even have boosted my daily well-being:

We think better on our feet, literally
Texas A&M researchers find that students using standing desks are more likely to engage and to stay on task.

What Part of "No, Totally" Don't You Understand?
A brilliant Kathryn Schulz piece on the sudden rise of "No, totally" to mean "yes."

Getting enough sleep is key to exam success
British research finds that to absorb new information, nothing is more effective than a good night's sleep.

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Cheers,
Daniel Pink

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Why You Should Stop Pursuing Happiness, Start Working in Bursts, and Worry Less About Exercise | Daniel H. Pink

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Welcome to the latest edition of our irregular and irreverent newsletter. In this issue, we've got an interview with mega-popular author Tom Rath, a list of 3 daily newsletters I can't live without, and our usual collection of intriguing articles. Let's get started . . .

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Listen to this episode from The Career Happiness Podcast on Spotify. In today's episode I talk about my own personal story. I also share with you a little bit about my parents, school life, university and career choices. To how career happiness was something which was already something that was simmering in the background.

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Blog - Soma Ghosh- Career Happiness Mentor

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Blog - Soma Ghosh- Career Happiness Mentor

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I arrive at lunch five minutes late and Laurie Anderson is already seated at our table, the sunlight cascading over her slight, angular figure as she swipes through her phone.

"Nice to meet you," she greets me warmly, slipping her phone in her pocket as I apologise. She's wearing an orange blazer over a brown plaid shirt, hair cut short and slightly spiked.

Anderson is one of America's pioneers of the avant-garde, a key figure in New York's legendary Warhol-era arts scene, a creative genius across music, art and film. Today, she's having lunch with me. The rest of the week she is: performing a show every night, preparing a Harvard lecture and then flying to Florida to play a concert with a group of rehabilitated chimpanzees (which she may or may not turn into a record of chimpanzee sounds).

"I was passing through the [Save the Chimps] foundation before the pandemic, and I heard the most amazing music I've ever heard, this amazing rhythm and vocals," she later explains. "And it was these chimps, screaming and begging. And I was like, 'Whoa.' So we're going to bring a bunch of instruments down, bring a sound recordist, an engineer . . .'"

She's excited. "I told a friend last night and she was like, 'Oh you just did cars, now you're doing chimps.'" Because Anderson recently organised a "car symphony" in the Hamptons. But more on that later.

Speaking with Anderson is delightfully strange because her voice is one of her musical instruments, precise and unhurried, at times detached. It was her voice that took her into the mainstream, when she accidentally scored a pop music hit with the song " O Superman " in the 1980s, looping her voice with a vocoder.

In person she sounds like Apple's Siri but more muffled, and with a Midwestern accent. But she speaks so quietly that I strain to hear her from across the table, and I'm anxious that it will later be a struggle to make out her words from my recording. I inch my phone closer to her.

Spending time with Anderson is similar to her art: mysterious, unstructured, sometimes hard to understand while it's happening. It can be difficult even to explain who Laurie Anderson is. Promotional materials list her as a "multimedia artist".

It's easier to define her by what she's done. Which is a lot. During her 74 years on earth, Anderson has: become the only ever official artist-in-residence at Nasa, made a song about the Iran hostage crisis that became a hit ("O Superman"), written several books, created a dozen albums and won a Grammy, consulted tech companies, received multiple "honorary doctorate" degrees, helped to create an Olympic opening ceremony and turned Moby-Dick into a techno-opera. The definition of art keeps expanding, but somehow Anderson remains deeply weird and uncategorisable, weaving across film, music, performance art, painting, artificial intelligence, poetry.

Anderson identifies as both a capitalist and a Buddhist. But mostly, she says, she's a storyteller. So I ask her to tell me what the story of America is right now, a topic she has tackled for decades through her work. "Last night I was coming out of the Public Theater and people were driving drunk, really recklessly, coming up on the sidewalk," she says. "On weekend nights there's a lot of students and a certain level of civility has dissipated. I don't want to do cheap psychology, but people are really traumatised."

We're on an idyllic leafy block of Greenwich Village. Anderson has spent the better part of five decades in this small stretch of Manhattan. She lives nearby, while her late husband, the rock star Lou Reed, lived a couple blocks north on West 11th Street. Her art studio is a few blocks west, where the island of Manhattan meets the Hudson River.

It's a culture built on feeling inadequate. So you always have to want something, and you want so much . . . And then you go, did I really even want that?

It must be nice to work there, I reason, in a stretch of quiet that real estate developers have recently tried to rebrand as "West Soho". It's a bit too far west for tourists to stumble into. "Oh, I wouldn't say it's quiet. The river is wild," she replies, in the most Laurie Anderson way possible.

Having worked in the FT's Manhattan office a few blocks away for six years, I've always been under the impression that I missed out on some bygone era of bohemian fun. Anderson's Soho was that of Patti Smith, David Bowie, Andy Warhol (who she and her friends affectionately called "Cinderella", she says). My Soho is $17 takeaway salads and the Apple Store. Lately the area has been defined by construction, as Disney and other corporations plant massive offices.

But Anderson dismisses the notion that this neighbourhood is any less cool. "This is a wonderful version of New York," she says, likening it to the 1970s, when "everyone was just out on the street".

"That's where the action was. There was nothing to do inside except have a job. And nobody wanted a job. It was a generation of people who just thought working was for idiots."

It's easy to see the parallels to now, as protests over race, the dystopian threat of global warming and the trauma of the pandemic weigh heavily over New York. People are rethinking their careers. "It's a culture built on feeling inadequate. So you always have to want something, and you want so much, and you do stuff that you're a slave to. And then you go, 'Did I really even want that?'" she says. "You go outside the city for 10 minutes and you see all these 'help wanted' signs. I think a lot of people are deciding not to want it."

I order an iced matcha to wake up. It's the smoothest matcha I've tasted, not a trace of the bitter grassy flavour found in corporate coffee shops. The server places the glass on the table and it glows so electric green it almost looks like an LED light. We marvel, and Anderson asks for one too.

It's peak Saturday afternoon brunch hour, but this cavernous Japanese restaurant is nearly empty, light flooding through the two-storey windows as generic piano music plays. There are two menu options, and I'm vegetarian, so I order the vegan bento box, while Anderson asks for the bento box with miso black cod.

The people who live here are weirdos! New Yorkers are total weirdos, and it's wonderful to see that

When I ask about her massive exhibition at Washington's Hirshhorn Museum, which is the official reason she is doing this interview, Anderson is dismissive, almost embarrassed. "I said no initially. I don't know what world I'm in," she offers. " The Weather ", which is both a look back at 50 years of her work and a home for new pieces, is filled with oil paintings, graffiti, virtual reality, installations and video.

She named the show in dedication to her friend John Cage, the composer, who wrote a piece entitled "Lecture on the Weather" in 1975. "He wanted to make things less like objects and more like the weather. And during the pandemic, I became more and more aware that nothing stays the same for more than a few seconds," she says. "And if you want it to stay the same, good luck. It won't."

Anderson was last year chosen for Harvard's prestigious Norton Professorship in Poetry. Previous honorees have included Toni Morrison, TS Eliot and Robert Frost. She gave six lectures, framing each one around a concept. One class was devoted to the river, another to the forest, and when we met she was preparing to talk about "The City".

On her 10-minute walk over here, she says, she saw more than 30 of the ad hoc outdoor dining constructions that now line every street in New York City, a visual marker of the pandemic.

"It's so weird because, especially in Manhattan, in the past it was so buttoned-up. And suddenly we're all outside, sitting in these really weird huts. They're like houseboats, like we're in Amsterdam or something," she laughs as she scrolls through photos on her phone, pointing out the "cheesy living rooms with flower boxes".

"And there are very few tourists, even now, so these are primarily New Yorkers. And you realise that the people who live here are weirdos! New Yorkers are total weirdos, and it's wonderful to see that."

To Anderson, everything is art. She finds playfulness in New York's honking cars, the exhaust blowing out from air conditioners, the sounds of trucks speeding over sewer caps, and yes, the restaurant huts.

But she's also feeling the heaviness of this late pandemic stage. Anderson lost three friends to coronavirus, including Hal Willner, the longtime music co-ordinator for Saturday Night Live. He called her on the phone one night and told her he had been infected but it was a "light case, thank God". The next day, he died.

Menu

EN Japanese Brasserie
435 Hudson St, New York, NY 10014
Cod brunch $28
Vegan brunch $24
Iced matcha x2 $18
Chef cookies $12
Matcha gelato $3.50
Fig gelato $3.50
Pumpkin gelato $3.50
Sesame gelato $3.50
Total (incl tax and tip) £124.52

The server interrupts with our food - a palette of individually packaged bursts of colour lined up like windows in a building. My box contains Japanese sweet potato, lotus root, maitake tempura, salad and rice, but Anderson tells me the speciality here is the tofu. They make it in-house every hour at "neatly spaced show times, much like a killer whale at Sea World", according to a New York Times review.

I dig my spoon into my tofu, which looks like a scoop of ice cream dipped in soy sauce. It's gooey and smooth.

Anderson grew up in Chicago, known as the "second city", which left her with an obsession with New York, the first city. In landlocked Illinois, she dreamt of New York as a port city on the water; she read books about tugboats. "I like things that are moving. And now I just need to see the mighty Atlantic passing by."

She moved to New York for university, but would end up spending most of her time at her studio. She started out as a painter, doing shows in the 1970s at galleries and museums, marching her way up to the top of New York's art scene. But once there, she "ran screaming away".

"In the '80s, it started being more about money. I thought I was joining the art world, but I was really joining the art market and it's just very - you know - now everything is about NFTs," she says. "They're excited about the money. Which is OK. But it's about the market, with the cover of it being about the art."

Part of the magic of Anderson's work is that while serious it's also playful, poking fun at the absurdity of our daily norms and the dark sides of American life. Her "car concert" was pretty much exactly what it sounds like. She conducted a group of Hamptons residents who placed their cars in a circle in a grassy field, honking their horns for 20 minutes.

"It's completely dopey," she says as she searches through her phone for a video. The server clears our plates and asks if we want dessert. I feel the need to stretch our time, so I order literally all the desserts.

She put up signs advertising the concert, but initially nobody was interested. "We were the hippies, you know, with our gardens and drugs. So I thought, OK, what motivates Americans? Competition." Anderson released a new callout, this time telling people that they "might be able to audition for the car orchestra, for free". Everyone showed up.

I ask music all the same questions: is it big enough? Is it beautiful enough? Is it sad enough? Is it finished?

She finds the video, and there she is, in the same orange blazer, instructing drivers through a megaphone to "start your engines" in her wry monotone voice.

"The Hamptons has this culture. I wanted to do something where it wasn't about showing off your house or your clothes. It was a sunny beautiful afternoon, in your town by the seaside, and you're doing something really silly that made a really big sound."

At 74, Anderson says she is "doing more than ever before". She's been painting more, and finds it similar to playing the violin or the saxophone. It takes the same physical gestures, and she likes using her body. "I ask music all the same questions: is it big enough? Is it beautiful enough? Is it sad enough? Is it finished?"

She has a problem deciding something is finished. She has been sneaking back into the Hirshhorn exhibit and changing things ("I just needed to add more green to one of the paintings," she explains - the Hirshhorn was not pleased). "If you really do believe in change, it's always unfolding."

The server arrives again with a comically large display of sweets, including a pumpkin gelato which Anderson politely offers to share - already an intimate act with a stranger; in a pandemic, it's out of the question. I stick to my black sesame scoop, which is just the right amount of sweet.

Time is running out, and I finally broach the topic of Lou Reed. She met Reed in her forties at a festival in Munich. The pair became inseparable for the next two decades, playing music together, studying butterfly hunting, enjoying life in the West Village with their friends. Reed died in 2013 from liver cancer. "His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid," Anderson wrote in a tribute to Reed. "I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life - so beautiful, painful and dazzling - does not get better than that."

The only time her smile turns sour is when I ask about a new documentary about The Velvet Underground, Reed's band, that was well received at the Cannes film festival last summer. "Officially what I would say about the movie is it seemed to focus more on film-making than music," she says, declining to elaborate. "So it was an interesting version of that time."

Anderson spent the worst days of the pandemic at her home in Long Island, by the sea, "being a country person with my dog". But the pull of the city has brought her back.

Still seeking some kernels of wisdom, I press again. What are we supposed to learn from this time? What's the story? "It's too soon to know," she says, digging into her purse as she prepares to get up. I haven't finished paying the bill, but she's got to go.

Anderson turns back to our table where I'm still seated, poking at the gelato. I wonder if she has more to say. But instead she calls: "Thank you for lunch!" And she's out of the door and into the humming city.
Anna Nicolaou is the FT's US media correspondent

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Artist Laurie Anderson: 'Nothing stays the same for more than a few seconds'

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I arrive at lunch five minutes late and Laurie Anderson is already seated at our table, the sunlight cascading over her slight, angular figure as she swipes through her phone. "Nice to meet you," she greets me warmly, slipping her phone in her pocket as I apologise.