What do you think? Does success make you happy? Or are you happy without success? I would assume your answer to this question would be based a great deal on how you define either of these two.
To look at it differently, you might wonder: Does success make you happy, or does happiness make you more likely to succeed?
This second set of questions is what Paul Lester, associate professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School; Martin Seligman, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center; and the late Ed Diener, an influential American psychologist, attempted to answer.
This trio followed over 1 million Department of Defense workers, over a five year span, in an attempt to answer the question. What did they discover? “You don’t have to be successful to be happy and you don’t have to be happy to find success.” Well that’s helpful.
I am pretty sure we all could have answered that question with less folks involved and in a much shorter time frame. Most people know someone who appears to be successful without much happiness. And we are aware of very happy people who do not appear to have much success. We actually might be someone in either of these camps.
Let me return to my statement in the first paragraph. Your answer would be greatly influenced by how you define success and/or happiness.
You must be the person who makes this decision for yourself. If your happiness is dependent on someone else’s definition of success or happiness then you may never attain either. However, if you are content with how you define these two then you will most likely achieve both.
It is my personal opinion that success is a byproduct of happiness, not happiness of success. When you find contentment, joy, peace, acceptance in who you are as a person you live in happiness. Happiness is a condition of choice, not a hostage of circumstances.
I was once asked, “Would you be happy if you had more money.” My response, “I am happy with what I have, but I would not turn down more money.”
If what you have is not enough, then what you get will never be enough. This is not a statement of complacency, but of contentment. This is not a statement of disinterest, but of interest in the right things. This is not a statement of demotivation, but of correct motivation.
Pursuit of achievement ought to be done from happiness, not in pursuit of it.