Pause for Happiness
One of life's mysteries
I broke the cardinal consistency rule for delivering this newsletter on Sunday evening. I had good intentions but felt the urge to pause for a moment of happiness.
You see, I have been working with a client on the idea of Happiness by Design and well it took me deep into the art and sciences of happiness. It is a squishy subject that everyone is pursuing today, like finding the Holy Grail in the Indy Jones movie The Raiders of the Ark or the Fountain of Youth in Pirates of the Caribbean.
You will know it when you get that in your possession!
Like Indy, my adventure has been interesting. I dove deep into Happiness by Design, by Paul Dolan - a London Business School professor who wrote a deep thesis on what designing for Happiness is all about. He also writes a Substack on Happiness you might find interesting - Crystal.
Another deep dive took me into the work of Arthur C. Brooks - author of several books on Happiness, a columnist in the Atlantic, and producer/host of a podcast named The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks or you can watch this TEDx Talk.
My discovery led me to understand the pursuit of happiness is a mysterious journey to try and find the ultimate experience that leaves you happy. Satisfied. You respond well to the shot of dopamine, also known as the “happy hormone”. It is the one that kicks in and gives you that feeling of happiness or satisfaction.
The kind of dopamine feeling you get from purchasing that new Porsche, LV handbag or the feedback from your post where you were drinking a Mai Tai on a secluded island beach somewhere in the Pacific.
Arthur even has an equation for this:
His TEDx Talk extends into a conversation with the Dalai Lama who defines happiness (or satisfaction) as...
“We need to learn how to want what we have, not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable happiness.”
It was the deeper dive into the biological roots of human understanding found in The Tree of Knowledge written by two PhDs - A Chilean biologist and a French Professor of Cognitive Science and Epistemology that brought home how to think about this subject matter.
The Authors state that The Tree of Knowledge is based on the subject matter of “Knowing How We Know”, which is deemed radical and exciting, disturbing and challenging by a testimonial for the book. I must say, it was deep, deep learning.
In working with my client and his design firm on their “Happiness by Design” philosophy as their approach to design, the art of happiness is showing up in more of an “addition by subtraction” construct. A rethink, about how we give back a feeling of happiness in the tools we use and the environments we work in.
How can we remove the friction of working on crappy technology that is being forced upon us at work? The decision was made to use this system, we paid for it - so you better just figure it out. In a remote or hybrid work situation, technology will either make or break us as it is the teether to our work and how we stay connected to the tasks at hand.
What if we could remove the friction of bad technology design? What if we could reimagine our office spaces to be more…well happy…and less 80’s cubicles? What if we could design a harmonious stream of synchronous and asynchronous workflows so answers to questions can be managed to a happier sense of existence?
Since the delay of the newsletter, the ChatGPT 4o came out and it has many game-changing features that could make for a happier existence. We can now speak human into a machine and it spits back information in a manner that helps us make sense of something that can lead to better decisions or actions to be taken.
How will this advancement feed into our happiness quotient? Will we get to a place of “Happiness First” in our quest to have a fun and productive day? What will that look like?
And, most importantly, how will that make us feel?
NOW (How you are realizing this today)
What makes you happy in your day?
Do you feel a sense of happiness at your work?
What are you doing to spread happiness?
NEW (How you will realize this tomorrow)
I will spearhead a discussion about the little things we can do to promote a happier culture by the end of May.
I will create a team to identify the friction points in our technology tools that could save a lot of angst across the organization by July.
We will engage with UX/UI Design teammates to rethink how to optimize our workflows into a happier place by the end of Q3.
NEXT (I see a world in which)
I see a world in which the pursuit of happiness becomes a new Sustainable Goal by the United Nations for 2030.
THE PAYOFF
“"The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us." - Ashley Montagu
If you are motivated to bring happiness to your company, hire me to design your corporate narrative and I will get you on track.