Introduction — What We Knew as Kids
Most of us remember the past as more pleasant than it really was. We cope with big blows, like a breakup or losing out on a dream job, better than we expect to. And over time, we put a positive spin on the bad parts. The heartbreak of being turned down for prom becomes a story that makes life more colorful. It’s exactly because bad memories soften that women agree to a second childbirth and authors agree to write a second book.
But when you chart how happy people actually feel at each age, a clear pattern shows up. Adolescence is one of the hardest stretches of life. The midlife crisis is real too, and our most miserable adult years usually fall between forty and fifty. Overall, we were happier as kids than we are as adults. That raises the question behind the whole book. What do we know now, that we didn’t know as kids, that is hurting our happiness?
To find out, Raghunathan uses what he calls the mental chatter exercise. For two weeks, you keep a brutally honest daily record of the thoughts that come up on their own. You don’t steer them in a positive direction, and you don’t look for closure or meaning. The negative thoughts matter most, because they aren’t random. They’re rooted in deep goals, desires, and values. Covering them with positive thinking is like popping peppermints to hide bad breath. It treats the symptom, not the cause.
The chatter tends to fall into three groups. Feeling inferior comes from comparing ourselves with others, which comes from the desire to be superior. Feeling unloved comes from insecurity in relationships, which shows up as neediness or avoidance. Feeling out of control comes from the desire for control and the urge to always make things better. Many of us believe these traits drive success. The evidence says otherwise. The need for superiority hinders more than it helps, the best leaders are compassionate and kind, and being overly controlling isn’t the way to succeed. So the plan is to let go of these habits and replace them with better ones, which makes us happier and more successful. The book calls the first set the deadly happiness sins and the second the habits of the highly happy. There are seven of each, and the first sin is the most basic: we don’t value happiness as much as we say we do.
Chapter 1 — From Devaluing Happiness to Prioritizing It
Imagine that for months you’ve told your boyfriend how to lose weight, and he’s ignored you. Then he comes home excited. Someone new has inspired him to change his lifestyle, and it’s nearly the same plan you’ve been suggesting all along. Do you angrily point out that this person told him nothing new, or do you congratulate him? When people were asked which was better for happiness, 85 percent said to congratulate him. In relationships, you can often be right or be happy, but not both. Yet when another group was asked what they’d actually do, only 72 percent chose to congratulate him. About one in eight were willing to give up happiness to be right.
The same thing happens with jobs. Job A will make you rich, but the work is dull and stressful and the people are hard to get along with. Job B pays about half as much, but the work is enjoyable and the people are genuinely nice. Asked which job was better for happiness, 78 percent of students picked Job B. When they chose for themselves in calm conditions, only 26 percent took Job A. But when students first took a stressful test meant to feel like job-interview season, 55 percent chose the miserable, high-paying job. Happiness is one of the most important goals people have, and yet they routinely sacrifice it for other goals.
The first habit of the highly happy is the answer: prioritize happiness, but don’t pursue it. There’s an old story about an American banker on vacation in a Mexican fishing village. He meets a sharp local fisherman and tells him he could be a successful banker on Wall Street. “But why would I want that?” asks the fisherman. “You’d earn big bucks,” says the banker, flashing his Rolex. “And then?” the fisherman asks. “Why, you could retire early, settle down in a little village like this one, and fish all day!” The fisherman, of course, was already there.
One reason we don’t put happiness first is that we think it’ll make us selfish. It’s the opposite. Happy people volunteer more, give more to charity, and are more likely to donate blood. Another reason is medium maximization: we forget the end goal and chase the means instead. In one study, people chose between a short task and a long one to earn candy. With nothing in between, they picked the short task. But when points were added between the work and the candy, they chose the long task, chasing points instead of the candy they actually wanted. People do the same with money. They chase it so hard they forget why they wanted it.
The fix starts small. For one week, a group of people got a daily email gently reminding them to make happiness-enhancing choices. By the end of the week, they were far happier than a group that got no emails, because they made choices like going to a kids’ baseball game instead of watching TV at home.
But there’s a catch. Chasing happiness backfires, because you keep comparing how you feel with how you’d like to feel, and you end up unhappy about being unhappy. Sleep works the same way. Watching for the moment you drift off is a great way to stay awake. It works better to eat a light dinner, work out, skip the argument with your spouse about what to watch on TV, and then stop checking. Prioritizing happiness means taking the steps that raise the odds, then letting go of the scorekeeping.
There are two steps. First, define happiness. When 188 people were asked to describe a recent happy moment, most pointed to four feelings: love or connection, joy, authentic pride in achieving something worthwhile, and hubristic pride, the feeling that you’re special and better than someone else. Add two more to that list. Harmony is not wanting to be anywhere else, doing anything else. Abundance is the belief that you have more than enough and that, however bad things get, it’ll all be all right. Life feels like a cozy mess, perfect despite its imperfections.
Second, list what brings on happiness as you’ve defined it, like the people, songs, and activities that triggered it before. Defining happiness makes it concrete, and the list shows you which choices to make. It also explains something about childhood. We teach kids to value money, status, beauty, and power, and that’s exactly how they lose sight of what makes them happy. And many of those lessons come down to one thing: being better than everyone else.
Chapter 2 — From Chasing Superiority to Pursuing Flow
We seek superiority because we want approval, self-esteem, and mastery, the sense that we’re getting good at something. Higher status really does make people healthier and happier. It boosts self-esteem and gives them more control over their own lives. But being superior and chasing superiority aren’t the same thing. Even among people of the same status, the greater the need to be superior, the lower the happiness.
Part of the problem is how we keep score. Superiority is hard to measure, so we count wealth, power, and fame instead. That pulls us toward material rewards, and materialism is one of the biggest happiness killers. We also get used to each new level, so we’d have to keep getting richer and more famous our whole lives just to stay happy. Materialism makes people more self-centered and less compassionate. One study followed 12,000 college freshmen for 19 years. Those whose main goal was making money were far less happy two decades later. And the more we compare ourselves with others, the less happy we are. It helps to watch for the moments that make you feel insecure, because that’s when the craving to be superior is strongest.
The second habit of the highly happy offers a better route to mastery. Do the plumber and the artist, the businessman and the scientist, share something in the experiences they find meaningful? They do, and psychologists call it flow. In flow, time seems to slow down and speed up at once. You lose your self-consciousness, because the activity takes all your attention and none is left over to judge how you’re doing. And you’re fully in the moment, focused on the next small step. Flow is most likely when you’re challenged just the right amount, like playing an opponent who’s slightly better than you. That’s when you learn and grow.
Flow beats superiority for a few reasons. It spreads. People are inspired watching others in flow, like a band that’s really rocking or a nerdy professor lecturing on a favorite topic. And one person’s flow doesn’t cost anyone else, while one person’s gain in wealth or fame comes at someone else’s expense. It also works better. Our attention is limited, so the more we spend on status, the less we have for the task. What sets great athletes apart from good ones isn’t physical skill. It’s the ability to forget what just happened, ignore what might happen, and focus on right now. Carrots and sticks make performance worse, because when we’re judged on outcomes, we lose our focus on the process.
Since we spend most of our waking hours at work, it helps to find flow there. Start by reconnecting with a hobby. At work, find where your talents lie and use them, even if it means bending your job description. And do more of what you enjoy, since “What do I enjoy?” is often easier to answer than “What am I good at?” Building real skill takes what Angela Duckworth calls grit, and the short-term pain is worth it. If you want a more meaningful job, spend a few hours a week around the people and work you’re drawn to. That slow, organic path usually beats quitting one fine day.
Two practices ease the need for superiority. The first is self-compassion. Say to yourself what you’d say to a friend after a failure, remember that everyone fails, and notice your feelings kindly without denying them. That makes you feel more secure, and secure people chase superiority less. The second is gratitude. When things go well, most of us pat ourselves on the back in private. The author admits he tells himself, “Raj, there’s no one quite like you!” That feels good, but it feeds the need to be superior. Instead, think of someone who played a key part in your success. No one achieves anything alone. Gratitude works like a bridge, carrying you from hubristic pride to love and connection. And love is where the third sin lives.
Chapter 3 — From Desperation for Love to the Need to Give
In the famous experiments of the psychologist Harry Harlow, baby monkeys were raised with two artificial mothers, one made of wire mesh and one of soft cloth. When something frightening entered the cage, the babies always clung to the cloth mother. Monkeys raised with only wire mothers grew up socially lost, and the females who had babies neglected them. Their ability to love depended on whether they’d been loved.
We need connection badly. In a study by Raghunathan and his coauthor Kim Corfman, people enjoyed boring videos more with a partner who agreed with them than entertaining videos with a partner who didn’t. We care more about agreement than about the experience itself. Being left out activates the same parts of the brain as physical pain. The researcher John Cacioppo found that feeling lonely may be the single biggest driver of illnesses from depression to diabetes. And a study that followed 268 men from college in 1938 into the late 2000s found that strong relationships were the only thing that set the happiest 10 percent apart.
But chasing love causes a lot of misery, because there’s a thin line between a healthy desire for connection and an unhealthy one. The unhealthy kind shows up in two ways. Needy people turn others off, partly because we undervalue what’s too easy to get, and so they end up lonely. Avoidant people see themselves as strong and independent, but that’s mostly a front. They want love as much as anyone. They just wait for others to make the first move, and since that isn’t endearing, the move rarely comes. The good news is that these patterns can change. Gratitude helps, since people who express it have a richer social life. So does self-compassion, which calms our sense of threat and helps us feel secure.
The third habit of the highly happy shifts the focus from being loved to loving and giving. On a flight once, Raghunathan heard that a passenger was having a heart attack. Three doctors and two nurses on board went to help a total stranger. Their eagerness confirmed what he’d long suspected. People have a built-in desire to help others.
Most of us don’t expect giving to make us happy. In one survey, 63 percent of people predicted they’d be happier spending money on themselves than on someone else. They were wrong. Giving to charity raised life satisfaction as much as doubling household income. Giving works because it takes our focus off our own worries, because the people we help are grateful, which lifts them too, and most of all because of the story it tells us about ourselves. When we help, we feel capable and abundant, like a king or a queen. Even a small act of generosity will do.
Givers also tend to succeed. Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, finds they’re the most likely to rise, even in business. The economist Arthur Brooks found that for every extra dollar people earned, their giving rose by 14 cents. But for every dollar they gave, their income rose by as much as $3.75. Employees who were there for others when needed were six times as likely to be promoted as those who mostly looked to others for help.
But giving takes energy, and too much burns you out. Caretakers of Alzheimer’s patients are three times as likely to be depressed as the average person. Grant finds that givers are the most likely to succeed and also the least likely. Selfless givers give so freely that they burn out and end up at the bottom. Otherish givers mean just as well, but they’re smart about when, how much, and to whom they give, and they often rise to the top. They keep the cost down, like teaching four or five people calculus at once, and they take real pride in the good they do. It also helps to see the impact of your giving, because that brings the biggest boost in happiness. Giving means letting go a little. The fourth sin is the opposite: holding on too tightly.
Chapter 4 — From Overcontrol to Internal Control
When people are asked to think about death, they cling even harder to their values and view of the world. The fear of death brings up uncertainty and a lack of control, so we grab whatever makes us feel in control again. We even believe we have more control than we do. People who picked their own lottery tickets were less willing to trade them for better odds than people handed tickets at random. It’s the same illusion that makes us fear flying more than driving, even though driving is far more dangerous. Behind the wheel, we feel in charge.
Control does serve a purpose. It makes us feel competent and free, and people with a higher need for control set bigger goals and achieve more. But past a tipping point, it lowers happiness. Trying to control other people backfires. Try to control your spouse’s diet, and they may eat more junk food just to spite you. Push your kids to finish their homework, and you’ll get grumpiness or open revolt. In relationships, you can have control over others or you can have their love, but not both. Controlling people also feel what the psychologist David McClelland calls power stress, the anger and frustration of watching others not behave the way they want.
Trying to control outcomes hurts too. That’s different from wanting good results. Having goals boosts happiness. You cross the line when the desire for an outcome starts controlling you instead of the other way around. Life often doesn’t go to plan, and people with a high need for control suffer more when it doesn’t. And when you’re obsessed with one outcome, like landing a certain job, you give up other things that make you happy.
It helps to appreciate uncertainty. We already do at some level. It’s why we avoid movie spoilers. But the most promising way to ease the need for control is internal control. It means keeping the keys to your happiness in your own hands and never blaming anyone else for your unhappiness.
That’s the fourth habit of the highly happy, and it starts with seeing how much our minds shape our feelings. As a boy, Raghunathan spent his summers with family in Trichy, a city in India. For fifteen or so summers, he always expected to enjoy them more than he did. So did his mother, sister, cousins, uncles, and aunts. We overpredict because, once a vacation is over, we mostly remember the good parts. We do it with bad events too, which is why heart attacks are more common on Monday mornings, before the workweek has even started. Our feelings follow our thoughts, so changing our thoughts can change how we feel. Instead of being angry that your boss didn’t give you a raise, you could feel grateful he didn’t fire you.
Taking internal control means taking personal responsibility for your happiness. Circumstances control what happens to you, but not how you feel about it. And when you have enough control on the inside, you don’t need as much control over other people and the world around you. Internal control grows like muscle, by taking on challenges that are neither too light nor too heavy for your current ability.
A few tactics help. Name what you feel, like telling yourself, “I’m feeling angry.” Most people expect that to make feelings stronger, but it makes them weaker, as long as you note the feeling and move on. Put things in perspective. Stressed about a meeting? Remind yourself that your work isn’t meaningless drudgery and that this is a first-world problem. But don’t push feelings down. The brain stays just as upset, holding it in drains energy you need, and other people can sense it, which stresses them and makes them like you less.
An even more powerful way to take internal control is to eat right, move more, and sleep better. It makes you feel good from the inside out and helps you handle stress. Sitting more than six hours a day greatly raises the risk of early death, and inactivity kills more people worldwide than smoking does. Even among people who exercised a lot, those who sat most of the day had a 50 percent greater risk of death. You need to move throughout the day. And 95 percent of people need seven to nine hours of sleep to feel rested. Most people know all this and still don’t do it. So the schedule partner project draws on a simple finding: you’re far more likely to reach a goal when you pursue it alongside someone else. Of course, that means trusting them, and distrust is the fifth sin.
Chapter 5 — From Distrust to Smart Trust
People in richer countries tend to be happier, and so do people in stable democracies. But one thing matters more than wealth or politics, and that’s trust. In one study, researchers “accidentally” dropped twelve wallets, each holding about $50 and the owner’s address, in each of sixteen cities around the world. The more wallets that came back, the happier the country.
Imagine not trusting your friends to split a restaurant bill fairly, or not trusting any coworker to keep a secret. When you can’t trust others, you can’t relax, and when you can’t relax, you can’t be happy. Many of us are wired to be cynical, and broken trust is hard to repair. The relationship researcher John Gottman finds it takes as many as five trustworthy acts to overcome the bad feelings from one untrustworthy one. Yet if enough of us trusted first, we’d build trust together, and everyone would be happier.
The fifth habit of the highly happy is smart trust. It starts from the idea that people aren’t set in stone. Few of us are pure saints or pure devils, and which side we show depends mostly on the setting. We act saintly in church and less so in certain parts of Las Vegas. So Raghunathan trusts people, but he decides ahead of time that if someone cheats him, he’ll track them down. The point isn’t revenge. It’s to understand what led them to break his trust. As he puts it, knowing is understanding, and understanding is forgiving.
To practice, think of someone you dislike. Call them X. Imagine you were born with X’s genes, X’s parents, X’s neighborhood, school, and friends. Would you behave any differently than X does? Once that sinks in, it’s easier to stop judging people as good or bad and start trying to understand them. The sixth habit asks us to stop judging in another way, this time about what happens to us.
Chapter 6 — The Dispassionate Pursuit of Passion
We can’t foresee everything an outcome will lead to. Marrying your sweetheart seems good now, but it may turn out badly later. A divorce seems bad now, but it may turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. Life is that unpredictable, so we shouldn’t hold strong views about whether what happens to us is good or bad.
We’re happier when we’re busy, and happier still when we’re doing something meaningful. So we don’t have to depend on outcomes for happiness. We can find it in the work of reaching for them, like preparing for an exam or planning a vacation. This is the dispassionate pursuit of passion. You can prefer one outcome over another before it happens. But once it happens, you don’t label it good or bad. He admits it’s hard to pull off.
Time makes it easier. Feelings about both good and bad events fade, but bad ones fade faster. We savor a first kiss long after, but we don’t stay upset about failing an exam for nearly as long. And once enough time has passed, people find their negative experiences more meaningful than their positive ones. The events we find most meaningful are often the ones we felt worst about when they happened. Hard times make us more compassionate and wiser about the curveballs life throws. They give us bragging rights, like the grueling hike up Kilimanjaro or the fried worms you were talked into eating on a trip, which make great stories on a first date. And they remind us that we survived, which makes us feel stronger.
Our beliefs can even shape what happens. The placebo effect is so common that every new drug is tested against a sugar pill. Not every belief changes reality. Believing the Earth has two moons won’t add one. But in some areas our beliefs clearly shape our lives, and people with a spiritual outlook are happier, and so are optimists. So how we choose to see what happens to us matters. The trouble is that smart people often don’t trust anything that can’t be reasoned out.
Chapter 7 — From Mind Addiction to Mindfulness
Most of us know emotions drive many of our decisions, and that we justify them afterward with rational-sounding reasons. What’s surprising is how uneasy we feel admitting it. We assume feelings make our judgment worse. That’s mind addiction, the habit of ignoring or underrating our gut instincts and feelings.
But gut instincts aren’t random. They hold useful information that served us well for a very long time, and thinking too much drowns it out. And our best ideas don’t come from careful thinking. They come from the subconscious, which is why they show up when we’re thinking about something else entirely. That doesn’t mean always going with your gut. Choosing between gut feel and careful thinking is more art than science. For practical group decisions, like hiring someone, careful thinking usually wins.
Mind addiction also comes with a lack of self-awareness, which the neuroscientist Richard Davidson calls one of the biggest happiness killers. Without self-awareness, you can’t see how you’re sabotaging your own happiness. You might care a great deal about being better than others while telling yourself you couldn’t care less. The smarter move is to stop fooling yourself and get honest about how you’re getting in your own way.
The seventh habit of the highly happy is mindfulness. We’re caught in a web of GATEs: goals, actions, thoughts, and emotions. Your boss shouts at you. You feel angry, which sparks thoughts of revenge, which spark actions, which spark new feelings, and on it goes. One way to break the web is to step outside it and simply watch, like a fly on the wall of your own mind. Take what the mind calls anxiety. Up close, it’s just clammy palms, a slightly faster heartbeat, and butterflies in the stomach. None of that is scary on its own. It’s the judging and chewing on it that makes it ominous and keeps it around. When you just observe a bad feeling, it fades faster.
The opposite of mindfulness is mind-wandering. A New Yorker cartoon shows a man at work thinking about golf, on the golf course thinking about sex, and during sex thinking about work. In one study, people were less happy when their minds wandered, whether the activity was pleasant or not. Even while doing something unpleasant, people were happiest when their minds were in the here and now.
Mindfulness keeps you in the moment, just like flow. It strengthens parts of the brain tied to positive feelings and quiets the parts tied to worry. People who practiced it stayed far calmer giving a speech in front of an audience. It even helps at work, by building the ability to pause before you react. It also helps to know that our behavior shapes our attitudes, not just the other way around. Act compassionately, even when you don’t feel it, and you’ll start to think and feel like a compassionate person.
Mindfulness isn’t about not thinking. It’s about changing your relationship with your thoughts. Before each session, tell yourself three things. Each session is new, so have no expectations. The only goal is to be a fly on the wall. And when you drift, use self-compassion and the dispassionate pursuit of passion to steer back. For most people, the breath is the easiest thing to watch. It’s always changing, so it holds your interest, but it doesn’t jump around the way thoughts do.
Chapter 8 — The Road Ahead
Step back and look at the whole book, and it says that once our basic needs are met, we need three things to be happy. Mastery is feeling that we’re good at something, like dancing, painting, or teaching. Belonging is feeling close to at least one other person. Autonomy is feeling that we’re the authors of our own choices.
None of that is news. The book’s main contribution is this: meeting those needs isn’t enough. What also matters is the route we take to meet them. There are two routes to Mastery: chasing superiority or pursuing flow. There are two routes to Belonging: desperation for love or the need to love and give. And there are two routes to Autonomy: seeking external control or gaining internal control.
The better routes all come from a sense of abundance. When we feel taken care of, we do things for the joy of them rather than for rewards. When we feel abundant, like a king or a queen, we feel able to be generous. And when we feel confident we can handle whatever life throws at us, we can let go of external control and look for control inside. So the recipe for a happy life comes down to moving away from scarcity and toward abundance.
Raghunathan is hopeful. As Sonja Lyubomirsky notes in The How of Happiness, most of us now live about as comfortably as the top 5 percent did half a century ago. So more people know from their own lives that more wealth doesn’t mean more happiness, and more of them want to learn what does. Still, cultural inertia holds us back, and we give more weight to goals that are easy to measure, even when they matter less. So borrow an idea from the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith: find a peer coach, someone who asks you the same questions every day. Did I do my best to prioritize, but not pursue, happiness? Did I do my best to be self-compassionate when I failed, and grateful for the good that came my way? To pursue flow instead of superiority? To not be needy or avoidant, and to give in otherish ways? To not be overly controlling, and to take responsibility for my own happiness? To eat right, move more, and sleep better? To exercise smart trust and forgive others? To look for the good that can come from bad events? And did I do my best to practice mindfulness?
The book started with one question: what do we know now, that we didn’t know as kids, that’s hurting our happiness? The answer turns out to be a few habits we picked up while trying to get ahead. Kids don’t chase superiority, cling, or try to control everything. They play, they give, and they trust. Being happy isn’t about learning something new. It’s about unlearning what got in the way.