Editor’s note: Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” is what clients value most. Grace will be writing a regular column for WRAL TechWire. Watch for future columns.
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I am thankful, exceedingly so, to have undergone a recent transformation: from clinically depressed back into the Grace, the person, happy.
Now, column readers, I wish to share with you the latest research on happiness, so you may learn to become a happier you, and a happier leader in your life.
To do so, let me introduce you to Arthur Brooks, a Harvard Business School professor whose Leadership and Happiness course is in high-demand, due to an increasing interest in soft skill development and the benefits to corporate entities in attracting, recruiting, and training better, happier managers and leaders.
According to Brooks, the central tenant of effective leadership is that ones happiness yields one’s success and effectiveness as a leader. It’s not the other way around. Happiness, in Brooks’s view, is a natural and valuable byproduct of intentional tending to family, friends, meaningful work, and faith or life philosophy.
In From Strength to Strength, Brooks recounts a plane ride that he says changed his life. While on board, he overhears a conversation between an elderly couple. The wife tells her husband “it’s not true that no one needs you anymore. Stop saying it would be better if you were dead.”
The plane lands. Brooks becomes aware of the man’s identity, recognizing him as a world-renowned individual. Brooks disembarks from the plane, and at the door, overhears the pilot addressing the man. “Sir, I have admired you since I was a little boy,” the pilot says to the man. The man—apparently wishing for death a few minutes earlier—beamed at the recognition of his past glories.
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A success addiction?
Entrepreneurs and leaders often suffer from the strivers’ curse and success addiction—since you’re reading this column, perhaps you know what I mean.
The more accomplished one is at the peak of their career, the more pronounced decline seems once it sets in. The agony of decline is directly correlated to the prestige previously achieved and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac’s most important work and most intensely productive years came in his twenties and thirties. After his mid thirties, he was still an active scholar and did some good work, but not like before. He wrote a short, sad poem about physicists being washed up by age thirty:
He is better dead than living still
When once he is past his thirtieth year.
This poem makes me think of the recent death of former Miss USA, Cheslie Kryst.
Given my struggles last year, I studied her life after hearing of her untimely passing at age 30, shortly after handing over her crown. She was secretly suffering from high-functioning depression and committed suicide.
Last year she wrote, “Society has never been kind to those growing old, especially women. Turning 30 feels like a cold reminder that I’m running out of time to matter in society’s eyes—and it’s infuriating.”
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Crystallized intelligence
Sadly, Kryst’s story is not a story in isolation. After professional athletes leave their sports careers and Olympic gold medal winners retire, they often struggle with addiction and even suicide. Dominique Dawes, 1996 Olympic Gold medalist, said “living life as if every day is an Olympics only makes those around me miserable.” Therefore, her post-Olympic life has been specifically engineered to avoid pitfalls people face after ultra-high achievement. She doesn’t live in the past.
Tom Brady is managing well, too, retiring at a time when he is still at the top of his game and has a great deal of crystallized intelligence from his years of Super Bowl stardom.
Fluid intelligence, what we possess earlier in our life, diminishes rapidly starting in our 30s and 40s, whereas crystalized intelligence continues to grow. With accumulated wisdom, we get better at vocabulary, can do well in foreign languages, and are better at combining and utilizing complex skills and expressing them to others. The oldest college professors tend to have the best teaching evaluations.
I have seen that to be true in my teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If I were to be asked again to teach, I would be a much better professor than when I was asked to teach at age 42, which is still young for university faculty. Very few people become “full” professors before the age of 40, and the average age of “full professors” is 55.
I now have more wisdom. As we age and increase in wisdom, we are able to bear more fruit in service to others. Leveraging your natural ability to counsel, mentor, advise, and teach others in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige can increase your happiness.
So, here’s my advice to you, as takeaways from Brooks’s book, From Strength to Strength.
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Get off the hedonic treadmill
I invite you to step off the hedonic treadmill. And, also, stop and smell the roses in your own backyard.
Many of us exhibit patterns of the addictive behavior workaholism—the compulsion or uncontrollable need to work incessantly.
These patterns of addictive behavior can also lead to alcohol abuse or addiction. Drinking at hazardous levels can turn off the sensation of anxiety like a switch—temporarily. Some self-medicate with alcohol. We may spend our discretionary time in work activities, thinking about work when not working, working well beyond what is required.
Marginal productivity tanks beyond 8 hours per day. Those who have workaholism crave success to an unhealthy level. Abraham Lincoln was desperately sad off and on throughout his life and at times suicidal, admitting once to a friend that he never dared to carry a knife in his pocket for fear he would use it on himself. Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former Formula 1 driver, said “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy.”
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What’s the cost?
Strivers do so at the cost of deep connections with spouses, children, and friends.
While I have always highly valued friendships and my relationship with my son, I now have a new appreciation. Do you live to work? Before my depressive episode last year, I must say that I often did live to work. Kick your success addiction. Are you addicted to accomplishing great things and to being special rather than being happy? Being a full person, a whole person, is what is important. When I took my positive psychology coursework in coaching from The Whole Being Institute, I may not have fully appreciated the name of the institute like I do now.
My son and I recently watched Uncut Gems and were greatly moved. Adam Sandler’s character, a jeweler, was addicted to sports gambling – worshiping basketball and the Celtic’s Kevin Garnett. Garnett’s character, in turn, worshiped an uncut opal sourced from Sandler that he believes has mystical powers enabling him to play better.
This movie exemplifies, “He who dies with the most toys, dies,” instead of Malcolm Forbes, “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” And made me think of the title of the Rolling Stones hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which perhaps should be renamed for its older fans, to “(I Can’t Keep No) Satisfaction.”
Satisfaction = What you have / What you want
The key to the formula is not what you have, but being content with what you have. Focusing on the accumulation of more things and material wealth can make you want more, just like drinking salt water will make you more thirsty. Be wary!
Years ago, I met entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, founder of online retailing pioneer Zappos, at an Inc. Conference where my client and friend, named Inc. Entrepreneur of the Year, was speaking. I heard Tony speak on his book Delivering Happiness, which seemed to be his favorite topic. He died at age 46 after a long period of drug abuse and self- destructive behavior. Get off the hedonic treadmill!
So, you’re interviewing for a job. What’s it really like at the company?
Figure out where you can best serve others
Brooks cites the four stages of life, or ashramas, said to last 25 years each:
- Brahmacharya: youth to young adulthood, dedicated to learning
- Grihastha: building career, accumulating wealth, maintaining a family
- Vanaprastha: retiring into the forest devoted to spirituality, deep wisdom, crystallized intelligence, teaching, and faith
- Sannyasa: dedicated totally to the fruits of enlightenment – earning your success and serving others – you can make the rest of your career itself your reward.
Rather than giving in to decline which is inevitable, build new strengths and skills. What got you here won’t work to get you into the future. Devote the back half of life to serving others and leveraging your accumulated wisdom.
Use your weaknesses to strengthen others. Elite credentials don’t make you relatable. They are a barrier to deep human connection. But your weaknesses do make you relatable, and can build connection. Share your weaknesses as there lies strength in suffering—this is what I have found in my recent experience with a severe depressive episode. Psychologists have found that the most meaningful experiences in life are quite painful. Sharing your weaknesses is a gift to yourself and others and can be your superpower.
Determine What is Your Why
In search of true success in your work and life, articulate your deepest purpose and shed activities that are not in service of that purpose.
Professor Brooks concludes his book with seven wise words:
“Use things.
Love People.
Worship the Divine.”
Material things are to be used, not loved, Brooks asserts. By removing attachment to material things, you open yourself to form longer lasting, more stable relationships with the people you care about most.
That’s true for your personal life, but also in your professional life. Workers with a “best friend at work” were found to be nearly twice as likely to report job satisfaction, according to Gallup research.
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Your Eulogy Virtues
I ask you to consider: what are your eulogy virtues? I hope you’d like your loved ones to hear something akin to “They were kind and deeply spiritual,” not “They sure had a lot of frequent flier miles.”
Earlier this month at the celebration of life services for Manoj George, it was abundantly clear that as a lifelong Christian, Manoj was at peace with God’s will as he battled his pancreatic cancer with his family by his side.
His dear friend and fellow entrepreneur, Scot Wingo, eulogized Manoj, and recounted when Manoj shared his diagnosis and asked Scot for his advice. Scot suggested that Manoj watch two videos: Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon’s The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams and Jimmy V’s ESPY acceptance speech.
Pausch structured this lecture to share everything he wanted his children to know after he left the earth. At the very end of his lecture, Pausch powerfully states: “It’s not about how to achieve your dreams, it’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you.”
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Manoj used things, loved people, and worshiped the divine each day of his life until his last, living each day of his illness to its fullest. He is an example for us all.
My wish for each of you in 2022, the Year of Tiger, is for good health and new possibilities. One of my key advisors told me years ago, “You see possibilities where others don’t.” I want the same for you.
