The Myth of Pursuing Happiness
Are you trying to find happiness and success? According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, you can’t pursue them directly. You can only find them as a byproduct of other things. Dr. Frankl, a survivor of four Nazi Germany concentration camps, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist, developed a new field of psychiatry, Logotherapy, just prior to being sent to the camps. He had travel papers that would have let him leave Germany for the US, but since his parents didn’t have a way to leave Germany, he chose to stay.
In the first part of his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, he talks about his experiences in the death camps, and in the second part, he discusses his theories on Logotherapy or healing through meaning. Dr. Frankl says that our search for meaning is our primary motivation. In study after study, we find that meaning is five times more important to most people than cold hard cash. Studies done in the US, Vienna, and France across different demographics all say the same thing.
So, what kinds of things result in happiness and success? According to Frankl, it is taking selfless actions. Work without purpose or fulfillment does not qualify. Dr. Frankl quotes Edith Weisskopf-Joelson from her article on logotherapy, “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.” The word unsuccessful could be substituted for unhappy in the previous quote.
How we deal with challenges defines who we are as people. If your life appears boring to you, chances are you don’t have a meaning or purpose behind your actions. What can you do to find meaning and help relieve boredom? You could start by finding work that would provide a purpose. If, for some reason, that’s not possible, find someplace to volunteer where people are worse off than you are if victims in concentration camps could find meaning in their lives while prisoners, there’s hope for the rest of us.
If You Want To Hit The Target, Aim High!
I saw a Viktor Frankl video this morning on the meaning of life. Dr. Frankl was a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. It’s a short video and to the point. Aim high to achieve results, and the drive to find meaning in work and life is one of our highest drives.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that to experience Flow, we must have tasks that make us reach just beyond our grasp. Tasks that are too easy don’t increase our skill levels, and we find them boring. They don’t help us grow. Ones that are too hard discourage us from trying because we’ll have more failures than successes. Tasks beyond our reach stretch us and make us better than we are. Dan Pink calls them Goldilocks tasks. Being better than we are is good, right? And it makes us feel good as well.
As we become better at what we do, we’ll become happier and more productive, and our value will increase. Self-worth and our value to the world around us will go up. As more managers and businesses adopt these ideas and prioritize Goldilocks tasks, our workplaces will become sources of meaning, not just a way to pay the bills.
