Happiness at work: does it matter?
Today I was a guest-blogger on the fabulous New York Times Shifting Careers blog. I posted on the question of Happiness at Work: Does It Matter? Your comments welcome!
Twelve Personal Commandments
Four Splendid Truths
- First: To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
- Second: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
- Third: The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)
- Fourth: You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.
What Started Me Thinking
- "The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain
- “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
- "Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
- “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
- “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
- “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
- “A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
- “Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
- “Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope
Happiness Theories I Reject
- Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
- Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
- Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
- Sartre: "Hell is other people."
- Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
- Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
- John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”
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Gretchen Rubin is the best-selling writer whose book, The Happiness Project, is the account of the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier. Here, she shares her insights to help you create your own happiness project.
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- March 16: 7 ways I violate some standard happiness advice.
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How could at least some level of happiness at work not matter? We spend most of our waking hours there (and more if you add in going to work, coming home from it, and thinking about it while awake). Life fulfilling bliss, maybe not, but total unhappiness just won't work in that kind of concentration.
Posted by: MJ | February 04, 2008 at 03:13 PM
Of course it matters! Not just for the employee but also for the employer. A happy employee will not go jobhunting.
Posted by: Joelle | February 05, 2008 at 08:19 AM
I am evidence that it matters alot. I quit my job as a nurse last year because I started my own home based business. I love it and am a completely changed person, for the better. I am happy, free and am enjoying my life now that I have changed jobs. My job as a nurse was fine, but my new business is positive, inspiring and motivating... it has made all the difference in my life.
Posted by: Nicole | February 08, 2008 at 02:43 AM