INTRODUCTION

I am a behavioral scientist, and I teach at Harvard Business School. I don’t cover traditional businesslike subjects, though, such as finance and accounting. I teach happiness from a scientific perspective. My classes cover a lot of neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics to help my students build happier lives and understand how happiness science can serve them in their management careers.

You might be wondering how this is a “business” topic, and that’s a fair question. Here’s my answer: Your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake. It is, in fact, like a start-up, where you are the founder, entrepreneur, and chief executive. And if you treat your life the way a great entrepreneur treats an exciting start-up enterprise, your life will be happier, more meaningful, and more successful than it otherwise would be.

Successful business entrepreneurs generally have experience in their industry and have had a few significant setbacks, from which they have learned and grown, leading to two key insights. The first is that one must be willing and able to take more risks than nonentrepreneurs do. Second, they do so in search of big returns, generally denominated in financial terms. Life entrepreneurs—all of us who want to be fully alive—can benefit from these insights. We need to be good self-managers, willing to take and manage appropriate risks in an effort to build a life of outsize rewards.

The key word from the preceding paragraph is “rewards”—specifically, in what denomination should we seek rewards in an entrepreneurial life? Your grandmother told you that money doesn’t buy happiness (research shows that she was right, mostly), so that’s not the right denomination. Nor is power, or pleasure, or fame, or prestige. Research over many decades—as well as almost every reputable religious and philosophical tradition—has warned against chasing these rewards beyond our ordinary needs, noting that focusing unduly on them will ruin personal relationships and impoverish the sense of life’s meaning.

Of course, these worldly rewards are the ones we naturally seek, though. Why would we go after something that doesn’t make us happy? The answer is certainly evolution: Mother Nature urges us to accumulate the resources that give us a better chance at survival and gene propagation. Meanwhile, we seek more happiness and make the incorrect assumption that following our natural urges will help us do so. This is a cognitive error, however. Mother Nature doesn’t care about our happiness; that’s our responsibility.

The right denomination of rewards for the start-up life is happiness itself, with a focus on love, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. The objective is to live and work in such a way that brings more of these things. Since we are naturally distracted by worldly resources instead, this task requires that we live in a fully awake way, alert to the mistakes we naturally make and putting forth the effort to live the way we intentionally want, not just according to how we feel.

The focus of business school is one’s career, obviously, and upon graduation from Harvard Business School my students are almost all going to work long hours—and, indeed, generate prodigious worldly rewards like money, power, pleasure, fame, and prestige. So I focus a lot in my teaching about how their careers can be a generative, positive part of a happy, start-up life, and not something that harms it. This, in fact, is how I see my own professional life, to which I owe a great deal to Harvard Business Review (HBR) and its related volumes on various aspects of work and leadership, which I have read for many years dating back to my time as an assistant professor.

One particular HBR volume that influenced my career and life is titled On Managing Yourself, which inspired my start-up life approach and research, culminating in the essay series “How to Build a Life” that I write weekly for The Atlantic (now almost 300 columns strong). This book, The Happiness Files, features some of the most popular essays from that series, organized into five aspects of a career at the center of a start-up life: managing yourself, building your career, communicating and connecting with others, keeping a work-life balance, and crafting the right professional goals.

Part 1, “On Managing Yourself,” picks up the themes of that famous HBR volume. It emphasizes the fact that in leadership over your life, you are your most important employee. You need to set rules and boundaries for yourself, treat yourself with respect, and learn how to act in the way that you want to act, not at every moment how you feel. The essays in part 1 show you how to do this.

Once you have a firm foundation on how to manage yourself, you can use this to build a career at the center of your start-up life. The key insight behind a career that consistently raises your well-being (besides not letting it take over your entire life) is progress. Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination, but rather from making tangible progress toward it. Indeed, one of the great errors people make in their careers is assuming that hitting a particular goal—a sum of money, a particular title, retirement—will give them the happiness they seek. The right approach is to set up a work life in which you create more and more value for yourself and others. That’s part 2, “On Jobs, Money, and Building Your Career.”

Rare is the individual who works entirely alone; rarer still is the individual who can be happy doing so. As you build your career, you must cultivate the key skills of part 3, “On Communicating and Connecting with Others.” Learning how to maintain a good relationship with colleagues with honest, open communication is not always straightforward—especially today, in a rapidly changing world of remote and hybrid work. But there are principles everyone can learn to improve communication and connection at work and help others do so as well.

Of course, the relationships that need tending the most for your life enterprise are not those at work; they are family and friends. For busy, ambitious people, these are often the relationships that become desiccated and malnourished, leading to a great deal of unhappiness. Thus, a core work competency in a start-up life is what most people call “work-life balance,” which is covered in part 4, “On Balancing Work, Life, and Relationships.” In truth, the challenge is more one of work-life integration. But no matter what we call it, the key skill is to understand that the returns on life come from the strength of your intimate ties.

The progress principle in your career requires that you have purpose and direction in your work and life. That’s where part 5, “On How You Define Success” comes in. What does “success” mean and what role do goals play? This is a tricky subject, where there has been a lot of disagreement in the business literature in the past. Some say you should have rock-solid, clear goals that stretch far out into the future; others say it is better to let the future take care of itself and to focus more on the present to do good work you enjoy. The approach in the essays in this book treats professional goals like a rhumb line—a navigational term for the straight course toward a destination, with the full knowledge and acceptance that circumstances will change that course and maybe even the destination itself. But without the rhumb line, progress is not possible to see and measure.

Each essay in this volume has two main sections to it. The first is the science and evidence behind my main assertion. I am an academic researcher by background, and my craft relies on ideas grounded not in what I might suppose, or even those that just seem to make sense; rather, they rely on what peer-reviewed scholarship has found to be empirically true. You will get a lot of information in this book about the research going on in several fields that is based in top-quality survey data and experiments using human subjects. This is meant not just to give you confidence but also to raise your understanding on an intellectual level. And I hope you will also find this work as fascinating as I do! But intellectual information isn’t enough. The second section of each essay is practical applications: lessons you can put to use right away in your work and life. These are ways you can practice new ideas and change your habits starting today.

Some readers might be tempted to cut right to those practical lessons, but do try to fight that temptation. There is a lot of research on the best way to learn and use new ideas. What the evidence shows is that you absorb, retain, and use ideas best when you understand them intellectually and then change your habits on the basis of your understanding. This is why, for example, surgeons learn about surgery and watch it being done before they ever get into the operating room to practice. And why athletes play better when they have an intellectual understanding of the game.

After understanding the science and changing your habits, there’s still one last step in using the material in this book. If you truly want to master these ideas—or any ideas, for that matter—you need to share them. The class I teach at Harvard Business School is called “Leadership and Happiness,” because I know full well that if my students use the happiness science in their work as leaders—effectively, becoming happiness teachers themselves in their own way—they will never forget the lessons, and will benefit as a result.

So here’s my appeal to you: Once you learn the concepts in this book, practice them, and upon deciding which ones you find most beneficial personally, teach them to others. The world will be better with happier leaders and professionals in it, and you can be one of them, and, as teacher, you can help create that world.