Class of 2022. Congratulations!
We all wish you success and happiness. These two prayers we have for you have guided my selection of the readings this morning. One reading is a collection of excerpts from works by Prof. Martin Seligman on “The New Era of Positive Psychology” and the other is from a book by Edward Hess, titled “Learn or Die: Using science to build a leading-edge learning organization”, which will be my first reading.
Hess talks about success as a product of learning to think. It reads and I quote…“What is your learning story? Do you think about how you think? Do you think about your learning processes? Do you really think enough? … As I think deeply about my learning story to date, I am fortunate in that I had over twenty-one years of education that included two advanced graduate degrees. You might assume that, given all this schooling, I understood a little about the most effective ways of learning during my college and postgraduate education. Not so.
During my time in school and in my first twenty years of work experience, I became an “expert” at speedy thinking, because I was right enough of the time to prosper. I thought the speed of my thinking was a competitive advantage, so I became a turbo-charged fast thinker and never slowed down to drill down, question, or critique issues. I just went with my very quick flow—believing erroneously that I was a good thinker. Until I hit my mid-forties and [experienced] my first two significant failures in life—[which shook] my self-confidence (or arrogance) enough to make me realize that I didn’t have as much figured out as I’d thought.
Those setbacks encouraged me to think deeply, over time about certain assumptions that were foundational to my mental models. It was not easy. I had to admit that I was not as “good” a thinker—or even a person—as I’d thought. I was still the kid who sat in the front row of my elementary school classes and raised his hand the fastest every time, wanting to show everyone how smart he was by earning the teacher’s praise. I had to change. I had to become more humble, more open-minded, a better listener, more emotionally intelligent, and a real (not a pseudo) critical thinker. Yes, I had a lot of work to do. The process was humbling but needed.
As a result, I began to work on being a better thinker. I learned to really listen. I learned to suspend my judgments and my rapid formation of answers in order to be in the moment, sensing people’s emotional cues, and focusing on what was and was not being said. I learned to stop interrupting people so much by counting to ten after a person stopped speaking and before I spoke. I became more direct at dealing with people issues. I learned that it was not all about me. I started mentally rehearsing upcoming key meetings and mentally replaying them after to learn what I could have done better.
I learned the power of apologizing to employees when I had inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings. As a leader, I learned the power of saying: “Please; Thank you; I was wrong; I don’t know; I am sorry; and how may I help you?” Over time I changed. And what happened? My teams performed at even higher rates of excellence, making the firms I worked for more successful. By becoming more authentic and less dominating, I unleashed organizational loyalty and productivity that made the last ten years of my corporate life much more rewarding financially and, just as important, emotionally rich and meaningful. I became a better thinker, leader, and learner. That last sentence is important. I became a better thinker by becoming a better learner. To become a better learner, I had to quiet my ego. That had a big impact on my leadership style and effectiveness. End of quote.
My second reading is from Seligman on happiness.
It reads and I quote…“the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, [is psychology’s untapped ability to] actually make people happier. There are three very different kinds of happiness and three different roots to those happinesses.
The first one is the one that almost all Americans and most people seem to believe is all there is to happiness - smiling a lot and having a lot of pleasures, I call that the pleasant life. It’s simply, having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can, and learning the skills — savoring, mindfulness — that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space. The challenge with the pleasant life is that it’s fleeting, such as eating a favourite food, watching a movie, shopping, going for a run, or gaming, all in the name of feeling good. There is a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation, and what that means is that human beings very quickly adapt to any kind of change. You buy a bigger house, you buy a new car, the new flat screen TV set, and you are made very happy by those things for a few days, a few weeks, but that does not last very long. Positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed.
The second is the good life, or eudaimonia— and what defines the good life is in fact not feeling a lot of pleasure necessarily but being completely absorbed in what you do. Most people pretty much in the whole world want to be happy and that is different from pleasure which is transient… which is temporary. A very unhappy person can experience pleasure. The good life is being one with your work, in love, in friendship, your leisure and parenting. You are in flow. Pleasure has a raw feel: you know it’s happening. It’s thought and feeling. But during flow, you can’t feel anything. You’re one with the music. Time stops. You have intense concentration. And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life.
I have to tell you about my friend Len, to talk about the good life, flow, and why Positive psychology is more than positive emotion, more than building pleasure. Len was enormously successful. By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company. But in love, Len is an abysmal failure. And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not. I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. He has identified his talents and is engaged in its use. He’s not consigned to the misery of unhappiness and that’s because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. When he walks onto the floor of the Stock Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell.
The third form of happiness is the meaningful life. And it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you. This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. One example of how we can use our strengths and virtues to achieve a meaningful life is the story of a gifted martial artist who experiences great pleasure in perfecting her skills in karate and winning prizes in tournaments. Yet then she discovers that one autistic child she is teaching shows signs of enormous improvement. This makes her feel so good that she opens a class for children with special needs. Seeing the children overcome their challenges gives her still greater happiness. Finally, she becomes so absorbed in the happiness of the children that she forgets about her own happiness. End of quote.
To conclude the two readings, one about success and the other about happiness, say essentially one thing, “do not ask how you can become a success, instead ask how you can bring value, and you will have both success and happiness”
I will end just as I began, by wishing you all success and happiness.
Class of 2022, Congratulations!