Is it just me, or does it smell like pumpkin pie?
After reading the prompt, I immediately imagined myself sitting around my table at Thanksgiving, re-realizing “what really counts.” Like any good cheesy family flick, everyone stops whatever they were doing to be truly happy with each other. The workaholic learns that money isn’t everything, the silly teenager leaves her directionless, guitar playing boyfriend, and they all help the frazzled mom make dinner – because that’s what true happiness is all about. When they are “counting their blessings,” they don’t use numbers – from my experience at least. The things that make people happy are not very easily quantifiable. That is one reason measurement of impact is difficult. And though there are so things in common among the people listing their blessings, everyone says something different. What makes individual’s happy is different from person to person – a second large difficulty.
As an organization, how do you measure happiness, and how do you cater to every individual’s personal happiness? Well, you don’t. You find what you believe makes people happy, and try to offer that to people to see if it makes the difference you think it will. This is typically your “passion.” The difficulty here is that what will often happen is that we get so caught up in trying to make this organization run smoothly, that we forget why we wanted it to happen in the first place. To stick with the holiday theme, we are so caught up in the presents that we forget the true meaning of Christmas. But as we learn in “The Grinch that Stole Christmas,” there’s no reason for the presents if we forget why we have Christmas. So much is missed if we are so focused on accomplishing business goals that we forget what our true end goal should be, and what success really is. Success, to me, is improving individual’s happiness as much as we have power to do. If happiness is not the end goal, ultimately, then I believe it is a waste of time and resources. To improve many lives for the better, the business side of things does need to be running smoothly, absolutely. But that’s not what it’s all about. Unfortunately, I do not know of an NGO Grinch to get us all on back on the right track. But I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how this. How do we honestly bridge the gap between the hippie wanting peace, love, and happiness, and the accountant in need of numbers to crunch?
To be the most effective, it has to be a balance of the two – efficient use of time and resources, and making people happy in the end. So, if we can find ways to measure individual happiness, then we can discover how it is to make lots of different kinds of people happy, thus improving the organization. Our difficulties can help us find answers. Measuring happiness, perhaps by surveys or self-portraits (a WHO self-esteem test technique) or psycho-analysis.
Ultimately, we need to make the things that count countable, in order to make it really count. That way we can have our Christmas and unwrap presents, too.
Love your post, Davi. I’m thinking about how happiness can be measured. It’s a trending theme among all the posts from our class, but I’m thinking about what if happiness isn’t the best measurement? There are just so many definitions of happiness, and they aren’t always along the same ethical or moral scale.
A lot of art and films are focused on this ideal of happiness being the true meaning of life, as you pointed out. But I would argue, that it isn’t being happy, but it’s learning, discovering, and the journey of highs and lows, that ultimately will hopefully lead to happiness, but not always.
Thoughts?
Mmm, good thoughts. I guess I should define what I am thinking about when I am saying happiness. I think I would specifically measure self-esteem. That is a good predictor of current and future happiness. If someone feels good about themselves, they are capable of making themselves happy. So if a program can improve self-esteem – and there are so many ways of doing that – then the program would be increasing individuals happiness in a larger and more sustainable way.
Great post! I love the picture you paint about all the different types of people gathering around the table at Thanksgiving, realizing what happiness is for at least that moment. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just act upon that realization, and make the needed changes in our lives (stop being a workaholic, or leave our directionless boyfriend, etc.)? It seems like we recognize what makes true happiness in those moments, but then we don’t make any changes and go about life as normal until the next Thanksgiving.
Great post. A few things about these ideas. I do think there are some pretty good tools developed by psychologists to measure individual emotional well being. They are self-report obviously, but if you have ever taken one, you know that they do a pretty good job at getting at how you really feel. They even have different tools that are validated for different cultures. There are also some well known general attributes and circumstances that increase the likeliness of emotional well being in people. So, I think one thing your post illuminates is the vast under served mental and emotional needs.
Davi, this is a great post. I’m finding an agreement within our class that our happiness, character, or being is what really matters. One of the greatest difficulties, as you mentioned, is measuring what really matters. There are plenty of tests and analysis that measure happiness and I believe them to be pretty accurate. My question then becomes how do we apply this measurement of happiness to an innovative solution to a social problem.
Let’s look at a solution that provides clean water for a community that does not have access to it. Does clean water produce greater happiness? If so, how should we prioritize investing in providing clean water? If it doesn’t make that much of a difference, where should it fall on our heavy list of social problems to solve? We know that clean water is an absolute necessity to sustain a healthy life and I’m curious to see how it would fair on the scale of causes for overall happiness within the community.
For me personally, my happiness when drinking a glass of tap from home and from the Philippines was pretty much the same. My fear of getting sick, on the other hand, was definitely different. When I didn’t get sick, I was happier than when I got sick. Maybe in a community where they are always drinking poor water and getting sick, clean water would be like drinking pineapple juice on a warm, summer afternoon. So, in order to effectively use happiness as one of the keystone measurement of impact, we must also consider what makes people unhappy and what makes people happy within each community.