The Myths of Happiness with Jackson Kerchis

Hey, it’s Jackson here. I want to do a quick introduction because you’re about to be seeing a whole lot more of me here on this channel.

My name is Jackson. I’m Paul Krismer’s business partner at Happiness Means Business. I’m a former Zen monk, management consultant, and startup executive, and now I work with Paul to deliver talks, training, and transformation at the intersection of happiness and work.

So, really nice to meet you. I’m excited to be here and be sharing with you. And what you’re about to watch is one of my favorite talks. It was sort of a TED Talk we called a Tide Talk from my time at the University of Alabama, where I explain some of the myths of happiness and success, and why you should prioritize your happiness.

So, stick around and watch. It’s a little bit about me. In my better days, I was born in San Jose, Costa Rica. I’m a proud dual citizen, grew up in the best town in the best state in the Union, Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. I took this gap year to live abroad and learn languages. I came back to UA majoring in economics and finance. Pro tip, it makes the conversation with your parents a lot easier when you tell them about majoring in happiness if you also major in the evening.

So, I’m a member of some great groups on campus as well, including but not limited to the Management Consulting Academy. And, as I touched on, I may be the first person in history to graduate with a degree in happiness.

I’ll tell you a little bit more about why I’m doing this. Who knows what’s going on here? This is water. It was Oscar Wallace and a few people said, right, how’s the water, what the heck is water? And the idea with this story is to say, Hey, so often the things that are right in front of most of the things that are the most important are the things we overlook.

And that was my experience as I obsessed over, what do I want to study? And finally, I found the answer right in front of me, happiness. To my knowledge, there’s never been another happiness major here at any other school, and I think that that speaks to the fact that much like fish in their ignorance of water, our society has largely overlooked a subject matter which is at the very heart of our experience.

So, it’s not just about why I’m doing it, it’s about why it matters to you. And so, what I want you to do is take out your phone, take out something you can write with, and just take a few seconds and write down what your happy life looks like. Maybe 10 seconds, nothing crazy. And if you’re not sure, that’s fine. That’ll make me look like I know what I’m talking about later.

All right, so who here was somewhat uncertain about what to put down for that? For you? Great. Let me ask another way. Who was so certain about their definite clear picture of happiness that they would be willing to bet their life that they’re right? No one? Okay, well this is important, right?

Because if a happy life is what we’re after, how you answer this question, that’s the wager you’re making. You’re betting your life on knowing how to do this. And so, it’s problematic that we really don’t know how to do this. But there’s also a point about why it’s important for all of us.

Because society does give us a sort of a model or narrative to what a happy life looks like, and in my opinion, it looks something like this. You graduate high school, you leave the nest, make new friends, start on your life. Then you get a career, right? So you can make money. Then you settle down with a soulmate, the American Dream, right? And then finally, I guess, you end up being successful, and then you can be happy.

But what does the science have to say about this model? So, this first idea of a fresh start, you know, make new friends, all that. Robert Waldinger and his colleagues at Harvard have been running the longest psychological study of its time, basically tracking every factor you can think of to determine what leads to life satisfaction and longevity. What they found, far and away, the biggest predictor to be is the quality of relationships.

So these aren’t Facebook friends. These are really time-intensive, deep, meaningful connections that lead to health.

Then, we have this idea of money, right? So, what’s going on here? Every year GDP per capita, that’s how much money we’re all making, has been increasing, but we see happiness has remained flat. And this is not just a problem here. In China, we have huge increases in real income, but we see that dissatisfaction has risen and satisfaction has declined. So, we’re over two, maybe we can turn around with a soulmate.

So, what’s going on in this graph here? So, you get married. On the left, you have life satisfaction. So, you see two years out, it’s like okay, yeah, that’s pretty good. One year, things are really going well, you’re getting married, for the best year ever. And then you start to come crashing back here. So obviously, it’s not very sustainable. And so now, this is for men and women. My hypothesis is that for a few American girls I met, it would look something like this. You’d have to keep up with us guys, we’re not always the best here. And although I haven’t been married, we do have some actual data on how this looks.

So now, getting back to this, right? We see this idea that you’ve seen you’re successful, all right, and then you’re happy. Once again, people at Harvard, Sean Achor, they studied this, and what they find is actually the reverse. It’s not successful then happiness, it’s happiness then success. Happy people are more engaged, more effective, and more productive.

So how did we do? Well, it seems like we underestimate long-term relationships. We overestimate money. Soulmate is not the answer, and success, we have it backwards. So, Houston, we have a problem, right? Because we don’t really know what makes us happy. And when we are looking for answers, society doesn’t really guide us in the right way.

So, where do we begin? What is happiness? How do we do it? And this is really the key thing I want to focus on, is this idea of going from what it is to how. And that’s because what implies something static, something fixed, a tree, whereas how implies something dynamic, a skill or a practice. And if you survey, you know, every discipline – philosophy, religion, science, all of them, this is the common theme: that happiness is a lifelong practice. It’s about intentional cultivation. And so, when we want to learn how to do something, what do we do? Two things, right? We study and we practice it. It’s a model for sports, for school, for music, whatever it is. And so, think of Happiness as our field of studying.

This is just a quick overview of how I, Paul Krismer, see it. So, you start at the bottom right. That’s your foundation: health, wealth, and time. These are your resources. If you don’t have those, you’re not going to do much else. Moving up, you have this idea of reflective and experience happiness. And really, this is saying: how happy am I in my life, or how happy am I with my life? The research action shows these are two very different things. For day-to-day happiness, it’s training your mind to be more positive, more present, and you know, spending time with people you like. For reflective, it has a lot more to do with your purpose, your goals, and your meaning.

And so, now hopefully, you’ve learned a little something here. I want you to get your phones back out, and you can leave them out this time. So we’re going to need them, and look back at, you know, what you originally wrote for happiness. And I want you to just reevaluate. What would you add, or would you omit, or would you edit? And take a second to, I guess, vet that. Again, and you really feel like it, send it to me because I want to see, you know, where your thoughts are, how it works, what your feedback is. And maybe you don’t want to send it to me. Send it to yourself, because I want you, next time you check your email, to get that reminder and be like, oh geez, that’s what I need to start prioritizing. Well, I need to start focusing on.

And so, what did we say, right? Keep your friends out, but when we want to learn how to do something, we said we study it, and we practice it. So, now we’re going to practice it. So once you get that phone and open up your camera or camera roll, and just go back a few months, maybe a year, and try to find a picture that really makes you smile, or you know, makes you laugh. Just a good memory. And you know, you can show that to people next to you, or maybe not, for some of you. I’m looking in the back there, uh.

So now, what I want you to do is just take a second to enjoy that, right? Because this is just sort of tapping into happiness. And you can hear it, right? I mean, this works. That’s why I’m up here. I don’t give these Majors back, anyway. So, what I want you to do now, if you feel so inclined, that picture probably has someone else in it. Or even if it doesn’t, it probably relates to an experience that did have someone else in it. Send that picture to them, and just say, hey, wasn’t this a great memory?

And if that’s, if that’s too awkward for you, or are you weird, just send a text and say, hey, I’m thinking of you. I’m doing this weird exercise, this is not this guy. And I promise you, this is going to make you really happy, and the other person really happy too.

And so, tonight we talked about why this is important, right? For you, and for all of us. And we started to look at with this exercise, and it sounds like it kind of worked, you know, how to study and how to practice to be happier. So this is what, if this was at all interesting to you, check out my website. It’s a work in progress, also disclaimer, I don’t think it exists yet, um. It’s been a tough week with the web developer, but this will be the domain so at least you can remember it. Check it out soon.

And to close, that’s not mine, to close, I just want to say, look at this last exercise where we enjoyed this memory and shared it. To me, this is the most important, and that’s because happiness is meant to be shared. Unlike pure excitement or pleasure, happiness cannot exist in isolation. Building a happier life will inevitably lead to happier friends, a happier campus, a happier community, and a happier world. But that all begins with a happier you.