4 Steps to writing your own Happiness Mission Statement

Dear Happiness & Leadership Community,

In this week's column, I share 4 steps to writing your own Happiness Mission Statement. One of the steps reflects back to the late Clay Christensen's powerful question, "How will you measure your life?"

Last year, when I launched this column, I reviewed Arthur Brooks new book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life and spoke with him: interview.

At the end of his "Managing Happiness" course, he asks learners to write their own Happiness Mission Statement.

Here are 4 suggested steps:

Write down how you will define happiness going forward as you age and change.

I believe happiness is:

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(example: having meaning by positively impacting others’ lives)

The late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen once asked a simple but powerful question, “How will you measure your life?” Write down the core values and behaviors that you will work toward to shape your future. Think about what you want to stand for and what you will be proud to achieve in life.?

In my life I will seek happiness through:

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(example: finding opportunities to help others through leadership coaching and consulting,?developing deeper friendships, and serving through acts of kindness).?

If you have an idea of what happiness is and how you will work toward it, ask yourself, what is the purpose of my happiness? Why is happiness important for my life? If you were to dedicate your happiness to a person or cause, explain the reason.?

The purpose for my happiness is:

_______________________________________________________

(example: work hard on happiness to stave off depression and lead a flourishing life, in order to be my energetic self with myself and with others. I dedicate my happiness for my family and close friends and for my clients - to help all to be the best they can be.?

Now that you have a clear idea of how you define happiness, how you want to pursue happiness, and why it is important to you, write your mission statement for your personal happiness.

Your mission should include your vision (the what), goal (the how), and purpose (the why). It should be short and simple enough that you can memorize it and share it with others.?

Your Happiness Mission Statement:

________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________

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Step #2 reminded me of my 25th HBS reunion where I had the chance to hear Clay's talk and speak to him which inspired my own talk later that day....

My classmate’s advice for my talk

I remember arriving on campus seven years ago for my 25th reunion where I was to do a mini TED talk along with a few other classmates.?I ran into Ben Esty, a section mate who is now on faculty at HBS.?I told him about the book I was writing,?Project Peak, and how it was originally focused on business - climbing the mountain of entrepreneurship, but I was considering focusing it beyond business… also on climbing the mountains of?life. He immediately said I should definitely do that and cited Clay Christensen’s recently published book,?How Will You Measure Your Life???

I carefully took note of Ben’s words as I highly respected him as well as Christensen, the acclaimed author and teacher, and the world’s foremost authority on disruptive innovation.

Clay Christensen’s Address to our Reunion Class

A couple days later, despite physical challenges from cancer and speech challenges from a stroke, Christensen emotionally shared the core message of his book to a packed auditorium of all reunion classes.??

Achievement & Gratification - immediate and delayed

He spoke about how at his 5th year HBS reunion, many of his classmates were married to spouses better looking than themselves and seemed quite happy, but then by the 10th, 15th, 20th and 25th reunions, things had changed.?Many were no longer happy with their lives, had gotten divorced and their children were being raised hundreds of miles away.?He said this had a lot to do with where we invest our time.?

Achievement oriented people often put their incremental extra time into places where they feel immediate gratification. And that usually is at work - career advancement, closing a deal, getting paid.?Investments in our family don’t pay off for a very long time.?Children misbehave each day and require discipline.?It isn’t until twenty years later that you can really see the benefits of those investments in raising children.?

Family & Close Friends -??#1?Factor for Happiness

Christensen believed that family and close friends are the greatest source of happiness in life.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, armed with decades of data, indeed validated his thinking when they published that the most important factor to happiness is having close relationships.?

Clay?encouraged us to examine our daily decisions that define our lives and encouraged all of us to think about what is truly important.

Jobs to be Done

In his Marketing work, he espoused the “jobs to be done” theory, a kind of design thinking in which you seek to understand what your customer is “hiring” your product to do.?By empathetically taking another’s perspective and acting in correspondence with these discovered needs, a company is able to innovate.?He spoke of a project he did for a large fast food company that was trying to increase milkshake sales.?Earlier, the client had conducted in depth research on what customers liked about their milkshakes, then they had improved on these attributes, but sales did not improve.?

Milkshakes

Christensen’s?colleagues decided to approach the research differently.?They tried to figure out what job the milkshake was “hired” to do.?They figured out that over 50% of the milkshakes were sold before 8am.?They then interviewed the customers who left with a milkshake in hand.?They all faced a similar situation?- a long and boring drive to work.?They wanted something convenient and interesting to do while they commuted.?They weren’t hungry yet, but knew they soon would be, so they wanted something that would keep them satiated for a while.?Clay also spoke about their research subjects who “hired”:?

• a banana gone in a few seconds, and didn’t satisfy their hunger for long,?
• donuts which were sticky and crumbled in between the car seats,?
• bagels, dry and requiring two hands to put on the jam creating safety issues,?
• and Snickers bars which made them feel guilty.?

The milkshake, they found, did the best job, as it was viscous and satiating, fit nicely in their cup holder, only required one hand, and lasted the whole commute to work.?

Now that the client understood what job the milkshake was being hired to do, they could improve it much more intelligently in order to lift sales.

How Will We Measure Our Lives?

In his decades of teaching at HBS, students always sought out Christensen’s advice on how to have a successful life, and to be happy.?Clay wanted to package up his beliefs to help future generations, which is why he wrote this very different book, combining his personal beliefs with the business models he had previously developed.

I had a second row seat to Clay’s talk and his wife happened to be in the same row. Clay applied his “jobs a company’s products are hired to do” concept to our personal lives.?He spoke of how your personal relationships always need your attention, even when you don’t think they do.?He suggested that we ask ourselves what your job in that relationship is, to better understand others and intuitively do the right thing.?He used the example of his job as a husband.?

What is a Husband Hired to do?

Sit in the exact position of the wife and think about what jobs are arising in her life that she is trying to do, and what things you, as a husband, can do to help her with those jobs. Develop a product that will do the job perfectly.

The words he used included: Selflessness. Sympathy. Being there. The “customer”?will then pull you into their lives without any persuasion needed at all.??

I couldn’t help but look down my row to see his wife’s radiant face as Clay spoke so sincerely from his heart. Sharing how much he focused on the job he was hired to do as her husband,?all of us knowing his days with her on earth were likely to be shorter than they had hoped.?As I wiped the tears from my eyes, I looked around to see that nearly everyone in the auditorium was doing the same.?

Inspiration to each and every one of us?

I was one of a very long line of alumni who had a chance to speak to him after this talk.?He patiently stood in the front of that line with the cane in his hand to balance him. I told him that he and Ben were inspiring me to focus my writing and speaking not just on entrepreneurship, but also on one’s whole life.?

He offered to schedule time to chat further.?Clay had a true passion, for helping others be their best selves, that permeated every aspect of his life. Sadly, his health did not allow that future chat, but his heart-felt encouragement in that reunion interchange pushed me ahead in my work.

Balance Work & Relationships: Virtuous Cycle

Christensen’s thesis and message, that employees and bosses both need to hear, is that counterintuitively, taking time away from work for family, relationships, etc. can have a huge positive impact on your career and happiness - in the long run.?This syncs up with Shawn Achor’s thesis in?The Happiness Advantage,?that it is happiness that creates success, not the other way around.?

I’d love to hear your Happiness Mission statements - please share, I'm interested!