The Pursuit of Happiness

This is an excerpt from my book Brand Hacks - How to Build Brands By Fulfilling the Customer Quest for Meaning. Brand Hacks is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Amazon Best Seller.

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We’ve been pursuing happiness for 2,500 years. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, economists, marketers, self-help gurus, Hollywood, Broadway, and just about everyone else has been trying to find out what makes happy people happy. Although we all search for happiness, we often have a hard time describing what happiness looks like. An exotic vacation? Sharing dinner with family? Buying a new handbag? A bigger house? Happiness is not just a positive mood, but rather an overall state of well-being that involves pleasure, engagement, deep satisfaction, and a sense of meaning. However, if we obsess too much on finding happiness, we might miss the joy from the little things in life that bring us pleasure and contentment.

The psychology of happiness

Over the last 20 years, the field of positive psychology and the science of happiness have made considerable advances in bringing to light what makes us happy. In particular, positive psychologists such as Martin Seligman and Ed Diener have analyzed the lifestyles of “very happy people” and found out that we can, to a certain extent, generate happiness through our thoughts and actions.

There are three dimensions of happiness we can cultivate:

The pleasant life emerges when we experience positive emotions in the moment, through basic pleasures such as enjoying a great meal, good company, watching the sun rise, or listening to music. Mindfulness, which we’ll look into later on in this book, can help us amplify these positive feelings and stretch them overtime.

The good life is achieved by building our skills, discovering our unique strengths and virtues and leveraging them to improve our lives. When we are actively involved in trying to achieve something (such as painting and decorating a home, putting together a complex slide deck or writing a book) and reach a point where we feel challenged, yet sense our skills are well suited to reach this goal, we experience a state called “flow.” In this state, we are completely absorbed during the experience and feel particularly rewarded after achieving our goal.

The meaningful life is when we feel fulfilled by a purpose that is much greater than ourselves. Our life feels meaningful when we raise a family, get promoted, improve the lives of people around us, or work towards goals or anything else that generates the feeling of a life well lived.

Applying positive psychology

Barbara Frederickson is a leading researcher in the field of social psychology and positive psychology. That is, she studies love and other positive emotions such as joy, inspiration, and pride, through the lens of social science, rooted in research studies, hypothesis, and data.

One of the ways she suggests we can cultivate positive emotions is by creating positivity portfolios. Each portfolio is made of mementos, images, gifts, music, and other objects that evoke a specific positive emotion such as joy, pride and amusement. Participants typically spend two days creating the portfolio and the rest of the week looking through it. One of the many contributors to Brand Hacks, Anna Lucas, studies positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She chose gratitude as a theme for her current positivity portfolio. Over time, Anna has assembled numerous positivity portfolios, each looking at a different positive emotion. Anna told me the exercise permeates her affect throughout her day and her whole week. The portfolio makes it easier and faster to prime herself with positive emotions. Each time she needs a boost, she can look back at her positivity portfolios and enjoy the memories they evoke.

Brand hack: How can your brand implement positive psychology?

Ask yourself how your brand can contribute to fulfilling these four quests?

Pleasure: How can you deliver something that feels rewarding immediately and help your customers savor the experience overtime?

Flow: Help your clients acquire new skills and achieve new goals. The key is to set goals that feel challenging for most people but are still attainable. Before finding success with Spartan Race, founder Joe De Sena lost millions of dollars trying to launch Peak.com, which was meant to become a hub for extreme adventure. As it turns out, not many people are willing to trek 350 miles or more through the Sahara or climb Mount Everest.

Deep satisfaction: We are not just talking about good customer service and managing call waiting time here. How will your product or service make a long-lasting positive impact on your customers lives?

Meaning: How can your brand and its products help people make their lives more meaningful? That is the big question this book strives to answer. Keep on reading…

“I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know

Everything that's shine ain't always gonna be gold”

—KID CuDi, American rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer

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