Are you creative and productive at your work?

We all live in a capitalistic world. We were brought up to believe that if we do well at school/college/university, we will be able to find a good job. If we will be successful at our workplace, we will make lots of money and will be able to buy stuff that will make us happy. Right?

Well, this isn’t necessarily true.

Prof. Yoram Yovell, the highly-respected psychiatrist, brain researcher, psychoanalyst, TV presenter, author, and keynote speaker, addresses the issue in How to be Happy. ?What makes us happy? It turns out that happiness has little to do with money and buying stuff. These have a very short effect, and you can never get enough of them.

Studies show that life satisfaction tends to peak around a GDP per capita of $45K. In other words, if you make over $45K a year, your income is not the main source of your happiness.

For people with a low income, their life satisfaction is impacted by the fact that they need to struggle to make a living.?

The chart below demonstrates this notion. For example, people in Costa Rica have better life satisfaction than the people in the UK, even though their GDP per capita is only one-third (1/3) that of the UK.

You can find where your country is located on the chart by clicking the image below.

Source: public tableau, Design: Luigi Cicciari

We spend most of our lives at work. It really matters how we perceive our workplace. Is it just a job, a place to make a living, or a place that contributes to our life satisfaction, our happiness?

The goal of commercial companies is, by definition, to maximize their revenues, profits, and bottom lines. Budgets are translated into goals and quotas. Higher-level goals are further broken into individual goals.???

Goals are important, but the journey to achieve these goals is far more important.?Whatever you do, do it with purpose, with meaning. When you do creative and meaningful work that contributes to your customers, or even better, to society at large, chances are that you get fulfilled and are happier than most of your colleagues.

Add to the above, meaningful relationships with your peers, coworkers, and customers, and this will elevate your motivation and satisfaction levels even higher.

If you work for MedTech company, you are super lucky! Your brand probably helps patients in some way or another. Try to look beyond the day-to-day tasks, your immediate goals, and your rewards. In a broader view, whatever you do, must have some contribution to humanity, even if it is a small one.

One can say that not all jobs are creative and meaningful. Take a production worker for example, or a finance person in charge of salaries and reimbursements. I would argue that a happy, motivated production employee will pay more attention in the assembly line or final testing, thus minimizing the chances of future failure of the product, which eventually elevates customer satisfaction.

The motivated finance person will prepare salaries and reimbursements accurately and on time, thus saving the grudges of the production people or any other employees in the company, keeping them happy and motivated. And so it goes on and on...

Now imagine that everybody around you, the entire company, are motivated, happy people – what a place to work it will be! Chances are that this is also a successful company.??

If what you have just read made you happy, share it with someone you care about.????