Pursuing Happiness: Lessons Learned from the Harvard Kennedy School Inaugural Leadership and Happiness Symposium
The pursuit of happiness, part of the trio of sacred and undeniable rights grounding the Declaration of Independence, set the United States of America on a bold path of seeking to restructure society for greater human flourishing. Despite those lofty ambitions stated by one of our founding documents, Americans are experiencing greater unhappiness than ever before. For over a decade, the percentage of Americans saying they are “not too happy” rose from ten percent to over 24 percent (Brooks/Winfrey, Build the Life You Want, 2003, p. xxiv). The COVID-19 pandemic witnessed increases in deaths of despair, especially among younger people, along with greater reports of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and burn out, especially among health-care workers. The Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, founded by Arthur Brooks within the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School in the beginning of 2023, hosted its inaugural Leadership and Happiness Symposium in June 2023 to learn what makes us happy and, based on current research, to teach us how to become happier.
One of the newest institutions devoted to happiness, the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, is in a distinguished company at Harvard. It joins the world’s longest scientific study of happiness, formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It was begun in 1938 and now led by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz, co-authors of the recent bestseller, The Good Life. In their book, Waldinger and Schulz succinctly offer their version of the origin story for pursuing happiness. It began over 2,000 years ago with Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia or flourishing with a well-lived life. Or, as they put it, eudaimonia, “…refers to a state of deep well-being in which a person feels that their life has meaning and purpose. It is often contrasted with hedonia (the origin of the word hedonism), which refers to the fleeting happiness of various pleasures. To put it another way, if hedonic happiness is what you mean when you say you’rehaving a good time, then eudemonic happiness is what we mean when we say life is good.” (Waldinger/Schulz, The Good Life, 2023, p. 18)
Despite this distinguished history, the modern study of what makes us happy as an academic discipline is relatively new and evolving, deriving strength from many fields, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, the behavioral sciences, neurology, psychotherapy, and others, in many combinations. Among the small cohort of scholars considered founders of positive psychology is Martin E.P. Seligman, who created the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, which he directs. Seligman spoke at the Leadership and Happiness Symposium via Zoom, while also participating in tournament bridge, one of his passions that makes him happy.
Having worked as a psychotherapist, Seligman effectively turned the field of mental illness around. Asking not how he could continue to treat those who were depressed or mentally ill, Seligman began to research what he could do to avoid negative outcomes, essentially helping people become well by building on strengths. Seligman has conducted and supervised research for the U.S. Army on how to combat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), studied trauma and how to overcome learned helplessness, the role of optimism in cardiovascular health, and developed curricula for teaching positive education in schools, and other subjects, in addition to researching the important role of gratitude to our overall sense of well-being, and the impact of writing gratitude letters, counting blessings, and actively responding to those around us with highly positive feedback. (Seligman, Flourish, 2011, pp. 30-44). His remarkable calling to practice positive psychology has inspired many students, adopters, and fellow scholars, including two former Seligman students and leading scholars in the field, Sonja Lyubormirsky and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman; Sonja Lyubormirsky who also presented at the Leadership and Happiness Symposium. Discussing what gets him most excited today, Seligman highlighted the potential role for artificial intelligence to become an effective tool for positive coaching. Given the breadth of his life’s work, it is no surprise Seligman’s happiness book, Flourish , is part of popular culture, recently appearing in the Netflix film, Happiness for Beginners, gripped by a fictional graduate student so that its distinctive cover graphic of fireworks exploding around the dot of the title’s ‘i’ flashed across the screen.
As Brooks stated at the outset of the Leadership and Happiness Symposium, the Laboratory seeks to help people become happier using ideas. Over the past two years, Brooks has rapidly distilled those ideas for general audiences in his most recent publications, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022) and Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier (2023) co-authored with Oprah Winfrey who encountered Brooks’ work through his column in The Atlantic, as well as through his EdEx online course, Managing Happiness.
Reece Brown, Assistant Director of the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, shed further light on its origin story. Seeking to create the greatest social good by researching and teaching happiness, the idea for Leadership and Happiness Lab grew out of the overwhelming popularity of Brooks’ course on Happiness taught at the Harvard Business School and gathered momentum through the process of seeking “…the places and cultures where people are looking for happiness or asking for it. Where that demand exists and it’s not being supplied, and where we can present some of the concepts.”
Reflecting on major takeaways from the inaugural Leadership and Happiness Symposium, I was immediately struck by the array of approaches offered by the presenters from a range of fields. Having read the presenters’ recent books, written to be accessible for general audiences, they may, at first glance, recall popular self-help literature. Don’t be fooled. The proposed models for traits and skills associated with becoming happier, frequently delivered in acronyms — Seligman’s PERMA model, Kellerman’s PRISM model, or Brooks’ application of the PANAS test — are all informed by rigorous research and frequently, random-controlled trials.
One of the stated goals of the Leadership and Happiness Symposium was to teach happiness to others. Participants heard from Laurie Santos, whose course, Psychology and the Good Life, became Yale’s most popular in over 300 years. Santos’ subsequent podcast, The Happiness Lab, already has over 85 million downloads, and she continues to develop happiness courses in various formats, including Sesame Street, for increasingly younger audiences. The popularity of Santos’s courses may be driving the use of the term happiness in academic circles, despite Seligman’s personal dislike it. Seligman observes the term happiness, “is so overused it is almost meaningless.” Yet, he also notes that he wanted to title his first book to be Positive Psychology, but his publisher thought having happiness in the title would improve sales (Seligman, Flourish, 2011, pp. 9-10). Given Seligman’s stature in the field, it is not surprising the names of the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory and inaugural Symposium follow suit.
For those who may be questioning how all this study and teaching of happiness has broader social impact, several scholars presented their research for developing metrics to measure well-being in the hopes of achieving greater opportunities for society to flourish. To Seligman, given that “Public policy follows only from what we measure, and, until recently, we measured only money, gross domestic product (GDP). So, the success of government could be quantified only by how much it built wealth. But what is wealth for, anyway? The goal of wealth, [is] not to produce more wealth but to engender flourishing. [So] the goal of well-being theory is to measure and build human flourishing. Achieving this goal starts by asking what really makes us happy” (Seligman, Flourish, 2011, pp. 28-29). Seligman’s co-author of Tomorrowmind Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, recently established a Laboratory of her own, BetterUp, committed to developing best practices for coaching members of the workforce to use a series of traits and skills from positive psychology for greater productivity and innovation. Building on Seligman’s earlier research on PTSD, as well as optimism and health, Tomorrowmind highlights the importance of prospection, or envisioning the future for bringing greater creativity into the workplace. Together they establish the need to embrace the behavioral sciences as fields that can help us thrive and discover tools that will allow us to build, proactively a brighter future — for ourselves, our corporations, and for whole society (Kellerman and Seligman, Tomorrowmind, 2023, p. 60).
From the field of economics, presenter Carol Graham echoed Seligman’s call for measuring more than merely wealth in the form of GDP. Based on her study of hope among urban teenage populations in Peru and the U.S., she concludes, “We need a new vision for the future, and that requires hope. It is time to prioritize society’s well-being, health, and its economic prosperity” (Graham, The Power of Hope, 2023, p. 128). Ultimately, Graham seeks to create social impact and shed light on “old problems — such as poverty and despair — with new tools and with interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, psychologists, geneticists, and psychiatrists” (Graham, The Power of Hope, p. 129).
Along with Graham, Tim Lomas expanded the Western focus of happiness studies at the Leadership and Happiness Symposium, specifically those in psychology and related fields, focusing on cultures that are largely Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, described by the acronym, “WEIRD” (Lomas, Happiness, 2023, p. 53). In his deceptively small but mighty book, Lomas reminds us that any discussion of happiness, well-being, or human flourishing requires meeting basic human needs for food, shelter, safety, health, education, among other factors, an approach further reflected in the percentage of variance from universal human needs as calculated in the 2020 World Happiness Report (Lomas, Happiness, 2023, pp. 136-137 and pp. 156-157). Despite disparities of wealth and well-being, Lomas further observes that “most cultures — maybe even all — have taken an interest in happiness,” as he defines broadly across time and place (Lomas, Happiness, p. 22 and pp. 21-52).
Several Symposium presenters offered tools based on their research for improving individual happiness, as a step towards greater collective happiness. For Sonia Lyubomirsky the observation that we can’t keep no satisfaction is explained by her research on “hedonistic adaptation” (Lyubomirsky, The Myths of Happiness, 2013, pp. 18-19). Brooks, using his own approach of explaining happiness ideas to a beloved grandmother, captures Lyubomirsky’s concept by altering the classic Rolling Stones lyric, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” to “I can’t keep no satisfaction” (Brooks/Winfrey, Build the Life You Want, 2023, p. 10). From Lyubomirsky’s work, we learn of “hedonistic adaption” that once we achieve our dream of happiness, whether that is finding our dream partner, house, job, family, or riches, we suddenly become complacent and fail to count our blessings, another topic that Lyubomirsky and her team have rigorously researched. Building on Seligman’s study of the importance of gratitude to our well-being, Lyubomirsky determined that the optimal number of blessings to count was five, as three was too few and eight was too many, to cultivate a greater sense of happiness (Seligman, Flourish, pp. 30-31).
In summarizing take-aways from studying Harvard’s happiness research collected for over 84 years, Waldinger drew on stories from participants in the Human Development Study, stressing the importance of relationships to our health and well-being. In The Good Life, Waldinger and Schulz give readers practical advice for improving their happiness, urging us to: “Think about someone, just one person, who is important to you, think about what they mean to you, what they have done for you in your life, and now think about what you would thank them for if you thought you would never see them again. And at this moment — right now — turn to them. Call them. Tell them.” (Waldinger/Schulz, The Good Life, 2023, p. 281.)
Following the Leadership and Happiness Symposium, Brown says he is still seeing the “magic” from bringing over 150 individuals and scholars together play out as new ideas and pathways for using happiness studies for the greater good emerge. Already, he observes, the goal of the Symposium to teach others to teach happiness has resulted in several institutions initiating happiness courses. With Brooks and members of the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, Brown was part of the delegation who met with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama in the spring of 2023. He is planning a future visit, one that is sure to strengthen the fourth pillar of Brooks and Winfrey’s call to “Find Your Amazing Grace” and the role of the transcendental path in increasing happiness (Brooks/Winfrey, Build the Life You Want, 2023, pp. 175-197). As Brown sees it, the Leadership and Happiness Symposium is about inspiring future research, to get these ideas “into the hands of people on the ground, as demonstrated by the recent book, Build the Life You Want, to train cohorts of leaders, as not everyone is going to be able to come to the Kennedy School, to create a journal, and to have ideas reflected not just in public policy and public interest organizations.”
As one of the lucky participants in the inaugural Leadership and Happiness Symposium, I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to hear from those leading this work and to connect with members of the audience. Reflecting on the impact for the Leadership and Happiness Symposium for my own life and work, I took pages from The Good Life, Flourish, The Myths of Happiness, and Build the Life You Want, and recently delivered a gratitude letter to my 93-year-old dissertation advisor, continue to count my blessings, and spend more time on spiritual practice. With 2024 on the horizon, I look forward to putting the rich array of happiness research reflected at the Symposium to work for even greater good. Thanks to the creation of the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, the future of happiness studies is bright indeed at Harvard University, a beacon for ideas that can help make our communities and the world a happier place to live and, in time, to flourish.
About the Author:
Elliot Bostwick Davis, Ph.D., a Senior Editor of the Social Impact Review, was a 2022 Fellow in Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Elliot began researching art museums as catalysts for human flourishing in 2016, while serving as John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. That work is forthcoming in the Visual Arts volume published by Oxford University Press as part of the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center Humanities and Human Flourishing Project.