In providing career counseling for a decade to our Career Counseling Connecticut’s clientele, I have observed the reciprocal causation between happiness and success.
Our cultural model provides the following:
Be successful first and then happiness will come next. Success causes happiness.
True but only to a degree. I have provided career counseling to numerous “successful” clients (defined by income and/or prestige) who were coming for career counseling because they were unhappy.
But there was another model that I observed both in my career counseling work and also in my own life: be happy first and then success will come next. Happiness causes success.
I love when my anecdotal observations are confirmed by hard research. Today, while watching my daily Ted talk, I cam across Nic Marks and his discussion on the connection between happiness and success at work. It turns out that success does cause happiness and happiness does cause success.
But happiness causes success at twice the rate!
This is a must watch.