Let’s look at happiness from a different perspective. Most people see happiness as a response to good things happening; a natural assumption to make, considering that when good things happen, it makes us happy. But the evidence is piling up that happiness is also a cause of good things happening. And by ‘good thing’, I don’t mean that people smile at you more because you’re cheerful, or some other pleasant but ultimately feebly benefit. I mean a better career, more chance of finding love, better resistance to disease, and many other things.

How is happiness supposed to bring success?

Happiness is a signal that things are going well. You’re safe, you have access to the resources you need, and you’re making progress towards your goals - life is good. When things are good, it makes little sense to put walls around you and carefully guard everything you have (a hallmark of ‘negative’ emotions). It’s a better time to expand, take on new goals and challenges.

Imagine you’re really rich. A multi-millionnaire if you like. Someone comes to you with a proposal for an investment. It’ll cost you £10k, and it’s risky, but the return could be pretty good. Do you do it? Probably! £10k is small change to you, you wouldn’t even notice the loss. That’s an extreme example, but basically it’s a similar principle with happiness. It encourages a person to expand, because the mind thinks opportunity is knocking. Therefore happy people should get more success, because their emotional state essentially makes trying to succeed more appealing.

Now the researchers in this field aren’t saying that the direction of causality is only from happiness to success. This wouldn’t even logically follow. If you got some success, your resources and abundance would increase, which according to this theory is one of the reasons you get happy in the first place! So if it’s true that happiness contributes to success, it can only be true that success contributes to happiness as well. So you could get a kind of upward spiral (though other things, like adaptation, complicate the matter - see this post for more details).

This series of posts is based on a huge analysis done in 2005 (1), see the footnotes for more information on the researchers. They pulled together a huge amount of evidence together to see if this perspective on happiness holds up, and find that it does in three areas: work, love and relationships, and health. Here we’ll look at work, but first let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about.

What do they mean by ‘happiness’?

The definition of happiness in this study was slightly different to the one normally used in studies (life satisfaction or subjective well-being, see what is happiness?). The definition here, is the experience of frequent positive emotions, and less frequent (though not completely absent) negative emotions.

Why this different definition? Because in this framework, it’s positive emotion that leads us to pursue new goals and opportunities in the moment - rather than how pleased we are with life generally.

So technically they are saying that success comes from from a happy state, not a happy disposition, but, a person with a happy disposition will be in a happy state more of the time.

What is success?

What do you think success is? You might see success as lots of money and a family. A man in the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia might see success as living to the age of thirty and marrying a woman with a 10″ ceramic plate in her lip. So success means to do well relative to the goals valued by the society you’re in.

As this study was done in the US, the researchers decided to use work, love and health as the markers of success.

Work

If you’re reading this from anywhere outside of a Western culture, let me assure you, we love to work! Well, most people complain about work, but they still get up at 7am every morning to do it. There’s very little I’d choose to get out of bed for at 7 in the morning, and yet I’ve woken up at that time and earlier, thousands of times, to go to work.

“Most people complain about work; but still get up at 7am every morning to do it!”

Work gets a bad rep, but it’s pretty normal human behaviour; even back in hunter/gatherer times we had to, well, hunt and gather. We assume we did anyway, based on the tools and other goodies we’ve dug up. I’ve never actually met a 40,000 year old person so I don’t really know for sure, but it’s a safe bet. Work is just the name given to activities which allow people and groups to build their resources. In modern life, we get tokens called ‘money’ in exchange for work, which we can exchange for the work of other people. Work also (potentially) allows us to do something meaningful, and produce the things our society needs.

Plus, as we live in a meritocracy, the better we are at work, the more we produce for society, the more money tokens you get and the more good stuff we can exchange them for. That’s one of the reasons we want to do well at work. So are happy people more successful at work than their unhappy colleagues, generally speaking?

Happy Workers are Successful Workers

Here are some interesting findings about happiness in the workplace. Happier people:

* Are more likely to get job interviews

* Are more likely to receive positive evaluations once on the job

* Are more productive

* Handle managerial roles better

* Have less ‘job burnout’

* Tend to be more satisfied with their jobs

* Earn more money

It seems clear that happiness and success go hand-in-hand at work. But these are all correlational studies, and you’ve probably heard the catchphrase “correlation does not mean causality.” In other words, they may go together but we don’t know which is the cause and which the effect, or whether both are an effect of something else altogether.

So more evidence is needed. The next step is longitudinal evidence. This is where something is measured at time 1, then something else (or the same thing) is measured at time 2. In this case, the researchers looked for studies that measured happiness first, then symptoms of success months or years down the line.

They found a few. For example. after a job interview, happier people are relatively more likely to get a second interview three months down the line. In another study, people with more positive emotion at age 18, were more likely to be financially independent, and generally doing well in their career. The researchers also found that doing well in their career made the participants happy too - so the link between happiness and career is a two-way street, as expected.

Happy people also earn more money tokens! One study found that happier Australians were more likely to receive an income increase in the near future, compared to their less happy mates. A similar result was found with a Russian study panel. Yet another study found that students who were more cheerful in their first year of study were earning more money some 16 years later.

In other words, more happiness now = more money and better career later.

So, in terms of career and money, it seems that happiness is not just a consequence, but also a cause. The idea that happiness causes success gets some support from the workplace. Next time, we’ll look into love and relationships.

让我们从不同的角度来看看快乐。大多数人认为快乐是一种人们对有好的事情发生的反应。作一个很自然的设定，有美好的事情时，我们会觉得快乐，但是许多证据显示，感到快乐有时候也是好事发生的原因呢。这里所谓的“好事”呢，我指的不是说人们因为高兴而对你多微笑几次，或者是其他让人快乐但不会带来利益的事情。我所指的是例如一份更好的职业，更多的找到爱的机会，更强的对抗疾病的抵抗力，等等。

快乐如何给人们带来成功呢？

快乐就是一切顺利的标志。你很安全，你能得到你所需呀的东西，而且你正一步一步地迈向你的理想--生活很美好！当一切都很顺利的时候，用负面情绪把自己全面武装保护起来根本就不合理。这正是继续大展宏图，设定新的目标和挑战的时候！

假设你是一位大富翁，如果你愿意的话，可以拥有数百万资产。有人向你提出一项投资建议。需要1万英镑，而且很有风险，但相对应的收益也会相当可观。你会采纳吗？很可能！1万英镑对你来说只是零头而已，甚至损失了你都不会去注意它。这是一个极端的例子，但这也是和快乐类似的一个基本法则。当人们认为机会在敲门时，他就会被鼓舞而寻求发展。所以快乐的人应该得到更多的成功，因为他们的情绪状况最终使得为成功而付出努力更诱人。

当前在此领域的研究并没有表明成功是快乐的必然结果，甚至也没有说它们之间有逻辑联系。如果你获得了某种程度的成功，那么你拥有的资源会更丰富，根据这套理论这也就是你最初得到快乐的原因之一！所以如果快乐会导致成功的话，那么成功也会带来快乐。从而你就进入了良性循环。

这一系列的文章基于2005年的大量分析资料，从本文的最后可以得到更多的研究信息。他们把海量的证据集中在一起，想要看这一快乐观是否站得住脚，并且发现在工作，爱情和人际关系和健康方面，它确实是正确的。下面，我们来看看工作，但首先，让我们先搞清楚我们到底是在讨论什么。

何谓他们口中的“快乐”？

在这里，快乐的定义和平时研究的快乐稍微有点不一样（生活的满足或是主观幸福感，请看《什么是快乐？》）我们的定义是：积极正面的情绪更多，而负面情绪更少（虽然不是完全消失）。

为什么定义不同？因为在这样的定义里，正面的情绪会促使我们追求新的目标和当前的机会而不是我们有多么为生命而快乐。

所以从学术上来说，他们认为一个快乐的状态是成功之母，这不是指一种快乐的性情，当然，一个拥有快乐性情的人是可以在大部分时间让自己处于快乐的状态的。

什么是成功？

你认为何谓成功呢？也许你会把有家庭并且富足看作成功。一个在埃塞俄比亚摩西部落的男人也许活到三十岁并且能和一个嘴唇上有一个“十毫的陶瓷片”的女人结婚就算是很大的成功。因此，一个人能实现其所在社会价值观所看重的目标，那么，他就成功了。

因为这项研究是在美国进行的，研究者决定用工作，爱情和健康作为成功的标签。

工作

如果你不是从《西方文化》读到的这篇文章，那么我敢保证，我们都爱工作。大部分人都抱怨工作，但他们仍然会在早晨七点起来去工作。我无数次地在这个点起床然后上班，然而很少是我自己选择这样做的。

“大部分人都对工作有诸多抱怨，然而他们仍会在早上七点起床然后去上班”

工作似乎“臭名远扬”，但其实，它确实很平常的人类的行为，甚至在人们以狩猎、采集种子为生的时代，人们得去劳动（狩猎、采集）才能得以生存。我猜应该是这样的，从我们考古挖出来的工具来看，我当然从来没有见过四万岁的人，所以我不能说非常确定，但如果打赌，这一定是个必胜之局。在现在社会，我们用工作来换取一种代币—钱，同时用钱又可以换来其他人的劳动成果。工作让我们干了一些有意义的事情，并产出我们的社会所需要的产品。

而且，因我们是在一个精英领导的社会，我们工作越出色，我们为社会贡献的就越多，从而我们拿到的报酬就会越多，那么可以拿钱换到的好东西也就越多。所以，总而言之，我们是不是可以说快乐的人们比他们不快乐的同事们要更成功呢？

快乐的劳动者是成功的劳动者

下面列出一些在工作场所发现的有关快乐的趣事：

快乐的人们：

· 更有可能获得面试的机会；

· 更有可能在工作岗位上获得积极的评价；

· 效率更高；

· 更能胜任管理的角色；

· 更少出现工作倦怠；

· 更容易对工作满意；

· 能赚更多的钱

这样，我们就可以很清楚地看到：成功和快乐在工作上是息息相关的。但是这仅是相关性的研究，你也许听过这样的话-“相关性并不等于因果关系。”或者说，它们是有关系的，但我们并不知道哪个是因哪个是果，又或者它们都仅是由第三者而引起的。

我们需要更多的证据来论证这一点。下面就是纵向的论据了。也就是说，我们先测量某事物在时间点1的状态，然后侧量另一事物（或者同一事物）在时间点2的状态。在这个案例中，研究者先对快乐进行衡量，然后研究随着时间的推移成功的表现。

研究者们发现了一些证据。比如，在面试之后，相对乐观的人更有可能在接下来的三个月内获得第二次面试的忌讳。而在另外一项研究中，带积极情绪的人更可能在进入成年期后经济上自力更生，并且在职业生涯中干得不错。并且，研究者也发现：工作出色也反过来给人带来快乐。因此，正如我们所想的那样，快乐与职业之间的关系是双向的。快乐的人总是能赢得更多的报酬！一项研究表明：在澳大利亚人中，比起其他同事来，过得更快乐的人经常更可能短期内获得加薪。俄罗斯一个研究专家组也得出同样的结论。而另外一个研究表明，在入学第一年过得很快乐的学生很可能获得更高的报酬，当然是在大约十六年之后（大学毕业之后）。

也就是说，更快乐=更多的钱以及更好的工作。

所以，从职业和薪酬这方面来说，快乐似乎不仅仅是其结果，也是原因。在职场，快乐使人成功的观点是有据可依的。下面，我们来探讨爱情和人际关系。

更多信息请查看英语美文写作