Welcome to Level 2 – The Most Important Thing

Welcome to Level 2, The Most Important Thing. In Level 1, we challenged the modern stress concept. In Level 2, we're going to look at the most important thing for happiness in life.

If I were to ask you what the most important thing is, you might say that it's money, or family, or faith. Maybe you think it's achievements, or health. Maybe it's freedom, or justice. Maybe it's love. Instead of starting with a different answer, I want us to start with a different way of finding an answer, and that's by using data.

I'd like to introduce you to the world's longest running study of human well-being. It's called the Harvard Grant Study, and it began in 1938, when 268 sophomores at Harvard were selected to participate. Originally they were going to be tracked for just a few years, but it turns out the study never ended and continues today.

Some of these boys participated for more than 80 years, well into their 90’s. I like to think of them as being tagged like rhinos.

Every two years, they completed exhaustive surveys looking at their body type, their IQ, their marital status, achievements, net worth, and some more surprising things, like vacation habits and alcohol consumption. The idea was to measure everything, so the scientists behind the study could then look at the data and see what actually correlates with happiness over the entire span of human lives.

George Vaillant ran the study for 30 years, and he wrote this book on the left side of the screen, Triumphs of Experience. If you want to go deeper into the study and see how it evolved, I recommend it.

Before we get to the findings, you might be wondering, if we're looking at what matters most for human happiness, and we're only looking at men, isn't that a little biased? Actually, it's much worse than that. We're only looking at rich white Harvard men. So it's super biased, we've left out pretty much the entire world.

Over the years, the study expanded to include a poor community in Boston, the spouses ad children of the original cohort, so they tried to address some of the biases. But in a funny way, the original bias is actually helpful.

Because if this group of rich white Harvard men is happy and this group isn't, it's not because of discrimination. If there were women or people of color in the study, it would have added variables that make it harder to see what's going on. But this is a population that has nothing but tailwinds, and yet some of them are measurably happier than others. So we can ask if the results would be different if a more diverse population was studied, and that's a good question, but what made the biggest difference within this population is also worth understanding.

I want to share the language that George Vaillant used in Triumphs of Experience to answer that. Here's what he wrote:

"There are two pillars of happiness. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away." I'll read that again. "There are two pillars of happiness. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away."

Both of these pillars matter — love, not pushing love away. The first one might be obvious. I think most of us know love matters in our lives. But the second one isn't so obvious.

What the Grant scientists might have expected to see as they watched these boys grow up into their 20's, 30's, and then some of them into their 90's, was that the happiest ones just lived magical lives where everything worked out great. I mean, they were privileged white men who went to Harvard. Maybe their whole lives were easy.

But actually that's not what the study revealed. All of these men were in World War 2. Some didn’t survive, but those who did lost friends.

And then after the war, they started businesses, many of those businesses failed.

They got married, many of those marriages failed.

But in the face of their challenges, the happiest people didn't take things out on their kids, or their siblings, their childhood friends, their spouse, their next spouse. They were better at clearing hurdles, or being resilient. In Vaillant's language, they were better at “not pushing love away.”

That ability to not push love away matters. It matters even more during times of adversity, which for many people now is every day.

And yes, love matters too, but I'm going to argue that as a tool in your toolkit, knowing how to not push love away matters more. Why?

It has to do with another bias, this time in how we experience emotions in life. In the next video, I'll show you what I mean.