The Happy Guy

I am copying this straight from a pass-around email I received recently.  It’s good, so I thought I would share it with you.

The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the ‘Peanuts’ comic strip. You don’t have to actually answer the questions.Just read the e-mail straight through, and you’ll get the point.

1. Name the five wealthiest people in the world.

2. Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.

3. Name the last five winners of Miss America .

4. Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.

5. Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress.

6. Name the last decade’s worth of World Series winners.

How did you do?

The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten.
Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.

Here’s another quiz. See how you do on this one:

1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through school.

2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult time.

3. Name five people who have taught you something worthwhile.

4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and special.

5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.

Easier?

The lesson: The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.

There is another excuse – oops, I mean another “reason” – why you should spend some time on Twitter or Digg or FaceBook or MySpace.

A recent study of 268 Michigan State University students reveals that those who use Facebook.com have higher self-esteem than students who don’t because they keep in closer touch with their friends.

Not surprisingly, the benefits of social media participation were most pronounced for thsoe who experience low self-esteem.  Social media gives them a means of entering into more productive interactions than they sometimes encounter in real life.  In fact, it allows them to easily make friends.

Does that mean that virtual friendships should take the place of real friendships?  Not at all.  But a healthy dose of virtual socialization makes a great supplement for people who are not already overly socially extended in real life.  In fact, it’s ideal for people like me who work from home.  But before heading out to Twitter or FaceBook or Digg, you might want to read this work-from-home fasion Q&A.  After all, you don’t want to meet new friends on Twitter wearing the wrong pattern pajamas, do you?

You can read the complete report on social media and self-esteem at http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html .

reTWEET this.

Haven’t I always said it?  Happiness is contagious.  Just smiling at people in a room can pick up the mood of a room…and in the process help you keep your own mood up (because happiness is contagious whether you are giving or receiving).

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler are co-authors of a 20-year study called Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network.  Here is the abstract of the study

Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probabilitythat a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2%to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.

In other words, it is in your own self-interest to make people around you happy.  Smiles, random acts of kindness, humor, music…adding all these uplifting features to your neighborhood will make your life better.  I wonder why the effect was not seen between coworkers; it really should have been, considering how close many people are to their coworkers, spending huge portions of their day with them and being incredibly affected by their moods.

Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow, was a guest of Christine Louise Hohlbaum at the blog “The Power of Slow”.  Carl offered ten tips on how to slow down the pace of your life.  Here is that top-10 list: 

1. Downsize your calendar.
2. Question your inner speed demon.
3. Take up a slow hobby.
4. Stop clock-watching.
5. Rediscover the joys of the table.
6. Take a walk.
7. Meditate.
8. Consider an alternative approach to your health.
9. Vacation slowly.
10. Turn it off.

It is comforting to know that I do about half of these, although I am not totally sure that I want to slow down that pace of my life.  I am doing a lot of amazing things and I want to keep doing them.  I would like some things to stop happening – like when a car part goes “Boing!” or when some gadget stops working properly, but I am not sure how to avoid that (other than swearing off machines altogether).

For more details on each of the points listed above, you can read the complete interview here.

…is a blank screen.  According to a 31-year study of 30,000 people, TV sucks.  My wife won’t want to hear this, because she is tired of hearing me lecture about how I would rather do things than watch other people do things.  Of course, my idea of doing things is not always what the study says will bring most happiness, being somewhat of a hermit…

“TV doesn’t really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does,” says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author. “It’s more passive and may provide escape, especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise.”

Robinson and his research team compared the activities of people who described themselves as happy with people who described themselves as unhappy.  The unhappy people watched 20 percent more television than the happy people (no word on whether TV makes people unhappy or whether unhappy people tend to watch TV, but the correlation is unmistakable).  Those who considered themselves to be happy were more likely to:

• be socially active
• attend more religious services
• vote
• read more.

Surprisingly, physical activities and keeping active is not near the top of the list, although that would seem an obvious activity of happy people.

Interesting tidbit: the three articles I read on the study each quote different stats.  Geesh…sloppy journalism.  Here’s the original source:

http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1789