Friends vs. Career

Last week, my brother-in-law shared an op-ed with me written by Steven Johnson entitled We’re living the dream; we just don’t realize it.  Johnson is a frequent TED presenter and author of the new book Future Perfect.

I was reminded while reading Johnson’s piece that as much as I try to stay current, some of my perspectives, such as the divorce rate, are outdated by some 30 years.  He also makes the point that so many of the positive trends in society are the result of a “complex network of forces” including the less publicized role that government plays.

In the build up to the upcoming new year, The Futures Company is one-by-one rolling out a series of white papers regarding what futurists there call 2013 “planning horizons.”

The first, one of five around the topic of “recasting success” is entitled Happiness: Is it your business?  The 17-page paper is an excellent update on what we know and can now measure about happiness including a factoid from a survey that shows that “globally only 37% of people agree [with the statement] ‘I would be happier if I owned more material possessions.”

The report notes that “governments worldwide are also turning to happiness as a better measure of social progress than Gross Domestic Product (GDP.)”  Happiness is also making businesses take another look at how it relates to the bottom line; and social entrepreneurs are being fostered by groups such as Bull City Forward in my adopted-home of Durham, North Carolina which has historically been a center of social innovation.

The Futures white paper on happiness distinguishes the momentary experiences from moods and focuses on our current knowledge and ability to measure what it calls the six main understandings related to overall life satisfaction:

1. Frame of mind
2. Wealth
3. Autonomy and competence
4. Basic needs
5. Meaning and engagement
6. Personal connections

It is reassuring to learn that globally the survey shows that “87% of people feel that your relations with your spouse or partner is highly important in determining how you feel, more so than any other factor including work, health and the amount of money you have.”

Another poll, taken in October, shows that by 2 to 1, Americans prefer great friends to a great career.  The ratio was up to nearly 3 to 1 for my age group which includes people at or approaching retirement age, maybe because from that vantage point it is even easier to make the distinction.

In my former career as a community-destination marketing exec for three different communities it was always difficult to choose, both because of the fact that I went about it was very intense and all-consuming but also because it is often very political.  Key is resisting special interests, however well-intended and that made it difficult to form friendships.

Many times those who seemed to be friends would turn out to be people or cliques who wanted to make unwritten and unspoken alliances where decisions would most likely be primarily based on “who’s asking.”

I have always been blessed to have two or three very close friends from places where I’ve lived in the past as well as in the cities I’ve represented. For this I am most grateful, and one of these special friends over the years has been my soon-to-be 40-year-old daughter, a connection I treasure.

I have numerous other people who I have considered and are perceived by others to be close friends and ironically, the common denominator for each one has always been trust.

These individuals have always been people who trusted me to do what I thought was right for the community and the organizations and stakeholders I served.  They were candid and well-aware of my flaws but always looked out for me, even when it wasn’t in their best interest.

I may have conversed with these friends only once or twice each year, maybe less, now that I’ve retired it might be considered ‘just in passing,’ but I know they “have my back” if needed.  Even though we may have exchanged less than a thousand words of a personal nature during our entire acquaintance,  there remains a deep respect and bond.

In many careers such as the one where I spent 40 years, the decision is not so much making a decision between a career and friendship as it is between being “liked” or being “respected.”  Bottom line: it is not all about friends.

The Futures white paper on happiness is well worth a read, especially with the overload associated with this time of year.  To subscribe to a daily email with the other trends, click here.

Tracking Down Happiness

I know it isn’t true but I like to believe that everyone’s memories of when they were the age of my grandsons, 6 and 8, are some of the happiest of their lives, as were mine.

The happiness about which I speak is more “what psychologists call a trait, not a state – a person’s typical emotional experience, not fleeting responses to events” as described by Dr. Richard J. Davidson in his new book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, co-authored with Sharon Begley.

Unfortunately, when I was the age of my grandsons back in the 1950s, happiness, as it has been scientifically measured from year to year across the entire population, peaked in America.  That’s a tidbit from The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, by former Harvard University president Derek Bok.

In an effort to really put today’s headlines about disparity in context though, I go back 100 years.

During the declining years of President Theodore Roosevelt’s life, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Willford Isbell King published a fascinating retrospective entitled The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States.

In part, Dr. King analyzed statistics available in 1913.  This was the year after the “anti-trust-enforcing” President lost a third-party bid to regain the White House.  It was the latter part of what we now call The Progressive Era.

It was also in the wake of the Gilded Age of super-rich such as Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, Flagler, Rogers, Morgan, Vanderbilt , Astor and Duke.  It also marked the end of a 60 year period of natural devastation in America including two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place over the last 400 years.

Dr. King computed back then that the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income, according to Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence.

Noah and Matt Yglesias have conducted a insightful multi-part virtual dialogue this week on Slate about why we should care about the divergence.

I’m intrigued by why we seemed happier in the 1950s according to scientific measures.  Coming out of the Great Depression and WWII, we shared a sense of common purpose and we didn’t mind paying higher taxes in exchange for the common good and policies not for the wealth and big business as they do today but out of determination to grow the middle class.

I get that. I also understand and agree with the TED speech Tuesday by Harvard conducted that reveal that money per se doesn’t bring happiness but it is closely associated with using it to help others.

We seem to have replaced the incessant debate about “nature” or “nurture” that was so prevalent back when I went to college in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s with one today about whether growing gaps in equality between groups are driven by “economics” or a break-down of “culture.”

It is hard to argue with author Richard Heinberg, who wrote The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality when he blogged about Bok’s book, wondering why our overall happiness has declined while:

“During the past 35 years, per capita income has grown almost 60 percent, the average new home has become 50 percent larger, the number of cars has ballooned by 120 million, and the proportion of families owning personal computers has gone from zero to 80 percent.”

I also understand and accept in part the premise of Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart which points to cultural issues.

But these two choices are far too blunt to provide a lens through which to understand what we do going forward.  I became a devote of the late  James Q. Wilson when asked in the mid-1990s by the Durham Crime Cabinet to  report on his then well-proven Broken Windows approach to reducing and curbing criminal behavior.

Today, nearly every community dabbles at an aspect or two of the Broken Windows theory, as Durham does, but those who have adopted it as an overarching strategy understand what Wilson grasped, that some social ills, such as crime, are not just individual choices but what columnist David Brooks terms as part of a “social psychology.”

I highly recommend a reading of Wilson’s 1985 14-page essay The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy.  Viewed through the retrospective of someone like Wilson who had passionately advocated for pieces of our social safety net provides a much clearer view that the solution is probably both/and not either/or.

Illustrating that Wealth + Growth does not = Happiness

I was playing with a cartogram depicting the shape and size of countries by wealth and fast-growth and happiness this morning as the newscasters agonized over whether the US or China is the largest economy.

For readers who didn’t have time or the interest today to open the links in an earlier blog, here are some images captured from a FedEx cartogram that may signal why as Americans we may need to pay more attention to our heart and less to our ego.

Consider first an image to the right morphing the depiction of country shapes by wealth vs. actual size.

The second image, below, shows the shapes proportional to fastest-growing and below that,

the third image shows the shapes proportional to happiness (yes, even happiness can be measured.)