Raj, you are a b-school professor? How come you are teaching a course on happiness?
Great question! When people get to know that I teach a course on happiness, one of the first things they want to know is if happiness can be taught. (It turns out that the answer is yes.) The next thing they ask me is, “How come a b-school prof is teaching a course on happiness?! Isn’t happiness the opposite of business in many ways?”
And I tell them that there’s a story behind this. In 2007, I brought a bunch of MBAs from the McCombs School of Business (where I am a prof of marketing) to India as part of a learning trip. By then, it had been about 15 years since I graduated from my own MBA school—IIM Calcutta. Many of my batch mates had risen to relative high positions by then.
It was when I met my batch mates that I noticed a very interesting thing. I noticed that there’s very little correlation between career success and “life success.” The people who had done well for themselves in terms of their careers weren’t necessarily the ones who were happy.
It struck me that the ultimate purpose of education ought to be to offer students the skillsets required to lead a happy and meaningful life. If not, what’s the purpose of education? That’s when I started teaching the class on happiness. It’s been 5 years since I started teaching the class (in 2009) and I am happy to say that the class has gone from strength to strength and it’s now one of the most popular electives, both at McCombs and at the Indian School of Business, where I am currently visiting.
A lot of people believe that happiness is a function of circumstances and events outside our control – your spouse, boss, job, and India’s performance in World Cup etc. can all contribute to your happiness but you don’t control them! What do you think?
I agree. Happiness can be a function of circumstances, but what’s also true that circumstances have only a temporary effect on happiness. So, for example, people may feel sad for a day or two—at best a week—after a World Cup loss, and then it’s gone. Prof. Sonja Lyubomirsky of University of California at Irvine has estimated that the impact of circumstances on happiness is only about 10%. Another 50% is due to genetic factors. (Some people are born with sunny personalities and others not.) The rest (about 40%) depend on the values, attitudes and world-views you have, which impacts how you view things (whether your glass is “half full” or “half empty”) and what types of decisions you make. That’s where my class comes in; by taking it, you’ll develop something I call “happy smarts”—the ability to consistently make happiness-enhancing decisions.
What role does heredity play here – aren’t some people born with a happier disposition?
Yes, indeed. As I mentioned just now, genetic factors determine about 50% of people’s happiness levels.
Can happiness really be learnt? Give examples of how we can learn to make ourselves happy.
The ability to consistently make happiness enhancing decisions can be learned. In the classes that I teach, I measure happiness levels at two points in the course: at the beginning and at the end. And I have found that, among those who attend all my lectures and complete all the exercises, as many as 70% seen at least a small improvement in happiness levels. Among those who miss 2 or more lectures and/or don’t complete at least one exercise, only 25% see an improvement in happiness levels. So, happiness can be learnt, but diligence is important.
As an example, one of the things that I have my students to is write a gratitude letter to someone that has had a positive impact on their lives. Then, I have them do something that might make some of them feel uncomfortable: I have them read the letter to the person to whom they wrote it for! It turns out that, despite the initial discomfort that one might feel, this exercise has a huge positive impact on happiness for a variety of reasons. (You’ll need to take my course to find out what these reasons are!)
This is just one example. I have several other examples that work really well to boost happiness levels.
Happiness seems like such a subjective and personal thing.
Happiness might be a subjective feeling, but it turns out that it can be reliably measured. And further, it turns out that certain attitudes and worldviews, and the types of judgments and decisions that emanate from those attitudes and worldviews tend to have a more positive effect on happiness levels than others.
So, the short answer to the question is: Yes—it is possible to come up with a happiness recipe that works for most people. Of course, not all “ingredients” in the recipe will work for everyone equally well, so there’s an element of what might be called a “fit.” In my course, I will be exposing students to “7 habits of the highly happy” and to the exercises that nurture and reinforce these habits. It’s up to the students to figure out which habits and exercises worked best for them, and to stick with them after the class is over.
So, we hear that you are going to be offering your course on Coursera. How does it work? How much does it cost and what profile of students are you looking for?
Yes, the course will start on June 15th, 2015, but registration is already open—and several thousand students from virtually every country in the world (at last count, from over 165 countries!) have signed up.
It’s really simple to take the course. All you need to do is register for the course—and it literally takes only about 20 seconds to register—and everything else is easy to do. You’ll get instructions and announcements via email and you just follow them.
The course is quite low on effort (2-3 hours a week), since it’s designed keeping the busy student/executive/home-maker in mind. You just need to watch all the videos (which I have tried to make fun!), and complete one exercise/week.
The course is also self-paced, so you can choose to watch all the videos for the week in one go (it will take you about 2 hours to get through them all) or spread them over all 7 days.
And finally—this is the best part—the course is totally free, unless you want to get a certificate of completion, which will put you back by $49.
I hope that this answers all your questions and I hope that you will consider taking the class. As I mentioned, it’s super-easy to sign up: all you need is an email id and a password that you can create on the spot. Just go to www.coursera.org/course/happiness to register.
I look forward to seeing you in “class”!
The way the course works is as follows. Once you sign up, you’ll receive a welcome email confirming your registration. Then, a week before the course starts, you’ll start receiving announcements more regularly.
