Why We’re Wrong About Happiness … thanks Charisma on Command

What would make you happier? Winning the lottery? Or becoming paraplegic?

What’s crazy is that a year after winning the lottery versus using the use of their legs, people from both groups rate their happiness as the same.

This is called impact bias: we overestimate which things will make us happy and for how long.

What’s crazy is this isn’t just a quirk of lottery winners – so many people spend their lives in a pursuit of happiness that is not that impactful and fleeting. You get the a job that you desperately want that once you arrive isn’t as glamorous as you thought, you get a phone, a computer, or a car, and for 2 weeks you notice how new and cool it is, but before you know it it’s just another thing.

There are ways to avoid this trap though.

I have spent literally years studying people, their happiness, and applying the lessons to myself.

What you see is that there are certain approaches that work and certain that don’t.

There are 5 things and I’m calling it the happiness ladder, because I tend to see it correspond to phases of our lives and people tend to move from one level to the next in order. My hope is that this video gives you a shortcut to the top.

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