Why Emotional Intelligence is more important than other skills?

In order to achieve success, one has to certainly practice many skills and the journey will surely be a process of trials and errors. Yet we don’t know exactly what skill or how long will we need to practice to actually become successful. Personally, I firmly believe that Emotional Intelligence is the skill that triumphs over all others and is the root of great achievements.

Successful people with high EQ level are more in tune with their emotions and thus, will do work that makes them feel good. More specifically, feeling good here means being happy. Yes, happiness is ultimately the foundation of success, and now we will look further into why it is.

In the book “Search Inside Yourself,” the author Chade-Meng Tan provides different types of happiness and explains the definition of each one. There are three types of happiness which include pleasure, passion, and higher purpose.

• Pleasure: can be defined as chasing after the next high.
• Passion: this is when both your performance and engagement align with each other at its peak or known as “flow.”
• Higher purpose: means being a part of something bigger than yourself.

According to Tan, pleasure is the type of happiness that is least sustainable. In contrast, higher purpose has the longest sustainability. To take into further consideration, when you always chase after the next high to seek happiness, the stimulus in your brain ceases faster and then return to normal set point. On the other hand, higher purpose has an altruistic origin which makes you motivated and thus, keeps you happy for a much longer period of time. So the way that we should pursue happiness to achieve success is to spend most of our time working on higher purpose, sometimes enjoy “flow”, and every now and then adding pleasures into our lives. According to Chade-Meng, “once we are working toward fulfilling our higher purpose, the work itself is the reward.” Therefore, to be able to attain great achievements, one should find their own higher purpose to do meaningful work. After all, this is why high EI level is the most essential skill to become successful.

Tan, C., & Goh, C. (2014). Search inside yourself: the unexpected path to achiving success, happiness (and worldpeace). New York: HarperOne.