How to Optimize for your Own Happiness through your Work

It’s 10:35pm, and I’m lying in bed thinking about how I should start this. First of all, this particular piece is a bit of personal philosophy I’ve had in my head for a while but that I’ve pondered long enough that I feel I want to share. Hope you like it.

First, a bit of backstory

It was December of 2017, and I was a university student about to graduate from business school, and, not knowing exactly what I was going to do post-graduation, I felt a bit lost. I knew I wanted to start another business (I’d been involved in startups for a few years), but didn’t know what it should be. My solution was to get to the root of the issue, to ask myself why I wanted to start a business in the first place, and to keep asking why to every answer I gave, and every answer to that. A typical thought process may have looked like this:

Why I want to be an entrepreneur -> To become liked & respected -> Why do I want to be liked & respected? -> Because I want friends, people to share my life with -> Why do I want friends to share my life with?… and so on and so forth.

Eventually I kept asking why until I came to the realization that I couldn’t really get any deeper than “because I want to be happy”. My answer to why for that was “because I just do”. Not very insightful. So then I felt even more lost. “What the heck, what is the purpose of all this?” I thought. I thought deeply and tried to divine some higher purpose to everything. I figured that if I could somehow decide what I thought the meaning of life was, I could optimize my actions towards that to achieve some level of meaning and purpose in my life, and as a result of doing so, would (theoretically) feel happy.

As you probably already assumed, I was not, in fact, able to divine what the meaning of life is, and that was depressing. You see if there is no observable meaning of life, and you then take the attitude that there then must not be one (and why should there be?), then you start to think everything is meaningless. And you know what, even if you’re religious and think the meaning of life is perhaps to be pious because it’s all part of some God’s or Gods’ plan, stop and ask yourself why? Why is there even a god to begin with (if there is)? What’s the point. There really isn’t one. Life just… is.

So, if life has no purpose, it simply is, then nothing you ever do really matters. Your life has no purpose. That can be a really, truly, depressing thought. And so there I was, depressed, and nihilistic.

But then a funny thing happened. I realized that if there’s no meaning to life, then there really are two ways to look at it. You can be depressed and sad like I was initially over the fact that there’s no greater meaning to everything, or, you can see it as freeing. If there’s not greater purpose, then hell, you may as well just try enjoy life and not feel bound to any form of higher duty. You don’t have to be bound to any grand idea of how you should live life, you simply can do whatever makes you individually happy, whatever that means to you.

So then I thought further. If the meaning of life is simply that there isn’t one, and that it’s really just about being happy, then how does one be happy? How does an individual really figure out what will be most optimal for them?

Given that happiness is really just a feeling, a state of mind, and given that feelings are just chemical processes in our brain, there must be some science behind this to inform how to optimize our actions to achieve greater levels of happiness.

The science of happiness

Turns out I was right. Happiness is mainly defined in our brains by 4 chemicals (and yes, this is an oversimplification — I’m business guy not a biochemist). Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins. Serotonin and Endorphins are primarily biological, and are determined based on your genetics. For example, if you’re clinically depressed, it’s likely due to a deficiency in one of these two chemicals, and you’ll probably benefit from taking supplements. You could also have too much, in which case you may suffer from bi-polarism, which is also not great.

But the first two, Dopamine, and Oxytocin, those are determined by our environments, and because of that, it means we can control them, and if we can control them, it means we can control our own happiness.

You’ll note there are more than just Oxytocin and Dopamine listed on the above image. Things like sleep help regulate serotonin levels, so a good sleep will help you feel happier. Falling in love can make you feel happy too, and it can be addictive, because it’s literally a drug. For the purposes of this article, I won’t touch further on these, but they’re worth reading up on. Fascinating stuff.

Let’s talk about Dopamine.

Dopamine is essentially the anticipation chemical. When there’s an awesome movie coming out soon that you’re looking forward to seeing, why do you feel happy when you hear about the announcement? Nothing has actually changed for you, your life is still the same. All that’s different is that you know that something will happen in the future that objectively interests you. That’s dopamine. It’s our ability to discount future events we predict will make us happy, to make us happy in the present, similar to how company stocks aren’t valued based on the revenue they have now, but rather by how much they’ll earn now AND in the future. Pretty cool, but what does this tell us about optimizing for our own happiness? It means that whatever we do in life, we should be doing things that are exciting, that move fast, and give us lots to look forward to.

Professionally, that might mean working for a fast-growing startup where you have more things to look forward to, like a new product launch, or a promotion. It might mean moving to a new city so that you can look forward to all the places you can explore that you haven’t been to yet. It can mean a lot of things, but the theory remains the same. To make yourself happier, put yourself in an environment and position that gives you plenty to look forward to on a regular basis. Your personal interests will inform what this means to you.

What about Oxytocin?

Oxytocin is my favourite chemical because as far as I’m concerned it’s why humans dominate the earth. Let me explain.

Oxytocin is essentially the empathy chemical. It’s what gives you empathy and makes you feel good when you make (or just see) someone laugh, smile, or otherwise feel good. There’s been lots of studies on things like how when you give money to charity, whether or not you feel good about that, and if you do, how good you feel, is usually defined by how directly you see the impact of that donation. The Charity: Water non-profit knows this, and so they allow donors to not only track every dollar they donate, but to see exactly whom they’re helping and how. When we make others feel good, we feel good ourselves, and the reason this is so important, is because if we didn’t care about other people, if we didn’t have empathy, then we wouldn’t have a sense of morality at all. We wouldn’t feel bad about stealing, killing, raping, or any number of terrible things that actually happen very often in the animal kingdom. Our empathy is the reason we’re able to form communities, collaborate, and work together. It’s how we decide what is good, and what is bad.

So what does this tell us about how we can be happy? It means we should try to make others happy with our lives, and in doing so, we will become happier ourselves.

Creating a plan to be happy everyday

So, if we know that looking forward to things, and helping other people make us happy, then we can start to define a framework around what sorts of things we should do to be happy ourselves. While everyone will have their own definitions and inferences from this, for me, that means social enterprise. I believe that the best way to find happiness is to help build or work in a startup or other fast growing company that actively helps to improve the world, and in doing so, helps make others happy. Whatever company that is, it should be exciting, and it should make transparent the direct effects it has on the people it helps to you.

Additionally, it’s also important to think about the degree of social impact one makes. I define this as the number of people you can impact, multiplied by the magnitude of impact per person you can create. If you take this approach, you can identify limitations in your work and life that prevent you from optimizing for helping others at your maximum capacity.

For example, if you are a waiter, the most people you can help per hour are those who you physically serve, which may be 20 people per hour, and the magnitude of that service is not very high, although you may brighten someone’s day. If you’re a CEO of a large company that is helping the world, you can perhaps spend that same hour making a policy decision that impacts thousands of people in a very significant way. Incidentally, this is also why CEO’s get paid more than waiters. The difference though is the CEO may not feel the same direct increase in happiness their decision makes as directly as a waiter may see a smile they put on a customer’s face. So, be cognizant of the limitations you may place on yourself (such as through your role, industry, etc) to help others and feel happy, both in scope, and in your ability to feel it.

Of course, within any company there will be other factors that affect your happiness, such as the culture of that organization, the shared values, beliefs, artifacts, and how staff interact. These all have more immediate effects on your happiness, but long term, it’s going to be defined more by the feeling of not having regrets, and feeling like what you did was important and useful. If you’re specifically looking for a list of things to consider for what a good workplace looks like, see the image below for questions you should be asking.

All of this is a lot to consider, but it’s helpful for you to start to examine your own life to build a plan of action to be happier. Try starting with just a few things you want to change. Then, take steps towards actually accomplishing them.

The difficulty of finding meaningful work

So that all sounds great, but “improving the world”, what company doesn’t claim to be doing that? If you asked any oil exec if they thought they helped society I’m sure they would say yes. People need oil. I know I do in order to drive my car. But aren’t oil companies contributing to environmental degradation? Don’t they lobby governments away from policies that may be bad for business but otherwise be good for the environment? You bet.

But here’s the problem. No one actually thinks they’re a bad person or immoral (unless perhaps they have very low self-esteem). An extreme example of this would be Hitler — he certainly didn’t think he was a bad guy. So if he didn’t think that, why should Oil execs, who are nowhere near as bad comparatively, they’re just supporting the degradation of the environment.

So why is this important? Because it represents a problem. How do we actually define what a social impact is in a world where everyone passionate about their business thinks that the thing they are doing is what’s really important? How do we find something to make us feel that we’re truly making a difference in the world? After giving this quite a bit of thought I’ve come up with the following philosophy on this.

Let’s take some new fin-tech banking app for example. Let’s say that this company has great marketing, a great user experience, and people love it. Suppose this company is able to steal market share and customers away from a company like RBC or Bank of America. Is this company really actually creating any meaningful value to society? In all likelihood what they’re really doing is simply moving money from RBC and Bank of America’s pockets to theirs. While their model could help customers save some degree of time, or give them a better interest rate, if you consider how much time and effort is even necessarily put into building such a system, you could argue that there maybe actually be a net loss, or breakeven, of aggregate utility for society. Hardly a social venture.

But what if a fin-tech company took a different approach, like Kiva? Kiva is a micro-finance company that allows anyone to loan small sums of money, like $20, to entrepreneurs in developing countries, interest free, to help them build sustainable incomes through business. This has a very clear, and very tangible benefit to society.

But what about the oil companies? Doesn’t oil have a very clear and very tangible benefit to society. It lets people get from point A, to point B. Well, we also have to consider externalities like pollution, which have very negative long-term effects. You could argue this outweighs the marginal gains to society these oil companies otherwise make.

How to Find Meaningful Work

So, what can we take away from all this? To define social impact, we must look at the net benefits to society, while weighing all opportunity costs, such as the costs (time, energy, etc.) required to create the benefits, as well as externalities, which can be things like environmental impacts, or even behavioural changes like how Tinder could help people meet others, but make people less likely to actually develop meaningful relationships due to creating a “grass is always greener” mentality in its users. This is a very economic and utilitarian outlook on social impact, but I think it’s a fair one.

So, taking all this into account, I’ve come up with 8 different categories of impact that we can orient ourselves around if we’re trying to optimize for our own happiness through helping others through meaningful work. They are as follows:

Education

• How people acquire information & are able to demonstrate / distribute / act on that knowledge
• Examples: Duolingo, TED, Blinkist

Health

• How people become and stay healthy (mentally & physically)
• Examples: Fitbit, Headspace, Aida

Finance / Commerce

• How people get/keep/manage money, and optimally allocate time and resources to society
• Examples: Kiva, NiceJob, Koho

Cities & Transport

• Where/how goods and people live and travel and how this increases personal freedoms
• Examples: Google Maps, Tesla, HostelWorld

Food, Drink & Socialization:

• What/how people eat/drink/acquire food/drink and develop/maintain relationships
• Examples: Your local pub, Linkedin, Beyond Meat (EDIT: actually unsure on them, I’ve heard some stories about negative environmental impacts, so this one is a bit unclear to me.)

Governance & Security

• How governments are held accountable to citizens, govern fairly and efficiently, and how people stay safe
• Examples: ADT, Allsides, Polimeter

Putting it all together

So, if we can identify the core benefit to society a business offers that we care about and want to be involved in, with a work culture that is ideal for us, with people we like, and at a company or in a role that gives us excitement and things to look forward to, then we will be optimizing for our own happiness.

If we can put ourselves in a place where we’re looking forward to the future, and helping others, we’ll be optimizing for our own happiness.

And, if we consider that those same benefits to society are those that we benefit from, then we can infer that if we can live somewhere that’s just and fair, where we feel safe, if we’re able to develop and maintain relationships with people who make us feel good about ourselves and whom we can help, where we have personal freedoms, can be efficient with our time and extract a salary proportionate to the value we’re creating (which also increases our personal freedoms), if we can stay healthy (both mentally, and physically), and if we’re able to constantly learn and grow through education in one form or another, then once again, we’ll be optimizing for our own happiness. :)

Things that don’t make us happy

It’s not about what car you have, how much money you make, or how good you look.

It’s also certainly not about giving yourself some abstract identity to try and live up to such as an “entrepreneur” or “artist” or any other identity or moniker. You’ll only use these to negatively compare yourself against others who are “more successful” than you, which is silly because there will always be someone luckier, or smarter, or better looking, or any number of things. Humans seem programmed to identify perceived inferiority, and are unnecessarily competitive.

From a biological perspective this is a good thing if you believe in Darwinism, but in the modern day it’s not useful. And if you’re not using these to look at inferiorities, you might be looking at people who you might feel superior to, and all this does is give you a sense of self-righteousness and makes you an jerk that nobody will like — something very detrimental to one’s happiness, not being liked.

So just be you. You’re the only person you can reasonable compare yourself against. Once you stop comparing yourself to others, you’ll be much happier.

A few other things that DO make us happy

If you want another simple framework for identifying the things we really need to be happy, you can look no further than Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. As long as you’ve got these covered, you’re pretty well off.

Once you’ve got your basic needs met (Physiological and Safety needs), you don’t really gain any additional happiness from adding to this. For example, if you’re super thirsty and you drink water and are no longer thirsty, you don’t get more happy by drinking more water when you’re not thirsty.

As to how to optimize for Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self-actualization, that’s kind of what this article has been all about. Following the steps in this article, optimizing for helping others as much as you can, and doing exciting things, is how you’re going to achieve your needs for Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self-actualization.

In Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this philosophical and pseudo-scientific journey with me. For me it shapes my decisions, and I use it to anchor myself to check if I’m heading in the right direction.

Life is meant to be enjoyed, so do things you love, with people you love, with things to look forward to. Love yourself, and forget the rest.

So just do your best to find a way to help others in a way you find fun and enjoyable. That’s all you were made to do, and it’s enough. You are enough. Thanks for reading!

Full disclaimer: I don’t know if this philosophy and strategy is the right one. Heck, the science may even be wrong — I have no way to tell. But I figure the world is better off with me wanting to make it better than not, and, it makes me happy — which is kind of the whole point. So, if you disagree with what I said here, power to ya. I hope it works for you as this system works for me. I’m a much happier person since I defined it for myself, and hopefully you got some value out of it as well!

About Me

I was the first employee and am the Director of Growth at NiceJob, (we’re hiring!), leading the growth side of things (marketing/sales/success/hr related departments). I’ve been involved with startups for almost 7 years now, have a degree in entrepreneurship and marketing from the UBC Sauder School of Business, and read articles on topics like strategy, organizational culture, and digital marketing and write things like this for fun.

Learn more about me here: www.connorjwilson.com