Dr. Geoff Smart

Geoff Smart is the #1 thought leader on the #1 topic in business. He is the Chairman & Founder of ghSMART, a leadership consulting firm, and his purpose is to help leaders amplify their positive impact on the world.

  • Home
  • About
    • About
    • Books
      • Who
      • Power Score
      • Leadocracy
    • Keynotes
  • SMARTtools
  • SMARTthoughts
  • ghSMART
  • Email Geoff
You are here: Home / Career Success / The Key to a Happy Life Isn’t What You Think

July 22, 2016 By geoffsmart 1 Comment

The Key to a Happy Life
Isn’t What You Think

The Key to a Happy Life

By Geoff Smart and Marshall Goldsmith

Marshall:  I see nearly everybody struggle with this.  Whether you are a janitor or a billionaire, you want a happy life.  But no matter how wealthy you are, you are likely looking for happiness in the wrong place.

Geoff:  The wrong place to look is the incessant pursuit of money or fame or extrinsic achievement or getting, getting, getting anything that may or may not happen in the future, right?

M: That’s the great Western disease—I’ll be happy when.  When I make a certain amount of money.  When I get an award.  When I complete some task.

G:  Our mutual friend Peter Drucker had a point of view on this subject, didn’t he?  I saw you quote our mentor in Triggers.  Drucker said, “Our mission in life should be to make a positive difference, not to prove how smart or right we are.”

M:  Peter Drucker saw throughout his long and expansive career how important it is to make a positive difference, for real, in other people’s lives.  He knew it was a key to success in business, and in life.

G:  I have observed that the happiest people I have a spirit of generosity.  Generosity to me means giving real value to others.  At a low level, it’s being kind.  At a high level, it’s love, or leadership on a large scale.  Like Sister Rosemary in Uganda.  She rescued hundreds of girls who were kidnapped and abused by warlords and gave them jobs making jewelry.  Or Malala, who took a bullet to the face standing up for girls’ education rights.  That is generosity to the nth degree—willingness to risk your life to make another person’s life better.  But in ordinary life, it’s just a way of carrying yourself—being generous by holding a door, by giving a person a smile, by empathizing with a coworker who is having a bad day.  Basic human stuff that matters.

M:  I would tack on a yin to that yang.  Gratitude is equally important for happiness.  The most wise and happy people I have met—Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Llama, etc.—all talk about, and they practice, deep gratitude.  What you notice when you talk with them is how freely they express gratitude.  Allowing yourself to feel deeply grateful is how you can do something bold.  Be happy now.  Not later.

G:  Your phrase, “Be happy now.”  I really like that.  Do you remember when our friend Chris Cappy brought that biofeedback machine to our author’s group, to show us the value of gratitude?

M:  Yes.  He showed us how “gratitude” is a mental state that a) you can most easily decide to feel, and b) that has the most immediate effect on improving your physical, not just mental, wellbeing.  The challenge is to remember to do it!  It’s important to create triggers in your work and in your life to remember to focus on gratitude.

G:  That session really had a positive effect on me.  In fact, I lobbied my colleagues to include “generosity & gratitude” in my firm’s list of 5 values.  We refer to it a lot internally, in measuring our culture, and we use it on the scorecard of whom we hire.  Those are the triggers we use to remember it.

M:  That’s smart.  It’s a good thing you were not named Dr. Dumb, by the way.

G:  Thank you for the laugh!  And it’s a good thing you were not named Dr. Pyritesmith, by the way.  Get it?  Pyrite, as in fool’s gold?

M:  To summarize our little philosophical chat here, the key to a happy life isn’t what people think.  It’s not wealth, fame, achievement, or even relationships.  It’s putting generosity & gratitude at the center of everything you do at work and in life.

 

—Dr. Geoff Smart is Chairman & Founder of ghSMART, a leadership consulting firm that exists to help leaders amplify their positive impact on the world.  Click for his downloadable free tools.

Who bookPower Score

 

 

 

 

— Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is the #1 coach in the world, #1 leadership thinker, and million-selling author of 35 books. Triggers is a #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller! Order it at Amazon. Visit marshallgoldsmith.com for free articles and videos.

TriggersWhat Got You Here Won't Get You There

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Filed Under: Career Success, Other

Comments

  1. scott mesh says

    July 22, 2016 at 3:33 pm

    Couldn’t agree more. Great piece. thanks for it. resonates with our experiences at Los Ninos as well.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign up for SMARTthoughts email newsletter
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

SMARTthoughts for Leaders:

  • Thank You
  • 5 Mistakes Leaders Make With Job Descriptions
  • Remote Work is No Joke
  • Don’t Come Back to Work
  • 26-Year Anniversary Letter to Colleagues
  • Are You a Great “Remote” Leader? Take This Checklist Challenge
  • Is It Possible to Have a Job That Is Fulfilling and Lucrative — but Still Have a Life Outside of Work?
  • Hiring Government Leaders: Lessons from the Private Sector
  • ghSMART Turns 25
  • How Crisis Revealed the Cultural Roots of the #1 Consulting Firm to Work for
  • Successfully Convince a CEO in 3 Steps
  • The 2 Secrets to World Class Service—It’s Not What You Think
  • 3 Reasons Why Recessions are Awesome for Great Companies
  • Do You Know Someone Who Has What It Takes to Get Hired to the Consulting Firm Ranked #1 in Overall Satisfaction?
  • Three Things to Say and Get Hired to Your Dream Job
  • Do You Have a “Ninja” Executive Assistant?
  • Confidence
  • Two Reasons Why Smart People Make Dumb Career Moves
  • ghSMART Unseats McKinsey as #1 Firm for Client Interaction, According to Vault
  • 5 Tips to Spot Candidates with the Right–and Wrong–Stuff
  • ghSMART Appoints Kevin Burns Senior Advisor and Founding Member of Chairman’s Council
  • Opposite Day—How to Fail at Becoming CEO
  • ghSMART Appoints Mike Peel As Senior Advisor And Founding Member Of Chairman’s Council
  • They Will Love Your Reflection
  • The #1 Most Important Word in Business, Which You Rarely Hear
  • Run Your Next Meeting Like A CEO
  • Why You Will Reach the Top of Your Field, And Others Won’t
  • 3 Questions No Leader Should Ever Ask
  • The 3 Hardest Questions about Your Career
  • Great CEOs Give Their Teams Freedom to Choose
  • 3 Simple Closing Techniques for Smart People
  • 5 Ways Smart People Blow the Close
  • Hold People Accountable with this Simple Leadership Hack
  • Set the Right Priorities with this Formula You Learned in Econ101
  • What if the Secret to Job Happiness is Who You Work With?
  • 3 Ways to Get Your Life Back
  • How to Hire Team Players
  • 5 Practical Ways to Learn Something New in Business
  • 3 Ways to Run Meetings Like a CEO
  • 5 Ways to Answer Questions
    Like a CEO
  • 10 Smart Public Speaking Tactics You’ve Never Tried
  • The Key to a Happy Life
    Isn’t What You Think
  • Stop! Don’t Make the
    #1 Mistake in Business
  • Two Leadership Titans Disagree about the #1 Key to Success
  • The 10 Best Questions to Ask your Future Boss, From the World Experts on Hiring
  • The 5 Degrees of Listening from the World Experts on Hiring
  • 20 More Ninja Tactics for Interviewing, from the World Experts on Hiring
  • 20 Questions about Interviewing, with the World Experts on Hiring
  • 10 Non-obvious Interviewing Tips by the World Experts in Hiring
  • Do You Want to Be in Our Next Book on Managing Your Career Better?

Copyright © 2023 by G. H. Smart & Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.