Happiness expert | Author
Raj Raghunathan is a professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, where he relies on themes from psychology, behaviorial science, decision theory and marketing to explain consumption behaviour. He also studies the impact that people’s judgments and decisions have on their own happiness and fulfilment.
Based on his research, he teaches a very successful online course on Coursera on Happiness (named A Life of Happiness And Fulfillment). His book (titled, If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?) was released in the US, UK, and India in 2016.
In our conversation, he speaks about his journey to researching happiness and his take on why so many people around us who are smart and successful but not necessarily happy. He talks about some common pitfalls people get into and some perspectives on how we can prioritise (not necessarily pursue happiness) in our lives.
He is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIM Calcutta. This conversation was published in May 2020.
Nuggets from the
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The journey till date
Raj speaks about his journey to becoming a researcher of happiness. He speaks about how he thought about his journey after graduating from IIM Calcutta and how he came to the US. He also speaks about how he started out with a deep interest in marketing but has gravitated towards teaching happiness over a period of time.
Defining happiness
Raj defines happiness and speaks about the common misconceptions people end up having around happiness. He speaks about the nuances around prioritizing (rather than pursuing) happiness and how one could walk that tight rope.
Achievement and happiness
Raj speaks about the link between levels of success and happiness. He goes on to speak about the relationship between happiness and education levels. He mentions that happiness rises till the undergraduate level but not necessarily post that, suggesting that the commercial threshold for us to be really happy is much lower than what we might think it is.
Abundance mindset and happiness
Raj makes the connection between our mindsets (scarcity versus abundance) and our levels of happiness. He mentions that more than the amount of money we have, our relationship with the money we have is a better indication of our happiness levels.
Time scarcity and generosity burnout
Raj speaks about the link between time affluence and an abundance mindset, two seemingly uncorrelated concepts. He also goes onto talk about the link between how much we load our plates and the link between that and happiness. He also shares some insights around how we can bring in some time affluence in our lives.
Why we lose the plot with happiness
Raj speaks about the habit of medium maximization (we forget the goals but start focusing on the means instead). He speaks about the paradox here and talks about how it shows up in the suboptimality in the way we make choices including critical ones such as choosing between jobs/career pathways.
Navigating mid-life
Raj speaks about the valley of mid-life and how we can try to bring greater happiness by either job-crafting (look for adjacent spaces around what we do currently in our company), pursuing a vocation on the side that energizes us that could one day possibly become a profession and pick up a hobby or two that could give us a sense of meaning and bring happiness that we could take back to our work.
Dealing with negative outcomes
Raj speaks about how we could reframe the way we look at negative outcomes. He speaks about the phenomenon where we end up having an intense negative feeling around an undesired outcome but often the intensity wears down over time. He suggests a “reminisce and reflect” exercise that could help us see things in perspective.
Pursuing flow than chasing superiority
Raj speaks about the notion of pursuing flow rather than chasing superiority as we think about making key choices in our journey. He also speaks different kinds of flow and goes onto speak about the importance of mastery in us experiencing high flow (harder to achieve at the foothills of a pursuit).
Raising happy kids - love versus discipline
Raj speaks about his thoughts around raising happy children and how parents need to walk the tight rope across discipline and love. He makes the case for leaning into love given a choice and speaks about the framework developed by Baum Rind who has studied this in detail.
Coping with COVID-19
Raj speaks about how we all could think about solving for happiness given the strange times we are in. He speaks about three broad clusters of people and how each of the clusters could cope with the evolving situation with Covid-19.