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Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR IDEA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I'm talking

with Emma Sepala, science director of Stanford Center for Compassion and Altrism Research

and Education. She's the author of the brand new book The Happiness Track, How to

apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate your success.

Emma, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Oh, you're more than welcome. I'm happy to be here.

So I thought we should just start by talking about how you define success in the purposes of the book.

Because you started, I thought was really interesting with a quote from late poet Maya Angelou who actually was one of my

all-time favorite interviews that we've done on the idea cast that was a few years ago

but she stuck out in my mind.

And the quote you start with is,

success is liking yourself, liking what you do,

and liking how you do it.

So was that kind of your working definition

for success in the book, or did you have a different way of thinking about it and does money come into it at all?

Well the way that I am presenting it in the book which is really what I found in the research is that there is a way

for you to be to maximize your potential to be as successful as you possibly can be and that

way is really to maximize your own happiness and well-being.

And that's interesting because I feel like there is a sense

to which you need a certain amount of money

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