Find Your Happy Place at Work

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Annie McKee, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book “How to Be Happy at Work,” tells the story of her journey to happiness—starting with her early job as a caregiver for an elderly couple. Even in later, higher-paying work, McKee saw that pursuing prestige and success for the wrong reasons ruined people’s personal and professional lives. She discusses how misplaced ambition, obsession with money, and fatalism are traps anyone, in any kind of job, can fall for—and how to not let that happen to you.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you navigate gender in your workplace?
0:04.0	HBR's fan favorite podcast Women at Work is back with personal stories, the newest research,
0:09.2	and practical advice on navigating disability, career failures, and joining a board.
0:14.0	Listen for free to H.B.
0:15.0	Women at Work, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBRIDIA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nikish in for Sarah Green Carmichael. If you're unhappy at work, you could blame
0:37.1	it on your company or where you live. Just ask the researchers at Columbia University in the Vancouver and London Schools of Economics,
0:45.5	their 2017 World Happiness Report maps job satisfaction around the globe.
0:51.0	In the United States and Brazil alike, 85% of workers say they're satisfied.
0:57.0	It's about 70% in India and China, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, around 60% coming out on top is Austria at 95% job satisfaction.
1:09.6	The study suggests that countries economies play a role in worker satisfaction and the types of jobs do too.
1:17.0	People in well-paying white collar positions say they're happier than those who aren't in those jobs.
1:22.5	But our guest on the show today says wherever you live and however you earn a living, you have
1:28.0	much more control over your own happiness at work than you think.
1:32.3	She says happiness is your choice and that too many people
1:35.2	get trapped in destructive ways of thinking that keep them in unfulfilling jobs.
1:40.8	Our guest is Annie McKee. She teaches leadership and emotional intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania.
1:47.0	She's the author of the new book How to Be Happy at Work, and she joins me now to talk about what she calls happiness traps and how to
1:55.1	escape them.
1:56.1	Annie, thanks for being on the HBR idea cast.
1:59.6	Thank you very much.
2:00.6	I'm glad to be here.
2:01.6	I want to ask you if you're happy at work. I am happy at work. I'm very happy at work. I haven't always been. There were times in my life where I stayed in a job a little bit too long. But recently I've made some decisions over the last few
	...

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