Work Insights from the World’s Longest Happiness Study

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

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's the start of a fresh year, and optimism is in the air. But if you want happiness to extend far beyond your New Year's resolution, Robert Waldinger says you can take some inspiration from the longest-running study of happiness out there. He’s a psychiatrist who runs the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The longitudinal research has followed individuals and their families for nine decades. He shares what makes people happiest in the long run and how their work factors into that. Waldinger is the author of the new book "The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you want to go deeper on business strategy?
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0:08.4	HBR editors like me hand select the best strategy case studies and conversations from
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0:17.1	Listen for free to HBR on Strategy wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes every Wednesday.
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review, I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:49.6	Some people take the flipping of the calendar as an opportunity to step back and re-evaluate
0:54.6	where they are in their personal lives and careers.
0:58.2	New years resolutions can be one way of reprioritizing those activities and downtime.
1:04.3	For other people, it's a personal milestone, like a birthday or maybe a professional
1:08.9	one, like the end of a big project.
1:11.2	We all have our own ways of measuring for ourselves the returns on our investment.
1:16.7	That's not always figured in money or time.
1:19.4	It can also be about satisfaction, dare I say, happiness.
1:24.6	Now as we all do this for ourselves, often year in and year out, there are also researchers
1:30.7	out there measuring some of the same things and asking the same questions on a much broader
1:36.0	scale with a large number of people over a long time.
1:40.4	Today, we're going to the source of one of the largest studies on human development and
1:44.8	happiness in history, a study more than eight decades in the making.
1:49.9	Our guest today is Robert Waldinger.
1:52.2	He's the director of the Harvard study of adult development, and he's the author of the
1:56.5	new book, The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
	...

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