The Foundations for Success and Happiness Are the Same

I recently listened to Dr. Tim Sharp’s Habits for Happiness on audiobook. Sharp, a psychologist who often goes by the nickname “Dr. Happy,” offers some useful advice on how to be happier.

While Sharp’s advice was sensible to me, it struck me as interesting that if the book had been called “Habits for Success” or “Habits for Achievement” the list wouldn’t have differed very much. Imagining your best possible self, setting clear goals, exercising regularly and getting enough sleep matter to both achievement and well-being.

This observation got me thinking about my Foundations project, specifically, the somewhat illusory tension between achieving in life and improving psychological well-being.

We’re used to thinking about achievement and happiness as being in tension with one another. After all, we talk about work-life balance, tell stories of the person who gives up their lucrative corporate gig to spend more time with family, and lionize (or demonize) the pundits who encourage us to “pay the price” required for success.

There exists a genuine tension between different goals in our lives. We have limited time, energy and resources. Doing one thing means not doing another so, all else being equal, we have to make choices about tradeoffs.

However, there’s an assumption lurking beneath all of this that most people have already maximized their life’s possible efficiency. That is, they’re at a point where trade-offs are the only move left, rather than moves that raise well-being and productivity, health and time with family, and so on.

The assumption is that we are, to use a technical term, at the “productive frontier” for any given trade-off of interest rather than some other point that we could improve.

How Close are We to the Productive Frontier?

There’s no simple answer to how much we need to consider trade-offs. Certainly, many of us are already working about the most we can work without making significant sacrifices. If you’re a diligent student, you may feel like you can’t study any longer (or better) without cutting something else. Maybe the same is true for other areas of life?

I suspect most of us could make some non-trivial optimizations in many areas of our life.

Consider exercise: the classic foundation people regularly assert they do not have time for. Yet, in all but the most extreme cases, I suspect it’s not true that there are literally no thirty-minute periods in the day where exercise would be possible. Even the busiest parent or professional probably has a few ten-minute chunks where a quick workout could be fit in.

Instead, there seems to be a circular problem of effort and energy. When exercising isn’t routine, we feel out of shape, so exercising is aversive. It requires a lot of effort and energy to do, but that same lack of routine also increases the self-discipline we need to exercise and drains us of the energy to move.

In short, if we could shift ourselves into exercising regularly, we would not only have enough time and energy to do it, but the habit itself would likely give enough returns to more than compensate for the habit.

The fact that most Westerners do not get the recommended level of daily exercise, therefore, is probably a trap we fall into rather than a genuine tradeoff. The trap is real, but the solution isn’t to exercise more by cutting back on other important things; it’s to make a dedicated effort to pull yourself out of the circular problem a lack of exercise creates.

There are plenty of examples of foundations where the problem can, at first glance, appear to be a tradeoff but is probably actually a suboptimal point for most people:

• Food. It’s become almost a reflex to say that “healthy eating costs more,” as if poverty itself were the cause of poor eating habits. While it’s true that fresh kale and avocados generally cost more than potato chips, brown rice and lentils are dirt cheap and frozen veggies are as healthy as fresh ones. Instead, the problem is that healthy eating is more complicated and effortful than unhealthy eating, so we get stuck in the trap of eating junk regardless of our time or finances.
• Productivity. While there’s always a tradeoff point in how much you work, much of the research on what generates performance in workplace settings lists the same factors that improve morale and well-being. People like to be productive, and the biggest killers of productivity aren’t spending too much time with your family but toxic work environments that rob you of progress and meaning.
• Sleep. Nowhere is illusion of tradeoffs more prevalent than in people who sleep less to “do” more. While insomnia and sleep difficulties are real problems, the reason most of us sleep too little is simply that we don’t go to bed early enough. But the energy regained almost always pays for itself in terms of what you can accomplish the following day.

Foundations for Happiness?

There are some inescapable trade-offs in life, and when you’re at the productive frontier in an area, you do have to think legitimately about what sorts of things you need to cut back on to do something else.

But, there’s a striking confluence of advice in wellness, productivity, happiness and health that basically all says the same thing. It’s not as if the management gurus are telling us one thing while the fitness buffs are saying the opposite. Instead, the practices we need to thrive as human beings appear to be largely harmonious across many different goals and pursuits.

This isn’t to downplay the difficulty of reaching the ideal point. If you don’t exercise regularly, moving enough is genuinely difficult. Similarly, if you have poor foundations in any part of your life, the fix is often not quick or effortless. The circular problem of suboptimal foundations often means change can be very hard indeed.

But, it does imply that the pursuit of the good life may be less one of inner conflict than we typically imagine, of carefully weighing the incommensurate goals in our life and finding the proper balance. Instead, it’s about raising ourselves to a higher standard, so we can enjoy happiness and productivity, health and wealth, ambition and connection. Regardless of the pursuits we choose in life, the foundations are essentially the same.

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P.S. – Learn more about my Foundations course here.