Success (as in more money), never makes us happier in the long run. The science is clear on that. Ted Lasso is teaching us an even more important message that success may not matter at all if you don’t have people around you to celebrate with you and care about you.
Transcript:
Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day, through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life.
I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and the science indicates that how successful you are does not contribute to your ultimate happiness. Which got me thinking about the Ted Lasso style of success. You see, his football team, Richmond, is terrible and everyone knows it. But that doesn’t stop Ted and his teammates from loving the game and playing to win, whether they ultimately win or not.
One of the characters loved the game so much that he says “football is life” all the time.
And I think that it’s so easy to get caught up in the next big pay raise, the promotion, the advancement when really, the science indicates that the excitement from achieving that milestone is very short lived on the happiness scale. That’s called hedonic adaptation, where people return to a baseline after a good or bad experience. The feeling doesn’t last as long as you think.
In fact the things that increase happiness the most have nothing to do with money. If you want to increase happiness, make time for meaningful relationships.
The fact is if you had more, you were a multi-millionaire, you would still want more and you wouldn’t be truly happy with all that money, you would just be stressed about where to park your yacht.
What Ted does in this show is connect in a meaningful way with people and truly want the best for the individual whether the team wins or loses. I’m still in the middle of Season Two, but I have a feeling if you are investing and building people from the inside, the work success will follow. In this case, I hope to see Richmond win more games. We’ll see.
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