Moment 81 - Malcolm Gladwell: What You Thought About Happiness and Fulfilment is Wrong

00:03What advice would you give to people around that age, say the early 20s, maybe just graduated and thinking about going off into the world? Because I hear a lot of these stories about certain small factors can have such a tremendous impact on your outcomes, like the city you live in. Would you encourage younger people to go and get into those big cities if they're trying to have careers in things like journalism or media or whatever or business and how much of a how much of a swing does that have because i always think you know i'm on dragon's den and i see these entrepreneurs coming in and pitching tech companies and i always think sometimes i think you're at like a 90 disadvantage versus just being over there on the west coast of america in san francisco um i think sometimes i think it's more than a 90 disadvantage but situational and environmental factors on outcomes.

00:53It's always been this puzzle in many countries, but particularly the United States, about why do immigrants do so well? And, you know, one of the explanations was immigrants to the United States have always been very aggressive about seeking educational opportunities, or maybe they brought with them education. So that was one argument for the longest time. But now we realize actually it's less that and more that they, unlike many Native Americans, are willing to move where opportunities are.

01:24So the immigrants are mobile in a way. They don't have any roots. They don't have family that's keeping them in one place or another. They simply make a beeline for the places where they can further their own economic and personal interests the quickest and the most efficiently. Native people don't do that because they have too many encumbrances. And so my advice to people, young people, is always, where do you want to move? It's the first question you should ask yourself.

01:56Your default should be you're going to move somewhere, right? Don't fall in the trap of when you're 23 of doing the comfortable thing and staying near family and friends. There'll be plenty of time for that later. The only question on your mind should be, where should I move? And once you decide where you move, I think a lot of other things fall into place. So if you are someone who imagines that you would like to start a company in the tech world, then yeah, move to Northern California or Austin, Texas or Tel Aviv or whatever.

02:30You know, go where the, I think you're absolutely right. You need to go where the opportunity is. It's not going to come to you magically. And you are at a huge disadvantage if you're not there. It's just no question about that. People have confused the efficiency of digital communication, the kind of the logistical efficiency of digital communication with emotional efficiency and kind of psychological efficiency. It is only logistically efficient.

02:58It does not resolve the question to help someone trust you more or take a chance on you or get to know you in all of your complexity. Yes. I wish. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the things my parents said to me at a very young age was we lived in Devon, which is, you know, Devon, right down in the corner on the farms. And they were very clear at young age. They said, you've got to leave here. So just so you're all well aware for the four of us, you have all got to go out of this city. So when we were all very clear on that, and all of my friends are still there, every single one of them. All of my best friends are still in Plymouth.

03:33But even if they went to university in another city, they came back. It's not to say that they're not happier than me and this is maybe my next question which is um because i because i hear that immigrant tale all the time that immigrants tend to have better outcomes relatively whatever it might be but my question becomes um are they happier and i say this actually because of a conversation i was having last night with my friend who has built his family have built a billion dollar company in this country um the dad was the first generation immigrant here the dad is just completely overwhelmed with work like he is obsessed to the point now the son said to me last night i don't actually think he could he knows what makes him happy at all but because he was in survival mode when he came here they've bought a billion dollars actually i think it was worth five billion now but is he happy and i i sometimes ponder that the first sort of generation immigrant is in survival mode the second generation has the chance of being in a maybe a thriving self actualization situation but i don't know if you had any light to shed on first generation happiness I'm always, I'm dubious of this.

04:34So I, all of this happiness stuff, and I say this, and I'm fully open to the possibility that I'm wrong, but my understanding of happiness is, because of the research on happiness, is that it's a fairly stable trait. In other words, there are people who are happy, regardless of where they are, and people who are not, or people who don't appear happy, or people for whom happiness represents itself differently. So I would say of your friend's father, you know, maybe he is happy.

05:08He just expresses it differently. He built a massive business. He's made his family stable. He's created a secure beachhead in a whole new country. You don't think that makes him happy when he puts his head on the pillow at night? I think it probably does. It's just not, it's not the kind of lie on the beach, read a good book happy. but it sounds to me like a pretty amazing set of accomplishments that would make him, will he die happy having done that?

05:36Yes, he will, I think. I don't know, I never met the man, but I'm just wondering. Just billionaires generally. What's that? People say they've never met a happy billionaire. I just don't believe that. I think they derive, I think people who've accomplished something like that, they derive a different kind of satisfaction from it, but it's not a lesser kind of satisfaction. You know, do I work more than most people? If I look at the cohort of people I went to college with, university with, do I work more than most of them? Yeah, probably.

06:12Do I spend less time, you know, watching movies and reading books and going on holiday? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean I'm less happy? No, I think I'm pretty happy. You know, I don't problem with i you know it's like and i i just i yeah that's i'm a little bit skeptical of this narrow definition of happiness so so i think i think it's based on this idea that to be happy or whatever you have to have this kind of recipe of ingredients and they have to be equally balanced so you have to have you know strong interpersonal relationships or meaningful connections you have to have you know exercise you know these kinds of things so when you see an individual who's so out of balance because they they just work 20 you know every waking hour of every day and they don't make time for friends families or walking the dog people and they're you know consumed by it people from the outside go well that's that's not a happy person and you would i would think the science would support the fact that people tend to be happier when they have stronger more meaningful relationships and they have more more balance in their lives, generally.

07:21Yeah. No, I think, so understand, I'm making, so let's go back to your friend's father. So your friend's father is not someone about whom we can generalize. Yeah. He's clearly a, you know, he's an outlier of some sort. He's probably, he's in an, I imagine there's a whole series of traits that he's in the 99th percentile on. Probably incredibly intelligent, incredibly driven, you know, list them all. So that kind of person is never going to have a balanced life.

07:52I mean, you could put him in, you know, the cornfields of Iowa and say, you're going to be a farmer. That's all you can do. And he's going to be someone who's like working, you know, 80 hours a week, right? That's just his temperament. So the question is, what I'm saying is happiness for him is probably going to look differently than happiness for lots of other people. But he's highly unusual. For the average person, yes, balance is appropriate.

08:23But you didn't ask me about an average person. You asked me about someone who built an enormous business from scratch. Yeah, I think I worry sometimes. Part of the reason I think I ask the question is for myself that I'm being dragged by my own, like, insecurities. So I sit here with a lot of, you know, successful, maybe billionaire CEOs that have built these great companies. And you find out that the reason they built them is because their mother, in the case of one of my previous guests, which was on two weeks ago, and he said this on the podcast, he's got a billion dollar beer company.

08:53You find out it's because his mother, when he was a young kid, basically always convinced him he was never enough. She'd come into his room, smash his toys and say things to him to convince him that he was just never good enough. So he's had this almost neurotic, obsessive drive to prove to the world that he is good enough. and you wonder how voluntary that drive is and what it's come at the cost of. And is he really, you know, is this individual really happy and fulfilled or are they just being pulled by their insecurities?

09:20But, you know, there are, maybe another way of saying this is that, so to use that person as an example, so he took a kind of trauma and made something productive out of it. He had a great deal of certain personal costs, but he took something that might have defeated others and ended up contributing substantially to society. He may not be happy, but I would describe his life as a triumph. Right? And the other thing I would say is that the language of happiness has to go alongside this question of what contribution you're making to the world you live in.

10:00that there are many people who are not personally happy, but who make enormous contributions. And that's a parallel, and in many cases, far more important function. Was Florence Nightingale happy? Probably not. As I can tell from what I know about her life, she had all kinds of psychological issues and whatever. But she made an enormous contribution that continues to this day, right? She started a whole... So there are, like I said, I would like to have a kind of, I would like to evaluate people's lives along a whole series of dimensions and understand that not everyone can satisfy each of those dimensions in any moment.