The formula for creating happiness

Still no news on not getting the job I expect to not get. But my attitude is much better - I’m actually assessing value on both jobs and neither of them look so bad.

Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor and author of some book or other on happiness, lifted the formula of making choices that will maximize your happiness in life.

Multiply

The odds of your action actually getting the payoff

by

The value of the payoff

Sounds easy? It’s not. It’s very easy to get either one of those parameters wrong.

Example: say you want to buy a VCR. It’s for sale nearby for $400, but all the way across town, it’s for sale for $300. Do you drive across town? Of course.

Say you are buying a car. It’s $31,900 nearby, but $31,800 across town. Do people drive across town? Most often not.  People judge things relatively.

Me too. I judged the new job as attractive partially because of some annoyances in my current job. Today I realized that the hiring manager may not be very dedicated to the mission of the department, especially since he was nearly forced into the job. On the other hand my current manager is every bit as passionate as I am about our job, and inspires me with her energy.

When I consider the probability of happiness in either job, I realize I made an error in thinking about the new job, and that is the manager will be as good as my current one. That could be a deadly error. It’s not an error that I cannot overcome, but I’m glad I thought about it now, rather than discover it later, to my disappointment.