Class Notes: Happiness

Happiness is not an endpoint. It waxes and wanes over time. And shifts based on age, gender, ethnicity, roles, and your time in life.  

We start simple, but soon fill up with angst and feelings of confinement, until we leave those behind to go conquer the world, before gradually trading ambition for balance, developing an appreciation for our bodies and our children, and evolving a sense of connectedness, for which we feel grateful, then happy, calm, and finally blessed.

Two problems:

1. If people (implicitly) perceive happiness as an endpoint, they believe they should be able to chase it. Untenable, frustrating goal.
2. People often do not remember exactly what brings them happiness. People often remember Disneyland as one of their happiest memories. But online experience ratings caste doubts on this. Finding parking is difficult, lines are long, and the park is often full of children who are crying. So why is it that you go home, wake up and can’t wait to return to Disneyland? Perhaps, at least in part because of the photos taken of you grinning ear to ear after exiting the ride (Sutton, 1992). 

Four pillars of happiness:

1. Autonomy
2. Competence
3. Relatedness
4. Self-esteem or set point

Barriers to happiness (Note: Be sure to weed these out if they seep into your organization)

• Confusion
• Loneliness
• Lack of control
• Struggle for survival

You need to either create the environment for happiness or you have to intervene in the barriers…which means that where there is misery and annoyance, there is opportunity to make $$ making people happy. Car rental companies (zipcar), airlines (southwest), and telcons (skype) have done exactly this.

• Name an experience that made you miserable. Could your brand that does the opposite? Advice: mute annoyance and play up happiness (80/20 rule)

Expectations are malleable.

• You can lower your expectations to be more realistic. The lower the expectations, the higher the happiness.

Create a reward system.

• The power of a small reward. Little things make a big impact.

You can gain the most important insights into an organization by finding answers to the following two questions:

1. What are the stories they are telling?
2. What are the experiences they are celebrating?

Class Notes: 5/18 -> Falcons & Hammer

• Tool #2: Off/On Brand Exercise (NFL)
  • Off/on brand exercise in which various visuals / examples are brought up and the target audience decides whether what is presented is well aligned with the brand (“on brand”), is completely unrelated to the brand or even takes away from the brand message (“off brand”), or is neither related and nor unrelated to the brand (“in the grey area”).
  • Making ‘on-brand’ decision is not always black and white… sometimes it’s grey. There is not always a 100% correct answer. Requires consideration and debate. Discussion about examples in the grey area typically yields the most insight.

Viktor Frankel on “Success”

In class, Sep read a passage from Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

Class Notes 5/11 ->

Recalled Insights: Inside a Start-up

• For startups, blogs can often drive business to websites more than traditional magazines
• Useful to have a hook (i.e. “geek chic”; Distilled Clothing)
• How to rethink the value proposition.  Pose the question: What is the value you can bring to others?

Storytelling 5/4

Recalled Insights: Storytelling Class

• Make a story a conversation with your audience.
• Know when to stop.
• The belief that the audience loves you changes the nature of a conversation.

Suggested Readings – Oren Jacob

We had a great time with BIB class.  There were some really awesome pitches – incredible! 

Here are 3 very easy, short reads for your students, all of which are gems.

http://www.amazon.com/Directing-Film-David-Mamet/dp/0140127224

http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241633596&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Movies-Sidney-Lumet/dp/0679756604/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

You can buy all 3 together from amazon for about $35… I found the 3-for deal on the OnDirectingFilm page.  Oren Jacob

class notes: april 28, 2009

- What do you do at a time of crisis? Use this time as a point of differentiation; use this as a point of renegotiation and rebranding. Transgressions are points when you can show that you listen, you can apologize and explain, and as a result you can renegotiate and rebrand.

- Personal Brand is part of your personal iceberg; it is an extension of who you are rather than a façade that you put on.

- Personal Brand is a reputation, it’s not manipulative.

- If you shiver when you hear a personal story, perhaps it is a defining story.

- Martha Stewart as an example of Personal Branding. Martha promised perfectionism, which set her up for a backlash in case something went wrong. As much as the US loves a train wreck, what the US also loves is a comeback story. One advantage to a person being a brand is that a person can take responsibility for a pitfall. For example, there is data that indicates that if a physician apologizes for an error, the likelihood of a lawsuit plummets in half