Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
There’s just one point I really want to take from this book: he makes it very clear that more trusting people are happier people. The less trust we show, the more we are suspicious of others, the less happy we become.
People may feel as deeply as you about this but many are also very grateful for having escaped the plight of previous generations – particularly women.
Yes, but that was the church or the mosque with a very male-centric interpretation of what marriage is: the vows are about a marriage of equals and caring for each other throughout life. That is not how it has been interpreted by patriarchal religious authorities and by patriarchal faiths and patriarchal legal systems: I don’t see this as going back or forward; I see it as going more deeply into what marriage is.
So, finally, why have we got Richard Layard in here?
There’s just one point I really want to take from this book: he makes it very clear in this book that more trusting people are happier people. The less trust we show, the more we are suspicious of others, the less happy we become. The people who are happier are more trusting, so they have more friends; the less trusting are more isolated because they are more suspicious.
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Anthony Seldon is a contemporary historian, political biographer and educationalist. He has written books on Churchill, Thatcher, Major and Blair and has recently argued for the need to tackle the collapse of trust in British public life. As Master of Wellington College, a major co-educational public school, he has pioneered lessons in happiness and well-being for teenagers.
On to Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.
So what Seligman did was give us a new approach to life, from a psychologist’s perspective. What Layard did is take happiness issues from an economist’s perspective and say, ‘Come on, if we’re so rich, which we are in the West, how come general happiness has been declining and depression rising? What’s going on? Not at an individual level, but at a country level?’ He synthesises lots of economics and sociology and religion, and psychology, too. And makes it very digestible: it’s presented in short, easy chunks. Sometimes it feels a little random. For example, why is Performance-related pay in between Respect and Advertising?
And what pearls of wisdom emerge from Layard’s book?
He strongly makes the case that standard economic policy doesn’t really take into account feelings, when actually feelings are the only reason you ever decide to do anything. You can look at all the data, but in the end you think does it feel right? That’s the reason you buy a house or take a job.
So he challenges standard economic theory and says we shouldn’t look at wealth, but at wellbeing. It’s quite simple. What is it you say you want for your kids? You want them to be happy. And there are lots of golden nuggets in the book, like the fact that self-help books make you happy. People shouldn’t pooh-pooh them and sneer. Alain de Botton actually says the same thing; the Romans were full of self-help books, so were the Victorians, how come we think self-help is somehow fit to be pooh-poohed?
If I wanted to be very happy at work, what would I take away from the Layard book?
Not much, which is part of the reason I wrote my own book. There were some unanswered questions for me in reading it, and there wasn’t that much about work in there. He says things like only $20,000 makes you happy at work, happy in life. That’s bullshit – that may make you very happy if you’re living in Niger, but if you’re living in New York City, $20,000 is not enough to live on. So there is this kind of mythical number out there, which I’m not sure exists. Layard does make the point that unemployment makes you very unhappy. It makes a big, big dent in your happiness. Work does make you happy. And I think that’s because you get a chance to stretch yourself and achieve your potential.
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Jessica Pryce-Jones lectures and teaches senior executives at London Business School, Chicago Booth, Oxford (Saïd) and Judge Business Schools. She also coaches senior executives and leadership teams. Her career started at Rothschild’s Bank in Paris and she then spent seven years in the insurance market before starting working as a consultant. Jessica has degrees in Classics (Latin and Greek) and Psychology. She works all over the world but is based in Oxford, UK. She is CEO of iOpener, a human asset management consultancy, the world’s leading expert in raising productivity through the science of happiness at work. Her new book, Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital For Success, outlines iOpener’s approach in a practical and easy-to-read way.
