How to be happy

I mean, is there better advice than this?

What if I were to tell you that the secret to a happy life comes down to a simple two-word concept that most people never think of?

That’s what I learned from talking with one of the leaders of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, an 85-year-and-running longitudinal study of 724 participants (and now their spouses and children) that set out to discover what makes people happy in life.

Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash

Almost a decade ago, Dr. Robert Waldinger, a Harvard psychologist who has run the study since 2003, did a TEDx Talk in which he summarized the most important takeaway:

The lessons aren’t about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this … study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.

Waldinger and the associate director of the study, Marc Schulz, a clinical psychologist and professor at Bryn Mawr College, wrote a book out about the study and its lessons, called The Good Life.

And if good relationships are the key to happiness, they say in the book that the key to developing those good relationships comes down to a novel concept — the two words we talked about at the beginning of this article: “social fitness.”

“There are practices that people can do,” Schulz told me in an interview. “We talk a lot in the book about this idea of ‘social fitness,’ that we tend to think of our relationships as something that just happens, but oftentimes our relationships wane over time. We all have friendships, for example, that we’ve lost contact with but that were important to us.”

Schulz and Waldinger suggest that the first step in improving social fitness involves “assessing where you’re doing well, and where you might need help.”

That can mean literally writing down an audit of your relationships — who they’re with, how they’re satisfying, and where you’d like to see improvement. They’ve also identified seven “keystones of support” that they say are especially useful in assessing relationships.

These include the following categories:

• “Safety and security.” These are the relationships you can count on in an emergency, or to help you through a difficult time.

• “Learning and growth.” These might be the mentors and cheerleaders who encourage you to want more in life and to do more to achieve it.

• “Emotional closeness and confiding.” Are there people in your life that you’d feel comfortable baring your soul to? And would they feel the same about you?

• “Identity affirmation and shared experience.” These are the relationships with people who “get” you, because they’ve been through things that are similar to the things you’ve been through.

• “Romantic intimacy.” I suppose this one is self-explanatory!

• “Help (both informational and practical).” The focus here is on practical help. Who are the people you’d call if you needed to fix something, or figure out how to do something?

• “Fun and relaxation.” It’s funny, this is just one of the seven categories but I think it’s the reflexive one we might think of when we think of friends. These are the people you can get together with and just unwind or have a good time.

Perhaps an audit and categories like this combine to seem like an especially calculated way to improve relationships.

But the point is that it’s very difficult to improve things you haven’t measured. And it’s especially hard to know afterward whether you have actually improved them.

Just as important, it’s never too late. In fact, as Schulz reminded me in our interview, there’s an entire chapter in the book entitled “Better Late Than Never.”

“One of the virtues of studying people across decades of their lives is that you get to see the ways in which they grow and change,” Schulz said, adding: “A big emphasis in the book is that you can do stuff right now.”

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7 other things

• A manhunt is underway in Manhattan after the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot Wednesday morning, according to the New York Police Department. Brian Thompson, 50, was shot near the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue just before 7 a.m. The NYPD called the situation "a brazen, targeted attack" that "does not appear to be a random act of violence." (Yahoo News)

• Why tech companies are panicked over Australia’s new ban prohibiting children under age 16 from having social media accounts. (The Guardian)

• A 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, Gregor Formanek, may now face trial almost 80 years after the end of World War II, after an appeals court overturned a lower court ruling saying he was medically unfit. Formanek is charged with aiding and abetting 3,322 murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin between July 1943 and February 1945. (The Guardian)

• The average Gen Z worker, those born between 1997 and 2012, now think they have to earn almost $600,000 a year to really “make it.” That’s nearly three times what any other generation currently thinks. (Axios)

• How Cuba fooled the U.S. to get millions of dollars from Miami for its armed forces. (Miami Herald)

• Crash prevention technology shows 'huge potential,' but the roadmap is up for debate. (NPR)

• I’m a travel writer who has visited 68 countries. Here are the 4 ‘magical places’ I think about moving to most: Helsinki, Finland; Singapore; Lisbon, Portugal; and Italy. (CNBC)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this Inc.com. See you in the comments!