This week, I visited my beloved Yale Law School to give a talk to the students about my Four Tendencies personality framework (take the quiz here if you don’t know your “Tendency”). When I was a Yale undergrad, the joke was that “New Haven is neither,” but it’s definitely a haven for me. I love to walk the streets and hallways and be reminded of my past self. I love whimsy, and on any visit to the law school, I always particularly enjoy glancing above my head as I walk through the doors to see the carvings of students fast asleep at their desks while their professor lectures.
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
I was absolutely fascinated to read about artist Anna Weyant’s The Dollhouse. A life-sized dollhouse! Isn’t that…a house? It reminds me of one of my personal koans: “Could you build a fake hotel where people could actually spend the night?” And it also reminds me of “On Exactitude in Science,” the one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a Cartographers Guild that grew so exacting that they “struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
Podcast listening is highest between 10am-2pm, according to new data from Edison Research. Breakfast time isn’t too far behind, however. The data also says that Americans age 13+ spend 10% of their total daily audio time listening to podcasts. More podcast-listening for all! If you need something to listen to, check out my new advice podcast with Lori Gottlieb, Since You Asked. Super fun.
When I have an itch, I have a bad habit of scratching until I break through my skin, in what’s called the “itch-scratch cycle.” It turns out that there’s a better way to handle an itch: Slowly rub or stroke the area with your fingers or a soft makeup brush—and you don’t even need to touch the precise itch, just be within 3/4 of an inch.
I’ve never used my dishwasher to clean anything other than dishes, so I was very interested to read “20 things you can clean in your dishwasher—that aren’t dishes.” Now I plan to wash baseball caps, sponges, plastic hairbrushes, pet toys, and flip-flops in my dishwasher.
This week, I went to a fabulous celebration of Gone Before Goodbye, the new thriller by Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon—I can’t wait to read it. There, I met legendary CBS News anchor Connie Chung. I told her that I’d been so moved by the New York Times article, “I got my name from Connie Chung. So did they”—about how a generation of Asian-American girls had been named “Connie” after Connie Chung—that I’d recorded a three-minute “A Little Happier” episode about it. The thing that had struck me most was that Connie Chung herself had had no idea of this fact, until Connie Wang wrote that article! I said to Connie Chung, “It must have been so gratifying to realize that you’d had that kind of influence, without even knowing it.” And she said that yes, it had been extraordinary.
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This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 556
Schedule a Saturday Synch-up, Lessons About Getting a New Dog & How to Question a Questioner
INTERVIEW
Judd Kessler
Judd Kessler is an award-winning professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want, is out now.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
We all want things in life.
Most of the time, we don’t question why we want them.
But I think an incredibly valuable — and underappreciated — thing we can do to make ourselves happier is to try to identify why we want something.
Economists like me think about what people want as coming from two places: (1) general preferences, which people more or less agree upon, and (2) idiosyncratic preferences, which are specific to an individual.
Liking a job because it pays more money is a general preference; liking it because it allows you to pursue your passion for a particular topic is an idiosyncratic one. Being drawn to a person because they are classically attractive is a general preference; being drawn to them because they have the same hobbies as you, or like the same weird movies, is an idiosyncratic one.
What is the value of thinking about our preferences this way? Once we understand whether our desire for something is driven mostly by general or idiosyncratic preferences, we can identify whether we truly want it or whether we are just being swept up by the tide.
Decades of research — including much of my own — suggests that when people observe others doing something, they are more likely to do it themselves. They may do this without thinking about whether taking that action is really right for them.
The same is true for preferences. I might get swept up by what others want, rather than thinking carefully about what I want: Am I excited about that job because it’s best for me, or because everyone else is excited about it? Do I really want to be with that person, or do I just like that other people also like them?
Because of this phenomenon, when you desire something because of a strong general preference, you should question whether it is really what you want or just a reflection of what others want.
But when you like something because of a strong idiosyncratic preference, you can be more confident it is something you truly value. And going after things you idiosyncratically want helps you make good matches — on the dating market, on the labor market, and everywhere else.
An added benefit of being guided by our own idiosyncratic preferences is that we often can secure things more easily. In these cases, we are competing against fewer people to get what we want: only those who happen to have the same tastes as us!
Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?
That being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes — to think about things from their perspective — is a superpower.
With friends and family, it can help you be more empathetic and more present for people through both the good and the bad.
At work and in business, understanding how others are thinking can allow you to get a handle on the dynamics at play and — like a chess grandmaster — identify your optimal next move.
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
For me, it’s Pilates at least once a week. When I do it, my back doesn’t hurt, which is basically all you can hope for at a certain stage of life!
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?
I like the quote attributed to the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to succeed in certain environments — which I call “hidden markets” — where outcomes seem to be dictated by luck but are in our control more than we think.
So, Seneca’s idea really resonates with me: by seeing these hidden markets and better understanding them, we can learn strategy to help us succeed.
I call this success getting “lucky by design,” which is the title of my new book!
Q: Has a book ever changed your life? If so, which one and why?
In my book, Lucky by Design, I tell a story about attending a book talk for Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play. The concepts from Eve’s book gave me a framework for thinking about how I was splitting housework with my wife and made me see that how we had been doing it was neither efficient nor equitable.
As I describe in my book, my wife and I combined Eve’s insights with some of our own — including the idea of “envy freeness” from economics — to optimize how stuff gets done in our home. Things move much more smoothly now!
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