CHAPTER 2 What Is Competition? What Is Happiness?Read more at location 422
What’s the Big Idea? Happiness is about activity, not lolling about, and competition is about systems, not just individuals.Read more at location 424
Though often denounced, friction (like competition) sometimes brings good things to life. The American Revolution and the emancipation of slaves came from friction. The Berlin Wall was sledge-hammered, sending sparks and dusty shrapnel everywhere.Read more at location 431
Even an exalted rock star–philanthropist like Bono presumably tries to write a better song each time he sits down at a keyboard with his pen.Read more at location 448
In Maoist China in the early 1980s, “no one talked about what they wanted to do. Students who were trying to enter graduate school overseas kept their plans to themselves, hiding college applications under their mattresses, scurrying to their mailboxes when none of their classmates were looking,” writes John Pomfret, who attended college in Nanjing, the sole American in his class. “My classmates snooped on each other, read each other’s diaries, feared and suspected one another—an expression of the deep mistrust they perfected during Cultural Revolution.” They couldn’t wait to outdo and undermine each other. In contrast, a private-property, free-enterprise system overtly encourages individuals, firms, and structures to compete for time, money, prestige, and attention.Read more at location 454
You can see three levels of competition: (1) the men feeling primal urges to demonstrate their potency and spread their seed; (2) the firms and their scientists in laboratories racing to find better and better treatments; (3) the marketing campaigns to attract customers. Each level of competition is needed to produce the end result: millions of men with newfound self-esteem (and many minutes of embarrassing television advertising).Read more at location 465
There’s nothing wrong with thinking about happiness. But we should start by recognizing that the very study of happiness may itself be a symptom of social success and prosperity.Read more at location 493
Happy fans of word puzzles solve 20 percent more puzzles than cranky ones.Read more at location 507
There is one caveat to the idea that happiness fuels brainpower. I’d call it the “automobile showroom exception.” If you are walking into a Chevy showroom and looking to negotiate a deal with the salesman, you are probably better off not giving off gleeful vibes, and not falling in love with that Camaro.Read more at location 509
Another reason happier people think better is that happier people tend to be healthier.Read more at location 513
How could we scientifically test the claim? How about deliberately injecting the flu virus into healthy people and watching their antibodies respond?Read more at location 516
Happiness matters for yet another reason. A simple reason. We want to be happy; at least most of us do.Read more at location 522
Wittgenstein almost always seemed miserable (though he did apparently enjoy Carmen Miranda movies), yet left a happy final note. On his deathbed he uttered these words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Nobody believed him.Read more at location 625
So: Is happiness an average of many moments? Or a random sample of moments? Or the final, deathbed moment? The linguist and broadcaster Barry Farber said that “in Russian tragedies, everyone dies. In Russian comedies, everyone dies too. But they die happy.”Read more at location 628
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has equipped volunteers with electronic survey machines (perhaps more like Nielsen rating boxes) that beep and prompt people to register their level of happiness at regular intervals.Read more at location 636
the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, have used the Day Reconstruction Method, asking subjects to fill out questionnaires and record their feelings about the preceding day.Read more at location 639
The General Social Survey, run by the University of Chicago, deploys a more traditional system, sending pollsters out to ask Americans in person, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”Read more at location 642
The beauty care pioneer Estée Lauder discovered early in her career that “even rich people love freebies,” because it puts them in a more cheerful frame of mind. Lauder shrewdly gave away sample lipsticks and face creams, igniting the now commonplace “gift with purchase.” Economists call this concept “framing.”Read more at location 649
As for my definition, I cannot separate happiness from a desire to live life. When do we know that we have grown happier? When we feel more joy in seeing a new day, a new decade, and when we hope that children, friends, and loved ones feel the same way.Read more at location 661
