What About Happiness?

Goals, Systems, and Identity

I was privileged to have a great conversation with a brilliant friend recently. Emily is someone who is an exceptionally high performer. She’s at the top of her chosen profession. She has a successful and fulfilling marriage. She also runs a non-profit foundation. She has two kids who are doing very well. She runs a global mentoring network. She exercises, meditates, and prays daily. She also is on the school board, church board, neighborhood board… I probably left out a few things.

Her observation was that she has achieved every goal she has ever set for herself. She’s wise enough to understand that the universe gets a vote in those goals; that is to say that the outcomes weren’t fully in her control and that to some degree luck and fortune amplified her efforts. Yet, she finds herself struggling with a really hard question: I’ve achieved every goal I’ve ever set for myself – now what? I don’t want to keep chasing goals to find happiness.

A voracious reader, she set out to look for answers and read several current books on the topic. But still, something wasn’t connecting.

In one of those moments where an insightful question causes the listener to connect dots previously left unconnected, we stumbled on an idea. Perhaps there’s a progression to this, and Emily’s expectations haven’t quite caught up with her progress.

We started with goals -discrete problems we will solve on a particular timeframe, such as “I will lose 10 pounds by Memorial Day.” The problem with goals is that happiness lives on the other side of achievement. So we set a goal, we paint a picture of how happy we will feel, and how we will feel happy, when we attain our goal. This picture serves as motivation to get started, and provides the ‘why’ to generate the dedication to stick to it.

Everything is going great until… the day we achieve the goal. Perhaps we give ourselves a moment of the happiness we imagined. But very quickly, one of two things happen. Having arrived, we set a new goal. Or worse, we celebrate by reversing our progress and have to set the same goal again! (For instance, celebrating losing weight by indulging in pizza and cookies!). Very quickly, happiness moves back over the horizon of goals. Of course, it is also possible that we never achieve the goal – either due to factors within our control or factors outside of our control. Feeling that we can’t achieve happiness because we can’t achieve our goals because of factors outside of our control can lead to some very dark, very nihilistic places. Not good.

Scott Adams famously (but probably not originally) suggested a solution. Implement systems rather than goals. James Clear made essentially the same recommendation in the very popular book Atomic Habits. Instead of “I will lose 10 pounds by Memorial Day,” a systems statement lives a level of abstraction higher. A systems statement might be of the form “Every day, I will exercise in some way, even if it is just a brisk walk.” The systems idea is that if one builds habits and patterns, then those habits create opportunities to succeed at a variety of pursuits. And some of these might not be opportunities that one could plan and make goals for, because the future is too unpredictable. A famous example is Steve Jobs. Jobs took classes in college that he thought were interesting, even though he didn’t know whether they would be useful in the future, and if so, how. He thought calligraphy was one of those interesting things that he wanted to learn more about. Because one of Jobs’ systems was to learn new things about diverse topics, he was able to connect his knowledge of calligraphy with his knowledge of computers and his brilliance at marketing to make the first PC with proportional type fonts – the MacIntosh. But Jobs couldn’t have planned to build the first Mac and then worked that plan into a list of goals, one of which would have been ‘learn calligraphy while in college.’

Where is the happiness in the systems model? I think it has to be in the joy of creation. The feeling of ‘Aha!’ when ideas and skills, previously separate, combine to create something new and, hopefully, valuable. So what’s the problem with that? Well, most people want to feel like they are working toward something meaningful. We are stimulated by challenges because we know the direction our efforts are leading, if not the end result. But if all we feel are challenges, without direction or the guarantee or even probability of that meaningful ‘Aha!’ it might be a lonely, barren journey. Even worse, it could devolve into the “Ants Marching” (Dave Matthews Band) problem wherein we do everything we are expected to do, with no hope of joy at the end of the journey. Another dark place.

Serendipitously, while we were discussing the systems approach, I mistakenly phrased an example as “I am the kind of person who exercises every day.” And here was a fun ‘Aha!’ moment. This is an identity statement, not a systems statement. It isn’t about a habit, it is about being or becoming a particular type of person. Emily quickly recounted how her mother used identity statements to help her succeed. If she was struggling in math, her mother would remind her that “you are the type of person who can do well at this.” And then when she succeeded “of course, you are a person who is good at math!” Brilliant!

Identity statements quickly led us to remember Aristotle’s virtue ethics, because Artistotle’s virtues can be phrased as the type of identity statements most people would like to aspire to. For example: “I am an honest person.” Or: “I am a courageous person.” Or even better: “I am a prudent person – I deploy the right virtues correctly in the appropriate situations.” Where lies happiness in the virtue model? The Greeks had thought about this so deeply that they had a special word for it: Eudaemonia. No such word exists in English. The closest might be “human fulfillment.” Even better might be “the feeling of deep fulfillment that comes from deliberately living a virtuous life.”

So our tentatively-developed model seems almost like a set of conditions or ways of living one might be able to progress through. From goal-setting and achievement, with its brief and fleeting rewards, to building systems and habits for improving ourselves and helping others, with the attendant greater but unpredictable joys, to practicing an identity as someone who consciously pursues becoming the most virtuous and capable version of ourselves, with the result of achieving human fulfillment. In this model, Emily was consciously in the systems mindset, although she rediscovered that she already knew the identity/virtue mindset, and she realized that she was seeking the wrong feedback system. Emily discovered that she was still trying to measure happiness, even though she is already well along the way to fulfillment. To Eudaemonia.