Ask HN: Does success in work bring you happiness?

"Money" won't likely drive your happiness. Not entirely.

"Increasing shareholder value" also won't likely drive your happiness. But enjoying the camaraderie, or seeing your leadership improve peoples lives, or the sense of accomplishment that comes with setting and achieving goals... those things can lead to happiness. And a lot of times, you can achieve that kind of happiness even if you miss your quarterly numbers, or a startup hypothesis doesn't pan out.

"Reading all the books by Author X." "Getting a Ph.D." "Coaching a little league team." "Completing project Y." "Publishing paper Z." "Taking a 2 month RV trip across europe." "Earning the respect of my spouse or partner."

Money, shareholder value, "assets"... are only a means to certain kinds of ends.

Having a certain amount of money, social standing, and meeting goals will generally help enable this.

But so too can one feel trapped in particular professions, if you don't feel you're adding any value, or if you lose that sense of active goal setting/valuing/achieving cycle, then it doesn't matter what other people's impression of yourself or your job or success are...a tendency towards depression in such a state would not be peculiar...

I am generally pretty happy (in a long-term sense), and to be honest, I'm unemployed and job-hunting at the moment, hoping to sign an offer this week. I certainly make far less than $1M per year. I quit my old job because I was unhappy there and starting to be unhappy when I went home, too: I was working long hours and trying to be very good at what I did, and I didn't get the sense that people around me (and my management in particular) valued the things that I was trying to be good at. That is, to be clear, not a criticism of management: they needed different things out me than what I had gone into the job expecting them to need. But it took me a while to really get to terms with how much I had let my sense of self-worth become defined by the value system in place at my work, even though my engineering skills and mindset had remained largely as they were. That dissonance got to me very badly.

I think that's the risk with trying to be happy by being successful at work: it's always an external metric. You can be very successful for years, and laid off the next day, and you always know that in theory you can be laid off the next day.

The things that make me happy now are all internal metrics, that is, they're accomplishments that I myself see as accomplishments, instead of hoping my management will acknowledge. I'm happy about the friends I have, about how much I've been cooking instead of ordering food, about how I've been getting better at singing, about the job prospects I have, about this video game I've been playing, etc. Some of them also have external measures (my voice teacher also says I've been getting better, the video game is letting me advance to new areas, etc.), but I can tell for myself whether I'm doing well or not, and - importantly - I'm continuing these things because I find them enjoyable, not because my voice teacher or the video game says I'm doing well.

Regarding money: on the one hand, I have enough savings that I could just quit my job and start job hunting, and that definitely made me happier than job hunting while staying at my job. On the other hand, I'm expecting a significant increase in compensation regardless of what offer I sign, and I don't think that's made me noticeably happier; I already have enough money that I can do things like quit my job without a new one lined up. I do think that you can feel unhappy from a sense that you're underpaid, but that again ties into external metrics: you know you're doing a job worth some amount, but you're being told it's worth less. I don't think being overpaid (for the work you do) is really going to bring you happiness, unless you have some plan to save up money and quit - and some plan for what to do with that money once you do and why you believe you'll be happy doing it.

Success at work usually makes me feel temporarily satisfied, but rarely happy as such. Happiness sneaks in of its own accord.

For me, I'm happy when I'm pushing myself to get deadlines done and to achieve goals that I set for myself... but also focusing on self care when I need to, and giving myself creative outlets outside of work (which for me is music and cooking).

So, success contributes to happiness, but it's important to try to strike a balance and not let that be the entirety of your life. There are some people who enjoy throwing themselves into their work, so for them it's a matter of working somewhere where they feel like their efforts are rewarded.

And unsurprisingly, not liking what you do will deprive you of happiness

Beyond that dollar amount, there's no increase in happiness.

Now, salary isn't necessarily predictive of "success," (as per your question...) so the above fact may not necessarily be relevant... but I present it for what it's worth.

EDIT: I haven't evaluated the study I cited (perhaps erroneously) as fact. But I'll leave this comment here for it to be evaluated.

This is the same type of thing. In other words, success doesn't make you happy, but it's hard to be happy without some level of success.

Life is experience. Not numbers. And, as some of us know, it -- or our health -- can be taken away at any moment.

Living with some planning for the future means if and when you get there, hopefully you will enjoy it.

But don't forgo happiness now for some potential future. A successful life is enjoying now, the majority of the time.

(Nothing's perfect, and there will be down times. But too much down is a bad sign. And, it becomes self-reinforcing. Don't fall into that trap.)

All that said, having a decent income does help. If I'd moved around more in my career, I might have actually been happier and gained more financial security.

In short, take care of yourself, including your emotional self. That's probably the surest road to personal success, however you end up defining it. Positioning yourself to work from a position of strength, and with positive support.

Yes. More than anything else.

It's not the money part. I don't make much. It's the influence and seeing my work actually shift how people act and live their lives - especially seeing where it will lead.

I have three kids and when I talk with other parents, they say that they get the most joy out of seeing how they can positively influence their kids.

What about positively influencing millions of people, consistently over the long run with your work? You do that through impactful, meaningful work. Maybe it's software or maybe it's building houses, or providing access to capital for low income people, or working on vaccines, or any number of the millions of things that influence people at scale. That's the difference, at scale.

You can't do scale with personal relationships, you do it with work. Define work however you like (charity etc... it's how you spend your time)

How could that not be the key to happiness?

Not sure if this helps answer your question, but I felt truly, blissfully happy the first few months of my arrival at America (from India).

I'm not sure what it was, maybe the fact that I achieved the 1st step of a childhood goal / dream. Or maybe it was the new experiences, living in a foreign land, finding cleanliness, orderliness, and a very efficient system in everyday life that was largely lacking in India.

But I really had nothing. Just 2 suitcases and 500 $ in borrowed money. I learnt on the 1st day on my job (on H1B visa) that I was there only for 2 months to fill in for an American woman who was going on her maternity leave and that I would be sent back to India * after that. I also didn't know anyone here, was told by the company that brought me here that I need to vacate the hotel they put me up in within a week, had no credit history, nothing.

I think that fact that I had no obligations -- financial or otherwise -- was part of it. Didn't have a mortgage, loan on a car, was single, no dependents to take care of, and very little physical possesion.

Nearly 2 decades later, I'm still trying to get back to that state of happiness. Like others have stated here, I don't think money has much to do with achieving 'happiness'.

I think the pursuit of happiness is purely a western-culture phenomena...

[ * hustled and extended my stay beyond the 2 months by doing the work of another citizen co-worker who offered to get the manager to extend my contract beyond 2 months if I "fixed" her code... 18 years later... I'm still here :) ]

On the other end, people winning the lottery also reverts to their pre-lotto happiness level after 6 months.

I guess the point is that you probably won't find happiness in work success if you're currently miserable.

There's some newer studies that helping other can make you happier, like this one published in Science:

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/application_uploads/...

The effect is not huge though. A meta study on this showed that it's only about 1 point on a 10 point happiness scale.

If you really are not happy, consider these common and proven recommendations:

- Get plenty of good exercise, at least 30 minutes, 3-4 times a week

- Get enough rest, 8-9 hours a night

- Check your vitamin D levels and supplement if needed.

- Eat healty and avoid alcohol and sugar

- Spend time building social support, do not neglect your circle of friends and family

- Get into a routine, for example go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning

And of course if you feel like this for more than 6 months, see a psychologist.

Of course, other people might feel like it matters to them and if so then I don't think there's anything wrong with that. However, I think it's really important to see that there are many things beyond your control, so if you try your best and still fail, I like to think you should still find happiness in how you hopefully grew as an individual.

Those people often see that helping others is a true source of happiness.

Matthieu Ricard is a quite famous monk having published a lot of interesting stuff:

http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/

This one is on the topic:

http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/books/happiness-a-guide-to-...