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Why So Many Successful People Are Still Unhappy
There are plenty of objective reasons to be unhappy — you’re failing at work, heartbroken, struggling to make ends meet, or suffering from a physical or mental illness, for example. But if you made a big list of all the unhappy people in the United States and you removed everyone whose malaise was down to one of these easily explainable causes, you’d still have a pretty huge number of unhappy people.
Being financially secure, professionally successful, and loved should be a great basis for happiness, but as we all know from personal experience, it’s perfectly possible to have all these things and still be pretty miserable.
Why is that? University of Texas at Austin business professor Raj Raghunathan wrote a whole book to try to answer this tricky question. It’s entitled If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? and Raghunathan spoke with The Atlantic’s Joe Pinsker about the lessons he learned putting it together.
How do you measure mastery?
The wide-ranging conversation is fascinating throughout, but one section in particular seems relevant to ambitious entrepreneurs and other professionals. To be truly happy, we all need to feel like we’re good at something — a feeling of mastery. High achievers generally have plenty of skills and accomplishments. They’re objectively…
