How to Be Happy
You’re nineteen years old, and your dream is to be a musician. Meanwhile, you’re a sophomore at Stanford University. Making it as a musician is a long shot—and a Stanford degree is a good insurance policy. Your father, a very wealthy man, tells you he’s going to give you your inheritance now, when it may be most useful to you. It’s a small gift relative to your father’s wealth, but it’s still a lot of money—$90,000 worth of stock in your father’s company. He tells you not to expect any more from him. This is it.
You can sell the stock and launch your music career. Or you can take a safer career path and hold on to the stock. Your music career may thrive or flop. The stock may skyrocket or crash. What should you do? Hard choice. Let’s eliminate the uncertainty. I’ve seen the future, and if you sell the stock to finance your music career, the gamble will pay off. You’ll achieve your dream. You’ll be a successful musician. Not Louis Armstrong or Mozart, but a successful songwriter for television and films. You won’t be a household name, but you’ll be respected by your peers. You won’t be a starving artist. You’ll make a very good living. That’s one path. And it sounds like a pretty good one.
In the second path, you give up on your dream of being a professional musician, stay in school, and hold on to the stock. With a Stanford degree you’ll have a good career, just not the one you dreamed of. And you’ll hold on to the stock as an investment. The stock will do well. Very well. To make it interesting, let’s assume that if you hold on to the $90,000 worth of stock you’re given as a nineteen-year-old, it will turn into $100 million over the next thirty-five years. You’ll enjoy a lifestyle that will make your musician’s salary look like a pauper’s.
Which path is likely to make you happier? Should you follow your dreams or go with the big money? How much are you willing to pay to achieve your dreams? If you want to get the most out of life, which path do you choose? Maybe being a musician isn’t that exciting to you, so pick your own dream. What would give you enough pleasure that it would be better than being fabulously rich? Or maybe you can’t think of anything. Maybe money is so appealing to you that you’d be thrilled to give up on your dream career, knowing that in return you’d have a life of incredible luxury.
Most choices in life aren’t quite this dramatic. And most of us aren’t anything like the son of Warren Buffett, the great investor whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, had a stock that really did grow a thousandfold over the last thirty-five years. Warren’s son Peter Buffett actually took a chance on the music; he dropped out of Stanford at nineteen, sold the stock his father had given him, and asked his father for help with planning and budgeting in order to make that $90,000 last as long as possible. Four years went by. Peter Buffett scraped along, living in a small apartment and driving a beat-up car, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to find paying work in the music business. Then he got a break. A neighbor introduced him to someone who needed music for an advertisement for a new cable television channel called MTV. One thing led to another, and Peter Buffett ended up with a successful career as a musician, which is no mean feat. He has written songs for movies and television and won an Emmy for his score for a TV documentary. He’s had a meaningful life, doing something he loved.
Did he make the right choice?
Maybe that’s an easy question for you to answer. Maybe not. As we’ll see in chapter 5, Adam Smith was not a big fan of the pursuit of fame and fortune. His view of what we truly want, of what really makes us happy, cuts to the core of things. It takes him only twelve words to get to the heart of the matter:
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.
The simplicity of this sentence is deceptive for two reasons. First, Smith uses words somewhat differently than we do, so understanding the phrase takes a little bit of work. Second, Smith packs a lot of richness into those twelve words.
The first part of Smith’s summary of human desire—that people want to be loved—seems pretty straightforward, although Smith doesn’t mean loved the way we mean it today, as connected to romance and family. He means it in a fuller sense. He means that we want people to like us, respect us, and care about us. We want to be appreciated, desired, praised, and cherished. We want people to pay attention to us and take us seriously. We want them to want our presence, to enjoy our company.
People do exist who claim not to care about what others think of them, but often it’s a show, a form of protection from the possibility that they are not loved, not respected, and not appreciated. Often the people who appear not to care what others think about them are the ones who desperately crave approval. Most people want to be loved. And it comes to us naturally, Smith says; it’s part of our essence. More than that, he says, “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.”
Smith also says it this way, emphasizing not just being loved but deserving to be loved, meriting being loved:
What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?
When Smith wonders why people are unwilling to do things that are morally reprehensible, he invokes the impartial spectator—the idea that we’re held in check by the judgments of an objective observer. Here, in talking about happiness, Smith invokes actual spectators, those in our social circle and beyond, who actually judge us. He’s saying that when that jury of our peers loves us for what we do and who we are, we’re happy.
You might rebel against Smith’s formulation and argue that it’s unhealthy to be motivated by external approval. But Smith isn’t arguing that our goal in life is to impress people around us so that we can be happy. That’s the wrong way to be loved. For Smith, being loved is a natural result of being lovely. What does Smith mean by lovely?
In today’s language, lovely means attractive to the eye or satisfying, as in “what a lovely vase” or “she sent me a lovely thank-you note.” But when Smith says that we want to be lovely, he means worthy of being loved. A poor synonym would be lovable, but even that modern word conveys more emotion and less richness than what Smith has in mind. He’s saying that we want to be seen as having integrity, honesty, good principles. We want to earn respect, praise, attention, and our good name—our good reputation—honestly. We want to be worthy of love. We want the love of others to be authentic in the sense that we don’t receive it on the cheap. Smith is saying that we care about our reputation—how others view us—and we care that we come by that reputation honestly, that it mirrors who we truly are.
Here is the fullest expression of Smith’s statement about being loved and lovely:
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.
When we earn the admiration of others honestly by being respectable, honorable, blameless, generous, and kind, the end result is true happiness.
Loveliness is an end in and of itself. Think about marriage. You want to be a good husband, not because that means your wife will treat you well. You want to be a good husband because that’s the right thing to do. Loveliness isn’t an investment looking for a return. That’s why you don’t keep score in a good marriage—I did this for you, so now it’s your turn to do something for me. I went to the grocery, so you have to run the kids to soccer. I was nice to you when you were under stress. Now I’m under stress, so you have to be nice to me. Or I’m up four to one, so the next three tasks fall on you. I went to two events with your friends, so for the next two, I drag you out with my friends.
If you think of your actions as a husband or wife as an investment or a cost-benefit analysis, you don’t have a marriage motivated by love. You have a mutually beneficial arrangement. I can have that with my butcher or my baker. I don’t want that arrangement with my wife. In a good marriage, you get pleasure from helping your spouse simply because that’s the kind of partner you want to be—a lovely one. Better that than a contest to see who gets the better deal. My marriage isn’t perfect. No one’s is. But whenever I struggle with the challenges of all that a marriage entails, I learn the value of giving more, not less. I try being more lovely.
Smith’s ideal is achieved when your inner self mirrors your outer self. Smith understood that we often fall short of the ideal. For years, financial adviser Bernie Madoff was seen by the outside world as a financial genius whose acumen and foresight improbably allowed him to earn consistently high returns for the investors who trusted him. Those returns seemed like a sure thing, and they were a sure thing as long as new investors could be found to feed his Ponzi scheme. Madoff was loved—revered—for what people thought was his wizardry as an investor. But Madoff knew that he was a fraud. He knew he wasn’t lovely. His returns and promises came not from his ability and skill as an investor but from his ability and skill to deceive.
Then there’s Warren Buffett, Peter’s father, the “Sage of Omaha” and a man who actually appears to have legitimately good judgment, a man capable of growing a $90,000 investment into $100 million. Smith is saying that even before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was discovered, Buffett slept better than Madoff. Not just because he didn’t have to worry about discovering new investors to cover up his fraud, as Madoff did, but because of Madoff’s disconnect between his reputation and the reality. Smith is suggesting that Madoff was a less than happy man before he went to prison, not because he was afraid of being caught but because in his own eyes he was already caught; he was a failure, and he knew it even when no one else did. Madoff reportedly expressed relief when he was arrested.
Or think of Lance Armstrong vehemently denying that he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. Year after year, his friends defended his reputation while Armstrong knew they were defending a lie. For a long time, he was very loved. But he was not lovely. It must have taken away some of the pleasure from the love he received. There was a disconnect between his reputation and the reality—and, again, not just because he worried about being caught. His public image was a lie, and it clashed with what he knew was the reality.
Smith realized that people are capable of fooling themselves, rationalizing or ignoring their imperfections and lack of loveliness. In the next chapter we’ll look at self-deception and the challenges of self-awareness. But being loved and actually being lovely, rather than imagining you are, is the ideal.
A modern way to capture what Smith is talking about when he talks about being loved and being lovely is authenticity. We want to be real, and we want the people around us to be real in how they think about us. Respect or love or attention that is inaccurate because I don’t deserve it isn’t real. Someone who is thought to be lovely, but who knows he isn’t, is living a lie.
So if I get praise I don’t deserve, says Smith, it should bother me. The praise feels good. But knowing it is undeserved makes it impossible to enjoy, he says. Why? It’s as if someone else is being complimented instead of you:
The man who applauds us either for actions which we did not perform, or for motives which had no sort of influence upon our conduct, applauds not us, but another person. We can derive no sort of satisfaction from his praises.
Then Smith adds an insightful twist as to why it bothers us. It’s not just the dishonesty of the compliment but that the compliment reminds us of what we might have done:
To us they [his praises] should be more mortifying than any censure, and should perpetually call to our minds, the most humbling of all reflections, the reflection of what we ought to be, but what we are not.
So if someone praises me for my generosity because I volunteered for a community project that in fact I failed to help with, it’s not just that the praise is inaccurate. It’s also a reminder that I missed a chance to be generous. Undeserved praise is a reprimand—a reminder of what I could be.
Some, of course, are happy to ignore the reprimand and enjoy what Smith calls “groundless applause.” Or worse, like Armstrong or Madoff, some try to create it dishonestly:
The foolish liar, who endeavours to excite the admiration of the company by the relation of adventures which never had any existence; the important coxcomb [a conceited show-off], who gives himself airs of rank and distinction which he well knows he has no just pretensions to; are both of them, no doubt, pleased with the applause which they fancy they meet with.
Smith’s reaction to those who indulge this impulse is scathing:
It is only the weakest and most superficial of mankind who can be much delighted with that praise which they themselves know to be altogether unmerited. A weak man may sometimes be pleased with it, but a wise man rejects it upon all occasions.
To be loved without being lovely—to be praised without being praiseworthy—is a temptation for the weak and foolish person, not the wise one. Smith is encouraging us to strive for harmony between our inner self and our outer self. We may be tempted at times to be loved without actually being lovely. The wise man, says Smith, avoids that temptation.
By “unmerited praise” Smith means praise that is simply mistaken—my admirers thought I was someone who I am not. I know better, so ideally I correct the mistake. But there’s another type of false praise I might be tempted to believe: flattery. Some flattery is just social pleasantry, such as paying someone a compliment. Another kind of flattery is insincere praise with an ulterior motive. Call it strategic flattery. Smith is providing a mechanism for explaining why flattery is so seductive. In Smith’s terms, strategic flattery is an attempt by someone else to make me feel more loved than I deserve to be because the flatterer hopes to get something in return.
A friend of mine was offered a job as a high-ranking executive of a major health-care foundation, a foundation that gives away millions of dollars of grant money. When he accepted the job, another friend of his said, congratulations—you’ll never pay for dinner again, and you’ll never receive another honest compliment. I don’t think he meant the part about never receiving an honest compliment literally. What he meant was that you’ll have a hard time telling when you receive an honest compliment because you’ll receive plenty of dishonest ones from people who will cater to your desire to be loved. Strategic flattery is fake love. Flattery can make someone feel loved who doesn’t deserve it.
I always find it slightly awkward when students tell me they loved my class as they turn in their final exams. Some of them, maybe all of them, mean it. But it’s striking to me how many of them say it before the exam is graded compared with the number who say it after the exam is graded. I’d like to believe that pattern holds because it’s easier to find me in the classroom right after the exam, instead of a month after the class is ended. But some of it—how much I cannot know—is that the students, perhaps unconsciously, figure that if they can give me the gift of being loved, then I might feel some debt to them.
A friend of mine was the head of an organization for many years and got burned out. He decided to change his career and do something different, and he planned a transition to ease his successor into the leadership role. After the transition, he met his successor for coffee and asked him how it was going. Was he enjoying being the boss? Everything was fine, his successor said, but one thing bothered him. It seemed that his jokes had gotten funnier. His humorous asides, which once had caused mild amusement at the weekly meetings, provoked lots of laughter now that they were coming from the boss’s mouth. His heart wanted to believe that he had become much wittier in the intervening time; his head told him otherwise.
We so want to be lovely that we can sometimes convince ourselves that we really did do what our friends think we did and that we really did have the right motives that they attribute to us. A boss can fool herself into thinking her jokes have gotten funnier when she became the boss; I can easily come to believe my class really is fabulous even after the exam is graded and the students are quiet, and my friend at the foundation handing out millions of dollars in grants can really believe that his control of the budget has nothing to do with why people keep asking if he has lost weight. (“You look fabulous!”) Strategic flattery can succeed because we want to believe the compliments we receive are real. Once you realize the importance people place on being loved and lovely, you become a little better at detecting strategic flattery. And you’re less likely, perhaps, to indulge in it yourself.
Our lives are filled with people who want to influence us in so many different ways. People around us want to be loved, just as we want to be loved. Sometimes they fool us into thinking we’re something we’re not, either for strategic reasons or just through an honest mistake. Smith encourages us not to be fooled. He encourages us to face ourselves honestly. But perhaps the biggest challenge we face isn’t detecting false praise from others. Our biggest challenge comes from ourselves. We so much want to be lovely that we can convince ourselves of our loveliness when the reality is otherwise. The wise man may reject the praise he does not deserve. But it’s so hard to be wise. And it’s our own praise that’s hardest to reject.