Harvard Business Review reposted this
Building a Happier World | #1 NYT Best-Selling Author | Professor Harvard Kennedy School / Harvard Business School | Columnist for The Atlantic
Your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake. It is, in fact, like a start-up, where you are the founder, entrepreneur, and chief executive. And if you treat your life the way a great entrepreneur treats an exciting start-up enterprise, your life will be happier, more meaningful, and more successful than it otherwise would be. Once you have a firm foundation on how to manage yourself, you can use this to build a career at the center of your start-up life. The key insight behind a career that consistently raises your well-being (besides not letting it take over your entire life) is progress. Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination, but rather, from making tangible progress toward it. Indeed, one of the great errors people make in their careers is assuming that hitting a particular goal—a sum of money, a particular title, retirement—will give them the happiness they seek. The right approach is to set up a work life in which you create more and more value for yourself and others. You can find a deeper exploration of this in my new book, The Happiness Files, available for pre-order now. https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/ghVa5pmQ