The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

3

The one thing your doctor, teacher, and Tom Hanks all have in common

Yes, that fear is still programmed into our heads.

It’s everywhere, it’s between our ears, it’s in our brains.

Tom Hanks, one of the world’s most successful actors, who earns millions with every movie and has scored two Academy Awards, said, “Some people go to bed at night thinking, ‘That was a good day.’ I am one of those who worries and asks, ‘How did I screw up today?’”

Andy Grove is the longtime Intel executive who helped transform the company into a multibillion-dollar success. He was believed by many to have helped drive the growth phase of Silicon Valley, was named Time’s Man of the Year in 1997, and was idolized by Steve Jobs, according to Jobs’s biography. How did he famously put it? “Only the paranoid survive.”

Our brains still follow this paranoid model every day, and it is a recipe for unhappiness! Some call it Medical Student’s Syndrome. That’s a term Jerome K. Jerome first coined in his 1889 classic, Three Men in a Boat: “I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of ‘premonitory symptoms,’ it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

“I sat for a while, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that, too—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight . . .”

It’s not just medical students. We’ve all been there.

We scan the world for problems because that led to our survival. And our current design of the world only reinforces and grows these negative-lens feelings.

At your doctor’s office when you get lab results, the doctor says, “Your blood sugar is fine, your cholesterol is fine, but your iron is low.” What do you do? You talk about getting your iron up. Eat steak! No work is done improving your blood sugar or cholesterol. If cholesterol should be below 200mg/dL and you’re at 195, great! If you’re 205, that’s a problem. Doctors get paid when we’re sick. Shouldn’t we pay them when we’re healthy?

Retail store managers “manage by exception” by staring at morning reports, finding a number below average, and trying to bump it up. If that report says your traffic count is fine, basket size is fine, but checkout time is below average, what does the boss want? Faster checkouts. More cashiers! No work is done improving statistics that are already average.

In the classroom the teacher hands back test results and offers extra help to those below average. They have to pass! If not, the year is repeated, the system is drained, friends all move ahead. What happens for the below-average kids? Extra help at lunch. Tutoring sessions. Remedial tests. Why aren’t students who get 100% offered any extra challenge?

It’s no different in the workplace. We get job evaluations showing how well we’re doing. What happens if you’re below expectations? Performance improvement plan! Extra meetings with the boss! Shipped to training classes! What happens if you’re doing well? Two percent raise. Pat on the back.

Rather than find good results and make them better, our brains do this:

Look for problem.

Find problem.

Improve problem.

That’s what our brains have been trained to do for two hundred thousand years. But because we scan the world for problems, sometimes that’s all we see. Here’s how New York Times–bestselling author Kelly Oxford framed our Medical Student’s Syndrome on Twitter: “WebMD is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where the ending is always cancer.”

So what do we do about it?