Originally posted in our July 2021 Top of Mind Newsletter.
Keeping on the thread of pushing through our own self-critique, we’ll move onto a piece from the Harvard Business Review. In it, the author suggests that happiness at work will often get you the opposite. Instead, we should seek meaning.
But what does that mean, and how do we accomplish it? According to the author and research she cites, there are five factors that differentiate meaning from happiness. These include things like how our social circles look to us for help versus how we get help from them, as well as the timeframe we are analyzing when considering our well-being (happiness is momentary, meaning tends to come from a narrative that includes the past, present, and future).
After looking at these factors, the author goes into ways to prioritize meaning over happiness. She also emphasizes that a meaningful life does not always feel like a happy life in the short term, but it will, in the long run, create more sustainable and lifelong fulfillment.