by Tom Rath
Giving your undivided attention to others tells them how much you value their thoughts, opinions, and time. Intently listening to what another person is saying is a great way to forge new relationships and invest in your existing friendships. Dedicating a little time to understanding another person’s perspective should also help you learn, grow, and expand your thinking.
Unfortunately, most of the time people are talking to you, you are not truly listening. You may think you are good at faking listening, but chances are, you’re not. People read facial expressions in a matter of milliseconds. So when you’re not paying full attention, other people can tell subconsciously, even if they don’t say anything about it.
You have probably experienced how frustrating it can be when you’re talking and it’s obvious the other person has drifted off. According to one estimate, people listen at about 25 percent efficiency compared with what is possible, mostly because they can think much faster than they can listen, and that allows them to multitask.
Simply being in the same room with someone and making eye contact is not sufficient. Even if you aren’t checking your smartphone messages while someone is talking, it’s just as easy to tune out mentally. At times, I’m guilty of allowing my mind to wander on to what I plan to say next instead of listening to the other person’s complete thoughts. Another challenge is that the average person listens for just 17 seconds before interrupting.
When you choose to have dedicated time with another person, such as dining, driving somewhere, or going on a walk, give that person your undivided attention. Talking on your phone, using apps, or reading a message tells others you don’t value their time as much as you could. You chose to be with them, so make it count.
Put Experiences First
Think back on some of the most memorable vacations, trips, events, and experiences you have had throughout your life. As you reflect on these moments, you may notice how much joy you derive (even years later) from recalling the times you spent with people you care about. The best experiences create memories and well-being that last for years to come.
There is no better use of your financial resources than to spend them on meaningful experiences with other people. This may be the single most important discovery about how to use money effectively. Consider what occurs before, during, and after a trip with loved ones. If you plan a vacation well in advance, you experience several exciting months of anticipation. Then you have the actual experience of a trip with friends or family, followed by many years of fond memories.
Compare all of this goodwill with the cheap thrill of buying a new shirt for yourself, or even a new car. You might get a small spike in happiness immediately after the purchase, but the excitement of buying that new car fades quickly when you’re sitting in traffic the following Monday morning. Even brief interpersonal experiences, such as going out to dinner with your spouse, a concert, or taking your kids to a sporting event, are a much better use of your financial resources.
One notable exception is spending on material goods that help you learn and grow, such as books, videos, sporting goods, and musical instruments. A 2014 study found that experience-oriented products do lead to increases in happiness.
According to San Francisco State University’s Ryan Howell, a leading researcher on spending habits, people underestimate the extended value of experiential purchases. “What we find is that there’s this huge misforecast,” he said. “People think that experiences are only going to provide temporary happiness, but they actually provide both more happiness and more lasting value.”
In Howell’s studies, people’s estimates of how happy they will be two weeks after a material purchase are pretty accurate. However, two weeks after an experiential purchase, people’s ratings of whether their money was well spent are 106 percent higher than their initial forecast. As Howell described, “Over time, material items are just crashing and life experiences are staying stable.”
Even waiting in line is more enjoyable if it’s for an experience — for instance, if you’re waiting to buy tickets to a sporting event or concert. In addition to lasting longer than material purchases, experiential purchases can boost the well-being of multiple people at the same time. Every dollar you spend on an experience with another person is a well-being multiplier.
Yet most people, in the United States in particular, spend far too much on material goods relative to experiential purchases. In a typical American family, a whopping 50 percent of all annual expenditures are spent on cars and housing. This simply does not leave enough — at least on a percentage basis — for better investments, such as food, entertainment, trips, and other forms of recreation. In other developed economies, people spend just 30 to 40 percent of their resources on housing and transportation, which leaves two to three times as much discretionary income for experiential purchases.
One caveat is that spending on experiences won’t work if you are doing it merely to impress other people. Howell noted, “Why you buy is just as important as what you buy . . . [W]hen people buy life experiences to impress others, it wipes out the well-being they receive from the purchase.”
Howell’s research reveals that experiences make people happier because they fill basic psychological needs for human growth, such as the need to feel competent, autonomous, and connected to others. Howell surveyed 241 people and discovered that their motivation for purchasing an experience determined whether their psychological needs would be met. He found that people who chose to buy life experiences — because those experiences were in line with their desires, interests, and values — were far more fulfilled as a result.
Buy Happiness (for Someone Else)
Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent much of his career studying the relationship between finances and overall well-being. He has found that the raw accumulation of wealth is not what matters most. Norton explained, “It’s not that it’s bad to accumulate money; it’s that people are focusing on something that doesn’t pay off all that much.”
What’s more important is how people spend their money. One of the most common traps Norton has studied is when people think they can buy their way out of a rut in life by spending on themselves. In extreme cases, people can live in enormous houses and drive expensive cars but have no friends and be clinically depressed.
Fortunately, Norton’s research also identifies the right ways to spend. Consider this example: If you go out right now and buy a coffee for yourself, it does little for your own well-being. But if you buy a coffee for someone else, it boosts your well-being and the other person’s happiness at the same time. Norton’s impression after conducting this research is that people leave a huge amount of happiness on the table by spending primarily on themselves. If you want to maximize both your money and your overall happiness at the same time, start thinking about how you can spend on other people.
When you are considering purchasing a material item, ask yourself how it will benefit another person or your relationships. If you can clearly see how the money you are about to spend will increase the well-being of people around you, it is a sound investment. However, if a purchase will give you a quick thrill right away but won’t have any lasting impact for you or for others, skip it. Your relationships will be stronger as you put less emphasis and value on material possessions.
Plan Ahead for Well-Being
When you’re planning an event, think about how it will increase the well-being of other people — before the actual experience. In 2006, while planning my honeymoon, I stumbled upon some of the earliest research examining the “anticipated utility” of experiences. The researchers measured and classified the degree to which anticipation, an event itself, and the memory of the event made distinct contributions to well-being.
It turned out that looking forward to a vacation or event provided even more happiness than the event itself. Even the memory contributed more to long-term well-being than the actual experience. While this surprised me at first, if you think
back on any recent vacation, your memories may have more value than the experience of packing, going through airport security, sitting in the car for a long time, and so on.
After studying this research, I realized what a bad idea it was to keep my honeymoon travel plans as a surprise for my wife. So I went ahead and shared all the specifics about what we would be doing and where we were going. It did not take long to see how quickly this paid off. A few days later, I noticed that my wife was exploring the destination on her laptop and discussing it with a friend.
The next time you are planning an experience for other people, share as much detail as possible. If you are planning a weekend outing to a local park, tell your friends or your children the day before. Every time I have tried this with my two young kids, I find that the anticipation helps and enhances the experience itself.
For trips and events, try to plan several months in advance. A large study on this topic found that the effect of anticipating a vacation can increase well-being for weeks and even months. Even when an experience does not go exactly as you had hoped or planned, it is likely to get better with age. Unlike material goods, which you adapt to and forget about over time, people tend to recall shared experiences with rose-colored glasses. So if it rains while you are at the beach or the amusement park is overcrowded, don’t despair. It will be a fond memory of family bonding down the road.
Avoid Flying Solo
The best moments in life rarely happen while you are sitting around alone. The times that make life worthwhile occur in the company of your closest relationships. However, there is too much time and effort focused on individual achievement. From schooling to work to personal goals, people spend a disproportionate amount of time working on solitary pursuits.
When researchers ask people to reconstruct the most positive and negative experiences of their lives, they consistently describe social events as their most influential memories over a lifetime. Across a series of four studies, participants recalled the moments when close relationships began or ended, when they fell in love, or when the loss of another person broke their heart. One of the study’s co-authors summarized, “In short, it was the moments of connecting to others that touched people’s lives the most.”
Participants consistently rated events with other people as more influential than solitary experiences. Independent events or individual achievements, such as winning awards or completing tasks, did not affect participants the most. Instead, the researchers concluded, social experiences “gain their emotional punch from our need to belong.”
Think about a few of your own priorities. Whether it’s finishing a big project at work, getting a degree, or running a half marathon, consider whether your goal involves another person or is a solitary effort. There is nothing wrong with working on important individual milestones as long as you understand that they may not be the memories you treasure 25 years from now.
Win While Others Succeed
The fundamental premise of a relationship is that two people are better off together than they are divided. You should experience more enjoyment when you are with your spouse than when you are apart. A friendship at work should produce more mutual enjoyment or achievement than if you were working independently. However, it is easy to take this for granted.
A team of researchers that studied new social connections as part of an experiment found that simple conversations made a big difference. When strangers were instructed to get to know one another for 10 minutes, it boosted their subsequent performance on a variety of common tasks. But if these conversations had a competitive edge, the benefit and improvement disappeared.
This experiment may help explain why it is so important to assume positive intent every time you meet another person. When both parties assume positive intent, there is a better chance they will achieve their shared goals and perhaps be a little happier in the process. However, if either person entering into an encounter views it as a competition, the interaction may be doomed from the start.
There is an entire body of literature on what political scientists call “zero-sum” situations. Zero-sum means two parties walk into a scenario in which each person is fighting to win a fixed portion of a limited pie. So if I get 60 percent, the best you can do is get 40 percent. In athletics and politics, there are certainly times when a short-term sum is fixed. Yet viewing a relationship as a zero-sum game is the fastest way to set it up for failure.
You win; someone else loses. The zero-sum mentality is engrained at a young age. Especially in competitive cultures and societies, there is an even more distinct win-versus-loss perspective. An athlete or team wins the gold medal, World Cup, or Super Bowl. The team that comes in second is the loser.
When it comes to the work you do, in many cases, others win more when you succeed. If you build a successful product or business, you create jobs, suppliers, and customers. You also add to the overall economy. Almost anything you do in your work creates more value than you are likely to extract from competitors or rivals. As a result, work teams and organizations that focus the most attention on catching up or beating the competition are the least likely to succeed.
Use Pro-Social Incentives
When you think about incentives, individual rewards for achievement usually come to mind. Yet personal rewards are often ineffective, perhaps because they rely on the assumption that people are concerned primarily with their own self-interest — or at least more than they are with helping other people.
However, a great deal of research suggests that the desire to help other people is part of what makes you human. Scientists are exploring whether giving can be a much more powerful motivator than receiving. A fascinating series of three experiments led by Duke’s Lalin Anik indicates that pro-social incentives help people achieve more and be more satisfied while doing so.
In one of the experiments, good work was rewarded with money that participants were directed to spend on a bill, expense, or gift for themselves. In contrast, participants in the “pro-social group” were given an incentive but instructed to spend the money on a teammate instead. Even though the study was conducted with a group of pharmaceutical salespeople (which is a traditionally competitive profession), the team that had incentive to do good for someone else saw greater gains in performance than the team with a more selfish incentive.
A second study was conducted with sports teams, using the same design of asking players to spend money on themselves or their teammates. The teams assigned to the pro-social condition had a dramatic improvement in their winning percentage. The third experiment Anik and team conducted gave bankers a $50 bonus, which they were instructed to donate to a charity on behalf of their company. When compared with a control group, the group assigned the pro-social donation saw significant gains in happiness and job satisfaction.
When you want to motivate people to do great work, give them an incentive that will serve another person or benefit the entire team. When your friends, colleagues, spouse, or children accomplish something, try giving them a gift that keeps giving. Structure donations of time or resources. Plan an outing that includes some of their closest friends. If it is a material gift, make it one they can share with a group of people, like a gift certificate to a restaurant. Try this when motivating yourself and others, and see if you can set a cycle in motion. Remember that everyone is wired to get more of a boost from giving than from receiving.
Build a Cumulative Advantage
When you focus on other people’s shortcomings, they lose confidence in their abilities. But if you focus on their hard work and successes, you produce a sustainable increase in their self-confidence. What’s more, researchers have discovered that the earlier in life you focus on a person’s daily successes, the greater the gains over time.
Scientists reviewed studies that followed more than 7,000 people for 25 years. They found that confidence at a young age led to what they described as a “cumulative advantage” — the careers of confident individuals took off at an exponential
pace compared with those who had lower levels of self-confidence. The benefits continued to increase by the year. The earlier people gained self-confidence, the more measurable the difference, even in their physical health. The members of the group with higher self-confidence at a young age started at about the same baseline level of health, but they had just one-third as many health problems 25 years later.
Help the people around you understand what gives them a natural charge. Think about your social circles, and identify someone who may need a little encouragement. Helping others see their daily successes more clearly can lead to rapid growth. Every person has hidden talent waiting to be uncovered. In some cases, you may be the only person who has spotted that unique strength — so be sure to call it out when you see it. As I learned from personal experience, a few encouraging words can go a long way.
Help Someone See What Could Be
As a result of my grandfather, Don Clifton’s, lifelong study of strengths, I was raised in an environment in which my family was looking for early traces of talent at every turn. By the time I was five, they had spotted my deep interest in reading. When I was nine, my grandfather noticed some entrepreneurial talent and helped me start a little business selling snacks. He helped me find space and figure out how to buy snacks in bulk. And he taught me some basic financial concepts. But the most valuable lessons I learned were about people, interactions, and relationships.
Throughout my grade school, high school, and college years, it became clear to me that my talents and interests were in the areas of business, research, and anything involving technology. When I graduated from college in 1998, Don asked me if I would work with him to bring his research on strengths to a wider audience through technology and this new thing called the Internet. I spent the next few years working with Don and our team to create an online strength-based assessment, dubbed StrengthsFinder. But in the midst of all the excitement around this new project, Don found out he had Stage IV gastroesophageal cancer and most likely only a few months left to live.
