He didn’t dismiss the idea. Instead, he talked about how much of life is random. In his view, we are all surrounded by thousands of moments of chance. You have to be prepared and attentive so you can grab opportunities when they come. And then you need to work hard and apply yourself, with what he referred to as “focused energy.” But even with all that, serendipity plays a role in any success.
“I ask myself regularly whether I got here by luck or skill,” he said with a slightly abashed smile.
Recognizing the role of luck can be uncomfortable for most of us, but Dr. Jarecki did it with great delight, rolling off story after story of the people he met by chance who helped him along the way. “Randomness plays a bigger role than any of us want to admit,” he said. Using simple math, he explained that in much scientific research, an event is described as less likely than chance if its so-called P value is less than .05. “Each of us probably has a hundred or a thousand events that occur in a day or a week, so if you multiply that by .05, you see that the probabilities of the unexpected are very high.” Those events could range from running into an old friend on a street corner (amazing that we’re both here!) to finding a business opportunity that made you rich. Dr. Jarecki thought his attentiveness to detail (obsessiveness, actually) allowed him to see “lucky” possibilities that others might miss. But Piff would have been pleased that a guy who has a pilot on staff to fly his own private Falcon 7X was able to look outward as well as inward to explain his success.
Thinking about the connections between luck and gratitude, I read some books and articles by Richard Wiseman, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire who holds a chair in the study of the Public Understanding of Psychology, the only such chair in Britain, if not the world. He’s also a magician, suggesting that it takes some wizardry to help the public understand psychology. Wiseman became fascinated by what makes people “lucky” or “unlucky,” and he eventually decided he could help people change their luck. Part of luck, as Dr. Jarecki suggested, was simply paying attention to your surroundings. Another part was believing you’re lucky so that you’re open to good things happening. In one experiment, Wiseman asked volunteers to look through a newspaper and count the photographs. The people who had described themselves as unlucky flipped carefully through every page, counting. The lucky ones finished in seconds—because they noticed the big ad on page two that said, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs.” Lucky people also noticed the ad in another experiment that said, “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win 250 pounds”—which the unlucky missed.
We’re likely to be grateful when good scenarios occur, but maybe we can also make them happen. Imagine, for example, that you’re out of work and headed to a coffee shop to get advice from a former colleague. As you arrive, you notice a twenty-dollar bill on the ground, and since there’s no way to identify the owner, you happily tuck it in your wallet. Well, that’s nice. You start to feel a little lucky. Your friend hasn’t arrived, so you sit down alone and chat with the man at the next table, who is also alone. He laughs at your stories about searching for a job and ultimately gives you his card and says to call if he can ever help. Turns out he’s an executive at a company where you’d love to work. You wait for your friend a little longer, then leave happy that the world is on your side. You’ll call him tomorrow.
The same day could happen a different way. Anxious to meet your contact, you rush into the coffee shop and never see the twenty-dollar bill. You’re too tense to talk to your neighbor so never know that your dream job is just a hello away. When the person you were to meet doesn’t show up, you slink away, embarrassed and dispirited. How can you be grateful to the world when good things never happen?
—
However we get it—luck, lottery, cleverness, or hard work—money has a complicated connection to gratitude. Numerous studies around the world have shown that beyond a basic level, more money doesn’t increase well-being. In the United States, the cutoff is said to be about $75,000 (toss in a bit for inflation) and above that, whether you’re earning $300,000 or $100,000 matters only marginally.
Okay, that’s a nice fact to toss around at cocktail parties and to make us all feel better, but is it really true? I have yet to meet anyone who says, “I’d like to be happier—so I need less money.” I heard one researcher explain that people with bigger and fancier homes were happier with where they lived than those in less lush dwellings, but he rushed to add that the mansion dwellers weren’t happier overall than others. But what does that mean? If you’re happier with your house and your higher-paying job and your ability to eat in nicer restaurants, aren’t you . . . happier?
I doubted there was some grand conspiracy among psychologists to slant their findings and convince us that money doesn’t matter. It seemed more likely that they were mixing up happiness and gratitude. The extra money did make people happier on a day-to-day basis. But it didn’t affect how they scored on tests that measured a deeper sense of well-being.
So in that way, the psychologists were right. “Well-being,” as I knew from Dr. Martin Seligman, is much deeper than superficial happiness. It’s affected mostly by the experiences we have and the joy we feel, the people around us and the love we feel. Dr. Seligman had discovered that our well-being goes up when we feel more gratitude. And here’s the tricky point—we don’t feel more gratitude just because we’re rich. In fact, gratitude is sometimes helped by scarcity. You wouldn’t say a crust of bread makes you happy, but if you’re starving, getting a few crumbs makes you very, very grateful.
A sociologist friend of mine at Columbia University says most people think their lives would improve if they had one more room in their houses and 10 percent more in their paychecks. He finds it amusing that we don’t imagine forty-room mansions or million-dollar paychecks. A lack of imagination? More likely we figure we’re fine, we’re okay, and if we could just improve things around the edges, we’d be even better. But being grateful for the current situation is a much better road to happiness than looking for that extra room or additional 10 percent. The problem comes back to that earlier finding that we judge ourselves against our neighbors and friends. Gratitude—stopping to appreciate the goodness already in your life—can prevent a toxic bout of envy. And few emotions are more toxic than envy.
Some years ago, the company where I had then worked for several years was acquired in one of the disastrous mergers happening at the time. (Remember AOL Time Warner? This was similarly bad.) I received some options in the new company, and once it was legal to sell, they turned out to be worth about $30,000. Hooray—an unexpected bonus! But then I learned that the executive I reported to—who had put together the deal—cashed his options for $30 million.
“He doesn’t deserve a hundred times more than everyone else! This is an insult!” I said to Ron, leaning furiously over the banister in our house while he sat calmly in a chair below.
“It’s not an insult—it’s thirty thousand dollars,” said my ever-reasonable husband.
“I’m not selling them for that price,” I roared.
“It would be a very substantial amount of money to get,” Ron said, trying one more time.
I insisted we hold on to the options until they went up, which might make the whole thing seem more fair. They didn’t go up. They plummeted to the point where they were worth a big round zero. I learned several things from that experience. First, when the guy who makes the deal sells his options, you should, too. Second, never compare—just appreciate what you have. But most important, I learned to marvel at the attitude (mine, of course) that turned a windfall into nothing—first in my mind, then in my bank account. A different mind-set that included a dose of gratitude at that point, and I’d have an extra $30,000 right now (plus interest).
Looking back, I’m embarrassed that I had ever been so ungrateful. Median household income in America is just over $50,000 a year, and about a quarter of the households are get
ting by on less than $25,000 a year. Only about 4 percent earn $200,000 or more. What had I been thinking? Like Piff’s Monopoly players, I’d been given a double bonus for passing Go and forgot to say thank you.
But it’s not the amount that really matters. I’d feel the same way if the sum had been half as much or twice as much. Behavioral economists say that financial losses bother us more than equivalent gains make us happy, so I suppose that’s one reason the lost money has haunted me. But far more important was how I’d let myself use money as a measuring stick and a way to value my worth. I didn’t want to do that anymore. Being grateful for what I had required seeing dollars in a purely practical light.
“What would you do if you had more money?” I asked my husband.
He thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “I can’t really think of anything. I have everything I want.”
“Wow, that’s crazy. Really?”
“Yup. How about you?”
“There’s no stuff I want,” I said, having learned my lesson about possessions the previous month. “But for other things . . .” I hesitated. Needing more money and doing everything possible to get it had always seemed like a given. But if money stopped being a measuring stick and I didn’t let it define me, then the mighty dollar lost its power. Like Ron, I had what I needed and I suddenly didn’t know how a bigger bank account would make me more grateful.
I’d been learning a lot from reading the Greek philosophers, so I decided to check out which ones had something to say on this subject. I dipped back into the world of Epicurus, who believed that having enough, but not too much, was a source of pleasure. Wanting more just caused trouble. Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little, he said. (Very few of his original works still exist, so most of his thinking was reported later by followers and fellow philosophers.) I wrote that quote on an index card and tacked it up over my desk to remind myself that enough really was enough.
Epicurus taught the simple concept that pleasure was good and pain was bad. (Can’t argue with that.) It’s ironic that “epicurean” has come to mean hedonistic or sybaritic since he warned against overindulgence. His view held that being grateful that you had enough brought pleasure while always wanting more increased pain. It occurred to me that you could draw a pretty straight line from his philosophy to the bond trader who angrily quit his job and the billionaire who wanted to land higher on the Forbes list. They had so many reasons to be grateful—but had missed the point and so lost the pleasure. Excess was the wrong goal.
A couple of days after deciding to add Epicurus to my list of Greek heroes, I chatted with a guy who lived a few miles away from me in Connecticut and had recently retired as a state police sergeant. He had a generous pension, but he was still on the young side and so had started being extra careful about expenses. He told me about calling the phone company to get a better plan (“they never let you know about it until you ask!”) and finding a cheaper electrical provider. He missed working and getting a regular paycheck, but he was also happy to be relaxing a bit and enjoying time with his wife and their four children. “It’s not like we’re eating cat food,” he said. “We have enough.”
Enough could be my new mantra. Grateful to have enough.
Feeling good about my new attitude, I headed out to do some errands and stopped at the nearby cash machine. Five twenty-dollar bills spewed out as “fast cash” and I stuffed them in my wallet and rushed off. But then I made myself think about the fact that I could get money whenever I wanted. Wasn’t that amazing? If I planned to be grateful for what I had, I needed something that would make the money feel meaningful.
Walking by a pastry shop, I remembered reading A Little Princess as a child and being enraptured by Sara, a little girl who has been left a pauper. Cold and hungry, she stared into a bakery shop window, and though she could smell the buns and imagine the warmth, she didn’t have a penny to buy one. Reading that as a child made me cry and inspired my first stirrings of empathy. Take one of my nickels, Sara! It’s not fair that you can’t buy a bun!
When I got home now, I went to the basement to find my well-worn copy and reread it, tearing up all over again at the ending, where Sara learns she really is a princess with a large fortune. She’s warm and pampered again and has nice clothes, but she can’t forget being poor. So she goes to the bun lady at the bakery and says that whenever hungry children are staring at the window, she should invite them in and give them something to eat—and send the bill to Sara.
I closed the book with a sigh. It occurred to me that if I’d paid more attention to Sara when I was eight years old, I would have had the whole money-and-gratitude question nipped in the bud. Because a couple of studies have shown that money used altruistically is money well spent. In an experiment at the University of British Columbia, people walking through campus were randomly handed an envelope with a small amount of cash inside (usually five dollars) and were instructed to spend it by the end of the day on either themselves or someone else. Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School who helped lead the study, noted that those who spent on themselves barely noticed it. Those in the group spending on someone else had to stop and think about what do with the extra dollars—and had a different kind of experience. The money seemed special, and at the end of the day, they reported a slight happiness boost.
Norton wondered if the positive effect of spending for someone else would also hold when people were struggling for basic needs. So he repeated the experiment in Uganda—and reported the same results. Spending on others makes you more satisfied than spending on yourself.
It reminded me of a night a couple of months earlier when Ron and I were walking through Times Square and he noticed a crumpled twenty-dollar bill stuck in the edge of a grate (dropped money is apparently more common than I knew). With hundreds of people passing by, we had no chance of finding who had dropped it, so he held it in his hand as we walked on. On the next block, a couple of street musicians playing reggae music attracted a crowd. We stopped to listen and then exchanged a long glance. We instinctively felt the money wasn’t ours and needed to be shared. When I gave a little nod of agreement, Ron dropped the twenty in the musicians’ collecting hat.
I can’t really explain why that made us both so happy. I suppose we could have used the twenty dollars to buy grande lattes for ourselves or “I Love New York” T-shirts on the next corner. But if we did, we would have forgotten about the experience by now, just like the people in Norton’s experiment. Instead, it’s a story that’s (obviously) stuck in my mind.
Dr. Seligman told me a similar story. Back before “forever” stamps, he went to the post office to buy some one-cent stamps on a day that postage rates went up. He stood in a long line, getting more and more frustrated, and when he finally got to the front, he bought the few stamps he needed. Then he had an inspiration—and asked for an additional ten sheets of a hundred each.
“Who needs one-cent stamps? They’re free!” he called to the people standing in line. Delighted, he handed them out to anybody who asked—and in minutes all the stamps were gone.
“Best ten dollars I ever spent in my life!” Dr. Seligman crowed when he told me that story.
Being grateful for the money I had this month didn’t leave me any richer or poorer than I’d started, but it did change my attitude. After years of being upset about money and worrying that I didn’t have enough, I was glad to have a broader perspective.
I caught up again with my longtime friend Susan, who had started her own real-estate company a few years earlier. Always successful, Susan had just completed a very big deal, and I was unconditionally delighted for her. She had spent her entire career in a macho world (why do you think men build tall buildings?) and we joked that part of the pleasure of her big score would be all the men who heard about it.
“This one makes me happy,” Susan admitted. “How are you doing?”
I shr
ugged. I didn’t have the financial success that Susan did, but my concern about reaching the next rung of the wealth ladder had started to slip away.
“I earn enough so that I’m fine. I appreciate what I have. What else do I really need?” I asked.
Susan looked at me as if I’d just offered to jump naked into the Erie Canal. How could the person she’d known for so long behave this way? Having listened to me worry for years about money, she seemed somewhere between surprised and alarmed at my new position.
“Are you still working hard?” she asked worriedly.
“Very,” I promised. Then using the lingo from multiple-choice exams, I said, “Think of being grateful for the present and working hard for the future as true, true, and unrelated.”
A few days later, at the end of the month, Ron and I sat down with our financial statements. He seemed prepared for my usual moaning. But before I looked at them, I took out a checkbook.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m writing five checks for one hundred dollars each. I think the best way to be grateful for the money I have is to be able to give some of it away.”
“To who?” he asked.
“That’s going to be the fun part. We’ll figure it out together,” I said, giving him a kiss.
Money usually pulls couples apart instead of drawing them closer. But that night, our financial statement looked a lot better to both of us. And we looked better to each other, too.
CHAPTER 7
The Career Game—or What I Learned from James Bond
So grateful . . . that my job this year is writing about gratitude!
Grateful to learn about joy from talking to James Bond
Lucky that gratitude can increase my ambition and not detract from it
This month, I wanted to see how gratitude could change my attitude toward work and my own career. My recent exploits in exchanging stuff for experiences and rethinking money had worked to the good, but taking a new view of my own career made me nervous. Gratitude required appreciating the present rather than fretting about the next step. If I didn’t fret, would there even be a next step?
The Gratitude Diaries Page 11
