A Massive Study Shows Success Doesn’t Lead to Happiness–But Happiness Does Drive Success

It’s easy to assume achievement will yield happiness. Start and build your own thriving business, be happier. Advance in your career, be happier. Get a bigger house, be happier. Finish a marathon, be happier.

Hard work and sacrifice lead to success, and happiness is by-product. In its most productive form, living in a dynamic of conditionality (first this, then that) is delaying gratification: doing or not doing this today, so you can have, or be, that tomorrow.

Saving money now so you can start a business down the road. Working harder than everyone around you so you can get promoted. Training and training and training so you can finally check a marathon off your bucket list.

Choosing to do (this), because you someday want to have, or be, (that): active choices, intended to produce desired outcomes.

That’s a good thing, both in terms of likelihood of achievement and fulfillment; after all, sometimes success is a driver of happiness.

But more often, the opposite is true. As a study published in Psychological Bulletin that reviewed over 200 different happiness studies found, happiness is much more likely to drive success. 

According to the researchers (long, but worth it):

The characteristics related to positive affect include confidence, optimism, and self-efficacy; likability and positive (outlooks towards) others; sociability, activity, and energy; prosocial behavior; immunity and physical well-being; effective coping with challenge and stress; and originality and flexibility.

What these attributes share is that they all encourage active involvement with goal pursuits.

The success of happy people rests on two main factors. First, because happy people experience frequent positive moods, they have a greater likelihood of working actively toward new goals while experiencing those moods. Second, happy people are in possession of past skills and resources, which they have built over time during previous pleasant moods.

Add it all up and in non-researcher-speak, happy people are primed to pursue goals — and because their happiness makes them more likely to have pursued goals in the past, they have developed skills that help them be more likely to accomplish their goals in the future.

The result is a self-sustaining loop: happiness = success = happiness = success….

Another example? A study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies determined employee well-being and happiness accurately predicts employee performance. The researchers spent seven years studying over 900,000 soldiers and found that high positive affect, low negative affect, and high optimism predicted awards for performance and heroism.

Or in non-researcher-speak, happy people perform better.

How much better? The most positive and optimistic soldiers were four times more likely to receive awards than the least positive and optimistic soldiers.

Of course, you could argue the relationship is correlational, not causal. High performance could result in happiness since high performers tend to receive more recognition and praise, tend to feel more like part of the team, tend to get promoted more frequently, etc. (Instead of my happiness driving my performance, maybe I’m happy because I’m doing so well.)

Except for the fact negative affect (read: I’m kinda miserable) predicted lower performance.

In short, happiness predicted performance, and with it, success.

So if you aren’t as happy as you would like to be, stop thinking success will be the cure. Making more money, for example, can certainly improve your well-being. But after a certain point, it won’t make you happier: the famous 2018 study published in Nature: Human Emotion found that somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000 per year is ideal for “emotional well-being.” (Feel free to adjust for inflation.) Daniel Kahneman’s famous study pegged the number at $75,000.

More generally (and without having to worry about inflation), a Journal of Positive Psychology study shows people tend to “grossly overestimate” the impact of income on overall happiness. 

In short, affluence (a fairly common way to measure “success”) is a terrible predictor of happiness. Financial success, past a certain point, won’t make you happier. I know at least a few incredibly rich people who say they’re miserable. Money isn’t their cause of their discontent, but nor has it helped them feel better about their lives.

On the other hand, maintaining even a few close friendships will. A 2013 PLOS One study shows doubling your number of friends is like increasing your income by 50 percent in terms of how happy you feel. So can helping other people; a number of studies show giving can be as beneficial for the giver as the receiver.

So can engaging in active or social forms of leisure. A 2017 PLOS One study shows working out, connecting with family or friends, or pursuing an interest are much more likely to increase levels of happiness compared with passive “activities” like vegging out or staring at your phone.

Bottom line? If you want to be happier, do things that make you happier. Do things that leave you feeling satisfied, fulfilled, and gratified. Not only will those successes — whether professional or personal — make you feel happier, they’ll also create a foundation for future success.

And happiness.