What makes a good life? There have being many studies of ‘What make a good life?’, with one study commencing during WWII and concluding just recently. So after 80 years of collecting and analyzing the data, what lessons can be gleaned from these men’s lives? Can the lessons be used to ease disharmony in the world, or at least help us all make better decisions?
What Makes a Good Life?
The Grant Study, also known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever done. Researchers wanted to answer a seemingly simple question: what makes a good life? But that simple question is, of course, remarkably complex. To answer it, they have followed hundreds of men for decades – through college graduation, marriage, war, parenthood, life crises, and old age – and collected a wide range of data about the men’s physical and mental wellbeing.
Here are 3 key takeaways:
1. Success is seen over the arc of someone’s life, so think long-term
Joshua Shenk, a journalist from The Atlantic and one of the first non-researchers to look at the archives, said that “a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading.” (You can read Joshua Shenk’s article on the Grant Study archives, What Makes Us Happy?, here.)
Some men started off happy and well adjusted, only to end up dying lonely and sad. And others started off with pretty bleak prospects for success, and ended up living long, satisfying lives. So to answer the question of what makes a good life, it’s essential to look at the whole picture.
Consider the lives of the following men as extraordinary examples:
A man named John Hines seemed to shine throughout his childhood and his years at Harvard. “Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study, the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.” But then his life took a seemingly inexplicable turn for the worse. He married, took a job overseas, and started smoking and drinking. He had an affair with a girl his therapist considered psychotic, and died suddenly of a disease in his 30s. In 1951 – at 31 – he wrote, “I think the most important element that has emerged in my own psychic picture is a fuller realization of my own hostilities. In early years I used to pride myself on not having any. This was probably because they were too deeply buried and I unwilling and afraid to face them.”
A man named Godfrey Minot Camille, on the other hand, went into the Study with fairly bleak prospects for life satisfaction: He had the lowest rating for future stability of all the subjects and he had previously attempted suicide. He had grown up in a terrible environment, eating meals alone until the age of 6, and the pain and desolation haunted him for years. But at 35, he had what he called a spiritual awakening, became a psychiatrist, and turned his pain into a tool for serving others. At the end of his life, he was one of the happiest men in the study.
These are only a few examples of many that show how “a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading.” Success is seen from a wide perspective of an entire life, not from any particular moment or achievement.
But what’s the lesson we can learn from this?
The primary lesson is to think long-term and make decisions with that perspective in mind. What will matter in 5, 10 years? When you are making decisions based on short-term criteria, then the tides of life can change quickly. Developing your ability to think long-term, to connect your daily choices with an overarching purpose and vision, is the key. When you actively consider what success looks like in your life with a long-term perspective, you are more likely to be successful over the long haul.
The second lesson is the importance of developing the skills you need to deal with life’s ups and downs.
2. Emotional intelligence is key
To be successful over the course of an entire life, one will inevitably deal with setbacks, struggles and pain. They play out throughout our lives, in moments big and small, and the strength and health of our emotional adaptations is a big part of what makes a good life – or stands in the way.
Vaillant came up with a list of the healthiest adaptations, which he considered the pillars of a long and happy life – and it is not a stretch to say they almost perfectly aligned with the emotional intelligence skills in the Six Seconds Model of Emotional Intelligence.
Altruism – A commitment to others’ wellbeing, which is the skill of increasing empathy.
Anticipation – Creating a sense of positive outcome, which is exercising optimism.
Suppression – A conscious decision to postpone an impulse or decision, which is applying consequential thinking and to an extent, recognizing patterns.
Sublimation – Finding outlets and expressions for feelings that promote growth and good decisions, which is navigating emotions and pursuing noble goals.
Humor – Acquired through self-awareness.
These skills not only separated successful men from the less successful, but changed throughout the men’s lives. Many men developed healthy “adaptations” after acting out unhealthy ones for years, even decades. This aligns with a growing body of evidence that emotional intelligence skills can be learned, at any age. More on that below. In middle age, the men were four times a likely to use mature coping mechanisms as immature ones. Between 50 and 75, altruism and humor grew more prevalent. But there wasn’t any guarantee. Some men developed unhealthy adaptations (or didn’t employ healthy adaptations) that derailed careers, marriages, and entire lives.
Overall, the Study highlights 3 different aspects of emotional intelligence that has been backed up by other research:
1. Emotional Intelligence is highly correlated with personal and professional success.
2. Emotional intelligence skills are learnable and measurbale.
3. Emotional Intelligence tends to increase with age, though the correlation is slight.
The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.
3. Relationships, relationships, relationships
When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships. Close relationships, the data indicates, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. The study found strong relationships to be far and away the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, and better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, wealth, fame, IQ, or even genes.
And strong relationships are not only correlated with happiness, but with physical health, longevity, and financial success, too.
The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. Strong relationships help to delay mental and physical decline. Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.
This revelation can be seen in both positive and negative terms. Meaning that while strong community seems to protect us from the literal coughs and colds of everyday life, a lack of community is also deadly. “Loneliness kills,” Waldinger says. “It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.”
In addition to life satisfaction and physical health, relationships also largely determined a person’s financial success. The warmth of relationships was highly correlated with financial success, more so than cognitive intelligence – a finding consistent with other research. There was not a significant difference in maximum income earned between those with an IQ of about 110 versus those with an IQ above 150. But those who scored highest on the measurements of “warm relationships” earned significantly more than the others at their peak earning years.
Overall, the study found “a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community.” The men’s relationships at age 47 predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except adaptations. But adaptations and relationships are, of course, inseparable.
“It’s useful to know it’s a choice worth making.”
This is a study conducted over 80 years, watching and evaluating individuals who agreed to this. The duration of the study gives crediants to the conclusion. You need to take this into consideration when you consider a business in Agriculture. Australian agriculture has had good times, those though were yesteryear and the present day it is tough going.
Australia’s agriculture sector has undergone considerable change over the last few decades. While continuing to grow in absolute terms, the size and importance of agriculture has declined relative to the rest of the economy. Within the sector, there have been marked changes in the number and size of Australian farms, the make-up of agricultural activities and the production and marketing strategies employed by farmers.
Some of the key factors shaping these trends have been changes in consumer demands and government policies, technological advances and innovation and emerging environmental concerns. The unrelenting decline in the sector’s terms of trade (that is, the ratio of prices received to prices paid) has been an important source of pressure for adaptation and change by Australian farmers. The sector has also had to respond to the continuing challenge of variations in seasonal conditions.
Historically, agriculture has played an important role in the Australian economy. In the first half of the 20th century, it accounted for around a quarter of the nation’s output and between 70 and 80 per cent of Australia’s exports. There was then considerable force in the old saying that the Australian economy ‘rode on the sheep’s back’.
Since then, however, agriculture’s relative importance within the economy has been in steady decline.
- Agriculture’s share of GDP fell from around 14 per cent in the early 1960s to 6 per cent in the early 1980s. Over the last two decades, it has ranged from between 4 and 6 per cent (figure 1).
- Agriculture’s share of employment has more than halved since the late 1960s when it accounted for around 9 per cent of the workforce.
- Australia’s reliance on agricultural exports declined from over two‑thirds of total exports in the early 1960s to just over one‑fifth in 2003‑04.
The relative decline in agriculture has several causes, notably:
- the growth in consumer expenditure being directed predominantly to services as national income has risen;
- a decline in the price of agricultural commodities relative to other goods and services; and
- relatively high productivity growth in agriculture, which has been critical to the sector’s performance, but also facilitated the release of resources to other sectors of the economy.
The decline in agriculture output is a relative phenomenon. Real output in agriculture actually increased by around two and half times over the four decades to 2003‑04.
In fact, in trend terms, agricultural employment has been relatively flat over the last forty years — declining by less than half of one per cent a year.
Agricultural exports have also grown in real terms — since 1974‑75 they have almost tripled in value, increasing at a trend annual rate of 3.5 per cent a year.
So you can be part of this yearly increase in Agriculture AND be happy doing it if you reflect on the 80 study, combining the learning from the study with growth in agriculture will lead to a great and prosperous life.