Without going too far out on a limb, I believe almost everyone would like two things from their jobs and careers: success and happiness. They want to do relatively well financially, receive fair recognition for their accomplishments, enjoy their work as much as they can, and become happier people as a result. These are reasonable goals, but they can be a lot to ask. So many people, especially ambitious, hard-working leaders, simplify them in a logical way: They first seek success and then assume that success will lead to happiness.
But this reasoning is flawed. Chasing success has costs that can end up lowering happiness, as many a desiccated, lonely workaholic can tell you.
This is not to say that you have to choose between success and happiness. You can obtain both. But you have to reverse the order of operations: Instead of trying first to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, start by working on your happiness, which will enhance your success. Best of all, evidence shows that this order of operations works on a larger scale, as well: Happier employees tend to make their companies more successful.
If possible, bosses should create a policy of guaranteeing whole days without meetings.
As such, whether you are simply looking for more success in your career—or whether you are a leader hoping to boost the success of your company—the goal should be to focus more intently on your happiness and the happiness of your employees.
In essence, that is the argument of my new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. This book is a curated collection of essays from my “How to Build a Life” column in The Atlantic, each of which focuses on how leaders and employees can make their professional lives happier. Although I cover lots of science and ancient wisdom, I’ve also included very practical lessons that all working professionals can put into practice today.
The lessons below are a small taste of The Happiness Files. I hope you’ll find them useful and a first step toward a better work life.
1. Kill more meetings
The research on meetings shows that if you want to be happier at work (or want your employees to be happier), you should fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity. And when they actually are necessary and unavoidable, there are a few steps you can take to make them less draining and more useful.
Ruthlessly avoid and cancel meetings
If you are plagued by unnecessary meetings where little is accomplished, find ways to avoid them if you can. Schedule work trips or important client calls to coincide with them, for example. In many cases, you can skip very large gatherings without anyone noticing. If you are the convener, cancel all meetings that don’t have a clear agenda or purpose.
Take this advice with caution if you are an employee, of course. It is not likely to be helpful, if your boss asks you why you are skipping all the staff meetings, to say, “Because I read a provocative book chapter.” If it’s too risky for you to skip meetings, maybe your boss will schedule fewer to begin with if you slip a copy of this chapter under their office door.
Create meeting-free days
If possible, bosses should create a policy of guaranteeing whole days without meetings. According to scholars writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, productivity and workforce engagement are maximized at four meeting-free days per week; stress is minimized at five meeting-free days. (In other words, stress is minimized when there are no meetings at all.) In an era when many are working in a hybrid format, if people come to the office three days a week, a good policy might be to hold all meetings on just one of those days.
Keep meetings to half an hour or less
In 1955, the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined what he called—and which has since been known as— Parkinson’s law: We expand a task in order to fill the time available to complete it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in staff meetings. How many times has a meeting started with the words “This shouldn’t take the full hour” only to take the full hour? So, what is the right meeting length?
Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, famously held micro-meetings that lasted 10 minutes. One productivity expert says that 25 minutes is ideal, based on what research says is the optimal amount of time for people to focus. But the point is clear: Make meetings more efficient by having a tight focus and getting right to the point, and make a commitment to finishing within a short window.
Don’t invite everybody
According to what is called the Ringelmann effect (named after the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann), as the size of a group increases, the average individual effort falls. Scholars differ on the ideal number of people in a meeting, which no doubt depends on the meeting’s goals. If the boss has a huge announcement such as “We’re bankrupt,” perhaps all staff is appropriate. (Then again, an email might suffice for that.)
For making decisions and discussing strategy, many management scholars recommend seven or fewer people in a meeting. People are less likely to fully participate beyond this number, and accountability can become confusing. Try to invite to your meetings the minimum number of people necessary to accomplish the task at hand.
If there is one rule to remember about work meetings, it might be that they are a necessary evil. They are necessary insofar as organizations need them for proper communication, but they are evil in that they are almost never inherently desirable and should thus be used as sparingly as possible for the sake of productivity and happiness.
2. Focus on your progress
To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, that life is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need to understand and pursue them in a different way. I recommend that you subject your goals to a bit of scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.
Are you enjoying the journey?
A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional trouble you will face.
Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now.
Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 years ago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weight lifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press my weight plus my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.
Do you like pie?
Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie. The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal is a lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stopping drinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. is being qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.
Can you take one step at a time?
Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point your efforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoy the daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.
3. Decide whether you want to lead
Should you seek the corner office? It depends. Maybe you are the outlier who finds perfect bliss in boss life, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Having your eyes open to the costs and not just the benefits of leadership is the wise course. Here are three guidelines to consider as you plan your future.
Some people should avoid leadership
If you have trouble with alcohol, you probably shouldn’t become a bartender or work in a liquor store, because your life will be harder in the proximity of so much booze. Similarly, if you are troubled by loneliness or your anger is hard to manage, leading others may well make your issue worse. Not only is this very bad for your well-being; it can make life harder for others around you and compromise your likelihood of success in an executive job at which, as we saw, 50 to 70% of new arrivals fail.
If you do take the job, be ready
Even if loneliness and anger aren’t particular problems for you, the data suggest that you might experience them at elevated levels. Just as you wouldn’t go into a high-stakes job unprepared professionally, you shouldn’t go in unprepared emotionally. Perhaps this means seeking help before you need it. This isn’t as strange as it sounds; I routinely recommend to executives that they seek therapy before they retire, to prepare for what can be a brutal transition. The same might be worthwhile before your promotion, but you can find many other techniques for emotional self-management, including meditation or prayer. The key thing is to start before you are struggling.
Don’t take the top job if you’re not willing to take a temporary hit to your happiness
Even if the average newly minted boss doesn’t have loneliness or anger-management concerns, they can face two years of happiness below their old level. This is baffling if they expected to be happier but completely normal and generally temporary. Still, two years is a long time. Perhaps you are willing to make this sacrifice for the good of others or for your own long-term gain. But you may have plenty of good reasons not to make this sacrifice—maybe you’re ready to wind down your career, for example, or would simply rather opt for the life-is-short school of living. Consider the cons before moving into the corner office.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life by Arthur C. Brooks. Copyright 2025 Arthur C. Brooks. All rights reserved.
