Moment 81 - Malcolm Gladwell: What You Thought About Happiness and Fulfilment is Wrong

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Reflecting on why immigrants and children of immigrants are often more successful than average, Malcolm turns conventional thinking on its head by saying it’s because immigrants make a ‘b line’ for where they need to go. They do this by often asking themselves one question. A question that Malcolm reveals, and explains why it’s crucial. It’s from the big decisions we take, and the big questions we ask ourselves, that our greatest happiness derives from. We’ll let Malcolm explain it from here… Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/rN33bySDtub Malcolm: https://www.gladwellbooks.com https://twitter.com/Gladwell?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Wait list for The Diary - Add your name here: bit.ly/3fUcF8q Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What advice would you give to people around that age? Say the early twenties, maybe just graduated and thinking about going off into the world? Because I hear a lot of these stories about certain small factors can have such a tremendous impact on your outcomes, like the city you live in. Would you encourage younger people to go and get into those big cities if they're trying to have careers in things like journalism, or media, or whatever, or business? And how much of a swing does that have? Because I always think, you know, I'm on Dragon's Den and I see these entrepreneurs coming in and pitching tech companies. And I always think, sometimes I think you're at like a 90% disadvantage versus just being over there on the west coast of America in San Francisco.

• 0:47Steven Bartlett?

  I think sometimes I think it's more than a 90% disadvantage, but situational and environmental factors on outcomes.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  It's always been this puzzle in many countries, but particularly the United States, about why do immigrants do so well? And, you know, one of the explanations was immigrants to the United States have always been very aggressive about seeking educational opportunities. Or maybe they brought with them education. So that was one argument for the longest time. But now we realize actually it's less that and more that they, unlike many Native Americans, are willing to move where opportunities are. So the immigrants are mobile in a way, they don't have any roots, they don't have family that's keeping them in one place or another.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  They simply make a beeline for the places where they can, you know, further their own economic and personal interests the quickest and the most efficiently. Native people don't do that because they have too many encumbrances. And so my advice to people, young people, is always, where do you want to move? That's the first question you should ask yourself. Your default should be you're going to move somewhere, right? Don't fall in the trap of, when you're 23, of doing the comfortable thing and staying near family and friends. That's, there'll be plenty of time for that later. The only question on your mind should be, where should I move? And once you decide where you move, I think a lot of other things fall into place.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  So if you are someone who imagines that you would like to start a company in the tech world, then yeah.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Move to Northern California, or Austin, Texas, or Tel Aviv, or whatever. You know, go where the, I think you're absolutely right. You need to go where the opportunity is. It's not going to come to you magically. And you are at a huge disadvantage if you're not there. It's just no question about that. People have confused the efficiency of digital communication, the kind of, the logistical efficiency of digital communication with emotional efficiency and kind of psychological efficiency. It is, it is only logistically efficient. It does not resolve, it doesn't help someone trust you more, or take a chance on you, or get to know you in all of your complexity.

• 3:06Steven Bartlett?

  Yes, I wish, yeah. It's one of the things my parents said to me at a very young age was we lived in Devon, which is, you know Devon, right down in the corner on the farms. And they were very clear at a young age. They said, you've got to leave here. So just so you're all well aware, for the four of us, you have all got to go out of this city. So, and we were all very clear on that. And all of my friends are still there, every single one of them. And all of my best friends are still in Plymouth. But even if they went to university in another city, they came back. It's not to say that they're not happier than me. And this is maybe my next question, which is, because I hear that immigrant tale all the time, that immigrants tend to have better outcomes relatively, whatever it might be. But my question becomes, are they happier? And I say this actually because of a conversation I was having last night

• 3:50Steven Bartlett?

  with my friend who has built, his family have built a billion dollar company in this country. The dad was the first generation immigrant here. The dad is just completely overwhelmed with work. Like, he is obsessed, to the point now, the son said to me last night, I don't actually think he knows what makes him happy at all. But because he was in survival mode when he came here, they've got a billion dollar, it's actually, I think it was worth five billion now. But is he happy? And I sometimes ponder that the first sort of generation immigrant is on survival mode. The second generation has the chance of being in a, maybe a thriving self-actualization situation. But I don't know if you had any light to shed on first generation happiness?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  I'm always, I'm dubious of this. So I, I, all of this happiness stuff, and I say this, and I'm, I'm, I'm fully open to the possibility that I'm wrong. But my understanding of happiness is, because of the research on happiness, is that it's a fairly stable trait. In other words, there are people who are happy, regardless of where they are, and people who are not, or people who don't appear happy, or people for whom happiness represents itself differently. So I would say of your friend's father, you know, maybe he is happy, he just expresses it differently. He built a massive business, he's made his family stable, he's created a secure beachhead

• 5:16Speaker 01

  in a whole new country. You don't think that makes him happy when he puts his head on the pillow at night? I think it probably does. It's just not, it's not the kind of lie on the beach, read a good book, happy. But it sounds to me like a pretty amazing set of accomplishments that would make him, will he die happy having done that? Yes, he will, I think. I don't know, I never met the man, but I'm just, I'm wondering.

• 5:41Steven Bartlett?

  Billionaires generally.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 5:42Steven Bartlett?

  People say they've never met a happy billionaire.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  I just don't, I don't believe that. I think they derive, I think people who've, who've accomplished something like that, they derive a different kind of satisfaction from it. But it doesn't, it's not a lesser kind of satisfaction. You know, do I work more than most people? If I look at the cohort of people I went to college with, university with, do I work more than most of them? Yeah, probably. Do I spend less time? You know, uh, watching movies and reading books and going on holiday? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean I'm less happy? No, I think I'm pretty happy. You know, I don't have a problem with it.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  I, you know, it's like, and I, I just, I, yeah, that's, I'm a little bit skeptical of this narrow definition of happiness.

• 6:36Steven Bartlett?

  So, so I think, I think it's based on this idea that to be happy or whatever, you have to have this kind of recipe of ingredients and they have to be equally balanced. You have to have, you know, strong interpersonal relationships or meaningful connections. You have to have, you know, exercise, you know, these kinds of things. So when you see an individual who's so out of balance because they, they just worked when, you know, every waking hour of every day and they don't make time for friends, families or walking the dog, people, and they're, you know, consumed by it. People from the outside go, well, that's, that's not a happy person. And you would, I would think the science would support the fact that people tend to be happier when they have stronger, more meaningful relationships and they have more, more balance in their lives generally.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I think, so you understand, I'm making, so let's go back to your friend's father. So your friend's father is not someone about whom we can generalize.

• 7:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  He's clearly a, you know, he's an outlier of some sort. He's probably, he's in a, I imagine there's a whole series of traits that he's in the 99th percentile on, probably incredibly intelligent, incredibly driven, you know, list them all. So that kind of person is never going to have a balanced life. I mean, you could put him in, you know, the, the, the, the cornfields of Iowa and say, you're going to be a, you're going to be a farmer. That's all you can do. And he's gonna, he's gonna live, he's gonna be someone who's like working, you know, 80 hours a week and right? That's just his temperament. So the question is, what I'm saying is happiness for him is probably going to look differently

• 8:17Speaker 01

  than happiness for lots of other people, but he's highly unusual. For the average person, yes, balance is, is appropriate, but you didn't ask me about an average person. You asked me about a, someone who's, who built, built an enormous business from scratch.

• 8:31Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I worry, I think I worry sometimes, part of the reason I think I ask the question is for myself, that I'm being dragged by my own like insecurities. So I sit here with a lot of, you know, successful, maybe billionaire CEOs that have built these great companies. And you find out that the reason they built them is because their mother, in the case of one of my previous guests, which was on two weeks ago, and he said this on the podcast, he's got a billion dollar beer company. You find out it's because his mother, when he was a young kid, basically always convinced him he was never enough. She'd come into his room, smash his toys and say things to him to convince him that he was just never good enough. So he's had this almost neurotic obsessive drive to prove to the world that he is good enough. And you wonder how voluntary that that that drive is and what it's come at the cost of.

• 9:12Steven Bartlett?

  And is he really, you know, is this individual really happy and fulfilled? Or are they just being pulled by their insecurities?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  But, you know, there are, maybe another way of saying this is that, so to use that person as an example, so he took a kind of trauma and made something productive out of it. It had a great deal of certain personal costs, but he took something that might have defeated others and ended up contributing substantially to society. I wouldn't, he may not be happy, but I would describe his life as a triumph, right? And the other thing I would say is that the language of happiness has to go alongside this question of what contribution you're making to the world you live in, that there are many people who are not personally

• 10:03Speaker 01

  happy, but who make enormous contributions. And that's, that's a parallel and in many cases, far more important function, you know, was Florence Nightingale happy? Probably not. I can tell from what I know about her life, she had all kinds of psychological issues or whatever, but she made an enormous contribution that continues to this day, right? She started a whole, you know, so there are, like I said, I would like to have a kind of, I would like to the, to evaluate people's lives along a whole series of dimensions and understand that not everyone can satisfy each of those dimensions in any moment.