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Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I've been thinking about what I've learned during the past six decades that really matters.
(A great list!)

leadership management lessons life hbr tony_schwartz wp

Everyone knows a business needs profits, customers, and ethics. What not everyone knows is which of those should come first, second, and third. A lot of companies fail because they get the sequence wrong...
Ethics, customers, profit. Don't forget that...
employees do best when they are led, not managed. When employees are asked for their advice, rather than being told what to do, they bring their best efforts, talents, and abilities to the table...
to be fully engaged, people need to know where the company is going. Everyone needs to be aligned around a goal that makes sense.

success hbr life business wp

That said, there have been some surprises. For example, while all these things do make people happier, it’s astonishing how little any one of them matters...As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do...A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it...

One reason is that people are good at synthesizing happiness—at finding silver linings. As a result, they usually end up happier than they expect after almost any kind of trauma or tragedy.

Aren’t they deluding themselves? Isn’t real happiness better than synthetic happiness?

Let’s be careful with terms. Nylon is real; it’s just not natural. Synthetic happiness is perfectly real; it’s just man-made. Synthetic happiness is what we produce when we don’t get what we want, and natural happiness is what we experience when we do. They have different origins, but they are not necessarily different in terms of how they feel. One is not obviously better than the other.

Is being happy always desirable? Look at all the unhappy creative geniuses—Beethoven, van Gogh, Hemingway. Doesn’t a certain amount of unhappiness spur good performance?

Nonsense! Everyone can think of a historical example of someone who was both miserable and creative, but that doesn’t mean misery generally promotes creativity. There’s certainly someone out there who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and lived to be 90, but that doesn’t mean cigarettes are good for you. The difference between using anecdotes to prove a point and using science to prove a point is that in science you can’t just cherry-pick the story that suits you best. You have to examine all the stories, or at least take a fair sample of them, and see if there are more miserable creatives or happy creatives, more miserable noncreatives or happy noncreatives. If misery promoted creativity, you’d see a higher percentage of creatives among the miserable than among the delighted. And you don’t. By and large, happy people are more creative and more productive. Has there ever been a human being whose misery was the source of his creativity? Of course. But that person is the exception, not the rule...

If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network—about your friends and family and the strength of your bonds with them.

science happiness hbr wp interview daniel_gilbert

Prioritizing requires reflection, reflection takes time, and many of the executives I meet are so busy racing just to keep up they don't believe they have time to stop and think about much of anything.
Too often — and masochistically — they default to "yes." Saying yes to requests feels safer, avoids conflict and takes less time than pausing to decide whether or not the request is truly important.
Truth be told, there's also an adrenaline rush in saying yes. Many of us have become addicted, unwittingly, to the speed of our lives — the adrenalin high of constant busyness. We mistake activity for productivity, more for better, and we ask ourselves "What's next?" far more often than we do "Why this?" But as Gandhi put it, "A 'no' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."
Saying no, thoughtfully, may be the most undervalued capacity of our times. In a world of relentless demands and infinite options, it behooves us to prioritize the tasks that add the most value. That also means deciding what to do less of, or to stop doing altogether.
Making these choices requires that we regularly step back from the madding crowd. It's only when we pause — when we say no to the next urgent demand or seductive source of instant gratification — that we give ourselves the space to reflect on, metabolize, assess, and make sense of what we've just experienced.
Taking time also allows us to collect ourselves, refuel and renew, and make conscious course corrections that ultimately save us time when we plunge back into the fray.

life hbr priorities practices slow

We don't find happiness by looking within. We go outside and immerse in the world. We are called to a higher purpose by the inescapable circumstances that are laid out on our path. It's our daily struggles that define us and bring out the best in us, and this lays down the foundation to continuously find fulfillment in what we do even when times get tough.
Happiness comes from the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, and what the world needs. We've been told time and again to keep finding the first. Our schools helped developed the second. It's time we put more thought on the third.
What big problems are you trying to solve?

happiness passion wp hbr

"As 2011 comes to a close, the editors of HBR.org are taking a look back at the most popular blog posts of the year to find out what most preoccupied you, our readers. These 11 posts all hit a common nerve and went viral; it's no surprise that most of them contain advice about how to succeed and be happy at work. We can't resist including another 11 posts, a hard-to-agree-upon sampling of the ideas we were proudest to publish and discussions we most enjoyed hosting this year. If you have some free time during the holidays to catch up on your reading, we hope you'll find this list a good place to start."

hbr managers management business 2011 wp

Business teams aren’t rowing crews, of course, but the same principles of competition and coordination apply. The next time you’re trying to assemble a team, why not have two groups face off on a series of problem-solving challenges, swapping members betw

HBR business lessons cooperation competition

management work leadership innovation HBR hamel

The flood of information that swamps me daily seems to produce more pain than gain. And it’s not just the incoming tidal wave of e-mail messages and RSS feeds that causes me grief. It’s also the vast ocean of information I feel compelled to go out and exp

Information Overload attention Email Productivity HBR

Ask leaders what they think makes employees enthusiastic about work, and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five w

management leadership organization business ideas people motivation HBR performance trends

Hierarchy plus meritocracy equals quality and efficiency, right?
Wrong.
In the kind of meritocracy that companies try to implement, people progress linearly...
This approach doesn't add up for three reasons:
It allows no scope for learning. It suggests th

leadership management HBR

the best bosses are people who realize that they are prone to suffering blind spots about themselves, their colleagues, and problems in the organization — and who work doggedly to overcome them.

management leadership listening ceo hbr self-improvement

# I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
# My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
# One

management leadership listening ceo hbr self-improvement boss work

Good leaders must face facts, prepare for the worst case scenario, draw on the whole team, show constant concern for stakeholders, acknowledge mistakes and not make the same ones twice, and do the honorable thing if getting in the way of company progress.

leadership business management hbr

I've got two pieces of advice for Gen Y as it enters the workforce. I'll convey them using the words of much wiser men.
First, Voltaire on digital oversharing: "The secret of being a bore is to say everything." A good ground rule, I believe, is to primari

genrationgap millenials workplace work hbr

Turbulent times put leaders to the test. How people handle unwelcome surprises and unexpected blows to the best-laid plans can exacerbate a run of bad luck — or turn things in their favor. Traumatic change is hard enough without adding insult to injury. W

changemanagement business management change leadership harvard hbr for:@twitter

Leadership is using yourself as an instrument to get things done in the organization, so it is about self-development...
To deal with the chaos, you need a clear underlying sense of what’s important and where you and your group want to be in the future. Y

leadership management hbr learning business harvard-business boss for:@twitter

So how do we stop kidding ourselves and take back control of our attention — and our lives? Here are six simple ways to start:
1. Let your deepest values become a more powerful guide to your behaviors.
2. Slow down. The faster you're moving, the more like

productivity attention focus hbr gtd

In the course of making a decision, managers often err in one of two directions—either overanalyzing a situation or forgoing all the relevant information and simply going with their gut. HBS marketing professor Michael I. Norton discusses the potential pi

thinking cognition HBR Harvard for:@twitter

Why do you work so hard?
I remind myself it really isn’t work. My dad was a laborer who got up at 5:30 each morning and worked for 50 years in all weathers for, by showbiz standards, petty cash. I remind myself of that every time I feel a bit hard done by

fame work hbr creativity success for:@twitter