I am Always Late

Have you ever had to deal with too ambitious people? Then you know how hard they can be to live or work with. Their life is directed to achieving and having the best: attending the best schools or colleges, receiving the most prestigious and highly paid jobs, aspiring to occupying the most respectable and highest social positions, socializing only with the best and the most respectable people, and so on. Sometimes they achieve what they want, sometimes they do not, but those who can observe the life of too ambitions people can confirm the idea that too high ambitions do not make people happy. Very often, too high standards and too high expectations from everything and everyone make people disappointed, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, and – always late, too.

Moreover, as the latest findings by a group of experts at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business have shown, being too ambitious and always aspiring for the best can be linked to even a shorter life. A group of scientists led by Timothy Judge, professor of management, tracked personal and professional success of 717 people for over 70 years, starting from their very childhood. The experts took such factor as the participants’ education level as one of the basic indicators of their ambitions. Those who graduated from Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Berkley, Stanford, or other very prestigious educational establishments certainly got better jobs, had more prestigious occupations, thus, were considered more ambitious than those participants who received their diplomas from colleges and less prestigious universities.

It turned out that high ambitious really helped people achieve very high professional success. Positive effects of ambitions on career achievements were obvious: ambitious people studied harder, they managed to enter the best universities, get more prestigious jobs and higher salaries. However, those ambitious people who seemed to “have it all” actually suffered from adverse effects of their demanding attitude to life in their personal life. “Despite their many accomplishments, ambitious people are only slightly happier than their less ambitious counterparts, and they actually live somewhat shorter lives,” Timothy Judge commented on the findings of his fellow-scientists.

Thus, ambitious people turned out to be less lucky in their marriages and were less likely to be able to  establish good and healthy personal relationships with their life-partners. They had big hopes and dreams about their private life, however, very few of those dreams came true. These people probably made too high investments in their professional life and career, they had extremely high motivation for achievements, but spend less efforts to built healthy private life. Timothy Judge warns the parents whose children are too ambitious in their studies to be aware about the effects of this tendency on future personal life of the children. “If your biggest wish for your children is that they lead happy and healthy lives, you might not want to overemphasize professional success. There are limits to what our ambitions bring us or our children,” he said.

In our times of economic and financial crisis, social and environmental changes, growing number of serious diseases and infections, a lack of positive emotions and hopes for future, and even`end-of-world’ threat, how many of us can say that they really feel happy? And how many happy people can we see around us? People are busy and focused on solving numerous problems and managing stresses, so they have no time even to think about happiness. Want to feel happy? Check out the list of the ideas below.

1. You can not feel happy unless you believe that you are happy. Being aware about your happiness and treasuring your happiness is the only way to maximize your feeling happy and take the most of this life!

2. Making others happy is the most effective way to be happy. It is a very common stress and depression management technique, which works perfectly well and always helps people feel good and happier. Making someone happier, making someone’s dream come true, making someone be more successful or self-confident can make a serious difference in your life as well, and you’ll feel happier!

3. Do not be afraid of looking too stupid or annoying because of being too happy. Some would suppose that happy people look too foolish and annoying, when sad and pessimistic people look more serious and smart. However, in real, happy people look much warmer and more friendly, more open and self-confident, less boring and selfish.

4. Happy people can share their happiness and make others happy as well. Think of that: if you can not make other people happy, are you really a happy person? I guess the answer is “rather not”.

5. You can start living a happy life on the foundation of your own nature. Listening to yourself, trying changing yourself for better, feeling happy with own individual growth, progress and success, feeling like being at the right place in this life and in this world – those are very important factors for feeling happy.

6. All you need to feel happier is to think of feeling good and right. Giving up thinking about endless problems, ailments, troubles, stressful conditions and pessimistic ideas, and learning to think of feeling good, safe, not troubled and healthy, will substantially improve your mood and make you feel heppy!

7. Being happy does not mean that everything is perfect. Being happy means having reasons to be happy, seeing beyond imperfections and problems in your life, enjoying being who you are, appreciating and taking pleasure from every moment of your life,

8. Trying to be happy is not selfish or self-absorbed. Some may believe that in the world full of diseases, poorness, suffering and tears, it is too selfish or callous, trying to be happy. There is also a public perception that happy people are not interested in the outer world and get focused on only their happy life. The truth is, happy people are much more open for helping others and sharing their positive emotions with those around them.

9. Start being happier right now!

It’s Friday afternoon and most of those who work in the offices or do any type of similar jobs usually feel great at this time of the day. Why? Because just few hours left till the working day is over, and then two long awaited days of rest come. A completely different picture can be seen on Monday afternoon: usually, everyone is feeling depressed, stressed out or nervous, because working week has just started and more job is coming any moment. This phenomena is something very common in all parts of the world, that is why it sometimes falls within a great interest of psychologists and scientists. There are many studies and researches dedicated to studying people’s mood and its influence on our productivity, psychological condition, stress management skills, etc.

In particular, there are a number of interesting facts which became apparent analyzing what people tweet. Scott Golder and Michael Macy, Cornell sociologists, analyzed about five hundred million tweets posted by about 2.5 million people from 84 countries around the world to find out what global tendencies in people’s mood are. No wonder why such technique was chosen, cos’ we usually tweet about the things that are quite important for us. And it’s very easy to figure out how does a person feel by reading his or her tweets.

To a big surprise, it turned out that most of us wake up every morning in very good mood, no matter how cranky or how stressed out we are in the morning. However, by the lunch time people’s mood starts falling down extremely, reaching its lowest point somewhere late in the afternoon. Then, by the early evening we usually start feeling better, and this interesting tendency is absolutely valid for all people, regardless of their cultural backgrounds or geographical location.  Therefore, people’s good mood peaks in the morning and in the midnight, making such factors as the amount of sleep and the amount of daylight important.

Workings schedules are considered another issue which plays a role in how we feel. For example, the study has shown that the peak of people’s good mood in the weekends is pushed 2 hours back, because we like sleeping more in the weekends. Also, people generally feel a lot happier in the weekends, and this tendency is related exactly to the opportunity to rest on Saturday and Sunday. For example, people who live in the UAE, where a working week starts on Sunday and ends up on Thursday, demonstrated quite low mood Sunday morning, cos’ it’s the fist working day for them. Besides of workings schedules, such factors as health condition, active lifestyle and spending a night in a night-club or with friends also play a role in forming people’s mood. The findings of this interesting survey were recently published in Science magazine (Science 30 September 2011: vol. 333  no. 6051  pp. 1878-1881).