Just be happy. Regardless of what’s happening around you. That may be the simplest and most straight-forward advice you can get from those who’ve studied the circuitry and poetry of the human mind.

It sounds simple enough. Of course, it helps to drill down and elaborate a bit about what that means for your long march to the top of your profession. Studies of our emotional lives suggest that five principles guide the building of happy careers:

1. You need to realize you’re bad at predicting which things would make you happy. No, really, we're all terrible at this. Magnificent as our brains are in finding ways to split atoms and explore the cosmos, they suffer from a host of illusions and wrong guesses when they try to imagine which circumstances would make us feel better about ourselves, say, ten years off into the future.

One finding always comes as a shock: Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert has noted that winning the lottery won’t make you happier than you currently are--and becoming a paraplegic probably won’t make you unhappier than you are.

“The fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives,” according to Gilbert, author of the acclaimed 2007 book Stumbling on Happiness, said in his popular TED talk from a decade ago.

How could this be? Experts have found that most of us maintain a certain baseline level of happiness, and outside events usually won’t change that. After a period of adjustment to a good or a tragic event, we generally go back to where we were.

You may imagine that a certain job, a corner office, a cabin in the woods, or a relationship would make you happy, and you may burst an artery trying to make it happen. But the research demonstrates otherwise.

2. Forget the hype: Your dreams should be reasonable and negotiable.

Yes, you’ve been told by the Oprah gang to have insane dreams and to never quit on them. But most folks who want to be well-adjusted human beings should pay no mind to that.

Rebecca Webber, writing recently in Psychology Today article about the process of reinventing ourselves, noted, “Most of us have a tendency towards illusory superiority—the belief that we are above average in our abilities, even though all of us can't possibly be. That's why it's crucial to be brutally honest as you assess yourself and the effort needed to achieve the reinvention you seek.”

And reinvention requires the ability to let go of old dreams in order to find more meaningful ones.

3. Doing things that you like will make you happier than doing things that would impress others.

I personally try to heed the advice that you’ll be happier buying an item that delights you rather than an item that would make others jealous. The same advice apparently applies to careers. Webber has cited research from the University of Rochester showing that people who are “intrinsically motivated—working toward things they find personally fulfilling—are less depressed and more satisfied with their lives than those who are extrinsically motivated, striving primarily to impress the outside world with a big paycheck or lofty job title.”

4. Reality check: You’ll feel the same way on the big stage tomorrow that you feel today on your small one.

To paraphrase the old parable of the talents, what you do with a little really is what you’ll do with a lot, and what you do on the small stage is pretty much all you’ll do on the big stage. Webber has deflated the myth that a bigger stage will bring out a better side of ourselves: “[Instead] we get our typical everyday self, struggling with the same traits—fear, laziness, procrastination—that consistently hold us back today."

If many of us realized this, we’d become happier, mainly we’d become less frantic about chasing down roles on the big stage, or we'd spend less time deluding ourselves about how we'll really "turn it on" once we find ourselves on a bigger stage.

5. There's no need to go “organic”: Artificial, synthetic happiness beats the natural kind.

Gilbert has described natural happiness as the kind that results from getting what we want. And synthetic happiness is the kind that we muster from deep within, as a healthy response to not getting what we want. [And I strongly suspect that synthetic happiness is the clinical term for what many religious people call “joy,” which can bubble up even in difficult circumstances.]

Ultimately, you build strong, long-term happiness by making sure that your dreams are reasonable and that your goals and priorities aren’t in conflict with each other.

In creating and managing a worthy dream or life goal, Webber has argued that the wise thing is to honestly ask yourself several questions, such as:

  • Does your goal match your values and your other priorities?
  • Will you be able to pursue it long-term, and for the right reasons?
  • Can you gain satisfaction from each step?
  • Is achieving it within your control?

Honesty in answering such questions can help you discern if that goal of yours that’s off in the distance, which seems so mouth-wateringly tantalizing to you, may turn out to be a mirage once you finally arrive at it.

Gilbert has suggested that we can dial down our desperate hoarding of natural happiness by focusing more on churning out the synthetic stuff. “Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown,” he said in his TED talk, “because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing.”

Psychologist Martin Seligman, the father of the “positive psychology” movement, has talked about the importance of "learned optimism," in contrast to helplessness and pessimism that also are often learned through experience. Given that optimism and happiness lead to better physical and mental well being, they need to be cultivated in and of and for themselves--regardless of what’s happening today in your life and regardless of what your 10-year plan is.

It's actually as simple as that: Just be happy. Even if you have to make happiness the "synthetic" way.

Rob Asghar is the author of Leadership Is Hell, now available at Amazon


(Photo credit: Charles Henry)