Speaker #0Hi everyone, Malou speaking. I'm the author of Life's Notebook. Welcome to the Elevation Grit. I speak about career, science and well-being. Okay, enough. Let's talk. So, addiction to success to some extent is if you work hard, you will be successful. And you will be happy. And the more you work, the more you will be successful and the more happy you will be, which is not necessarily true. Because even if you are more successful, it does not necessarily mean that you will be more happy. Especially at the beginning of my career, I was moving from one achievement to the other and in between. That was kind of a filler time, in the sense that I... It's like what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill. It's like you want to have a thrill because you have gotten an achievement, and after that achievement, the thrill wears off. and then you need another achievement to have a thrill again. And so that's how you live your life. In that sense, you overinvest in your career and you underinvest in your family life, which is, you can be successful in that sense, but it's not necessarily true that you will be happy. So the question is, do I have examples of people who are successful and unhappy? Actually, I was recently at my medical school reunion and met a lot of my previous colleagues who were very successful in their career, but who were divorced and their children were not very happy either. And... who felt that their life was not that successful, actually, because they did achieve success, but not happiness. How did I become aware that happiness and success were not necessarily related? It's when I... I got several promotions in a row and had so much workload that I couldn't see my husband on a regular basis. And my personal life was quite unsatisfactory. And so I decided maybe I need to be more balanced, to have more... Success obviously, but in my career, but also to balance my personal relationships so that I can be happy because I think that happiness drives success, not the other way around. And there are quite a lot of gurus who explain this, that this is the case. Happiness drives success, not the other way around. I became more reasonable with time. I have been very unbalanced in the sense that I was, and that is probably related a little bit to my traumatic experience in childhood when I really, the only thing I had to do is to... To work and be successful because I didn't have much of a family life because my mother died very early. And so I invested all my time in my career and neglected to some extent the private aspect. And when I met my husband, it was a different situation. He would remind me sometimes that there is also a personal life. Even so, I didn't listen initially very much. But with time, I understood that to be really happy and balanced in life, you need to have a good balance between both of them. I would suggest that you don't get fixed on one. end goal you are not your happiness is not too too dependent on one end goal but that you enjoy the journey and the process of improving and progressing and getting to some place rather than the specific end goal because it might change with your you you are changing the world is changing so eventually your end goal as you have planned it initially, is not achievable. And you still need to be happy, even if that goal is not achievable, but you are finding another goal which might be more appropriate for the situation and still be happy. For example, I started my life in research and development in the pharmaceutical industry and I could have taken as an end goal for success to become the best developer in the pharmaceutical industry. And this is obviously difficult because you always have somebody in the world who will be better than you are. So it's not a reasonable end goal to base your happiness on success on that end goal. Eventually life changes and I went to business school and eventually that end goal was not appropriate anymore. I enlarged my goal to include also business aspects of the pharmaceutical industry. And And so my happiness evolved with time and I was happy with what I had to some extent. I was not the best developer, but I was the best pharmaceutical industry person I could think of. So I think... In order not to get too much stuck with a certain image of success or certain understanding of what will make you happy. While being successful is to break down your long-term goals on intermediary goals and make progress without being too dependent on the end goal. And that prevents you from being unhappy if you don't reach that specific end.
