Speaker 1:	Hopefully we'll have a great year. Thanks. (applause) 
Roxanne:	Okay. So for today's presentation we have from the UT marketing we have-,
Speaker 3:	I think it was me.
Speaker 4:	Get away from the speaker.
Roxanne:	Okay, I'm little rattled now, but we're all safe, that was another one. So from marketing, we have Dr. Raj Raghunathan, who's going to speak to you today about something that should be really helpful at the start of your semester. He has information about success, willpower and happiness. Knock yourself out for lunch, by the way, but you might think about the willpower thing. And-,
Speaker 5:	[inaudible 00:00:56]
Roxanne:	... pizza over there and he's here to take it away. Actually you might wanna [inaudible 00:01:04]
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah, they said, I have this mic out here.
Roxanne:	We're good
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay.
Roxanne:	Yeah.
Dr. Raghunathan:	All right. Do we have one of those clicker thing, you're going to do it.
Roxanne:	We had something else.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. Great. Anyway, good noon, I guess good just afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. I am a professor in the marketing department at the University of Texas, McCombs School of Business, just across the street. I teach a course called creativity and leadership, it has to do broadly speaking with identifying the determinants of leading a fulfilling, meaningful and happy life. 
	It's a long story as to how I evolved into teaching that course. But it's very fulfilling course for me to teach. It's the topic that speaks to me most personally. And I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to teach this course and to talk to you guys about a small part of that course that I've kind of pulled together to make this talk. 
	So I've titled it, 'What does it take to succeed?' And before I give you a little bit of my perspective on this question, I'd actually like to ask you guys a question. So, how would you guys define success? I know some of you have got lots of pizza in your mouth and perhaps you don't want to talk right now, but, yeah. 
Speaker 7:	Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Wow.
Speaker 7:	The author is Winston Churchill.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Wow. Okay. It's a good quote. I think I should write it down. Any other perspectives on it? Yeah.
Speaker 8:	Enjoying what you do and making money at it.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. That's good. 
Speaker 9:	Being able to stay and come home at the end of day and not be [inaudible 00:03:05].
Dr. Raghunathan:	So you just don't have any negatives, that's good enough kind of a thing. Okay. Any others? Maybe I'll take a couple more. Yeah.
Speaker 10:	Success is sacrifice. 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. What kind of sacrifice?
Speaker 10:	If you have a goal and there's other stuff that you wanna do in order to reach your goal, you have to sacrifice other things no matter how you want them in order to reach your goal. 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. So kind of overcome the temptations or whatever to. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 11:	The process of continuing and getting better.
Dr. Raghunathan:	All right. I'll take one more. Last one.
Speaker 12:	Overcoming obstacles to the goal that you want to [inaudible 00:03:48]
Dr. Raghunathan:	Overcoming obstacles, similar to what she said kind of a thing. Okay.
	There's many different ways in which you could define success. The one way in which I'm going to define it today is the following, which hopefully nobody will have major objections to, which is that achieving what truly matters. So I'm pitching it at a really high level, what really matters to one might be different from what really matters to another person, but achieving that, that truly matters, then you're successful. 
	So I'm going to give you a little bit of perspective on what I think everybody really at some level desires. So what truly, truly matters to a lot of people. And I based it off of research that's been done across a variety of universities, a variety of people, including some of my own, but I'm not going to cite all the research here, I'm going to get straight to the punch line. 
	So many of you might have come across this saying by or this quote by Maya Angelou that, "People don't remember what you said or what you did, but they remember how you made them feel," right?
	So, I've been wondering about whether that's true for your life to. When you get to the end of your life, you look back and you think to yourself, "I don't really care what I did what I said, but I really wonder how I made myself feel." Of course, an important part is how you made other people feel too. But is it possible that what truly, truly matters to you at the end of your life is how happy you are with your life? 
	So let me give you kind of synopsis of two sets of studies that are relevant to this question. One is studies on what people remember from past events, okay. And it turns out that people remember mostly how they felt about it. If you think about a movie that you might have seen 10 years back or a vacation that you took to Italy five years back or wherever.
	You may forget the details of the movie. You might forget exactly what happened, what happened to the plot, etc. But surely you remember how you feel about the movie. If somebody would ask you on a five point scale. How many stars would you give it? You'd be able to answer that question pretty easily. 
	Likewise if you've met somebody; Sarah at a party like last Halloween, and you were like drunk out of your mind, you don't remember much about how Sarah looked, you know, the color of her hair or whatever. But you have a kind of emotional trace about Sarah. You have a feeling about her. It turns out that we are very adept. We're almost programmed as a human species. In fact, animals are the same way. There's studies done with Alzheimer's patients who forget that their son just visited them, but somehow they are in a happy mood. They don't know why. 
	So we retain an emotional trace of events from our life. And that it seems is more important than our thoughts about that particular event or our sensory memory about what we saw, what we smelled and so on. Another set of studies which I called winter years studies, is a set of studies that look at what people remember or rather I should say that people when they asked this question; what is it that you would do that's different from what you have done if you could live your life all over again?
	Most people it turns out don't really regret having led the kind of life that they led. Which is somewhat understandable that people are pretty egotistical about the way that they went about their life and they are on average pretty happy about what happened. But if there're forced and to answer this question, it turns out most people say that, "well, I just wish that I hadn't been so stuck up about my life. I'd be a little more easygoing, I'd remember to enjoy my life and remember to come back home and hug my kids and kiss them good night to asleep, and so on.
	So most people feel that they were too focused on achieving this notion of success that most of us subscribe to, especially in capitalistic societies and we forget to kind of enjoy life. We forget to kind of be in the moment; so to speak. So, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration, I think that if you were to extrapolate from the studies to come to the conclusion that what eventually matters, what truly matters to most people, is, "Did I lead a happy life?" 
	I'm going to try and talk a little more about happiness. I don't want to make the case that you could argue that there are two kinds of happiness. So, what exactly is happiness? And what is the kind of happiness that people find the most meaningful? So one happiness, and I kind of refer to this happiness by the small letter h, is the kind of happiness that most of us think happiness refers to. This has to do with achievements, a feeling of superiority, feeling of pride, and importance. A feeling that at the end of the day, I'm special, I'm gifted and somehow different from other people, but in a positive way. 
	Most of us can relate to it. And if I were to ask you to recount the last time you were happy, chances are that you will go you're going to write something that has to do with this kind of happiness, you know, something that's achievement oriented.
	Then there's another kind of happiness that results from a feeling of harmony within yourself. If you think about the different aspects of yourself, the goals that you have the relationships that you have, the kinds of thoughts that you have, the kinds of feelings that you have, the kinds of actions that you engage in, the kinds of movies that you see, and so on, you could make the case that sometimes people do things that fragment them. 
	Other times people lead a life that could be called a harmonized life where every aspect of the persona are building on top of each other, there's no inconsistency in the different aspects of the persona. So this kind of happiness is different from the earlier kind of happiness. Or you could refer to the first kind of happiness with a small h as egotistical happiness; which kind of really results from a feeling that you are somehow better than other people. 
	And the second kind of happiness as resulting from a connectivity not just other people, but with your existence, with everything around you. It leads to a feeling that life is perfect with its imperfections. Challenges are no longer daunting and overwhelming and stress inducing, they are what make life interesting. So that kind of happiness. 
	Now, how many of you guys feel that you relate to this difference? Just with a show of hands? Okay. Anybody really out here that feels that the second kind of happiness that I described doesn't ever apply to them, they have never experienced it. Anybody like that? 
	It's okay. I mean, this is like a therapy session. You can raise your hands. Nobody's going to look down on you. The important thing is, to be honest. I'm going to make the case that the second kind of happiness is superior to the first kind of happiness, not in some kind of moralistic judgmental way, but just in terms of being more sustainable.
	It's the kind of happiness that if you know how to achieve it, it's based on itself. It builds up as a virtuous cycle. The first kind of happiness in contrast, builds a vicious cycle where it becomes more and more difficult to maintain it. 
	I'm going to tell you why, but first, I mean, I don't want to make the case at both of them are positive states. One of them is more tranquil, if you will, it's got its depth in peace rather than a heightened stimulation. And I also want to make the case that both kinds of happiness are recognized in the world and emphasized but to varying degrees across societies. 
	And I think that in most capitalistic Western societies, the first kind of happiness with small h is emphasized more. If you look at the messages in society, the achievement orientation and so on. That is the kind of happiness that's emphasized and we absorb it as the kind of happiness that we want to experience. And we implicitly all move around the world with a set of goals that are more conducive for achieving the first kind of happiness.
	Okay, except in the arts I think that when you look at music or go to a museum or see movies that are the type of happiness that I'm talking about. You'll see lots of examples of that. So let me just quickly talk about the subversive nature of the first kind of happiness. If you set your life up to achieve that kind of happiness, because that's the kind of happiness that truly matters to you. Then what happens is that you're going to ... I'm going to eventually conclude by saying that you're going to be on a treadmill, thereafter you have to run faster and faster to be in the same place. 
	And this is the reason why, set of reasons actually. There's no heart yardstick for measuring your importance or your achievement. If you run a 100 meters race in 10 seconds, is that good or bad? You don't know. The only way you can assess how good you are is by comparing yourself to other people. There's a bunch of experiments that have been done on it. You can just google social comparison experiments. You know, there's a really famous experiment from the 1950s by Ash, that will come up; it is really entertaining and informative to see. 
	So what happens is that in order to feel important, we end up comparing ourselves to others on what we can see. Which turns out to be things like money, fame, power, beauty, and so on, all these extrinsic rewards. So a person who wants to maximize happiness with a small h, ends up kind of running after these things.
	And it turns out that, of course, other people are not going to give you a validation that your high achiever or any more high achieving than they are. Maybe they'll say it on your face, but you know that they're not being sincere a lot of times, because they themselves are after exactly the same thing, that's one reason. 
	The second is adaptations. I mean, if you have a big house and a big car and a big swimming pool, is that good enough or not? I mean, you get adapted to it, and you want to even a bigger salary and bigger house and bigger car and so on, before you can feel the same level of happiness that you were feeling earlier. 
	And lastly, I mean, there's only one place at the very top. I mean, there's only one person who can be the richest. And even that person if you look at them, they're pretty insecure, because there are other people kind of right behind them, wanting to overtake them. So there's no security in being at that very top place.
	So like I mentioned some time back, the quest for happiness to the with a small h results in being on our hedonic treadmill kind of thing. And what kind of implicitly you might be unconscious of this, but what it leads to is what I call a scarcity mindset. You're constantly kind of vigilant that other people are sniffing at your heels, you're constantly bothered about how much richer or famous or beautiful you are than other people. So you end up feeling that life is a zero sum game, I can only win if other people lose. 
	Alright, so let me talk a little bit about the second kind of happiness. I call it the symbiotic nature of happiness. If you're not familiar with the term; basically what it means is that it's a win win world. So I can help other people and in that process get helped myself. There are two kinds of things that produce this kind of happiness. And these might be somewhat alien to us concepts. But once I described them, I think you can relate to them. And one of them is what I call the need for absorption. 
	And the second is the need to love and nurture other people, rather than the need to be loved and nurtured. And it might be surprising on the face of it, to think that loving another person or feeling compassionate towards other people can actually produce happiness. Okay, but that's a testament to how disconnected we are with what our true nature is, I think. 
	But let me first talk a little bit about the need for absorption. So I want to describe to you a kind of experience and you can tell me if you've ever experienced this. So you're involved in an activity. It could be anything from rock climbing, to painting, to dancing or whatever or having sex for that matter. Okay, but where time seems to expand in the moment. You almost see it going still by still in front of you, like in a movie theater. But yet when you look back upon the event, it seems like the whole thing past really fast. That's one of the kind of ceiling characteristics of being absorbed.
	You don't have any attentional capacity leftover to be self-conscious when that activity is happening. So you're not judging yourself while you're engaged in the activity, the whole persona, your everything that you are, is immersed in the activity. Again, I mean, it could be anything, you know, different people are different. We have different intelligences. We have different proclivities. It could be while watching a game too, sometimes.
	So ironically, you're not really happy in the sense that, you know, I've described these two kinds of happiness, while you're engaged in the activity because you can't make a pronouncement as to what's going on. But if somebody were to measure your galvanic skin response, so your heart rates and so on, you're very relaxed. You're very relaxed and tranquil. It's only when the event is over that you reflect back upon it and you can make the pronouncement that you're happy.
	So I already mentioned this, that this is a serene feature of the activity, that you're immersed in the activity, and you're also fully present. How many of you guys have had these kind of experiences in your life? Anybody never had these experiences again. I mean, no one's going to look down upon you. So if it's totally alien to you, that's interesting, I think. Again, goes to show perhaps, that you've been unlucky in not having stumbled upon something that is perhaps one of the most significant features of human existence to experience this thing called flow. 
	So, let me talk a little bit about flow and how it was kind of unearthed so to speak. So there was this guy Csikszentmihalyi, who gave a bunch of 800 people in the 1960s a little like a pager device, and he would have them ... whenever the pager went off, you know, it would go off at random times they would have to write down what they would were doing in a journal that he had given them, and also indicate how happy they were. 
	And then he took all those journal entries and then he read through them. And it turned out that when people experience this thing called flow, it's usually characterized by this thing that I'm going to talk about, which is that; the required ability of engaging in a task is just a little bit more than the amount of ability that people have to engage in the task. So, imagine that you're playing a game of tennis, but you playing against somebody who's just a little bit better than you are. So, you're stretched. You have to bring in all your experience and your abilities and everything to the fore to engage in that activity. That's when you're likely to engage flow. Or you're climbing a rock face you're a rock climber, and it's just a little more difficult than anything you've done in the past, so you stretch now. 
	So you're completely absorbed in, you know, you're not really thinking in the sense that we think of thinking, you're just absorbed. Every aspect of your personality is absorbed in that activity. Now, it turns out that there are different types of flow. And in the lower levels, when you're playing tennis against a beginner, you're a beginner, you know, you can't even get like a rally going, that's not very, really absorbing as much as it is, when you get to a higher level of expertise. When you can now kind of have a good backhand and a forehand. And the rallies are kind of 10 to 15, number of times, exchanges and so on.
	So, I'm going to kind of leave that part out now for the time being, but this is the most important feature for flow activities, that your ability is stretched. I want to talk about the second determinant of this happiness with a big H. So, the flows and absorption is very important. So what it means basically, is that you need to identify something into which you can get absorbed as your vocation as your job. 
	And the second is this need to love or nurture and, you know, I think there is a prevalent notion again, especially in the Western world that you know, we're all selfish and there is a book called the 'Selfish Gene' you might have read it, Richard Dawkins, it's a good book. 
	But I think that we've ignored the other part of it, which is that we are, people who have the ability to imagine the pain of other people and the pleasure that other people experience, we have the ability to empathize. And that's a big source by which we experience our emotions; by relating to what other people feel. And this naturally leads to a desire for caring about other people. And this is most explicit, of course, in you know, parent child relationships. But it's also kind of pretty obvious when you look at how friends react to each other or interact with each other. 
	There have been studies done with monkeys which show that even monkeys have a sense of fairness and trust and compassion. And, there is studies which show that it doesn't happen with kids who are below four years old. They are generally pretty self-centered, they have other positives, I mean, they're cute but they're not exactly the most sharing, giving kind of people. 
	So the other interesting thing is the feelings of elevation as it's called. It's come to be called elevation. So you could replace the happiness of the big H with this new term that's been introduced over the last three or four years in the emotions research with this term called elevation. Is experienced even when you vicarious even when you watch two other people being kind to each other, as happens when you watch a movie. I'm going to show you guys a quick video clip here. 
	... Roxanne, could you help me with this?
Roxanne:	Okay, you want it to play?
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah, I just wanna play. 
Roxanne:	[inaudible 00:21:58]
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. You might wanna do this then.
Roxanne:	It?s loading now.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Right, but it could start playing it even before it loads up fully. You might wanna reload it?
Roxanne:	All right. We'll have to it start with the commercial though! 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah, probably. But you know what we can do is-,
Roxanne:	You talk while [crosstalk 00:22:20].
Dr. Raghunathan:	Okay. Yeah, I just talk while- ... Let me see what I had what I had next. Okay.
Roxanne:	[inaudible 00:22:42]
Speaker 13:	(audio from video) Just impossible to say.
Roxanne:	Okay.
Dr. Raghunathan:	If only you could increase the volume. 
Speaker 14:	(video) When elephants retire, many pack their dams for the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. They arrived here one by one, but stay here two by two. 
Carol Buckley:	(video) Every elephant that comes here, searches out someone that she then spends most of her time with. What are you doing? 
Speaker 14:	(video) Sanctuary co-founder Carol Buckley says, "It's like best girlfriends." 
Carol Buckley:	It's just like us. You know somebody that they relate to. They have something in common with. Oh hello, how are you?
Speaker 14:	Debbie has Ronnie.
Carol Buckley:	Best buds, these two. 
Speaker 14:	Misty can't live without Dulory and perhaps the closest friends of all-, 
Carol Buckley:	Tara and Bella, of course.
Speaker 16:	There's no other elephant around here? 
Speaker 14:	That's Tara. 
Speaker 16:	Just these two. 
Speaker 14:	And this is Bella. 
Carol Buckley:	This is her friend and her friend just happens to be a dog and not an elephant. 
Speaker 16:	That's hilarious. 
Speaker 14:	Bella is one of more than a dozen stray dogs that have found a home at the sanctuary. Most want nothing to do with the elephants and vice versa. But not this odd couple. They are absolutely inseparable. 
Carol Buckley:	When, it's time to eat, they both eat together, they drink together, they sleep together, they play together.
Speaker 14:	Tara and Bella have been close for years but no one really knew how close they were until recently. A few months ago, Bella suffered a spinal cord injury. She couldn't move your her legs, could even wag her tail. For three weeks, the dog lay motionless up in the sanctuary office.
Speaker 14:	And for three weeks the elephant held vigil. 2,700 acres to roam free, and Tara just stood in the corner. 
Carol Buckley:	To me it really was she was concerned about her friend! 
Speaker 14:	Then one day co-founder Scott Blake carried Bella onto the balcony, so she and Tara could at least see each other. 
Scott Blake:	And Bella's tale started wagging, you know and we had no choice but to bring her down the sitar. 
Speaker 14:	They visited like this every day till Bella could walk. 
Speaker 16:	Wow. 
Speaker 14:	Today, their love and trust is stronger than ever. Bella even let's Tara pet her tummy with her foot. They harbor no fears, no secrets, no prejudices, just two living creatures who somehow managed to look past their immense differences. Take a good look America. Take a good look world; if they can do it, what's our excuse?
Speaker 18:	People at the sanctuary say that over the years, Bella has become very protective of Tara. Protective of what? No one's really quite sure.
Speaker 3:	That was pretty amazing.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Alright ... Why is it moving around like this. Okay. 
Roxanne:	[inaudible 00:25:39].
Dr. Raghunathan:	That's fine. I mean it can be ... Open it back. ...
	All right. Good. Okay. I would say that this two needs, the need for absorption and they need to love as opposed to need to be loved are our sustainable sources of happiness. And there are many reasons for this. But I'll just talk about a couple of ones. One is that, when you're focusing on the activity for the activity sake, rather than for rewards, it turns out that you automatically build expertise over a time. And you are known for that activity over time. You may not be famous initially, you may not be rich or whatever, people may not be paying attention to you. But lots of people are doing really weird stuff. 
	If you think about everything that we take for granted as something that the world was like that from when I was born like a drum set, is like a drum set is a snare. Somebody invented that somebody put that together. It didn't exist before somebody put that together. Somebody spent a lot of time putting it together, and maybe two generations. Why is the piano the way it is? Somebody put that together. I mean, there are people who manufacture mannequins, where did that come from? I'm just picking ... The people repair mannequins and make a career out of it, and they love it.
	I mean there's so many things out there, so many options out there that we don't see but unless we're true to what our passion is, it's difficult to discover it. If you just follow the heart and we want to make money and become powerful and rich and so on, then of course you can go into investment banking and consulting and become a lawyer and so on. But it's boring. Find what you're passion is.
	So you have no option but to develop expertise in the area that you're passionate about over a period of time. If you follow the activity for the activity's sake. And the other thing is and here's where it becomes really kind of interesting is that even though people get really jealous when you say that, "The guy's making a $1,000,000 dollars. And look at his beautiful wife, or look at the big house that they have on the hill," or whatever. When you say that, "That guy he's really into his work, he's really happy and enjoying his work." Nobody says, "Gosh, you know I feel really jealous." People almost feel like, "That's good, that's great." I mean, that the guy enjoys his work. So nobody grudges your sense of absorption and the activity of flow. So those are just a couple of reasons why these are sustainable. 
	And the other thing that happens, especially with regard to the need to love is that when you truly are authentically worried about and caring about what other people feel and feel their pain and want to help them out, then you automatically behave in exactly the same fashion that you would if you wanted to be loved. So if you're authentically coming from a place of caring for other people, and compassionate, then again, I mean, you have no choice but to become the kind of person that everybody loves. So it's one of those things where when you don't chase it, it certainly comes to you, instead of this positive feedback loop. 
	It leads to the adoption of what I would call an abundance mindset. You know, life is plentiful, I'm thankful for everything that's around me. And there's nothing in my life that's missing. And when you operate from that space and everything does come to you. Okay, that's the irony of it. What are the implications ... let me just talk a little bit about this and then I'll open it up to any questions that you might have. So I think that if you could kind of make a decision right now, that you want to move away from trying to maximize this happiness with the small h, and move towards a maximizing happiness with a big H, I think you will be doing yourself a big favor. 
	But I don't want to say or pretend that this is an easy thing to do. It's a very tough transition to achieve. And partly because we've been coached through our entire lifetime to believe in the scarcity mindset. Most of the stuff that we see around us is programmed to instill in us a sense of competitiveness, a sense of feeling that I can only be superior if somebody else is inferior. That there is a limited amount of resources out there. Intelligence is defined in a very limited sense and if somebody else is intelligent, in that sense, then I'm not as intelligent and so on.
	But what I would ... And this is a big topic. I cover this topic over the entire semester in my class. But if I were to give you a quick, four point tip on tips on how to go about achieving this transition, the first thing that I would say is that you really need to spend a lot of time figuring out what you'd want to do in life. I mean, that's very, very important. 
	It seems like almost an obvious thing that if you're kind of headed and running fast in some direction, you need to know where you're going, right? If your destination is not clear, then why are you running in the first place. But we hardly ever in any education system across the world focused on this important question, what do you want to do with your life? We just kind of run around like headless chicken thinking that that problem is going to resolve itself at some point, it doesn't. 
	A couple of books that I recommend out here is; 'The Element' which just came out in 2009, I think, by a guy called Ken Robinson, who talks about the importance of finding what it is that you love to do, and ending up with doing that. Okay, what you love to do.
	The second book is, 'Now Discover Your Strengths.' I forget the names of the authors now. But, if you write down the title of the book, you can google it on Amazon, which leads you through a bunch of exercises that are programmed to letting you discover what you're good at. 
	The other thing, though, that I would say, which I think is indispensable is to keep a journal. Get into the habit right now, if you don't already do it, but every evening, just write down what it is that has happened to you that day. And what is it that you enjoyed doing. And if you make it an explicit purpose, to find out what it is that you truly inherently enjoy, then it will kind of immerse to you over a period of time. 
	And I say that this only emerges over a period of time for most people because we have lost touch. As kids we knew what we wanted to do. And sometimes as kids we don't know what we want to do, but we just say it because momently we feel like we want to be a pilot or whatever, we say it but, we definitely are more in touch with what it is that we enjoy in a moment to moment basis and we lose touch with that. So if you keep your journal and you write down in it, what it is that you truly enjoy doing, reflect on it, over time you'll arrive at that point where you know what it is that you're passionate. 
	Second is that you need to surround yourself with stimuli. And by stimuli, I mean people, activities and so on that emphasize flow and need to love. So movies, books, videos, I'm going to suggest a couple of those on the next slide. But the other thing that becomes very important here is social service. I mean, a lot of people think that, well, I don't have the time for it, and I don't have money for it and really, I mean, truly speaking, I'm not the kind of guy that derives any enjoyment. I'm not a compassionate person, you know, let's face it, that's how you might feel at the end of the day. 
	But here's where I think there is a huge amount of kind of nobility in acting according to where you want to be. And I think that sometimes what happens is you discover that you have hidden potential that you didn't know existed till you actually start acting. So we usually think of our attitudes and our values as a driving behavior. But behavior can often drive your attitudes too. So all you need to do is just take a step in that direction and the world will help you out, will pull you into its grasp, so to speak. 
	So again, there's no dearth of social service organizations. But once you start doing it, you know, building a home for somebody who's home is wrecked. Or you help out people like I do, you know, there's a community called the care communities. And we help out people who are on the last legs, very close to their death. Either with AIDS or cancer, mainly, but even other kinds of diseases, but they're going to die in the next six months to two years. 
	So, we go and help or just talk to them, that's it, nothing major. Take them out for an ice cream. You hear all these kind of stories about their lives, it's really heartening to make a connection with somebody like that. So that then activates this I think, potential that all of us have to, to love and be compassionate towards others. 
	The other thing that I would say is that when you do achieve success that everybody else considers is important. You know, you get a good grade or a great job or whatever, rather than feeling proud, I will suggest that try and see if you can feel gratitude. And it's a kind of a mental shift from thinking about the achievement resulting from your talents and your hard work and how you overcame obstacles? 
	Where does your mind go to? Do you tend to go towards that set of determinants of your success? Or do you start to recognize everybody who's helped you? Who's been instrumental from your parents, to your friends to just chance circumstances. You could have been born in Afghanistan for all you know. I mean, you were born here and everything worked out. Your kidneys have not failed you. And you have a great roommate, whatever. So you can for the same event, and you can either feel proud you can feel gratitude. And I would say that the more you start feeling gratitude, the more you're putting yourself in the place for experiencing the kind of happiness with the big H.
	And even if you do feel pride, I would say that you know, try and feel into intrapersonal. That is that, think of yourself as having improved over where you were, rather than think of your yourself as being better than another person. And the last one I would say here is develop what I call happy smarts. I mean, develop this antenna to identify what the happiness maximizing option is. I'll give you a simple example. You walk into a salad bar, let's say, and they charge you by the pound when you put on stuff onto your plate. And let's say that you love chickpeas and you don't particularly care for grilled chicken, let's say. And you're loading up your plate and then you come across chickpeas and grilled chicken. And you know the grilled chicken is more expensive. 
	But you're going to enjoy the chickpeas more. What are you going to do? Are you going to load up your plate with more real chicken because you're maximizing value for money? Who cares? You're there to enjoy you. How good is it if you take the salad back and then you're not even gonna enjoy it? So, you have to have your antenna out for what it is that you enjoy doing, rather than be caged in by superstitions or beliefs or late theories or values or whatever. The more you're attuned to what it is that you enjoy doing, the more it is that you're attuned to what brings you happiness with a big H, the better off you are, in terms of having clarity on how you make judgments and how you make decisions.
	So, the last thing that I want to end here with is this kind of a broad thing. Most of us are going to end up being pretty stressed out. That's kind of the direction in which we're headed. If you look at depression rates, there is 30 million Americans who are depressed or more right now. This is a kind of conservative figures because people don't like to confide that they're depressed. 30 million Americans are on antidepressants, and it's doubled in the last five years. Lifestyle satisfaction is stagnant, despite being the richest country in the world. Despite standard of living having gone up so many times over the last 50 years. 30% of US citizens are obese. 
	And if you contrast what's happening in the world with what our core value is, as University of Texas education system, you can go and see it up in the mall, right opposite the tower, it says, "To transform lives for the benefit of society." Are we really doing a good job as an education institution in transforming lives for the benefit of society, doesn't seem like it, given these statistics. 
	There are even more horrifying statistics when you think about what is happening to other animals, what is happening to third world countries and the poor out there and so on. So, but rather than kind of blaming society or blaming education, I would say that, just take this as a personal responsibility to be the change that you want to see. You Be the change ... you behave in the manner that you wish society were, first, and then you can start judging other people. And if you take that perspective, then I would say that it starts really with being clear about what kind of happy do you want? What truly matters to you? Is it the kind of happiness with the a big H that I talked about. 
	So that's the single biggest thing that you can do to yourselves I feel at this point in time is that; you have a clarity to focus on adopting the kinds of attitudes and behaviors and action tendencies that make you more prone to experiencing the kind of happiness that I talked about with a big H. 
	Thank you very much. I'm going to leave you with a few movies. And of course, you can add to this, this is just a bunch of stuff that I've seen and a couple of books that I've read. It turns out that I don't, as a personality kind of really vibe with books that are kind of bubbly and happy all the time. You know, I want a little bit of darkness in them and so ?The Fine Balance? and ?Atonement?. These are two books that spoke to me but those certainly not the only books out there. 
	And by the way, one last thing is that I blogged for Psychology Today and if you go to this link, you can write it down if you wish, you will be able to see other articles on similar kinds of ideas. 
	Thank you. (audience applause)
Roxanne:	If you have questions, I would be happy to run over there with the microphone and just like Phil Donahue ... You're too young to know who that is but that's okay.
Speaker 19:	My question is simple, are you happy now?
Dr. Raghunathan:	Big H? Yeah I'm more happy now than I've been in many instances in the past but not quite as happy with a big H as I could be.
Speaker 19:	So, why are you happy now? Why are you ... Why now is not the most happiest time?
Dr. Raghunathan:	Because there have been instances in the past when it's just ... You can't kind of produce all these kinds of happiness on demand. Sometimes it happens by accident, more or less. And you put yourself in a position to be accident prone, so to speak. And sometimes it just it happens. So I've had experiences where I've been exuberantly joyful without any reason for it. And those are just intensely positive experiences of almost spiritual flavor to them, that I'm not currently feeling for whatever reason.
Speaker 20:	Have you personally felt ... taking part of how your behaviors have influenced your mindset? 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah, so let me give you a quick example of an experiment that was conducted in the 60s, I think. So, what happened is that a bunch of people were called into a room where there was a snake on display. And a month or so, before they were called into the room, they were asked, "How afraid are you of snakes." And as you might imagine, I mean, there's a bunch of people who are really afraid of snakes and maybe a few that are not afraid, but there's a distribution. 
	And before they entered the room though, where the real life snake was, they were all wired up. And they were told that you're going to listen to your own heartbeat as you approach the snake. And the trick was that ... The experiment played on them was that, they received false heartbeat so that some people got really fast heartbeat and some people got really slow heartbeat. And it turned out that regardless of how afraid they truly were, in some sense, which you could elicit from their responses to the question a month back on how afraid they were snakes. The students or the respondents in this experiment, inferred the extent to which they were afraid of snakes based on the false heartbeat that they heard. 
	So what it tells you to some extent is that you don't really have access to your attitude. Okay, and you infer your attitudes based on what you see in the real world as evidence. And this happens across a variety of events and circumstances. So you might not know whether you're a kind person or not for instance. I'm just coming up with an example right here on the spot. But let's say you walk out and you see a bird that's dying, or whatever. And you are not really a compassionate person normally, but you see other people, they're looking at you, and what do you do now? And you're closest to the bird. And you pick it up and you try, and kind of put it in the nest because you want other people to look at you kindly. 
	But that act of doing that thing might evoke in you a sense of feelings or set of feelings that make you realize, you know, "I really am kind of somebody who can relate to this." So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, we often have this erroneous opinion that we are already fully formed inside of us. We have all the set of attitudes that we need to govern our behavior. And our behaviors just the tip of the iceberg and the attitudes are really what drives our behavior. But oftentimes kind of goes the other way around as well. That you don't actually have a well formulated set of attitudes and behaviors, values and so on, but rather you infer what you are to how you see yourself behaving. 
	Okay. I don't know if that answers your question. But there's actually lots of studies on this. So this is no longer a debatable point. I mean, we have far more confidence in our faith in this directionality of where does our behavior emerged from. And it's like a single unidirectional arrow is how we think we are, but it's bi-directional. 
Roxanne:	[inaudible 00:43:40]. 
Speaker 21:	Okay I'll just-,
Dr. Raghunathan:	You can shout it out.
Speaker 21:	The two characteristics for big H happiness, the flow adoption and [inaudible] are also often associated with some illegal drug use-,
Dr. Raghunathan:	Oh yeah.
Speaker 21:	Such as marijuana or ecstasy for example.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Right.
Speaker 21:	Has there been any studies that show the effect; either positive or negative, over the long term, over such a short term artificial production of that kind of happiness? 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah. So, you know, you're right, first of all. And the thing is that there're two things that come to mind. One is, there's a set of studies done by I forget his name ... Now he's up at Madison, Wisconsin, where he looks at the effects of mushrooms, magic mushrooms, as a call on feelings of spirituality. And it turns out that when you have these mushrooms, if you look at brain scan images, the parts of the brain that lights up are exactly the same parts that light up for people who are experienced meditators. 
	So the feeling that the meditators get, one of connectivity with the rest of the world of dissolution of time and as almost a divine kind of feeling, of joy and exuberance, which is non egotistical. You know, there's a melting of the ego associated with it, is the kind of experience that you get when you're not a meditator but have these drugs. And it can definitely have the feeling. 
	And I think in that sense, then that I'm not, by the way, recommending taking drugs, but I think that it can have the beneficial effect of opening your eyes to a potential possibilities that you didn't think existed. The downside is, of course they're pretty well known is that, you might get addicted to that feeling. And, you know, and you might lose faith in your ability to produce that feeling organically. And it is possible to do it, it just takes more hard work in some sense. So I don't know if that answers your question.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Any other questions? 
Speaker 22:	I have a question.
Dr. Raghunathan:	Yeah.
Speaker 22:	What interested you in this topic of happiness, both the two kinds that you defined it as. 
Dr. Raghunathan:	Right. So I graduated from a really good school in India and then I came here for my PhD. And, and when I went back to India, I took a bunch of MBAs with me to show them India. You know, this is part of a class. I met up with a lot of my batchmates from the MBA school. By then all of us had grown, of course, and they were in the middle management to high management. And it turned out that a couple of things struck me. One was that, there's hardly any relationship between; kind of academic smart and achievement and career success, as he pointed out earlier on. 
	So, getting good grades doesn't mean that you're going to be successful in life, which of course, is kind of now pretty well established. There's something called EQ or EI. Emotional intelligence, that is a stronger determinant of your success than IQ is. And the second thing that is, I guess, in some sense, more important with this topic is that, even if you're really successful in life, you know, your CEO, whatever, doesn't mean that you're going to be happy. And so then it kind of made me ponder about this question. Why are we running around? Where are we after? What are we after, right?
	If you ask people they'll think like a simple question like, is productivity a good thing? And most people think, yeah, you know, nice to have like, next gadget, and the next medicine and so on. But why? Why do we want all this? You know, so would you be really happy if the next generation of iPad came to you right now? And then two seconds later, the one after that, and then three seconds later, the one after that! Where we are very be running? Why this productivity for the sake of productivity? 
	If you sit back and examine that question, it turns out that, you know, we have kind of somehow bought into or subscribed to an ideology of how to live from what's been handed down to us. And for some reason, or the other, you've been emphasizing this productivity angle than the efficiency angle for a long time. And to me, it seems like it's a no brainer when I think about it. That to me, what really truly matters is whether I'm happy in the moment. And over time, whether I build up a body of work of which I'm reasonably proud and that is meaningful to me and it's fulfilling to me
	And if I look at it from that perspective then turns out that this question of what leads to happiness, is not necessarily the kinds of success that society deems as praiseworthy. 
	Okay, so in a nutshell that's kind of the set of events that triggered this interest in the topic. And since I'm kind of a professor in the business school, I thought that this is something that perhaps might be interesting/relevant for the business school people. And then I put it together as a course and it turns out that people do relate to it quite a bit.
	All right, good. Are we done? Okay, thank you. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. (applause from audience)
Roxanne:	Thanks everyone for coming. There were lots of folks who made this initial research plus pizza happen today. ... So we don't want to have that loud noise again. And I would like to thank them all. Many people helped make this possible. Thank you very much. Okay. (applause) Thanks to yourselves for coming. Think about that keeping a journal every evening and thank you very much for presenting.
Dr. Raghunathan:	My pleasure.

RPP-Raghunathan 

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