Dan Gilbert on Happiness & Satisfaction

Fascinating presentation from Dan Gilbert author of Stumbling on Happiness at TED. There’s a great Q and A at the end of the talk that’s worth watching also. Gilbert makes a number of points that are relevant to the global economy right now (and particularly relevant for cultural organisations). He says that satisfaction or goodness is directly related to our capacity to estimate the odds of getting what we want and the value we attribute to the getting of what we want. Research suggests that we’re not great at either set of estimates. But the point that stayed with me was about our tendency to compare what we have/want to the past as distinct to the possibility in the future. What’s familiar will always be what we reach for…many, many questions here about how we re-imagine ways of working if our tendency is to compare to the past as distinct from looking to newer ways that have yet to be imagined.
Gilbert writes a blog which you can access here.