THE REAL TEST

“WOULD YOU SACRIFICE JOY FOR THE MOST PART OF YOUR LIFE TO TRY TO DO SOMETHING WORTHWHILE, EVEN IF YOU KNOW YOU WILL FAIL?”

- JAMES CHAI

If I were to give you an offer: You would start a company with two friends and develop a new product specialising in making games realistic. Your company would be successful, eventually growing 591,078 per cent from the IPO. Would you take it? The catch is that there will be two decades of nonstop setbacks and lowlights with only rare highs. It will be filled with stress, uncertainty, loneliness, and “ample doses of pain and suffering”.

There will be adoration and invitations to every conference in the world, but it will only come 20 years later. Would you still take it? How much joy are you willing to forgo to do something worthwhile?

THE SECRET TO HAPPINESS

Society and academics have poured time and money into exploring the happiness question. Countless bestsellers on the topic have filled the bookstores.

We know that the correlation between money and happiness stops at a threshold where even doubling or tripling doesn’t make a difference. We know that fame is prison. Despite these insights, the secret to happiness remains surprisingly straightforward: relationships. It’s the time you spend with the people you love, the friendships you forge, and the memories you make.

Yet, we don’t spend time on it — not for a lack of knowledge but a lack of intention. It is true that if you were to travel with your family for a few months in a year, it would make you happier, but you probably still wouldn’t halt your new biotech startup to do it.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman was convinced that we don’t actually want to maximise happiness. We would rather go through some hardship to chase something less joyful and more worthwhile: satisfaction. Students who get good grades do things that sacrifice joy to achieve it — social connection, time off, and taking breaks. Chief executives and entrepreneurs go through high levels of depression and loneliness to make their ideas come to life.