I am telling all of you this story because I was reminded of it when I read this fantastic article by Charles Duhigg called, Wealthy, Successful and Miserable. It is the story of how Charles, a Harvard Business School graduate, discovered that -- despite obtaining boatloads of financial success -- many of his classmates actually ended up miserable after school.

Sure, we all need and deserve basic financial security. And when we don't have it, money can really buy a great deal of happiness. But there's lots of research out there, some of which I have written about before, that suggests that happiness quickly plateaus once our basic needs are met.

As soon as we're no longer worried about money, we actually crave other things from our paychecks. We want it to also be a source of purpose and meaning. To give one concrete example, the article cites a study about a set of enthusiastic and high performing janitors in a large hospital. What was ultimately found was that they saw their jobs not just as cleaning, but as a kind of healing for the patients. They had purpose.

But what I found most interesting about the article was the discovery that finding happiness in life and business might require, or be aided by, a bit of struggle along the way:

And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.

We are, of course, talking about the "also-rans" at Harvard Business School. They're no slouches struggling to find work. But I don't think that negates the point being made here. It can be easy to get caught up doing what we think we ought to be doing when in reality we should be finding meaning in something we hopefully love doing.

I am telling all of you this story because I was reminded of it when I read this fantastic article by Charles Duhigg called, Wealthy, Successful and Miserable. It is the story of how Charles, a Harvard Business School graduate, discovered that -- despite obtaining boatloads of financial success -- many of his classmates actually ended up miserable after school.

Sure, we all need and deserve basic financial security. And when we don't have it, money can really buy a great deal of happiness. But there's lots of research out there, some of which I have written about before, that suggests that happiness quickly plateaus once our basic needs are met.

As soon as we're no longer worried about money, we actually crave other things from our paychecks. We want it to also be a source of purpose and meaning. To give one concrete example, the article cites a study about a set of enthusiastic and high performing janitors in a large hospital. What was ultimately found was that they saw their jobs not just as cleaning, but as a kind of healing for the patients. They had purpose.

But what I found most interesting about the article was the discovery that finding happiness in life and business might require, or be aided by, a bit of struggle along the way:

And many of them had something in common: They tended to be the also-rans of the class, the ones who failed to get the jobs they wanted when they graduated. They had been passed over by McKinsey & Company and Google, Goldman Sachs and Apple, the big venture-capital firms and prestigious investment houses. Instead, they were forced to scramble for work — and thus to grapple, earlier in their careers, with the trade-offs that life inevitably demands. These late bloomers seemed to have learned the lessons about workplace meaning preached by people like Barry Schwartz. It wasn’t that their workplaces were enlightened or (as far as I could tell) that H.B.S. had taught them anything special. Rather, they had learned from their own setbacks. And often they wound up richer, more powerful and more content than everyone else.

We are, of course, talking about the "also-rans" at Harvard Business School. They're no slouches struggling to find work. But I don't think that negates the point being made here. It can be easy to get caught up doing what we think we ought to be doing when in reality we should be finding meaning in something we hopefully love doing.

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