(Covey, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, p.168)

The Good Life: Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

1: What Makes a Good Life?

“Spoiler alert: The good life is a complicated life. For everybody. The good life is joyful... and challenging. Full of love, but also pain. And it never strictly happens; instead, the good life unfolds, through time. It is a process. It includes turmoil, calm, lightness, burdens, struggles, achievements, setbacks, leaps forward, and terrible falls. And of course, the good life always ends in death.

A cheery sales pitch, we know. But let’s not mince words. Life, even when it’s good, is not easy. There is simply no way to make life perfect, and if there were, then it wouldn’t be good.

Why? Because a rich life—a good life—is forged from precisely the things that make it hard.

Some psychologists object to the word “happiness” because it can mean anything from a temporary pleasure to an almost mythical sense of eudaimonic purpose that few in reality manage to reach. So in lieu of happiness, more nuanced terms like “well-being,” “wellness,” “thriving,” and “flourishing” have become common in the popular psychological literature. We use those terms in this book. Marc is particularly fond of the terms thriving and flourishing because they refer to an active and constant state of becoming, rather than just a mood. But we still use “happiness” at times for the simple reason that this is how people talk about their lives. Nobody says, “How’s your human flourishing?” We say, “Are you happy?” And it’s how, in casual conversation, we both find ourselves talking about our research as well.

(Waldinger & Schulz, “The Good Life”, p.99)

Thousands of stories from the Harvard Study show us that the good life is not found by providing ourselves with leisure and ease. Rather, it arises from the act of facing inevitable challenges, and from fully inhabiting the moments of our lives. It appears, quietly, as we learn how to love and how to open ourselves to being loved, as we grow from our experiences, and as we stand in solidarity with others through the inevitable string of joys and adversities in every human life.