I’m going to ask you to stop ‘giving it your all’. Give it 70% instead.
I first met Micael Dahlen the year he launched his Happiness Studies university course. The course, Happiness and Wellbeing: Making a Better Life, struggles to meet demand and is the university’s number one elective.
Dahlen is an enigmatic figure. At a teacher conference in Stockholm, I sat transfixed for 40 minutes while he spoke, entirely in Swedish. I did not understand a word and it didn’t matter.
He was Sweden’s youngest economics professor in 2008 and today he has a crisply minted mission as the world's first recipient of a professorship in happiness, wellbeing and welfare, heading up a new centre dedicated at the Stockholm School of Economics.
His entire body represents his purpose, tattooed arms serving as daily reminders of things that make him happier.
The number 70 on his right forearm, reminds Dahlen not to give 100 per cent to projects all the time, so that he doesn’t burn out.
A roadworks sign reminds him the learning is never done, professor or not.
At the core of his pedagogy is what Dahlen himself calls his "naughty approach". Some of his challenges to students are worthy of attention as tired educators haul themselves over the line to summer. Try them:
Make eye contact with strangers.
Confront a fear.
Reconcile a friendship with a person you’ve lost touch with.
Ask someone for help.
Do one of these things today and see how much happier you, and the other people around you, might be.