594: 56.03 Raj Raghunathan – Achievement and happiness

Play to Potential Podcast

NUGGET CONTEXT

Raj speaks about the link between levels of success and happiness. He goes on to speak about the relationship between happiness and education levels. He mentions that happiness rises till the undergraduate level but not necessarily post that, suggesting that the commercial threshold for us to be really happy is much lower than what we might think it is.

GUEST

Raj Raghunathan is a professor of Marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin, where he relies on themes from psychology, behaviorial science, decision theory and marketing to explain consumption behaviour. He also studies the impact that people’s judgments and decisions have on their own happiness and fulfilment.

Based on his research, he teaches a very successful online course on Coursera on Happiness (named A Life of Happiness And Fulfillment). His book (titled, If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?) was released in the US, UK, and India in 2016.

In our conversation, he speaks about his journey to researching happiness and his take on why so many people around us who are smart and successful but not necessarily happy. He talks about some common pitfalls people get into and some perspectives on how we can prioritise (not necessarily pursue happiness) in our lives.

He is an alumnus of BITS Pilani and IIM Calcutta. This conversation was published in May 2020.

HOST

Deepak is a Leadership Advisor and an Executive Coach. He works with leaders to improve their effectiveness and in helping them make better decisions specifically around organizational and career transitions. He currently runs Transition Insight (www.transitioninsight.com) and works with leaders to handle phases of transition thoughtfully. He has worked as an Operations Consultant with KPMG in UK, Strategy Consultant with McKinsey in the US and as a Leadership Consultant with EgonZehnder (a Swiss Leadership Advisory firm) where he helped companies recruit CEOs, CXOs and Board Members and worked on Leadership Development. Deepak is a certified CEO Coach and is an alumnus of IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad and London Business School. His detailed profile can be found at https://in.linkedin.com/in/djayaraman

OTHER GUESTS

1.Vijay Amritraj 2.Amish Tripathi 3.Raghu Raman 4.Papa CJ 5.Kartik Hosanagar 6.Ravi Venkatesan 7.Abhijit Bhaduri 8.Viren Rasquinha 9.Prakash Iyer 10.Avnish Bajaj 11.Nandan Nilekani 12.Atul Kasbekar 13.Karthik Reddy 14.Pramath Sinha 15.Vedika Bhandarkar 16.Vinita Bali 17.Zia Mody 18.Rama Bijapurkar 19.Dheeraj Pandey 20.Anu Madgavkar 21.Vishy Anand 22. Meher Pudumjee 23.KV Shridhar (Pops) 24.Suresh Naraynan 25.Devdutt Pattanaik 26.Jay Panda 27.Amit Chandra 28.Chandramouli Venkatesan 29.Roopa Kudva 30.Vinay Sitapati 31.Neera Nundy. 32.Deepa Malik 33.Bombay Jayashri. 34.Arun Maira 35.Ambi Parameswaran 36.OP Bhaat 37.Indranil Chakraborty 38.Tarun Khanna 39. Ramachandra Guha 40. Stewart Friedman 41. Rich Fernandez 42. Falguni Nayar 43. Rajat Gupta 44. Kartik Hosanagar 45. Michael Watkins 46. Matt Dixon 47. Herminia Ibarra 48. Paddy Upton 49. Tasha Eurich 50. Alan Eagle 51. Sudhir Sitapati 52. James Clear 53. Lynda Gratton 54. Jennifer Petriglieri. 55. Matthew Walker

DISCLAIMER

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