"What makes people flourish?"
A study about what makes people not just survive but flourish. It got answers from over 200k people around the world.
The aspects they asked about:
- Happiness and life satisfaction: how content and fulfilled people feel with their lives.
- Physical and mental health: how healthy people feel, in both body and mind.
- Meaning and purpose: whether people feel their lives are significant and moving in a clear direction.
- Character and virtue: how people act to promote good, even in tough situations.
- Close social relationships: how satisfied people are with their friendships and family ties.
- Financial and material stability: whether people feel secure about their basic needs, including food, housing and money.
Honestly the list above for how they broke it down is the main thing I took away from this article. A lot of the data seemed either things I already believe, or were somewhat expected.
There was one stat about work status leading to people flourishing more, which is pretty obvious. I thought it interest that self-employed people were higher than those who worked for others, but I suspect that is a fair bit of survivorship bias as the people working for themselves are the ones who had "made it" and found it able to fund their life, and thus they were happier, and those who tried who make it but fell short are underrepresented as they probably identified more as "working for someone else."
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"Why layoffs don’t work"
"All of a sudden," David Gelles, author of the Welch biography The Man Who Broke Capitalism, told NPR, "other CEOs saw that… if we rapidly wind down the cost of our labor, we could potentially see a meaningful increase in earnings per share for the next quarter and Wall Street sure liked that."
That ethos remains today. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 1.5m-2m Americans are typically laid off or discharged every month, a number that increases during recessions.
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"The number of exceptional people: Fewer than 85 per 1 million across key traits"
A research paper which I came across. The abstract:
Cognitive biases can lead to overestimating the expected prevalence of exceptional multi-talented candidates, leading to potential dissatisfaction in recruitment contexts. This study aims to accurately estimate the odds of finding individuals who excel across multiple correlated dimensions. According to the literature, the three key individual differences variables are intelligence, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. Consequently, data were simulated using a multivariate normal distribution (N = 20 million), where the three variables were standardized (mean of 0 and SD of 1). The correlations were specified as: intelligence with conscientiousness (−0.03), intelligence with emotional stability (0.07), and conscientiousness with emotional stability (0.42). Cases were classified into four categories based on z-scores across the three dimensions: notable (≥ 0.0 SD), remarkable (≥ 1.0 SD), exceptional (≥ 2.0 SD), and profoundly exceptional (≥ 3.0 SD). Approximately 16% of cases were classified as notable, 1% as remarkable, and only 0.0085% met the exceptional criterion of 2 SDs above the mean. Just one case was identified as profoundly exceptional. These findings highlight the rarity of individuals excelling across multiple traits, suggesting a need to recalibrate recruitment expectations. Even moderately above-average individuals on these key dimensions may merit greater recognition due to their scarcity.
It's a lot of words to say that they measured base on three relationships between intelligence, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. And then they did simulations and analysis to determine that roughly there are 85 people out of 1 million who excel at all three of those.
I also like their definitions for each of the three aspects discussed:
Gignac and Szodorai (2024, p. 2) defined intelligence as a person's "maximal capacity to achieve a novel goal successfully using perceptual-cognitive processes."
Conscientiousness has been described as multi-faceted (DeYoung et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2014), with facets revolving around work ethic (industriousness, achievement striving, orderliness, and self-discipline) and personal responsibility (dutifulness, carefulness, and dependability). These traits combine to shape a personality that values structure, achievement, and trustworthiness in both professional and personal spheres
Emotional stability, the opposite of neuroticism, reflects calmness, resilience to stress, and emotional composure in difficult situations (Roberts & Yoon, 2022).
An interesting insight about distribution of exceptional individuals in any dimension, including an example using height as an example. Good to know I'm "exceptionally" tall by these definitions.
According to the properties of the normal distribution, only about 2.3% of the population (23,000 per 1 million) is expected to score two standard deviations above the mean on any given dimension (Grami, 2019). To gain an intuitive sense of what this level represents, consider that the average heights for American adult women and men are 162.0 cm (SD = 7.1 cm) and 175.7 cm (SD = 7.5 cm), respectively (Fryar et al., 2018). A height two standard deviations above the mean would be approximately 176.2 cm (5′8") for women and 190.7 cm (6'2.5") for men. Male celebrities like Jim Carrey, Ted Danson, and Adam Driver, who stand between 6′2" and 6'3", would be considered tall by most, though perhaps only just barely exceptionally so.
At the end of it, the paper is defining the rules for a randomized sampling based on informed perameters. I don't consider it earth shattering. The main thing I enjoyed was the insights to the three factors and the data support or disproving relationships between then.
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"The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship"
After over 100 interviews with pairs of friends, Julie Bell has six things she feels drive all lasting friendships:
Accumulation
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, extracurricular activities.
Attention
Paying attention goes a long way when forging these unexpected friendships—noticing when you click with someone, being open to chance encounters. It helps to step out of our habits and into the moment. Because as much as we may feel like our social networks are set and settled, it's never too late to meet someone who will be important to you for the rest of your life.
Intention
Attention only gets you so far without action. When opportunity arises, you have to put yourself out there, and that requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let things be awkward.
Ritual
One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. I personally find that the effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) is the biggest barrier to seeing my friends. It's much easier when something is baked into my schedule, and all I have to do is show up. For instance, while working from home during the pandemic, I've gotten lunch every Friday with my friend who lives around the corner (when it's been safe to do so).
Imagination
Society has a place for friendships, and it's on the sidelines. They're supposed to play a supporting role to work, family, and romance. It takes imagination not to default to this norm, and to design your life so that friendship plays the role you really want it to.
Grace
I'm not religious, but I do love the concept of grace, of a gift so profound that it could never be earned or deserved. And so when I cite grace here as the final and most important force in friendships, I mean it in two ways. One is the forgiveness that we offer each other when we fall short. The other is the space that creates for connections—and reconnections—that feel nothing short of miraculous.
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Perfect people are a delusion
Largely I agree, as we get to know people we find them moving towards the center. I do think the boundaries here are not wide enough, there are definitely people I know well who I would still consider angels & devils. But the core point is that people want a simple heuristic for judgment of people and that is simply not true.
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