Boost Your Business with Reality – or Happiness?
Here are some business headlines in the news lately.
“Today’s Number 53,000 – this is the number of jobs Citigroup plans to cut (about 20% of its work force) – the second-most on record”
“IBM Cutting 60,000 jobs”
“WaMu to cut 335 jobs”
It’s getting to the point that I don’t even want to pick up the paper in the morning. The only good thing about the news is how glad I am about being in my own family business…
The real question in my mind is; is all this news helping or hindering the economy? I say that it is not. I believe instead of these stats being on the front page of every newspaper, and the first thing you hear on the news channels we should instead be given a glimmer of hope by getting the good news first – and there is still some good news…
Another article, further down on the front page of the paper by Rob Stein of The Washington Post, was entitled, “Want to be happy? Surround yourself with happiness”. Now, that’s an article worth reading, and one that can help get us on the road to economic recovery.
The stats in this article were much more promising. In a study of 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years it was found that people who are happy, or become happy, boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. In addition, happiness can spread to that person’s husband, wife, brother, sister, and so on…
Here’s some more highlights of the study.
- One person’s happiness can affect another’s for up to a year.
- Happiness can spread across groups for an extended period of time.
- When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse, etc. would become happy increased from 8% to 34%.
So, I say instead of reading the paper or watching the news let’s spread a little happiness around and see how much faster we boost our economy and the fun quotient in our lives.
What do you say?
