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Test goals against five categories
The five categories
Positive emotion is enjoying what you are doing and feeling good through the day. Engagement is flow: doing something challenging at your skill level, like research or writing a script. Relationships are strong ties with friends, family, and colleagues. Meaning is being part of something bigger than yourself, whether religion, community, or a business. Accomplishment is setting hard goals and achieving them.
Testing a goal
The method is to take a list of goals and place each one in those categories, which is called a categorical prompt, and evidence shows it helps people produce more meaningful goals. Take a Ferrari. Racing it on a track for hours would be engagement. Friends who own Ferraris would be relationships. Positive emotion might last a couple of days, which is the hedonic treadmill. Accomplishment fits only if the car was a goal since age five.
Gaps in a life
Some goals turn out to contribute to none of the categories. Looking at the whole model can also reveal where a life has over-indexed, such as achieving so much that relationships paid for it.
Why do big purchases stop feeling special?
Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell coined the phrase hedonic treadmill in 1971. In a 1978 study by Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, lottery winners reported being no happier than a comparison group and took less pleasure in everyday events. People who had been paralyzed in accidents reported lower happiness than the comparison group, though higher than most expected.
Why does flow come when challenge matches skill?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began studying flow in the 1970s by interviewing artists, chess players, and rock climbers about moments of total absorption. He later used an experience sampling method, in which people carried pagers that prompted them to report what they were doing and feeling. His data found that flow appeared when a task's challenge and a person's skill were both high and in balance. His 1990 book Flow brought the idea to a wide audience.
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