Are You Fully Charged

Are You Fully Charged shows you the three keys to arriving at work and life with a battery that’s brimming with happiness and motivation, which are energy, interactions and meaning, and how to implement them in your day.

There are many books, movies, and entire cultures built around the pursuit of happiness. It’s what fuels the American Dream (and life in most other Western countries), and while there’s a lot of debate around what it should look like, hardly anyone questions the premise itself:

Is happiness even something that must be pursued?

Well, Tom Rath isn’t “hardly anyone”, so he raises just that question. He believes thinking that, as long as we spend enough time chasing it, we’ll eventually find happiness is one of the biggest misconceptions of the 21st century.

You might have already learned that external motivation ruins internal motivation. But if Tom Rath is right, this means it actively makes you unhappier, instead of just not increasing your happiness.

He says happiness is simply a by-product of a meaningful life, which is centered around internal motivation.

I’m in a café right now. Let’s say the waitress can comfortably serve 50 people a day, then she can make all these interactions light and positive and find meaning in those. If her boss told her she’d get twice the money for serving 75 customers, she’d be forced to give less time to each one, and focus on efficiency, rather than politeness.

She might get the extra money, but that not only won’t make her happier, she’d also sap the meaning from her interactions and thus end up a lot unhappier than she was before.

Have you ever seen two people in a restaurant, sitting opposite each other, each staring at their own smartphone? It’s a nightmare. The only thing that’s worse is when just one person stares at their phone, and leaves the other one hanging. I’ve always tried to avoid using my phone in conversation, but this I didn’t know about, and it takes it one step further: A 2014 study found that conversations, where no phone is visually present, are significantly superior to those, where a phone is on the table, in someone’s hand, or otherwise in sight. This is called the iPhone effect, and it implies that even if people just see a phone while talking to you, they already feel like you’re not giving them your full attention and can’t be as empathic towards you. My phone is dead silent, and I usually put it face down on the table when I’m out with friends, but from now on, I’ll try to completely put it out of sight – and you should do the same…