Created By: MICHAEL W. FORDYCE, Ph.D
Answers the question – What are the top 14 traits of happy people?
Fundamental Fourteen is our last of the Fundamentals, and therefore, the final lesson on personal happiness.
We’ve come a long way since we began our exploration of happiness…
We started with a discussion of “The Most Important Thing in Life” and at that time, we concluded, for most people it was personal happiness.
We proceeded from that point on to examine the many characteristics from the “Big Board in the Sky,” the objective and situational correlates that have long been associated with personal happiness over many years of research.
There we explored the kinds of everyday of things happy individuals enjoy. The “good things in life” that they often have more than others.The higher income, the higher social status, the model family life, the good marriage, the success, the good health, the good mental health, the “fun life,” — and the variety of other situational, personal, and objective benefits that others share much less in life.
This moved us, inevitably, to “The Bad News of Happiness Research.”
And the “bad news” was: that a lot of the things the research has shown that can make a contribution to a person’s happiness are things that very few of us ever get.
As much as the research continues to confirm that the “good things” in life contribute to one’s potential happiness — income, success, social standing, health, etc. — few people in any society are lucky enough to accumulate all these happiness-benefits in any lasting abundance.
It looked a bit hopeless at that point in our discussions. If the research had veracity, it seemed that only a small minority of people in any part of the world would ever enjoy the happiness we all seek.
Yet clearly this was not the actual case! There are millions and millions of happy people in the world. Millions more than a simple “success and riches formula” would ever predict!
We realized, at that point in these Volumes, that there must be something more to explain happiness than mere situational success and comfortable circumstance. And the answer was in the happiness research findings themselves…
Beyond the data regarding the objective and demographic data collected over the years regarding happy people, there was a wealth of data regarding their personalities and everyday approach to living as well.
And from these, a number of characteristics about happy individuals appeared to us as things most anybody could learn from — and possibly develop themselves.
Fourteen of these potential “happiness traits” we’re eventually isolated, and they have become the basis of the study that’s been presented in this second Volume onHuman Happiness.
