Christopher Peterson, one of the founders of positive psychology, was asked to summarize the field in three words. He said: other people matter.
Other people are the best antidote to life’s slings and arrows and the most reliable source of recovery and flourishing. We are not solitary creatures who learned to cooperate. We are social creatures whose survival depends on cooperation. Relationships are not an addition to a good life. They are a basic element of it.
Edwin’s Leadership and Restaurant Institute serves frog legs to its customers while serving fresh start to its employee-students. Edwins gives people with a criminal record a second chance after serving your sentence. Students enroll in a rigorous six-month training program to learn about fine dining and hospitality. Does it work? After three years, about two thirds of formerly incarcerated people go back to prison. In contrast, 99% of Edwins graduates become productive members of society and do not return to prison.
Edwins build relationships by offering high support and expecting high standards. There is no shortage of studies that demonstrate Edwin’s emphasis on the importance of relationships is critical to performance. Here are three. Two are about how long and how well we live. The third is about how well we work.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same people, and now their families, for more than eighty years, and the study continues to this day. The quality of a person’s relationships turned out to be among the strongest predictors of how healthy people stay, how long they live, and how well they live. Not wealth. Not fame. Relationships.
The quality of our relationships is among the strongest predictors of how healthy we stay, how long we live, and how well we live.
Vivek Murthy, twice US Surgeon General, reviewed what happens when connection is missing. Drawing on a meta-analysis of 148 studies and roughly 300,000 people, his advisory reports that the mortality risk from social disconnection is comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day, and greater than the risk from obesity. Not equal to obesity. Greater.
Google studied 180 of its own teams in Project Aristotle to look for factors that predicted performance. It was not who was on the team. It was how people treated each other.
Since relationships carry that much weight, the next question is what distinguishes relationships that strengthen us from relationships that wear us down. We practice virtue in our relationships with others. Trust needs someone to trust. Compassion needs someone to serve. Justice defines what we owe one another. Courage is usually spent on someone else’s behalf. Every one of the seven is practiced on another person. That is not a coincidence. Virtue is the set of habits that makes a person worth being in a relationship with. That is why it is the most pro-social practice we have and this is why the seven classical virtues have been admired across cultures and centuries.
There are libraries full of books on virtue. While we cannot remember entire books or even paragraphs, we can remember catch phrases:
- Trust is efficient.
- Compassion: service before self.
- Courage: do the hard right, not the easy wrong.
- Justice: live by conviction, not circumstance.
- Wisdom: strive to understand rather than be understood.
- Temperance: calm is contagious.
- Hope: be better, not bitter.
Reflect
Think of the relationships that strengthen you and the relationships that wear you down. How does the presence or absence of these virtues shape each one?
If you decided to strengthen one of these virtues, what habits would you want to use less and what habits would you want to use more?
What habits do you want to use less and what habits do you want to use more?
