Our Story
Dr. Walt, Founder
Mission
Happiness360 has set an ambitious goal: to increase the level of happiness of 10 million Americans by the year 2015. The Foundation seeks to help returning soldiers, senior citizens, school children, single parents, those facing relationship and career challenges – anyone searching for a happier life – to reach greater mental and physical health thus allowing Americans to live longer, more meaningful lives and our nation to thrive.
In Search of Happiness
Several years ago, Dr. Walt found himself at as a crossroad. Newly divorced and no longer fulfilled by his work teaching university courses in behavioral science, he had to admit the truth: he simply wasn’t happy.
He was not alone. Other people were looking at their lives and finding them less than satisfactory. In a struggling booksellers’ industry, for example, bookstores reported that sales were up 150% in only one area: self-improvement. Even nations were looking at the importance of happiness on the wellbeing of their citizens. In 2004, the first annual International Conference on Gross National Happiness (GNH) was held in Bangkok, Thailand. Over 40 nations, hundreds of government, scholars and other thought leaders, gathered to explore the possibility of making Gross National Happiness or GNH the true indicator of a country’s health and quality of life (as opposed to the commercial measurement GDP or Gross Domestic Product).
Behaving Our Way to Happiness
Mid-life crises are not unusual but, as a behaviorist, Dr. Walt dealt with his a little differently. He found himself asking, “So what exactly is happiness? And how do we reach it?”
To answer these questions, he kept returning to a main tenet of B.F. Skinner, Father of Behavioral Psychology: “If you can measure a behavior, you can control it and if you can control it, you can teach it.”
Dr. Walt began his quest for happiness with a determination he had learned from his own father, a man who was an entrepreneur long before the word was part of everyday vernacular. Walt’s father alternately owned shoe stores as well as pool halls, sold real estate, ran a brokerage firm and even booked dates for the legendary Harlem Globetrotter basketball team.
One day, when he was 15 years old, Walt came home to discover their entire basement filled with scores of large cardboard boxes. His father had bought one million hair combs! Walt’s entrepreneurial father could not pass up the bargain that had been offered him: a million combs at a fraction of a penny a piece. It took several years, but Walt’s father eventually sold every one of those combs to barbers across the country for twenty cents a piece.
Walt set out with that same dogged persistence to learn everything he could about the subject of happiness. In 2005, he founded the Happiness 360 research company. Behavioral scientists often first approach a subject anthropologically: Dr. Walt asked, “Throughout history, and from all walks of life, what has been recorded about happiness? How did we get to our understanding of the subject today?”
Researching Happiness
Dr. Walt read the works of Buddha, Confucius, Aristotle and even our Founding Fathers (who called the pursuit of happiness an “unalienable right”). As he read through the centuries of literature, he saw a pattern emerging. Words such as joy, pleasure and quality of life were used interchangeably with happiness. While there had been an interest in the subject of happiness dating back thousands of years, the actual definition of happiness was not something on which people easily agreed.
Scientists don’t like that kind of ambiguity. Dr. Walt kept searching and brought his exploration to more modern times. He revisited contemporary humanistic psychologists – Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers – and a more recent branch of psychology called Positive Psychology (credited to Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 2000), a psychology that focuses on people’s strengths as opposed to mental illness.
With the advent of groundbreaking books such as The Conditions of Happiness by Ruut Veenhoven (1984) and the scientific review The Journal of Happiness Studies, it seemed that the scientific study of happiness was finally gaining legitimacy. However, Dr. Walt found that many of these studies still relied on subjective data rather than objective or quantitative findings.
Can We Measure Happiness Scientifically?
If you ask four different people how happy they are on a scale of 1 through 10, you may get four different answers or several common responses. Either way, you have no way of knowing what the chosen numbers represent to the individuals. Upon further questioning, someone with an answer of “7” might actually seem to have a happier life than someone who answered “9”. Their answers, as well as your interpretation of their answers, are personal and, therefore, subjective. Objective evidence, on the other hand, appears the same regardless of the observer and is, therefore, replicable in follow-up studies.
Behavioral Psychology believes that “people are the summation of what they say and do”. They are less interested in what is going on inside individuals, their personal meanings, than what can be seen and measured.
Dr. Walt believed there must be a way to measure what happiness is and how to increase it in a true empirical fashion. What had been a personal and professional interest for Dr. Walt grew into a larger mission: to discover the quantitative predictors of happiness.
Without a way to define and measure the behaviors of happiness there was no way to control and, therefore, learn those behaviors so that people actually became happier.
Testing Happiness
Dr. Walt’s research company, Happiness 360, moved into its testing phase. Instead of using bubbling beakers as their tools, behavioral scientists use rigorous research methodology to design studies for collection of empirical data. The data must be replicable and is often gathered through written tests administered to volunteer subjects.
First, Dr. Walt set out to bring clarity to the question of what constitutes happiness. Starting with over 30 categories, testing and retesting, and continually refining the research design, Dr. Walt and his team discovered 13 behaviors that could predict happiness to a 92% reliability factor. Usually, if a behavioral scientist’s tests reveal a 60% reliability score, their findings are considered successful and published in a peer-reviewed journal. At 92%, Dr. Walt’s findings were unprecedented!
Again, this was not a transformation that depended on mindset change or long-term talk therapy. Dr. Walt had identified behaviors that people could easily do that would guarantee more happiness.
Happier People = Healthier Society
In 2009, Dr. Walt founded Happiness360 to disseminate the findings of his Happiness360 research firm. What had started as a personal search was now a driving sense of purpose to make America a happier country. Studies show that Americans are least happy between the ages of 35 and 60. That means that approximately 140 million out of 305 million, or 56% of Americans, are not as happy as they could be.
This fact has huge consequences on individual as well as collective health. Stressed, unhappy people are more susceptible to heart and other diseases and more prone to depression. Unhappy nations are less safe and less innovative.
In this realization that happiness isn’t a “nice to have” but a “must have” for individuals as well as societies, Dr. Walt and Happiness360 find they are part of a growing movement to define and increase happiness. If you “googled” the term “happiness research” in 2005, you would have received 760 citations. Today, you’d be given 7.4 million citations.
Dr. Walt and Happiness360 bring a unique offering to this developing national and international movement: the discovery of 13 quantitative predictors of happiness plus a self-help tool that will give people a road map to a happier life.
In Happiness360’s “Self-Improvement Toolbox”, an individual is asked questions in thirteen areas: social support groups, work-life balance, volunteerism, spirituality, hobbies, leisure time, music, intimacy, donating, exercise, touching, preventative health and random acts of kindness.
Each answer receives a numerical and, therefore, measurable value. When a person
follows the concrete recommendations that follow from their unique statistical totals, his or her level of happiness is guaranteed to rise.
Helping 10 Million Be Happier By 2015
The Happiness360 has set an ambitious goal: to increase the level of happiness of 10 million Americans by the year 2013.
The time is right. Since Dr. Walt began his full-time research our country has fallen into its deepest economic crisis since the Depression. The upside of this crisis is that people are realizing more than ever that while it’s important to cover the basics, true happiness cannot be secured through material wealth. In addition, growing awareness of the inability of our ecosystems to sustain unending growth and consumption has increased people’s willingness to discard commercial transactions as the sole measure of well-being.
As President Obama calls for America to return to its former prominence as a leader in scientific research and education, Happiness360 imagines a societal transformation where interdisciplinary teams of scientists - behavioral scientists, medical doctors, chemists, biologists, neuroscientists and so forth – work together at a U.S. Cabinet level (as they do in other countries) to create a happier and, therefore, safer and more sustainably productive America. It imagines the children of American, and eventually the world, being schooled in this emerging science and learning how to achieve a lifetime of happiness.
Take the First Step to Greater Happiness
To this vision, Happiness360 offers its free “Self-improvement Toolkit” complete with behavioral recommendations for a happier life. Further coaching will be available to anyone who wants additional guidance as well as incentives for those who take the “90 Day Challenge” to greater happiness. All the money from grants, donations and coaching plus book and souvenir sales will be placed back into the Foundation to reach and support the millions of Americans searching for a happier life.