Michael Norton holds a Ph.D. in psychology and puts his training to work while teaching at the Harvard Business School. In this fascinating TEDTalk, he shares with us a variety of experiments that convinced him and his team that you can, in fact, buy happiness. But only when spending your money on others! What I found rather astounding about this was not, actually, Michael’s conclusion. I’ve experienced that before and so, I bet, have you: the great feeling that comes from buying someone a gift, however small, or making a donation to an organization that will make a difference in someone’s life. When my kids and I...

I came across this TEDTalk after I read Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. In it he offers a great summary of his major thesis: that we misremember many of our experiences and therefore are poor predictors of what makes us happy. But there’s an upside: we’re actually very good at creating what he calls “synthetic” happiness by almost always looking at the bright side. In a reverse of the “sour grapes” phenomenon – perhaps we should call it the “lemonade” phenomenon 🙂 – we are hardwired to make the best of our situations. And if we trust that rather than think we can make...

Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...

Near the end of July I’ll be participating as one of nine keynote speakers at a conference called “Rethinking Stewardship” at Luther Seminary. I’ll be joining the likes of Chris Farrell (of Minnesota Public Radio and APM’s Marketplace Money) and Nathan Dungan (of Share, Save, Spend) to talk about new approaches to stewardship. Our understanding of stewardship is that it’s not simply asking people for money but helping them relate to money in light of their faith – something almost every Christian I know has stated as a desire. How, that is, does our faith in Christ inform our lives as economic as well as spiritual beings? How...