China, Europe and the Netherlands: Opportunity Is Knocking at Our Doors

Apr. 2015 
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with German students about the “Success Factor Hap-
piness”.
Varying definitions of happiness
In 2012, the United Nations put happiness into the 
spot light when it proclaimed 20 March the “Interna-
tional Day of Happiness”. Only the year before, the UN, 
in the historic resolution 65/309, invited its member 
states to take a holistic approach to development and “to 
pursue the elaboration of additional measures that bet-
ter capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness 
and well-being in development with a view to guiding 
their public policies”. Happiness was acknowledged 
as not only being a fundamental but also a universal 
human goal. In the “World Happiness Report 2013” 
it is stated that there exists “now a rising worldwide 
demand that policy be more closely aligned with what 
really matters to people as they themselves characterize 
their lives.”
Bhutan is considered a major pioneer and initiator 
of a happiness based approach in political decision 
making. It has inspired leaders of nations all over the 
world to start looking not only at the Gross Domestic 
Product (GDP) as the main indicator for the develop-
ment of their countries but also to look into elements 
that are included in the Gross National Happiness 
index (GNH) as it is measured in the former kingdom 
in the Himalayas. The index consists of 124 subcompo-
nents which allow the local and national governmental 
institutions to detect the areas where policy changes are 
most needed. In recent years other countries learned 
from Bhutan. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) 
of the U.K. now regularly collects data on well-being in 
terms of happiness, life satisfaction as well as anxiety. 
The EU publishes a well being index for all EU member 
states on its website. In Brazil, the “Felicidade Interna 
Bruta” became a widespread tool to be implemented 
in the political decision making process typically on a 
community level.
But what exactly is happiness (or subjective well-be-
ing as it is also called in the academic world)? The 
OECD defines subjective well-being as “good mental 
states, including all of the various evaluations, positive 
and negative, that people make of their lives and the 
affective reactions of people to their experiences.” This 
definition condenses the results of years of discussions 
among scientists from different disciplines such as 
psychology, economics, philosophy and neuroscience 
and includes the following three elements the OECD 
suggest to measure: 
- Life evaluation: a reflective assessment on a per-
son‘s life or some specific aspect of it.
- Affect: a person‘s feelings or emotional states, typ-
ically measured with reference to a particular point in 
time.
- Eudaimonia: a sense of meaning and purpose in 
life, or good psychological functioning.
The importance of a focus on the subject of happi-
ness in people’s lives at work, at home or as citizens 
has been demonstrated by numerous results of recent 
happiness research projects. For example, happy peo-
ple live healthier, get older, are more resilient to stress 
and ultimately are more productive and creative in 
their professional lives. Interestingly enough people 
can actively and sustainably influence their individual 
happiness level by themselves: Around 50% of the 
individual happiness level is genetically determined 
while only 10% is influenced by factors such as income 
and environment. 40% of one’s own happiness level is 
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Development
accounted for by our daily activities and the conscious 
choices we make. Luckily happiness is a skill that can 
be trained. Recent research from the field of neuroplas-
ticity showed that even the brain structure can be ac-
tively changed e.g. by regular mindfulness meditation 
that lasts for at least eight weeks.
Universal benefits of pursing happiness
Therefore, focusing on happiness has the potential 
to make the world a better place. Not only individuals 
but also companies and even states should look into the 
effects a focus on happiness has to offer.
States can and should increasingly study how sat-
isfied the population is. A focus on the purely quan-
titative development of a country neglects qualitative 
components. The OECD showed in one of its publica-
tions for the case of Egypt how researching subjective 
well-being can be more valuable as an indicator of 
progress than economic indicators: While the GDP per 
capita grew constantly between 2005 and 2010 you can 
find a clear decline in the development of subjective 
well-being right before the “Arab Spring”.
Individuals are able to effectively change their own 
brain structure and thereby develop skills in happiness. 
Just like mindfulness teaches how to focus on the here 
and now, the perfect moment to start increasing ones 
personal level of happiness is now. Worrying about the 
future (that can’t be controlled anyways) and thinking 
about the past (that can’t be changed any more) will 
only delay and negatively affect the pursuit of happi-
ness and leading a good life. The experience of per-
forming a simple “random act of kindness” right now 
could be able to kindle the desire to learn more about 
happiness.
Techniques and practices like this, by which the indi-
vidual level of happiness may be affected, are more and 
more often introduced into companies. For example, 
Google offers the program “Search Inside Yourself”, 
which was developed by its “Chief Happiness Officer” 
(CHO) and former Google engineer, Chade-Meng Tan. 
At the headquarters in Munich the top management 
level of BMW is trained in mindfulness. In a world, 
where working employees are exposed to a constant 
white noise resulting from a variety of sources during 
a work day it can be important to once in a while take 
a break and consciously experience the individual mo-
ments. Since happy managers have more creative and 
productive employees, topics like mindful leadership, 
compassion and gratitude become valuable compo-
nents of everyday work in more and more companies.
Companies need to change their priorities. Selling 
a product for the cheapest price can’t be the only goal 
of a company any more. Employees ask for more than 
their salary but also for a work environment that lets 
them flourish. Customers demand more than just the 
physical product they paid for but also an experience 
that makes them happy. Zappos, the online shop that 
doesn’t only deliver shoes but happiness, is one of 
the successful California based examples for this new 
sales and marketing approach. By making use of the 
resources a society has to offer, companies have a huge 
responsibility in society. They therefore should develop 
programs that allow them to give back and support 
local and distant communities. The adventure travel 
company G Adventures and its foundation Planeterra 
is one of the prime examples in this respect. Selling 
trips to only travel enthusiasts was never enough for 
the founder Bruce Poon Tip. By starting Planeterra 
he managed to transcend the brand of the original 
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