Harvard study, more than 80 years old, first set out to answer this question in 1938. Now well into the 21st century, the study’s treasure trove of data reveals some of the answers to this eternal question.
Let’s take a look at the findings and discuss the implications for our own lives, and for the decisions we’ll make today, this week, this year, and beyond.
The Grant Study, also known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is a gem, one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever done. Researchers wanted to answer a seemingly simple question: what makes a good life? And so they have followed hundreds of men for decades – through college graduation, marriage, war, parenthood, life crises, and old age – and collected a wide range of data about the men’s physical and mental well being. Before we look at the lessons learned, let’s take a look at how the project started, how it almost ended, the what the original founders had in mind.
The Grant Study: Left for Dead, Resuscitated, and Now Invaluable
Dr. Arlie Bock, a Harvard physician, began the project in 1938 with his patron, department store magnate W.T. Grant. It began with 268 men who were sophomores at Harvard between 1939 and 1944. Bock wanted to get away from medicine’s tendency to focus on the small, specialized and sickly. He wanted to study successful and normal men, to see what makes a good life and maybe even decipher a general recipe for success.
The men agreed to a wide range of interviews, questionnaires, physicals, and extensive physiological measurements, which have formed the basis of the data collected.
But unfortunately, like most longitudinal studies, enthusiasm waned after the initial burst of excitement. Grant stopped funding the study after a decade, and by the mid-1950s, the study was on life support. A group of researchers led by Charles McArthur kept the thread alive, at least sending questionnaires to the participants every couple years. Funding came from a variety of groups, ranging from the Rockefeller Foundation to the cigarette company Philip Morris.
Then two things happened that changed the study’s fortunes. First, as the men reached middle age in the 1960s, many achieved dramatic success. Four ran for U.S. Senate, one became president, another a best-selling author. And then in 1967, a young psychiatrist named George Vaillant discovered the Harvard study, and fell in love with the possibilities it presented. In Vaillant, this amazing dataset had found its chief supporter and storyteller – and the project picked back up full force. Researchers brought in a second cohort of 456 disadvantaged inner-city youths, from a project known as “The Glueck Study,” who grew up in Boston neighborhoods in the early 1940s. This added some valuable and much needed diversity to the study.
The interviews, questionnaires, physicals, and extensive physiological measurements resumed as the men’s lives found success, heartbreak, and everything in between.
1. Success is seen over the arc of someone’s life, so think long-term
Joshua Shenk, a journalist from The Atlantic and one of the first non-researchers to look at the archives, said that “a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading.”
Read Joshua Shenk’s article on the Grant Study archives, What Makes Us Happy?
Some men started off happy and well adjusted, only to end up dying lonely and sad. And others started off with pretty bleak prospects for success, and ended up living long, satisfying lives. So to answer the question of what makes a good life, it’s essential to look at the whole picture.
Consider the lives of the following men as extraordinary examples:
A man named John Hines seemed to shine throughout his childhood and his years at Harvard. The Grant Study staff noted the following:“Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study, the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.” But then his life took a seemingly inexplicable turn for the worse. He married, took a job overseas, and started smoking and drinking. He had an affair with a girl his therapist considered psychotic, and died suddenly of a disease in his 30s. In 1951 – at 31 – he wrote, “I think the most important element that has emerged in my own psychic picture is a fuller realization of my own hostilities. In early years I used to pride myself on not having any. This was probably because they were too deeply buried and I unwilling and afraid to face them.”
A man named Godfrey Minot Camille, on the other hand, went into the Grant Study with fairly bleak prospects for life satisfaction: He had the lowest rating for future stability of all the subjects and he had previously attempted suicide. He had grown up in a terrible environment, eating meals alone until the age of 6, and the pain and desolation haunted him for years. But at 35, he had what he called a spiritual awakening, became a psychiatrist, and turned his pain into a tool for serving others. At the end of his life, he was one of the happiest men in the study.
These are only a few examples of many that show how “a glimpse of any one moment in a life can be deeply misleading.” Success is seen from a wide perspective of an entire life, not from any particular moment or achievement.
But what’s the lesson we can learn from this?
The primary lesson is to think long-term and make decisions with that perspective in mind. What will matter in 5, 10 years? When you are making decisions based on short-term criteria, then the tides of life can change quickly. Developing your ability to think long-term, to connect your daily choices with an overarching purpose and vision, is the key. Six Seconds calls this skill pursuing noble goals, and it’s a hallmark of success because it’s a surefire way to avoid the traps of self-absorption and short-term thinking. When you actively think about what success looks like in your life with a long-term perspective, you are more likely to be successful over the long haul.
The second lesson is the importance of developing the skills you need to deal with life’s ups and downs, and that leads us to our 2nd takeaway from the study…
2. Emotional intelligence makes all the difference, whatever you want to call it
To be successful over the course of an entire life, one will inevitably deal with setbacks, struggles and pain. Dr. Vaillant, the longtime director of the study, focused a lot of his energy on how – and how effectively – the men in the study responded to life’s troubles. He called the skills one uses to deal with these setbacks “adaptations” – and they largely determined how successfully the men aged, both physically and psychologically.
In an interview with The Atlantic, Vaillant described these defenses as akin to basic biological processes. When we cut ourselves, our blood clots. Similarly, when we face a challenge big or small – a loved one’s death or a disagreement at work – these coping mechanisms guide us through the emotional situation. But just like clotting can save us from bleeding to death or clog an artery and kill us with a heart attack – the defenses we employ can save us or ruin us. They play out throughout our lives, in moments big and small, and the strength and health of our emotional adaptations is a big part of what makes a good life.
