Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Q&A
BY SCOTT S. SMITH
JIM RUBENS IS A FORMER serial entrepreneur and New Hampshire state senator who is now a member of the Granite State Angels, a group that invests in New England technology start-ups. His new book is called OverSuccess: Healing the American Obsession with Wealth, Fame, Power, and Perfection.
Define what you call “Over-Success” and contrast that with healthy success.
“OverSuccess is a mass cultural phenomenon causing Americans to measure success exclusively by external appearances: wealth, fame, power and physical perfection. Over the past 30 years, the global economy and pervasive, celebrity-saturated media have driven success benchmarks more rapidly upward. We are pedaling harder to reach increasingly unreachable status goals, leading to unsustainable consumer and business debt loads, rising dissatisfaction with life, deteriorating social and family relationships, pervasive ethical decline, rising substance and behavioral addictions, among several dozen hard-data indicators I track in the book.”
You talk about a “science-based recipe for happiness.” What would that look like?
“Science has shown a number of things will improve our feelings of well being: Have control over the major elements of your life; select major goals for which you are 50 percent likely to succeed given your skills, intelligence, resources and social network, rather than goals that are either too easy or too difficult; focus on the process of reaching goals, not just achievement; do purposeful, meaningful work and activity in which you can grow; be of service to something larger than self; find faith, spirituality or religion; be married, since 40 percent of married people say they are very happy compared with 24 percent of those unmarried; live a rich social life with multiple strong friendships; get sufficient sleep and aerobic exercise; act happy to be happy, since there is evidence to support ‘behavior induction,’ the purposeful replacement of negative emotions, bodily motions, facial expressions and vocalizations with positive ones. It isn’t rocket science, but many of us have ignored common sense to feed our addiction to OverSuccess.”
You wrote the book before the economic meltdown. Would you change the message now? And how do you see society and business changing—for better or worse—over the next few years?
“The bubble has popped, and businesses and consumers are being forced to shed excessive debt and consumption. But the jury remains out as to whether we are prepared to face down our anything-goes ethical culture that spawned the liar loans and falsely rated derivatives that triggered the financial meltdown. I’m not sanguine. As soon as gas prices dropped back from $4 to $2 per gallon, the surge in small car sales evaporated. American leaders have to find ways to motivate us to adopt goals that match our means and to assign value to the forgott en things we need to live healthy social and psychological lives.”
