Progress-focused

How important should we consider being happy? Should it be a general goal in our life to be happy? Or should it perhaps even be the ultimate goal we should have as a person? Must we see happiness as the main goal in many or all domains of our life, such as work and education? While happiness as a goal sounds quite important, perhaps we should not conclude too quickly that our life resolves or should revolve around happiness only. What happiness precisely is, how we achieve it, and to what extent we should focus on it, may harder to answer that you might think.

Parents, teachers, and managers play an important role for respectively children, students, and employees. They not only have a facilitating, helping role but also a directing role. They pay attention, show understanding, they help and facilitate, they give a good example and they clarify expectations and set limits. When they fulfill their role effectively, the individuals they work with will be likely to function and develop well en feel good. These individuals are likely to engage in what they find interesting and important and to behave in well-adjusted ways and offer useful contributions.

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist researching grit. Grit is the quality of people to work hard and keep focusing on their long term goals, or their long term passions. Grit consists of two aspects: resilience, the ability to continue after setbacks, and consistent long term goals or passions. People with much grit are less easily distracted and conquer setbacks and obstacles more effectively (one study this was found in is Duckworth et al. (2007) . In a study by Duckworth & Quinn (2009) grit was found to be a better predictor of academic success than IQ and, surprisingly, grit was negatively correlated to IQ.