We're coming near the end of our time together, and
I want to share a story with you about someone who I think I would
give an A to on their answer to this question, what is success?
So I was sitting in a Wharton conference room,
attending a seminar on happiness and relative income throughout the world.
And someone had done a country-wide study across different national boundaries.
Nigeria, Bhutan, India, America, Denmark, Germany,
and doing correlational studies between overall happiness,
the kind you measure by thinking.
You ask yourself, overall how happy are you?
And wealth in that country and income.
It's a pretty complicated social science study.
And I was in there with about 15 faculty from across the university, and
before the seminar started and
there was a presenter who was getting ready to show his data.
The door opened, and this older gentleman walked in, who obviously looked to me
as if he had been working on the campus on some construction project and
had heard that there was a seminar being offered on happiness.
And we have a tradition here at the University of Pennsylvania that
the members of the public are welcome to attend any seminar that is available.
And so, seeing members of the public come in is not a crazy thing.
We always sort of wonder what it is that this person might take away, or
what they might say when they got there.
Or not sure, since they're not part of our tribe, the academic tribe,
what to make of them.
But here comes this gentlemen, and
he ended up sitting down at the end of the table next to me.
And I could see from his hands, because his hands were on the table,
resting on the table, they were definitely working man's hands.
They were sort of calloused, and he was wearing a flannel shirt and
blue jeans and sort of a rough-hewn face.
And so I just turned my attention back to the presentation.
And the scholar who's giving the research paper talked about the data here and
the wealth levels there and the answers to the questionnaires and
how happiness and wealth may or may not be correlated,
and then he concluded and he asked for questions.
And somehow asked a question about the regression analysis that was
used on this data set, and there was some discussion.
And then this guy sitting next to me raised his hand.
Now as I said, when a member of the public shows up at one of these seminars, and
actually speaks, the rest of the faculty kind of hold their breath, because it's
hard to know exactly what they might be saying or where they're coming from.
So there was this sort of holding of the breath as this guy raised his hand, and
the presenter said yes sir, and he said something I'll never forget.
He said, I'm just a member of the public, and
I don't really understand a lot of what it is you're talking about here, but
it does seem to me you're talking about happiness and money.