WHY THE WORLD NEEDS THE ACADEMY

The developed world has changed.  

We used to be culturally callous about how people feel. We used to expect people to be “tough” and to “suck it up” when they felt badly. Now we seek to be compassionate and are a little more sensitive about how other people experience life. We even ponder how we could actively improve. 

These are good things. Caring about how people feel can make the world a happier place. It might even make your world a happier place.  

Unfortunately, happiness is underrated. What if it wasn’t?

Imagine that you manage a business designed to produce happiness instead of revenues. As with all businesses, you have a limited amount of resources to invest and you want to maximize return on investment. If your goal is to maximize happiness, how would you invest? How would you decide where to invest?  

As with all successful businesses, you would look for a large market with a common problem. Ideally, your target market would represent a huge population who know that they are miserable and are literally dying for a solution. Buyers in this market would readily purchase your product and you would reap massive amounts of happiness.     

Such a market exists, but it is mainly in the less developed world. It’s called poverty. Poverty creates scads of unhappy feelings.  

When your resources are skinny you don’t worry about being fat. You don’t stress over carbs or Keto. You are perpetually lean because you are relentlessly hungry. When you don’t have enough money, you aren’t anxious about how many “likes” you get, you are just grateful for the friends you’ve got. When you live with financial insecurity you don’t stress about retirement or bucket lists. You are glad to have a bucket. You don’t concern yourself with getting into the best university, you are delighted you can read. You don’t go out after dark to express your anger, you try to get home early enough to avoid violence.  

If you are in the happiness creation business, poverty is a wide open market. In fact, nearly 700 million people (about 1/10th the global population) live on less than $2/day. It would be arrogant to conclude that just because people are poor, they are unhappy, but none would argue that a little more wouldn’t go a long way.   

If your imaginary business decided to maximize happiness returns by attacking poverty, how would you do it? The most obvious answer is to give poor people money or stuff. But that has been tried–and it doesn’t work very well. Instead of creating happiness, it provides temporary relief and sometimes screws up the local economy. Relief is sometimes exactly what people need in a specific circumstance, but it isn’t sustainable as a happiness-generating activity. In fact, people who spend too long on the dole lose happiness. Durably upregulating people’s Happometer (Hap-AHM-mee-ter) requires changing people’s situations.

This too is challenging because for a person to change their situation, they must have the desire and tools to change. They must want something better and see clearly how to get there. And they will need support every step of the way–because life has taught the poor to focus on the moment, but change means maintaining focus and effort long-term. 

Let’s say that your imaginary company has nailed it. You have a product that is perfectly designed for the poor, uneducated, and perhaps doubting person. It teaches them liberating principles in a way that they can understand and implement. Your system engages them emotionally and fills them with hope. It also builds a natural support network to sustain effort when emotional reserves dry up. Awesome.  

But, as you know, having a great product won’t accomplish anything if you can’t get it to market. Without distribution, you won’t sell anything. For your happiness-producing product to be successful, it will require a broad network of distributors throughout the undeveloped world–with engagement points everywhere including the most rural villages and cardboard camps.  

Even with the best product, it could take 20 years to develop a distribution network big enough to have meaningful impact. But you want results now. Your happiness investors won’t wait 20 years for returns.  

There is good news. A poverty-reducing/happiness-creating product already exists and has done the two decades worth of investment necessary to establish a distribution network with touch points in thousands of impoverished communities.  

The product is a set of principles and courses that are designed to help a motivated but uneducated person to start or improve a business to upgrade their family’s financial independence and outcomes. Through close partnership with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this product has distribution points in thousands of the most impoverished locations throughout the world. Participants meet regularly for training and provide each other mutual support.  

And it gets results. 70% of people who start the program actually create or expand a business. Nearly every night of the week, thousands of people meet to learn and support people in their community. And they are happier because of it. Why? Because they have hope. Because they have support. And because so many of them are seeing their lives change.  

This product is created and produced by the Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE). It has been serving the financially challenged since 1999 and is making a difference.  

If you were in the happiness-creation business and trying to figure out where to invest your resources for greatest returns, you would probably create a product like ACE. Or, I suppose, you could just contribute to ACE and bank the happiness dividends–paid daily

Of course, this is all hypothetical and sort of silly. No one is in the business of creating happiness. Or are they? Maybe you actually are running a business designed to produce happiness instead of revenues. That business is called life–and happiness is its purpose.  

Jacob Marley was miserable because he didn’t pay enough attention to the financial needs of those around him. He learned that his own happiness was linked to what he did for others.  Marley declared, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” 

Perhaps Jacob was right. The more our investments of time and other resources match our real business, the more happiness we get. 

ACE is actually an enterprise exactly like the one we imagined together–a business whose revenues are measured in the advancement of people from poverty to financial security and therefore, a greater sense of happiness. ACE is in the happiness-growth business. Like our fictional enterprise, it doesn’t produce any monetary revenues, but the money that ACE spends actually does buy happiness.

Since we all need a little more happiness, perhaps we need a little more ACE.

Keoki Andrus is a retired High Tech executive and entrepreneur. He is also an award-winning speaker, author, consultant, and board member and was a key leader in the creation of Microsoft Office, the evolution of Intuit QuickBooks, and the revival of Ancestry.com.