Finding Well-Being on the Way to Success: A Conversation with Dan Lerner

Why are some people successful but not happy? Why are others happy and successful? When does passion add to our lives and success, and when does it detract from our overall well-being? If you’ve ever wondered about the connection between success, well-being, and happiness, this conversation with Dan Lerner is for you.

Dan Lerner (C’12) is an author, speaker, consultant, and professor who helps people from college undergrads to opera singers succeed without sacrificing their well-being. Learn about his story, how he went from working in the music industry to teaching the most popular elective at NYU, and why he is so passionate about passion. 

MAPP Magazine (MM): Please share with us a bit about yourself, your work, and how you're applying positive psychology.

Daniel Lerner (DL): I spent 10 years in the music industry as an agent, and I got really interested in a couple of things. I was in classical music and represented mostly younger opera singers. I’d see certain people’s careers take off and others did not. And I got really interested in what was happening. Why were some people able to realize their potential in that capacity, and other people were not? I figured it had to be psychological. The other thing that caught my attention was that I had a wonderful mentor who represented these very successful, established artists. Many of them were living fulfilling lives, and many of them were miserable, and clearly lots of gray area in between. I came from a household where my parents were both professional classical musicians. They both loved what they did, so I hadn't really seen the folks who were successful but unhappy, and that was fascinating to me. How could you be making music, something you had been striving for and making a very good living doing, and not be living a fulfilling life?

And so, I left with the question of when do excellence, success, and happiness coexist? I learned that happiness was not the thing, but it was really well-being. So, really, when do excellence, success, and well-being coexist? 

First, I went back to study performance psychology. On my syllabus, there were a couple of books that caught my attention. One was Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the other one was Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman.

I knew I needed to know more about the science behind this, so I applied to MAPP, and studied and explored the question: When do excellent success and well-being coexist?

After I graduated, I [worked] with artists, musicians, and performers of all types. I was a college athlete too, so [I also worked] with athletes and other folks who were striving to realize excellence in their chosen field, but also who wanted to address well-being.

While I was working on my capstone, a mutual friend introduced me to Alan Schlecter, a psychiatrist, who just started teaching a course called the Science of Happiness at NYU. He invited me to come and attend a class. At the end, I said, “Alan, you're a wonderful instructor, and this is such an important topic. But if you're going to teach a course called the Science of Happiness, I really think there should be more happiness.” 

You know, this is a physician, so med schools are about eliminating the problems. And about 75% of his syllabus was around that. What is stress? How do we deal with it? What is anxiety? All so important and essential, but if you're going to teach a course called the Science of Happiness, it has to go beyond some of the basics that I think are built into positive psychology. 

And Alan said, “I love it. Take a shot at rewriting the syllabus.” So I did, and we went through it together, and he said, “Why don't you teach this with me?” I'd never expected to be teaching at a university, especially not having gone through a PhD program. But Alan invited me to come join him, and we started teaching it together in the fall of 2012, and we've been teaching it together ever since. 

We have 500 students each semester in the classroom. It's the largest elective at [NYU], and in 2017, we wrote a book together called U Thrive: How to Succeed in College and Life, which is based on the material we put together for this course. The course is now about 70:30 positive psychology to traditional methodologies of addressing issues.

It's just a joy to be able to do this for a number of different reasons. I get to teach with Alan, who is a brilliant psychiatrist and has become my best friend. 

We make sure that our course is very interactive. One of the essentials for our courses is the understanding that I'm not alone. I'm not the only one. There are things that the students teach each other better than we can teach them. 

We want to share the data with them on well-being and both the opportunities for well-being and the challenges, but we want them to really be able to specify what changes they want to make that semester.

We did a study on two cohorts of students about two or three years ago, along with David Yaden and Jer Clifton, and we wanted to see if our course created change. It turned out that the folks who [experienced] the greatest change came in with specific ideas about what they wanted to change and why they wanted to change it. So, we encourage that very early on, and we do it throughout the semester.

That's what we've been doing for the last twelve years. And it's been incredibly meaningful stuff.

I also meet with students about ten hours a week, which I love to do. I find it's really important to sit with students and get a sense of who they are and have them know that there's someone there who cares and listens. There's data on university and college alumni who are thriving between five and ten years after graduation, and two of the top-five factors are that they say they had a professor, mentor, role model, or coach who either cared about them as a human being or had a shared interest. So, being able to nurture that outside the classroom is important. So, that is the NYU portion of what I do.

I've also done a fair amount of coaching and workshop design. And that's been [in] highly competitive environments as well. I designed a ten-part workshop for the Metropolitan Opera Young Artist Development Program, which is kind of the most prestigious young artist program for opera singers in the world. They take twelve singers, very talented young performers, on generally three-year contracts. It's an incredibly stressful environment. As I say to them, it's like going straight from high school baseball to play Yankee Stadium—like that's not how it's supposed to go. You're supposed to go to the minor leagues first and play for a couple of years and get used to things. 

So, being able to work with them, not only on stress management and performance issues but also helping to embed routines that can raise levels of well-being throughout challenging times, both at the moment and in their future careers, is really important. 

I've done the same with folks like plastic surgeons. Paddy Steinfort and I teamed up on a cohort of high-level plastic surgeons who were addressing well-being in their practices. I've worked with other highly competitive and high-stress environments like lawyers.

Being able to introduce well-being into competitive environments where people are really striving to perform at their peak has been something that I've focused on in the coaching, teaching, writing, workshops, talks, and keynotes. 

That's the other thing I do—30-ish or so talks a year to different institutions. About 90% of them are corporate. Being able to introduce that in a way that offers a competitive advantage matters. 

MM: Thanks for going through all of that. You're doing a lot of exciting things, and we're happy to hear you share about it.

We’re curious about the question that you said led you to MAPP, and that is, what is the relationship between happiness or well-being, excellence, and success? And then also, how do you explain when success and excellence are present, but happiness and well-being are not?

DL: I think there's a real bi-directional relationship between the two. We tend to think in our communities that when I'm successful, I'll be happy. When I get the grades, I'll be happy. When I get the raise, I'll be happy. When I get the promotion, I'll be happy. Get the house, meet the person in my life, etc. 

But what we're seeing is that there are so many advantages to well-being on that pathway that we actually are more likely to perform more effectively, often more efficiently, when we are primed with well-being beforehand. 

And I use that blanket term of well-being. And each [component] of well-being is going to have a different impact. If we're talking about raising levels of meaning, it's going to have a different impact on our performance than, say, raising levels of positive emotion. But each of them, engagement or character strengths, will have a different impact on our ability to perform. 

Being able to get a sense of where an individual is and where their opportunities lie for raising levels of well-being, but also how they're defining success clearly for themselves is so important. I mean, just saying success, what does that mean? Getting a sense of what success looks like for them, allows us to start having conversations about actions they can take that will impact those specific areas in terms of how they define their success. 

I want to be really clear that one doesn't have to have well-being to perform at their peak. I think we can give lots of examples of that. We can compare and contrast people who are very successful and who have well-being and who don't. 

[For example], we can take Steve Jobs, as successful as they get in almost every measurement, but not a particularly happy person. Now look, I can't say if only Steve Jobs would have taken some time cultivating more positive relationships, he would have been more successful. That may be the case. But I'm not going to argue that because it's tough to argue Steve Jobs, right? But you can contrast him with someone like Richard Branson, who has always said, “The reason I am successful is because I have spent time with family and friends and do things that are important to me.” 

We can do the same thing in the arts. You take Whitney Houston, one of the most talented and successful artists of our generation,  and look at [her] tragic end.  She was clearly not a happy person. But for some people, there's a chemistry where that's not the case. 

You can contrast her with Maya Angelou, who was born into the most challenging circumstances and lived a very hard young life. But she attributed her success in many ways to doing things that were meaningful to others and to the world and to having relationships that were really positive. 

I'd like to think of it as a choice, that we have the choice to go one way or the other. We tend to highlight those who have suffered their way to success, but we need to shine a spotlight on the exemplars who have incorporated well-being into their process as well. There's this drive to be successful, and probably more because of social media and how we view and define success. The comparison culture is such that so many people define success by others. You need to have a benchmark, but it used to be far more limited than it is right now. Now, everyone's more successful, and everyone's happier, and everyone's better dressed, and everyone's having better lives than you are. It's almost impossible to realize people's definition of success. Their bar is raised and it's become more externally driven than it used to. And that's an issue.

MM: Thank you for that, Dan. 

You talked a bit earlier about passion, and you referred to these two different kinds of passion. I would love for you to unpack that more. What's the role of passion in the pursuit of excellence? When does it help, and when is it a hindrance?

DL: Passion is a fascinating topic. Bob Vallerand, who is the former president of the International Positive Psychology Association, came to MAPP years ago and talked about passion. He is the father of all this research and has been doing it for about 30 years.

What Vallerand and his colleagues have found is that there are two distinctive ways of experiencing passion, and again, lots of variations in the middle. But we can experience passion in what they call a harmonious way, or we can experience obsessive passion.

I think that the two sit at the crossroads of performance and well-being, and they can be major factors in how we experience our lives.

Harmonious passion is sort of like it sounds; it fits in harmony with the rest of your life. Harmonious passions tend to be something that we love.

So we look at kids. When you are four years old, you wake up, and you think, time to play with Legos, time to draw, time to go outside, and play kickball. You know what you want to do, and you look forward to doing that thing. And it's wonderful.

Then something happens. Your mom opens the back door and says, “It's time to come in and practice piano” or “Do your math homework.” All of a sudden, you start doing it for someone else or for other reasons. 

And as we grow older, obsessive passions are really defined. They're rooted in doing it for status, for glory, for fame, for money. It doesn't mean that it's a horrible thing, but that's one of the foundational ideas. Is it something I love, or am I doing it for outside reasons? 

Another aspect of harmonious passion is that it’s a part of your life. Think about your life like a pie chart. I have my passion. Let's say it's math, or it's tennis, or it's music, or it's spending time with friends. I also have other things that are happening, too. With an obsessive passion, your pie chart tends to be one color. Even if you’re not playing tennis 24 hours a day, you might be thinking about it. 

Finally, with obsessive passion, people tend to do it to be the best. And if they're not the best, they're nothing because they're really rooting themselves, their lives, their egos, and their self-worth on that one thing. With harmonious passion, I do it because I love it, and even if I'm not the best, I still get a chance to do something that I really enjoy. 

I think about some of my former clients, like pianists at Juilliard, who practice for eight, nine, ten hours a day. Lunchtime comes, and there's a knock on the studio door. “I'm going to go get a slice. You want to come with me.” And that pianist might be like, “I've been at it for like three hours. Let's go do it.” And they'll talk about anything, a date they had the night before, a movie they just saw. Maybe they'll talk about music. 

But you knock on someone else's door, and they won't come out. They say, “I can't, I’ve got to practice. I’ve got a competition in two weeks.” And if you can drag them out, then they might be with you physically, but they're thinking, I shouldn’t be here. I should be practicing. 

So, it can be all-consuming in a lot of ways, and that's a real issue. If you say no often enough, people stop knocking. So, you're not cultivating the positive relationships you need for these stressful situations. You don't have anyone to turn to when things go poorly or to share when things go well. It has this whole effect of how it impacts your life, your performance, your longevity, and the likelihood of burnout. 

Those are the basic characteristics. Now, the outcomes of these things are interesting because, according to the research, the way that we pursue a passion colors a lot of our lives. Let's say your passion is not for work. Let's say your passion is for tennis. When we are able to pursue our passion adequately each week, it tends to color our work lives as well. So, if we have a harmonious passion away from work, we are still rated as less likely to lie, cheat, or steal than our obsessively passionate colleagues, and we tend to have higher levels of positive emotions throughout our days. 

Vallerand and his colleagues looked at college basketball players who are either obsessive or harmonious, and those basketball players who had harmonious passion, when they had practiced in the morning, the rest of their days tended to be better. They enjoyed things more. Those folks who were obsessively passionate the rest of their days tend to be slightly worse. How we pursue it matters not only for our level of performance but also for our overall well-being in life.

There are a number of reasons for this, but some of them are very clear to us in the positive psychology world. If you're doing something you love, you're being primed with positive emotions. If you're cultivating positive relationships and taking that time to make your pie chart different colors, you're going to have the stable support you need. You're more likely to have meaning because you are thinking about other folks. 

Branson said, “There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you.” What's so important here is “in a way that benefits you and the world.” So it's about looking outside. And that, for me, indicates meaning. Pursuing a passion can be an extraordinarily powerful thing. 

Research suggests a correlation between harmoniously passionate people and deliberate practice because they're willing to accept feedback and willing to put that time in and not look over their shoulder at someone else, but rather focus on what they’re doing. There's also a correlation between harmonious passion and subjective well-being.

At the end of the day, the folks who practice deliberately, as rated by their instructors, have higher levels of performance. So the argument is that we need to suffer, right? But we can not only look at someone like Simone Biles—who to me is the greatest athlete alive—who will say, “I think it's really important and essential for us to have fun at what we're doing to be great.” But we can also look at the numbers and the research, and see the outcomes of folks who have a harmonious passion for performing. Does it address everybody? Of course not. We'll go back to Steve Jobs again. Go back to other folks who just have this idea that it has to be that way. And look, you can't change people if they don't want to be changed, and for some people, it's not right to change them. 

But there is an opportunity. And we have some really strong data from Vallerand’s lab and increasingly from other researchers that indicate how effective harmonious passion can be on overall performance, both in the short term and because of much lower burnout rates in the long term as well.

MM: Great. We really appreciate you just being with us and sharing.

DL: Amazing. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to connect with you.

To learn more about Dan Lerner and his work, visit daniellerner.com

About the expert | Dan Lerner (C’12) has become known for his exploration of how positive psychology can affect the pursuit of world-class development, particularly how to leverage the advantage that a healthy psychological state can bring to performance excellence both at work and at home.

As an in-demand speaker, author, strengths-based performance coach and instructor of one of the most popular undergraduate courses at New York University, Dan’s expertise in positive psychology helps people lead thriving, successful lives.

Employing cutting-edge research into positive psychology and peak performance, Dan works with students, established and high-potential performing artists, athletes and numerous Fortune 500 companies and executives around the world helping them manage stress and anxiety, achieve well-being, uncover their core strengths and define and realize their own brand of success.

With a deep passion for helping the next generation of talent achieve their utmost potential, Dan, along with his co-author and teaching partner Dr. Alan Schlechter, penned U Thrive: How to Succeed in College (and Life).  Filled with fascinating science, real-life stories and tips for building positive lifelong habits, U Thrive addresses the opportunities and challenges every undergraduate faces and helps students grow into the happy, successful alums they all strive to be.

Whether it is speaking, coaching, teaching or writing, Dan injects intellect with motivation, science with compassion and makes change both exciting and fun.  Dan engages a room like few can.