According to a recent Princeton study money can buy you happiness – to a point – around $75,000 as an annual household income apparently. More than that has limited or no effect on your emotional well being or how elated, sad or stressed you feel on a day to day basis.
Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his most recent book. Pink offers that the secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Dan Pink is the guest this week for the Reach Personal Branding Interview Series, book your complimentary 'seat' for a lunchtime of learning with what promises to be an enlightening and entertaining interview.
So if you are currently sitting at around $75,000 income level then using the personal branding approach can be a way to raise that level of satisfaction and happiness to the next level. A great place to start would be to take stock of your Values, your moral compass, in terms of current levels of personal engagement with them and then set some actions around raising your score on them. Take the Values alignment exercise here.