Make you happy?

Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask for neighborly advice - or so says a study from Harvard University, which shows that another person's experience is often more informative than your own best guess.

The study, which appears in the March 2009 issue of Science (Vol. 323, no. 5921, pp 1617-1619), was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

"If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "People do not realize what a powerful source of information another person's experience can be because they mistakenly believe that everyone is remarkably different from everyone else.” [From a Harvard news release]

Even though I’d rather believe that I really am remarkably different from anyone else, I’m leaning into this idea of learning from another’s experience. Just last night I listened to a couple of friends’ perspective: their wisdom gained from experience is now informing one of my decisions around vocation.