One of the most enduring strategies for lasting happiness and fulfillment is to choose how to contribute to making the world a better place for our having passed through it in the time we have allotted here on the planet.

For some, the choice of how to contribute to the world seems to have been almost preordained. You know the people I’m talking about – the ones who always wanted to be a doctor, a nurse, a lawyer, a chemist, a professor – and then who go on to live out that promise.

For others, the choice of how to contribute comes later in life – sometimes after retiring from their first career or profession – and then looking for a way to give back to the community or society-at-large.

For still others, clarity on contribution arrives after an experience with a terminal disease.

For me, even though my specific calling was cloudy for a quite a while, it is rooted in enjoying helping people feel happier. Although I’ve always loved to make other people laugh and have fun and feel happier about themselves and their life, in doing so, the idea of doing this directly as a career never crystallized until I was in the midst of my second career as an organization transformation consultant. I realized that, while I really enjoyed helping my client companies and organizations improve their service, their leadership skills, their structure and systems, and their employees’ skills, there were other effects that were rewarding as well. My epiphany (if I may use that term) was that, while I was helping the companies and organizations by training and coaching their individual employees who would then implement their newfound skills and attitudes to help the company improve performance, I was also, and maybe even more important, often having a sometimes profound impact on the individuals on a personal level – an impact that often went beyond just the skills and concepts they were learning. Many felt inspired beyond just working harder and saw their new attitudes and performance as a life-changing experience.

So, for this last career – after some delays due to some of the life challenges that await us all – I wanted to focus on helping individuals directly – and then rely on them to help their companies.

And, to aid in this quest, the researchers in the new and emerging field of positive psychology have cooperated wonderfully. Just in this past decade, they have proven facts about employees that many of us already intuitively knew but lacked evidence-based support for our beliefs. Among their findings are the research-validated truths that psychologically-well (a.k.a. happy) employees exhibit higher levels of performance and productivity, are less likely to quit their job, are superior decision-makers, and are actually healthier. And, maybe even more significantly, people who are unhappy in life are unlikely to find satisfaction at work, in spite of well-intended efforts to improve job satisfaction.

Findings like these have spurred me to (finally) write my first book The Serious Pursuit of Happiness:  Everything You Need to Know to Flourish and Thrive which provides people with everything that they need to know to live happier and more fulfilling lives – and to also offer and deliver training programs and interactive talks aimed directly at the individual employees – helping them to live better and more purposeful lives. Employers who sponsor these programs do so secure in the knowledge that, in turn, these happier employees will contribute even more performance and productivity to their organizations. In fact, investing in the psychological well-being of their employees may be the optimal way for companies and organizations to reap the needed benefits of optimal performance, productivity, and global competitiveness in the world of today and tomorrow.