Wisdom Of The Week

Last night I started reading George E Vaillant's book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study and the lessons so far has been life altering to say the least...

• First lesson is that positive mental health does exist, and to some degree can be understood independent of moral and cultural biases.
• The second lesson is that once we leave the study of psychopathology for positive mental health, an understanding of adaptive coping is crucial.
• The third lesson is that the most important influence by far on a flourishing life is love.
• The fourth lesson is that — people really can change, and people really can grow. Childhood need be neither destiny nor doom.
• A fifth lesson is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of a child’s total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychopathology. Let me repeat myself: what goes right is more important than what goes wrong.
• A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change, and so do the factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck. Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from a life of dependency and loneliness.

Persuading twenty-first-century Wall Street types that love is all you need was going to be a hard sell.

There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study. One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.