A Midlife Pivot To Hardwire Happiness
At one point, Ashish Kothari seemed like someone who had it all. At 42, he had the kind of life that checked all social boxes. Professionally, he was a Partner at McKinsey. On the personal front, he was married to Lizzie, and was the father of Ashwin, his pre-teen. Living in Boulder, Colorado, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, his home was set in the rugged allure of an idyllic cityscape.
But as he candidly admits in his book, Hardwired for Happiness, his internal state did not mirror the external markers: “I should have been blissfully happy and satisfied, yet I continued to hustle faster, harder and longer.” His own subjective sense of his life was hardly upbeat. He wrestled with sleeplessness, was jittery and wired, and also dismayed by his weight gain. Yet, he was fearful about stepping off the linear track and veering into a slower lane. He was immensely well qualified – with an Engineering degree from IIT-Bombay and an MBA from Booth (University of Chicago) – but hadn’t yet plotted a Plan B.
As it happened, rather fortuitously, at that point, he was selected to participate in a Leadership Development retreat. Organized by Johanne Lavoie, a Partner at McKinsey, and Amy Fox, the founder of a coaching and leadership development enterprise, the getaway was held at a monastery in Europe. During those five transformational days, Kothari embarked on an inward journey that helped forge his ikigai. He realized that he felt most joyful when he helped others tap into their own human potential.
Having formulated his purpose, he needed to steer his path towards the new goal post. All this while keeping the home fires burning. Leveraging his strong brand equity at McKinsey, he opted to work part-time (at 70% of his earlier capacity), while he upskilled himself. Over the next five years, he retrained himself, soaking in theories and experimenting with practices. He became, as he puts it, a “living laboratory” for his new methods. After all, if those techniques did not work with him, how could he transmit them with conviction?
He learned “Ontological Coaching” from Julio Ollala and Veronica Love at the Newfield Network, digging into his own ways of being, and learning how one could shift that for himself and others. He also undertook a ten-day Vipassana course, and plumbed happiness research, neuroscience findings, spiritual tenets and psychological insights that drove human behavior. Overall, in those five years, he read more than 500 books and listened to about 2000 hours of lectures. He was willing to absorb lessons from various perspectives, from the mystics and the scientists, from the ancients and the moderns.
At the end of his intense learning journey, Ashish decided to summarize his practices in a book and to launch an enterprise – Happiness Squad – that transmits these methods to organizations and individuals.
Nine Practices to Elevate Well Being
Kothari narrates an old Cherokee tale, wherein a grandfather tells his grandson that we all possess two warring wolves. One wolf embodies anger, fear, jealousy, resentment, hatred, cynicism and so on. The other signifies positive traits like love, peace, kindness, empathy and forgiveness. When the grandson asks which wolf wins, the grandfather responds: “The one you feed.” In his book, Ashish lays out the means to feed the more constructive wolf.
For instance, he suggests, that reflecting on your life experiences, memories, triggers, proclivities and strengths can forge an acceptance of who you currently are, and what kind of changes you wish to usher.
The Author’s Plumbs His Own Journey
Ashish dwells on his own upbringing and childhood, analyzing how it prodded him into certain pathways. Raised in India, by intensely academic parents, he was always conscious about bringing home stellar report cards and maintaining a high class rank. His mother held a PhD in Mathematics and was a gold medalist to boot. His father had topped the State in his Engineering college. Even from the age of 7, Ashish was always goaded into scoring not just high, but higher marks.
And like many high-IQ kids in the country, he was expected to crack the preposterously competitive IIT. In his midlife reflections, Kothari dwells on an irony: of stemming from a country that pioneered Yogic practices and inward journeys, but of being relentlessly urged to strive for extrinsic markers. As a high-performing teenager, he continued to toe the parental line, enrolling in rigorous coaching classes and studying for inordinately long hours. He recalls that he had “no time for games, hobbies, or other extracurricular activities.”
After his admission to IIT Bombay, Ashish was to face another challenge. He was now surrounded by the nation’s dazzling geniuses, and needed to toil harder to keep up his class rank. “My fears of not being good enough and disappointing my parents overwhelmed me, and I doubled down on my efforts to compete against the raw brilliance surrounding me.” He studied more than 60 hours a week, his grueling life made endurable by “alcohol, cigarettes and food.”
At the end of his IIT stint, he landed a job at IBM, arriving at Chicago’s O’Hare airport with $5000 in his pocket. From 1997 to 2005, he steadily scaled the corporate ladder, while also gaining an MBA from the University of Chicago. But some habits were hard to break, so he continued to work unhealthy hours, even as he suffered from “imposter syndrome.” He feared that no one else knew how doggedly he slogged to remain a high performer.
In 2005, he joined McKinsey, where he rose from Associate to Partner. He met Lizzie at McKinsey in 2008, and in 2010, they had their son, Ashwin. Despite his unfaltering rise inside the firm and his success with clients, Kothari felt that his work no longer seemed to resonate with his values. “On paper, my life looked perfect, but inside I was a mess.” Besides, he wrestled with the tedium of doing the same thing.
Just when he felt stranded at an emotional crossroads, the Leadership Development retreat was organized. He reiterates a saying attributed to the Buddha: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
The Nine Practices
Ashish lays out nine techniques that can help individuals discover their ikigais and raise their well-being. Broadly, they include
1. Cultivate Self Awareness
2. Define Your Purpose
3. Embrace Mindful Living
4. Practice Gratitude
5. Master Your Moods and Emotions
6. Fuel Up with Compassion and Kindness
7. Invest in Your Well-Being
8. Strengthen Your Community
Peppered with stories drawn from client interactions, researchers and happiness gurus, Kothari sketches a blueprint that can be adopted by all human beings. As Ashish himself emphasizes by recounting his own experiences, success does not necessarily foster happiness.
Rather, we would do well to shift that equation, and consciously “cultivate” happiness. Success, thereafter, can be a positive by-product. If not, we would have built up our internal resources to bounce back from failure. Or even reach a point, where we can give up the tiresome ricocheting between desire and disappointment.
Kothari quotes Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Catholic Benedictine monk, who said: “it is not happiness that makes us grateful, it is gratitude that makes us happy.”
References
Ashish Kothari, Hardwired for Happiness: 9 Proven Practices To Overcome Stress and Life Your Best Life, Houndstooth Press, 2022