Investor who studied at Harvard’s ‘Happiness Lab’ shares the No. 1 thing that ‘actually drives happiness’—it isn’t money

Alexa von Tobel learned at Harvard University that money doesn’t buy happiness.

She’s certainly experienced some of the former: After launching fintech startup LearnVest in her 20s, she sold it to Northwestern Mutual for a reported $375 million in 2015. But despite her own financial success, von Tobel, 39, says she’s derived the most happiness throughout her career from “the intangibles that money can’t buy.”

She learned the seeds of that lesson as an undergraduate psychology major at Harvard, where she studied at the school’s Leadership and Happiness Laboratory, also known as the “Happiness Lab.”

“Through my time at Harvard’s Happiness Lab during my undergrad years, I really gained a new perspective on what drives happiness,” von Tobel tells CNBC Make It, adding: “What actually drives happiness are the simple routines and the daily rituals in our lives that create community and connectedness.”

In college, von Tobel earned Magna Cum Laude honors for a senior thesis on happiness in the small country of Bhutan, according to her LinkedIn profile. At LearnVest, she focused on the daily fulfillment of working hard to build a company she’d be proud to run whether it made millions of dollars or not, she says.

Currently, she’s a founding partner at venture capital firm Inspired Capital, where she says her approach is the same: “I use these values every day. It’s about the love of the journey of building a company that is most fulfilling.”

Her advice, in other words: Don’t focus on specific career or financial goals at the expense of taking pride and fulfillment in the work you put in along the way. It might seem easy to say once you’re already wealthy or working your dream job — but a decades-long study from Harvard has shown that more money doesn’t necessarily result in higher levels of happiness.

Von Tobel and her husband even take a similar approach to parenting their three children, she’s noted. “We don’t celebrate the outcomes; we celebrate the process,” she told the “Oh Ship” business podcast in 2021. “It’s an input you can control.”

At Harvard, von Tobel says she took particular inspiration from lecturers Tal Ben-Shahar and Shawn Achor, who taught one of the school’s most popular courses at the time: Psychology 1504, or “Positive Psychology.”

Positive psychology, a popular branch of the field, involves finding pleasure and fulfillment in connecting with others, showing gratitude and using positive thinking to create positive outcomes. It’s faced opposition from critics who say it ignores the limitations of positivity and gratitude, and their effects on real-world outcomes.

For von Tobel, the lessons from her time at Harvard still resonate by reminding her to focus on whatever brings her joy in her day-to-day life, rather than obsessing over results like money or material items, she says.

“The daily effort drives happiness, not the outcome,” says von Tobel.

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