Do What Makes You Happy - Chris Cleveland

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's episode of the worst advice I ever got. Our guest today is Chris Cleveland, a 30 year educator who currently serves as the headmaster for wesleyan school. Wesleyan's goal is to provide a broad spectrum of learning opportunities within a christian environment where students are encouraged to reach their full potential. Chris, thanks for joining us today. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Sean, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it very much. [00:00:31] Speaker C: So, in each of these episodes, we don't beat around the bush. We jump right into the whole purpose of the podcast, which is tell us about the worst advice you ever got. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Well, Sean, I'm a little embarrassed to say that the worst advice is advice that I've given. And so I'm the source of the bad advice. And I bet you are, too. [00:00:53] Speaker D: And what is it? [00:00:54] Speaker C: Leave it to you to say I haven't been given bad advice. I'm the one that did it. But I'm very intrigued. Tell me, Chris. [00:01:01] Speaker B: Well, in working in education for more than 30 years, working with thousands of students and parents, I get involved in lots of conversations with seniors in high school who say things like, I don't know what I want to study. I don't know what I want to do with my life. And the advice I have heard time and time again, and I'm confident that I have given this advice many times, is you should just do something that makes you happy. [00:01:28] Speaker C: Okay, very interesting. So I'm trying to figure out how this is bad advice. In fact, I think there's a song, don't worry, be happy. How is this bad advice? [00:01:38] Speaker B: There is a song, and thank you for not singing, Sean. I appreciate that. But I think there's a well known saying that says if you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life. And I think there is a lot of truth in that statement. But I think when you make the sole pursuit happiness, there are some real downfalls to that that are worth unpacking and talking about and considering. And it's kind of advice that just rolls right out of your mouth, like you don't even really think about it. Somebody is sitting in front of you and saying, I don't know what to do. It's almost a default to say, well, you should do something that makes you happy. But here's the reality. You and I both know that you can love your job and love what your career is all about, and you're not going to be happy every day. There are always going to be aspects of your job that don't make you happy. No job is perfect, but when we tell young people to pursue happiness, to pursue an emotion, we're building into them an expectation that's completely unrealistic and unsustainable. You can't be happy every day. It's just not possible. You're not designed to be happy every day. We need to think about the long term effect of that. [00:02:59] Speaker C: I'm sitting here thinking about a couple of things based on this. First, I'm thinking about how many times I've told Rosie, my daughter, who, you know, honey, you just need to be happy. Don't worry about this. Don't worry about that. And it's almost like we're dismissing it as easy, like, what's the problem? [00:03:21] Speaker B: Right? [00:03:21] Speaker C: Just be happy. And inevitably, and you're probably seeing this more and more today, being in education for 30 years, I think it's a growing trend that there's more and more disillusioned in young people than there is just natural happiness. [00:03:35] Speaker B: Right. We are really alarmed with the rapidly increasing rates, particularly amongst teenagers and people in their early 20s. Talking about depression, stress, anxiety, what those things lead to sometimes self harm, in the worst of cases, people attempting to take their own lives. And I'm not saying that the advice of pursue something that makes you happy leads to those things. There's lots of factors that are baked into that. But I think that we have to pause and consider. We're giving this advice as adults. We have a long life experience that we can reflect on. We have 2030, 40 years of work history that we can reflect on. This is an 18 year old in front of us who doesn't really have much of a catalog of life experience to reflect on. And they're listening to people they trust and they love and they respect, and they're saying, okay, I need to do something that makes me happy. That sounds good. That sounds realistic on its surface. And again, I don't think we as adults are intentionally trying to set them up, but to process that as an 18 year old, the consequences of that are this what happens when I'm not happy? Well, is something wrong with me? [00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:58] Speaker C: I can see the inward beating of oneself up by saying, well, it's supposed to be easy, and I'm not happy. What am I doing wrong? [00:05:07] Speaker B: Right. And everybody I look at on social media, they sure look happy because nobody's posting. Man, I'm having a really bad day today. I'm really disillusioned with my job, so everybody around me seems happy. I'm being told that I should pursue happiness. I'm not happy. Something is wrong with me. [00:05:25] Speaker D: And I'm not happy all the time. That's the biggest issue. I'm not happy. All you can be sure. I promise you, you were happy sometimes. [00:05:32] Speaker B: That's right. [00:05:33] Speaker D: But this thriving, this making it the end goal, trying to be the only thing that's important is happiness. [00:05:38] Speaker B: Well, and again, we have to consider what happiness is. I mean, happiness is an emotional response to the environment and conditions around us, right? And so if I get a good grade on a test, I'm happy. If I get a promotion, I'm happy. But what happens on the day when I have to go into work and I have to tell somebody else they're not getting the bonus? That's not a happy occasion. That shouldn't make me happy. That's hard. And there's aspects of all of our jobs that we don't enjoy. Now, we are willing to fight through those aspects of our job because we do love what we're doing. But I would argue that's not rooted in happiness. That's rooted in some other things that would be better advice for us to give. So I think the other thing is, you look in our culture right now, and we exist in a time when if you don't like the situation you're in, then just leave and go to another situation. So again, if I don't like the circumstances, if I'm not happy with the circumstances, I'll just change the circumstances. Because the mantra is, I need to pursue what makes me happy at all costs, at all costs, at any cost. And so three career changes and eight jobs down the road, at some point you have to look in the mirror and say, what's been the common denominator in all of those situations? Well, the common denominator is me, and that becomes very disillusioning. And that's not leading to a lot of resilience, a lot of grit, a lot of fighting through the hard things, and it's leading to a roller coaster of emotions. And so my day is good when I'm happy. My day is bad when I'm not happy. And again, I don't know why we've chosen happiness as the thing to pursue, but I would say there are some other words we could replace happy with. That would be better advice that would serve young people much better than just saying, pursue something that makes you happy. [00:07:42] Speaker C: Even though it's rooted in a good place, it almost feels like it's quick and dismissive, so to speak. [00:07:48] Speaker B: It is. And I think in the fast paced world we live in, where efficiency is kind of an idol that we worship. Yeah, this is an easy thing to just rattle off, particularly if you're talking to a group of people. People would be better served to really sit with someone, to have a conversation with them, to kind of pull some things out of them. And then I think to be able to give more specific and a little deeper counsel than just pursue something that makes you happy. But this is a message that I think we send to young people in a lot of different areas. You're a parent of two children. I would guarantee you you've had this conversation with somebody when somebody said, well, what do you hope for your children? What do you want for your children, man? The first thing that all of us ratled, I want to be happy and healthy. Those are the first two things that come to mind. And of course, I know you, and I know your children. I know if you had time to have a longer answer, you would say things like, I want them to be men and women of character and integrity, and I want them to work hard, and I want them to love their family and friends, and I want them to have the right priorities in life. But again, in the quick hit response, the kind of bullet point response that we have in this life, and this time, it's kind of like, I just want to be happy and healthy. Well, have we ever thought about, what does that really mean? [00:09:15] Speaker C: Yeah. And where does that come from? The happiness and the healthiness comes from a lot of those things you just talked about. [00:09:22] Speaker B: Right. Another one that drives us crazy at our school is when parents say college is the best four years of your life. Well, there's some truth in that. I mean, I think all of us who went to college, we look back and we kind of filter out the bad. We filter out, like, the loneliness of being a freshman. We filter out the kind of lostness of. I'm not really sure what I want to do. And we just remember the great times. Yeah, it was great going to football games and hanging out with friends and, yeah, I went to school 3 hours a day and I had 21 hours to do whatever I wanted to do. Yeah, of course, we look up back on that and say, that was a great time. But if you're 18, the message you get from that is, well, I better make the most of these four years, because apparently after that it is just a slow, methodical decline into middle age and old age, and I'm just going to work and be miserable the rest of my life. Now, we're not saying that. Yeah, but again, we're speaking from the perspective of somebody who's in their forty. [00:10:23] Speaker C: S or fifty s decades of experience, they're 18. [00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:27] Speaker B: And so what that creates is so much pressure on that decision. That decision becomes the be all, end all of their life. [00:10:34] Speaker C: Oh, which college I'm going to, which. [00:10:36] Speaker B: College I'm going to. And then if I get to college, man, the number of children that we see who are disillusioned within the first six months of they set foot on a college campus. And I'm not just saying our school, I'm just saying in general, if you read the research, there's a lot of college freshmen who are out there. And essentially what they're saying is all, you guys built this up to be the greatest experience of my life. This isn't great. I'm not having that kind of experience. So again, there must be something wrong with me or I'm just going to change the environment I'm in. There was some point when my oldest child was playing church league sports and just starting in athletics, and I caught myself one day after a game in which he had played really well, saying, man, I'm so proud of you. And I thought to myself, he's like nine. Does he think that there are days that I'm not proud of him? And does he think that I'm not proud of him? When he doesn't have a good game? I want him to know that I'm proud of him every day. If he makes every shot, if he misses every shot, I'm proud of him. And so I tried to really discipline myself, and I'm not patting myself on the back, and I'm sure I didn't get this right all the time, but to really be intentional after he had a really good game, I would say, I'm really happy for you. I'm happy for you that all your hard work came to fruition in the game today. And then if he had a bad game, man, I made sure to tell him, I am so proud of you, so proud of how hard you played and how hard you tried. Yeah, and those are subtle differences, but it's so easy for us. Just kind of this default that just kind of rolls off our tongue. I think one of the great things about the theme of this podcast is it forces you to stop and think, and that's not something we do very often in this world anymore. [00:12:37] Speaker C: You talk about also this sort of this dilemma that our young people are facing right now and who they seek for advice. And it's almost more of a factory mentality right. We get them in, we get them out. We get them in, we get them mean. You're in education. It's a hard thing. How do we fix advising young people in a better fashion than maybe we are now? And I know it's not all the school system's responsibility. [00:13:02] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. I think a couple of thoughts, Sean. One is nobody really appreciates unsolicited advice, and we are great as adults at giving kids unsolicited advice. Like, we lead the league in that category. And that's tough, particularly when it's our own children, because we feel like we can kind of forecast where the pitfalls might be five, six, seven steps down the road. And we want to try to kind of head that off and help them avoid those missteps. But the reality is we know that in building character and developing persistence, it's the pitfalls that make you stronger and make you better. And you learn more from life's hard lessons than you learn from the advice that your parents speak to you. And so I think unsolicited advice is really a big one, that we need to watch ourselves as parents, but also, I think just anytime we're interacting with young people more directly, to your question, I think counsel in the context of a personal relationship is really valuable. And so relationships take time. Relationships take intentionality. You can't do a relationship over email or text. You have to be with a person and build respect and trust from that person, and you do it by investing your time. If you think about young people, particularly, I'm thinking about people who are in high school, about to be launched into the world. One of their most valuable commodities is time. They don't have control over a lot of their time. When they see an adult who is willing to give of their own personal time to spend time with a young person, you get relational capital there. And that is when the door is going to be opened for, let me give you some counsel. Or that might be the question. Instead of unsolicited advice, it might be, man, I'm really struggling in this area. [00:15:14] Speaker A: They'll open up to you, and then. [00:15:15] Speaker B: You have an opportunity. And because you have relational capital with them, you know this person, you can speak to those specifics that we talked about earlier instead of kind of the blanket advice of just pursue something that makes you happy. [00:15:28] Speaker C: Right. [00:15:28] Speaker B: Well, man, let's talk about you, and where's your heart? Where's your interest? What do you think you enjoy? And you can begin to kind of have. It's a conversation instead of a one way, giving and dispensing of advice. It's a conversation between two people that I think has a greater opportunity to be successful, for lack of a better word, because, again, it's not rooted in, hey, I've been where you are right now, but you haven't been where I've been. So let me kind of tell you what you need to do. It's more of, I want to come alongside you and help redirect you in the right direction so that you can have the type of life and experience that we would want for all of our children, whether they're ours or someone else's. [00:16:18] Speaker C: And when we're harmed, we tend to learn more from it than when all things are good. But when you're developing that personal relationship, they get to know some of those things about you, where you struggled and you seem to have come out the other side. Your advice means a little bit more to them at that point. [00:16:33] Speaker B: That's right. There's context for it. You can speak personally to it. Instead of kind of this kind of hallmark greeting, kind of pursue what makes you happy, it's, hey, let me tell you a time I did this, and this is what I experienced, and your life doesn't have to be the same as my life, but I think there might be something valuable from this for you to learn. And young people are growing up in a time when storytelling is such a powerful part of their narrative and their life give you an opportunity to speak truth into somebody's life and not have it feel like I'm just giving you advice. [00:17:10] Speaker D: If someone were to ask you a similar thing now where your kind of default would be normally, just do what makes you happy. What do you say now? [00:17:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I think replacing that word happiness with talking to them about what do you think your gifts are? What do you think you're good at? If you do something that you're good at, there's going to be fulfillment and happiness that it's a byproduct of that. What are you good at? What gives you purpose? [00:17:43] Speaker C: It's very interesting. You're coming back to their question now with questions. You're not coming back to them with dismissively saying, just do whatever makes you happy. You're digging. [00:17:53] Speaker B: That's right. So I would say don't pursue the things that make you happy. Pursue the things that you think can make a difference in the world. What that does is it takes the focus off of me. [00:18:09] Speaker C: Yeah. Individual. [00:18:10] Speaker B: And I think any scientific study that you would look at on happiness, and there have been plenty of them done. One of the core tenets of those studies would say the people who are happiest are the people who aren't obsessively focused on themselves. Think on those lines. Don't think about happiness, because if you pursue what you're passionate about, if you pursue where you think your gifts are, I can assure you more days than not, you're going to be happy. [00:18:37] Speaker C: It's a byproduct, what you're talking about. The happiness is a byproduct of this living your purpose. [00:18:44] Speaker B: That's right. And again, I think the inverse is not necessarily true. If you just pursue what makes you happy, you may never find what your true passion is. You may never find really what your gifts are. Because then you've got to define, okay, what makes me happy. It's just purely an emotional response. It's a feel. And judging the value of your career based on just a feeling is not a long term strategy for sustained excellence. [00:19:17] Speaker C: Well, Chris, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. While our invitation to you wasn't my pursuit of being happy, I certainly am happier with this podcast and with my day that you joined us than I would have been had you not joined us. So thanks for that great advice on the worst advice you got. [00:19:37] Speaker B: Well, Sean, thanks for having me. I have enjoyed this experience. And again, I would say the best part of this, from the time you initially contacted me, is that it has caused me, it's forced me to really think about the advice that I give, to think about the role of happiness in our lives, and to ask myself if there's a better way, a better way to guide young people to live a life that's fulfilling and within that they'll have happiness as well. So thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. [00:20:09] Speaker C: Thank you, Chris. [00:20:11] Speaker A: Well, JB, I think you see why we had asked Chris to join us. I've had the pleasure of knowing him for years, and man, just what a great focus in on something that we all commonly do, right? [00:20:23] Speaker D: For sure. It was so interesting to me how he took advice that he actually has given as the worst advice. That's certainly a twist. And how he's like, I'm guilty of this just as much as everybody else. [00:20:36] Speaker A: Well, and for me, I can personally relate to it. When I had first graduated from college, I was trying to figure out how to be happy, really. And I was having a hard time, really hard time. So it's funny that his advice really hit really right in the center of my heart. [00:20:52] Speaker D: I think we're going to see a lot of that on the podcast moving forward is these cliches. And I really like what he was talking about. Sort of the easiestness of the. [00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's easy and it's quick. Right. It's like, gosh, I hate that you're hurting. Let me help you quickly. Just be happy. We all do that. And I will say one of the things that Chris said was that when he got invited to join our podcast, it made him actually stop and think, and it was a process that was good for him. So that's really what we want for our listeners, right? Is to have that impact. But it made me feel good that he, as a guest, had that experience as well. [00:21:31] Speaker D: He really put himself in the perspective of, here's what I'm saying to people who do give advice and think about what you're doing. Think about what you're saying. And as somebody who offers advice to young people, here's what I'm saying. And that's what he learned from the bad advice, which, as you're saying, that's what we want people to take from this. What can I learn from this? Worst advice I ever got. [00:21:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I learned a lot today. It feels know everybody will when they listen to this great episode. Thanks again to Chris Cleveland for joining us today. Thanks for listening, everybody. Tune in next week to the worst advice I ever got.