[MUSIC] Another misconception we have about what's going to make us happy. Another thing that we miss want is we assume, especially as teenagers listening to this, that if you had the perfect grades and you can get into the best college, you would be happier. I think if I could present teens with the one thing, at least their hard work shows that they think will make them happy, it would be something like this. The big grade, the perfect repose work hard to send home to the parents. But does this actually make us happier? Well, we have lots of work on this. First of all, there's lots of notions that grades might not be making us as happy as we think. If we look at memes that high school students put out, we don't get this. So, when your teacher hands are straight back, it's a horrible headache. Here's another one of my favorite, teacher has your tests, well, I'm going to feel better when I see it, right? And they're like, feel better when I see it, right? But this is like, we think we're going to feel happier but there's a sense that maybe it doesn't work in the way we think, but so do good grades really make us happier. Well, here's a spot where I want to turn to another researcher, Alfie Kohn, who's looked at this in a lot of detail. In fact, he has a fantastic book that I wish every high school student could read. It's called punished by rewards. So, you're already getting a sense that maybe he's not going to tell us that grades are going to make us happy but he in the book reports a correlation between people's high school grade point average. So, think of whatever your grade point average is right now and your overall well being. He's going to look at the correlation between these. Does your happiness go up as your grade point average goes up? And what he finds is that there's a pretty significant correlation but it's a negative correlation. What does that mean as your high school GPA goes up on average your well being is going down and sadly it's not just your well being, it also seems to be your levels of optimism. Also a negative correlation there and interestingly also your levels of self esteem. The students who have the highest GPAs in high school on average have lower levels of self esteem not higher. So, it's not what we think. And so, you might be asking, okay, maybe my GPA is not helping my happiness right now but maybe if I get bad grades or I don't I worry about my GPA, I'm going to affect my future chances of success, right? All the success that I'm going to get from my future happiness is just not going to work out, right. And I will admit that yes if you're defining success narrowly by the particular kind of perfect college that you get into. If you have a really terrible GPA you're probably not going to get into a perfect college, if you have a really terrible high school GPA your probably not going to get to say Yale where we're teaching this right now. But that's a pretty narrow definition of success. I sort of force you to say well why do you want to get into a good college? What do you think you'll get out of it? And if you push and push and push high school students sometimes, what they'll say is like well, I assume I need to get a good college degree so I can get a good salary later on, right? So, I can lead a good life and have a good job and this kind of stuff later. But then that predicts that something about your GPA should be predicting your salary later on and we can look at that. In fact, Roth and Clark have looked at it. Not just they looked at it, they did a kind of study that we like to call a meta analysis. And my students at Yale know that I love in my heart of Hearts meta analysis so much because this isn't just one study. It's a statistical method that takes all the published studies and puts them together to get really one big conclusion. So, you know you have a lot of statistical power, you know that the effect is probably real and they did this in the context of looking at the correlation between grades and starting salary. So, what's the salary you're going to make based on your college level grades. And what they find is there's a correlation but it's a weaker one than you expect and that's for starting salary. What you don't care what you make when you're 21, you get your first job, you care what you make when you're in your late 20s and 30s. If we look at your salary growth over time, that correlation is basically non existent. There's something there but it's basically nothing, right? You're happy that your college GPA, even your high school GPA is not really predicting your salary in the way that a lot of people think. And that correlation I'd just like to compare with the correlation you just saw which is that you are taking your well being. And if you've listened to other lectures, you've heard that your cheerfulness level in high school is actually predicting your salary pretty well in your 20s and 30s. So, there's an interesting question about whether you should be stressing a lot about your GPA and what that's doing to your well being and what it's doing to your future earning. So, all this goes to say another good marvel meme, tell me the truth, I'm ready to hear it getting good grades it's not going to make you as happy as you think.
