Posing with Santa Claus at Christmas is one of those great American traditions that we hold dear. Each year, every kid, smiling or crying, from one to 92 lines up in malls and shopping centers across the country to have their photo snapped with the jolliest, most famous, red-suited, white-bearded philanthropist on the planet. It's a magical time when kids are encouraged to dream as big as they can, and for families to have a keepsake that they can cherish for generations to come. But when all of the photos have been taken, and all of the wish lists have been heard and guaranteed on a "naughty or nice" basis, most families go back to their homes for a long winter's nap, and most "Santas" pack up the suit, take off the beard, and call it a day until next December. But for one Santa in Austin, Texas, every day is Christmas.

His real name is Alan Graham, and for the past 11 years, as co-founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes he has taken his role to heart. Today, armed with a fleet of 13 trucks, an uncanny resemblance to St. Nick and an unconditional love for his fellow man, Graham is one of the toughest soldiers leading the fight to end homelessness in America, and his mission to serve this country's less fortunate is as unwavering as his dedication to a higher calling. Catching up with Alan and his team of volunteers on the eve of a holiday season that will see a significant increase in the number of homeless families in need of food and shelter, I asked him to share his thoughts on the concept of Christmas 365 days a year and how we as Americans can change the state of homelessness in this country by not only facing our fears, but by changing our attitudes about the homeless.

How many times have you been Santa Claus for the holidays? 

Funny you should ask. I actually began playing Santa when I was 15 years old back in Alvin, Texas. I was hired to play Santa at an old Gibson's department store. The next year they actually flew me in on a helicopter. I gained a reputation and started to play Santa for some of the mentally challenged folks who lived in my town.

What did you do before Mobile Loaves & Fishes?

 I was in the real estate development business. Particularly towards the end of this part of my life I was focused on developing air cargo facilities on airports around the U.S.  When did Mobile Loaves & Fishes get its start? The idea germinated in the Spring/Summer of 1998. My wife Tricia and I were having coffee with a friend of ours who was telling us about a ministry in Corpus Christi where multiple churches would come together on cold winter nights to distribute resources to the brothers and sisters who lived on the streets. It was at this moment that the idea of a catering truck as a distribution vehicle entered my conscious mind. <em>What did it take to get started? Acting on the idea. That simple really. Once I began to share the idea with others the concept just took off.  

Do you remember your first day?

First, we had to prove that this was something we could do. So on October 13th, 1998 six of us loaded up 75 sack meals into the back of my buddy's green mini-van and hit the streets of Austin. Our first stop we ran into a homeless couple who lost their friend the night before to an accident. They were awash in grieving and there we were at this most appropriate time in their lives and ours. We have never looked back since.

Do you have any prior experience dealing with the homeless? Does it require training?

 None really. Unless you recall the time in about 1981 when my then girlfriend, now wife, Tricia was accosted and panhandled by a homeless man in downtown Austin as being experience. I was incensed and berated this poor fellow telling him to get a job and lift himself out of his pathetic situation. I thought I was being righteous but realized later I was being an ass. No training required. It is on-the-job training. Just care about other people. 

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about the homeless?

I would say that the biggest misconception is that they are lazy, drug addicts and choose to be this way. Nothing can be further from the truth. I tell people that in all the years I have been doing this I have never and I mean NEVER come across anyone who chooses homelessness as a lifestyle choice. Accepting, yes. Choice, no. In terms of being lazy I can tell you that it is quite the opposite. Having spent many, many nights on the streets I have found that the homeless are quite resilient and resourceful and the opposite of lazy. I often half seriously joke that if Armageddon hits we all need to leave the comforts of home and find the homeless population; you will survive there. Drug addicts? This particular segment of our population is infected with this disease too. The U.S. Conference of Mayors study on homelessness found that 25 percent of the homeless population battles issues of addictions. That also means that 75 percent don't battle this disease.

People have told me that they are often conflicted about what they should do when they encounter a homeless person. There is often suspicion about what the homeless person is really up to. Some question if the homeless person is being honest about what they really need. How do you know when to help and when not to?

Just saw a three panel cartoon the other day. Homeless person holding a sign that says "Being honest and I just need a drink". Next panel shows a fellow handing over some money and saying that they appreciate the honesty then in the third panel the homeless person is at the local fast food joint getting a bite to eat with the recently "dishonestly" acquired funds. We send out mixed signals and like Madison Avenue they play to that. Kind of like GM implying that if we buy that new red Corvette that the blonde babe will come along too. Say that your generosity is between you and your God. We pray that our generosity will be used for positive purposes but we really can never control that. And frankly the person may have a wife and child just out of our sight and they need formula and diapers but if I only focus on the negative -- that they will buy drugs, alcohol or tobacco -- then I miss the opportunity to help really fill the need. I say, let them carry the burden of how they use our generosity. I don't want to be oppressed by the fear of being "scammed" out of my dollar. Help when your heart says to help and leave it at that. 

Most of the homeless population in the U.S. are concentrated in urban areas, so if you could address all the city mayors at once, what would you tell them?

If you want to understand homelessness you MUST first understand what H-O-M-E is! In the ground breaking book "Beyond Homeless" the authors talk about the phenomenology of home and that there are eight characteristics of home. Home is a place of permanence. Home is a dwelling place. Home is a storied place. Home is a place of hospitality. Home is a safe resting place. Home is a place of orientation. Home is a place of embodied inhabitation. And Home is a place of affiliation and belonging. Our political leaders do not have a clue what HOME really is, and so will never be able to address the real causes of homelessness. They must come to grips with this. Go to MLFNOW to learn more about what HOME means.

How has your experience working with Mobile Loaves & Fishes changed you?

Profoundly! Really hard to articulate this but the past 11 years have been transforming in many ways. 

Your story appears in my new documentary called Happiness Is, so does serving the homeless actually make you happy?

 I often say that if there were a Fortune 500 for the happiest people on the planet I would have to be in consideration for the top spot. Happy? More than I have ever been. Serving PERIOD makes you happy. Serving is the happy drug. Take some and get hooked! 

If someone wants to help the homeless but they are not sure what to do or where to go, what advice do you have for them?

Begin big by rolling down your tinted windows and saying hello. Start there and repeat as often as possible and then see where that leads. It is that simple yet profound. yet profound.

Watch him in action...

Ms. Walker, now 36, scribbled the idea in her journal. And though she dismissed it at first, after weeks of fatigue, insomnia, pain and preoccupation with her symptoms, she decided to give it a try. The treatment and her experience with it are summed up in the title of her new book, “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life” (Da Capo Press).

Ms. Walker gave a gift a day for 29 days — things like making supportive phone calls or saving a piece of chocolate cake for her husband. The giving didn’t cure her multiple sclerosis, of course. But it seems to have had a startling effect on her ability to cope with it. She is more mobile and less dependent on pain medication. The flare-ups that routinely sent her to the emergency room have stopped, and scans show that her disease has stopped progressing.

“My first reaction was that I thought it was an insane idea,” Ms. Walker said. “But it has given me a more positive outlook on life. It’s about stepping outside of your own story long enough to make a connection with someone else.”

And science appears to back her up. “There’s no question that it gives life a greater meaning when we make this kind of shift in the direction of others and get away from our own self-preoccupation and problems,” said Stephen G. Post, director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University on Long Island and a co-author of “Why Good Things Happen to Good People” (Broadway, 2007). “But it also seems to be the case that there is an underlying biology involved in all this.”

An array of studies have documented this effect. In one, a 2002 Boston College study, researchers found that patients with chronic pain fared better when they counseled other pain patients, experiencing less depression, intense pain and disability.

Another study, at the Buck Institute for Age Research in Novato, Calif., also found a strong benefit to volunteerism, and after controlling for a number of variables, showed that elderly people who volunteered for more than four hours a week were 44 percent less likely to die during the study period.

How giving can lead to mental and physical changes in health isn’t entirely clear, although studies suggest that altruism may be an antidote to stress. A Miami study of patients with H.I.V. found that those with strong altruistic characteristics had lower levels of stress hormones.

By contrast, being self-centered may be damaging to health. In one study of 150 heart patients, researchers found that people in the study who had more “self-references” (those who talked about themselves at length or used more first-person pronouns) had more severe heart disease and did worse on treadmill tests.

And like Ms. Walker, numerous people have reported feeling better after helping others. A 1988 Psychology Today article dubbed the effect the “helper’s high.” Analyzing two separate surveys of a total of 3,200 women who regularly volunteered, the article described a physical response from volunteering, similar to the results of vigorous exercise or meditation. The strongest effect was seen when the act of altruism involved direct contact with other people.

For Ms. Walker, a former creative director for an advertising agency, most of the gifts involved time, emotional support or small acts of kindness. After the first 29 days, she began a new cycle, a pattern she continues. Neither she nor Mbali Creazzo, the spiritual adviser who taught her about the month of giving, knows why it is 29 days rather than 30 or 31 — it may have something to do with the lunar cycle, which is 29.5 days.

Ms. Walker says she now approaches daily giving as a crucial part of her treatment, just like regular medication. She has also found new purpose in her experience and started a Web site, 29gifts.org, that encourages giving to improve health.

“Giving for 29 days is not suggested as a cure for anything,” Ms. Walker said. “It’s simply a coping mechanism and a simple tool you can use that can help you change your thinking about whatever is going on. If you change your thinking, you change your experience.”

Dr. Post, of Stony Brook, agreed. “To rid yourself of negative emotional states,” he said, “you need to push them aside with positive emotional states.

“And the simplest way to do that is to just go out and lend a helping hand to somebody.”

Happiness

In January 2008, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index was launched. It was designed to work like a Dow Jones average of attitude. At least 1,000 people are surveyed daily, 350 days a year. (You can see how happy people are broken down by congressional district; Utah turns out to be the merriest state, West Virginia the glummest.) When the markets tanked last fall, happiness did too, and anyone who has lost his or her job, house or health care is probably still in a world of pain. But here's the funny thing: by this past summer, overall well-being was higher than it was in the summer of 2008, before the Apocalypse. In fact, the latest report finds America's cheeriness at an all-time high. An August report from the Pepsi Optimism Project (POP) positively fizzed: Americans are more optimistic now than a year ago about their well-being (88% vs. 84%); health, finances, relationships and odds of finding love (70% vs. 61%). Don't trust soda-company polls? Consumer Reports confirms that we don't plan to spend much money this Christmas, but the vast majority of us — 87% — expect this holiday season will be as happy as or even happier than last year's. Meanwhile, the Secret Society of Happy People (which "encourages the expression of happiness and discourages parade-raining") reports traffic to its not-so-secret website has increased since the downturn. (See 20 ways to get and stay happy.)

Everyone — or at least everyone who claims to be happy — has some reason for finding the upside to the downturn. Mine has to do with the end of Expectation Inflation, a phenomenon that can be as corrosive to our spirits as price inflation is to our savings. Expectations are a mash-up of hope and conceit, what you've earned and what you imagine luck might hand you as a bonus for just showing up. So what did it mean that over the past generation our expectations grew so big so fast that we had effectively supersized the American Dream?

Some parts of raised expectations are plainly good. We expect to live well into our 80s because medicine keeps getting better. Many more high school students expect to go to college. In 1973, 47% of recent high school graduates attended college; last year 69% of new graduates enrolled. We expect our gadgets to get smaller and smarter, cooler and cheaper, because technology evolves exponentially, and at light speed. (See how to plan for retirement at any age.)

But the Great Recession has also exposed our magical thinking about what constitutes a middle-class lifestyle. Flash back a generation to the house with the white picket fence. It had a black-and-white TV with an antenna, a car in the garage, a chicken in every pot and two kinds of lettuce (light green and dark green). Now the average house is more than 50% bigger, the car is twice as powerful (and there's often more than one), the TV is flat and gets 900 channels, and we expect the grocery store to have strawberries year-round and about 50 flavors of mustard. Small wonder we started charging our life-insurance premiums on our credit cards; we only expected to pay when we died.

So while optimism is the all-American anesthetic, at some point Expectation Inflation was bound to take its toll. I'm struck by how many people tell pollsters that the voluntary downshifting and downsizing of the past year have come as a kind of relief. Maybe we've lowered our standards. But we already knew that money can buy only comfort, not contentment; happiness correlates much more closely with our causes and connections than with our net worth. Americans may have less money — charitable giving in current dollars dropped for the first time in 20 years in 2008 — but about a million more people volunteered their time to a cause. Which makes me wonder: Is it a coincidence that eight of the 10 happiest states in the country also rank in the top 10 for volunteering?

Whatever you make of the psychology of happiness, we know something of its physics. It rises as it ricochets off other people, returning to us stronger by virtue of being released. It gets bigger when we don't care if it gets smaller; we stopped buying all the stuff we didn't need that was supposed to make us happier, and we seem to be happier for it. And who would have expected that?

“I worked at the top of the world,” she said. “And the next day you’re working down on Broadway and saying to somebody, ‘Let me show you where you can get a bowl of soup for the night.’ ”

After being laid off, Ms. Traina, 50, enlisted in the growing army of the newly unemployed that have been marching into the offices of nonprofit organizations since the recession hit, looking to do some good, maybe network a little or simply fill the hours they used to be at the office.

They have searched for tasks on volunteernyc.org — which last month had 30 percent more visitors than in February 2008 — and forced New York Cares, an umbrella organization, to add extra new-volunteer orientations at a Whole Foods Market downtown that quickly booked solid an unheard-of three weeks in advance. In Philadelphia, Big Brothers Big Sisters has seen a 25 percent increase in inquiries from potential mentors over this time last year. And theTaproot Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that places skilled professionals in volunteer positions, had more people sign up on one day earlier this year than in an entire month a year ago.

Many who run nonprofits have marveled at the sudden flood of bankers, advertising copywriters, marketing managers, accountants and other professionals eager to lend their formidable but dormant skills. The Financial Clinic, which counsels the working poor on economic matters, recently dispatched an M.I.T.-educated ex-Wall Street type to help people in Chinatown prepare their tax returns.

“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, a marketing manager for the nonprofit organization Learning Leaders.

But others grumbled that the current love affair with volunteerism, encouraged by President Obama’s nationwide call to public service, can be a mixed blessing. Smaller organizations, with staffs of fewer than 20 and no full-time volunteer coordinator, have struggled to absorb the influx, especially since many of them have simultaneously had to cut back on projects in the face of dwindling donations and government grants.

“Can you make them stop calling?” groused one nonprofit executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Everybody’s inspired by Obama,” he said, adding: “They also don’t have jobs.”

Lindsay Firestone, who manages pro bono projects for Taproot, said the organization had scaled back recruitment this year after attracting more volunteers than it could possibly accommodate. “It’s like a Greek tragedy,” she said. “We’re thrilled to have all of these volunteers. But now organizations are stuck not being able to take advantage of it because they don’t have adequate funding.”

Bertina Ceccarelli, a senior vice president at the United Way in New York — which partners with the mayor’s office to run the volunteernyc.org matching service — said the outpouring was similar to that after 9/11 — except that the new volunteers have more time to fill.

“It’s sad but true,” Ms. Ceccarelli said, “but the irony is that sometimes it’s almost more work to find something for a volunteer to do than to just turn them away.”

None of that has dimmed the volunteers’ enthusiasm.

Continuum Hospice Care, which assists New Yorkers at the end of their lives, has started a waiting list this year for volunteers. Allison Maughn, the interim president, said many of them were hoping that their unpaid work would eventually turn into a paid job, and have been raising their hands for the most menial tasks, like stuffing envelopes and data entry. “They’re even happy to sit at the reception desk and answer the phones,” she said in amazement.

New York Cares had double the number of volunteers this February as last, and a survey the group conducted showed that a third of them were unemployed. At one of two packed orientation sessions on Thursday, aspiring volunteers scribbled notes as they listened to Dennis Tseng, a cheerful 27-year-old, speak rapid-fire for nearly an hour about the nuts and bolts. The session, held adjacent to a cafe in Whole Foods, was so full that latecomers had to stand and lean against a wall.

“Right now, I could volunteer about five times a week,” said Emily Jimenez, 29, who lives on Staten Island and was laid off last month from the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown. “If they’d want me to.”

Katherine Howie, an out-of-work lawyer, wrote “N/A currently” under employment information on the orientation forms. “I don’t mind making a commitment,” she said. “I’m happy to work with children, or sports, or recreation. I just want something to fill my time.”

Nini Duh, 29, was laid off from Lehman Brothers in September and now volunteers at any number of places — an elementary school, a finance workshop in Chinatown — nearly every day. It is a welcome change from her 100-hour weeks before her investment bank went bankrupt.

Marcus Buckingham / Leading expert in personal strengths and bestselling author

Posted: September 23, 2009 09:09 AM

Last week, I posted a piece called "What's happening to women's happiness?" in which I highlighted two longitudinal trends--a) women are less happy than they were forty years ago, as compared to men, and b) as women get older they get sadder--and I asked what might be causing these trends.

 Some of you didn't think this was much to fuss over--"It's not depression or neurosis we're talking about here, it's only sadness." But many of you took these trends seriously--while a life of utter contentment is a fool's goal, who would ever wish on those they love a life of increasing unhappiness?--and, as you can see from the responses, thousands of you here and elsewhere offered explanations.

 Obviously, no one explanation is entirely sufficient, and many are spiced with speculation. In this post, I'll take the five most-frequently asked questions and tell you what we know for certain.

 Are these trends increasing or decreasing? They are increasing. In the previous post, I presented Plagnol and Easterlin's graph showing that, according to the U.S. General Social Survey, women begin their lives more satisfied than men and then become less satisfied with every aspect of their lives as they age.

 This used to be true. Today, women don't even begin their adult lives happier than men. Here's a graph showing the relative levels of life satisfaction of 430,000 12th graders, girls as compared to boys; boys' happiness is the constant black line. (This graph is taken from the Monitoring the Future survey data).

 Yes, in Churchill's words, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics," but still, it's hard not to look at this graph and conclude that contemporary life is disproportionately stressful for young women, that this stress puts them at an immediate disadvantage, and that this state of affairs is damaging, wasteful, and needless.

 So, if you find it hard to relate to the gradual decline in women's happiness, if you always feel focused and successful, with plenty of energy and time, and what few doubts you have are quickly drowned out by the many moments of real fulfillment, well done to you.

 Just know that, in aggregate, the next generation of women doesn't feel as you do.

 What is causing men's happiness to rise? Some of you looked at the gradual climb in men's happiness and wondered whether '"Feminism had benefitted men more than women." You may be right, though the data points the other way--in 1977, 35% of men in dual-earner couples reported feeling some kind of work/life conflict, whereas today 59% of men do.

 However, we know what is causing men's slight increase in happiness and it's not Feminism. It's increased prosperity. Over the last 40 years, the Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. has climbed 3.1% per year and, though money neither buys nor sustains happiness for individuals, increases in national G.D.P. do correlate to increases in national levels of happiness.

 This makes women's decline even more startling. The tide of prosperity should have raised everyone's spirits, but instead, women's have gradually sunk lower. Are women simply more honest about their feelings?

 Maybe. Maybe men, in aggregate, are emotionally closed off, out of touch with their true emotions, and so, though they are actually as unhappy as women, they just don't know it; or won't admit it.

Maybe.

But even if we accept this as true, surely it isn't a recent development. If emotional distance is simply part of being a man and emotional sensitivity is part of being a woman, these characteristics would have been as true 40 years ago as they supposedly are today. That would make them a constant. In which case it's hard to see how they could be the cause of these recent changes in women's happiness.

What we do know for certain is that women are harder on themselves than men. When nationally representative polls of women and men are asked the question, "Which do you think will help you be most successful in life, building on your strengths or fixing your weaknesses?" men split right down the middle, whereas 73% of women report they would focus on fixing their weaknesses. This too may be a constant--and I stress "may" be--but if it is, then it is a constant that creates a downward spiral of dissatisfaction. Since women, as a group, believe that success flows from drilling down into their weaknesses, and since, as has happened to women over the last 40 years, they've gradually acquired more and more domains in which they are supposed to succeed, a researcher would expect to see women characterizing themselves more and more by who they aren't, becoming more and more self-critical, and more aware of their flaws and failings, all of which might well accelerate these dissatisfaction trend-lines.

 Are women unhappy because they are trying to become men?

 Some of you suggested that what was causing the decline was women straying too far from their natural role as caretakers of the home and family, that, in a sense, women were better off 40 years ago, when the challenges of running a home and raising kids gave women a unique, valuable and, above all, focused role to play. (As I mentioned in my previous post, 42% of men and 39% of women do believe that it is natural for women to play this role.)

 I have my own opinions on this: that while, for obvious reasons, women are compelled to make a greater biological investment in bearing and raising babies than men, this does not apply to raising toddlers and teenagers, nor to running the home, and that, even if it did, what is natural is not necessarily right. (It is natural for the strong to dominate the weak, but it is rarely moral.)

 However, my opinions are beside the point. What we know for certain is that returning women to the role of primary caretaker won't make most women happier. We know this because whenever and wherever the research is done on this subject, the results are always the same: women with no kids are, in general, happier than women with kids. I realize this sounds perverse--who doesn't love their kids--and yet the research has been repeated so many times, in so many countries, there's no escaping it. Kids, it turns out, are a bundle of stress. They may give our lives trajectory, and meaning, and purpose, but their gift to us is not happiness. Of course, this does not apply to all women--some women feel as though they were put here for the sole and express purpose of raising their kids and nothing, no professional dream or accomplishment, can compare to the joy of this. What the data show, though, is that these women are in the minority.

 And the kids appear to be aware of this. A recent study of a thousand 3rd-12th graders asked: "If you were granted one wish that would change the way that your mother's work affects your life, what would that wish be?" In a parallel study, their mothers were asked to guess what their children would wish for. Here's what they found: "Most mothers (56%) guessed that their children would wish for more time with them. In fact, only 10% of children made that wish. Their most frequent wish: 'I want my mom to be less stressed and tired' (34%)."

 Why am I, a man, writing about this? I'm writing about it because this is what I do. It is my area of expertise. I study groups of people who excel at something, examine the research, and draw conclusions.

 I am not a housekeeper, but when I joined the Gallup Organization back in 1987, my first assignment was to design psychological tests to help Walt Disney World select more housekeepers like their best housekeepers. The initial step in the design process was to gather a small study group of the very best housekeepers and ask them questions to discover the traits or habits or insights they shared. So, imagine eight housekeepers sitting around a table, some nervous, others completely relaxed chatting away in English or Haitian Creole or Portuguese. One of them had been a housekeeper for only 18 months, while another had cleaned the same section of rooms in the same hotel for 23 years. They were of different races, sexes, and ages. They didn't know each other.

 And yet, when I asked them the question, "How do you know if a room is clean?" they all spontaneously gave the same answer: "To know if a room is clean, the last thing you do before leaving it is to lie on the guest's bed and turn on the ceiling fan."

 "Why?" "Because," they explained, "that is the very first thing that a guest will do after a long day out. They will walk into the room, flop down on the bed and turn on the fan. If dust comes off the top of the fan, no matter how sparkling clean the rest of the room is, the guest might think it is as dirty as the top of the fan."

 I love this phenomenon: that people who look very different on the surface, and who don't know each other, do actually share an insight or a practice or an approach, something you can discover by asking open-ended questions and then keeping quiet. I pursued this phenomenon with my next project, the study of the world's best managers, which eventually grew into my first book, First, Break All The Rules. From this research with great managers, I now know that when you ask them an open-ended question, such as, "What is the best way to motivate people?" they all say the same thing. "It depends on the person." And from this, and other similar questions, I also know that individualization is one of the practices shared by all great managers. I know this for certain, even though, as my team will attest, I am not a great manager.

 Spurred by the data I shared in my previous post, and by a rather overwhelming outpouring of questions after an appearance on "The Oprah Show," I decided to take the same approach with women. If you could find the happiest and most successful women, women who had somehow bucked this downward trend in life satisfaction, women who had made life choices that strengthened them, who had become happier the older they got, if you could find these women and ask them questions and listen, what would you discover? Despite all their differences--of style, age, career, wealth, value system--what if anything would they have in common? What would they share?

 I'll focus my next post on how we selected the study group and what we learned. ***

 Marcus Buckingham is the bestselling author of five books, with more than 3.7 million copies in print, and the world's leading expert in personal strengths. An internationally renowned consultant and the founder of TMBC, a management consulting company, he has been hailed as a visionary by corporations such as Toyota, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Disney. Buckingham has been featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Larry King Live," "The Today Show," "Good Morning America," and "The View," and profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Fortune, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review. A Senior Researcher at Gallup Organization for nearly two decades, Buckingham addresses more than 250,000 people in live audiences each year and leads management training initiatives in organizations worldwide. His most recent book is Find Your Strongest Life (Thomas Nelson).

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/womens-happiness-what-we_b_295876.html?view=print

By Carl Zimmer
Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

"Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit. See Pictures of Dogs Learning New Tricks.

"You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit. See a video on how dogs think like us.

Henry could find the biscuit by sniffing the cups or knocking them over. But Hare does not plan to let him have it so easy. Instead, he simply points at the cup on the right. Henry looks at Hare's hand and follows the pointed finger. Kivell then releases the leash, and Henry walks over to the cup that Hare is pointing to. Hare lifts it to reveal the biscuit reward. See TIME's photoessay " Puppies Behind Bars".

Henry the schnoodle just did a remarkable thing. Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought. Henry, as Kivell affectionately admits, may not be "the sharpest knife in the drawer," but compared to other animals, he's a true scholar. See TIME's photoessay "Color My Dog!"

It's no coincidence that the two species that pass Hare's pointing test also share a profound cross-species bond. Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example--the probable ancestors of dogs--live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they've adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs--the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives--spring from those social skills. Hare and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal's remarkable abilities.

Trying to plumb the canine mind is a favorite pastime of dog owners. "Everyone feels like an expert on their dog," says Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College and author of the new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. But scientists had carried out few studies to test those beliefs--until now.

This fall, Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he is going to test hundreds of dogs brought in by willing owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently opened his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe.

The work of these researchers won't just satisfy the curiosity of the millions of people who love their dogs; it may also lead to more effective ways to train ordinary dogs or--more important--working dogs that can sniff out bombs and guide the blind. At a deeper level, it may even tell us something about ourselves.

See pictures of Presidents and Their Dogs.

Evolving Gifts

Hare suspects that the evolutionary pressures that turned suspicious wolves into outgoing dogs were similar to the ones that turned combative apes into cooperative humans. "Humans are unique. But how did that uniqueness evolve?" asks Hare. "That's where dogs are important."

The first rule for scientists studying dogs is, Don't trust your hunches. Just because a dog looks as if it can count or understand words doesn't mean it can. "We say to owners, Look, you may have intuitions about your dog that are valuable," says Hauser. "But they might be wrong." See TIME's video "The New Frugality: Doggie Day Care."

Take for instance the kiss a dog gives you when you come home. It looks like love, but it could also be hunger. Wolves also lick one another's mouths, particularly when one wolf returns to the pack. They can use their sense of taste and smell to see if the returnee has caught some prey on its journey. If it did, the licking often prompts it to vomit up some of that kill for the other members of the pack to share. The kiss dogs give us probably evolved from this inspection. "If we happened to spit up whatever we just ate," says Horowitz, "I don't think our dogs would be upset at all." See TIME's video "The March of TIME: Hunting Dog Field Trials."

Horowitz and other scientists are now running experiments to determine what a behavior, like a kiss, really means. In some cases, their research suggests that our pets are manipulating us rather than welling up with human-like feeling. "They could be the ultimate charlatans," says Hauser.

We've all seen guilty dogs slinking away with lowered tails, for example. Horowitz wondered if they behave this way because they truly recognize they've done something wrong, so she devised an experiment. First she observed how dogs behaved when they did something they weren't supposed to do and were scolded by their owners. Then she tricked the owners into believing the dogs had misbehaved when they hadn't. When the humans scolded the dogs, the dogs were just as likely to look guilty, even though they were innocent of any misbehavior. What's at play here, she concluded, is not some inner sense of right and wrong but a learned ability to act submissive when an owner gets angry. "It's a white-flag response," Horowitz says.

While this kind of manipulation may be unsettling to us, it reveals how carefully dogs pay attention to humans and learn from what they observe. That same attentiveness also gives dogs--or at least certain dogs--a skill with words that seems eerily human.

Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began exploring the verbal gifts of dogs when she saw a television show about a border collie named Rico--an animal that to all appearances could fetch dozens of different objects in response to their names. Kaminski put Rico to a rigorous test and confirmed that the dog could learn names for more than 200 toys, balls and other items. "I think Rico is a highly talented dog," says Kaminski, "but we've also found new dogs that do what Rico did."

That doesn't mean that the dogs understand the words the way we think they do. When they hear "Frisbee," they may think only, Get the Frisbee. Unlike us, they may not be able to recognize that Frisbee is a word for a distinct object that can be combined with other words to create sentences like "Run away from the Frisbee."

Going to the Dogs

Some scientists acquired their fascination with dogs directly, but Hare's grew out of his research on chimpanzee cognition in the late 1990s, when he was part of a team of primatologists led by Michael Tomasello, now at Max Planck. A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That's a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans. Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing. To their surprise, the chimps did badly, able to learn the meaning of a pointed finger only after lots of training.

The apparent explanation for these results was that pointing--and the social smarts behind it--required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. "I said, 'Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that,'" Hare recalls.

Hare's later research revealed that while chimps and even wolves lack an innate ability to understand what pointing means, dogs come by the knowledge naturally. They're not limited to reading hands and fingers alone. Dogs understand what Hare means if he points with his foot or sets a piece of wood on top of a container with food inside. Even puppies understand, which means it can't be a skill they need to learn. "This is something that dogs just do," says Hare.

Foxy Dogs

To understand how dogs evolved this skill, Hare traveled to Siberia. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists set up an experiment on a farm outside the city of Novosibirsk to understand how animals were domesticated. They decided to study foxes, which are closely related to wolves and dogs.

The Russians began by breeding a group of foxes according to one simple rule: they would walk up to a cage and put a hand on the bars. Foxes that slunk back in fear and snapped their teeth didn't get to breed. Ones that came up to the scientists did. Meanwhile, the scientists also raised a separate group of foxes under identical conditions, except for one difference: they didn't have to pass a test to mate.

More than 40 generations of foxes have now been bred in Novosibirsk, and the results speak for themselves. The foxes that the scientists bred selectively have become remarkably doglike. They will affectionately run up to people and even wag their tails. In 2003, Hare traveled to Novosibirsk and ran his pointing test on baby foxes. The ordinary ones failed miserably. As for the doglike ones, "they did just as well as puppies right out of the box," Hare says. As the animals were bred for their affability, a new side of their social intelligence was apparently awakened.

If foxes are a guide, dog evolution may have begun with a similar shift in personality. Ancestors of dogs could cooperate to hunt, but the cooperation had limits. Wolves are fiercely competitive, as each one tries to claw its way to the top of the pack. Hare proposes that aggressive wolves evolved to have an easygoing personality thanks to a new opportunity: trash.

As humans became better at hunting, they left scraps around their gathering spots. When they departed, the ancestors of dogs could move in. At first, when humans and wolves came into contact, many of the animals ran away. Others lashed out and were killed. Only the affable animals had the temperament to become camp followers, and their new supply of food let them produce affable puppies. "They selected themselves," says Horowitz.

Once dogs became comfortable in our company, humans began to speed up dogs' social evolution. They may have started by giving extra food to helpful dogs--ones that barked to warn of danger, say. Dogs that paid close attention to humans got more rewards and eventually became partners with humans, helping with hunts or herding other animals. Along the way, the dogs' social intelligence became eerily like ours, and not just in their ability to follow a pointed finger. Indeed, they even started to make very human mistakes.

A team led by cognitive scientist Josef Topál of the Research Institute for Psychology in Hungary recently ran an experiment to study how 10-month-old babies pay attention to people. The scientists put a toy under one of two cups and then let the children choose which cup to pick up. The children, of course, picked the right cup--no surprise since they saw the toy being hidden. Topál and his colleagues repeated the trial several times, always hiding the toy under the same cup, until finally they hid it under the other one. Despite the evidence of their eyes, the kids picked the original cup--the one that had hidden the toy before but did not now.

To investigate why the kids made this counterintuitive mistake, the scientists rigged the cups to wires and then lowered them over the toy. Without the distraction of a human being, the babies were far more likely to pick the right cup. Small children, it seems, are hardwired to pay such close attention to people that they disregard their other observations. Topál and his colleagues ran the same experiment on dogs--and the results were the same. When they administered the test to wolves, however, the animals did not make the mistake the babies and dogs did. They relied on their own observations rather than focusing on a human.

One question the research of Topál, Hare and others raises is why chimpanzees--who are in most ways much smarter than dogs--lack the ability to read gestures. Hare believes that the chimps' poor performance is one more piece of proof that the talent is rooted not in raw intelligence but in personality. Our ape cousins are simply too distracted by their aggression and competitiveness to fathom gestures easily. Chimps can cooperate to get food that they can't get on their own, but if there's the slightest chance for them to fight over it, they will. For humans to evolve as we did, Hare says, "We had to not get freaked out about sharing."

Deeper understanding of the mind of the dog will come with more testing, and Hare and other researchers are planning it--on a grand scale. They're designing new experiments to compare different breeds and to search for genes that were transformed as the animals' social intelligence evolved. Plenty of dog owners are signing up for the studies Hare will be launching this fall. "We'd be happy with thousands," he says.

The biggest challenge to the new experiments, Hare says, will be not the giant pack of dogs he'll be studying but their anxious owners. "When a puppy does badly, people get upset," says Hare. "You have to emphasize that this is not the SATs."

Perhaps that's the most telling sign of just how evolved dogs are. They have us very well trained.

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Ultimately all learning must speak to both human potential and well being, for the welfare of humanity, our planet, its creatures, and all interrelating systems.

Today, there is a strong need for creative problem-solvers with skills spanning science, mathematics, and technology. However, the underlying goal for really any kind of learning in Arts, Science, Mathematics, Technology – or any other learning area for that matter – is essentially altruistic (from the the Latin, Alter, the other). We pursue knowledge and ideas literally for the good, interest, and possibly the happiness of others.

That underlying message, at its core, is the educator's pursuit of happiness, which takes the form of creative, intellectual, logical, and even unconventional collaborative exchange, making learning vital, promising, innovative, imaginative, effective, and real.

For the educator and teacher in each of us, learning is as much about preparing ourselves to serve others as it is about preparing others to serve others. Collaboratively, though, we learn and teach by "working together" toward common universal, altruistic goals.

Published: September 14 2009 15:48 | Last updated: September 15 2009 08:52

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