When work is piling up, and enjoying your life seems to be a luxury, stop and watch these videos. Reexamine your view about work and success. What does success mean to you? Is work a means to it? Or is work a means at all?

Shawn Anchor: The Happy Secret to Better Work

Sharn Anchor, an award-winning Psychology professor at Harvard University critically discusses the paradigm of happiness. Anchor rejects the notion that working harder leader to more happiness. Ancho argues that, actually, it’s happiness that inspires us to be more productive, and not the other way around.

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Alain de Botton, author, philosopher, and co-founder of The School of Life, examines our ideas of success and failure in this talk. Alain posits fundamental questions about our view of success or failure: Is success always earned? Is failure?

 

Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit

Angela Lee Duckworth, a professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, left her job at a consulting firm and took a  job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. In this talk, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

 

Margaret Heffernan: Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work

Margaret Heffernan is a former CEO of five businesses. Prior to that she was a producer at the BBC. Heffernan argues that the usual “superchicken model” of running organizations (based on the idea of putting premium on assembling star employees who outperforms others) does not drive the high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan argues that it is social cohesion that leads over time to great result.

 

Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work

Nigel Marsh is an author the author and chairman of a strategic planning consultancy firm. Nigel, in this video, lays out an ideal day balanced between family and work.