Ramblings:

I was recently talking with coworkers about intelligence, and the many forms of it that exist beyond just raw cognitive quickness, of course in the context of the company. There are social skills and being able to interact with people, curiosity, the ability to absorb information quickly, the ability to make cognitive leaps quickly, the ability to just get things done, etc.

I would say that these all qualify as different forms of intelligence. They all have their uses. Some can be trained / improved more than others. They also can conflict with each other at times. For example, one of my coworkers talked about how he spent a couple hours investigating the inner-workings of the Java garbage collector because of a bug that actually was caused by some code that was accidentally allocating orders of magnitude extra memory than intended. I laughed and said I was lazier and would never have bothered looking so deeply and would have just assumed I did something stupid. I see this as curiosity + quick cognitive leaps vs. getting things done.

Jumping to the end, the article talks about wisdom as a learnable skill. In this context, I would say that wisdom is yet another type of intelligence, one that can have an impact on your other intelligences, and it is one that is quite trainable.

Onto happiness - I think it's a bit of a shame that society doesn't attempt to teach "happiness"[0] more. Maybe this is a stretch, but I feel like there are some legitimate fundamental ideas and mental skills that could help a lot of people live more fulfilling lives.

In the case of worrying, for example, it would be helpful to be able to quickly identify that you're worrying (which can be hard to catch!), ask yourself why you're worrying, and then either come up with an plan to resolve it if it's solvable or, in the case of agonizing over the human condition, accepting it as something that just is. This is something that you can practice.

Or goals. Schools seem to emphasize setting goals and creating plans to achieve them. But I feel like I was never taught about what to do once I reached a goal, or what to think about goals in general. Every time I reached a goal, I was satisfied briefly, and then I felt sort of an emptiness that accompanied the thought of "That's it? What now?" Now that I've done plenty of reading (e.g. Mastery by George Leonard), I've learned to accept that while it's useful to set goals, they're inherently unsatisfying to achieve. Fulfillment lies in the struggle to achieve them, and the struggle never ends.

Maybe these kinds of things are hard to teach since they're so inherently personal and learning them requires tight integration with personal motivations (which is hard to do on a grand scale), and maybe what works for me wouldn't work for many others, but I still feel like there must be some "happiness" knowledge nuggets that could be taught broadly.

[0] I prefer fulfillment to happiness because it's way more realistic. Minds are pretty chaotic, and I've found that even when I should be happy since everything is going well, I can be unhappy. Likewise, even when a lot of bad things happen, I can be really happy. Fulfillment, on the other hand, seems a lot more stable and less vulnerable to the random meandering of mood.