What constitutes a good life? Marc Schulz, co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, highlights useful insights from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has been running for over eight decades. You’ll hear advice you can use in building your good life.

Marc Schulz joins us from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

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Marc Schulz is the associate director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and the Sue Kardas PhD 1971 Chair in Psychology at Bryn Mawr College.

He also directs the Data Science Program and previously chaired the psychology department and Clinical Developmental Psychology PhD program at Bryn Mawr.

Dr. Schulz received his BA from Amherst College and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a practicing therapist with postdoctoral training in health and clinical psychology at Harvard Medical School.

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For More on Marc Schulz

The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Retire Happy – Dr. Catherine Sanderson

Happier Hour – Cassie Holmes, PhD

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer

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Wise Quotes

On Relationships and Well-Being

“One is a finding that should be familiar to many of your listeners. We really want to take care of our body like we’re going to be in it for a long time. Let’s shoot for 100 years. And what does that mean? That means that we want to move our body. Exercise is good for us. We want to avoid smoking. We want to moderate our drinking of alcohol. And we also want to, particularly as we age, to go to doctors and make sure that we’re getting treatments that are important to maintain our health, because many of us develop different kinds of challenges as we get older, physical and medical challenges that are important to take care of. The study also has made important contributions to recognizing that stuff happens to all of us, that very few lives happen without adversity, and how we meet adversity, and particularly the feelings and emotions that adversity tends to engender, are really important for our health and our well -being. But the big finding, and this is the finding that we talk about most in our book, The Good Life, is that it’s very clear across this 86 years of research, and hundreds of papers, that the most important predictor of health and happiness throughout the lifespan is the quality of our relationships with others. How connected we are, how much we can rely on other support, and how much we’re able to do that are really key predictors of how happy we’ll be and how healthy we will be. And it’s all kinds of relationships. It’s not just the person who you may have been lucky enough to spend a good portion of your time with. So it’s not just our marital partners or our intimate partners, it’s friends, neighbors, people we work with, people in our communities, it’s all types of relationships that matter.”

On Social Fitness

“So we talk about this idea of social fitness as being really important. Obviously, it’s a metaphor like physical fitness and some of the lessons about physical fitness apply here. We want to, first of all, assess where we are, and to be thoughtful about where we are. And this comes from our research when we interviewed people, for example, in their 80s and we asked if they had regrets. Most of the regrets that people had had to do with losses in relationships. People that they had been friendly with, that they lost touch with, people who maybe they hadn’t been as kind to as they wish they had. And this could be the person that they were married to. It could be children. It could be people they worked with. But people talked about remorse and regret around not building and sustaining relationships over life. So we know that if we don’t attend to them, just like our muscles, our fitness in the social domain tends to atrophy. So we need to kind of lean in, be proactive about our engagement with others, and it helps to step back and assess where we are. So what’s going well in my social connection sphere? Who am I spending time with? Are those the people I want to spend time with? Who am I not spending time with that I have a strong connection or I’d like to develop more of a connection with? So that assessment is a critical part of physical fitness and it should be part of social fitness. And then it’s really about leaning into this and walking the walk. So what do I mean by that? We want to spend the time that we think is important on relationships. That means making time to talk to people regularly, to go on walks with people that we care about, to go to social engagements in which we might meet new people or sustain relationships that are important to us.”

On Paying Attention

“Attention is just so important. You learn stuff when you write books, and one of the things we learned early on when we were writing the book is the language we use around attention. We pay attention, and that suggests how much of an important resource attention is. It’s something we control or we try to control, and we can give it to people. We can lavish people with it if we prioritize them in our lives. What’s particularly important is we’re in an era where there are lots of attempts to grab our attention. So phones and technology are particularly good at grabbing our attention away from other people, and we need to proactively, intentionally focus our attention on the people that are important to us. That’s the way that we build relationships, and it’s a way we convey to others that they’re important to us. So paying attention on purpose, listening with curiosity, those are the things that are really important. For many of us in this busy world filled with technology, having the experience of being particularly in person, having someone pay attention to us is an incredible feeling. It’s sometimes something we sadly forget because we don’t have the experience enough. So really critical for people to do that. It’s something that we hope we might get from parents or grandparents. It’s a gift that people can give to others, including parents and grandparents. But it’s true in all relationships. It means really listening and being curious.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy. He’s an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.4 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference.