Supercommunicators, page 23
The other young man from that period was different. John Marsden was an exceptional student and came from a wealthy and prominent family that ran a dry-goods franchise in Cleveland. Marsden also volunteered for World War II, served valiantly, and then, rather than accede to his father’s wishes to join the family business, he followed his passion and enrolled in the University of Chicago’s law school, where he graduated near the top of his class. He became a public-service lawyer, got married, and eventually started a successful private practice.
The Grant Study had been designed with the aim of objectivity. The researchers wanted to avoid guessing which of the participants were likely to soar or stumble, lest those pre-judgments taint the data. But when it came to Camille and Marsden, it was hard to avoid predictions. It was clear to everyone that Camille was likely to end up depressed and lonely—or, perhaps, dead by his own hand. “Everyone had predicted he would be a loser,” one researcher wrote. Whereas Marsden, the scientists assumed, would become a leader in his community, another chapter in his family’s proud legacy. Marsden, a researcher noted, is “one of the more professionally successful members of the Study.”
Then, in 1954, sixteen years after it began, the study’s funding ran out. Billy Grant had by now donated the equivalent of $7 million in today’s dollars and was frustrated that the study hadn’t revealed much that was helpful about selecting store managers. Even worse, Harvard had failed to sufficiently mention his generosity when it published papers from the study. Grant was done shelling out money, he told administrators. The researchers scrambled to find alternative sources of funding—at one point, they convinced a collection of tobacco companies to fund the project by suggesting their work might reveal “positive reasons” for smoking—but eventually that support dried up, as well. Final reports were written. Farewells were made. There were sporadic attempts at keeping in touch with some participants, but for the most part, the study was boxed up and stashed in the basement of the medical school.
That would have been the end of the story, except that, in the early 1970s, a group of young psychiatry professors started digging through those boxes and stumbled upon the project’s surveys. Intrigued, they began tracking down the participants, sending them new questionnaires and scheduling follow-up interviews. They expected to find that most participants had kept traveling along the same trajectories as when the study had ended. When they spoke to Camille and Marsden, though, they discovered that assumption was completely wrong.
In the intervening decades, it seemed, Camille had become a different person. He was now in his fifties, married, a leader in his church, and had won over Boston’s medical establishment by founding a large, independent clinic that specialized in allergy treatments. He was a nationally recognized expert on asthmatic patients, invited to symposiums, and interviewed on television. When researchers spoke to his daughters, who were now young adults, they called him an “exemplary father,” someone with “the innate ability to just give. He could play like five-year-olds do.”
Researchers, drawing on the study’s previous protocols, conducted follow-up surveys every two years. Each time they spoke with Camille, he seemed happier than ever. “Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one,” Camille wrote in 1994, when he was seventy-five. But he had managed to escape that legacy, he continued, by changing “into the person I’ve slowly become: Comfortable, joyful, connected and effective.” At eighty, Camille threw himself a potluck birthday party, and more than three hundred people showed up. A bit later, he let the scientists know that he was flying to the Alps for a climbing trek with friends. He died of a heart attack on that trip, at eighty-two years old. At his memorial, the church was packed. “There was a deep and holy authenticity about the man,” the bishop eulogized. Camille’s son told the crowd that “he lived a very simple life, but it was very rich.” Camille, the Harvard researchers later determined, was among the top—perhaps the top—participant in the study by measurement of happiness, health, and satisfaction from life and work. “Who could have foreseen,” one of them wrote, “that he would die a happy, giving, and beloved man?”
In contrast, Marsden, the lawyer, was in terrible shape when the researchers found him after the study’s hiatus. In his fifties now, he was divorced and alienated from his children and his family in Cleveland. Though his law practice was successful, he had few friends and spent most of his time alone. He reported feeling angry, lonely, and disappointed by life. He eventually remarried, but just a few years later, reported that the relationship was “loveless.” Do you ever go to your wife when you’re upset? one survey asked. “No, definitely not,” Marsden wrote. “I would get no sympathy. I would be told that it’s a sign of weakness.” When asked how he coped with difficulty, Marsden wrote: “I keep it to myself. I tough it out.” One researcher broke protocol and offered to find Marsden a couples therapist. Marsden and his wife attended one session, but then abandoned the effort. “He seemed like a broken person,” that researcher, Robert Waldinger, told me. Eventually, Marsden stopped responding to interview requests. The researchers discovered why when a survey was returned, unopened, by the U.S. Postal Service. The addressee had died, according to a note on the envelope. The current residents had no idea if there were next of kin.
How was it possible, the researchers wondered, that things could turn out so unexpectedly for these two men? It wasn’t just Camille and Marsden. As the scientists compared other participants’ contemporary lives to the plans and aspirations they had described as adolescents, they found that a number of them—men and women who seemed to have bright futures and were seemingly destined for greatness—had ended up, instead, lonely and depressed adults, dissatisfied by their lives. Whereas others, who had faced crippling obstacles, such as mental health and poverty, had arrived at old age happy, successful, and surrounded by family and friends.
The researchers, by now, had seven decades of data to draw upon, and they began crawling through it. They scrutinized people’s genetics and childhoods, looked at their propensities for alcoholism and schizophrenia, measured how many hours each participant had worked and how many kids they had raised, all in hopes of determining which variables could reliably predict how things would turn out later in life. They discovered some correlations: Having loving parents made it easier to find happiness as an adult. Possessing genes related to physical hardiness and longevity was helpful—as was getting enough exercise and eating well. Education early in life, as well as a lifelong commitment to learning, also provided a leg up.
However, as important as these factors were, one thing seemed to matter much more than anything else. It didn’t come as a surprise; it had been obvious to everyone, across the decades, as they had conducted their interviews. The most important variable in determining whether someone ended up happy and healthy, or miserable and sick, was “how satisfied they were in their relationships,” one researcher wrote. “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.”
Another researcher put it more bluntly: “The most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love.” Not romantic love, but, rather, the kinds of deep connections we form with our families, friends, and coworkers, as well as neighbors and people from our community. “Love early in life facilitates not only love later on, but also the other trappings of success, such as prestige and even high income. It also encourages the development of coping styles that facilitate intimacy, as opposed to ones that discourage it.”
Participants who ended up happy all had “warm adult relationships” with numerous people. They had good marriages, were close to their children, and had invested in strong friendships. The people “who flourished found love,” one researcher observed, “and that was why they flourished.”
On the other hand, people who had not invested in relationships—who had prioritized their careers over families and friends or had struggled to connect for other reasons—were mostly miserable. Take John Marsden, for example. When he was forty-three years old—with almost half his life in front of him—this is what he wrote when asked by researchers to describe what he found himself thinking about often:
I’m growing old. Realize for the first time the reality of death.
Feel I may not achieve what I wanted.
Not sure I know how to bring up children. I thought I did.
Tensions at work are severe.
Marsden didn’t mention other people, or relationships, except in a negative sense. When he felt depressed, rather than seek out companions, he went to his office and tried to use his legal practice to distract himself. When he argued with his wife or children, he stomped off and withdrew, rather than talking through issues until a resolution, or at least an understanding, emerged. “He was a very self-critical person,” said Waldinger, who currently leads the Harvard project. “He pushed himself hard and judged himself pretty harshly, and that made him successful in his profession. But it also meant he was critical of other people, which is probably what alienated so many of them.” As one summary of Marsden’s surveys put it, “he developed a wariness of people and habitually negative ways of coping with the world. He had difficulty connecting with others, and when he encountered challenges, his instinct was to withdraw from the people closest to him. He married twice, and never felt that he was truly loved.”
Compare that with Camille, the doctor. During the year he spent in the tuberculosis ward, Camille began developing relationships with fellow patients. He met some for Bible study, and with others to play cards, and formed relationships with nurses and orderlies. He later told researchers that his time in the hospital had felt like a rebirth. “Someone with a capital ‘S’ cared about me,” he wrote on one survey. “Nothing has been so tough since that year.” When he left the hospital, he joined a church and threw himself into committees, potlucks, Sunday school—anything where he could meet other people. Researchers later determined that, until the age of thirty, Camille didn’t have one real, durable friendship; a decade later, he was among the most socially active people in the study, and as his network expanded, his career took off. “My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become,” he wrote on a survey at the age of seventy-five. “Connectedness is something we must let happen to us…. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric.” Talking to other people, connecting with them, sharing his joys and sorrows, he said, had transformed his life. “You know what I learned?” he told one interviewer. “I learned love.”
Across the decades and surveys, similar findings emerged again and again: The happiest participants called others regularly, made lunch and dinner dates, sent notes to friends saying they were proud of them, or wanted to help them shoulder sad news. Most of all, happy participants engaged in many, many conversations over the years that brought them closer to others. “Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity,” reads a 2023 summary of the Harvard data. “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier.” And, in many instances, those relationships were established, and kept alive, via long and intimate discussions.
This central finding has been replicated in hundreds of other studies over the past few decades. “We now have robust evidence indicating that being socially connected has a powerful influence on longevity, such that having more and better relationships is associated with protection and, conversely, that having fewer and poorer relationships is associated with risk,” reads one paper published in 2018 in the Annual Review of Psychology. Another study, published in 2016, examined dozens of biomarkers of health, and found that “a higher degree of social integration was associated with lower risk” of illness and death at every stage of life. Social isolation, the researchers wrote, was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other chronic diseases.
Put differently, connecting with others can make us healthier, happier, and more content. Conversations can change our brains, bodies, and how we experience the world.
* * *
—
Which brings me back to my confession from the prologue: In many ways I wrote this book for myself. After I had failed as a manager at work and was wondering why I had become someone who couldn’t seem to read cues or hear what others were saying, I realized I might need to reevaluate how I communicated. So, one night—and I know this sounds a little strange—I sat down and scribbled out a list of all the times, over the last year, that I could remember screwing up a conversation. I wrote down the times I had only half-listened to my wife, when I had failed to empathize with coworkers as they told me something vulnerable, when I had ignored a good idea because I had already decided to follow my own notions, all those meals I had spent talking about myself instead of asking about others, the times (it shames me to say it) when I told my kids to please stop asking me stuff so I could get some work done. All of us, I think, carry some version of this list in our heads. But writing it out forced me to confront some hard questions: Why was it that, at times, I had so much trouble hearing what someone was trying to tell me? Why was I so quick to get defensive, or to glide past the emotions people were clearly trying to share? Why, sometimes, did I talk so much and listen so little? Why hadn’t I understood when a friend needed comfort rather than advice? How could I put my kids aside when they so clearly wanted to be with me? Why did I struggle to explain what was inside my own head?
These struck me as meaningful questions, worthy of exploration, and I wanted answers. So I began calling neurologists and psychologists and sociologists and other experts, asking them how it was possible that I—someone who has been communicating my whole life!—could still get it so wrong. This book is the result of that journey. What all that reporting and reading studies and squinting at data offered, in the end, is something invaluable: It has helped me to connect better, to be more mindful when other people reveal something personal, to know that there is always a conversation going on—be it practical, emotional, or social—and that we won’t be able to connect until we come to an understanding about what we all want and need. Most of all, it has convinced me of the importance of having learning conversations, where my aim is to pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring; to identify our goals for a dialogue; to ask about others’ emotions and share my own feelings; and to explore if our identities influence what we say and hear.
I’ve tried to have learning conversations in every part of my life, and it has helped me listen more than I used to. (I’m getting better, though my wife, just last week, asked how a rambling dinnertime monologue might align with some of the advice in this book.) I try to ask more questions—both to determine what people want out of a conversation and to explore the deep, meaningful, and emotional parts of life where real connection occurs. I try to reciprocate others’ happiness and sadness, as well as their admissions and vulnerabilities, when I’m lucky enough to encounter them, and own up more freely to my own mistakes, feelings, and who I am. As a result, I feel closer to the people around me, more connected to my family, friends, colleagues—and, most of all, more thankful for these relationships than ever before. (And I hope this only continues: If you send me an email at charles@charlesduhigg.com, I promise I’ll respond.)
There is no single right way to connect with other people. There are skills that make conversations easier and less awkward. There are tips that increase the odds you’ll understand your companions, and they’ll be more likely to hear what you are trying to say. The effectiveness of various conversational tactics waxes and wanes based on our surroundings, the types of discussion we’re having, the kind of relationships we hope to achieve. Sometimes we get there; sometimes we don’t.
But what’s important is wanting to connect, wanting to understand someone, wanting to have a deep conversation, even when it is hard and scary, or when it would be so much easier to walk away. There are skills and insights that can help us satisfy that desire for connection, and they are worth learning, practicing, and committing to. Because whether we call it love, or friendship, or simply having a great conversation, achieving connection—authentic, meaningful connection—is the most important thing in life.
To John Duhigg,
Susan Kamil,
and
Harry, Oli,
and Liz
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must start by thanking the people who shared their thoughts, insights, and experiences with me. Over the three years I spent reporting this book, hundreds of scientists and thinkers have been generous with their time, for which I am enormously grateful. One unfortunate aspect of large reporting projects is that some of the most helpful—and fascinating—people never appear on the page, and so I wanted to offer special thanks to Dacher Keltner of Berkeley, Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University, and the many people affiliated with the Dartmouth Social Systems Lab, NASA, and the writing staff of The Big Bang Theory, among others, who agreed to speak with me.
