 There's a lot of research in the area of happiness, meaning, and social media. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that stream of research. One of the most recent studies that we've done, we took two randomized sets of subjects, and we gave, let's say it's you guys, the simple task which is take the next 24 hours and go create happiness for yourself and for others, and then you report what you did. And we took another set of subjects, so let's say it's you, and we said, go create meaningfulness in the next 24 hours for yourself and others, and we watched what you did. And we came back 24 hours later and we said, how happy are you? And overwhelmingly, the people in the second group were happier than the people in the first group. And there was only one thing that they really did differently, and that was how they spent their time in that day. The people in the second group spent their time feeling connected to others, the world, and something bigger. And the people in the first group did not. We're also doing a stream of research around social media, and how social media does or does not foster a connection, and how it can or cannot foster infectious action. And I have to tell you, from a personal perspective, I've been very skeptical about social media. This is my perspective on social media at least two years ago. So the more time we spend on Facebook and Twitter, the more we think about ourselves, the more stalkers we have in our lives, and the more we have ADHD. So the inability to stay focused, to stay present, to stay in the moment seems more and more difficult to do. Now, this wouldn't be so bad, but my husband loves technology, and in particular social media. We have 10 universal remote controls at our home. Stay with that. We have 68 normal remote controls, and I still can't turn on the television. So this is the kind of conversation we have at dinner time, which is how are we giving back in the world, and are we raising our children correctly with inspiration, and why do we have 10 universal remotes in our home? Now, what we did with you, a subset of you, we gave you a questionnaire about a month ago, and we asked you all sorts of questions about happiness in social media. One of those questions was, what were the first three words that come to mind when you think of social media? So I wanted to illuminate some of the data that you provided to us. About half of you thought that social media meant this, and about half of you thought that social media meant this. So I felt a little vindicated in my belief of social media. Everything changed for me about two years ago. I was teaching a class on creativity and innovation, and one of my students, Robert Chatwani, he shared with me a story at the end of the class, and that story had a fundamental impact, not only on our research on happiness and meaning, but on my view on social media, and what we've done with it. Samir Bhatia was his best friend, and he's 32 years old, recently married, social entrepreneur, Stanford, educated, and he was here in India about two and a half years ago, and he got hot and feverish, and they took him to the hospital, and he was diagnosed with leukemia. And as Robert and Samir's friends and family wondered what to do, they started reaching out and found out that a friend of theirs also had leukemia and was recently diagnosed. His name was Zinae, also recently married, and I'm going to just share with you in silence the story that Robert shared with me. Instead of just treating this like their friend had leukemia, they treated it as an organization, but instead of a revenue goal, they had a goal of 20,000 South Asians in weeks, and they built out the brands. They executed like crazy. Robert created an email, and he spent three hours on that email telling the story and carving out a clear call to action, and they bought with $80 the names of 450 Indians that related to Bhatia, and they sent it out, and they took social media, Facebook, Twitter, Google, et cetera, and they blew out that email. They blew out that story. They amplified the message. They built out websites, and on these websites were strategies that were breathtaking. Every single one of these links are live. So if you hear this story and you want to do something and you want to hold a bone marrow drive, you just click on the bone marrow drive, and here is a cut-and-paste letter. You can say, Lakshmi, I want to run a bone marrow drive on Friday, and this is what I need, cut-paste send. Thank you so much, Lakshmi. We ran a bone marrow drive. This is how many people we got in there. This is what we need to do next, collectively, cut-paste send. The idea of social change in a box, providing tools and templates for anyone who wanted to act, and the results were amazing. People created Facebook ads and widgets. People that didn't even know Samir contributed. Indian celebrities created videos and put them on YouTube, compelling people to act, and the result in 11 weeks was 470 bone marrow drives, 24,611 South Asians, and a perfect match for Samir. And Vinay had a near-perfect match, and Samir shared his story because he's connected to all of those people that participated in his life, and he blogged prolifically, and he even put his bone marrow transfer onto YouTube so that others could see how easy, in fact, it is and how not full of pain that people often think it is. And the lessons they learned were remarkable. The power of a single-focused goal, the idea of reversing the rules, understanding what others do and just doing the opposite, the power of telling a story to connect and designing for collaboration, this idea that others can contribute to your cause and act as if it were their own. An update on Samir. He passed away at the end of my class, and this is a picture of Samir and Reina, and they celebrated his life by sharing his memorial service with the world. 6,000 people had a live webcast to celebrate Samir, and Vinay passed on to. Three months after Samir did, he fought hard, but he sadly also passed on. As many of you know, the probability of survival is not just whether you get a perfect or good match, it's the speed with which you get that match as well. But, and the reason I'm here today is because out of the 24,611 people registered, 266 people were matched immediately. That's 266 people who had hope, who had the time and the gift of potential life. This idea that most revolutions are sparked by the actions of a few ordinary people is what drove Robert and his friends. An idea that your biggest asset is a clear mind and a very focused idea to find the ignition points and light it. And all I could do as I was thinking about this story and listening to him talk is think, what could I do now? Could I water this story? Would it grow? How would that make me feel? And all I could think about was happy. So I talked to my technology-based husband and I said, what could we do in the world that would have this kind of impact and how could we harness social media to do so? And I reflected stories of individuals in for-profits and non-profits that have created infectious action. Jessica Jackley at Kevan Profounder and Scott Harrison and Charity Water and Jane Shannon Embrace, these individuals that created infectious movements with very little resources but are getting others to contribute to the cause. And what was so interesting in this data grab that we did was understanding which campaigns took flight and which campaigns did not because there were a number that did not. And there were two common factors with the campaigns that took off versus those that didn't. The first is that the campaigns that took off harnessed social media but they did it where the core idea of what the individual wanted to do had deep, deep meaning for them. And then they amplified that idea through social media. And then the second was that four activities were common among all of them and those four activities were coordinated with precision and in sync. And those four activities were focused on a single goal and grabbing attention and making people look and making people care through telling a story and in designing for collaboration enabling others to act. The dragonfly is a symbol of happiness and it's the only insect that can fly in any direction when all four wings are acting in concert. And the dragonfly effect refers to the idea that small acts can create big change and the core idea underneath it is deeply meaningful to you and when the four wings are acting in concert and we collected those stories and provided a book for anyone who wanted to create infectious action and all that does is simply makes me happy. So one very reasonable question would be, why are you so happy? It's a very sad story. It's a tragic story and yet you're happy. So I wanted to present three potentially different hypotheses as to why that's so. The first is that I felt a very different type of happiness. There's two types of happiness and this is work with Cassie McGillner and Seb Convar, but people often assume there's only one type of happiness. The first type of happiness is exciting happiness and it has these types of associations and the second type of happiness is this is peaceful happiness and has those types of associations and what's interesting about these two types of happiness is not that they just differ across cultures which they do and across ages which they do but that they can change in a moment's notice. In one study we recently ran we told a group of individuals to breathe normally so you breathe normally and the second group we told you to breathe deeply and we deeply focused on the presence and then we came back later point of time and said what is happiness to you and you said it was excitement and we said what is happiness to you and you said it was peaceful. This idea that something as small as five minutes of deep breathing focused on the present could redefine your way of looking at happiness is stunning I think. You can choose your own happiness and what is even more interesting to this group of individuals and we offered you two teas one is a refreshing peppermint tea and one is a relaxing calming chamomile tea and you disproportionately picked the peppermint tea and you disproportionately picked the calming soothing tea. We can choose our own happiness and whatever happiness we choose to experience has a significant impact on the decisions we make at this moment and in the future and I believe I chose my happiness and that had an impact on the decisions I made. The second insight or hypothesis is that I felt a less of a need to be happy which much research shows doesn't work anyways. When we asked you what is one thing you could do to be happier or improve your happiness this is the type of data that you responded with. My favorite is to get one of those startups to actually start making money so I can get on with my life and the research shows that even if you can achieve these seemingly untenable goals that within a few days of achieving that goal you are very likely to be back at the same base rate of happiness that you were before you achieved that goal so instead of trying to improve or get happier might we reconsider the view of happiness to be associated with moments of happiness and we have a class designing happiness and these are moments of happiness that came from the students created by Emily and Joe and this had such deep impact on me and I think about Robert and I think that the moments of happiness that he had had a lot to do with just knowing you found a perfect match for your best friend and a second moment of happiness that has to do with 266 individuals matched within one year and for me I think a moment of happiness is knowing I could do something more and a second moment of happiness is right here right now with you and the third is I saw a way to create something bigger the idea that one small individual act when repeated can create big change had a transformative impact on me if you just think of that one email that Robert wrote and the subsequent impact on the bone marrow drives that were run in the United States in 11 short weeks these dots represent each bone marrow drive that collected 24,611 South Asians across the United States 11 weeks with that email socially shared amplified through Facebook and Twitter and Google and video you name it it's jaw dropping for me so the question is it's one thing to write a book but the question is could you put it to work and the sad reality is that this problem exists in very big ways the numbers are still terrible if you're South Asian this is Sanjana Sanjana is a mother of eight year old twins and she was educated at Delhi University and came to the United States to be a teacher and she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma five years ago she gave herself a stem cell transplant and she went into remission and it's come back the only thing that will save her is a bone marrow transplant and they have been looking for two years we have come so far and yet we still have so far to go but the happy, very happy news is that the technology has shifted dramatically bone marrow transfers used to take one to two days in the hospital now they take with peripheral blood stem cell techniques only three hours of sitting in a hospital and doing something that's not dissimilar to a blood test or a blood withdrawal getting tested used to be necessity to have blood taken and now it's as simple as a cheek swab what can we do? What can we do together? One idea was could we get 100,000 South Asians in the bone marrow registry in one year when Samir and Vinay were matched the first words out of their mouth was let's get another 25,000 and in honor of those two men what would it look like to get 100,000 South Asians into the registry this year and could I take one trip to be here with you today to possibly save one life and to help the efforts of a national bone marrow registry a small act taken collectively leads to a big change and in closing I wanted to say that happiness often feels big and lofty but we rethink happiness in our choices in designing our environments and in our actions can we make those connections and meaning and be a part of something bigger through social media so what is one small act you can do and we invite you to potentially give a cheek swab which is outside after our session and to share that hope with Sanjana and to share stories and tweet them and vlog them and video them about small acts that create big change the ideas that the world would be a much better place if we share those stories and I can promise you that you will be indeed happy thank you