THEME 2: Help people kick ass so they can reach their dreams. That’s how you create happiness. Make that your business and your life.

Happiness
The products and services we build have a wide array of goals. We think of our business as being the category that our product falls into. My company, Revolution Health, is obviously in the business of health content, tools, and community, right? Well, most businesses are reducible to the business of happiness. Jane McGonigal predicted that quality of life will become the ultimate measure of a product. “Happiness is the new capital.”

Kicking Ass
Similarly, Kathy Sierra asked “How do you help your users kick ass?” I found that to be a really powerful question. How much time do we spend at work on work that does not help an end user kick ass? If that’s the majority of the time, either the product is on the wrong track or you’re doing the wrong work.

New Measurements
We need to reframe and re-evaluate what we and our products actually accomplish in our end users. Metrics should not be around page views and sales but around how effective we’ve allowed someone to be or how many interruptions we’ve eliminated from someone’s life.
Jane provided four common elements that provide true happiness across the board. Take these as starting points for your new ‘happiness startup’.

1) Satisfying work to do
2) The experience of being good at something
3) Spending time with people you like
4) Chance to be part of something bigger

Dreams
I want to leave you with Randy Pauch’s life changing talk on making people’s dreams come true. Creating happiness is something bigger than the products and services we work on. It’s how we should live our lives.

Update: Looks like Randy Pauch has written a book based on his amazing lecture.