Eric Stein
FNDN 201 IR: Ideas that Inspire
Instr. Eric Stein
January 1, 2021
1. Waldinger begins his talk by referring to a recent survey that reported that a major life goal for over eighty percent of millennials was to get rich (2016).
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2. From the same study, Waldinger reports that “another fifty percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous” (2016).
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3. Waldinger argues that our understanding of what makes people happy throughout their lives is often based on people’s recollections, not on actual observation (2016).
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4. Doing comprehensive, long term research groups of people is very difficult, because “too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die” (Waldinger, 2016).
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5. For this reason, the Harvard Study of Adult Development is an incredibly important piece of research, because it has succeeded in both the scope (724 original participants) and range (over 2000 children of the original participants) that it originally proposed (Waldinger, 2016).
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6. The lesson that the Harvard Study teaches repudiates the dreams of many millennials: relationships are the most important factor in living a happy life (Waldinger, 2016).
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