MyHappy was launched in February of 2008 with the goal of allowing people to interactively discover things about themselves in the context of recent scientific research on happiness without losing sight of the ancient wisdom that preceded such research. Clear?

For example, there are lots of books about happiness which take research out of psychology labs and bring it to Barnes and Noble customers. But somehow there is an interactivity that is lacking in such exercises. It’s one thing to learn about the results of a survey and another thing to actually take the survey and judge for yourself whether the questions are a true reflection of what the survey was meant to measure. It’s great to be able to take advice from a book, but quite another thing to be able to discuss your experiences using that advice with others. And it’s wonderful to hear about cutting edge research, but if you aren’t reading the positive psychology journals directly, how are you supposed to keep abreast of what’s really cutting edge.

At MyHappy, we are trying to create a community of people interested in talking about their experiences applying happiness research to their lives. To that end, we’ll give you tools (such as the ability to take scales and participate in new research) and knowledge (such as the latest results from psychology labs) to have such a discussion.

But through it all, we never want to lose sight of the fact that much of what we are discovering through application of the scientific method exists in some spiritual text somewhere and was discovered long before. No scientific research is without flaw and it is in the convergence of results from the science of happiness and ancient wisdom that we can perhaps find truth that we can really hang our hat on.

Now for some boring stuff….

MyHappy was founded by Ravi Iyer, a graduate student in social psychology, and David Siemer, a new media investment banker who founded Siemer & Associates. Both of them started this site with the idea that a lot of good can be done by publicizing happiness research. And that good things happen to people who do a lot of good.

MyHappy.com is a social business as conceived by Mohammed Yunus, the nobel prize winning founder of the Grameen Bank, which started the microfinance movement. The idea of a social business is patterned after his experience with Grameen. Specifically, a social business aims to combine the efficiencies of business with the aims of helping society as a whole. By creating an organization that is able to pay reasonable wages to workers and compete with other organizations, we hope to create a business that is not dependent on donations, does not spend lots of time raising money, and is sustainable beyond the limits of the good intentions of the founders.

At the same time, we recognize the conflict in priorities that a business that measures its success in profit creates. We also recognize the drag on our main priorities that can occur as a result of corporate profit taking. As such, we vow that beyond paying our initial investors back for their initial investment, without any interest or profit, we will reinvest any money we make in the business with the goal of increasing our ability to promote knowledge about happiness research. As well, while we hope to eventually pay a reasonable salary to people who work on this enterprise, such that there is not constant turnover and we build a dedicated professional staff, we vow not to pay anyone associated with this enterprise a wage beyond what is necessary to ensure our competitiveness in the human resources marketplace.

In short, our goal is to increase knowledge of happiness research, not profit, and we feel that we can do that best with our social business model, rather than the traditional non-profit model. If you would like to read more about the concept of a social business, consider reading this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Creating-World-Without-Poverty-Capitalism/dp/1586484931

- MyHappy