Who is happy?

Are rock stars, billionaires or recently-funded entrepreneurs happier? What about teenagers with clear skin?

Either what happens changes our mood... or our mood changes the way we narrate what happens.

This goes beyond happiness economics and the understanding that a certain baseline of health and success is needed for many people to be happy.

The question worth pondering is: are you seeking out the imperfect to justify your habit of being unhappy? Does something have to happen in the outside world for you to be happy inside?

Or, to put it differently, Is there a narrative of your reality that supports your mood?

Marketers spend billions of dollars trying to create a connection between what we see in the mirror and our happiness, implying that others are judging us in a way that ought to make us unhappy.

And industrialists have built an economic system in which compliance to a boss's instructions is seen as the only way to avoid the unhappiness that comes from being penalized at work. And so fear becomes a dominant paradigm of our profession.

Those things are unlikely to change any time soon, but the way we process them can change...

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3 digital designs that earn word of mouth

We don't always share techie examples of word of mouth marketing, because word of mouth shouldn't rely on digital or social media to work. But that doesn't mean your web strategy couldn't use a little WOM boost.

Here are three ways to do it:

• Feature your customers
• Give it some personality
• Make sharing fun

1. Feature your customers

For their first anniversary, Free People, a women’s clothing retailer, replaced models with photos sent in by their customers. If their customers love them enough to share pictures of themselves wearing their stuff, they’ll certainly love...

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