THE MEDIA-DRIVEN

 "HEY, BILL GATES; START A HAPPINESS CORPORATION!"

CAMPAIGN

 The "Hey, Bill Gates; Start a Happiness Corporation" Campaign is a project with one purpose.  It exists to enlist our mass media  (print, television, radio, and internet) in  encouraging our world's richest and most generous philanthropist, Bill Gates, to found and run a for-profit corporation with the sole purpose of training people to become happier. 

PROPOSAL LETTER

             Dear Mass Media Professional;

 I'm writing to offer you a great story.  What almost all of us want most in life is happiness, but very few of us are very happy.  Here in the U.S., the average person scores 69 on their happiness level , and is only happy 54 percent of the time.  In fact, on any given day, one quarter of us are actually mildly depressed.  Why is this?  40 years of research on happiness (subjective well-being) has shown that our "get happier" strategies, (including our number one strategy of having more money) hardly work at all.

          Not only are 37 percent of the people on Forbes' list of wealthiest Americans less happy than the average person, according to the latest poll (1999-2001) by World Values Surveys (based at Michigan State University), the happiest country in the world is now Nigeria, followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Puerto Rico.  We Americans come in 16^th place on the list.

           While the average person knows very little about happiness, twenty-five years ago, psychologists began learning through experimentation how to help people become much happier.  In fact the first of these happiness-increase experiments made its subjects about 25 percent happier after just six weeks of training.

           Here's the story:  Almost no one is using this powerful research to help people become happier.  Since the Spring of 2003, former American Psychological Association president, Martin E. P. Seligman has been personally training hundreds of "happiness coaches," but getting coached in happiness is expensive, and no happiness market has yet been created!  (who's ever heard of a happiness coach?).

           What we Americans need is for "Big Business" to sell us happiness.  People pay Berlitz language schools to teach them English, French, and Italian; they pay Kaplan to teach them how to increase their standardized test scores, they would pay a happiness training company to teach them happiness.

            I've contacted you because, as a mass media professional, you can make big things happen with what you write about.  What do you think would happen if reporters from all over the world began to write about the need for happiness training businesses?   What if the media launched a campaign to encourage our world's richest and most generous philanthropist, Bill Gates, to take on the cause of happiness, not as a charity but as a business?  Bill Gates is rich enough to easily set up an international chain of happiness training centers.  He is also rich enough to saturate the media with advertisements promoting this new happiness training business.

           My estimate is that Gates could offer classes to about twenty people at a time, and charge them each $300 for six weeks of happiness training.  The result would be that his customers would become about 25 percent happier, and Mr. Gates would gross $6,000 for each class. 

           This Gates angle is admittedly quirky, but as a story, that would be appealing to many readers.  Happiness is HOT now; just check out Oprah's "O" April, 2004 cover story.  Also,  review  the happiness facts,  increase experiments, and documented benefits pages on The Happiness Show website.  To help you get started, I've included a "Story Angles and Themes" section that presents captions and press releases.

  It's pitiful that so many of us are so much less happy than we could be simply because we've never been taught how to become happier.  So many of us could be taught to become much happier if businesses realized that many of us would eagerly pay for this instruction.  I hope you'll review the information I've presented, and then write a story that will inspire Bill Gates to create a happiness training business. 

                                                                Sincerely,
                                                                            George Ortega

Happiness Benefits

By Bill Gates selling happiness as a product, he would be selling consumers much more than success in achieving their strongest desire and goal in life - happiness.   Extensive research shows that as individuals become happier, they reap physical, emotional, financial, social, ethical, and societal rewards.  Click here for a fully referenced list of published studies demonstrating how becoming happier helps people to become physically and emotionally healthier, more economically productive, more pro-social, and more charitable, etc..