How I became HAPPY (Dr. Jim Doty)

Stanford neurosurgeon Dr. James Doty, MD; Ellie Askew, Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

What is there to know about Professor James R. Doty, MD (Into the Magic Shop)

How rich am I today, Secretary? - Well...

By every measure of success in society, I had it. I had a large penthouse in the top of a building in San Francisco, Porsches, Ferraris. I was flying around in private jets.

I was dating beautiful women. All my friends were saying, "God, this is amazing. You're having such a great time." And I realized...I was miserable. I couldn't understand it, because I had done everything that I thought would bring happiness.

Then something happened. Interestingly enough, in this misery, where I had everything, I had been involved in dot-com stuff. And when the stock market crashed, within six weeks, I lost 80 million dollars and was bankrupt and 3 million dollars in debt. My Ferraris, Porsches, my penthouse, all gone.

This put me into a period of deep reflection in which I realized what was missing. Don't get me wrong, I was never a mean or evil person, but I had spent my whole time trying to prove something. It was about me, and that "always being about me" resulted in a sense of deep loneliness and unhappiness.

So there I was, with no money and $3,000,000.00 in debt, and not long before, I had actually given a large amount of stock in this company to charity.

My lawyer called me up and said, "Jim, I have extraordinary news for you. You know we were supposed to file these papers that gave all the stock away to charity. But the attorney, the junior attorney, had not done it yet, so actually you don't have to give anything away." This stock was in the company that went public for $1.2 billion, where I was the CEO.

This put me in an incredible quandary, so I asked my friends and the woman I was dating at the time, "What should I do now?"

You can guess what they all said. A few advisors said I would be a "complete fool" to give my remaining assets away. Not a single person said otherwise. But I ended up giving that stock to charity. And that company then went public, and I became this extraordinary philanthropist.

I set up health clinics all over the world, blood banks, a wing at the hospital, research centers, and so on.

Suddenly, I had everything. It was no more about me. It was about being of service to others because, you see, this is how we are designed as a species -- to love, to care, and when you do that, your physiology works at its best.

You have this warm feeling. The centers in your brain associated with reward and pleasure are activated. It decreases your stress hormones. It decreases the creation of inflammatory proteins. It improves your cardiac function.

Yeah, Dr. Doty do good (dalailama.com).

There have been studies that show that being compassionate has more benefit than being at your ideal body weight or exercise (which is not to say you don't do those things, you just be more compassionate). But my point is that it shows you how profound the effect is of these types of behaviors. And you're just much happier.

The problem in the world is not about not having enough resources. It's because so often we look at someone else as "the other" instead of ourselves. When you look at the other as yourself, everything changes.

I spend a lot of time with different groups of people. And often with the wealthy, you talk to them, and they're deeply suffering. And because so many people look up to these people as successes, these people think that by having people admire them and want to be like them, that that will fill that emptiness they have.

You can talk about different types of happiness -- the selfish, hedonic happiness of buying things and what you get from that -- but for most people that's very, very transitory.

The thing that gives a deep-seated, prolonged sense of satisfaction and meaning in life is being of service to others. And that's just reality.

- Stanford Professor James Doty, M.D., FACS, FICS, FAANS

• Dr. James R. Doty, MD (Into the Magic Shop)
• Center for Compassionate Altruism (ccare.stanford.edu)

Dr. Doty is a clinical professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, of which the Dalai Lama was the founding benefactor.