Unlocking Happiness: Key Levers for Success

What if happiness wasn’t a mystery? What if success wasn’t luck?

I’ve become a little obsessed with a question: what if the things that make our lives better aren’t hidden at all? What if they’re sitting right in front of us, and we just aren’t pulling them?

People call these things “life hacks.” I don’t like that word. A hack feels like a trick, a shortcut, something clever you stumbled into. I think there’s a better word: levers.

A lever is different. A lever is something you pull on purpose, knowing exactly what it will do. And once you know where the levers are, you don’t have to guess anymore. You just have to pull.

Here’s what I mean.

Ask most people about their daily commute and you’ll get a groan. It’s the low point of the day, brim with traffic, noise, wasted time.

But give that same commute to someone riding with a friend, and it flips. It becomes the high point of their day. Same road. Same minutes. Completely different experience.

That’s a lever. Not a hack. A lever.

Here’s another one, and this one has real data behind it. People who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their job.

Seven times.

So why isn’t every manager, every HR department, every company on earth treating “does this person have a friend here” as a metric worth caring about? Engagement isn’t a mystery we can’t solve. It’s a lever we’re not pulling.

My friend Ken Krogue co-founded InsideSales.com, and his team studied something simple: how fast companies respond to a new lead.

The average business waits about 48 hours to follow up on a web lead. Two full days.

But if you respond within five minutes, you’re 100 times more likely to actually make contact with that person. And you’re 21 times more likely to turn that contact into a sale.1

Not twice as likely. Not five times. Twenty-two times.

That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different business. And yet almost nobody is built to respond in five minutes. Why? Because most companies aren’t designed around the lever. They’re designed around habit.

Reid Hoffman taught something years ago that has stuck with me ever since: you are five times more likely to land a meeting with someone if a mutual connection introduces you, compared to reaching out cold.2

I’ve felt this firsthand. A single introduction from a trusted friend once opened a door for me with two bestselling authors that cold outreach never would have touched. One warm connection did what a hundred cold emails couldn’t.

So why do so many of us still default to cold outreach? Why do we treat the lever like it’s optional?

This is the part that keeps me up at night. I’m not talking about secrets. I’m talking about things we already know. The data exists, the research is published, and the lever is sitting right there.

So why doesn’t everybody use it?

Maybe people don’t know the lever exists. Maybe they know, but don’t quite believe it applies to them. Or maybe — and I think this is the harder truth — some of us have quietly made peace with not succeeding. We’ve stopped expecting more, so we stopped reaching for it.

I don’t think that’s how we were meant to live. I think we were built for more than the default setting.

I believe there are hundreds of these levers waiting to be found, documented, and understood — for happiness, for work, for relationships, for life evaluation as a whole. Some are backed by hard data, like Ken’s five-minute rule. Some are simple and human, like riding to work with a friend.

The problem was never that the levers didn’t exist, it’s that nobody built a system to help you find the ones that matter to you, and then actually pull them, consistently, without relying on willpower alone.

That’s exactly what we’re building at Soar.

Imagine an AI system that knows the levers — all of them, catalogued and verified — and helps you configure your own life and work around the ones that fit you. Not a list you read once and forget. A system that keeps pulling the lever for you, in the background, every single day.

Success and happiness were never supposed to be random. They were supposed to be engineered — on purpose, by design, by people who finally decided to stop guessing and start pulling.

The levers are there. The only question left is whether we build the systems to use them.

Paul Allen is the co-founder of Ancestry.com and CEO of Soar, an AI Studio building agent fleets that uplift individuals, organizations, and communities. Create a personalized AI fleet for your company today.