How to Be Happy

Does the big corporation executive work harder than the man who owns his own company? Which is happier and healthier? Whose wife is better off? To find the answers to these and similar questions, Arthur Stanley Talbott, a California advertising man, questioned in top California executives ($35,000 a year and up). He checked the parking-lot attendants at their plants, spoke to their wives, secretaries and doctors, snooped around their golf and yacht clubs, even checked their medicine cabinets. Last week Talbott released his findings.

Of his original group of 111, Talbott soon found 37 who were putting in only 30 hours a week or less. They got to work around 10, knocked off at 3, took three-hour lunches, played golf or went fishing two or three times a week, often stretched their weekends to four or five days. All but five of this group either owned their own companies or were officers of small local businesses.

After eliminating these 37, plus ten more who worked a straight 40-hour week (three of them were small-company men), Talbott took a look at what he had left--the 64 hard workers. They were almost all employees of large national corporations. Said Talbott: "They worked from 69 hours a week to as high as 112, and I mean all work." Most were in the office by 8, left at 6:30 with a pile of homework; when they went out to dinner (an average of three times a week), it was always on business.

The eager beavers, said Talbott, "dress better, as do their wives. Their offices are better run, their desks are neat, they can speak quietly and get action. For the most part they are better liked by their employees. The discipline is better, and so is the morale." They live well at home (all have maids), and better on the road. Their "manners are precise and good, while the small-time president is likely to spread a whole slice of bread." They take fewer sleeping pills and less alcohol, but "can sit down and have four drinks before dinner and never show it."

In most such cases, it is not the wife who is doing the pushing to hard work. Said Talbott: "At least 75% of the wives who are married to hard workers are unhappy. They never see their husbands." In one month, Talbott checked on six executives who worked 90 hours a week. "In that month, and of that six, four got divorced." Unanimously, the wives agreed that they would prefer their daughters to marry "some kid with less ambition." But the hard workers themselves are much happier than the lazy ones. "If they had to choose between their wives and their jobs, they would take their jobs any time. They love the business luncheons and train compartments and long hours. They enjoy it all."

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