Chris Schell isn’t always comfortable talking about what led him to seek a life and vocation centered on happiness. “It’s hard for me to talk about it because it makes me feel what I felt back then,” he says.
“Back then” was 2002. Settling into a lucrative career as a hedge fund manager after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Business School, Chris began suffering from anxiety that eventually escalated to panic attacks.
“I felt like I had been given this false dream and followed it, and it was making me miserable,” he says. “And so it made me think, What do I really want from life? Because this is not what I want.”
Through his soul-searching, he says, “I realized that the answer to the ultimate question of what you want from life is to be happy.”
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It was a revelation that allowed Chris to hand over his company to his business partner the day after a particularly bad panic attack and start a journey of understanding happiness and where it might lead him.
Chris and his wife, Lori (pictured with him, below), moved to Rehoboth Beach, Del., where Chris’ family had spent summers and his identical twin brother, Preston, owned a development company. He walked on the beach, read self-help books, reconnected with his old lifeguard pals, and kept a happiness journal to make notes about what makes him happy (or doesn’t).