Certified Happy Person
I am a certified happy person and can now speak from a point of authority about my certification on how to be happy.
The certificate itself is useless. While an electrician license ensures that I am able to safely replace a socket, a happiness certificate does not guarantee that I will brighten up the office on a Monday morning.
The certificate as a signal is also useless. Online courses with easy to obtain certificates can often still be great for signalling interests to a future employer. A course on Kubernetes signals that I would like to work with Kubernetes. It follows then, that this happiness certificate tells potential employers that I would like to work with happy colleagues, unlike all the people that relish the chance to work with miserable curmudgeons.
So the certificate neither gave me a tangible skill nor signals a particular interest to an employer.
Did it at least make me happy ?
Well, … no.
An online course did not magically teach me how to be happy.
What the course actually provides is a perspective on a bunch of happiness techniques that we all already know: Money doesn’t buy happiness, social connections are important, exercise helps, gratitude journaling, etc. The course didn’t tell me anything new, but the perspective it provided made some things click: