Speaker 1: If we with hold our feelings of awe and deep
Speaker 1: reverence for only the wide eyes and graduation stations and
Speaker 1: all stages, and only the father daughter dances at weddings,
Speaker 1: and only the healthy baby screeching in the delivery room,
Speaker 1: then that's only going to add up to like ten
Speaker 1: days in our life. We're only a live for thirty
Speaker 1: thousand days. I want to make the other twenty nine,
Speaker 1: nine hundred and ninety days full of awe as well,
Speaker 1: and my way of doing it is by writing down
Speaker 1: these small and simple pleasures. Wow. Hello, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Neil Pasricha to the show.
Speaker 1: Neil is an author, entrepreneur, podcaster, and public speaker characterized
Speaker 1: by his advocacy of positivity and simple pleasures. He is
Speaker 1: best known for his The Book of Awesome series and
Speaker 1: The Happiness Equation, which are international bestsellers. His first TED talk,
Speaker 1: The Three A's of Awesome, is ranked one of the
Speaker 1: ten most inspiring of all time on the TED side,
Speaker 1: Neil hosts an Apple Best of Award winning podcast called
Speaker 1: Three Books, and his most recent book is called Our
Speaker 1: Book of Awesome. In this episode, I talked to Neil
Speaker 1: about how to live an awesome life. The levels of
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety, or its high as today now more
Speaker 1: than ever, is when we need hope and positivity. According
Speaker 1: to Neil, the key to living a happier life is
Speaker 1: appreciating the little things all in Gratitude should not be
Speaker 1: reserved for big moments, but they should be cultivated in
Speaker 1: the every day. We also touch on the topics of
Speaker 1: social media, motivation, confidence, and authenticity. I really enjoyed this
Speaker 1: chat with Neil. He's a really good guy, and he
Speaker 1: really has this real positive energy and he just inspires
Speaker 1: you just by talking to him. So I'm sure he'll
Speaker 1: inspire you all as well. So let's just get right
Speaker 1: into it. Here we go. Neil pas Richa, Well, it's
Speaker 1: nice to finally meet you after all the it feels
Speaker 1: like years we've been talking on Twitter. I know, nice
Speaker 1: to meet you too. Yes, Twitter, well that's a whole
Speaker 1: other topic Twitter, and that's become. But I want to
Speaker 1: call Twitter awesome right now? What do you now? I'm
Speaker 1: actually I'm actually very close. I think I'm gonna do it.
Speaker 1: I think I'm a twenty twenty three full social media Delete. Yeah, delete,
Speaker 1: I'm like thinking across all platforms. Yeah, I'm finding it
Speaker 1: hugely interfering with my mental health but also my ability
Speaker 1: to do deep work. So I don't know what else
Speaker 1: there is to do. And I think like you, you you know,
Speaker 1: I've been working for a lot of years to try
Speaker 1: to cultivate an audience with a podcast, an email list,
Speaker 1: and those things don't need, you know, algorithmic interference. So
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that it won't be as vague, but I'm
Speaker 1: hoping it's enough to kind of preserve my mental health
Speaker 1: and kind of keep me off the scrolls. It's not
Speaker 1: just Twitter. I find Instagram, Facebook, They do the same
Speaker 1: kind of thing. I just don't feel goodhen I'm done
Speaker 1: with them. That's important to know that about yourself and
Speaker 1: to break that boundary around your life. I don't even
Speaker 1: tell you that you're right about this stuff. You've been
Speaker 1: really wildly successful with your book of awesome series. But
Speaker 1: can you tell us to our audience a little bit?
Speaker 1: Just step back, tell us about who you are? You
Speaker 1: know what are you all about in life? You know
Speaker 1: what are you all about? Man? Yeah? Sure? I My
Speaker 1: mom was born in Nairobikinya and my dad was born
Speaker 1: in Amritzar India. They had an arranged marriage in England.
Speaker 1: The arrangement riage with their second date. The first date
Speaker 1: was my dad asking my mom if she would eat
Speaker 1: a hamburger. She said yes, proving that she wasn't a vegetarian,
Speaker 1: and that was good enough for the wedding, which followed
Speaker 1: two weeks later. They emigrated to Canada in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties. I was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, just
Speaker 1: an hour east of Toronto, in nineteen seventy nine, and like,
Speaker 1: who am I? What am I all about? You know,
Speaker 1: I think I had a pretty comfortable childhood Scott Like,
Speaker 1: you know, my dad would say to me, You know,
Speaker 1: never forget how lucky you are. You got power in
Speaker 1: your house, you got water in your taps, you got
Speaker 1: schools across the street, you got hospitals down the road.
Speaker 1: But growing up here with all these advantages that we experienced,
Speaker 1: being you know, you're in New York, I'm in Toronto,
Speaker 1: that we experienced, they're pretty invisible to you when you
Speaker 1: have them, And so I didn't. I didn't appreciate those
Speaker 1: base kind of things I had going for me until
Speaker 1: my late twenties. In my late twenties, I went through
Speaker 1: a really tough period of my life. I lost my marriage,
Speaker 1: and I lost my house because we were living together,
Speaker 1: and I lost my best friend to a suicide, all
Speaker 1: within the span of a few days. And for a
Speaker 1: lot of people who maybe have experienced more hardships than me,
Speaker 1: you know, this would be a bump in the road.
Speaker 1: But for me, Scott, it was like I was destitute,
Speaker 1: like I was. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping. I
Speaker 1: lost forty pounds and I wasn't that big. I lost
Speaker 1: forty pounds. Yeah, well, I mean that's everybody was saying
Speaker 1: to me in the hallway. They're like, you look great.
Speaker 1: What's your secret? Right? But it was just stress. I
Speaker 1: started therapy for the first time of my life, and
Speaker 1: it became clear that I was one of the people
Speaker 1: that needed to go to therapy multiple times a week
Speaker 1: to start processing this stuff. And it was in this
Speaker 1: period of my life. And by the way, what was
Speaker 1: I doing at the time was working at Walmart. I
Speaker 1: was director of Leadership Development inside the world's largest company,
Speaker 1: and multiple people have that title, but my job was
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to grow leadership inside the
Speaker 1: world's biggest company. Two point five million employees. So that's
Speaker 1: my day job. But outside of work, as I was
Speaker 1: going through this tough time, I start a blog called
Speaker 1: one thousand Awesome Things dot Com just as a way
Speaker 1: to try to cheer myself up. Perhaps inside me Scott,
Speaker 1: I had some inner optimists for my dad, just like
Speaker 1: knowing that writing down positive thing every night before bed
Speaker 1: would be good for me. But it wasn't like it
Speaker 1: came easy. A thousand sounded like a small number at first,
Speaker 1: but my first post sucked. It was it was brock
Speaker 1: of flower, the strange mutant hybrid child of nature's ugliest
Speaker 1: vegetables like green cauliflower. That's all. That's all I could
Speaker 1: come up with. I write this post, I pushed you know,
Speaker 1: posts on WordPress, and for the next one thousand straight weekdays,
Speaker 1: I just keep doing it. I just keep doing it.
Speaker 1: It was it was like a vine out of the
Speaker 1: quicksand for me. And over time these little posts started
Speaker 1: to hit a nerve. I wrote old Danger Playground Equipment
Speaker 1: one month into this blog, and it hit the front
Speaker 1: page of a website you might know called fark dot com.
Speaker 1: It sent fifty thousand readers to my site in one day,
Speaker 1: and suddenly I never went below like five thousand people
Speaker 1: again like reading the daily awesome thing and so whether
Speaker 1: it was you know, wearing warm underwear from just out
Speaker 1: of the dryer, getting called up to the dinner buffet
Speaker 1: first at a wedding, these what I call awesome things,
Speaker 1: you know, started finding an audience. Fortuitous career. It began
Speaker 1: now fourteen years ago, the path that I'm still on,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, being one of these people like you,
Speaker 1: like many of our mutual friends, simply trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what it means to live a great life and
Speaker 1: writing about my own experiences and cataloging what I'm learning
Speaker 1: as I go about trying to do that. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's amazing. And your first book came in New York
Speaker 1: Times bestseller, right, book, the Book of Awesome. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Book of so the Book of Walsome. I was
Speaker 1: joking people, you don't need to buy it's just literally
Speaker 1: my blog printed out in staple together. I mean when
Speaker 1: it came out, they printed six thousand copies. It was
Speaker 1: a six thousand copy book, which for those that aren't publishing,
Speaker 1: that's not very big. But a few lucky bumps happened.
Speaker 1: Heather Reasman, who is the CEO of the largest book
Speaker 1: chain in Canada. She made it one of her Heather's picks,
Speaker 1: kind of like an Oprah's pick up in Canada. That
Speaker 1: prompted it to hit number two in the best Our List.
Speaker 1: And then from there I got invited on the Today
Speaker 1: Show and then the Early Show, and those things, as
Speaker 1: you know, have their own kind of momentum. And eventually,
Speaker 1: after all the press died down, the book kept selling
Speaker 1: and it stayed on the Best Our List for eight
Speaker 1: years and sold over a million copies. And so that
Speaker 1: book hit the New York Times a year after it
Speaker 1: came out. Actually, so it wasn't an instant you know that.
Speaker 1: You know the phrase instant New York Times bestseller. I
Speaker 1: have never identified with that. Ye yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 1: So that's interesting, Like, how's your life different from not
Speaker 1: being a bestseller to being a bestseller? How does that
Speaker 1: change you as a person? I mean it doesn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just here's what it did for me. I'm as
Speaker 1: I just mentioned, my parents are East Indian immigrants to Canada,
Speaker 1: and so the life path for me, Scott was supposed
Speaker 1: to be, like, you know, get good grades in chemistry
Speaker 1: and biology and physics and math and go to med school.
Speaker 1: Go to med school, be a doctor. You know, in
Speaker 1: in Indian culture, it is the it's the kind of
Speaker 1: the highest guaranteed kind of income. And it's the like
Speaker 1: in the in the arranged marriage culture, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's like are they a doctor? What kind gp specialists?
Speaker 1: What kind of specialists? You know? And and so I
Speaker 1: failed on that path. I did business school instead twice,
Speaker 1: once up in Canada, once down down at Harvard in
Speaker 1: the States. And so for me, I had already fallen
Speaker 1: off that path. But quitting my job at Walmart, that
Speaker 1: would have been a whole other thing. That would have
Speaker 1: been saying goodbye to like a pension, a nine to
Speaker 1: five job benefits. You know, who's going to pay for
Speaker 1: the dentist if I don't have a job. And so
Speaker 1: it took me eight more years. Eight more years were
Speaker 1: on the side. I wrote five books, gave two hundred talks.
Speaker 1: Thank goodness, my company, Walmart was so kind to like
Speaker 1: keep letting me take like a day off here, a
Speaker 1: day off there, a day off here. I said to
Speaker 1: my speak agency, I can only do speeches on weekends.
Speaker 1: It was just weekends because I kept the day job,
Speaker 1: and at Walmart, it was hard to say goodbye to
Speaker 1: it because I was given really cool jobs. I mentioned
Speaker 1: the Director of Leadership Development role, which was my last
Speaker 1: role there, which is a great role. But I also
Speaker 1: got to be project manager to our CEO for four years,
Speaker 1: a really cool development experience where I sat outside the
Speaker 1: CEO's office and I helped him, you know, with everything
Speaker 1: he was working on. And so I had these cool
Speaker 1: development roles at Walmart, and I was writing books on
Speaker 1: the side for eight years until twenty sixteen when The
Speaker 1: Happiness Equation came out, which is it is just one
Speaker 1: of my bigger books. And at that point I just said,
Speaker 1: I can't do both any lot for any anymore. I quit.
Speaker 1: I was really scared. I was really nervous. I thought
Speaker 1: this huge lurch into like you know, the bit of
Speaker 1: having no benefits and no reason to get up in
Speaker 1: the morning was going to be like a free fall.
Speaker 1: And looking back, I honestly wish I'd made the leap
Speaker 1: earlier because there was so much more I could do
Speaker 1: once I was spending all my time on it as
Speaker 1: opposed to just evenings and weekends. That's like the career answer,
Speaker 1: and then the personal answer is that I also have
Speaker 1: gotten remarried now and we have little kids who I
Speaker 1: hope you don't hear through this one through this conversation,
Speaker 1: but it's there's a chance. And so I'm still living
Speaker 1: in Toronto. My wife, Leslie and I are We've been
Speaker 1: married a number of years now and we have four
Speaker 1: little boys under eight years old, so we've got a
Speaker 1: busy house at the same time. What does she do?
Speaker 1: Leslie is a TDSB Toronto District School Board inner city
Speaker 1: elementary school teacher. I be liking her to like a
Speaker 1: I like in her like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.
Speaker 1: You know, she's she's a real like rock star in
Speaker 1: terms of working inside inner city schools and helping kids
Speaker 1: especially around age twelve, thirteen, grade seven and eight kind
Speaker 1: of her specialty. In addition to that, she's also a
Speaker 1: trained parenting coach. I get the brag about her a
Speaker 1: little bit, trained under doctor Laura Markham, who you might
Speaker 1: know who wrote a wonderful book called Peaceful Parent, Happy Child.
Speaker 1: And she also conducts empathy based circles in our community
Speaker 1: for parents and for kids. So she's doing a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of social and educational work in our community,
Speaker 1: and I'm very lucky to be married there because she
Speaker 1: helps me every single day with a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff I'm stressed and I'm anxious, don't worried about which
Speaker 1: is always a lot of things that's wonderful. Your mission
Speaker 1: seems to be about awesomeness of every day, like every
Speaker 1: day off awesomeness. Yeah, awesomeness as a word can sometimes
Speaker 1: connote something profoundly. This great peak experience, you know, where
Speaker 1: you're standing at the top of the mountain, you're in
Speaker 1: that moment and you're like, Wow, this is awesome. But
Speaker 1: you can find awesome in the every day is It
Speaker 1: seems to be a big message of yours And there's
Speaker 1: also so a positivity to what you're doing. Why do
Speaker 1: you think people need this? Do you think they need
Speaker 1: it right now even more than ever? Yeah? Absolutely, Well
Speaker 1: a few things. First of all, if you go on
Speaker 1: an urban dictionary, the definition of awesome is I'm scared
Speaker 1: to know the word Americans use to describe everything. And
Speaker 1: as you're intimating, you know, the kind of classic definition
Speaker 1: is one of kind of like a mixture of reverence
Speaker 1: and kind of staggering beauty, like looking into the abyss
Speaker 1: of the Grand Canyon, staring out into the milky Way.
Speaker 1: But you're right, I actually tried to use that word
Speaker 1: in repurpose that word back into focusing on life's simplest pleasures,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that all those awe inducing moments
Speaker 1: we have in our life, Scott, whether that's the healthy babies,
Speaker 1: preaching in the delivery room, the father daughter dance at
Speaker 1: the wedding, you know, the wide eyes and a graduation states,
Speaker 1: they don't add up to much time. They don't really
Speaker 1: add up to that many days of the thirty thousand
Speaker 1: days we have. And so when I was going through
Speaker 1: my divorce, when I was with the loss of my friend,
Speaker 1: I found that focusing on these tiny, simple pleasures was
Speaker 1: good for me, And hell yeah, I think people need it. Now.
Speaker 1: There's higher than ever, anxiety, higher than ever, depression, higher
Speaker 1: than ever, loneliness. We've got suicide rates that are pretty
Speaker 1: off the charts compared to where they've been over the
Speaker 1: last few decades. And so why, in this era of
Speaker 1: infinite abundance do we seem to be living with the
Speaker 1: greatest mental health challenges of all time. I'm convinced that
Speaker 1: part of the reason why is because we aren't as
Speaker 1: good at seeing all the tiny little pleasures that surround
Speaker 1: us every day. What I had in my house growing
Speaker 1: up was my father constantly reminding me of these things.
Speaker 1: You know. He'd point out, you know, the look of
Speaker 1: cream dissolving into coffee. He'd point out the little stickers
Speaker 1: on the bananas, and can say, can you believe this
Speaker 1: came all the way from Ecuador? And he'd constantly be
Speaker 1: doing that. When I first showed him an iPhone, he
Speaker 1: was like, it's like the whole world in your pocket,
Speaker 1: you know. He was constantly filled with this idea of awe.
Speaker 1: And I think that these things have bad marketing lands man, like,
Speaker 1: like who's who's who's on the marketing committee for all
Speaker 1: the tiny joys in our life? They there's no there's
Speaker 1: no UH sponsored posts on Instagram that's going to tell
Speaker 1: you that wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer
Speaker 1: is good for you, But it might give you a
Speaker 1: smile and a piece of joy in the middle of
Speaker 1: a busy day. And that's why I think we should
Speaker 1: all try to practice and cultivate our ability to see
Speaker 1: those things and share those things and talk about those things.
Speaker 1: And I have been given the gift of being able
Speaker 1: to do that. In a number of books you're write,
Speaker 1: they all have awesome in the title for the most
Speaker 1: part of the book of Awesome, book of even more awesome,
Speaker 1: book a Holiday Awesome. It's kind of a one trick thing.
Speaker 1: At the same time, it's it's because I need it.
Speaker 1: I need it. I'm naturally bent towards seeing problem, seeing negativity.
Speaker 1: We all are, right, you know, you know this better
Speaker 1: than anybody. Not all of us. Some people are prettidisposed
Speaker 1: towards optimism. What I mean is that like the amygdala
Speaker 1: secreting fight or flight hormones, like you know, the idea
Speaker 1: that inside us when when there's a wreck on the
Speaker 1: other side of the highway, we all rubber neck. You know,
Speaker 1: when there's a blood test back from your doctor, pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody scans for that high cholesterol. You know, you
Speaker 1: get a math test back from your teacher, you look
Speaker 1: for the one you got wrong. Majority of us are
Speaker 1: We've had three millions of years of evolution on these
Speaker 1: brains like look, scanning for problems, finding problems, and identifying problems.
Speaker 1: It's it's the design of almost everything in the world.
Speaker 1: I always say to people. Shouldn't we pay doctors when
Speaker 1: we're healthy as opposed to when we're sick. Like every
Speaker 1: single thing in the world is oriented to words, looking
Speaker 1: for problems, finding problems, and solving problems. I know what
Speaker 1: you mean. You're saying some people are naturally predisposed to
Speaker 1: be positive, and I hear you. It's just that I
Speaker 1: think that those people are few and far between. The
Speaker 1: natural bent of most of us to be rubberneckers, cholesterol
Speaker 1: lookers and you know, errors on the math test look
Speaker 1: or seekers, like we look for those mistakes for the
Speaker 1: most part. I mean, yeah, as a species, we evolved
Speaker 1: for that to be beneficial, to make our tongue go
Speaker 1: towards the toothache as opposed to the rest of the teeth. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this tongue towards the toothache. I like it, and like
Speaker 1: it's kind of worked out right, Like we'd be remiss
Speaker 1: enough to mention that this orientation of our brain has
Speaker 1: kind of worked out pretty good for our species. We
Speaker 1: took over the whole place, you know, we figured out
Speaker 1: how to make tools and boats and get everywhere and
Speaker 1: kill almost everything, and kind of we took over. We won.
Speaker 1: This is we run the place now. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: in the world we live in today, those are not
Speaker 1: as helpful to us now. And if you're listening to
Speaker 1: this and you're somewhere warm, and you have clothes on
Speaker 1: your back, and perhaps you're surrounded by devices or screens
Speaker 1: that can fill you with any form of information that
Speaker 1: you might desire at a fingers push of a button,
Speaker 1: there is less need for your brain to see a
Speaker 1: non responsive email or a negative tweet or a bad
Speaker 1: review as the way you're interpreting it, which is you
Speaker 1: know the end of everything right. You don't need to
Speaker 1: see it that way, and yet we all do that.
Speaker 1: I'm on the precipice of a book launch, man, and
Speaker 1: I you know, three days out, I should not be
Speaker 1: worried about There's no reason I should be worried about
Speaker 1: my book launch. There's absolutely no reason. There's no reason
Speaker 1: from a success point of view, financial point of view, results.
Speaker 1: But yet I can't sleep at night because I'm worried
Speaker 1: about Like why why is that? I know I shouldn't,
Speaker 1: but I can't not. What are you worried about? What
Speaker 1: do you fear? Yeah? You know it's interesting because when
Speaker 1: you probe down a couple levels, you're like, well, what
Speaker 1: is it? Like? I think what I was saying to
Speaker 1: Oliver Berkman, who I know you're connected with as well,
Speaker 1: is I think the thing I'm really playing for is
Speaker 1: the right to keep going, you know, like I really
Speaker 1: just want This is my tenth booker journal since twenty ten.
Speaker 1: It's twenty twenty two that we're speaking, and every ten
Speaker 1: books or journals in twelve years, Like, by any measure,
Speaker 1: you know you're done. You don't need to keep going.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, I can't turn off that
Speaker 1: inner engine inside me that's made me want to do
Speaker 1: all those things. And so what do I fear. I
Speaker 1: probably fear irrelevance. I probably fear I'm afraid talking to
Speaker 1: you because I know how smart you are, I know
Speaker 1: who you have on the show, and I'm like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to be asked things that I don't know the
Speaker 1: answer to. I think I'm afraid of maybe not being
Speaker 1: proud of my own work. When you have immigrant parents
Speaker 1: and when you bring home a math test and there's
Speaker 1: one question wrong and the first thing they do out
Speaker 1: of a place in love is sit down when you
Speaker 1: get the kitchen table and work on that one. You
Speaker 1: got wrong. You know, perhaps my brain is just going
Speaker 1: to do that. My whole life is constantly try to win.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, when I first wrote the Book of Boston
Speaker 1: twenty ten, the metrics for success were like this bestseller
Speaker 1: list and it was printed once a week in the newspaper.
Speaker 1: Right now that number is on Amazon and it's refreshed
Speaker 1: every hour and it doesn't turn off. And so this
Speaker 1: is kind of the equivalent for authors of like the
Speaker 1: infinite scroll. Our brains are programmed to look for stopping mechanisms.
Speaker 1: You used to read the newspaper till it was over.
Speaker 1: You used to watch the news till it ended. Now
Speaker 1: we're so deeply immersed in these never ending scrolls and
Speaker 1: these never ending screens and these never ending extrinsic metrics
Speaker 1: that if you can't turn it off yourself, or you
Speaker 1: don't have a way inside your life to put your
Speaker 1: phone in the basement, put it on airplane mode, go
Speaker 1: up to bed an hour before. Like, if you don't
Speaker 1: have this stuff designed, you're going to fall prey to
Speaker 1: the endless algrams that are going to just suck you
Speaker 1: back in. And I think at the root of it is,
Speaker 1: you know, it's capitalism, Like I mean, the point of
Speaker 1: the machine to keep scrolling is that it can feed
Speaker 1: you more ads and have more of your attention and
Speaker 1: make more money off you. So that's partly why not
Speaker 1: as overtly an hour book of Awesome my new book,
Speaker 1: but I have in my last two books before this
Speaker 1: really talked a lot about systems and habits and the
Speaker 1: design of life to create and ensconce our minds in
Speaker 1: a place where we can feel contentment, satisfaction, freedom, and
Speaker 1: these like pleasures that seem really far off sometimes, but
Speaker 1: if we can design our life in a way that
Speaker 1: enables them, then, you know what, that's pretty good. And
Speaker 1: it's harder to do now than ever before. The trauma, loss,
Speaker 1: and uncertainty of our world have led many of us
Speaker 1: to ask life's biggest questions, such as who are we?
Speaker 1: What is our highest purpose? And how do we not
Speaker 1: only live through but thrive in the wake of tragedy, division,
Speaker 1: and challenges to our fundamental way of living. To help
Speaker 1: us all address these questions, process what this unique time
Speaker 1: in human history has meant for us personally and collectively
Speaker 1: an emerge whole, I've collaborated with my colleague and dear
Speaker 1: friend doctor Jordan Feigeld, MD, to bring you our forthcoming book.
Speaker 1: It's called Choose Growth, a workbook for transcending trauma, fear,
Speaker 1: and self doubt. It's a workbook design to guide you
Speaker 1: in a journey of committing to growth and the pursuit
Speaker 1: of self actualization every day. It's chock full of research
Speaker 1: from humanistic psychology, positive psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, cognitive science,
Speaker 1: and neuropsychology. So lots of themes that you hear about
Speaker 1: on this podcast, and it's aimed to help us all
Speaker 1: integrate the many facets of ourselves and co crete our
Speaker 1: new normal with a renewed sense of strength, vitality, and hope.
Speaker 1: Whether you're healing from loss, adapting to the new normal,
Speaker 1: or simply looking ahead to life's next chapter, Choose Growth
Speaker 1: will help steer you there two deeper connection to your values,
Speaker 1: your life vision, and ultimately your most authentic self. Choose
Speaker 1: Growth will officially hit the shelves September thirteenth, and you
Speaker 1: can border your copy or the audiobook in the US
Speaker 1: now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all
Speaker 1: major retailers. If you're in the UK and Commonwealth. You
Speaker 1: can border now at bookshop dot org dot UK. We
Speaker 1: truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and
Speaker 1: become your best self. Okay, now back to the show.
Speaker 1: I'll come like with with all your successes, like you're
Speaker 1: still insecure? Like how is that possible? You know? On
Speaker 1: one hand, it's like maybe I'm successful because of the insecurities.
Speaker 1: You know, guy, go the other way around. But I
Speaker 1: wrote this two by two in the happiness equation that
Speaker 1: has always been resonant to me. And it is a
Speaker 1: confidence matrix. And I think a one axis, let's call
Speaker 1: it the X axis across the bottom, you got your
Speaker 1: opinion of yourself. It can be low or it can
Speaker 1: be high. Right, If it's left, it's low. If it's right,
Speaker 1: it's high. And on the y axis it's your opinion
Speaker 1: of others. It can also be low and it can
Speaker 1: also be high. Scott, I think if your opinion of
Speaker 1: others is high and your opinion of yourself is low,
Speaker 1: you are insecure. So the top left box is insecure, right,
Speaker 1: I mean I am I live there sometimes right now.
Speaker 1: If your opinion of yourself is high but your opinion
Speaker 1: of others is low, then you're arrogant, and I live
Speaker 1: there sometimes too. If your opinion of both is low
Speaker 1: it's the bottom left box and the matrix, then you're
Speaker 1: cynical and I live I live there sometimes too. Now,
Speaker 1: my definition of confidence is when you can hold in
Speaker 1: your mind at the same time a high opinion of
Speaker 1: yourself and a high opinion of others. And that is confidence. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's how I define confidence personally. I will say in
Speaker 1: twenty ten, when the Book of BOTM came out, I
Speaker 1: was confident probably five percent of the time. Today, you know,
Speaker 1: moving through life, moving through relationships, you know, achieving some
Speaker 1: of these goals, but also just like getting older and
Speaker 1: you know, being more comfortable in my own skin, that
Speaker 1: five percent is probably moved up. It's probably somewhere between
Speaker 1: thirty and forty percent of the time I'm feeling confident.
Speaker 1: And for a lot of people that sounds low, but
Speaker 1: hey man, that's like a that's a lot of growth
Speaker 1: for me. You know, I've come a long way, and
Speaker 1: so yeah, I still feel insecure and cynical and arrogant sometimes,
Speaker 1: but my journey towards confidence is something I think of
Speaker 1: more like a north star. It's like inch by inch,
Speaker 1: day by day, situation by situation. Well, you're always trying
Speaker 1: to grow. I mean, for a lot of people, the
Speaker 1: pinnacle of the melonin is getting that New York Times
Speaker 1: best selling book, and you could kind of just stop there.
Speaker 1: The problem I think with that thinking though, and I
Speaker 1: sometimes I ask people. I've asked a couple of close
Speaker 1: friends of mine, you know, what's your what's your definition success?
Speaker 1: And they're like, when I get invited on your podcast,
Speaker 1: That's how I'm going to know why I've made it? Right? Really, Oh, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I should feel like I've made it then, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're very and you are. You are going to be
Speaker 1: on three books in twenty twenty three. We've already talked
Speaker 1: about this and played date bingo about for three months.
Speaker 1: I know, I think Oprah came calling and then suddenly
Speaker 1: I was like, you know, second fiddle for a little bit,
Speaker 1: just kidding, I'm not verifying that. Here's what I say
Speaker 1: to them. I say, don't put your success on me.
Speaker 1: There's a difference between intrinsic motivators and externsic motivators. And
Speaker 1: you know this research as well as anybody. You know,
Speaker 1: there's that famous study Teresa Mmabile yeah. Originally at Brandis
Speaker 1: University now Harvard Business School, where she had girls teach
Speaker 1: the piano to other girls, and one group was given
Speaker 1: the joy of teaching piano and the gift of being
Speaker 1: told thank you, right, intrinsic motivators largely, and the other
Speaker 1: group was given like two tickets of the movies after
Speaker 1: thirty minutes of teaching. And it's not a surprise that
Speaker 1: the extrinsically motivated girls were less patient, they spent less time,
Speaker 1: and they had poorer results. There are poor results, and
Speaker 1: many studies have replicated this that extrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, they
Speaker 1: replace intrinsic motivators in our brains. We can't see the
Speaker 1: joy of connecting through someone's travelog photos on Instagram when
Speaker 1: all were presented with are the number of likes, the
Speaker 1: number of comments, the number of followers, the number of
Speaker 1: These numerical adjudicators are extrinsic motivators that cover up the
Speaker 1: intrinsic reasons that we got the thing in the first place.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember what social media was like about
Speaker 1: seeing your friend's pictures. You know. Now on my own
Speaker 1: Facebook group where I have a one hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: follow me, I can write a personal note, it only
Speaker 1: goes to a thousand people. I have to pay to
Speaker 1: reach my own audience. And then I'm encouraged to do
Speaker 1: that because I see how what's the reach? What do
Speaker 1: I optimize? How many comments? It's like the whole thing
Speaker 1: is being gamed to be extrinsically emotivated, and you end
Speaker 1: up losing yourself on the process. So intrinsic over extrinsic always,
Speaker 1: And another way of saying this is simply do it
Speaker 1: for you. Do it for you. Make sure that the
Speaker 1: thing you want to be doing is something for you.
Speaker 1: There's a reason that David Foster, Wallace's author of Infinite Jest,
Speaker 1: wrote a really famous essay that I love called the
Speaker 1: Nature of the Fun, and he talks about how after
Speaker 1: you've achieved some measure of commercial success, you're incentivized heavily
Speaker 1: to chase that success. That's why the Second Strokes album
Speaker 1: sounds like the first right. And I don't mean to
Speaker 1: use that band as an example, but for the most part,
Speaker 1: if you hit some measure of success, you copy that
Speaker 1: kind of music, or you copy that kind of writing,
Speaker 1: or you copy that kind of stuff until you realize
Speaker 1: that the reason you got success from the first louse
Speaker 1: is because you actually were chasing fun. The nature of
Speaker 1: the Fund's thesis therefore, is that what you need to do,
Speaker 1: even after you've had commercial success is not change those
Speaker 1: chase that extrinsic motivators, but rather try to get back
Speaker 1: into the intrinsic feeling of joy that you had when
Speaker 1: you were producing that thing that was successful in the
Speaker 1: first place. And no surprise, that sometimes leads to more
Speaker 1: success because now you're chasing fun again and that comes
Speaker 1: through in the work. So true. What is the happiness equation? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know everyone wants to know that. Everybody I want
Speaker 1: to know that. I want to everybody wants to know that.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants to know that. The subtitle of the book,
Speaker 1: the happiness equation is want nothing plus do anything equals
Speaker 1: have everything. What I did in the design of that book,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't programmed, like, I didn't write it this
Speaker 1: way on purpose, but I ended up coming up with
Speaker 1: nine what I called at the time secret You can
Speaker 1: call them chapters, you can call them totems, you can
Speaker 1: call them principles. Nine things that kind of went three
Speaker 1: by three under those tent poles. So want Nothing had
Speaker 1: three pieces underneath it, which were be happy first, where
Speaker 1: I talk about how it's not great work, big success,
Speaker 1: be happy. It's the opposite. Being happy actually leads to
Speaker 1: great work, which leads to the big success. I know
Speaker 1: you've had so a Lebomirski on this on this wonderful show,
Speaker 1: so you know she's the Jane King and diner like.
Speaker 1: This is the formative work on positive psychology. Chapter number
Speaker 1: two is called do it for You. It's where I
Speaker 1: talk about intrinsic versus ex forensic motivations. I talk about
Speaker 1: the three kinds of success which we might want to
Speaker 1: go into. Three types of success sales, social, and self.
Speaker 1: Have you heard me talk about this before? No? No,
Speaker 1: it's I can talk about this for a second. Basically,
Speaker 1: I believe that in everything you do in life, you
Speaker 1: have to choose the type of success you want from
Speaker 1: the beginning. And there are three kinds. There's sales success
Speaker 1: that's obvious, how many of you you sold, how big it
Speaker 1: does it get? Right? Social success that is less obvious.
Speaker 1: It's the recognition from your peer group, right. And then
Speaker 1: there's self success, which is do you feel proud of
Speaker 1: your accomplishment? And I say I argue that it's impossible
Speaker 1: to have all three and I have to pick which
Speaker 1: one you want at the beginning. And I often use
Speaker 1: movies as the best metaphor here because traditionally the hurt
Speaker 1: Locker won Best Picture when I had twenty six million
Speaker 1: dollars at the box office, whereas Alvin and Chipmunks the
Speaker 1: Squeak Well had four hundred million dollars, a much bigger
Speaker 1: sales success, but was nominated for no awards at all,
Speaker 1: no no social success at all amongst the movie going audience.
Speaker 1: And it's like that every single year at the movies.
Speaker 1: The year that Moonlight won Best Picture had nineteen million
Speaker 1: dollars in the box office, and Fast and Furious seven
Speaker 1: like almost made a billion dollars. So it's like, which
Speaker 1: which would you rather have? And the reason I think
Speaker 1: that's important to delineate between the two is because I'm
Speaker 1: often asked as a writer, hey, how do I write
Speaker 1: a book? And then when I proke people on what
Speaker 1: they're trying to write for, it's often not sales. I
Speaker 1: wrote the Book of Austin when I was really going
Speaker 1: for sales. I was really I was in booksers every day,
Speaker 1: I was signing books, I was saying yes to any
Speaker 1: radio station that wanted to have me on. I was
Speaker 1: trying my best to have the book sell right. But
Speaker 1: when I ask people, well, what puts you on to write,
Speaker 1: They're like, I want to catalog my grammar mother's memoirs
Speaker 1: for our family. Okay, I really want to document, you know,
Speaker 1: like this cool approach I have for building backyard decks. Okay,
Speaker 1: these aren't going to sell. Well, I don't care. I
Speaker 1: just want to do it. Well, that's a different it's
Speaker 1: a different reason. So discriminating between which actual type of
Speaker 1: success you want for me Scott as someone who's kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, wound up a little bit, is it helps
Speaker 1: me remember what the purpose is from the beginning. So
Speaker 1: when I started my podcast three Books in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: I purposely said this is not for sale. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to put any ads on the show. I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna have any commercials, I'm not gonna have any sponsors.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to orient myself that way. I'm going
Speaker 1: to do this for myself, a personal self learning journey
Speaker 1: where I get to ask people which three books will
Speaker 1: shape their life, and then I buy and I read
Speaker 1: the books in advance, and I got your books upstairs.
Speaker 1: By the way, I got your Maslow on my shelf.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and so I buy the books, I read
Speaker 1: the book, or at least flipped through it, and then
Speaker 1: that is what I'm playing for. And whenever I get
Speaker 1: whenever I get you know, we be and say, oh, man,
Speaker 1: how come my pocket isn't in the top one hundred
Speaker 1: wedges between Tim Ferriss and Rich Role and Scott Mary Kaufman.
Speaker 1: I just remember, well, that wasn't what I was doing
Speaker 1: this for in the first place, man, was it was
Speaker 1: I was? I told myself it was for self success. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the second secret in the Happiest Equation is do
Speaker 1: it for you, And the third one is remember the lottery.
Speaker 1: Whereas just where I paint out the portrait that my
Speaker 1: dad always taught me about realizing how lucky we are
Speaker 1: to be here right now. And those three chapters are
Speaker 1: under that first principle want nothing. And that's where I
Speaker 1: come up with the title of the book, the Happiness Equation.
Speaker 1: It's not because I've figured out happiness. It's because I
Speaker 1: tried my best to write down everything I knew at
Speaker 1: that time, which was twenty sixteen and I put it
Speaker 1: in the form of a letter to my unborn child.
Speaker 1: So when my wife was pregnant, that gave me the
Speaker 1: creative orientation towards writing the book, which was in the
Speaker 1: form of a letter to my son on how to
Speaker 1: live a happy life. Wait, so one nothing is just
Speaker 1: one part of the equation. Do you want to go
Speaker 1: through the rest of it? Do anything? Is the second,
Speaker 1: which is about freedom. And so my first yeah, well,
Speaker 1: my first principle actually is maybe counter in two of it.
Speaker 1: It's the most controversial chapter of my entire book. It's
Speaker 1: called never retire. Wow. Yeah. And so I believe that
Speaker 1: the concept of retirement is just this complete false idol
Speaker 1: in our society today. Retirement was invented in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds in Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck,
Speaker 1: which is the coolest head of state name ever. And
Speaker 1: at the time in Germany, youth unemployment was like between
Speaker 1: twenty and thirty percent and the average lifespan was sixty seven. Guys,
Speaker 1: keep that number in mind. Sixty seven auto declare that
Speaker 1: anybody at age sixty five who wants to kind of
Speaker 1: retire invented invented concept could do. So it was optional.
Speaker 1: That's another things that it was optional, not mandatory, which
Speaker 1: it is in many countries mandatory, and it has been
Speaker 1: in Canada for number of year and they took off
Speaker 1: the mandatory aspect of it. But a lot of countries
Speaker 1: is like, hey, you hit sixty five, you're out. You
Speaker 1: know it's over. But notice that it was only two years.
Speaker 1: It was only two years from the average life span,
Speaker 1: which was sixty seven. Penicilla wasn't invented for forty years, right,
Speaker 1: and so we've mimicked that number. You know, the UK
Speaker 1: followed sixty five, US followed sixty five, can To follow
Speaker 1: sixty five. A lot of countries around the world followed
Speaker 1: this number, and lifespans have dramatically increased. And so now
Speaker 1: what we have in our society is this false prophet
Speaker 1: that you hit this age and in fact, if anything,
Speaker 1: we want to be younger where you get to kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, throw in the time stamp, you know, punch,
Speaker 1: you know, make your last punch at the meat packing plant,
Speaker 1: and you never need to work into the day in
Speaker 1: your life. A whole community. I read about this in
Speaker 1: the book in a little bit more detail, but you know,
Speaker 1: this entire industry emerged of like retirement living, and the
Speaker 1: design of the whole ad campaign was like you deserve it,
Speaker 1: like you know, this is this is your reward for
Speaker 1: like a great, great long life of work. And if
Speaker 1: you look at tables and grass throughout the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: the percentage of people who chose to retire was like
Speaker 1: nine percent at the beginning, and then you know, in
Speaker 1: the eighties ninees, it started becoming like seventy two percent,
Speaker 1: eighty five percent, to the point where now today it's
Speaker 1: like a pretty common concept. But I think that there's
Speaker 1: a problem with the idea that you want to do nothing.
Speaker 1: That you I don't mean want nothing in terms of contentment,
Speaker 1: which I was describing in the front of the book,
Speaker 1: but I mean like that you desire to be accomplishing nothing.
Speaker 1: Two that you can afford it, right, That's the other thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's just it's just it's just massively underwater,
Speaker 1: just financially, and that we can afford to pay others
Speaker 1: to do so these three things kind of fall away. Instead,
Speaker 1: I argue that we don't actually want to retire, we
Speaker 1: just want to do something we love. And I think
Speaker 1: that work can be broken down into four s's. Number
Speaker 1: one social connection, Okay, that's really what we want. We
Speaker 1: want to be. We want to be socially connected to people.
Speaker 1: Number two stimulation. We always want to be learning something new.
Speaker 1: Number three is structure. You want to have a reason
Speaker 1: to get a bend in the morning. Yah, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone's weak. The same number of hours in it, right,
Speaker 1: fifty six hours for sleep, fifty six hours for work,
Speaker 1: fifty six hours to do what you want. Those things
Speaker 1: out up to one hundred and sixty eight. Everybody gets
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty eight hours a week. I think
Speaker 1: that the structure is important to have a reason to
Speaker 1: get a vend the morning. And number four is story.
Speaker 1: You want to be part of something bigger than yourself.
Speaker 1: You want to be part of a community, a group,
Speaker 1: or a tribe or a place that is accomplishing something
Speaker 1: that you could not do on your own. And so
Speaker 1: what I argue in the book is that we actually
Speaker 1: don't want to retire. We just want the four s's,
Speaker 1: And if we're constantly seeking those s's in our work,
Speaker 1: then that will actually lead to a happier existence. So
Speaker 1: that's chapter number four of the book. Chapter number five
Speaker 1: is called overvalue you, where I talk about the way
Speaker 1: to measure your time in terms of dollars per hour,
Speaker 1: no matter what job it is you're doing, and I
Speaker 1: talk about how that's actually a scale. How when I
Speaker 1: graduated from Harvard Business School in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: the majority of my peers are working like sixty to
Speaker 1: eighty hour weeks in jobs like consulting and banking and
Speaker 1: private equity and you know, those types of things, and
Speaker 1: they weren't that happy. And so I compare that job
Speaker 1: with other jobs, like an elementary school teacher. Maybe not
Speaker 1: surprising to you that my dad's won and I've been
Speaker 1: married to two. I seem to surround myself with teachers,
Speaker 1: the oly ones that could, that don't wither at my
Speaker 1: endless questions. I guess I compared to you an assistant
Speaker 1: manager at Walmart, which is where I was working at
Speaker 1: the time. And I show that all three jobs, the
Speaker 1: high falutin kind of a one hundred and twenty grand
Speaker 1: straight out of business school Harvard Business School job, the
Speaker 1: forty five grand teacher's job, which has, as you know,
Speaker 1: more time off throughout the year, and the sort of
Speaker 1: seventy five k at the time. These were the numbers
Speaker 1: I was using assistant manager job at Walmart, all of
Speaker 1: which all three of which jobs I had good access to.
Speaker 1: In terms of numbers, I distilled all three jobs down
Speaker 1: to be making the same exact twenty eight dollars per hour.
Speaker 1: And so that was kind of the principle of the
Speaker 1: fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is called create Space. I'm
Speaker 1: really proud of myself, I gotta say, for like having
Speaker 1: my whole book memorize here right now. Create space, which
Speaker 1: is is all my models and tools to actually create
Speaker 1: space in your life, right they are things like my
Speaker 1: and I don't know how many people will be kind
Speaker 1: of listening to this versus watching this, but I could
Speaker 1: draw really quick for you what I call my space scribble,
Speaker 1: which is I argue that every single decision that you
Speaker 1: make in your life takes a certain amount of time
Speaker 1: and is of a certain importance. So importance, yeah, time
Speaker 1: and importance. It's different than the Seven Habits of Highly
Speaker 1: Effective People model, where Stephen Covey is comparing time and urgency.
Speaker 1: And the key takeaway from that two by two for
Speaker 1: those that have read Seven Habits is that we typically
Speaker 1: are over focusing on urgent and we're underfocusing on important Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're a systematizer. You're a systematizer. Yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't rise to the level lover goals.
Speaker 1: We fall to the level of our systems. Is a
Speaker 1: two thousand year old, like you know proverb, and it
Speaker 1: holds true for me today because I argue that low time,
Speaker 1: low imports decisions in your life, Scott need to be automated.
Speaker 1: There's a reason why I've where I've worn the same people.
Speaker 1: I've worn the same sweatshirt and the same sweatpants every
Speaker 1: single day all week. As you change the stuff underneath,
Speaker 1: as you change the stuff underneath. But I automate that, right,
Speaker 1: I'm in the same room. So what is that? Is
Speaker 1: that is that low ice? Yeah? So for example, it's
Speaker 1: like I've automated the same thing for breakfast every day. Right,
Speaker 1: it's the same shake, It's got the same ingredients. I've
Speaker 1: had it for fifteen years. I if I ever need
Speaker 1: to go anywhere, I just even though I'm in my
Speaker 1: own car in my own city, I'll automate that to
Speaker 1: ways the traffic app. I like, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: low time loanports decision. I just don't want to be
Speaker 1: thinking about which way I'm going to go, So I
Speaker 1: just outsourced that. It's the same reason Barack Obama says
Speaker 1: the only wars two colors of suits, the same reason
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg says he only wears the same color of shirt.
Speaker 1: It's the same reason that anybody who you know, my
Speaker 1: friend Chad has every single consumable item in his entire
Speaker 1: house on Amazon order refilms, including like towels and soaps.
Speaker 1: You know, he knows that he needs like one new
Speaker 1: facetel every six months, so just like arrives because he's
Speaker 1: automated that decision. More interestingly, though, in this two by
Speaker 1: two matrix, so I think is the high time decisions
Speaker 1: that are not very important. This is where we are
Speaker 1: spending the majority of our time today, Scott, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: so this is like emails. Email is a great example.
Speaker 1: Regulate it does. Okay, it does, and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: make them all rhyme for you too. So the high time,
Speaker 1: low importance decision needs to be regulated. And so emails
Speaker 1: a great example where I regulate email on my good
Speaker 1: days when I'm doing it right to two hours a
Speaker 1: day from nine to ten in the morning, and four
Speaker 1: to five pm. What that gives me is two hours
Speaker 1: in my inbox every day, Scott, which is a lot.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of time on email. That's a lot.
Speaker 1: But you know what it also creates for me at
Speaker 1: ten am to four pm email free, six hour oasis
Speaker 1: every single day. And so I think that regulating is
Speaker 1: really important. When Leslie and I my wife's name was Leslie,
Speaker 1: bought our first house, it was downtown Toronto, a really
Speaker 1: old house. Man. I'll tell you, every something broke in
Speaker 1: that house every day. It was like a fuse popped,
Speaker 1: or a patio stone is wobbly, or like a cupboard
Speaker 1: door is squeaky, and then we were driving ourselves mad
Speaker 1: trying to like fix stuff every day. Eventually, what we
Speaker 1: ended up doing was we made a list on the
Speaker 1: inside of one of our kitchen cupboards of everything that
Speaker 1: was breaking in our house. I sent my wife a
Speaker 1: recurring invite on the first Saturday morning of every month
Speaker 1: called Old House Day from nine am to twelve pm,
Speaker 1: three hours a month. That was it. And what ended
Speaker 1: up happening was we regulated everything that was falling apart
Speaker 1: in our house to one kind of binge batch process.
Speaker 1: On the first Saturday of every month, where we regulated
Speaker 1: these annoying things into a specific window that made twenty
Speaker 1: nine days of every month kind of worry free. Right now,
Speaker 1: what about the stuff that's really important that doesn't take
Speaker 1: very long? I almost had to invent a word for
Speaker 1: this one, but it's a real word. It's called effectuate.
Speaker 1: Effectuate just means get or done. Execute. You know what's
Speaker 1: really important that doesn't take long. Saying hi to your
Speaker 1: team every morning, saying by to your team every night,
Speaker 1: picking your kids up from daycare. Just do it, Just
Speaker 1: do it. And the cool part about this model, what
Speaker 1: this affords me if I follow it, and others if
Speaker 1: they follow it, is you actually create space. Which is
Speaker 1: the point of that that sixth chapter, to debate, to
Speaker 1: debate the high time, high importance decisions. I see your
Speaker 1: work on the Psychology podcast as ultimately what you're doing
Speaker 1: is grappling and wrestling and toying with you know these
Speaker 1: gigantic life themes. Well, this is your debate quadrant. When
Speaker 1: you're on your podcast. I don't see you check an email, right,
Speaker 1: I don't see you like being distracted by a million things.
Speaker 1: So you're doing a Yeah, that's that's those are the
Speaker 1: kind of key concepts from the Happiest Equation, which is
Speaker 1: the book I wrote the Happiest two books before this one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very cool, And I feel like there's still one third left. Yes,
Speaker 1: there is, there is. It's just called have Everything. This
Speaker 1: is my kind of more motivational part of the book.
Speaker 1: You know. For example, one of the biggest questions I
Speaker 1: have been getting since the success of the Book of
Speaker 1: Ausma is what do I want to do in my life?
Speaker 1: So I called chapter seven the ultimate Thesis is bu
Speaker 1: and I gave people three ways to try to figure
Speaker 1: out what they want to do in life. They are
Speaker 1: called the Saturday morning test, the bench test, and the
Speaker 1: five people test. So I take people through these three
Speaker 1: tests to try to figure what you want to do.
Speaker 1: What's the Saturday morning test, Scott, Well, what do you
Speaker 1: do on a Saturday morning when you have nothing to do? Yes?
Speaker 1: I know what I do? What we can't talk about
Speaker 1: it on the psychology and I'm taking trace back from
Speaker 1: your natural Yeah. Well, so for somebody that's like I
Speaker 1: go to the gym, it's like, okay, you know, how
Speaker 1: do we wildly you know, you know, brainstorm off of
Speaker 1: your interest in going to the gym, anything else you
Speaker 1: might be interested. Are you interested in being a personal trainer?
Speaker 1: You want to be a way powder importer, exporter? Do
Speaker 1: you want to be a gym teacher? Like, let's wildly
Speaker 1: brainstorm off of the thing you're naturally interested in. So
Speaker 1: that's the Saturday morning test, the bench test. I had
Speaker 1: a friend in high school named Fred who got into
Speaker 1: every single Ivy League school. And he was in Canada,
Speaker 1: where I live, and so he rented a jeep for
Speaker 1: a week and he drove to all of them and
Speaker 1: he performed a test on every single campus scot where
Speaker 1: he found a bench somewhere in the middle of campus
Speaker 1: and he sat on the bench patiently for an hour
Speaker 1: and observed his natural reaction to all the conversations around
Speaker 1: him that he heard. Nice And I think that that
Speaker 1: type of test is missing wholesale from our society. We
Speaker 1: know that before you buy a car, you should test
Speaker 1: rive it, but no one test drives. We very rarely
Speaker 1: test drive a house. We very rarely test to have
Speaker 1: a job. You go in for an interview, but how
Speaker 1: often do you ask for like a walk around the office.
Speaker 1: How often you say, like, could I just like shadow
Speaker 1: someone here for a day or two like that type
Speaker 1: of stuff is. So, how many people do you know
Speaker 1: that went to law school that say, like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: really I actually hate law Like I just didn't know
Speaker 1: once I finished that I wouldn't like this job. Right,
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of our peers in this space are lawyers, right,
Speaker 1: Susan Kane, Rich Roll, Mel Robbins, they're lawyers. Their lawyers.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Fields is a lawyer. So that's kind of the
Speaker 1: thesis of the kind of the last half of the book,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like how to embrace your authentic self,
Speaker 1: and the very last chapter of the book, because I
Speaker 1: was so afraid of writing a book that was really prescriptive, Scott,
Speaker 1: the very last chapter is don't take advice? Yes, did
Speaker 1: you know the word cliche is actually like from a
Speaker 1: French typography word for like words that are so frequently
Speaker 1: used together they could be put together on one like
Speaker 1: metal stamp. That's what ache is. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: So I went back through history and came up with
Speaker 1: every single cliche I could, and as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: they all have of an exact and direct polar opposite, right.
Speaker 1: So it's like actions speak louder than words, Or is
Speaker 1: it the pen is mightier than the sword, right, is
Speaker 1: it you know, uh, the early bird gets the worm,
Speaker 1: or is it good things come to those who wait, right?
Speaker 1: And so so basically what I do is I say,
Speaker 1: one day, while I was researching this chapter of the
Speaker 1: Happiness Equation, I actually found that the top story on
Speaker 1: the New York Times, which is, like, you know, the
Speaker 1: number one newspaper in the US, was like you know,
Speaker 1: scientists say, you know, it was a big quoted study,
Speaker 1: you know, with lots of you know, lots of prominent
Speaker 1: names that you know, nobody is getting enough vitamin D. Right.
Speaker 1: That was. And at the same time, at the same day,
Speaker 1: at the same exact time, the Toronto Star, which is
Speaker 1: the top newspaper in Canada, had it's number one article
Speaker 1: saying nobody needs extra vitamin D. They had a bunch
Speaker 1: of studies with a bunch of names, with a bunch
Speaker 1: of people saying you didn't need you didn't need viteminy.
Speaker 1: And that's my point. It's like almost all advice ultimately conforms.
Speaker 1: The real answers have to come from inside you. So
Speaker 1: I try my best in that book to give people
Speaker 1: as many of my ideas as I could, and at
Speaker 1: the end just reminding them that it's you, not me.
Speaker 1: Take what works, and remember that the ones that work
Speaker 1: are partly because they're already resonating with something inside you
Speaker 1: that you already think or No, what's the relationship between
Speaker 1: that and having everything? You can have everything if you
Speaker 1: don't take advice I'm trying to make I just had
Speaker 1: to make the equation work, man, I just had to
Speaker 1: make it work at the end of the day. You know.
Speaker 1: The original title of the book was called How to
Speaker 1: Be Truly Rich. At the very last minute the publisher
Speaker 1: said it was Putnam Publishing, a part of Penguin Group
Speaker 1: and hang around them as you know, since the merger,
Speaker 1: and they were like, truly rich, Like that's going to
Speaker 1: make people think rich, like you know, money. And I
Speaker 1: was like, no, no, truly rich. It's about, like, you know,
Speaker 1: true life satisfaction. They're like, you know, no, no, we
Speaker 1: need the word happiness and it relates about happiness. And
Speaker 1: so we were just brainstorming how to get this. I
Speaker 1: don't come out and say ever in the book, nor
Speaker 1: ever in any of your beach or anything. I don't
Speaker 1: say like I know the secret's happiness. I know the
Speaker 1: equation happiness. I don't say that. People often credit me
Speaker 1: with the sort of happiness is reality MIAs expectations. I
Speaker 1: often get that, and I don't know why. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I look like Tim Urban or what. But
Speaker 1: really that was him who said that great, wonderful little equation,
Speaker 1: which is happiness is I'll say one more time, reality
Speaker 1: Maya's expectations. I think he wrote that in a weight
Speaker 1: but why post, and it went really viral. But if
Speaker 1: you look through my history, I mentioned at the very
Speaker 1: beginning of this conversation that part of the way I
Speaker 1: came into this stuff was because I went through the
Speaker 1: throes of a really terrible time. And in the throes
Speaker 1: of that terrible time, I wrote a TED talk called
Speaker 1: the three A's of Awesome. And if you watch my
Speaker 1: twenty ten TED talk on TED, it is attitude, awareness
Speaker 1: and authenticity. So the twenty ten version of myself, which
Speaker 1: is like I was thirty one, that was what I
Speaker 1: would argue was the answer to the big question we're
Speaker 1: talking about today. The answer is got attitude awareness and authenticity.
Speaker 1: Right then, the twenty sixteen me, which is the writer
Speaker 1: of the happiness equation, would have made this argument that Okay,
Speaker 1: here's all these little totems. It's you don't be happy
Speaker 1: first do it for you? Remember the lottery, you know,
Speaker 1: never retire. We tried to come up with a structure
Speaker 1: that held those things together, and now here today in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. Now I'm forty three, I'm married, I've
Speaker 1: got little kids. You know, I think I'm a little
Speaker 1: bit more comfortable with myself. I've told you my confidence
Speaker 1: has gone up. But at the same time, I've also
Speaker 1: recognized more and more and more Scott, that almost nothing
Speaker 1: I do that's prescriptive takes as well as the stuff
Speaker 1: I do that's non prescriptive. And so the first book
Speaker 1: I wrote is the Book of Awesome. If you open
Speaker 1: the book, it doesn't sound like a highly systemized thinker talking.
Speaker 1: It's me talking about flipping to the cold side of
Speaker 1: the pillow in the middle of the night, right. That's
Speaker 1: what the book's about. And the feedback I give in
Speaker 1: that book is this is the only self help book
Speaker 1: that doesn't tell me what to do, but it shows
Speaker 1: me how to do it. And so I've partly returned
Speaker 1: to that concept because through the pandemic over the last
Speaker 1: few years, I have felt those old demons of anxiety
Speaker 1: and of thoughts and so on like resurfaced again. And
Speaker 1: at hs ME, you know, nationalists to do mental health
Speaker 1: is forty three percent of us have a depressive symptom today.
Speaker 1: That's a depressing symptom right there. You know, that's like
Speaker 1: almost half of us. So, you know, Gene Twangy is saying,
Speaker 1: you know, one in three college students have clinical anxiety.
Speaker 1: You're doing an event with Jonathan Height at the Comedy
Speaker 1: Cellar like he has harping on these same numbers as well.
Speaker 1: Vivic Murphy, the Surgeon General, saying loneliness is at an
Speaker 1: all TIMEHME. The CDC says that our suicid rates are
Speaker 1: now eighteen per one hundred thousand, which just to contrast
Speaker 1: with murder rates, that's triple. That's triple our murder rates.
Speaker 1: So I always say, like, we're three times more dangerous
Speaker 1: to ourselves as anybody else's to us. So in this era,
Speaker 1: what I've done is return to the idea of simply
Speaker 1: putting out a book that's literally just a pile of
Speaker 1: awesome things. There's nothing else in this. I don't have
Speaker 1: any research in it. Yeah, to our listeners who don't
Speaker 1: have access to the video. You're holding up big book
Speaker 1: of your your I just want to state this in
Speaker 1: audio format. It's called our Book of Awesome, a celebration
Speaker 1: of the small joys that bring us together. And what
Speaker 1: I thought was so cool about is you really kind
Speaker 1: of outsourced this and you got a lot of diverse
Speaker 1: walks of life kind of giving you their own sort
Speaker 1: of thoughts of things are awesome and things from wheelchair
Speaker 1: accessible nature trails, I love that. I love that, to
Speaker 1: cooking for a loved one who's just been released from
Speaker 1: twenty seven years of incarceration, to a steaming bald head
Speaker 1: after a satisfying winter run, or when you go out
Speaker 1: for lunch and your daughter is your server. These are
Speaker 1: little joys in life, Yeah, that really give you, in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways, even a deeper sense of liveness
Speaker 1: and meaning and maybe a lot of the other things
Speaker 1: that people focus on in our society. Can you be
Speaker 1: my publicist? Like you just nailed that's exactly That's exactly
Speaker 1: what I would say. I would say, Like I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: that if we withhold our feelings of awe and deep
Speaker 1: reverence for only the wide eyes and graduation stations and
Speaker 1: all stages, and only the father daughter dances at weddings,
Speaker 1: and only the healthy baby screeching in the delivery room.
Speaker 1: Then that's only going to add up to like ten
Speaker 1: days in our life. We're only a live for thirty
Speaker 1: thousand days. I want to make the other twenty nine
Speaker 1: nine and ninety days full of awe as well. And
Speaker 1: my way of doing it is by writing down these
Speaker 1: small and simple pleasures, adding a gift note to yourself
Speaker 1: on your online order when you find out what was
Speaker 1: making that horrible smell and getting rid of it opening
Speaker 1: the dishwasher and somebody already emptied it, you know, sleeping
Speaker 1: in sheets that were dried in the sun, rejigging the
Speaker 1: entire three D puzzle of your freezer to somehow squeeze
Speaker 1: this giant box of chicken fingers in there, peeling the
Speaker 1: dried glue off your fingers, right, And so I think
Speaker 1: simply by focusing on them, and you mentioned, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: cultivated from a lot of people. What happened was at
Speaker 1: the back of the book of Awesome, I actually put
Speaker 1: a page at the back saying, you know, if anybody
Speaker 1: wants to write your own, you know, go to one
Speaker 1: thousand awesome Things dot com slash submit, and I had
Speaker 1: that feeding into a Gmail account that I never checked
Speaker 1: called one thousand Awesome Things Submissions at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: When it came time Scott to put this book together,
Speaker 1: I went and checked the Gmail account. I had received
Speaker 1: over ten thousand complete essays from people around the world
Speaker 1: who had taken the time to write down their own
Speaker 1: awesome things. And part of the magic of the Book
Speaker 1: of Awesome is that the book is simply a vehicle.
Speaker 1: It's simply like a little it's a little torch, and
Speaker 1: it tells you and helps you spark. You're in your
Speaker 1: own imagination what's awesome too. So I can't tell you
Speaker 1: the number of times someone has been like, we set
Speaker 1: up a wall of awesome in our in the in
Speaker 1: the lobby of our residents where we ended up making
Speaker 1: a book of ausesome in our fifth grade, in our
Speaker 1: fifth grade social studies class, or you know, at the
Speaker 1: old folks home that I work at. We decided to
Speaker 1: put up a little like you know, everybody writes one
Speaker 1: thing down and put on the wall. People stop and
Speaker 1: they read them and they smile. And I'm not the
Speaker 1: originator of this concept. This is the least original blog
Speaker 1: idea of all time, right, A thousand awesome things. This
Speaker 1: guy's going through a divorce. He just writes down a
Speaker 1: thing to make him happy. I mean, can you get
Speaker 1: any more you know, cliche than that. But I think
Speaker 1: the magic that came with it, honestly in the first
Speaker 1: place was consistency, because I posted one a day for
Speaker 1: a thousand days. When you do anything that long, you
Speaker 1: just kind of a get better at it and be
Speaker 1: the people that come to you for the same thing,
Speaker 1: like the same you have a system and a schedule
Speaker 1: for releasing this podcast, right, so that your fans and
Speaker 1: your listeners will tell you if you miss one. So
Speaker 1: I had the same kind of the positive pressure of
Speaker 1: wanting to kind of service an audience kind of built
Speaker 1: up in there. And the other thing that was built
Speaker 1: in there was I wrote a thousand. Well, the books
Speaker 1: only have a couple hundred of them, right, So it's
Speaker 1: the old wedding photographer analogy of take more pictures. You
Speaker 1: ever asked a wedding photographer how they get so many
Speaker 1: good pictures? Oh my gosh, look at these fifty pictures
Speaker 1: from the wedding. They're awesome, And they say, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I was clicking the whole time. I took a thousand pictures.
Speaker 1: Of course I'm going to have fifty good ones. I
Speaker 1: threw ninety five percent on them away. There's a reason
Speaker 1: why the guy who has the most strikeouts in baseball,
Speaker 1: Nolan Ryan, also has the most walks. There's a reason
Speaker 1: why the guy who has the most win saw Young
Speaker 1: also has the most losses. The winds pile up when
Speaker 1: you pile on the number of times you step up
Speaker 1: to the plate. My point is the reason I've been
Speaker 1: able to do kind of well. I guess with these
Speaker 1: books or the books I've been able to do well,
Speaker 1: it's just because if you write something every day, you
Speaker 1: could pick you could cherry pick the go once and
Speaker 1: put in the thing right. You're very consistent. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: consistency is, man, You underestimate how that can that can
Speaker 1: trick all over time. Well, and also it depends what
Speaker 1: you're running from. Like for me, consistency was consistency of
Speaker 1: writing an awesome thing was probably pulling me away from
Speaker 1: other things that would have been less healthy for me
Speaker 1: to do, right, whether that's really to nutrition or how
Speaker 1: I'm spending my time socially, or how I or whether
Speaker 1: it's related to like, uh, you know, drinking or whatever
Speaker 1: it is. It's like this was a positive pull in
Speaker 1: my life that helped to kind of balance me and
Speaker 1: keep me oriented to wheres things that I knew logically
Speaker 1: that I wanted to be focusing on. Absolutely, do you
Speaker 1: take time to yourself to bask in the glory of
Speaker 1: your past accomplishments or are you always moving on to
Speaker 1: the next thing. There's no basking, that's for sure. I mean,
Speaker 1: even why not, because like so that's a part of savoring,
Speaker 1: it's a part of I would say, part of awesomeness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I've certainly, I guess, designed my life through
Speaker 1: these systems and malls to be comfortable. And so you
Speaker 1: know about a very comfortable sweatshirt, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And I have a Rubik's cube piece of art behind
Speaker 1: me that a guy made out a Rubik's cube that
Speaker 1: that says wow, And I got the design what that
Speaker 1: looks like and it looks really cool and it wasn't cheap,
Speaker 1: but I really wanted it. And so you know, I
Speaker 1: can do a few things like that. But the reason
Speaker 1: there's no basking is because like what does basking do?
Speaker 1: Maybe you're maybe I'm confusing what you mean by basking.
Speaker 1: You're saying savoring that is different. Yeah, I mean we
Speaker 1: have this in myoks huge growth. We have a four
Speaker 1: by four metrix. I know you love that shit. I
Speaker 1: know you loved THEO. I'm sorry, two by two two four. Man,
Speaker 1: that's like three dimensions. I met two by two, my bad.
Speaker 1: I know you love the two by two matrix. And
Speaker 1: so we have one of savoring and and uh and
Speaker 1: luxuriating is one form of savoring. But marveling like being
Speaker 1: wonder and all at the world. But basking, I mean
Speaker 1: you're allowed to take some time to just think to yourself, Wow,
Speaker 1: I had written ten books. I have had a book
Speaker 1: on the New York Times, multiple books in the New
Speaker 1: York Times bestseller list. Like, I have really grown a
Speaker 1: lot in my life, and I should be really proud
Speaker 1: of myself. And I'm allowed to just spend a day
Speaker 1: doing these things you call distractions. I've allowed to just
Speaker 1: get a massage today for myself. I called healthy selfishness,
Speaker 1: you know, Like, I think that's part of being awesome.
Speaker 1: Practice I do practice that. I think what happened was
Speaker 1: a few years ago I started getting a few emails
Speaker 1: a day with people telling me how much the books
Speaker 1: had affected them, Steer them away from suicides, help them
Speaker 1: in the relationships. You know. I still get three or
Speaker 1: four handwritten letters mailed to me every week, and I
Speaker 1: had to in my mind separate the receipt of those
Speaker 1: types of notes and letters from how I think about
Speaker 1: myself in my day. And so when I'm given that
Speaker 1: type of feedback, usually what I try to do in
Speaker 1: as gentle way as possible is try to help the
Speaker 1: person recognize and realize that that's actually something that's come
Speaker 1: from them. And while I might have been kind of
Speaker 1: beside them for that, the truth is they were beside
Speaker 1: me too. I owe the reader, I owed the listener.
Speaker 1: Who am I to even be doing any of this stuff?
Speaker 1: Who are any of us? You know? And so I
Speaker 1: have been given the gift of being able to have
Speaker 1: a podcast and to be writing these well, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: who's anybody? I guess, you know, I oscillate, I guess
Speaker 1: like everybody does between those emotions, but I don't. I'm
Speaker 1: also afraid, I think also as a parent, you know,
Speaker 1: with little kids, I'm you know, the worst case scenario
Speaker 1: for me after some monicum of success with these books
Speaker 1: and so on is to raise children that don't see
Speaker 1: the value of hard and meaningful, deep work. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, I guess I'm always working because I
Speaker 1: also want to be a role model for working, you know.
Speaker 1: And I don't mean working like you know, grinding. I
Speaker 1: mean working like the joy of producing and of making
Speaker 1: and creating. I don't want to turn that off. You
Speaker 1: enjoy the mastery process and learning and being better, No,
Speaker 1: I can tell I know. Also, you come across as
Speaker 1: very authentic to me that you really do believe it
Speaker 1: when you say, well, we are at a global breaking
Speaker 1: point and we need to combat it with awesome. You're
Speaker 1: committed to putting more and more awesome into the world
Speaker 1: and never stop and never stop doing that. So I
Speaker 1: would end this interview by encouraging you to never stop
Speaker 1: doing it. The world needs it right now, especially tow it.
Speaker 1: Consider it. But thanks, Scott. The reason we connected in
Speaker 1: the first place is because I detected the exact same
Speaker 1: vibe from you. Thanks you're author. No, you're you're very
Speaker 1: very authentic. I really really love your podcast. It's often
Speaker 1: on the level of thinking that's like a you know,
Speaker 1: a little over my head, but I try my best
Speaker 1: to keep you and your guests, but it's just a
Speaker 1: wonderful gift to the world, and you know, keep it
Speaker 1: up too for you. Thank you, Neil, it was a
Speaker 1: real pleasure having you on my show today. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to react in some way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at the
Speaker 1: Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page the
Speaker 1: Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some
Speaker 1: episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want
Speaker 1: to check that out. Thanks for being such a great
Speaker 1: supporter of the show, and tune in next time for
Speaker 1: more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.