Neil Pasricha on the Happiness Equation

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Neil past Richa, a

New York Times bestselling author. Neil's books have been published in over a dozen languages, and he spent seven years in counting on best seller lists and sold millions of copies. His first book, The Book of Awesome, was based on his blog One thousand Awesome Things, which scored over fifty million hits and twice won the Webby Award for the Best Blog in the World. His new book is The Happiness Equation. Want Nothing and Do Anything equals Have Everything.

Hi Neil, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to discuss your most recent book called The Happiness Equation. Want Nothing plus do Anything equals have Everything. But before we do, let's start, like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

You know, I find my bad wolf coming out sometimes right. And usually when that happens when I'm yelling at my kids, or when I get into a fight with my wife, or when I like I'm I'm rude over email to somebody that works for me, I take a step back, and you know, what I always noticed is that I have failed to feed the good wolf. I have failed to get a good night's sleep, or go to the gym, or eat eating nutritions and healthy food, or or eat

every meal. And that's self care. Feeding that good It takes time, right, So if you subtract that time from a day when you think you have a busy day, you suddenly are like, I don't got time to do that. But then you have the anxiety bubbling up, the low resilience, and the poor decision making. So for me, it's a reminder to always take care of myself first before I take care of others. Even if those things appear to take time, they're actually just building in more effective use

of my time later. It's such an important point, and it's a hard lesson that you know, I think I learned, and then I have to learn again, and I have to learn again. But those fundamentals, you know, just like you said, sleeping well, exercising, eating well. You know, for me, meditation like those are like just the core fundamentals to me doing everything else well. And I surely wish there

were easier fundamentals than those, but they are what they are. Yeah, absolutely, And I think all those fundamentals as well as you just listen to them, are also ensconced in little behaviors. Right, So for me, sleeping while includes no screens an hour before bedtime, it includes having a good book of fiction literally at my bedside table, so I have something to clear my mind before bed. It means having my eye patch or at least like good blinds that are closed.

It means, you know, no screens when I wake up in the morning for an hour. Like, There's all these elements that include good sleep. So I can't just be like, oh, I'm gonna go to go to a bit of ten it works. I have to remember the little habits and behaviors that go along with creating it. Yep, I agree completely. Sleep has been a little bit of a problem for me. I have pretty good sleep hygiene and all that, but I also have a condition called restless legs, and they

have just been coming back lately. And it has been a real drag. But that's one of those times that like all the advice about sleep starts to backfire a little bit because you're like, I know it's so important and I'm not sleeping. Oh my god, you know, so I have to be like, all right, it is good to sleep, it's important, but I'm not. You know, I'm not gonna die because I'm getting less sleep. And again, you know, I'm doing everything I can to to sort

of figure it out. Well, let's go into your book. You have nine different steps that you think are sort of critical to getting this, you know, um, the happiness equation. And we're not going to go through all of those, but we're gonna get through some of them that I thought were particularly interesting, and I wanted to start with. You know, you've got these nine different things, but you've got you've also got here, You're like the Boodha. You've got all kinds of lists, seven ways to be happy

right now. And there were just a couple of those I wanted to hit. And the first was the idea of three walks. Okay, basically what happened was this guy named Michael bab back down in Pennsylvania, did this incredible research study and he showed that doing three brisk, thirty minute nature walks a week actually outperformed a test group who was taking antidepressants, and outperformed a second test group who was doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants.

And You're like, what, how, How's that possible? I could just just walking alone, I'll perform the other two groups. Well, you know what if I'm ever in like a large audience and I was like, well, who here has a dog? And like people put up their hand and you're like, do you ever have to walk your dog at like ten o'clock a night in the middle of winter and your partners in the Netflix coma and you're like, who

stupid dog is this? But by the time you get around the block, after putting on your hat and your gloves and your mits and everything, by the time you get around the block and you get home, you're like re energized. You're like ready to build a snowman. And that's what the study says. The two key words, of course are brisk and nature. So a walk through a

forest is better than a mall. And Eric, you've probably been following this new research that's been coming out this year that's saying, hey, actually there's this there's this kind of like chemical released by trees that we didn't know much about before called picassens p h y t O c I N and they're saying that this chemical actually reduces cortisol, or the stress hormone in our body. So there's over a thousand licensed forest bathers, you know in the US now that will take you kind of on

a meditative forest bathing trip through the forest. I mean seriously, we used to call them hikers, which is a term I prefer, but but the point is like, literally, you gotta us gotta be somewhere in nature. You've gotta be somewhere nature. And so that's the three walks. You said, what's one of you know I had seven in the book. Well, that's one of them. All the ones I have in the book, and the happiest equation are thirty minutes or less, and that is just get out in nature three times

a week. Yeah. We had a woman named Florence Williams On who wrote a book, uh sometime in the last year called The Nature Fix, and it reviews all the studies on nature and it's just kind of overwhelming, and it's one that I recognize is so hugely important for me and one of the first to go as I get busy, Like I'm pretty good about the diet, the exercise, the meditation. I mean, you know, I'm I'm nine adherence to what my goals are or or more, you know,

over a long period time. But nature is the first one to go as I start to get busy and all of a sudden be like, I haven't done that in a month. Um, yeah, it's just it's one to watch for for me. Well, we let it slip. Nature doesn't say anything when when you ignore it, you know, there's nothing that comes at you and sort of reminds you.

I had a friend who worked in Manhattan and was totally stressed out, anxious, couldn't sleep, working for one of the huge, big, famous kind of companies that won't kind of out him. And he went to the in house kind of consulting company therapist and she said, I want you to collect three souvenirs from nature every day and

just leave them on your desk at work. And he said, literally, the act of looking for a really nice crisp maple leaf or a certain rounded stone from the edge of a fountain on his way to work in Manhattan was so grounding and centering amongst the sort of concrete jungle. That is a great one. I've never heard of that one before. That's a really, really good one. It reminds me of another sort of thing, which is to take at least one or two beautiful pictures a day, right,

because then your eye is tuned towards beauty. But that's just another variation that I think is a great one, totally, absolutely all right, let's talk about you know, this is another one that is pretty commonly known, but I want to hit on it again because it seems like I heard a lot about it for a while, and then I don't hear as much recently. Is you know, random acts of kindness. So Sia lab Amirsky really famous kind of kingpin in the positive psychology world. Um at Stanford

and now at the University of California. She published an amazing book called The How of Happiness, and one of the studies she did was showing that performing five you know, I call them random acts sometimes but really they're more conscious acts of kindness a week actually is shown to increase your happiness more than almost anything else. And the

interesting reason why you're prolled into this. You're like, okay, holding a door for somebody, but I got coffee from my doorman, you know, um, bringing flowers home for my husband or wife. Why why does it make you feel happier? The amazing, interesting insight from the study is because your

own ego fills you up with the positive feedback. So when you're holding that door for everybody leaving a meeting room, or you buy coffee for your dormant and he says thank you so much, for the rest of day, you think I'm awesome, I am super nice, I am the friendliest, nicest carrying this guy around, and that self fulfilling kind of kind of statement that you're saying yourself makes you

happy for the rest of the day. Is there any data in those studies about it being important to remember it or dwell on it or you know, think about it during the day, Because it's one of those things that I do notice like I do it, and it it feels good, But they just kind of go by pretty quickly for me, like I do it and then I'm off to kind of the next thing. And I'm also curious whether any of the studies you've read have anything to do with that. The more you do it,

the less efficacy it has. Um which I'm not saying like, oh, you know, start cutting down on your kindness so each one feels better. But I'm just kind of curious, like, you know, if you're somebody who always holds the door, do you really get much of a boost out of doing that if you do it all of the time. Well, it's interesting you asked that question because most of the studies are over a very short time frame, right, like like a week, two weeks, three weeks, that type of thing.

A really famous one that we've seen is with employees at Google where we actually had them put a little reminder in their calendars every single morning at nine am. And for your listeners in a corporate setting, they might find this interesting. What was the reminder for you by Why when you put a reminder at nine am, it doesn't block your calendar. It's not like nine to nine thirty or nine to ten. It's just a ding, you know, pops up and all it says is right, a three

sentence email to an old boss or co worker. So you say, you know, hi, sonja, Uh, you may not. You know, this is Neil. You may not remember this, but five years ago, when I was just a new person on board of the company, you told me to talk lass in meetings and try to listen before speaking. I want to let you know I'm still doing that today. Thank you so much, Neil. That's it. A three sentence email thanking an old boss or co worker for something they taught you over time. And why does that work?

Because I don't know what your email response rate is, like, Eric, but mine is like I don't know. Well, it's a on the on the easy emails. When you write a thank you to somebody, they always right back within an hour saying, oh my gosh, you really touched me, you made my day, and you feel good all day. So we had the Google employees do this for for twenty one days, three weeks. And what do you notice, No surprise,

massive uptick on their happiness levels. Right, because now you're going through the day thinking there's someone up there whom thinking who's who's thanks me back? I feel good about myself. I recognize I learned a lesson, you know, along the way, and it adds this positive glow throughout the day. Yeah, that's a very interesting study for sure. Again, you've got seven ways to be happy that take less than thirty minutes.

We've covered a couple let's talk about a complete unplug I'm laughing because this seems to be the biggest problem we have in the world right now. Okay, So a couple of stats before we jump into this one. Just over five years ago, the average person used their smartphone for eighteen minutes a day. This year, the most recent data I've seen says that we are using our smartphones

now for four hours and twenty minutes a day. In fact, according to a research company called de Score based in the US, we now touch our cell phones over twenty five hundred times a day, which is more like a constant fondl right exactly. And if you are as obsessed with your phone as I am, as everybody is, I highly recommend you download an app called Moment m O M E n T Moment, because all this app does is every single day, at noon, it just tells you

what your screen time was the day before. That's it. All it does is tell you what what it was. And so if you're you know, if you follow Peter Drucker's old adage, what gets measured gets managed. You won't be a price to learn that people who use moment actually reduce their screen time by something like eight just just by having this app. So why does it complete unplug actually work? Well, it means what does it mean?

First of all, it means when you get home after work, or when you check into your family on the weekend, whenever that is, put your phone on airplane mode, plug it into the basement, and do not check it until the next day. I mean, just even getting it, Eric, even just getting out of the of the bedrooms is kind of a win these days, right, Everyone's like, it's got it's my alarm clock. I need it. I'm like, go to Walmart, play a tent all our alarm clock.

You know, Because what's happening right now is our brains are constantly distracted. We are losing our ability to focus, we are lowering our attention spans, and we cannot get into any deeper thinking, any deeper project work, any deeper meaningful challenge when we're constantly flinging between pings and dings all day. Therefore, at the end of the day, where all you're doing is bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks,

which is the actual language the researchers use. Bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching. You don't feel like you got anything done. And that's what actually is reducing our happiness. It's not the actual things that we're looking at on our phone. It's the fact that at the end of that we don't feel like anything happened. You know, you click on enough hyperlinks, you get so many dopamine doses of pleasure.

At the end you're like, oh my gosh, it's ten thirty pm, Like what where did the last hour or two hours ago? Like I I just got sucked in, you know, and I don't remember any of it. I don't remember any of it. There's nothing long lasting. Meanwhile, I have this like dusty book on my on my my bedside table that I've been meaning to read and

I'm still on page fourteen. Meanwhile, my child is downstairs like building a block tower, and like it would have been fun to spend two hours playing with my kid, and I just ignored him because of because of Instagram, Like you, you get all these disgusting emotions, and I don't want to judge the emotions that I've been there. That's why I'm labeling them. But it's like the complete

unplug is the exact opposite of that. It's putting the phone away, shuddering it And a great hashtag to follow for anyone interested in this is called hashtag device free dinner. There's this big movement happening right now on the internet. They're just saying, can everyone just put their devices away for dinner? It sounds like a return to leave it to beaver, but we've just come so far away from

that we need to have a hashtag for it. You mentioned Moment is such an interesting app because a it'll tell you how much screen time you have. The other interesting statu it has is how often how many times did you pick up your phone, which is sort of staggering. You're like, wow, I picked that thing up thirty times in an hour, Like that's every two minutes, you know.

And the other thing I like about moment if you actually I think you might have to pay for this version of it, but you can go in and put things that are screen time that you consider valid. You could take those out of what's counted. So, for example, if I'm using my phone to read a book, right I can I can take that time out of the screen time because I feel like, well that that's time, that's not poor use of time, right, um, And so you can you can make some of those judgments yourself.

But I love that app. Yeah, Can I just go on like a little extended, tiny round on the cell phone thing here right now? Because I cover this in the Happy Screen. But as you probably know, er you know, I have this podcast. It's called Three Books, and it's all about getting rid of devices and focusing on reading actual, real books again. And all I do on the podcast is is trying to uncover the three most formative books of inspiring people. Why am I focusing on that because

I hate cell phones. They have three problems and they all start with the letter P, physical, psychological, and physiological. What's the physical problem of cell phones? Well, when you tilt your head down to look at your phone, you had sixty pounds of pressure to your spine. I went to the physiotherapist last year for uh, my thumb, Like literally my right thumb stopped working. I couldn't bend it

it hurts so much. And what my physiotherapist said to me was all we do is thumbs Now like, like, nobody you ever see a kid with a cast on their arm and leg anymore. No, they have bags under the rise and broken thumbs. So there's a huge physical problem with phones. The second one psychological. You're always online comparing your director's cut life with everybody else's greatest hits.

You know, um, no matter what you're eating for dinner, this amazing homemade lasagna, Like you go on Instagram someone at a lobster buffet in the Maldives, right, everyone else is doing something cooler, And it's impossible to be the best anymore. You can't be the best anything. You can't be the best high school basketball player because there's someone better. You can't even be the best person in video games. This is depressed to me. I was as a kid. I was like I could get to the end of

MERRYO three or Contra. And now it's like, now there's someone who defeated the entire game on YouTube in twelve seconds. Right, So psychologically you're just never good enough. And the third palm is physiological. And I mentioned earlier about the nose screens before bed, Well, that's is based on research from Australia that's showing that when you expose your brain too bright screens within one hour of bedtime. Physiologically, your body

doesn't produce melatonin overnight. You know it's the sleep hormone. So you have a less RESTful sleep. What does that mean? It means when you wake up the next point, you have lower resilience for the next day. You have less energy to deflect sort of microaggressions on social media. You get a little snappier in meetings. You might ye at your wife her husband because you haven't rested your body yet. And so when you're not rested, what do you look

at in the morning? What did Trump tweet? Like? You're interested because you don't have the resilience to focus on something deeper. So we've got these three huge piece of problems with cell phones and and it's it's really really troubling, and so device free dinners one. Plugging your phone in the basement is another one. No screens an hour before bid is a third, and my biggest advice of all,

it's just like live in airplane mode. You know, turn that entire device from a push device which sends you alerts and texta notifications all day, into a poll based device or once or twice a day, you consciously exit out of airplay mode, face the barrage of alerts and notifications, recognize that none of them are very important, and then go back into airplay mode. Yeah. I survive on do not Disturb mode. I mean I am on it very

very often. You know, just put the thing on do not Disturb for a few hours, and I do it constantly because downloads, like seriously, with hundreds of No, I'm serious with d That's why you have that. You even created this incredible pocket because you're not being disturbed. Yeah, so question for you and around the screen light situation

before bed. You know the phone, some of the newer phones have night shift mode, right that takes that blue light out, and I'm really curious if you've seen anything about how that works. And the reason I ask is that I do most of the reading for the show on my kindle because I take notes. It's just the amount of time it saves me is dramatic, right, because I just highlight it and then I've just got a

whole process built around it. But I also do worry, like am I exposing myself to screens more than I should? Before bed? You know, I've got the night shift mode. I just haven't heard anything about whether that actually works. Yeah, and it's thank god that we have more awareness around it. And I think, you know, blue light and and there's red light and this yellow light. You know, all these

things are helpful aids. They sort of reduced the what you're what the worst case scenario is just like a really blindingly bright white screen in your face, which tells your primal brain that it's you know, it's daytime. I'm awake. But I'm just going to tell you my solution. And I'm not comparing or contrasting. But this is where I've gotten to is that I've switched entirely to analog books,

um hunt like pretty much. And I've I've purchased a red reading light that I wear on my forehead like a crazy person, um because my wife goes to bed. David Sedaris has told me in an episode of Three Books, he said, you know, he picks garbage on the side of the road for like eight to twelve hours a day. David Sedaris that the crazy thing, right, And he's like yeah, He's like, you know, your craziness is correlated to the

number of things you wear on your head. And he was like a light the hat and stuff, and I was like, yeah, I guess I'm the same because I have a red like essentially camping light that I wear on my forehead because the research I've done shows that it's not as bad for my brain as as a white light. So I have a red reading light on an analog book for typically one to two hours before I fall asleep, often with a book like on top of me. And it's almost always fiction by the way.

I read nonfiction in the morning and fiction at night. Yeah. Oh if I if I'm reading fiction, I try to almost always have the book. I just prefer the physical book. But just like I said, for the show and the all the reading I do, it's just such a kindle, such an amazing device for that. Okay, let's change gears here now to one of your nine sections in the book. One is called never Retire. And I love this one,

um because it rings so true to me. And You've got a quote in there a woman who's sort of saying, like, you know, a lot of dogs are working dogs, like they have to work to be happy, and she describes herself as a working dog. And I realized, like, that's me, it's just such an extent that like, I feel like I want to be doing things that are meaningful, and

when I'm not, I don't feel so happy. And but you kind of talk about it was fascinating to me that the concept of where retirement came from, when it came from, and what its purpose was and what it did. So you have picked up on of the nine secrets in the Happiness, you have just picked the most controversial one by far. So I'm glad you picked it because it's a provocative conversation. Why did I go and rail against retirement? By the way, I'm living in a culture,

in a society, in my East Indian culture. I'm East Indian, I'm Canadian. I live in Troy, where everywhere you look it's promoting retirement right in my in my family and my um on TV. You know, it's about freedom, it's about you know, quitting early, retiring early, all that stuff. And I'm like, no, this entire thing is backwards. And to and to prove it, I went into the research. Okay,

where did the phrase retirement come from? It came from the late eighteen hundreds in Germany when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared that anybody over age sixty five who was infirm, like they weren't able to work could if they wanted to. So it was not mandatory, it was optional leave the workforce and receive a small amount of money from the state.

Three interesting things about that that announcement. First of all, he made up the number sixty five, and the only relevance of that number was that the average lifespan was sixty seven, Like Penicilla wasn't invented for forty more years, right, like sixties when people live to sixty seven, he's like based like it's like saying ninety now, you know. So,

So that's the first thing. The second thing is youth unemployment in Germany at the time was in the in like it was like between twenty and so we had a huge problem. He had a huge, like political problem, which is that young people have no work. So he was also trying to move people out of the system to make jobs. What happened, every Western country followed that number sixty five as social security Act. I'm in Canada, we followed it to England. Whatever. Everyone copied that number

sixty five. So in the Western world, sixty five is this arbitrary number which bears no connection to our lifespan anymore, which has extended another twenty thirty years. And it presumes a few things. It presumes that we want to leave the workforce, it presumes that we can afford to, and it presumes that we can afford to pay others to do it. Okay, So then I took I zoomed out again. I like, wait a minute, is this like, let's go

back to first principles. Let's look around the world. What do you find When you look around the world, you find societies in Eastern cultures that are healthier and happier than ours, who live longer than ours. For example, the famous blue zone of Okinawa, Japan. And when I say blues and I'm I'm citing a national geographic study called the Blue Zones by Dan Putner. So you go look at Okinawa, Japan. They live seven years longer than we do. Aar like, that's a long that's a lot longer, seven

extra years of average lifespan. And then you look in their culture and guess what. They don't even have a word for retirement, Like literally, no word in their language describes the concept of leaving work completely doesn't even exist. Instead, they have a different word there. It's called ikey guy, which is spelled I K I G A I ikey guy, and it roughly translates as the reason you get out of bed in the morning. So it turns out you don't actually want to retire. You actually just want to

be doing something that you love. And I argue in the happiness equation that you need what I call the three s is and they are social statement social like like having friends and a connection point at work, the stimulation, second stimulation of always learning something new, and the third S, which is called I called story because Ikey Guy was an eye and I wanted to start with S, which means you have a reason to get up in the where you have like a you're doing something that you

couldn't do by yourself. It's like most comparable is the company's purpose right or mission statements. So if you work at Google, you're organizing the world's information. If you work for Wikipedia, you're giving the sum of human knowledge to every earthling for free. If you're working for the across you're creating health and and troubling situations or whatever it is. Every company has some some gigantic, high level purpose that they couldn't do without all the people working for them.

And if you're not working for our profit organization, fine, you probably are. Maybe you're part of the community, or you're helping spread literacy, or you're you know whatever, connecting connecting people through a coffee shop. It could be anything, but those three says of social stimulation and story are actually what we're craving. We do not actually want to retire. We just want to do work we love right till

the very end. Right. You know, when I think of retirement, I think of like, oh God, I can do all those other things that seem so meaningful that I don't have time to do. I think the other s and I feel like I maybe you didn't include it in the three s is, but was in the book in other different places. Is the s of structure, Right, That's

one of the things that work does. And whether that again, whether that work is the work you do to get paid, whether that is after you've retired, the volunteer work you do, or you know, anything that you do, it provides a structure,

you know. And what I notice with people, you know, I do a lot a lot of coaching work with people, and boy, the people that don't have structure, externally enforced structure have to work really hard to create an internal structure for their own lives because without any structure, we get lost. You know, I always say structure liberate. So I think that's the other important piece to why having something to do that matters do you at any age is so important and totally and how agree. It also

takes off a lot of pressure. You know. You look around, You're like, I'm saving up for this, I'm saving up for that. I'm putting away tempercent on my income. You're like, you crazy, like, like why you just abandon that concept and realize that And by the way, I just also add in here. Fortune Magazine has has done a study that shows the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year that we are born and the year

that we retire. And almost everyone I talked to knows like some distant uncle or a brother in law that like retired on that year they had a heart attack. You know, Like it's a commonly held story in our culture that once somebody loses their sense of purpose, their sense of connection, their sense of learning, they lose themselves as well. Let's talk about one of the things near the end of the book, which is and I loved this.

I mean, I love the retirement section, but I might have loved this section even more, which was don't take advice, and not in a hardhead sense, but because all advice conflicts. I have this conversation all the time with my girlfriend as we're looking at how to eat well. Right, It's just like, oh my god. I mean, you know, every time you turn around, somebody's got a different opinion. You should do this, you shouldn't do that, you should you know.

You mentioned in the book reading on one day in the New York Times a study that says vitamin D uh supplements don't do any good, right, waste of money. And then the next day the Toronto Star has, you know, here's all the benefits of taking vitamin D. And and then in the book you go through and you list all these I thought this was great. You list all these cliches, and that for almost every cliche we have, we have another cliche that's almost exactly it's opposite. And

I just thought that was was so great. So let's just talk a little bit about how all advice conflicts and how do you recommend people find their way through this morass? First of all, the interesting they had discovered while researching this was that cliche is actually a French word, as maybe you know because it sounds French, but basically, in an old printing presses, a cliche was an actual physical metal printing plate, which also used to be called

the stereotype. And over over time it made sense to cast commonly used phrases on one single slug of metal instead of letter by letters. So cliche was literally a collection of words used together often. Okay, So so then I started looking up what we call cliches today. This is the most kind of timeless advice of all and and sure enough, every single cliche you you find has an equal, an exact opposite. So birds of a feather flock together, or opposites attract or there's clothes make the man,

or you can't judge a book by its cover. There's absence makes the heart grow fonder. And then there's out of sight, out of mind, there's nothing ventured, nothing gained, or better safe than story. There's you get what you pay for. The best things in life are free. That you know. It goes on on the good things come to those who wait. The early bird gets the worm

that there's in is my favorite one. The pen is mightier than the sword, or actions speak louder than words, and it's like suddenly they look flimsy, right, And so then this is a real problem because I'm in this self help universe right like you, we're talking about the happiness equation. I've got a whole new book coming out all about resilience right now, and like I'm in this self help ghetto. And and it's a lot of snake oil salesman right, Like it's a lot of like do this,

do that, do this? Do that? You know, be Vegan b be Paleo as you as you said, there's all these exact opposite things. Um and by the way, you know, my wife Leslie is expecting. It's even worse. In the parenting world. You know, it's sleep with your baby, never sleep with your baby. Only breastfeed. Don't don't breastfeed, like, don't worry about breast Like it's just NonStop. So what do you do? Well, you have to put yourself in

situations where you can confidently test things yourself. So one of my favorite examples of this is something that called the bench test. So rather than following advice, you just do the bench test. What is the bench test? My buddy Fred is super smart, and he got into like every Ivy League school. And if you go on, if you are in the same boat and you get into every IVY the school, you go visit Harvard, and you go visit Princeton, you go visit Yale, and what do

they do. They give you a tour of campus, like this is the classic things, like here's the residences, and here's the gym, here's and you're like, I'm evaluating which school to spend my four years in based on how new the treadmills are, Like it's really weird. So my friend Fred came up with this idea called the bench test. He drove to all the Ivy League schools that he got into, and he found a bench in the middle of campus and he sat there for an hour in

each one. All he was doing is patiently listening to and observing the conversations around him, the people, the people's mannerisms, the sort of the sense of culture. And he thought, really, my four years at this school is going to be a sum of all these conversations. So where do I feel my heart connects most? Right? So in his case, he it was Princeton, and he went to Princeton. He met the love of his life, he met his best friends, he's happily blah blah blah. Everything is great. And so

why do I mention the bench test? Because when you're going for a job interview, you can call it the office tour test. I was an HR for ten years at Walmart. Hardly anyone ever asked me for a tour of the office. But when you walk around the office, you see, do people say hi in the hallways? How does it? How is this structured? Is there a hierarchy that's clear? What do people dress like? Like you notice

all that stuff? And if you're thinking buying a house, it's called the sidewalk tests, right, like don't you visit the house? Like walk around the neighborhood. And almost every situation people are like, well, you know, my parents won't let me live with my boyfriend or girlfriend like cultural, culturally, and I'm like, go on a trip together. Like there's a version of the bench test for almost every major life decision you encounter. I think that's a great one.

Spending time like that and learning to trust your own intuition is so important. The other thing that I find really helpful is to look for the commonality. So if I look at the diet stuff, right, and I look at eat a key agenic diet, eat a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a paleo diet, what I look at what they all agree on is way less processed food, eat whole foods. And I'm like, Okay, that seems like, okay,

here's a point of commonality, you know. Um. I also love when I see modern science proving something that's been part of a long term wisdom tradition, because I'm going, all right, I'm getting it confirmed both ends. It's stuck around for this many thousands of years and there's all this stuff to it, and science is saying, look, this seems to be really good. I'm like, all right, that's a double confirmation. Um. So those are a couple of

things that I also do. And then I think ultimately it's just realizing like there is no one right answer to anything. I mean, again, if we want to get very specific about is there a right answer to whether there's climate change or is there a right answer to the size of Jupiter. Of course there is, but when it comes to things in life that there's a lot more subtlety and nuance, there's usually not one right answer.

My son and I did this with school. I was like, you know, do the best you can to make the best decision you can. But you know what, there's pros and cons to every one of these places and every one of these things, So just do the best you can and then realize that there isn't the right answer. There's just the one you chose. Mm hmm. Yeah. My dad always used to say growing up, the best decision is the one you made. Yeah, that's great, and there's

you know, in the happiest equation. I quote this, this quote from Charles Varley in eighteen seventy two, which I love saying and I don't want to take credit for it, and the quote is when we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. Yeah, that's great. And I remember that if I'm like, do you think I should buy this or not? I'm like, oh, I'm just looking for someone else to tell me that I should you

know or shouldn't. Like I'm just literally looking for someone to agree with the thought I'm not willing to even tell myself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, we are coming near

the end of time. You and I are going to have a post show conversation where we talk about your upcoming audible book on resilience, and resilience is something I've been so interested in lately, Like, you know, how is it that some people have really difficult things happen and they turn that into um positive or they survive or they come out stronger, and lots of other people get beaten or broken. So we're going to discuss resilience in

the post show conversation. Uh, listeners, if you're interested in that one you feed dot net slash support you can get access to all of those. But for the last part of this conversation, I want to talk about something

you say in the book. You say that you know, we have a few different wars going on inside of us, right we We started the show with the parable, you know, battle between good Wolf and bad Wolf, right, um, but one that you use is the war between more and enough, and I thought we could hit that kind of on our way out here. Yeah exactly. Okay. My argument is that we used to live in the culture of enough, so so for hundreds of thousands a few years the

history of our species, all you needed was enough. You scrounged for enough. You tried to get enough to eat. You hoped to find enough of a mate that you could you can mate with. Of of the seventeen people you met in your life, you know, one of them was you know what I'm saying, like you literally needed enough. And then something happened, which is that in the late eighteen hundreds, Um, there's a huge culture shift, and we switched to this culture of more. Why did that happen?

Because really the big shift that was happening was the invention of appliances like like um, the fridge and the washing machine and the dishwater like these these appliances took out so much time and so much labor that was in our days, and suddenly we had conspicuous consumption came into fashion and like you know, showing off wealth and

all these things that con didn't happened before. And a very famous comic strip was developed around this time called Keeping Up with the Joneses, which is where the phrases actually from, and it ended up becoming the longest running comic strip in the world of the time ran for like thirty years and thousands of papers and all this stuff, because it was about this idea that we're now going into this culture of more, we have to have more.

And the way I kind of close off the sections by actually quoting Kurvannigett, who I know is one of your favorite authors. When his friend Joseph Heller died. So Joseph Heller, author of Catch twenty two, died, Kurvanna can Get published a very strange obituary of him the New Yorker. And I say strange because it was really just like a few sentences he said, true story, word of honor.

At a billionaire hedge funds party on Shelter Island, you know, Joseph Heller and I kind of went as a special guests, and I said to Joe, hey, how do you feel having written one of the most prominent works of literature in the twentieth century. How do you feel about the fact that this guy made more in a in a day or a month or whatever it is, then you've made over your entire life. And Joseph Heller said, it's true, but I'll have one thing that he'll never have, and

curvaning and said, well, wha whatever could that be? And Joseph Holler said, the knowledge that I have enough and what I'm arguing for and the happiness equation is a return to the awareness of how much we need versus how much we want is a possible tool to save us from so many of the ills that we have today. Tying together our conversation about cell phones, social media, psychological addiction on social media, it ties together like finding purpose

and retirement. It all comes back to thinking for yourself, what is enough to me? How can I articulate and how can I define that? And you recognize it's a lot less than you probably already have. Yeah, that's that's such a great place to end the conversation and bring it around full circle. You know, a lot of the show is about just being conscious about what we think,

what we choose, what our brain is doing. And that is one of those fundamental questions I think that we can come back to over and over again is do I have enough? And it's correlate. There is one that you talk when we talked about the seven different things you can do in less than thirty minutes, right, one of them's gratitude right, which is we just hear over and over and over again, but again, we hear it

over and over again because it works. And gratitude is a form of reflecting on I have enough or even more than that, like you know that I have enough and and there's lots of wonderful things right within where I'm at, beautiful and an incredible way to remind me that I should be thinking about the same way you do. Well, that's why I do every one of these interviews, because

I need them. Well, thanks Neil so much. Like I mentioned, you and I are going to continue talking a little bit more about resilience, but thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Absolutely my pleasure. Eric and I always say to the people at the very very end of any podcast, these are my favorite people

in the entire world. They really are. And so if anyone listening we wants to drop me a line, I'm just at Neil at Global Happiness dot org Neil at Global Happiness that or and the reason I throw that out there just because, like I said, the people who listen to podcasts all the way to the very end, especially on my favorite shows, are my favorite people to

meet around the world. And I always love the connections wonderful And we'll have links in the show notes to UM your book, your website, and we'll have links also for your new audible program that we're going to discuss here uh in the post show. So thanks Neil, thank you bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.

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