Neil Pasricha || How to Live an Awesome Life

these small and simple pleasures. Wow. Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Neil Pasricha to the show. Neil is an author, entrepreneur, podcaster, and public speaker characterized by his advocacy of positivity and simple pleasures. He is best known for his The Book of Awesome series and

The Happiness Equation, which are international bestsellers. His first TED talk, The Three A's of Awesome, is ranked one of the ten most inspiring of all time on the TED side, Neil hosts an Apple Best of Award winning podcast called Three Books, and his most recent book is called Our Book of Awesome. In this episode, I talked to Neil about how to live an awesome life. The levels of depression and anxiety, or its high as today now more

than ever, is when we need hope and positivity. According to Neil, the key to living a happier life is appreciating the little things all in Gratitude should not be reserved for big moments, but they should be cultivated in the every day. We also touch on the topics of social media, motivation, confidence, and authenticity. I really enjoyed this chat with Neil. He's a really good guy, and he really has this real positive energy and he just inspires you just by talking to him. So I'm sure he'll

inspire you all as well. So let's just get right into it. Here we go. Neil pas Richa, Well, it's nice to finally meet you after all the it feels like years we've been talking on Twitter. I know, nice to meet you too. Yes, Twitter, well that's a whole other topic Twitter, and that's become. But I want to call Twitter awesome right now? What do you now? I'm actually I'm actually very close. I think I'm gonna do it. I think I'm a twenty twenty three full social media Delete. Yeah, delete,

I'm like thinking across all platforms. Yeah, I'm finding it hugely interfering with my mental health but also my ability to do deep work. So I don't know what else there is to do. And I think like you, you you know, I've been working for a lot of years to try to cultivate an audience with a podcast, an email list, and those things don't need, you know, algorithmic interference. So I'm hoping that it won't be as vague, but I'm hoping it's enough to kind of preserve my mental health

and kind of keep me off the scrolls. It's not just Twitter. I find Instagram, Facebook, They do the same kind of thing. I just don't feel goodhen I'm done with them. That's important to know that about yourself and to break that boundary around your life. I don't even tell you that you're right about this stuff. You've been really wildly successful with your book of awesome series. But can you tell us to our audience a little bit? Just step back, tell us about who you are? You

know what are you all about in life? You know what are you all about? Man? Yeah? Sure? I My mom was born in Nairobikinya and my dad was born in Amritzar India. They had an arranged marriage in England. The arrangement riage with their second date. The first date was my dad asking my mom if she would eat a hamburger. She said yes, proving that she wasn't a vegetarian, and that was good enough for the wedding, which followed two weeks later. They emigrated to Canada in the late

nineteen sixties. I was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, just an hour east of Toronto, in nineteen seventy nine, and like, who am I? What am I all about? You know, I think I had a pretty comfortable childhood Scott Like, you know, my dad would say to me, You know, never forget how lucky you are. You got power in your house, you got water in your taps, you got schools across the street, you got hospitals down the road.

But growing up here with all these advantages that we experienced, being you know, you're in New York, I'm in Toronto, that we experienced, they're pretty invisible to you when you have them, And so I didn't. I didn't appreciate those base kind of things I had going for me until my late twenties. In my late twenties, I went through a really tough period of my life. I lost my marriage, and I lost my house because we were living together, and I lost my best friend to a suicide, all

within the span of a few days. And for a lot of people who maybe have experienced more hardships than me, you know, this would be a bump in the road. But for me, Scott, it was like I was destitute, like I was. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping. I lost forty pounds and I wasn't that big. I lost forty pounds. Yeah, well, I mean that's everybody was saying to me in the hallway. They're like, you look great.

What's your secret? Right? But it was just stress. I started therapy for the first time of my life, and it became clear that I was one of the people that needed to go to therapy multiple times a week to start processing this stuff. And it was in this period of my life. And by the way, what was

I doing at the time was working at Walmart. I was director of Leadership Development inside the world's largest company, and multiple people have that title, but my job was trying to figure out how to grow leadership inside the world's biggest company. Two point five million employees. So that's my day job. But outside of work, as I was going through this tough time, I start a blog called one thousand Awesome Things dot Com just as a way

to try to cheer myself up. Perhaps inside me Scott, I had some inner optimists for my dad, just like knowing that writing down positive thing every night before bed would be good for me. But it wasn't like it came easy. A thousand sounded like a small number at first, but my first post sucked. It was it was brock of flower, the strange mutant hybrid child of nature's ugliest vegetables like green cauliflower. That's all. That's all I could

come up with. I write this post, I pushed you know, posts on WordPress, and for the next one thousand straight weekdays, I just keep doing it. I just keep doing it. It was it was like a vine out of the quicksand for me. And over time these little posts started to hit a nerve. I wrote old Danger Playground Equipment one month into this blog, and it hit the front page of a website you might know called fark dot com.

It sent fifty thousand readers to my site in one day, and suddenly I never went below like five thousand people again like reading the daily awesome thing and so whether it was you know, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, these what I call awesome things,

you know, started finding an audience. Fortuitous career. It began now fourteen years ago, the path that I'm still on, which is, you know, being one of these people like you, like many of our mutual friends, simply trying to figure out what it means to live a great life and writing about my own experiences and cataloging what I'm learning as I go about trying to do that. Yeah, that's that's amazing. And your first book came in New York

Times bestseller, right, book, the Book of Awesome. Yeah, yeah, the Book of so the Book of Walsome. I was joking people, you don't need to buy it's just literally my blog printed out in staple together. I mean when it came out, they printed six thousand copies. It was a six thousand copy book, which for those that aren't publishing, that's not very big. But a few lucky bumps happened. Heather Reasman, who is the CEO of the largest book chain in Canada. She made it one of her Heather's picks,

kind of like an Oprah's pick up in Canada. That prompted it to hit number two in the best Our List. And then from there I got invited on the Today Show and then the Early Show, and those things, as you know, have their own kind of momentum. And eventually, after all the press died down, the book kept selling and it stayed on the Best Our List for eight years and sold over a million copies. And so that book hit the New York Times a year after it

came out. Actually, so it wasn't an instant you know that. You know the phrase instant New York Times bestseller. I have never identified with that. Ye yeah, I hear you. So that's interesting, Like, how's your life different from not being a bestseller to being a bestseller? How does that change you as a person? I mean it doesn't. I mean,

it's just here's what it did for me. I'm as I just mentioned, my parents are East Indian immigrants to Canada, and so the life path for me, Scott was supposed to be, like, you know, get good grades in chemistry and biology and physics and math and go to med school. Go to med school, be a doctor. You know, in in Indian culture, it is the it's the kind of the highest guaranteed kind of income. And it's the like in the in the arranged marriage culture, and you know,

it's like are they a doctor? What kind gp specialists? What kind of specialists? You know? And and so I failed on that path. I did business school instead twice, once up in Canada, once down down at Harvard in the States. And so for me, I had already fallen off that path. But quitting my job at Walmart, that would have been a whole other thing. That would have been saying goodbye to like a pension, a nine to five job benefits. You know, who's going to pay for

the dentist if I don't have a job. And so it took me eight more years. Eight more years were on the side. I wrote five books, gave two hundred talks. Thank goodness, my company, Walmart was so kind to like keep letting me take like a day off here, a day off there, a day off here. I said to my speak agency, I can only do speeches on weekends. It was just weekends because I kept the day job, and at Walmart, it was hard to say goodbye to

it because I was given really cool jobs. I mentioned the Director of Leadership Development role, which was my last role there, which is a great role. But I also got to be project manager to our CEO for four years, a really cool development experience where I sat outside the CEO's office and I helped him, you know, with everything

he was working on. And so I had these cool development roles at Walmart, and I was writing books on the side for eight years until twenty sixteen when The Happiness Equation came out, which is it is just one of my bigger books. And at that point I just said, I can't do both any lot for any anymore. I quit. I was really scared. I was really nervous. I thought this huge lurch into like you know, the bit of having no benefits and no reason to get up in the morning was going to be like a free fall.

And looking back, I honestly wish I'd made the leap earlier because there was so much more I could do once I was spending all my time on it as opposed to just evenings and weekends. That's like the career answer, and then the personal answer is that I also have gotten remarried now and we have little kids who I hope you don't hear through this one through this conversation, but it's there's a chance. And so I'm still living

in Toronto. My wife, Leslie and I are We've been married a number of years now and we have four little boys under eight years old, so we've got a busy house at the same time. What does she do? Leslie is a TDSB Toronto District School Board inner city elementary school teacher. I be liking her to like a I like in her like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.

You know, she's she's a real like rock star in terms of working inside inner city schools and helping kids especially around age twelve, thirteen, grade seven and eight kind of her specialty. In addition to that, she's also a trained parenting coach. I get the brag about her a little bit, trained under doctor Laura Markham, who you might know who wrote a wonderful book called Peaceful Parent, Happy Child. And she also conducts empathy based circles in our community

for parents and for kids. So she's doing a lot of kind of social and educational work in our community, and I'm very lucky to be married there because she helps me every single day with a lot of the stuff I'm stressed and I'm anxious, don't worried about which is always a lot of things that's wonderful. Your mission seems to be about awesomeness of every day, like every day off awesomeness. Yeah, awesomeness as a word can sometimes

connote something profoundly. This great peak experience, you know, where you're standing at the top of the mountain, you're in that moment and you're like, Wow, this is awesome. But you can find awesome in the every day is It seems to be a big message of yours And there's also so a positivity to what you're doing. Why do you think people need this? Do you think they need it right now even more than ever? Yeah? Absolutely, Well

a few things. First of all, if you go on an urban dictionary, the definition of awesome is I'm scared to know the word Americans use to describe everything. And as you're intimating, you know, the kind of classic definition is one of kind of like a mixture of reverence and kind of staggering beauty, like looking into the abyss of the Grand Canyon, staring out into the milky Way.

But you're right, I actually tried to use that word in repurpose that word back into focusing on life's simplest pleasures, because I don't think that all those awe inducing moments we have in our life, Scott, whether that's the healthy babies, preaching in the delivery room, the father daughter dance at the wedding, you know, the wide eyes and a graduation states, they don't add up to much time. They don't really add up to that many days of the thirty thousand

days we have. And so when I was going through my divorce, when I was with the loss of my friend, I found that focusing on these tiny, simple pleasures was good for me, And hell yeah, I think people need it. Now. There's higher than ever, anxiety, higher than ever, depression, higher than ever, loneliness. We've got suicide rates that are pretty off the charts compared to where they've been over the last few decades. And so why, in this era of infinite abundance do we seem to be living with the

greatest mental health challenges of all time. I'm convinced that part of the reason why is because we aren't as good at seeing all the tiny little pleasures that surround us every day. What I had in my house growing up was my father constantly reminding me of these things. You know. He'd point out, you know, the look of cream dissolving into coffee. He'd point out the little stickers on the bananas, and can say, can you believe this came all the way from Ecuador? And he'd constantly be

doing that. When I first showed him an iPhone, he was like, it's like the whole world in your pocket, you know. He was constantly filled with this idea of awe. And I think that these things have bad marketing lands man, like, like who's who's who's on the marketing committee for all

the tiny joys in our life? They there's no there's no UH sponsored posts on Instagram that's going to tell you that wearing warm underwear from out of the dryer is good for you, But it might give you a smile and a piece of joy in the middle of a busy day. And that's why I think we should all try to practice and cultivate our ability to see those things and share those things and talk about those things. And I have been given the gift of being able

to do that. In a number of books you're write, they all have awesome in the title for the most part of the book of Awesome, book of even more awesome, book a Holiday Awesome. It's kind of a one trick thing. At the same time, it's it's because I need it. I need it. I'm naturally bent towards seeing problem, seeing negativity. We all are, right, you know, you know this better than anybody. Not all of us. Some people are prettidisposed

towards optimism. What I mean is that like the amygdala secreting fight or flight hormones, like you know, the idea that inside us when when there's a wreck on the other side of the highway, we all rubber neck. You know, when there's a blood test back from your doctor, pretty much everybody scans for that high cholesterol. You know, you get a math test back from your teacher, you look

for the one you got wrong. Majority of us are We've had three millions of years of evolution on these brains like look, scanning for problems, finding problems, and identifying problems. It's it's the design of almost everything in the world. I always say to people. Shouldn't we pay doctors when we're healthy as opposed to when we're sick. Like every single thing in the world is oriented to words, looking for problems, finding problems, and solving problems. I know what

you mean. You're saying some people are naturally predisposed to be positive, and I hear you. It's just that I think that those people are few and far between. The natural bent of most of us to be rubberneckers, cholesterol lookers and you know, errors on the math test look or seekers, like we look for those mistakes for the most part. I mean, yeah, as a species, we evolved for that to be beneficial, to make our tongue go towards the toothache as opposed to the rest of the teeth. Yeah, yeah,

this tongue towards the toothache. I like it, and like it's kind of worked out right, Like we'd be remiss enough to mention that this orientation of our brain has kind of worked out pretty good for our species. We took over the whole place, you know, we figured out how to make tools and boats and get everywhere and kill almost everything, and kind of we took over. We won. This is we run the place now. I'm just saying, in the world we live in today, those are not

as helpful to us now. And if you're listening to this and you're somewhere warm, and you have clothes on your back, and perhaps you're surrounded by devices or screens that can fill you with any form of information that you might desire at a fingers push of a button, there is less need for your brain to see a non responsive email or a negative tweet or a bad review as the way you're interpreting it, which is you

know the end of everything right. You don't need to see it that way, and yet we all do that. I'm on the precipice of a book launch, man, and I you know, three days out, I should not be worried about There's no reason I should be worried about my book launch. There's absolutely no reason. There's no reason from a success point of view, financial point of view, results. But yet I can't sleep at night because I'm worried about Like why why is that? I know I shouldn't,

but I can't not. What are you worried about? What do you fear? Yeah? You know it's interesting because when you probe down a couple levels, you're like, well, what is it? Like? I think what I was saying to Oliver Berkman, who I know you're connected with as well, is I think the thing I'm really playing for is the right to keep going, you know, like I really just want This is my tenth booker journal since twenty ten.

It's twenty twenty two that we're speaking, and every ten books or journals in twelve years, Like, by any measure, you know you're done. You don't need to keep going. And at the same time, I can't turn off that inner engine inside me that's made me want to do all those things. And so what do I fear. I

probably fear irrelevance. I probably fear I'm afraid talking to you because I know how smart you are, I know who you have on the show, and I'm like, I'm going to be asked things that I don't know the answer to. I think I'm afraid of maybe not being proud of my own work. When you have immigrant parents and when you bring home a math test and there's one question wrong and the first thing they do out of a place in love is sit down when you get the kitchen table and work on that one. You

got wrong. You know, perhaps my brain is just going to do that. My whole life is constantly try to win. And unfortunately, when I first wrote the Book of Boston twenty ten, the metrics for success were like this bestseller list and it was printed once a week in the newspaper. Right now that number is on Amazon and it's refreshed every hour and it doesn't turn off. And so this is kind of the equivalent for authors of like the

infinite scroll. Our brains are programmed to look for stopping mechanisms. You used to read the newspaper till it was over. You used to watch the news till it ended. Now we're so deeply immersed in these never ending scrolls and these never ending screens and these never ending extrinsic metrics that if you can't turn it off yourself, or you don't have a way inside your life to put your phone in the basement, put it on airplane mode, go

up to bed an hour before. Like, if you don't have this stuff designed, you're going to fall prey to the endless algrams that are going to just suck you back in. And I think at the root of it is, you know, it's capitalism, Like I mean, the point of the machine to keep scrolling is that it can feed you more ads and have more of your attention and

make more money off you. So that's partly why not as overtly an hour book of Awesome my new book, but I have in my last two books before this really talked a lot about systems and habits and the design of life to create and ensconce our minds in a place where we can feel contentment, satisfaction, freedom, and these like pleasures that seem really far off sometimes, but if we can design our life in a way that enables them, then, you know what, that's pretty good. And

it's harder to do now than ever before. The trauma, loss, and uncertainty of our world have led many of us to ask life's biggest questions, such as who are we? What is our highest purpose? And how do we not only live through but thrive in the wake of tragedy, division,

and challenges to our fundamental way of living. To help us all address these questions, process what this unique time in human history has meant for us personally and collectively an emerge whole, I've collaborated with my colleague and dear friend doctor Jordan Feigeld, MD, to bring you our forthcoming book. It's called Choose Growth, a workbook for transcending trauma, fear, and self doubt. It's a workbook design to guide you in a journey of committing to growth and the pursuit

of self actualization every day. It's chock full of research from humanistic psychology, positive psychology, developmental psychology, personality psychology, cognitive science, and neuropsychology. So lots of themes that you hear about on this podcast, and it's aimed to help us all integrate the many facets of ourselves and co crete our new normal with a renewed sense of strength, vitality, and hope.

Whether you're healing from loss, adapting to the new normal, or simply looking ahead to life's next chapter, Choose Growth will help steer you there two deeper connection to your values, your life vision, and ultimately your most authentic self. Choose Growth will officially hit the shelves September thirteenth, and you can border your copy or the audiobook in the US now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indie Bound, and all major retailers. If you're in the UK and Commonwealth. You

can border now at bookshop dot org dot UK. We truly hope this book helps you grow and thrive and become your best self. Okay, now back to the show. I'll come like with with all your successes, like you're still insecure? Like how is that possible? You know? On one hand, it's like maybe I'm successful because of the insecurities. You know, guy, go the other way around. But I wrote this two by two in the happiness equation that has always been resonant to me. And it is a

confidence matrix. And I think a one axis, let's call it the X axis across the bottom, you got your opinion of yourself. It can be low or it can be high. Right, If it's left, it's low. If it's right, it's high. And on the y axis it's your opinion of others. It can also be low and it can also be high. Scott, I think if your opinion of others is high and your opinion of yourself is low, you are insecure. So the top left box is insecure, right, I mean I am I live there sometimes right now.

If your opinion of yourself is high but your opinion of others is low, then you're arrogant, and I live there sometimes too. If your opinion of both is low it's the bottom left box and the matrix, then you're cynical and I live I live there sometimes too. Now, my definition of confidence is when you can hold in your mind at the same time a high opinion of yourself and a high opinion of others. And that is confidence. Okay,

that's how I define confidence personally. I will say in twenty ten, when the Book of BOTM came out, I was confident probably five percent of the time. Today, you know, moving through life, moving through relationships, you know, achieving some of these goals, but also just like getting older and you know, being more comfortable in my own skin, that five percent is probably moved up. It's probably somewhere between thirty and forty percent of the time I'm feeling confident.

And for a lot of people that sounds low, but hey man, that's like a that's a lot of growth for me. You know, I've come a long way, and so yeah, I still feel insecure and cynical and arrogant sometimes, but my journey towards confidence is something I think of more like a north star. It's like inch by inch, day by day, situation by situation. Well, you're always trying

to grow. I mean, for a lot of people, the pinnacle of the melonin is getting that New York Times best selling book, and you could kind of just stop there. The problem I think with that thinking though, and I sometimes I ask people. I've asked a couple of close friends of mine, you know, what's your what's your definition success? And they're like, when I get invited on your podcast,

That's how I'm going to know why I've made it? Right? Really, Oh, well, maybe I should feel like I've made it then, Yeah, you're very and you are. You are going to be on three books in twenty twenty three. We've already talked about this and played date bingo about for three months. I know, I think Oprah came calling and then suddenly I was like, you know, second fiddle for a little bit, just kidding, I'm not verifying that. Here's what I say to them. I say, don't put your success on me.

There's a difference between intrinsic motivators and externsic motivators. And you know this research as well as anybody. You know, there's that famous study Teresa Mmabile yeah. Originally at Brandis University now Harvard Business School, where she had girls teach the piano to other girls, and one group was given the joy of teaching piano and the gift of being told thank you, right, intrinsic motivators largely, and the other group was given like two tickets of the movies after

thirty minutes of teaching. And it's not a surprise that the extrinsically motivated girls were less patient, they spent less time, and they had poorer results. There are poor results, and many studies have replicated this that extrinsic motivators. Unfortunately, they

replace intrinsic motivators in our brains. We can't see the joy of connecting through someone's travelog photos on Instagram when all were presented with are the number of likes, the number of comments, the number of followers, the number of These numerical adjudicators are extrinsic motivators that cover up the intrinsic reasons that we got the thing in the first place. I mean, I remember what social media was like about

seeing your friend's pictures. You know. Now on my own Facebook group where I have a one hundred thousand people follow me, I can write a personal note, it only goes to a thousand people. I have to pay to reach my own audience. And then I'm encouraged to do that because I see how what's the reach? What do I optimize? How many comments? It's like the whole thing is being gamed to be extrinsically emotivated, and you end

up losing yourself on the process. So intrinsic over extrinsic always, And another way of saying this is simply do it for you. Do it for you. Make sure that the thing you want to be doing is something for you. There's a reason that David Foster, Wallace's author of Infinite Jest, wrote a really famous essay that I love called the Nature of the Fun, and he talks about how after you've achieved some measure of commercial success, you're incentivized heavily

to chase that success. That's why the Second Strokes album sounds like the first right. And I don't mean to use that band as an example, but for the most part, if you hit some measure of success, you copy that kind of music, or you copy that kind of writing, or you copy that kind of stuff until you realize that the reason you got success from the first louse

is because you actually were chasing fun. The nature of the Fund's thesis therefore, is that what you need to do, even after you've had commercial success is not change those chase that extrinsic motivators, but rather try to get back into the intrinsic feeling of joy that you had when you were producing that thing that was successful in the first place. And no surprise, that sometimes leads to more success because now you're chasing fun again and that comes

through in the work. So true. What is the happiness equation? Yeah, I know everyone wants to know that. Everybody I want to know that. I want to everybody wants to know that. Everybody wants to know that. The subtitle of the book, the happiness equation is want nothing plus do anything equals

have everything. What I did in the design of that book, and it wasn't programmed, like, I didn't write it this way on purpose, but I ended up coming up with nine what I called at the time secret You can call them chapters, you can call them totems, you can call them principles. Nine things that kind of went three by three under those tent poles. So want Nothing had three pieces underneath it, which were be happy first, where I talk about how it's not great work, big success,

be happy. It's the opposite. Being happy actually leads to great work, which leads to the big success. I know you've had so a Lebomirski on this on this wonderful show, so you know she's the Jane King and diner like. This is the formative work on positive psychology. Chapter number two is called do it for You. It's where I talk about intrinsic versus ex forensic motivations. I talk about the three kinds of success which we might want to go into. Three types of success sales, social, and self.

Have you heard me talk about this before? No? No, it's I can talk about this for a second. Basically, I believe that in everything you do in life, you have to choose the type of success you want from the beginning. And there are three kinds. There's sales success that's obvious, how many of you you sold, how big it does it get? Right? Social success that is less obvious. It's the recognition from your peer group, right. And then there's self success, which is do you feel proud of

your accomplishment? And I say I argue that it's impossible to have all three and I have to pick which

one you want at the beginning. And I often use movies as the best metaphor here because traditionally the hurt Locker won Best Picture when I had twenty six million dollars at the box office, whereas Alvin and Chipmunks the Squeak Well had four hundred million dollars, a much bigger sales success, but was nominated for no awards at all, no no social success at all amongst the movie going audience. And it's like that every single year at the movies.

The year that Moonlight won Best Picture had nineteen million dollars in the box office, and Fast and Furious seven like almost made a billion dollars. So it's like, which which would you rather have? And the reason I think that's important to delineate between the two is because I'm often asked as a writer, hey, how do I write a book? And then when I proke people on what they're trying to write for, it's often not sales. I wrote the Book of Austin when I was really going

for sales. I was really I was in booksers every day, I was signing books, I was saying yes to any radio station that wanted to have me on. I was trying my best to have the book sell right. But when I ask people, well, what puts you on to write, They're like, I want to catalog my grammar mother's memoirs for our family. Okay, I really want to document, you know, like this cool approach I have for building backyard decks. Okay, these aren't going to sell. Well, I don't care. I

just want to do it. Well, that's a different it's a different reason. So discriminating between which actual type of success you want for me Scott as someone who's kind of, you know, wound up a little bit, is it helps me remember what the purpose is from the beginning. So when I started my podcast three Books in twenty eighteen, I purposely said this is not for sale. I'm not going to put any ads on the show. I'm not gonna have any commercials, I'm not gonna have any sponsors.

I'm not going to orient myself that way. I'm going to do this for myself, a personal self learning journey where I get to ask people which three books will shape their life, and then I buy and I read the books in advance, and I got your books upstairs. By the way, I got your Maslow on my shelf. So yeah, and so I buy the books, I read the book, or at least flipped through it, and then

that is what I'm playing for. And whenever I get whenever I get you know, we be and say, oh, man, how come my pocket isn't in the top one hundred wedges between Tim Ferriss and Rich Role and Scott Mary Kaufman. I just remember, well, that wasn't what I was doing this for in the first place, man, was it was I was? I told myself it was for self success. Okay, So the second secret in the Happiest Equation is do it for you, And the third one is remember the lottery.

Whereas just where I paint out the portrait that my dad always taught me about realizing how lucky we are to be here right now. And those three chapters are under that first principle want nothing. And that's where I come up with the title of the book, the Happiness Equation. It's not because I've figured out happiness. It's because I tried my best to write down everything I knew at that time, which was twenty sixteen and I put it in the form of a letter to my unborn child.

So when my wife was pregnant, that gave me the creative orientation towards writing the book, which was in the form of a letter to my son on how to live a happy life. Wait, so one nothing is just one part of the equation. Do you want to go through the rest of it? Do anything? Is the second, which is about freedom. And so my first yeah, well, my first principle actually is maybe counter in two of it. It's the most controversial chapter of my entire book. It's

called never retire. Wow. Yeah. And so I believe that the concept of retirement is just this complete false idol in our society today. Retirement was invented in the eighteen hundreds, late eighteen hundreds in Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, which is the coolest head of state name ever. And at the time in Germany, youth unemployment was like between twenty and thirty percent and the average lifespan was sixty seven. Guys,

keep that number in mind. Sixty seven auto declare that anybody at age sixty five who wants to kind of retire invented invented concept could do. So it was optional. That's another things that it was optional, not mandatory, which it is in many countries mandatory, and it has been in Canada for number of year and they took off the mandatory aspect of it. But a lot of countries is like, hey, you hit sixty five, you're out. You know it's over. But notice that it was only two years.

It was only two years from the average life span, which was sixty seven. Penicilla wasn't invented for forty years, right, and so we've mimicked that number. You know, the UK followed sixty five, US followed sixty five, can To follow sixty five. A lot of countries around the world followed

this number, and lifespans have dramatically increased. And so now what we have in our society is this false prophet that you hit this age and in fact, if anything, we want to be younger where you get to kind of like, you know, throw in the time stamp, you know, punch, you know, make your last punch at the meat packing plant, and you never need to work into the day in

your life. A whole community. I read about this in the book in a little bit more detail, but you know, this entire industry emerged of like retirement living, and the design of the whole ad campaign was like you deserve it, like you know, this is this is your reward for

like a great, great long life of work. And if you look at tables and grass throughout the twentieth century, the percentage of people who chose to retire was like nine percent at the beginning, and then you know, in the eighties ninees, it started becoming like seventy two percent, eighty five percent, to the point where now today it's like a pretty common concept. But I think that there's a problem with the idea that you want to do nothing.

That you I don't mean want nothing in terms of contentment, which I was describing in the front of the book, but I mean like that you desire to be accomplishing nothing. Two that you can afford it, right, That's the other thing. It's like, it's just it's just it's just massively underwater, just financially, and that we can afford to pay others to do so these three things kind of fall away. Instead, I argue that we don't actually want to retire, we just want to do something we love. And I think

that work can be broken down into four s's. Number one social connection, Okay, that's really what we want. We want to be. We want to be socially connected to people. Number two stimulation. We always want to be learning something new. Number three is structure. You want to have a reason to get a bend in the morning. Yah, you know, everyone's weak. The same number of hours in it, right, fifty six hours for sleep, fifty six hours for work, fifty six hours to do what you want. Those things

out up to one hundred and sixty eight. Everybody gets one hundred and sixty eight hours a week. I think that the structure is important to have a reason to get a vend the morning. And number four is story. You want to be part of something bigger than yourself. You want to be part of a community, a group, or a tribe or a place that is accomplishing something that you could not do on your own. And so what I argue in the book is that we actually

don't want to retire. We just want the four s's, And if we're constantly seeking those s's in our work, then that will actually lead to a happier existence. So that's chapter number four of the book. Chapter number five is called overvalue you, where I talk about the way to measure your time in terms of dollars per hour, no matter what job it is you're doing, and I

talk about how that's actually a scale. How when I graduated from Harvard Business School in two thousand and seven, the majority of my peers are working like sixty to eighty hour weeks in jobs like consulting and banking and private equity and you know, those types of things, and they weren't that happy. And so I compare that job with other jobs, like an elementary school teacher. Maybe not surprising to you that my dad's won and I've been

married to two. I seem to surround myself with teachers, the oly ones that could, that don't wither at my endless questions. I guess I compared to you an assistant manager at Walmart, which is where I was working at the time. And I show that all three jobs, the high falutin kind of a one hundred and twenty grand straight out of business school Harvard Business School job, the forty five grand teacher's job, which has, as you know, more time off throughout the year, and the sort of

seventy five k at the time. These were the numbers I was using assistant manager job at Walmart, all of which all three of which jobs I had good access to. In terms of numbers, I distilled all three jobs down to be making the same exact twenty eight dollars per hour. And so that was kind of the principle of the fifth chapter. The sixth chapter is called create Space. I'm really proud of myself, I gotta say, for like having

my whole book memorize here right now. Create space, which is is all my models and tools to actually create space in your life, right they are things like my and I don't know how many people will be kind of listening to this versus watching this, but I could draw really quick for you what I call my space scribble, which is I argue that every single decision that you make in your life takes a certain amount of time and is of a certain importance. So importance, yeah, time

and importance. It's different than the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People model, where Stephen Covey is comparing time and urgency. And the key takeaway from that two by two for those that have read Seven Habits is that we typically are over focusing on urgent and we're underfocusing on important Okay, so you're a systematizer. You're a systematizer. Yeah, yeah, Well, you know, we don't rise to the level lover goals.

We fall to the level of our systems. Is a two thousand year old, like you know proverb, and it holds true for me today because I argue that low time, low imports decisions in your life, Scott need to be automated. There's a reason why I've where I've worn the same people. I've worn the same sweatshirt and the same sweatpants every single day all week. As you change the stuff underneath, as you change the stuff underneath. But I automate that, right, I'm in the same room. So what is that? Is

that is that low ice? Yeah? So for example, it's like I've automated the same thing for breakfast every day. Right, it's the same shake, It's got the same ingredients. I've had it for fifteen years. I if I ever need to go anywhere, I just even though I'm in my own car in my own city, I'll automate that to ways the traffic app. I like, you know, it's a low time loanports decision. I just don't want to be thinking about which way I'm going to go, So I

just outsourced that. It's the same reason Barack Obama says the only wars two colors of suits, the same reason Mark Zuckerberg says he only wears the same color of shirt. It's the same reason that anybody who you know, my friend Chad has every single consumable item in his entire house on Amazon order refilms, including like towels and soaps. You know, he knows that he needs like one new facetel every six months, so just like arrives because he's

automated that decision. More interestingly, though, in this two by two matrix, so I think is the high time decisions that are not very important. This is where we are spending the majority of our time today, Scott, and I think, yeah, so this is like emails. Email is a great example. Regulate it does. Okay, it does, and I'm trying to make them all rhyme for you too. So the high time,

low importance decision needs to be regulated. And so emails a great example where I regulate email on my good days when I'm doing it right to two hours a day from nine to ten in the morning, and four to five pm. What that gives me is two hours in my inbox every day, Scott, which is a lot. That's a lot of time on email. That's a lot. But you know what it also creates for me at ten am to four pm email free, six hour oasis every single day. And so I think that regulating is

really important. When Leslie and I my wife's name was Leslie, bought our first house, it was downtown Toronto, a really old house. Man. I'll tell you, every something broke in that house every day. It was like a fuse popped, or a patio stone is wobbly, or like a cupboard door is squeaky, and then we were driving ourselves mad trying to like fix stuff every day. Eventually, what we ended up doing was we made a list on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards of everything that

was breaking in our house. I sent my wife a recurring invite on the first Saturday morning of every month called Old House Day from nine am to twelve pm, three hours a month. That was it. And what ended up happening was we regulated everything that was falling apart in our house to one kind of binge batch process. On the first Saturday of every month, where we regulated these annoying things into a specific window that made twenty

nine days of every month kind of worry free. Right now, what about the stuff that's really important that doesn't take very long? I almost had to invent a word for this one, but it's a real word. It's called effectuate. Effectuate just means get or done. Execute. You know what's really important that doesn't take long. Saying hi to your team every morning, saying by to your team every night, picking your kids up from daycare. Just do it, Just

do it. And the cool part about this model, what this affords me if I follow it, and others if they follow it, is you actually create space. Which is the point of that that sixth chapter, to debate, to debate the high time, high importance decisions. I see your work on the Psychology podcast as ultimately what you're doing is grappling and wrestling and toying with you know these gigantic life themes. Well, this is your debate quadrant. When

you're on your podcast. I don't see you check an email, right, I don't see you like being distracted by a million things. So you're doing a Yeah, that's that's those are the kind of key concepts from the Happiest Equation, which is the book I wrote the Happiest two books before this one. Yeah, very cool, And I feel like there's still one third left. Yes, there is, there is. It's just called have Everything. This is my kind of more motivational part of the book.

You know. For example, one of the biggest questions I have been getting since the success of the Book of Ausma is what do I want to do in my life? So I called chapter seven the ultimate Thesis is bu and I gave people three ways to try to figure out what they want to do in life. They are called the Saturday morning test, the bench test, and the five people test. So I take people through these three tests to try to figure what you want to do.

What's the Saturday morning test, Scott, Well, what do you do on a Saturday morning when you have nothing to do? Yes? I know what I do? What we can't talk about it on the psychology and I'm taking trace back from your natural Yeah. Well, so for somebody that's like I go to the gym, it's like, okay, you know, how do we wildly you know, you know, brainstorm off of your interest in going to the gym, anything else you might be interested. Are you interested in being a personal trainer?

You want to be a way powder importer, exporter? Do you want to be a gym teacher? Like, let's wildly brainstorm off of the thing you're naturally interested in. So that's the Saturday morning test, the bench test. I had a friend in high school named Fred who got into

every single Ivy League school. And he was in Canada, where I live, and so he rented a jeep for a week and he drove to all of them and he performed a test on every single campus scot where he found a bench somewhere in the middle of campus and he sat on the bench patiently for an hour and observed his natural reaction to all the conversations around him that he heard. Nice And I think that that type of test is missing wholesale from our society. We know that before you buy a car, you should test

rive it, but no one test drives. We very rarely test drive a house. We very rarely test to have a job. You go in for an interview, but how often do you ask for like a walk around the office. How often you say, like, could I just like shadow someone here for a day or two like that type of stuff is. So, how many people do you know that went to law school that say, like, yeah, I really I actually hate law Like I just didn't know

once I finished that I wouldn't like this job. Right, tremendous amount of our peers in this space are lawyers, right, Susan Kane, Rich Roll, Mel Robbins, they're lawyers. Their lawyers. Jonathan Fields is a lawyer. So that's kind of the thesis of the kind of the last half of the book, which is kind of like how to embrace your authentic self, and the very last chapter of the book, because I was so afraid of writing a book that was really prescriptive, Scott,

the very last chapter is don't take advice? Yes, did you know the word cliche is actually like from a French typography word for like words that are so frequently used together they could be put together on one like metal stamp. That's what ache is. I didn't know that. So I went back through history and came up with every single cliche I could, and as you can imagine, they all have of an exact and direct polar opposite, right.

So it's like actions speak louder than words, Or is it the pen is mightier than the sword, right, is it you know, uh, the early bird gets the worm, or is it good things come to those who wait, right?

And so so basically what I do is I say, one day, while I was researching this chapter of the Happiness Equation, I actually found that the top story on the New York Times, which is, like, you know, the number one newspaper in the US, was like you know, scientists say, you know, it was a big quoted study, you know, with lots of you know, lots of prominent names that you know, nobody is getting enough vitamin D. Right.

That was. And at the same time, at the same day, at the same exact time, the Toronto Star, which is the top newspaper in Canada, had it's number one article saying nobody needs extra vitamin D. They had a bunch of studies with a bunch of names, with a bunch of people saying you didn't need you didn't need viteminy. And that's my point. It's like almost all advice ultimately conforms.

The real answers have to come from inside you. So I try my best in that book to give people as many of my ideas as I could, and at the end just reminding them that it's you, not me. Take what works, and remember that the ones that work are partly because they're already resonating with something inside you that you already think or No, what's the relationship between

that and having everything? You can have everything if you don't take advice I'm trying to make I just had to make the equation work, man, I just had to make it work at the end of the day. You know. The original title of the book was called How to Be Truly Rich. At the very last minute the publisher said it was Putnam Publishing, a part of Penguin Group and hang around them as you know, since the merger, and they were like, truly rich, Like that's going to

make people think rich, like you know, money. And I was like, no, no, truly rich. It's about, like, you know, true life satisfaction. They're like, you know, no, no, we need the word happiness and it relates about happiness. And so we were just brainstorming how to get this. I don't come out and say ever in the book, nor ever in any of your beach or anything. I don't say like I know the secret's happiness. I know the equation happiness. I don't say that. People often credit me

with the sort of happiness is reality MIAs expectations. I often get that, and I don't know why. I don't know if I look like Tim Urban or what. But really that was him who said that great, wonderful little equation, which is happiness is I'll say one more time, reality Maya's expectations. I think he wrote that in a weight

but why post, and it went really viral. But if you look through my history, I mentioned at the very beginning of this conversation that part of the way I came into this stuff was because I went through the throes of a really terrible time. And in the throes of that terrible time, I wrote a TED talk called the three A's of Awesome. And if you watch my twenty ten TED talk on TED, it is attitude, awareness

and authenticity. So the twenty ten version of myself, which is like I was thirty one, that was what I would argue was the answer to the big question we're talking about today. The answer is got attitude awareness and authenticity. Right then, the twenty sixteen me, which is the writer of the happiness equation, would have made this argument that Okay, here's all these little totems. It's you don't be happy first do it for you? Remember the lottery, you know,

never retire. We tried to come up with a structure that held those things together, and now here today in twenty twenty two. Now I'm forty three, I'm married, I've got little kids. You know, I think I'm a little bit more comfortable with myself. I've told you my confidence has gone up. But at the same time, I've also recognized more and more and more Scott, that almost nothing I do that's prescriptive takes as well as the stuff I do that's non prescriptive. And so the first book

I wrote is the Book of Awesome. If you open the book, it doesn't sound like a highly systemized thinker talking. It's me talking about flipping to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night, right. That's what the book's about. And the feedback I give in that book is this is the only self help book that doesn't tell me what to do, but it shows

me how to do it. And so I've partly returned to that concept because through the pandemic over the last few years, I have felt those old demons of anxiety and of thoughts and so on like resurfaced again. And at hs ME, you know, nationalists to do mental health is forty three percent of us have a depressive symptom today. That's a depressing symptom right there. You know, that's like

almost half of us. So, you know, Gene Twangy is saying, you know, one in three college students have clinical anxiety. You're doing an event with Jonathan Height at the Comedy Cellar like he has harping on these same numbers as well. Vivic Murphy, the Surgeon General, saying loneliness is at an all TIMEHME. The CDC says that our suicid rates are now eighteen per one hundred thousand, which just to contrast with murder rates, that's triple. That's triple our murder rates.

So I always say, like, we're three times more dangerous to ourselves as anybody else's to us. So in this era, what I've done is return to the idea of simply putting out a book that's literally just a pile of awesome things. There's nothing else in this. I don't have any research in it. Yeah, to our listeners who don't have access to the video. You're holding up big book of your your I just want to state this in audio format. It's called our Book of Awesome, a celebration

of the small joys that bring us together. And what I thought was so cool about is you really kind of outsourced this and you got a lot of diverse walks of life kind of giving you their own sort of thoughts of things are awesome and things from wheelchair accessible nature trails, I love that. I love that, to cooking for a loved one who's just been released from twenty seven years of incarceration, to a steaming bald head after a satisfying winter run, or when you go out

for lunch and your daughter is your server. These are little joys in life, Yeah, that really give you, in a lot of ways, even a deeper sense of liveness and meaning and maybe a lot of the other things that people focus on in our society. Can you be my publicist? Like you just nailed that's exactly That's exactly

what I would say. I would say, Like I mentioned earlier, that if we withhold our feelings of awe and deep reverence for only the wide eyes and graduation stations and all stages, and only the father daughter dances at weddings, and only the healthy baby screeching in the delivery room. Then that's only going to add up to like ten days in our life. We're only a live for thirty thousand days. I want to make the other twenty nine

nine and ninety days full of awe as well. And my way of doing it is by writing down these small and simple pleasures, adding a gift note to yourself on your online order when you find out what was making that horrible smell and getting rid of it opening the dishwasher and somebody already emptied it, you know, sleeping in sheets that were dried in the sun, rejigging the entire three D puzzle of your freezer to somehow squeeze this giant box of chicken fingers in there, peeling the

dried glue off your fingers, right, And so I think simply by focusing on them, and you mentioned, yeah, it's cultivated from a lot of people. What happened was at the back of the book of Awesome, I actually put a page at the back saying, you know, if anybody wants to write your own, you know, go to one thousand awesome Things dot com slash submit, and I had that feeding into a Gmail account that I never checked called one thousand Awesome Things Submissions at gmail dot com.

When it came time Scott to put this book together, I went and checked the Gmail account. I had received over ten thousand complete essays from people around the world who had taken the time to write down their own awesome things. And part of the magic of the Book of Awesome is that the book is simply a vehicle. It's simply like a little it's a little torch, and it tells you and helps you spark. You're in your

own imagination what's awesome too. So I can't tell you the number of times someone has been like, we set up a wall of awesome in our in the in the lobby of our residents where we ended up making a book of ausesome in our fifth grade, in our fifth grade social studies class, or you know, at the old folks home that I work at. We decided to put up a little like you know, everybody writes one thing down and put on the wall. People stop and they read them and they smile. And I'm not the

originator of this concept. This is the least original blog idea of all time, right, A thousand awesome things. This guy's going through a divorce. He just writes down a thing to make him happy. I mean, can you get any more you know, cliche than that. But I think the magic that came with it, honestly in the first place was consistency, because I posted one a day for

a thousand days. When you do anything that long, you just kind of a get better at it and be the people that come to you for the same thing, like the same you have a system and a schedule for releasing this podcast, right, so that your fans and your listeners will tell you if you miss one. So I had the same kind of the positive pressure of wanting to kind of service an audience kind of built up in there. And the other thing that was built

in there was I wrote a thousand. Well, the books only have a couple hundred of them, right, So it's the old wedding photographer analogy of take more pictures. You ever asked a wedding photographer how they get so many good pictures? Oh my gosh, look at these fifty pictures from the wedding. They're awesome, And they say, yeah, man, I was clicking the whole time. I took a thousand pictures. Of course I'm going to have fifty good ones. I

threw ninety five percent on them away. There's a reason why the guy who has the most strikeouts in baseball, Nolan Ryan, also has the most walks. There's a reason why the guy who has the most win saw Young also has the most losses. The winds pile up when you pile on the number of times you step up to the plate. My point is the reason I've been

able to do kind of well. I guess with these books or the books I've been able to do well, it's just because if you write something every day, you could pick you could cherry pick the go once and put in the thing right. You're very consistent. Yeah, what consistency is, man, You underestimate how that can that can trick all over time. Well, and also it depends what

you're running from. Like for me, consistency was consistency of writing an awesome thing was probably pulling me away from other things that would have been less healthy for me to do, right, whether that's really to nutrition or how I'm spending my time socially, or how I or whether it's related to like, uh, you know, drinking or whatever it is. It's like this was a positive pull in my life that helped to kind of balance me and keep me oriented to wheres things that I knew logically

that I wanted to be focusing on. Absolutely, do you take time to yourself to bask in the glory of your past accomplishments or are you always moving on to the next thing. There's no basking, that's for sure. I mean, even why not, because like so that's a part of savoring, it's a part of I would say, part of awesomeness. Yeah, I mean, I've certainly, I guess, designed my life through

these systems and malls to be comfortable. And so you know about a very comfortable sweatshirt, you know what I mean. And I have a Rubik's cube piece of art behind me that a guy made out a Rubik's cube that that says wow, And I got the design what that looks like and it looks really cool and it wasn't cheap, but I really wanted it. And so you know, I can do a few things like that. But the reason there's no basking is because like what does basking do?

Maybe you're maybe I'm confusing what you mean by basking. You're saying savoring that is different. Yeah, I mean we have this in myoks huge growth. We have a four by four metrix. I know you love that shit. I know you loved THEO. I'm sorry, two by two two four. Man, that's like three dimensions. I met two by two, my bad. I know you love the two by two matrix. And so we have one of savoring and and uh and luxuriating is one form of savoring. But marveling like being

wonder and all at the world. But basking, I mean you're allowed to take some time to just think to yourself, Wow, I had written ten books. I have had a book on the New York Times, multiple books in the New York Times bestseller list. Like, I have really grown a lot in my life, and I should be really proud of myself. And I'm allowed to just spend a day doing these things you call distractions. I've allowed to just

get a massage today for myself. I called healthy selfishness, you know, Like, I think that's part of being awesome. Practice I do practice that. I think what happened was a few years ago I started getting a few emails a day with people telling me how much the books had affected them, Steer them away from suicides, help them

in the relationships. You know. I still get three or four handwritten letters mailed to me every week, and I had to in my mind separate the receipt of those types of notes and letters from how I think about myself in my day. And so when I'm given that type of feedback, usually what I try to do in as gentle way as possible is try to help the person recognize and realize that that's actually something that's come

from them. And while I might have been kind of beside them for that, the truth is they were beside me too. I owe the reader, I owed the listener. Who am I to even be doing any of this stuff? Who are any of us? You know? And so I have been given the gift of being able to have a podcast and to be writing these well, I mean, like, who's anybody? I guess, you know, I oscillate, I guess

like everybody does between those emotions, but I don't. I'm also afraid, I think also as a parent, you know, with little kids, I'm you know, the worst case scenario for me after some monicum of success with these books and so on is to raise children that don't see the value of hard and meaningful, deep work. Yeah, so I'm like, yeah, I guess I'm always working because I also want to be a role model for working, you know.

And I don't mean working like you know, grinding. I mean working like the joy of producing and of making and creating. I don't want to turn that off. You enjoy the mastery process and learning and being better, No, I can tell I know. Also, you come across as very authentic to me that you really do believe it when you say, well, we are at a global breaking point and we need to combat it with awesome. You're committed to putting more and more awesome into the world

and never stop and never stop doing that. So I would end this interview by encouraging you to never stop doing it. The world needs it right now, especially tow it. Consider it. But thanks, Scott. The reason we connected in the first place is because I detected the exact same vibe from you. Thanks you're author. No, you're you're very

very authentic. I really really love your podcast. It's often on the level of thinking that's like a you know, a little over my head, but I try my best to keep you and your guests, but it's just a wonderful gift to the world, and you know, keep it up too for you. Thank you, Neil, it was a real pleasure having you on my show today. Thanks for

listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.