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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with author Raj Raghunathan.
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He s the author of If You re So Smart, Why Aren t You Happy?
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We re gonna talk about maximizing our happiness, things we do to sabotage our ability to be happy, and decision-making processes that we need to have mastered in order to consistently do what will, in the end, make us happy.
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This is a great episode.
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He is a brilliant researcher and a great professor, knows this stuff back and forth.
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So enjoy this one with Raj Raghunathan, and with that, welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox, where we discuss body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion,
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networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC, just text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444, or go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have some of the questions.
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All right, here s Raj Raghunathan.
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Tell us what you do in one sentence.
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What I do, I think of myself as somebody who s really very interested in enhancing the well-being
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of many different stakeholders, in particular the smart and successful people like the MBA students and people who work for big firms and organizations.
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That s what I see myself as, you know, somebody who is the purveyor of well-being.
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Purveyor of well being nice it sounds like a fancy title you ve given yourself there but I read the book and you have earned it in my opinion anyway.
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I really enjoyed the book by the way title being if you re so smart why aren t you happy not necessarily just to poke fun at the smart and successful people that are buying and reading books but the fact is.
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smart and successful people tend to not be any happier than anyone else, which I found very surprising because smart and successful people tend to, kind of by definition, know a little bit more, be better educated, have more money.
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What s wrong with all of us that, with all of our fancy education and great jobs, superior IQ, we re just as miserable as everybody else?
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What s the deal there?
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Yeah, so it is kind of surprising, isn t it?
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That s something that even I found very intriguing, and which is why I started exploring this topic.
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I think that if you were to kind of take a step back and look at why this paradox of sorts exists, I think there are two main reasons for it.
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One is that the very things that make people smart and successful, some of the characteristics, so a big achievement orientation, a drive to be better than anyone else at something, et cetera, actually can come in the way of happiness.
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And the second big reason is that
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And the smart and the successful people are no different from the rest of us.
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None of us is educated in any way to think about this question of what are the determinants of a happy and fulfilling life.
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If you think about your university education, I can bet my bottom dollar that there was no course on happiness.
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Not just that, I don t think the idea of what does it take to lead a happy and fulfilling life was even tangentially mentioned in any of the courses.
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And now you might have been different and lucky.
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it did get mentioned in one or two of your classes, but by and large, I think our education system fails us in this regard.
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This is an important topic.
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Everybody at one point or the other in their life, sooner rather than later, I would think, kind of asks this question to themselves and tries to answer it, but there s no systematic attempt at inquiring into it.
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And so that leaves the smart and the successful people in the same boat as the rest of us, clueless about what it takes to lead a happy and fulfilling life.
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That s the second reason why this paradox exists.
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quote unquote grownups, because I m not quite there yet, but people just slightly older than me at age 36 who are technically not millennials, plenty of millennials have this too, but they have a much different outlook, which is you work really hard, you get a great education, you get a great job, dot, dot, dot, happiness, and what I find now is my friends who are older than me,
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and my own age, again, early 40s, late 30s, what we end up doing is we look back and we go, alright, I ve been here for almost 10 years, when does the happiness part kick in?
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Because I m freaking miserable right now.
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Right, yeah, absolutely.
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And that s the whole midlife crisis thing, right?
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That s the target segment in a sense that I m trying to speak to.
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You re right that the millennials, I think, ask this question a little bit earlier, and there are many different reasons why this happens.
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One of the big reasons being that
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They, I think, have seen it firsthand.
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They ve had access to resources.
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They ve grown up in houses that were pretty wealthy.
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And they ve also seen it happen to their own parents, that their parents are pretty rich in terms of access to resources, wealth, et cetera, high achievement, orientation, et cetera, but aren t very happy, haven t led very fulfilling, meaningful lives.
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In fact, many of them grew up in broken homes where the parents try to, you know, assuage their guilt by getting these kids anything that they want from toys to praises and so on.
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These kids, the millennial kids, you know, your generation has actually seen it firsthand, that the correlation doesn t exist between all these extrinsic yardsticks of success and smartness and the intrinsic kind of feeling of happiness.
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And so it s a much more obvious question that is raised a little bit earlier in the case of millennials than it s been in, I think, any previous generation.
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That makes a lot of sense.
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I mean, for smart and successful people, again, superior education, superior IQ, we re really good at achieving goals, especially really important goals.
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Kind of ironically, one of the goals we re really, really bad at is becoming happy, even though we re really good at achieving all these other things that we think
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are going to actually make us happy.
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And I ve noticed a lot of other people, again, my same age, have a lot of thoughts related to inferiority.
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I do this a lot.
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I compare myself to other people or other people with businesses.
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In the book, it turns out this is pretty normal.
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This is the desire for superiority.
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And I d love to hear your thoughts on this because the instant I read that, I was like, oh, yep, I got that.
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No, it s great that not only do you have the self-awareness to recognize you have it,
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you also have the humility to admit it in a public context.
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And I think that speaks volumes about your potential for overcoming it.
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I think the worst thing you can do is actually suffer from this, what I call a happiness sin of chasing superiority and not even be aware of it.
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Or even if you re aware of it, pretend as if it doesn t really exist.
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It s a very prevalent thing, Jordan.
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And it s not as some new age spiritualists might like to believe,
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some kind of superficial need that only those with an unusually big narcissistic personality have.
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Every one of us has it.
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It s served a very useful purpose.
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I might also have that, but I m not sure yet.
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Hopefully I fall somewhere in the normal range.
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Normal people still have the superiority and control complex, or whatever you call it.
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Yeah, the desire to chase superiority or the desire to be superior to other people.
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Yeah, everybody has it.
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And it served a very important kind of a purpose in our evolutionary past.
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we all are the byproducts of people who survived, and those people who survived were the fastest, richest, most powerful, etc.
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people or had access to those kinds of people.
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And so if you were superior to other people and on dimensions that mattered in that community in which you were born, you had a higher chance of surviving.
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And therefore you had a higher chance of actually procreating.
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And we are the progeny of those people.
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So we are hardwired in a sense to seek superiority.
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So I don t really want to call this one of these kind of evil things that, you know, only if you re, you know, unusually egotistical, you re prone to doing.
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I think every one of us
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carries prestige and which is why all of us at one level or the other are prone to committing this sin.
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The problem is that we now don t live in a context in which our survival is at stake.
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And in this context, actually, this drive for superiority and chasing superiority and the social comparisons that it promotes come in the way of not just happiness, but also in the way of success.
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It turns out that if you chase superiority, you want to be the best at what you do, right?
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I mean, I want to be the best professor.
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I want to earn the most money.
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I want to be the most prestigious school and so on.
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Actually, that comes in the way of my ability to focus on the task at hand.
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So it takes away part of my brain capacity to be able to do a good job in my research or do a good job in my teaching, do a good job in writing my book.
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It s much better to kind of get caught up in what s called the flow of the activity rather than having part of your brain being devoted to monitoring how you re doing compared to other people.
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So that very desire that actually promotes our chances of survival, which is very important, of course,
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actually reduces our chances of flourishing and thriving, particularly in jobs like the ones that you and I have, intellectual creative jobs.
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So one of the reasons we can t let go of some of these bad mindsets, like trying to maximize control, trying to become superior to others, is because we re evolved to think that we actually need them.
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Indeed, exactly, that s well put.
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Yeah, so we carry the vestiges of that hardwired genetic propensities that we don t realize are actually counterproductive now.
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Right, they re counterproductive now, but we can t just turn it off and go, look, I ve got plenty of food, I m gonna be fine and survive, let me flip a bunch of switches in my brain and decide that I need to maximize
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enjoyment and gratitude and familial relationships and all this other stuff that over the last however many hundred thousand years humanoids have been around have been less important.
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So this is something that becomes more problematic when we realize, oh wait a minute, pretty much everything in my brain is fighting against this.
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Because on the ladder of things that are going to keep me alive tomorrow, happiness is towards the bottom unfortunately.
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Right, that s very true.
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I do want to say though that even in the evolutionary past where
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Survival was arguably more important than flourishing and thriving and enjoyment and all that.
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Even in that circumstance, happiness in relationships and leading a full life, et cetera, served a very useful purpose.
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It is what got us to invent things.
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It is what got us to seek out new ways of doing things and be creative and exploratory and stimulation-seeking, all those things.
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Those things happen when you re feeling happy, right?
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I mean, ask yourself, let s say that you re in a new city like Paris or something, you ve never been there before, and you re really stressed out because you don t know if you re gonna make your next train on time or something.
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Is that the circumstance under which you re likely to be exploratory and ask yourself, oh, wow, you know, this street looks so quaint, but lots of these like old shops, antique shops, let me go explore it.
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Are you going to be more in the mood for exploring when you re feeling good?
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Right?
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I mean, the answer is obvious when you re feeling good.
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And that exploratory tendency is going to lead you to discovering new ways of doing things, maybe a shortcut, maybe a new set of records that one of your favorite artists produced or whatever.
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And that knowledge that you gain by being exploratory when you re feeling good broadens your capacities.
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So there s this researcher called Barbara Frederiksen who s come up with this theory called broaden and build theory, broaden and build.
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And so the idea is that when you re positive is when you broaden your horizons, you explore new territories.
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And over time, you build new skills and capacities that come in very handy for survival, in fact, right, but only in the long term.
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It s not immediately in the short term.
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So it s a set of capacities that you re kind of almost building banking in a sense for the future.
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So it s very important to remember that even though happiness, enjoyment, et cetera, might ve been lower on priority in comparison to comparing yourself to other people and fighting and competition and all that, it still played a very, very important role even in the past.
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One concept that I found extremely interesting from the book was something you call the fundamental happiness paradox.
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This is a great one because it s so insidious and people who are successful have this much more because we re so logical and smart that we ruin ourselves with this even more than usual.
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refers to the idea that although happiness is technically, in theory, I should say, one of our most important goals, people often forget this and then get distracted by other goals, which you brought up earlier.
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Things like value for money.
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Can you explain this concept?
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Because everybody listening right now probably has this.
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And if you don t, it s because you worked it out of yourself somehow.
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But everybody else, we got this.
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We do this.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And I think the best way to kind of introduce this concept of the fundamental happiness paradox is to ask,
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what I call the genie question.
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I mean, imagine a genie like in the Aladdin story appears in front of you and grants you three wishes.
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What three wishes would you make?
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And what I ve discovered is that I ve asked this question to thousands of people from around the world.
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Very few people, on average only about 6% of people actually ask the genie for happiness.
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You know, sit back and think about it.
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It s actually very interesting that very few people ask for happiness because
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In all other surveys that people have conducted where happiness is actually listed as one of the things that you can ask or you can rate in terms of importance, happiness always emerges as the most important goal or pretty much in the top three for sure, but often the most important goal, more important than success.
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more important than making money, more important than smartness, intelligence, et cetera.
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But when you re presented with this genie question where happiness is not explicitly stated as something that you can ask for, people don t ask for it.
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So what hinted to us, the colleagues and I who are researching this, is that people seem to somehow forget all about happiness as they re going about
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the day to day lives you go about making decisions thousands of them in a day what did you need question hint is that we tend to maybe prioritize the things that we ask for from the genie you know which might be status what we find is money is number one and then career success status is number two and then relationships number three.
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Relationships are still good, you know, it s fine because it s very important for happiness.
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But as I mentioned some time back, people often rate money and status far lower than happiness, right?
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And yet here they have a golden opportunity to ask for anything and everything from this all-powerful, all-knowing genie, and they fail to ask for happiness.
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So we extended this genie question insight into a number of studies.
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And in one study, we actually had people imagine the scenario.
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They walk into a salad bar,
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and they can take anything from the salad bar, put it on their plate, and they walk up to the counter and pay about $7 a pound, right?
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And in this scenario, we asked people to imagine that they love, love, love chickpeas.
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They love eating it, but they absolutely hate grilled chicken, right?
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Pound for pound, the grilled chicken obviously costs more.
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It s just more expensive as an item.
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And the question was, what should a happiness maximizer do?
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That was our first question.
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Close to 100%, almost everybody thought, you know, in responding to this question,
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that you should not take any grilled chicken on your plate at all because, you know, so what if it costs more?
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You re not going to enjoy it, right?
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So the idea of eating that salad is to eat something tasty and healthy and chickpeas are just as healthy and you enjoy it.
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So take the chickpeas and avoid the grilled chicken.
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So people seem to have the clarity when looked at from the lens of, okay, what should I do if I were to maximize my happiness?
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But another set of participants, we didn t ask them this question of what should you do if you wanted to maximize your happiness?
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We just asked them, what would you do?
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And in this scenario,
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Only about 75% said that they would completely avoid the grilled chicken.
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So what it suggests to us is that close to 20, 25% of the people are willing to sacrifice their happiness for the sake of value for money in this context.
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It might seem like a small number, 25, 20, 25%, but when you add it up over the hundreds and thousands of decisions we make every day, right?
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you re leaving a lot of happiness on the table.
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The big thing that emerges from this is that people tend to devalue happiness.
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They tend to somehow, on the one hand, think happiness is very important, and they re not lying.
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Happiness is very important.
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But on the other hand, when you observe them behaving, when they take action, they seem to somehow sacrifice happiness for other goals.
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Why do people do that?
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It seems like such an obvious mistake that leads to long-term dissatisfaction, and yet we do this.
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I mean, you d mentioned earlier, oh, it s good that you re aware of this because it gives you more potential in order to avoid it, but is awareness all we need in order to avoid this type of paradox?
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Because you re right.
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hundreds if not thousands of decisions each day, if we do this only one quarter of the time, in air quotes, only, we re gonna make a lot of bad decisions that don t maximize happiness throughout our day, let alone our entire life, and some of those are gonna be huge decisions, like career choice, do I wanna have kids or not?
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Stuff like that, you re gonna choose wrong, and that s terrible, that s a terrifying consequence.
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Yeah, I absolutely agree, and in fact, we do have, as you know, one experiment where we actually look at
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job choices that MBAs make and we document this fundamental happiness paradox in that context too.
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So a very important context where people are sacrificing happiness.
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My answer to your question on how to kind of overcome this is just being aware of it enough.
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To some extent it is.
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It does seem like we have one study where we send an email out to these participants just telling them that, remember that
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ultimately what you want to do is maximize your happiness or enhance your happiness.
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Just remember that, right?
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Just that simple reminder, receiving it on an everyday basis seems to steer people in the direction of recognizing what s the happiness-maximizing choice, right?
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So one participant in that study actually wrote that instead of, when I came back home and I was tired, instead of sitting in front of the TV and just vegging out, I actually told myself, oh, I need to go and play with my son.
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I just played some ball with him, and I actually felt very good after it.
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I felt much happier.
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So it seems like just reminding yourself that ultimately what you want out of life is to lead a happier, more meaningful, more fulfilling life and reprioritizing happiness in a sense can work.
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But I would also add that it s very important to kind of put yourself on the path towards making more deep-seated changes.
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Deep-seated changes whereby you re not pursuing superiority.
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That s not your main way of motivating yourself or gaining mastery and skills in what you do.
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If you re not somebody who s like being overly controlling, if you go on these paths,
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chances are that you re going to repeatedly kind of commit this fundamental happiness paradox.
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So just that simple reminder is not going to do it in the long run.
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But it s a good start to become aware of this idea of devaluing and that you might be prone to it.
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And then use that as a starting point to build in more kind of habits and exercises in your life that kind of trigger a series of more deep-seated changes.
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Sure, tons of exercises in the book.
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We ll link to the book and we ll link to some of the exercises in the show notes as well.
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I d love to dig a little bit deeper into why we devalue happiness.
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The first reason that I thought was really obvious and yet elusive at the same time was we don t really have a clear and concrete idea of what happiness actually is and that s where everything just sort of goes wrong from there because since we don t know what it is,
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It s abstract and then it s just a big snowball that goes down the hill really really rapidly fall down the stairs.
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Can you explain the fluency effect essentially since it s so abstract it causes
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all these other problems, you call it the fluency effect.
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I thought that was fascinating because I see all this happening kind of in real time since reading the book, and I see a lot of people doing the same thing as well.
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Yeah, so one way in which we found out that this is a big reason why people devalue happiness is we followed up the genie question with another question.
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We asked people who did not wish for happiness why they did not have happiness on their wish list.
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is happiness not that important to you?
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Typically, the participants would come back to us and tell us, no, no, no, it is very important to me, but I don t know what I would get in return.
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if I ask the genie for happiness.
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I don t know if the genie understands my definition of happiness.
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And then we would dig deeper into, okay, what is your definition of happiness?
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Then people would start floundering, saying, I know what happiness is when I experience it, but I can t kind of put it in words.
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And right there is the problem, right?
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Because what the fluency effect shows is that if a concept is abstract to you,
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it s not concretely defined in your mind, then you re going to devalue it.
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There was a neat study done where they looked at packaging for different kinds of products.
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So imagine that you walk into a grocery store and you see two brands of cough syrup.
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The only difference between the two brands really is that the packaging on one brand looks pretty and neat and the boundaries are sharply defined.
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You can read what it says.
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and the other one is kind of blurry and smudged up a little bit, right?
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Which brand are you likely to buy?
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The answer is, you re more likely to buy the first brand, just because it s easier to read.
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That s the fluency effect.
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If something is easier to understand, if something is more graspable, mind-wise, you re going to give it a higher priority.
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That s what the fluency effect says.
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If you extend it to this context, what it means is that the more concrete your definition of happiness is, the more you have an idea of what happiness means to you, the more you re going to value it.
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So that s the first thing that we recommend that you do.
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That s the first exercise.
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You know, the first part of the first exercise is to define happiness in a way that s concrete to you.
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One thing that this led to that I thought was a huge problem, and again, saw this in myself and saw this in a lot of my friends, is the problem of what you call medium maximization, which, since the goal happiness is more or less vague, let s just accept that for now, we forget about that end goal and instead pursue the means or the mediums, or media, I guess, to that end goal.
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So instead of saying, I want to be happy where it s not measurable and it doesn t seem like a smart goal for people to have,
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you say, okay, well what does that mean?
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Well, it means I have enough money.
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So you say, okay, I need to have enough money, and then you end up just focused on money, which unfortunately leads you away from happiness.
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So we end up falling prey to medium maximizations.
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Instead of looking to ask for happiness, like in the genie question, we get so caught up then in chasing money, we forget about why we wanted that money in the first place, or that career in the first place, or that girlfriend, or wife, or family, or whatever house in the first place.
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It completely becomes the entire goal instead of a means to another goal, and you end up going in these vastly different directions.
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But money s not the only medium that distracts us from happiness.
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We have other goals that are maybe less tangible, like the desire to be right, or to be seen as smart, or to be beautiful, to be famous.
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All those things can distract us.
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What do we do about that?
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You have a story about being in the glasses store, trying to get some new specs, and you had to sort of really wrap your mind around this whole idea and take action on it, which I think, as aware as you are of all these concepts, it seems like you still fall prey to some of this.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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So medium maximization is another reason why we devalue happiness, as you rightly pointed out.
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we believe, and to some extent we are right, that certain things are going to make us feel happier.
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You know, and when you get a bigger paycheck, you do in fact become happier.
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When you get closer to a friend that you desire to be closer to, then you do get happier, right?
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But what we end up forgetting is that these things are just mediums to the end state of happiness.
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And after some time, we are going to get used to that new level of money, and then it s not going to bring us more happiness.
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And so we end up wanting more money.
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And then when we do get that more money, we end up feeling happier.
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And then over time, we just learn almost by classical conditioning, right?
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I mean, like the Pavlovian dog who ends up salivating when the bell gets rung because every time the bell rings, it s given lunch, right?
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And then after some time, you don t need the lunch to get it to salivate.
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You just ring the bell and it salivates.
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We kind of end up in that situation where we just get shown money and then we start salivating, thinking that it s going to make us happier, even though it may not make us happier or at least want
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Give a sustained case of happiness and we end up chasing it over and over and over again until we find ourselves on what s called a hedonic treadmill right we have to run faster and faster chasing these things these mediums in order to stay in the same place.
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So that s one problem devaluing happiness is another problem and the third one is that we have all these negative misconceptions about happiness that is gonna make me lazy or it s gonna make me.
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selfish or it s going to be fleeting and so on and so forth that I talk about in the book.
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But altogether, what they add up to is this fundamental happiness paradox, right?
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I mean, because we choose mediums rather than happiness itself, we tend to deprioritize happiness.
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in favor of prioritizing these mediums.
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Because we don t have a concrete idea of what happiness is, we end up chasing those things that we have a much more concrete idea of, like a bank balance, or power, or prestige, etc.
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Because we feel happiness might make us selfish, or it s fleeting, or that it ll make us lazy, we end up again devaluing happiness.
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So I had this
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funny thing happened to me that you mentioned.
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I walked into the store and by this time, by the way, Jordan, I d been researching on this topic for over three years, right?
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Conducting studies on fundamental happiness paradox.
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And I walked into the store and I see that there s a sale going on.
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Buy one pair of glasses and get the second pair of equal or lesser value for half off.
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And I found this really amazing looking pair and it was $120 and I said, okay, I m gonna buy this.
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Now, let me take advantage of this sale and I started looking around.
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for a second pair that was, you know, also good looking.
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And I found this really great looking pair, not as good as the first pair, of course, but, you know, very, very good looking pair.
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And I was about to buy it when I flipped around to look at the price and it was $70.
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And I felt like, you know, you could almost see the wind deflating from me almost.
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I felt that I was kind of losing $50 by buying a second pair that was so much lesser than the first pair.
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And so I started looking around for another 10 minutes for another pair of glasses that was just as good looking as the second pair, but was $120, just so that I could take advantage of this.
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And then suddenly, you know, something snapped in me and I recognized here I was, you know, researching on this topic of fundamental happiness paradox whereby you prioritize value for money and other things more than you prioritize happiness.
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And despite having researched this topic, here I was about to commit that very sin.
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The second pair, a good-looking pair, was the one that was going to make me happy.
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So what if it was $70?
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You know, it was almost as if I could have given that pair to the store owner, right, the clerk, and he could have erased the $70 and put in $120, and I would have been happier.
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You know, that s what it amounted to.
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So I ended up, you know, kind of smiling to myself, and I walked out with that $70 pair as the second pair.
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And I have to say that I ve gotten some compliments on it.
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Good, on the glasses or on the decision-making process?
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Yeah, on the glasses, on the glasses, yeah.
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It goes back to your earlier point, which is it s important not to pursue
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or chase happiness, even though we re supposed to maximize happiness, we can t turn around and pursue it, because otherwise we start doing this kind of weird brain exercise, or I should say trap, where we start to compare how we feel now with how we would like to feel, and since of course we always want to feel happier than we currently do, we re always unhappy wherever we are if we re pursuing happiness.
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That s kind of a tough concept to wrap your mind around,
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You re supposed to go for happiness, but you re not supposed to chase it so hard that you make yourself unhappy doing it, because then you end up, again, unhappy.
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So it s this weird, vicious cycle that you have to be really careful to get off the merry-go-round at the right time.
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Yeah, so this is what makes this topic so fascinating, right?
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I mean, we recognize that happiness is important to us, and then once we recognize it, we start kind of putting in place things in our life that lead to happiness, but then we re not supposed to chase it.
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How can you prioritize happiness without chasing it?
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But it is very important.
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As you pointed out, you know, one big reason why when you chase happiness, you become unhappy is because when you chase happiness, you start monitoring how happy you are to how happy you d like to be.
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And you end up being unhappy about being unhappy.
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Yeah, so but at the same time, Jordan, I mean, happiness is not unusual in this regard.
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There are many other goals in our life that are very similar to happiness.
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We just don t kind of spend time thinking about this.
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And so we don t see it that it s actually similar to
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goals like sleep, right?
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I mean, everybody recognizes or most people do that getting a good night s sleep is so important, right?
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Or love, you know, finding love is so important.
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But if you chase sleep too directly, right?
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I mean, you re lying down in bed, imagine that you tell yourself, okay, I m about to fall asleep there, I almost fell asleep there.
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That s more of a recipe for insomnia than it is for falling asleep.
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And likewise, I mean, chasing somebody the object of your love too intently is also going to reduce your chances
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of actually attacking that person.
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You re going to be a bit of a creep if you kind of constantly chase this person around.
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So there are other goals which also have the same kind of property to them that you can t chase them to directly, even though they re very important.
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And what we do with those goals is that we learn to prioritize those goals.
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And how do we do that?
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We do that by setting up a set of habits.
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We re acquiring a set of habits, setting up a life plan or lifestyle that makes it more likely for us to be able to achieve those goals.
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So with sleep, it might be, you know,
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eating something heavy after 9 p.m.
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or something, exercising, you know, taking a warm shower, et cetera, with love.
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It is to kind of, you know, maybe even play a little bit hard to get, right?
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Doing something magical and then vanishing.
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We know how to kind of play that game when it comes to sleep and love, but because we re not educated on happiness, I think many of us kind of don t know, and we end up chasing happiness too directly, you know, and monitoring it and being desperate for it.
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And that s one of the worst mistakes you can make.
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You re not gonna be happy if you do that.
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And you re pointing out in the book that even as kids we re exposed to things like this, because it s easy to say, oh, adults, you know, we do this, we have so many bad habits, but even as kids we re exposed to things, feedback in subtle or not so subtle ways, peg us as inferior to others around us, and again, going back to superiority,
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social programming, media, social media, things like that really start to peg us down, and then of course we re going to chase happiness and superiority, and this explains a lot.
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This one especially hit close to home.
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You wrote, there s another important reason that we seek superiority.
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Being superior gives us the autonomy or freedom to be who we are.
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findings show that higher status individuals don t feel the need to watch what they say or otherwise restrict their behaviors, and those of lower status, by contrast, feel the pressure to become more accommodating.
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So, superiority then is not just about survival, and I ve seen the shift in myself going from lower status to quote-unquote higher status, and it does change things.
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It does become about self-esteem, and it becomes about autonomy and mastery, and it becomes really obvious that
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again, it s not just the narcissistic side of people or the ego side, it s a deep-seated need that a lot of us have.
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And unfortunately, no matter how successful we are, if we constantly chase this, it s always relative.
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So you could technically be a billionaire, but you could still be low status if you re hanging out with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Warren Buffet, you know, they re probably still like, oh, well, I don t have a space company, right?
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You know, that still goes on.
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So although that superiority enhances happiness levels,
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It turns out, just like chasing happiness, the pursuit of superiority lowers your happiness levels, too, because it s impossible to come up with objective yardsticks for assessing our standing relative to other people in almost any other domain.
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So we end up with what you d mentioned before, which are these proxies for the factors of happiness, money, power, fame, and now we end up measuring something that s twice removed from what would actually make us happy.
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Right, we re going, okay, I wanna be happy.
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Well, how do I do that?
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I gotta have these things met.
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Money, power, company.
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Okay, great.
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And you get obsessed with those goals and then it forces us to focus on the proxy instead of what makes us happy.
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And this I can t beat enough into everyone listening here because this is always this flag, this red herring
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that s hanging off in the distance where you say, alright, I wanna be happy, I gotta do this, so you look at Twitter fame and you go, okay, Twitter followers, but the reason you wanted fame is so you can be happy, so you re not even chasing happiness, you re not even chasing fame, you re chasing Twitter followers, no wonder you re frickin  miserable.
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Indeed, yeah, absolutely, you hit the nail on the head.
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That s not the only reason, again, I mean, what happens when you chase these extrinsic yardsticks is not only is it twice removed, as you put it, from what you really wanted, which was happiness,
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Extrinsic yardsticks have this property of high levels of adaptation.
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You kind of quickly get used to a certain number of followers, right?
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And then you want more.
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And then when you do get more, you get this spike in happiness, which is very seductive.
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And that s what keeps us going back to it, right?
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In one sense, is that we know from experience that it does deliver happiness.
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The problem is it s very short-lived, right?
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A couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, and then you want more of the same thing and so on, and then the game continues forever.
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So you end up, first of all, on an impossible growth curve, because if tomorrow I end up winning the lottery and I have an extra million dollars, I m pretty stoked, but two weeks later, it s starting to wear off, and two years later, it s like it never happened, right?
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Even if it s a hundred million dollars.
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So the idea is, even if you win $100 million or you build a $10 billion company, you have to keep doing that in order to maintain that marginal increase in happiness.
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And first of all, it s so obvious that that can t work.
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We look at materialism and those materialist desires, and you see the downward spiral of materialism come into play because we re thinking, oh, well, okay, great, I built this company.
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I m happy, well let me buy something so that I have some of the trappings, some of the invisible or impossible measuring stick of happiness.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, okay, that didn t work, or didn t last anyway.
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So we end up on the treadmill, on the hamster wheel of buying things or materialism, which everybody listening right now knows, materialism is bad, and yet we do,
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something very similar when it comes to actual achievement, and smarter people, smart and successful people, tend to do with achievement what maybe less educated people tend to do with materialism.
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People who are uneducated and not as well informed on this would buy a flat screen TV, video games, or a nice car, try to get a nicer house, and us educated people sitting here chuckling to ourselves all smugly about how smart we are because we re not materialist, are killing ourselves trying to build something so that we get the exact same set of feelings.
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Yeah, absolutely, and I m not sure that the less smart and less successful are necessarily more materialistic.
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I don t think so either.
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I think that we are just as culpable of it, maybe at just a higher level, yeah.
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Yeah, I agree.
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It just seems so obvious when you see some people buying things to make themselves happy, but then you get people who listen to the show who are very smart and educated.
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I tend to look at people who are materialists and go, oh, if you only knew, and then I turn around and work myself to death on my business.
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I understand.
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I m not saying we know better.
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I m saying it looks like we know better until you dig a little bit, and then we re exactly the same.
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Why is it bad, then, to continually chase the superiority?
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Because, again, going back to comparing ourselves with others, there s a drive here that s actually quite healthy.
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It s only when it gets out of control that it becomes bad.
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Yeah, I do think that if you keep your focus on, well, I want to develop into somebody who experiences a lot of these so-called flow states where you get so lost in the activity that you don t even notice the passage of time.
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Those kind of states where you get completely immersed in an activity, where you and the activity become one, so to speak, are very, very meaningful for people universally.
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And those are very desirable states to be in from the standpoint of happiness.
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from the standpoint of carving some meaning out of your life and from the standpoint of acquiring skills and nurturing those skills that you were given when you were born, your aptitudes or genetically endowed skills.
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So it s very important from all those perspectives.
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And you can actually progress towards acquiring those skills and experiencing flow states by comparing yourself to other people and saying that, yeah, I want to be better than this person at singing or journaling or whatever it is.
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Where I think you cross the line is when your self-esteem and how you regard yourself starts getting tethered to how you stack up compared to other people.
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Then I think what happens is that now you re kind of addicted to coming out superior to other people in order to feel happy.
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And when that happens, you ve basically handed out the keys to your happiness to the external world.
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Then all kinds of problems start kicking in.
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You could potentially be the
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numero uno, you know, the richest person or whatever it is that you re trying to do in your field for a while.
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And you might feel very happy and proud in that moment.
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But sooner or later, somebody is going to catch up with you.
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And sooner or later, you re going to get used to being superior by so much compared to the next person.
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And then you re going to need more and more and more.
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And that s when you lose the plot and you end up becoming miserable.
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So you ve got to be really careful.
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You know, I mean, you can compare yourself to other people, motivate yourself by saying that, yeah, I want to be better than that person so that
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I can get to experience these flow states where I get completely lost and immersed so that I can kind of evolve in the direction of becoming more skilled and gain this mastery.
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But once you lose sight of those goals and you start looking at the social comparisons in order to feel the sense of pride, feel the sense of superiority over other people, and that s your primary driver, it s not to become a master of your domain, then I think that you re setting yourself up for a lot of unhappiness.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it undermines our success, and so on the one hand, we have to be careful about watching out for situations that make us feel insecure, because of course, when we feel insecure, that s when we re more likely to seek superiority, and our need for superiority, as you wrote, is more pronounced when we feel insecure.
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And then on the other hand, we ve gotta figure out how to mitigate the need for superiority without jeopardizing our chances of succeeding, which are driven in large part by the drive given to us by the need to feel, at least at some point, and for some reason, at certain times only,
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SPEAKER_00
that feeling of superiority so it s a delicate balance in the way and like you said that flow state the flow state in general becomes something that s really nice to have because then you re able to pursue flow or at least go for the flow state instead of the superiority state which as you write.
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is a much more sustainable source of happiness than chasing superiority itself.
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But easier said than done.
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You ve got great exercises and practicals in the book as well that involve a lot of journaling and things like that, and I think those are brilliant.
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Of course, people should definitely have a look at those.
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I d love to talk as well about why extrinsic rewards, after a while, hurt our performance.
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Because, especially when it comes to flow state, which is a favorite topic here on The Art of Charm,
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It seems obvious that, look, why shouldn t we seek to achieve these things?
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Extrinsic rewards, materialism is one thing, but look, we ve got to have some kind of goal.
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We ve got to have some kind of reward based on the outcome of our pursuit.
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Why are these a problem?
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You studied this.
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SPEAKER_00
You proved they hurt our performance.
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They don t actually help.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so if you use those extrinsic rewards in order to kind of motivate yourself to progress towards mastery, right?
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And that s the role that they play, then it s good, actually, you know, it can actually serve a very useful purpose in the sense that you don t get caught up in this medium maximization kind of a trap.
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And you can actually aspire to
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experience sustainably higher levels of happiness as you progress towards mastery.
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The problem comes in when those extrinsic rewards become substitutes for what you really want in life, which is a sense of mastery or a sense of connection with other people or a sense of autonomy or control over your life.
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And when they become end goals in themselves,
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Then what happens is for a variety of reasons, including materialism, including adaptation, including the company of people that you get to keep.
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Everybody knows the materialistic people and their company is kind of miserable if you think about it.
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When you hang out at a party, they are the ones who are constantly name dropping or telling you about the fancy places that they went to visit last summer.
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the kinds of restaurants that they ve been to for dinner, et cetera.
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After some time, you can t take any more of it.
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Just miserable, the company of materialistic people.
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And so those are the reasons why chasing these extrinsic rewards is not so good for you.
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Ends up not just not making you happier, it makes you miserable.
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but also not really promoting your chances of success.
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I did mention some time back that if you pursue these extrinsic rewards, you can use it to motivate yourself to become better at what you do.
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But you ve got to be really careful, you know, because very quickly without you realizing it, you can lose that plot.
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And rather than pursuing those in order to become better at what you do, you might end up chasing them directly in and of themselves.
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So what I propose is an alternative.
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And in some ways, this is a difficult alternative if you re addicted to chasing superiority through these extrinsic rewards to motivate ourselves.
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But if you can kind of at least conceptually understand that there are a whole bunch of problems with that, and therefore look for an alternative way to motivate yourself, which is the pursuit of flow.
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All of us have experienced flow at one level or the other, particularly as children.
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You know, activities, maybe it was climbing up a tree, maybe it was kind of dissecting a bug, right?
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Or maybe it was swimming or whatever, or climbing a rock face, et cetera, playing tennis.
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we ve experienced flow.
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And if we can just devote our time and attention to identifying those activities that routinely, reliably get us into states of flow, right?
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And if we string together a sufficiently large number of flow inducing events or experiences in our life, then we have no option but to become better at it.
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So there s this obvious way in which to motivate ourselves to find our flow, find the things that we re really passionate about, that we re good at, we enjoy doing, and just devote a lot of time and attention to it.
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we would end up becoming masters.
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And once we become masters or progress sufficiently far enough towards mastery, other people will start recognizing us for this thing that we do really well.
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Like you do, right?
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I mean, Jordan, I m sure that you spend many hours afloat in the process of interviewing and learning how to ask questions and put together a podcast.
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And that, in the end, is the real reason for your success.
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It s not your desire to be superior to other people.
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You mentioned some time back that you can t help but get caught up in that.
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I m sure that you also recognize that that s not what got you to be successful.
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It s your ability to get into flow.
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It s your ability to really identify the kinds of talents that you have that are different from anything else that anybody can bring.
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Sure, yeah, you have something superior to them.
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Also, your ability to kind of nurture those and get into these states where you completely lose track of time.
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That s really the reason for the unsung hero, so to speak, of your success.
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I would agree.
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And so it s very important to kind of recognize that and keep your focus on that and realize that it is the flow states that lead to success and to happiness more so than the desire to compare to other people.
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If anything, comparing to other people, which is something I mentioned earlier, I do get caught in, that s annoying every time.
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I very rarely see the positive side of that.
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When I do see the positive side of that, it s because I look at somebody who s really killing it in the podcast or talk show realm, and I go, oh, this is possible.
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Oh, this is a good idea this person had.
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Or, wow, look at them stretch the boundaries in that area.
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What can I learn from it?
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But I have to stop there and catch myself.
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Otherwise, I start going, oh man,
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I m not doing enough, and it ruins the happiness that I get from being in flow and doing the interviewing and everything like that.
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And you write about this as well, that a lot of this involves beating ourselves up, having negative self-talk, and some people think, okay, well, I can deal with that because I m doing this for my family.
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but you look at the studies that you ve created here, or that you cite in the book as well, and there s always this unhappiness with pursuing the wrong goals, the superiority, chasing the materialism, the neediness and avoidance and things like that, that it causes in relationships, always rears its ugly head.
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So basically, if you re doing this wrong, you re not just harming yourself, you re harming your kids, your wife, your family, and even in the book, you include the loneliness scale, the experiences in close relationships scale,
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self-compassion exercises.
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I mean, that s not coincidentally in there.
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It s in there because doing this wrong screws with everything that you hold dear in your whole life.
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It s not just you re beating yourself up.
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You re probably doing all this work so that you can make these people happy, and at the same time, you re making them all miserable and isolating yourself from those same people.
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It becomes a deeper problem, I think, than people realize, and it happens quickly.
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So this is why I think that you can, in a sense, get on the win-win-win path or the lose-lose-lose path.
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I think that if you prioritize happiness, I think you end up quickly recognizing that what seems like a self-centered goal to want to lead a happier life ends up becoming a goal that is beneficial for everybody.
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You recognize that by coming to this insight that you can t really be happy if you re self-centered.
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You can t really be happy if you re chasing superiority.
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if you re needy in relationships, if you want to control other people and control outcomes.
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You can only be truly happy if you re pursuing flow, and if you re kind and compassionate to other people, where you want to give and love, you are willing to take some, what I call internal control, control over your own mind, and responsibility for your own happiness, rather than blaming other people for it.
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Once you go down that path, or taking the personal responsibility, and pursuing flow and so on, as you rightly pointed out, then, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, your life starts falling into place.
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and your relationships get better.
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I ve had so many of my students say that.
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At the end of the course, I have them write what s called a retrospective exercise, where I have them maintain a journal for the period of the semester, and I have them go over the entries, look at the broad arc of their life over the past three or four months, what has happened.
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Invariably, I get people reporting that, I didn t even notice these changes, but I ve gotten more positive over time in what I write.
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And I ve also noticed that other people are happier with me.
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And I seem to be less stressed out about things not working out as they wanted them to, you know, all kinds of positive changes basically coming about.
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because you ended up pursuing what seemed like, initially at least, somewhat selfish goal of leading a happier, more fulfilling life.
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Which is why I think of this goal of leading a happier life to be a noble goal.
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You know, I think there can be no nobler goal than seeking fulfillment and happiness.
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I 100% in agreement with that.
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We teach a lot of some of the more advanced, or at least they come later in the book, concepts that you have as well regarding internal control, cognitive reappraisal drills, we do a lot of at our live events, especially when it comes to the trust, which you talk about a lot later on in your work as well, being more proactively trusting, getting other people to trust you, reframing negative events and things like that.
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I just think it s really interesting looking at, especially what you ve done with negative events,
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showing that the very events that we consider to be the most negative in our lives continue to be the ones that we later come to cherish.
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I would love to kind of jump over some of this and skip to that, because I thought that concept was very, very powerful as well.
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You re right.
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I mean, by the way, that s a quote from Sonia Lubomirsky s book, The Myths of Happiness, and she writes that, you know, when you ask people to recall the best event and the worst event that happened in the past year, people are often surprised to note that it s one and the same event.
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And what it suggests is that what we think of as negative events, as they re going on right now, somehow end up sparking those set of changes, new perspectives, if you will, that make us learn and grow and evolve in ways that, in retrospect, are very, very useful for us.
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And those are the things that end up being the more meaningful things, those negative events.
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That insight, that seemingly currently negative, might later, two years down the road, we might look back and in hindsight,
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appreciate as our most cherished event is a very beautiful insight because what it does is to me at least I mean one of the logical conclusions you can take from that is that you can look at your current negative events whatever it is that you re going through right now and that you ve judged as being negative and ask yourself
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You know i m really knowledgeable enough to know all the ways in which this event that i think is negative is gonna trigger these downstream consequences open new doors of opportunity of learning of growth of meaning that how can i be so confident that this is actually a negative event how can i be confident that.
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Later on i m not gonna look back and cherish that this event has been.
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one of the most meaningful events, right?
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And that, you know, self-awareness, you know, ability to step back a little bit, ask yourself this question.
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Maybe this is a beautiful thing that s happening right now.
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How fascinating that I failed to get into that college, right?
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Or how fascinating that I broke an arm right now.
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If you can get yourself to just ask that little seed of a question even, right, even if you don t fully ask it, even if you ask it just a little bit, I think it s gonna change how you view life.
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What it s gonna do is it s gonna
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give you what I call an implicit trust in life.
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It s going to make you feel that whatever happens to me, even though I might be completely convinced right now that this is an unwanted thing, this is a negative thing, I start looking at that very event and wondering, maybe this is a good thing, right?
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I mean, it kind of
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opens up this ability to trust life.
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Eventually, what hopefully will lead to is what I call a belief in a benign universe.
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And the idea is that you end up believing that the fundamental nature of the universe, or if you don t believe in a god or whatever, of nature itself, is to help you grow and learn and evolve into a better, more happier, more kind, more compassionate, more skilled human being.
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So you look at everything that happens to you from that lens of, okay, what are the ways in which this event
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could help me grow and become a better person and once you do that then you become more resilient become more optimistic and so on and the real beautiful thing about this is that most people think that oh you know what that s delusional to think that the universe is benign or you know everything that happens to me so that i can learn and grow.
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But really, what are the alternatives, right?
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I mean, you can believe that the universe is malign.
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Is that any more realistic or more scientific?
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Or you can believe that it s completely indifferent to you, right?
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Which many smart and successful people think that s the most rational view to hold.
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But in reality, it turns out that each of these views, life is benign or malign or indifferent, is equally scientifically valid.
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Whatever you believe, you re gonna see evidence for it.
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This is because of what s called the placebo effect in other contexts.
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Basically, show me a person who believes that life is benign and he or she will come up with lots and lots and lots of evidence.
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for that hypothesis and show me a person who believes life is malign or indifferent, they likewise are gonna come up with lots of evidence for supporting their theory.
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And so scientifically speaking, there is no theory that s more valid than the other, so you might as well believe in something that is more productive for you, more useful for you.
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And from that perspective or from that question, there s absolutely no doubt that believing that life is benign or universe is benign is much more productive.
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There s so much in this book, again, I wanna just reiterate that, that I read the whole thing, which I often do, however, there s a lot of practicals in here.
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Scarcity versus abundance path, something you call the happiness MBA, which is essentially a flow chart to looking at different situations and running these happiness exercises, which are aimed at things like mitigating the scarcity orientation, stopping you from pursuing
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or I should say chasing superiority and things like that.
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This is so useful and the happiness idea is so powerful and healthy, the win, win, win, win, as you put it.
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Why hasn t the recipe caught on?
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I mean, what s the deal?
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How come nobody seems to know this?
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Or we know it and then we kind of go, eh, I gotta go to work, see you later.
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What s the deal there?
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Yeah, so in the book I talk about a couple of reasons why it s not really caught on.
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And one of the big reasons is
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that you have to remember, Jordan, for vast swaths of time in our evolution as a species, we have lived in, objectively speaking, a scarcity-oriented universe.
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Food was scarce.
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Homes were scarce.
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Security even was scarce.
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You were often attacked by animals or by
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inclement weather or by marauding tribes and so on and so forth.
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It s only recently in the evolution of our species that a critical mass of us has actually experienced in objective terms a sense of abundance.
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And so given our evolutionary past and our hardwired tendencies, we talked about this earlier too, right?
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It s not like a switch that you can just switch off.
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So that s part of it, just the inertia, so to speak, of the past.
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The second big reason is that only in the last about 15-20 years, researchers systematically explored this question of, okay, what does it take to lead a happy and fulfilling life, right?
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I mean, before that, we had a lot of old wisdom traditions from religions and spirituality, and as it turns out, you know, for the most part, they had it right.
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if you look at the Bible or look at the scriptures in Islam or Hinduism and so on, they do talk a lot about kindness and compassion being important, a sense of surrendering to the universe or to the environment or to forces beyond your control being very important for happiness.
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So they did have a lot of things right, but for a scientifically minded person, for the smart and successful target audience that you and I are talking about here, that sense of faith, you know, just believe it and you ll see greater happiness, wasn t good enough.
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They wanted to see scientific evidence.
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And that s a big difference now, that we actually see a lot of scientific evidence on this topic.
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And therefore, my hunch is that 15, 20 years down the road, this is not going to be news.
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That if you pursue happiness, if you re sincere about it, that it s not only going to lead to a happier life for you, it s also going to lead to greater success.
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It s going to make you a kinder person.
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And overall, as a society, if a critical mass of people is really very authentically interested in the idea of leading a happier, more
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fulfilling life, it s going to improve the world, the society s productivity.
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We re going to make more meaningful progress.
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We re not going to be doing things that cause a lot of harm to our future generations, to animals, to our rivers and polluting our environment and so on.
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And so these are just a couple of big reasons I feel that happiness hasn t gained that much attention in the past.
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And this idea that the recipe for a happy life is also a recipe for a successful and
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a better, you know, nobler kind of compassionate existence has not really caught on.
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But I m really hopeful that in the next 20, 30 years, like I said, this is the time in which there s going to be a big change.
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And in fact, my prediction is that happiness as a topic is going to be
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a discipline, a course that is taught, starting even with, I would say, schools.
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Maybe not elementary schools, but certainly from high school onwards.
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Raj, thank you so much.
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If you re so smart, why aren t you happy?
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The link is in the show notes.
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Your course, your online and free course on happiness, is also going to be linked in the show notes.
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Really appreciate you taking the time today, Raj.
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Thank you so much, Jordan.
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I really, really enjoyed talking to you.
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You re awesome at what you do.
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Thanks so much, Raj.
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Absolutely, absolutely.
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You know, that was an interesting show.
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I really love the idea, first of all, of maximizing happiness in scientific ways, not just trying to be happy or thinking positively all the time regardless.
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There s a lot of things that smart and successful people do to sabotage our ability to be happy in the first place, going for those mistaken goals, those red herrings that distract us all the time, and of course, making the right decisions is a constant challenge, and what a good guy.
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I mean, yeah, of course, if a guy who studies happiness turned out to be kind of a dick, it would really negate the whole book,
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He s a great guy, really knows this stuff back and forth.
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Really glad to have him here today, and I hope everybody else found that useful as well.
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And of course, if you did, don t forget to thank him on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as his book, The Happiness Course, and some of the other resources we mentioned on the show.
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You can tap the album art in most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet
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this episode, that ll be right on your phone as well if you re using any sort of respectable podcast player.
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And I m on Twitter as well, at The Art of Charm.
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Tell me what you thought of the show if you get a chance.
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I also want to encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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It s all about improving your networking and connection skills, inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I m doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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They will make you a better networker.
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It will make you a better connector and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or text charmed to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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go ahead and tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.