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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 Neil Pasricha, author of The Happiness Equation.
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Happiness, kind of a buzzword.
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We hear it maybe too much.
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We re gonna talk today about not only some actual practical exercises and science behind becoming happier every day, but happiness is a learnable, teachable skill,
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and why you should never retire.
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And I know you re thinking, I m 25, I m not thinking about retirement.
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The things we re gonna learn today are gonna help you play along for the rest of your life.
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So enjoy this one with Neil Pazricha, and this is The Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger, and I m here with producer Jason.
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Happy time.
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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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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the questions.
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All right, here s Neil.
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So Neil, tell us what you do in one sentence.
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Hey Jordan, I increase happiness levels in organizations through simple models.
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Okay, happiness is a buzzword.
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It s trendy.
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Everybody s talking about it.
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I mean, even you said pre-show, there are 75,000 books on Amazon alone with the word happiness in the title.
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So, everybody s into the happiness thing.
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It s the latest thing.
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What s the deal?
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Why is happiness so trendy?
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I know, it s interesting, too, because you didn t quite say happiness fatigue, although I might go that far and just say, yeah, we re kind of tired of it.
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It s a nebulous term.
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It s something we ve been scratching at for a while, but I think the reason it s still so present is because we still aren t there yet.
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It turns out that the longest study ever done on happiness in society, which is Professor David Myers at Hope College, University of Michigan, another Michigan reference, he s been studying happiness in populations since 1955, and it turns out that 20% of people
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declare themselves to be happy.
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And it s been the same number since the 50s.
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They ve done this test every five years.
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So our wealth has gone up, access to technology has gone up, our availability of food, our mobility, everything s increased.
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But our happiness is flatlined.
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So part of it, I think, is that it s the nut that we haven t cracked yet.
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So, of course, a gigantic industry full of all kinds of interesting characters has emerged.
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But part of the reason we re so interested is because
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We have partly been promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it s something we re still pursuing.
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I mean, we ve gone to the freakin  moon.
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How come we haven t managed to figure out the happiness thing in all this time?
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You know, I put forward a model that is controversial, but it s something I really believe in, and I say that our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for 300,000 years, and for 299,950 of them,
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Our brains were oriented to do three things, which is look for problems, find problems, and solve problems.
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The classic running away from the saber tooth tiger example is always out there, but even the model of the world we ve created for ourselves is oriented around problem finding.
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So, you know, you get your blood test back.
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If you re me, you re like scanning for the high cholesterol.
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If you get a math test back, you re like scanning for the three problems you got wrong.
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Everything we do is problem scanning.
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Our brains are oriented towards that because that s what s led to our survival.
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I think we have to let ourselves off the hook for not being happy.
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We are oriented every day to look for problems.
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It s how we survive.
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And no wonder that happiness is being declared, and I think generally accepted now, as an exercise, something you can work on, a muscle you can develop, as opposed to something that we just are because we re not.
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So basically it s elusive because we re looking for other things.
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Yeah, exactly, like you get up in the morning, I get up in the morning, you see something, you find what s wrong with it.
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It is much easier to go through your day to find problems.
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If you think about the average person listening who may be working, what are you given once a quarter, once a year?
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You re given a job evaluation.
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The whole point of it is to tell you the three things you ve done wrong and you scan quickly for those three things to see if you are gonna be on a remedial plan or if you re gonna get like a 2% raise.
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and everything we re doing is oriented around that problem finding, so that s why the percent of our thoughts we can control, the happy thoughts, it s a lot more difficult to develop that.
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I actually read the whole book, and there s a lot of hand drawings in there, which I thought was kind of funny.
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I mean, maybe I just had a draft, but do you actually sketch out a lot of these little blocks that you use to create the exercises we re gonna discuss?
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Yeah, exactly.
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So, happiness equation s full of a bunch of hand drawings.
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They re all me drawing them with a Sharpie
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computer printer paper, which is probably not the right kind of paper to be using.
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It was a really fun idea when the publisher agreed to let me put hand drawings in the book, and it became a really annoying idea when they asked for revised versions of every drawing seven times, because I kept having to redraw all these tables and then courier them down to New York.
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So, yeah, those are all me drawing stuff by hand, partly because my wife and I, when we re thinking about happiness in our own lives, or success, or time, or whatever, we end up just sketching stuff out.
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It s just a nice way for us to think about things.
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What got you interested in all this?
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I mean, you argue in the book that the happiness model we re taught from a young age is actually completely backward.
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Did you figure this out by hitting a wall or what?
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Yeah, I mean exactly.
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If people have heard of my stuff before, it s not for the happiness equation, right?
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It s for the book of awesome and a thousand awesome things.
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And that s a project I started five years ago when my wife told me she didn t want to be married to me anymore and my best friend was on the verge of suicide and sadly did end up taking his own life.
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So from that painful few years spawned
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a series of books around the observation of simple pleasures.
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I m most known for flipping to the cold side of the pillow, or smelling bakery air, or hitting a string of green lights on your way to work.
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That s kind of what my name has been associated with.
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But then, so why this?
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Well, five years passed, I didn t write a thing.
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I started moving from the observation of awesome things to the application of one, like living again, starting to online date, starting to say yes to going out on Friday nights instead of staying home and writing every Friday night.
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and when I fell in love again to a woman named Leslie, and we ended up getting married, she told me she was pregnant on the flight home from our honeymoon, and when we landed at home in Toronto, I started writing a letter to this unborn child on what I thought was the most important thing I could tell him or her, which is how do you actually live a happy life?
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So the happiness equation, that book you have there, is the letter I wrote to my son
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and the origin of it is me trying desperately to say, okay, what s the manual, Jordan, or what s the action step you can take, and the 75,000 books I was looking at didn t show it to me, or at least I couldn t find it, so I wrote a letter to help guide this new human in case anything ever happened to me.
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That s what got me into the happiness world.
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Okay, and now, why is everything backward?
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How are things backwards in your mind?
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So my parents are immigrants, right?
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My mom s from Kenya, my dad s from India.
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They kind of beat a simple model into my head as a child.
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It goes like this, it s like, Neil, you do great work, then you have a big success, then you be happy.
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And that model is pretty well understood.
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You study hard, you get good grades, you get into a great school.
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You work really hard, you get promoted, you get more money, and you re happy.
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But all the positive psychology research by people who have been on your show before, but also people that are well-known in the field, like Sonja Lyubomirsky at University of California, Sean Acor, you know, all the research actually says, no, that s wrong.
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It s the opposite.
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Instead, if you be happy first,
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If you invest in your happiness at the beginning, then you get all kinds of positive outcomes.
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The great work follows.
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You re higher in productivity and creativity, et cetera, and then you have the big success.
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So we think we gotta start by working hard.
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Instead, we have to start by investing in our happiness.
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So essentially, we have to be happy first, and then do we actually end up doing good work as a result, or it just doesn t matter anymore because we re happy?
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Well, yeah, I mean, that s the beautiful thing.
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The meta-analysis that Dr. Sonja Lubomirski put together shows that our productivity goes up 31% when we re happy.
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We have 37% higher sales.
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We re three times more creative.
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Shawn Achor did a study that shows that we re 40% more likely to get that promotion that we ve been gunning for than people who aren t in a happier state.
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So yeah, happiness actually is worth the 20 minutes of investment it takes a day because everything else you want to follow in your life technically will because you re in a better place.
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And you know that to be true, right?
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I mean, you think about work or you re like, yeah, the happy guy is kind of the one you want on your team.
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It s the person that
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maybe pulls in a little extra.
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It s somebody that you enjoy presenting with or working with on a school project, whatever, but we know it to be true and the science suggests it is true.
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We are searching for it so desperately.
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We re not getting it yet.
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If you type in how to be into Google, the first dropdown is happy.
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Number two is pretty, number three is rich, number four is model, and then how to be a real estate agent.
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That s what we want next.
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We want to be happy first.
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And so people are looking for it because it is so elusive.
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There s a classic quote by Herman Hesse in Siddhartha, where he says, what can I tell you except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking,
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cannot find, and in this book, I try desperately to prevent people from looking for happiness, but instead, show them that it s already inside them.
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Every single one of the secrets is an internally-based, self-driven exercise.
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If it s already in there, how come we can t just think ourselves into a good mood whenever the hell we want?
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You know, you sort of say like, oh, well, my buddy or my friend is an optimist, they always see things on the bright side.
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Actually, I don t think that s the case.
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I think that the glass isn t half empty or full, it s refillable.
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And you can t just wake up in the morning and flip a switch.
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So what we know now is that there are specific exercises you can do in just 20 minutes a day to train your brain to be happy.
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They re things that your listeners are probably already familiar with, like meditation,
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writing down five gratitudes, journaling for 20 minutes, going on a brisk 20 minute walk.
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All of these little investments in yourself increase your happiness levels.
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I think another thing that s exacerbating a lot of the happiness versus unhappiness is there s this sort of new wave of people that are constantly, in my opinion, probably lying about being happy all the time, and it creates this insecurity complex in those of us that are normal, where we re like, crap, I m not happy all the time.
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It s like the social media thing, where everyone else s life looks amazing, and you re like, oh, mine s full of ups and downs.
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I m such a loser.
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I totally agree, Jordan, and you know, it s that classic Facebook newsfeed phenomenon where they actually have done studies that show when you block the newsfeeds of your friends, you may actually be happier because you re not exposing your director s cut life to their greatest hits, but that source of comparison is extended so far in this, you called it new generation, and yeah, I mean, you can t be the best singer in your school and be happy with that anymore because there s someone better on YouTube.
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You can t be the best writer in your class or your city or your town in the school paper because there s someone better.
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And that is so detrimental to our happiness, the source of comparison.
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I actually say in the happiness equation, you know, think of it like you ll never be number one out of seven billion in the world at anything.
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Let that be a relief to you.
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Be comfortable being number two to seven billion because we all grow up thinking that geniuses are at the next level and it can become
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huge problem when we start valuing the extrinsic motivators of stats or bestseller lists or job evaluations or salaries instead of valuing the intrinsic motivators we all have.
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What I m trying to say is, yeah, in that social media landscape, we are exposed and bombarded with so many extrinsic motivators and they can really be a huge detriment to our happiness.
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Right, so basically these extrinsic motivators, seeing other people achieve things, stats, likes, financial rewards, that type of thing, they block our other motivators?
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They get in the way of actual motivation?
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Absolutely, there s some incredible science behind this.
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They ve done studies, like Dr. Theresa Amabile is really famous for doing some studies.
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She did it at Brandeis University and Boston University, where they ve asked people, for example, to write poetry.
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and they tell one group of people, write poetry, you ll love it.
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Poetry is beautiful, you ll have fun playing with words, and they tell the other group, you can become a famous poet, you ll make a lot of money, you ll be judged and maybe given like a gift certificate afterwards.
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And when they compare the independent judges  result of who produced better poems, of course, as you may guess, those given the intrinsic reasons for doing it, the sort of you ll love it, it ll be great for you to have the word play, those people perform way better.
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And it s amazing, but the conclusion of the study, and there s a number of studies like this, is that extrinsic motivators actually in your mind block you from seeing your own intrinsic motivators.
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So what I m saying is if you want to teach your sister how to play the piano because you love your sister, great.
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If your mom says, well yeah, I ll give you a free ticket to the movies, if you teach her for half an hour, suddenly you become frustrated
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you re annoyed if she doesn t learn it, and you re out of there in half an hour.
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So we have to be careful because there s extrinsic motivators everywhere in life.
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They re called report cards.
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They re called job evaluations.
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They re called, for you and me, people in creative landscapes, all kinds of bestseller list rankings or podcast rankings or all of those things bombard us and actually trick our minds into valuing that more than the reason we re doing something in the first place.
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It makes perfect sense now that you explain it, but there s a part of me that s like, but I want to make a lot of money so that I m comfortable because then I won t have the stress that goes along with not having, but at what point do we need to stop worrying about that and then worry more about the quote unquote intrinsic motivators?
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Not only do I see what you re saying, I am you.
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I am so in your mental place and shoes all the time.
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The book I ve written is partly the advice and wisdom and studies I ve learned, but also it s advice to myself.
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The Happiness Equation just hit number one up here, I m in Canada.
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on the bestseller list and the international bestseller list.
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What am I thinking about this morning?
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I m like, why is it not on the New York Times bestseller list?
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What am I missing for the New York Times?
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What do they need from me?
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What do I have to see?
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It s like, I have to catch myself.
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I have to catch myself, Jordan, because then I have to say, wait a minute, I wrote a letter to my child.
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That s what I did.
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I wanted him to have something.
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If I m gone, or if he s searching for happiness, and I m like, did I do that?
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Yeah, am I proud of that?
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Yeah, and my wife is a really big grounding for me, because she s, you know, nursing a baby at home, looking at me like, sideways, saying like, who cares about the New York Times bestseller list, or whatever it is, and I can use the examples you ve given.
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I m like, but I need money, and it s about resources, and then I have to catch my brain, because it turns out,
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There are two wars happening in our head every day.
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And this is the problem.
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You ve got an amygdala in your brain firing fight or flight adrenaline hormones saying, I gotta have enough money to live.
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I m going to die and live in a cardboard box if I don t nail it.
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You ve got that happening.
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And you ve got the culture of more surrounding us all where
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everyone else you look at, the Keeping Up with the Joneses, has something greater than you, because they do.
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There is someone with a bigger book, or podcast, or marks at your school.
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You have to think to yourself then, get above that voice in your head and say, okay, I ve got an amygdala, a physiological element of my brain, flashing me warning signs, which may or may not be helpful, and I m living in a culture where I can compare myself to other people who have more than me all the time.
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Then I m hoping that relieves you and can take a step for yourself again.
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Yeah, I mean, the problem isn t that we have negative thoughts in our brain, the problem is we think we re not supposed to have any of those.
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Exactly, exactly.
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We wake up in the morning, or we go through a day, and when we have a bad day, we blame ourselves for it.
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What I m trying to say in the happiness equation is, no, let yourself off the hook, remember that you re partially a victim of your own evolutionary biology, and the culture that we live in, and then take a big breath, take a step back,
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and recall those things so that you can revalue your intrinsic reasons for doing something.
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And if you do that, and I ve got three tests in the book on how to find what it is you love, we can talk about that separately, but if you then do that, then I think that s a path to greater happiness, because now you re doing what you love, not what you re told to love.
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Great, so when we get back, I wanna hear about how evolution is causing all of us to be unhappy, or at least 80% of us.
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Back with Neil Pazricha.
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I m curious, how come evolution has just given us this crappy hand of Euchre throwback?
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How come it s given us this crappy hand of like, hey, you should be unhappy because evolution, because nature?
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What s going on there?
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Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, it s really hard for us to perceive this, of course, but the Earth has been around
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for billions of years.
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Animals, which we are, we are animals, have been around millions and millions and millions of years, and us, homo sapiens, we ve been around like a speck of time, right?
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And yet today, over that speck of time, like if you put our existence on a calendar year, like we only came to be on like December 31st to like 11.52 p.m.
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or something, like we just got here in the grand scheme of things, but yet we re the most dominant mammal on the planet.
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So, like, holy cow, these three pound piles of flesh hidden between our ears, these human brains, they turn out to be the most complex objects in the universe, and wowza, we can invent harpoons and spears and, like, chase animals down and, like,
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start hunting in tribes and start growing empathy and trust and relationships and putting ostrich eggs out to collect rainwater when everyone else would die because of the drought.
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My point is, our brains are awesome.
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They are super cool.
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You get one for free for 25,000 days, which is the average length of a life.
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You got one for free in your head.
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It s awesome.
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But the problem with it is that it s so good.
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It s the world s highest cranked computer ever.
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that the way it s so good is it is always scanning for problems.
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You are always scanning everywhere for like, is there gonna be something wrong?
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Is there gonna be a car coming I gotta be careful of?
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Do I have to protect my baby from this?
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Am I gonna get something wrong on a test that s gonna prevent me from being a doctor?
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That scanning machine is so powerful that it jolts us into this forward-thinking, aggressive, ambitious brain that achieves so much.
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Wow, we built skyscrapers.
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and iPhones and the Beatles and the Bible and like, you know, your favorite movie and your favorite album, like wow, isn t that incredible?
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But in exchange for that incredible brain, you get something that unfortunately puts you in a state of unhappiness a lot because you re always looking for problems.
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Yeah, basically life back then, and back then is not so long ago, is basically this brutal existence.
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So, our brain evolved to look out for things trying to kill, eat, hurt, starve, whatever, get us sick, not this post-modern notion of, you should just relax, everything s taken care of, calm down.
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I know, exactly.
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If you think about it in terms of math of hierarchy of needs, a lot of us, I mean, those fortunate enough to have the time to listen to a podcast, for example, a lot of us are scratching at the top, the self-actualization.
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We don t really worry about our shelter too often, unless you re on ramen noodles at college or whatever, but you don t worry about it that often, and so, because we re scratching at the top of the hierarchy, yeah, of course, it s gonna be a drain to sort of get there,
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no wonder it s so difficult to be happy.
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We ve got everything else covered and our brains are programmed to find problems.
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Right, because lasting happiness, that was risky.
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We gotta be on our toes.
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Yeah, imagine you were happy when your lifespan was still 30 and it was the year 10,000 B.C.
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You would be chilling out, relaxing on cool, to quote the Fresh Prince theme song, in an African savannah, 10 seconds before a giant jaguar pounced on you.
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and ate you for dinner, because you chilling out and being blissed out happy, that was not gonna pay off.
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And so, yeah, exactly, everything we do today, whether it s dropping a glass on the floor, or getting something wrong on a math test, or the guy in front of us doesn t go on a green light, it pisses us off the same way, because our brains haven t evolved to think it s just not a big deal.
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Right, yeah, of course.
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Instead of enjoying the fact that we ve got a nice place to live, a bunch of friends, enough food to eat, and a box in our kitchen that keeps it cool and fresh and unspoiled, we re on WebMD being like, oh my god, I ve got that.
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Wait, no, I ve got this too, right?
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We re freaking out on the internet looking for things that could potentially be wrong with us to worry about.
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I know, and that s why they always say in the newspaper business, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.
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You scan the headlines and say, of course, that s still the case.
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But it doesn t lead because the newspapermen are like, you know, these cynical oligarchs, like, desperate to, like, sell newspapers.
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It leads because that s what people buy.
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That s what they want to read.
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That s what we re oriented to look for.
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We want to hear about the bombing because we re already convinced it s going to be terrible.
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Yeah, I love this quote from your book.
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I think it s from somebody else, but it s WebMD is like a choose-your-own-adventure book where the ending is always cancer.
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You laugh at it, because it s like, yeah, it s so true.
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Every time I have a cough, my wife Leslie laughs at me, because I m just like, uh-oh, do you think it s pneumonia?
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She s like, are you joking?
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She s like, you re the reason the emergency rooms get clogged up, people like you.
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In the book, you mention
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There are specific things that we can do, of course, to improve our happiness, but basically, even if everything in your job, your marital status, your relationships, health, wealth, all that stuff, that s 10%, we can reasonably predict 10% of your happiness.
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The rest of it has to do with the way your brain processes it.
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So it s like 90%, correct me where I m wrong, 90% how we react to it, 10% what happens.
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Can you explain that?
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I m not sure that that s clear, and if so, that s a huge revelation in thinking.
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Yeah, I know, it is interesting.
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It says 10% of your happiness is based on your circumstances.
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Okay, so what happens to you?
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Who wins the election?
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You know what I mean?
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50% is your genetic set point, okay?
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And 40% are your intentional activities.
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the actual exercises and behaviors you do, the walking, exercise, meditation, gratitude writing, random acts of kindness, whatever, that you do to increase your happiness levels.
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The point being that there are famous studies that show, regardless of whether you win the lottery or suffer a car accident, like a year later, you revert back to the relative mean,
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and you have a great deal of influence over how happy you are.
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Essentially, and it s commonly accepted these days, happiness is a choice and you have more effect on your happiness level than anything else.
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What are some of these little exercises from the book, some of these little exercises that can help us become happier?
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I love the 20 minute replay and things like that are kind of secretly brilliant.
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Yeah, sure.
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Well, sometimes I say to organizations, I say, take the 20 for 20 challenge, which means for anyone listening, try to commit to doing one of these things for just 20 minutes a day.
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If you can do that for 20 days in a row, you ve got a new habit.
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So let me give you three that people can choose from.
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The first one is taking a brisk 20-minute nature walk a day.
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Professor Michael Babiak and team published in the American Psychosomatic Society showed that these brisk walks actually outperform a test group on antidepressants and another test group doing both, taking the antidepressants and doing the walking.
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My point is, there is power in the Fitbit.
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Actually going and doing a brisk, energetic walk
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really increases your happiness levels.
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And if you can do it for 20 minutes a day, before work, at lunch, after class, whatever, it really does pay off in the long term.
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That s the first one.
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Choose that one, or choose the second one, which is the 20-minute replay.
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You mentioned that already, but it s a very famous University of Texas study called How Do I Love The, Let Me Count The Words,
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that shows that if you journal for 20 minutes about one positive experience that happened during your day, you are happier.
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They did this on couples and relationships, and those who journaled were 50% more likely to stay together after three months, which is a really long relationship at university.
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And it s funny, people sometimes ask me, do I actually have to write it down or can I just think about it?
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No, you actually have to write it down.
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Because the way journaling works is your mind has no GPS signal in it.
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When you re journaling about something, your mind thinks you re there again.
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If I say, oh yeah, Jordan bought me lunch and we went out for sandwich, it was great, I relive the experience when I write about it.
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And if I read my own journal, I relive it a third time.
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so you get a tripling effect on the positive thing that happened to you.
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That s exercise number two.
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Exercise number three I will give you is committing a random act of kindness a day.
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This is a famous study done at Stanford University that shows if you do five small random acts of kindness over the course of a week, which is why I say one a day, then it has a greater effect on your happiness level than any of the other studies I mentioned.
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So that means doing something nice for other people really does make you feel good about who you are.
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I m the door holder opener.
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I m the lunch buying generous man.
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Like I think I m awesome and it helps me feel good and it helps me feel happy.
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Speaking of journals, tell us about the nuns, because I found this fascinating, because of course I m reading all this research and the things in your book, and I m still a little skeptical, and the nun thing kind of put me
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over because of the evidence.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Well, here s what I say to people.
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I say, do you know that the average lifespan is 25,000 days?
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That s the average world lifespan in days.
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You often hear it like, okay, 72 years, but in days it hits you a little harder.
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And then if I said to you, hey, Jordan, if you could press a button.
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just literally press a button and have 3,000 extra days.
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Would you want that?
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And most people say, well, obviously, you know, I want to see more sunsets and have more ice cream and kiss my kids goodnight more often.
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So yeah, well, how do you do that?
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Well, this is the Nunn Study, University of Kentucky.
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Researchers found a bunch of cardboard boxes full of handwritten autobiographies written by nuns as they joined U.S.
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convents throughout the 1930s and 40s.
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Knowing nothing else about the nuns, they split them into piles based on their perceived happiness levels, i.e.
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a nun who said, you know, I m looking forward with eager joy, you know, I ve had a blessed life.
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That language or grammar, you know, they re like, okay, that is a happy nun.
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We don t know who this person is, but they re happier.
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Guess what?
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The University of Kentucky researchers found these autobiographies in the year 2000.
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They could find out what happened to the nuns.
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Those who were in the happiest pile lived 10 extra years.
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Those are your extra 3,000 days right there with the press of a button.
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You just have to be happier at the outset.
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And how do you do that?
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That s the problem.
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Well, we just talked about that.
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Those are some of the exercises you can do.
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So part of what I was trying to do with this letter to my son is like, you can own your happiness.
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Here s the actual manual on how to actually do it.
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And the nun study is a great example of that.
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Plus all those extra years, as you may guess, are happier years.
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You re enjoying yourself through them all.
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Right, and it s something that we ve seen from Dan Harris and John Acuff and yourself, is that happiness, in part, is a learnable, teachable skill and a set of exercises and mindsets.
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And the nun study, we kind of see, look, the happy people don t necessarily have the best of everything.
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They, quite frankly, make the best of everything, as evidenced by these journals that these nuns actually kept.
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I know, exactly, it s so true.
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And you know what, it s the other thing that s funny, I don t say it too often, but nuns are actually, it turns out, the perfect study group ever, because they re the same gender, they wear the same clothes, they live in the same building, they eat the same food, none of them smoke or drink or have sex.
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Like, you can t get a better control group than nuns.
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If you ever want to do a university study on any people about attitude or positive thinking, like, nuns happen to be perfect to study.
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Right, same clothes, same house, same food, right, exactly, same habits, same set of prohibitions, difference, mindset, right?
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They have the same friggin  schedule every day, for the most part.
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Exactly.
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I said this in front of an audience recently, you know, that none of them smoke or drink or have sex ever, and a woman in the front row yelled out, don t be so sure about that!
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And it was kind of funny, because either she was a nun or knew a naughty nun, I don t know.
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Uh, Jason says, same habits, really bad pun.
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I just got it.
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But I m Ching.
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Rimshot, Jason.
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Same habits.
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What about folks that would love to do these happiness exercises but are busy achieving?
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The busyness thing, that s another even more overused kind of buzzword.
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Everybody s busy, people brag about being busy, then the rest of us try to be less busy.
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I wish I had more hours in the day, which is wait till you have kids.
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I mean, busyness is kind of this demon that looms over all of us, and yet many of us wear it like a badge of honor.
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I know, I totally agree with you.
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And first of all, confirm that people are legitimately busy.
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You know, the average person these days gets 147 emails.
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That s the average.
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My mom gets six emails, so some people probably get 300.
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The average person checks their phone now 150 times a day, every four minutes, if you can believe it.
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And my own primary research in the book shows that the average person makes about 300 decisions a day.
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So of course we re tired because decision-making energy is a finite resource.
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When you run out of it, you can only replenish it by either sleeping more or having glucose, which is why at the front of a supermarket,
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after you re done choosing between 45 kinds of salsa and 20 kinds of eggs, there s a whole bunch of candy bars.
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Your mind knows it needs sugar to keep going.
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And so what do you do?
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How do you stop being busy?
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Well, I present a solution in the book called Creating Space.
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And to do that, I say you have to eliminate three things.
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You have to eliminate choice, you have to eliminate time, and you have to eliminate access.
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Super quick on each, how do you eliminate choice?
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You simply stop making so many decisions.
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Automating your route to work.
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Okay, like I started using Waze, the app, it sends me down dark alleys and shortcuts, fine, but I don t think about how I m gonna get to work anymore.
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Double dinners, you know, just make twice as much for dinner.
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If you re taking a lunch the next day, then you don t have to think about what restaurant to eat at or who to go with every single day or where to eat.
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Things like that, what can you automate so that you have less choice?
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There s a fascinating study done by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard that calls it the magic of being totally stuck.
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And he shows that when we have less choice, we actually are happier.
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And I give an example of a restaurant here in my hometown of Toronto called Ruby Watchco, where there s no menu.
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Everyone eats the same appetizer, the same entree, the same dessert.
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It changes every day, but there s no menu, and people love it.
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because they re not bogged down by having to make so many decisions.
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So that s the first thing, eliminate choice.
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The second thing is eliminate time.
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You ve heard of Parkinson s Law probably.
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For those that haven t, General Northcote Parkinson wrote an article in The Economist in 1955.
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No one had ever heard of this guy.
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And the premise of the article was, in the first sentence it said,
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work rises to fill the time available for its completion, right?
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And so, of course, if you have a week to do the essay, everyone s done midnight the night before.
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And so, the simple way to be less busy is to reduce the amount of time you have for all of your projects.
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And I give an example in the book of a very famous tech entrepreneur who takes his entire team off site for one day and says, okay, we re gonna build a whole new website in one day.
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Forget meetings, forget vacations, forget schedules.
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I ve got everyone here who can do this.
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Coders, programmers, layout, editing, whatever.
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you re gonna do it today until we re done.
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And when you eliminate time from your projects, you actually get more done after you ve done the project.
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So for anyone in school, the way to relate to this is when the teacher says, hey, you get an extra week at the last minute to do your homework and you ve already done it, you feel low.
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Because you re like, no, I have another week to revisit all my answers or revisit my essay.
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That s annoying.
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That s the beauty of reducing time in any of your projects.
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The third and final one is eliminating access.
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I counted up, Jordan, how many access points I had to myself at Walmart.
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I worked there for a decade, turns out I had voicemail, I had email, I had text messaging, I had the office instant messaging program, people could walk up to my desk.
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all these points of access.
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And what I noticed was the CEO I was working for had one point of access.
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He didn t have a personal cell phone.
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He didn t have any social media accounts.
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He wouldn t answer email.
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No one knew his phone number.
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He just was in person only.
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And he got a lot more done.
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And I remember thinking, how am I sending the 147 emails but getting less done?
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And the point is, whenever we have to switch between
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Access points, if you re like the average person, you check Twitter, then you re checking Facebook, then you check maybe multiple email accounts, your brain has to bookmark, prioritize, and switch between tasks.
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McKinsey estimates we actually spend 30% of our day switching between tasks instead of doing what Cal Newport calls deep work and focusing on one.
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So my point, how do you eliminate access?
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Delete some of the social media accounts you don t use very often.
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If you have multiple emails, consolidate.
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Point your voicemail to your email, that s what I do.
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So my voicemail just says my email address over and over again, and it doesn t beep.
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You can t leave a message.
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So I know that if someone s gonna call me, they ll have to email me.
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And if you eliminate access, going backwards, and time, going backwards, and choice, I say you ll never be busy again.
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You ll have created space in your life.
3
SPEAKER_00
When we get back, more from Neil about why you should never retire.
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In air quotes, this is Art of Charm.
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All right, Neil, we talked before, and in your book, this I thought was kind of a fascinating idea, because, look, I m 36, I can t really picture myself retiring.
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I would imagine everybody at age 36 is like, yeah, I m never gonna retire.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you actually argue that we should not.
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Give us a little background on that, and tell us why we shouldn t retire.
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Sure, you know, I tell the story that a lot of people may be familiar with, which is that my guidance counselor, who everybody loved in my high school, and who loved all the students, he was forced to retire at age 65, mandatory retirement up here, and the next week he had a heart attack and died.
3
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You know, and I think there s a reason Fortune magazine says that the two most dangerous years of our life are the year we re born and the year we retire.
3
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And so you sort of think, well, isn t retirement something I always want?
3
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And I know your listeners are all different ages, but yeah, I dream about this endless kind of golf playing, sunset sailing time.
3
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And what I actually say is, I went deep into the research on this for the book, and it turns out that retirement was invented, okay?
3
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It was invented in 1889 in Germany when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck just declared that if you re 65 or older and you need care
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from the state, they ll pay you a little bit of money to move out of the workforce.
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He had a huge youth unemployment issue, and turns out the average lifespan was 67, so it was kind of easy for him to say.
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These days, we ve adopted that age 65 number in most of the Western world, and people live much longer, and they all want to retire way earlier, so it s like we got this untenable kind of situation where we can t
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pay for this retirement, but yet we re all aspiring towards it.
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So, in the research, it turns out National Geographic did a study on Okinawa.
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Okinawa, a bunch of islands in Japan, where the average lifespan is seven years longer than in the U.S.
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Like, that s a lot of years.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s like the nun study, you know?
4
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Why?
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What do they call retirement there?
4
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What do they think about the end of life?
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Here s the amazing thing.
4
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They don t even have a word for retirement.
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Like literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work.
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Instead they have a word called icky guy, which is I-K-I-G-A-I, and it roughly means the reason you get out of bed in the morning.
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And so what I argue for is having a purpose, and I think having a purpose is actually one of four S s you need in work.
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You need social stimulation, you need the structure of having a reason to get up, you need the stimulation of learning new things, and you need that story, or the icky guy, the something you re doing that s bigger than yourself, you know, like the high-level mission you re part of.
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And so what I advocate in the happiness equation is, no, no, no, you don t want to retire.
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SPEAKER_00
Although I know it sounds dreamy to sort of think of yourself laying in a hammocks finally reading that
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pile of novels you ve had collecting your whole life, it ain t gonna happen because it reduces your happiness.
4
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Instead, you want the four S s, social structure, stimulation, story.
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They will over-deliver on your happiness.
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I personally feel like I will never retire.
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I ll always be doing meaningful work.
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It doesn t matter if it s for money or not.
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The point is, the four S s drive happiness, not retirement.
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I think it s interesting that he was like, yeah, we ll take care of you for the rest of your short, pitiful, lonely old life.
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And now it s like, hey, you got another 20 years.
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SPEAKER_01
Oops.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know.
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SPEAKER_00
I know.
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SPEAKER_00
And it doesn t help that we, first of all, made it mandatory.
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And then, you know, on top of that, we sort of created a culture and an industry, you know, around insurance, etc.
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SPEAKER_00
that you wanna retire early, you wanna kinda get out of the workforce as soon as possible, does that sound good for solving the world s biggest problems?
4
SPEAKER_00
Providing for your family, paying for other people to do that?
4
SPEAKER_00
The whole thing is untenable, it s just not gonna last anyway, so rather than listening to newspaper articles for the next 30 years spouting about how no pension s gonna actually be able to fund your existence, take it into your own hands and just decide today, I ll never retire, I ll always be in something interesting.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, and it doesn t mean that you can never leave General Motors, right?
4
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What we re talking about here is if you ve set things up correctly, or at least if you aim to do so, what we ve got is the ability to switch careers at a certain age when finances maybe aren t your primary concern, financial security.
4
SPEAKER_01
maybe isn t your primary concern, or when just one career has run its course and gives you the benefits that you need to transition into something else that might be a little bit, I don t know, easier on your lower back, or have shorter hours, or is more enjoyable, or just a change of pace.
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SPEAKER_00
Totally.
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SPEAKER_00
I think you put it really nicely with the GM example.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not saying to the guy that s about to punch out after 30 years the meatpacking plant, like, hey, buddy, punch in for 30 more.
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What I m saying is use some natural, authentic tests in your life
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like the Saturday morning test, what do you do on Saturday morning that you love, the bench test, how can you immerse yourself in a new situation, and the five people test, what are you naturally surrounding yourself with, people or media or other inputs that hint to you what you actually love doing.
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Don t quit the day job, but rather complement it
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with something you love.
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Those things you love are better for the world, they re better for your happiness, and over time, as you and I both know, being in the creative world, they do pay off longer term, but you ve gotta go headfirst into them today.
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I love the quote by a former editor of The Onion, Todd Hanson, I think his name is, if I m getting that right, who was asked, how do I write jokes for money?
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And he wrote back, you do it for free for 10 years.
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And the point is, I m not saying just do whatever and you ll get paid.
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I m saying follow your heart, find those four S s, and it will lead to longer term life satisfaction.
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In the meantime, you might have a regular job, and that s okay.
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Totally, yeah, exactly.
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Hey, for me, the Book of Awesome hit number one in 2010.
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I quit Walmart in 2016.
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So, I mean, I had five years, four books, a full-time blog, all that stuff, while at the same time doing my quote-unquote nine-to-five office job because I was of the mindset, yeah, that the creative side of my life, until it becomes I can t ignore it, then I don t wanna ever stop doing my, again, quote-unquote day job, which I was learning a lot from.
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Neil Pasricha, thank you so much.
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Is there anything else that you want to tell the AOC family before we let you get on with it?
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Just that I have big respect for anyone that makes the end, like I think there s an end of podcast community, you know, people that are here right now with us.
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And for me, you know, I m at globalhappiness.org.
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That s my new project, the Institute for Global Happiness.
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If for anyone that s interested in what we talked about today, it s tons of free resources.
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I m at Neil at globalhappiness.org, and I d love to keep the conversation going.
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Thanks so much, Neil.
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Interesting stuff, in the book, The Happiness Equation, of course linked up in the show notes here, there s a lot of these little diagrams he s got called scribbles, which are how to deal with people and how to make decisions, and they re these little quadrants that you can write out quite literally on a napkin in order to make decisions, and it s not just happiness and that type of thing, it s how to make decisions that might leave you happy or long-term.
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There s a lot here, and there was a lot of advice in here that s actually solid, practical, and actionable, because at first, of course, when they told us this book is about happiness, I rolled my eyes, both figuratively and sort of literally at the same time, which was quite the feat of acrobatics, but I enjoyed this one, and if you did, don t forget to thank Neil on Twitter.
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We ll have that in the show notes, along with the book, The Happiness Equation, linked in the show notes.
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You can view the show notes on your phone by tapping our album art in most mobile podcast players.
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Neil s also on Twitter, of course.
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We ll have my Twitter and his Twitter linked in there, so say hi to both of us and tell us what you thought of this.
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Our sponsors are in the show notes or go to theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
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And don t forget to join the Art of Charm Challenge, the social capital challenge, at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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Challenge is about networking, connection skills, relationship skills, encouraging other people to build relationships with you and vice versa.
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I m doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every week.
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And we ve got our fundamentals toolbox that covers topics like networking, persuasion, nonverbal communication, body language, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
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That s at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm, produced by Jason DeFilippo, Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Now go ahead, 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.