#72 Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits | The Knowledge Project

Happiness is the joy you feel while striving towards your potential.

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Today I'm speaking with Neil Pasricha.

Neil is the New York Times best -selling author of the Book of Awesome series, a Harvard MBA, and a ridiculously popular Ted speaker.

If the conversation seems more familiar and personal than normal, it's because Neil is a friend of mine.

We go deep on a few things and gloss over some others, but we talk about life, business, and everything in between, including building resilience, parenting, what he learned at Harvard, why we all need an untouchable day, and so much more.

It's time to listen and learn.

I'm curious, we spent a lot of time together, so we'll probably be more familiar with each other than most of the guests that come on the show.

But one of the questions I meant to ask you last time we had dinner in Toronto was, what were the big lessons you learned from your parents?

Oh my gosh, so many.

First of all, so my mom's from Nairobi, Kenya, and she immigrated in this sort of Idiamean kind of dictatorship crisis of the early 1970s.

She's from a wealthy family, but they lost all their wealth in the India -Pakistan partition.

So a suddenly poor family, the youngest of eight kids fleeing East Africa, okay?

My dad is from Northern India, Amritsar.

He's from a very poor family, scrapped and saved, got his master's in nuclear physics, and came to Canada as one of the first high school physics teachers.

He went back to England one summer, met my mom, they had an arranged marriage like wham, bam, like one date.

My dad gave my mom one test on the first date, which was the hamburger test, seeing if she eats a hamburger, because he told me later, I didn't want to marry a vegetarian.

That was his one. Oh, the test was whether you eat the hamburger or not how you eat it, because there's also like people that butcher eating hamburgers, right?

Like the bun and the meat and it just falls all over the place.

I will not marry a sloppy eater.

A separate test. Second, this one was just like, I, he ordered a couple of hamburgers and was like, will she eat the hamburger?

She did. So two weeks later, I'm not joking, they got married.

Two weeks later, the second time my mom saw my dad was at their wedding.

Okay, pause right there for one second.

That's amazing. I know so many couples that are still together, that within like a month of knowing each other, just knew right away, like, one of my best friends parents were engaged 24 hours after meeting, not an arranged marriage, they just met, gotten still happy.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Isn't that crazy? 24 hours?

24 hours after they met.

Isn't that insane? I mean, it is partly insane.

Okay, back to your parents, the arranged marriage.

Yeah, so they come to Canada kind of my dad gets here in the late 60s.

My mom gets here in there in the early 70s.

And they did all the hard work.

They did they did they came to a new country where they didn't know anybody had no friends here, no family here, settle in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, which for those that may know it is an hour east of Toronto, super white community, especially that day and age, saying you're a vegetarian or didn't eat meat,

like my mom knew temples, no brown people like no, like it was like you're on your own.

And what I learned from them, ultimately, Shane was really the model of resilience, the idea that you can add a yet to any sentence you you can't do in your life.

And you can learn to do it later.

Meaning, when Mike when I talked to my mom growing up, she'd be like, well, dad would take me to the Sherman Club.

And I tell myself, I don't, I don't know how to ballroom dance yet.

Or I don't, I don't have any experience working in a Canadian company yet.

And the idea in her head was always one of I can or I will or I might later.

And that sense of mental strength and mental resilience, I think has hopefully stuck with me.

And it's one I'm paranoid of how do I teach my kids that because, you know, when you when you don't go through hardships, how do you make sure you can handle them?

What's deep dive on resilience a little bit here?

How would you define resilience?

It's the capacity to get back up or to return to your current state after a blow of some kind, whether that is a relationship blow.

You know, you get fired from your job, you go through traumatic experience, you have a death in your very close family, you lose a close friend, whatever it's how what, what musculature are you using on the inside of yourself to return to your baseline?

How quickly do you do it?

How well do you do it?

How how do you do it?

And all of that musculature I refer to as resilience, that inner strength.

And you say it's learned?

I think so. How do we learn it?

Well, a lot of people think you have to just go through all these things.

You have to go through these blows, you have to, you know, go through a divorce and lose a friend and suffer from some tragedy.

And then you you develop the musculature as you're going.

But part of the problem, I believe, is that right now in the world, we got it fairly easy.

I mean, we live in the most abundant time ever in human civilization, right?

You can press a button, a car picks you up, your phone entertains you on the way home.

And by the time you get to your front door, you got takeout waiting on the porch.

I mean, we live in an era of infinite abundance.

And I believe because of that, that's partly why we're seeing spiking anxiety rates, loneliness rates, depression rates, and suicide rates, because we no longer have that musculature.

By the way, I've used the word musculature three times in the last minute and I haven't used it in two years.

Like, I'm just like trying out a new word today.

But I'm like, but therefore it's so life is so relatively easy that we have lost our capacity to handle failure, or even, and this is even more important, perceived failure, so that when you get two likes on your Instagram photo, it now feels like I have no friends, you know, the traumatic feeling of loneliness

or anxiety or depression, these things are coming to us sharper and harsher, because we have lost the internal systems to handle them.

We're more focused on the external sort of validation of social media versus the internal intrinsicness of it that and we don't have any famines.

No one's getting shipped off to war.

We, uh, do you know anyone that has suffered from the plague lately?

Like the jet, if you look, if you zoom out to like human civilization over our 200 ,000 year evolutionary history, it's like, pretty much always we had gigantic kind of plonks, like, plonk, like you can't, we were going through wars, economic depressions, huge like, like gigantic traumatic societal things

and now we live like kings lived 100 years ago and I'm talking about the average person, I'm not talking about the upper class, I'm talking clean water in your taps, feeling safe at the front door, marrying who you want.

You used to be, you used to be thrown in jail for, uh, being gay or certain, or, or beaten or being trans or something.

These, we've gone past a lot of that stuff, so we got, we are living in a relatively, we are living in relative ease.

People listening might say, oh, this guy's out to lunch, he doesn't know what my life is like, you don't understand like why you think I'm going to protest.

I'm not saying it's perfect.

I'm just saying that's relatively a lot more abundant and a lot of a more easy lifestyle than we had even 50, 100, 200 years ago.

Why are we so unhappy?

The ultimate question, right?

Professor David Myers at University of Michigan has mapped over the last 50 plus years our increases in abundance relative to our happiness levels.

And to your point, Shane, everything's gone up.

Wealth, longevity, education rates, literacy rates, but our happiness has been pretty flatlined.

Celia Lemirsky at Stanford University has posited a model that I really love from the book, The How of Happiness.

And she says happiness is 50 % genetic.

Let's just start there.

Okay, so 50 % of your happiness is like a genetic.

So you're like predisposed somewhere on this continuum to be happy or unhappy.

You got two kids. You probably feel like one of them might have a higher or lower disposition than the other one.

And I have multiple children and I kind of see that too.

My parents would say that about me and my sister.

Then she says 10 % is circumstantial, okay, which means what happens to you, okay?

There's a really famous sub -study I can talk about about the lottery winners versus the paraplegics you may have heard of.

You know, a year later, whether you win the lottery or you suffer a traumatic accident, where you become a paraplegic, a year later, you've relatively returned to your baseline.

In fact, the lottery winners may even have gone lower because they have taken on all kinds of new stresses and expenses, etc.

Now, what is the remaining 40 % of that pie chart?

50 % is your genetic set point.

10 % is your circumstances.

So the remaining 40%, according to the Celia Lemirsky model, is your intentional activities.

Okay, now you just asked me, why are we so unhappy?

Can we zoom into that 40 %?

Keep in mind, it's the only part we can control on the pie chart and it's huge.

It's gigantic. From reviewing a ton of positive psychology studies, I can tell you very quickly what some of the specific things you, me, all of us should be doing in that 40%.

There are things like nature walks, there are things like a journaling practice, there are things like a meditation practice, there are things like reading fiction from a real book, right?

There are things like a gratitude practice, etc.

You and me, you know, listeners may have heard some of these kind of general totems in life that will help you be happier, but then compare that to how we are actually spending our time today.

Look around the bus station or the airport and what is every single person doing?

Heads down, staring at a bright screen, totally addicted to it.

And the dopamine hits we are getting from the cell phones are endless, and we are swimming slash sinking into a sea of huge pain and problem, ultimately rooted in our cell phone addiction.

We are totally addicted to them en masse.

So when you look around, it doesn't look like an addiction because it looks like everyone has got it.

Everybody is doing it.

And a few people are starting to really ring the alarm.

People like, I believe his name is Tristan Harris for the Center of Humane Technology.

People like Adam Alter who wrote a great book called Irresistible about the seductive properties of cell phones.

People like, I think Robert Lutwig who wrote a book called The Hacking of the American Mind is starting.

But look around, cell phones have three P's of problems.

Number one is a productivity problem.

When you're on your phone, you don't do anything else.

McKinsey says 31 % of our days are now spent bookmarking, prioritizing and switching between tasks.

And people listening and people like me, I feel like it's more than that.

Like we're not doing anything, you're deciding what to do.

So the first P is productivity.

The second P is a huge one which is physical.

When you expose your eyes to bright screens an hour before bed, you don't produce as much melatonin.

So you don't sleep as restfully.

So your resilience is lower the next morning.

So you instinctively reach for your cell phone which unfortunately for most people is beside their bed.

So you're looking at what Trump tweeted at 7 a .m.

before you've had a time to think about your day.

Never mind the, I'm looking down, of course people can't see me that the, what's it called that hunchbacks were all developing and the texting thumbs and all that stuff.

And then the third P, which is the biggest one is psychological.

So we are comparing everybody else's greatest hits life with our director's cut, you know, no matter how good the lunch you and I have today after we record, somebody will be at a lobster buffet in the Maldives on Instagram.

So I will feel like our lunch sucks.

Like I will feel like my life sucks.

So the three P's of problems are our productivity, physical and psychological.

That's rooted in cell phone addiction.

That's rooted in the 40 % of how we should be spending our time and we're spending it the wrong way.

I think that's a big reason why we're not happy today.

I think it's a people are listening.

They're probably thinking, but I'm too busy to go walk in nature.

I'm too busy to like, my life is so frantic.

I feel like, um, I'm barely keeping up with everything as it is.

How would you respond to that?

Uh, I think those people are lying to themselves.

And I think that I, and I, and I'm guilty of that statement as well.

So for example, I, I, I often say this one line and when I give speeches, I say, everybody should be reading 20 pages of fiction from a real book to open or close your day.

There's research, uh, in 2011 in the annual review of psychology that shows that that's what opens up your mirror neurons, um, parts of your brain response for empathy, compassion, understanding, you know, there's a famous game of throne quotes called a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

The man who never reads lives only one, you know?

And so we know the power of reading.

They've done MRI scans at Emory University.

They show that your language centers open up, but how no one starts and finishes their day with reading Shane.

And when they, when I asked them why they say, I don't got the time.

And then I tell them straight to their face, you're lying, ma 'am or sir, because according to the university of California, the average person reads a hundred thousand words per day today.

It's called Instagram comments, Twitter feeds, blog rolls, news headlines, texts, alerts, and notifications.

And the average knowledge worker receives 147 emails today.

So I'm not saying add 20 pages of fiction to your to -do list.

I'm saying subtract excise 20 pages of the garbage that you're currently reading.

And to respond to the question of time, that would be my counter argument.

Look at how you're spending your day.

What are you spending in a non -thoughtful way that you can eliminate or reduce?

And for a lot of people, and I'm pointing this finger at myself too, I'm not saying I know this and you don't as Neil does this problem too.

If you look at my schedule, I'm like, oh my gosh, what?

I was, I was sucked into my phone for, for half an hour, you know, instead of doing some deep work.

And that happens repeatedly.

It's a muscle that we have to learn how to build.

I remember the last week speaking of phone and getting lost in your phone.

I was in California and I took a, um, 90 minute car ride and I get in the car at the airport and I left the car at the hotel.

And I don't think I noticed anything over those 90 minutes.

I was just like trying to catch up on email and work and, um, actually trying to do work, not just sort of like go in the comments and stuff, but like, I looked up and all of a sudden we're at the hotel and I was like, oh my God, like I felt rude because it was like, I didn't talk to this guy at all.

He was like driving me and, um, you just get lost.

No social connection.

There's no social connection and you're so focused on your phone.

Like I'm oblivious to, I don't know why, but the phone is like, it's great for this intense focus because like anything could almost be happening.

And you're like, that's why I don't use my phone when I'm around my kids anymore.

Because I realized at some point, maybe three or four years ago that like, I was just trying to sneak in an email here or there, you know, trying to manage things.

And then I just realized like I'm all consumed by this and then I'm not consumed by what's important to me.

There's even early studies starting to come out saying that babies are having a harder time connecting with parents because of lack of eye contact or while women are breastfeeding, they're not looking at the baby that's cooing at them and even looking at their cell phone.

And they're starting to be some early studies on like the sort of disconnection it might be causing with children.

So I admire your, you're putting your cell phone away when you're with your kids.

I need to do that more.

The only thing I've come up with Shane is I give Leslie, my wife, my phone on Friday night.

And I say, do not give this back to me until Monday.

And don't tell me where you put it.

Now that takes a lot of willpower to even say that.

And then it takes her a lot of willpower to, when I'm begging for on Saturday nights, check my fantasy football, you know, who's injured.

She's like, well, you told me not to give it to you.

Like I got to log into CBS on like my laptop, you know, but that that little pause creates a greater connection with my children.

I'm sure of it. The little bit of friction goes a long way.

How would you, well actually, let's pull this back to resilience again.

What stories stand out in your mind from your parents that you say your parents taught you the resilience?

Like what are the moments that you remember where that happened?

You might not have recognized in the moment, but thinking back now, you're like, okay, so my mom, I mentioned it earlier.

She's the youngest of eight children.

She was the fifth girl and had three boys, East Indian culture, 1950s and 60s.

A hundred percent of the family's resources went to the boys, education and development.

Zero dollars went to the women.

Okay. They were expected to cook and clean and take care of a husband later in life.

So my mom, on her own, of her own volition, sat outside their house in Nairobi, Kenya, memorizing license plates of cars drove and driving by.

She would see a car coming and she would try to guess the license plate if she saw like a green car or whatever and she silently congratulate herself if she got it right.

She ended up developing an incredible memory.

And when they wrote the national exam at age 12, all Kenyan children had to write it.

She got first in the whole country.

So she was whisked away under a full scholarship to the English boarding school with the children of all the kind of colonialist children.

And she was given the only one of the five daughters, an education.

Okay. She learned eight languages.

She memorized Shakespeare.

She ate soft boiled eggs in the corner of the school cafeteria.

She prayed to a God she'd never heard of before.

Like it was the Lord's Prayer.

She was like, who's the Lord?

Like she didn't have that upbringing.

And that I thought was a great story.

But then when she was whisked into the arranged marriage, my dad, they never would have got married.

I told you she was from an upper class family, but they lost all their wealth.

My dad's from a poor family, like the caste system dictated that they wouldn't have met.

But because she was the youngest of eight fleeing east Africa and the family had lost the resources.

Now she's married to this poor dude who takes her to a suburb in Canada in a continent where she has no family, no friends at all.

That is a boom. And you're in your twenties, by the way, when this happens.

So today, I had dinner with my mom last night.

I saw her this morning before I flew up here and her ability to have navigated what I would call a huge traumatic experience of starting fresh and turn that into a soft, quiet, calm, loving demeanor.

All she ever did for my sister and I was love us.

She slept like we were babies.

She slept with us in the bed.

She never sleep trained us.

She never, anytime I wanted to quit anything, she let us quit.

She was just pure love.

And I think partly why my sister and I have ended up fairly confident and stuff like that is because all we got showered with was just endless love.

She channeled all of it into just pure love for my kids, giving them everything I can give them, taking care of them as best as I can.

And when I see how she got to that from where she came from, it's not something I talk about much, but it's pretty astounding to me.

It always feels like a wow.

I would never be able to do that.

And I think she just kept going.

It's interesting that you said she let you quit things.

Yeah. Because I was thinking in my head as you were saying that, I was like, wait, doesn't, doesn't forcing your kids to like fulfill their obligations and do all this build more resilience?

I don't know. That's a good question.

I started beavers, I quit beavers.

I started cubs. I quit cubs.

I said, I did soccer.

I quit soccer. I was the smallest.

I was the tiniest. I was the puniest.

I was the nerdiest.

I broke my glasses.

Like I just was like a terrible mess at most of these sports.

So she let me quit them.

And, and maybe Shane, that's partly why I have taken longer to develop a resilience muscle in myself.

Maybe that's why when I got divorced in my late twenties and lost my friend through suicide in that same time period, I struggled for years to get back up and out of that thing.

I lost weight. I couldn't sleep.

I lost 50 pounds. It wasn't like I rebounded.

I'm not some exemplar model of like, look at me.

I'm like, you know, Mr.

Teflon. I just rebounded.

No, I suffer. I was in therapy twice a week for years.

Right. So maybe some of that softness was ingrained in me.

And I took, it took me heart.

It was harder for me to get tough.

And I'm, I'm, I'm mentioning that because I also now worry about that for my own kids, you know, my wife will like put three pillows in their little beds and I'll be like three pillows.

Like you're making these kids too soft.

They're think no kids have more than one pillow.

Like I'm using that as an example, but it's more like, how do we, when we're giving our kids a lot, make sure that they also have the muscles to, to rebound.

How do, how do we make sure they're not anxious?

They're feeling awesome to use a word I use a lot, right?

How do we make them failure proof instead of failure prone?

How do we make sure that they are, you know, that's what I'm anti -fragile, that's what I'm wondering about.

And that's what I'm trying to explore with my thinking today.

I think it's really interesting because we're, at this, this place in time and maybe it's just me and maybe this has always existed, but I'm seeing my friends increasingly sort of like thirties and forties go through some sort of life event, whether it's a divorce or they get fired or they're changing

careers or something happens that life doesn't go their way.

And their capacity to handle that when you talked about sort of like this muscular development of resilience, isn't really there.

And I think part of the reason it's not there is because we had this generation of parents who loved us so much.

Everyone got a gold star.

Everybody gets a gold star.

You get participation medals, like, and you don't sort of get feedback.

And more so than that, you're sort of like prevented from failure and prevent it from recovering.

And I'll give you an example from like my kids school, right?

Like, they're so hawkish on the kids at this point that.

What's hawkish mean?

Oh, they're just like always on the, like no rough housing.

You can't talk, you can't touch anybody else.

You're sort of, and it's really interesting to me because that goes away, right?

But it goes away in grade seven and grade eight, but you get all this social feedback in grade one, two, three, and four, where like, if you're running around putting a booger on somebody, they're going to push you.

But in grade two, I mean, it doesn't really do any damage, right?

Like you're going to cry, but you learn in that age.

But if you're doing stuff that annoys other people in grade seven, now they're going to punch you and it's really going to hurt.

So you're like getting this feedback, right?

What's it called a progressive resistance?

Well, it's a natural consequence to a lot of this behavior.

And we're, increasingly, it strikes me that we're moving away, like we're trying to prevent natural consequences from happening.

Or we're saying there's something wrong with the natural consequence versus the behavior causing the natural consequence.

And I worry about that as parents.

What are you doing for your kids to build resilience to sort of like help them through this so that when they're 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 and something in life doesn't go their way, they have the capacity and the strength to handle that.

Uh, that's, you just put your finger on the root issue and the root question.

And it was epitomized for me in a slightly different story, but very similar chain.

When I got off the stage and this like well -dressed 50 something year old executive runs up to me, like urgently, like it's not, you always get questions after a speech, but you rarely get someone like racing to see you like with something burning on his head.

And he says, Neil, how do, what's wrong with my son?

And how do I fix him?

I was like, excuse me.

Like what, who's your son?

He's like my son. He graduated from high school, valedictorian, captain of the football team, you know, straight A student.

He gets a scholarship to Duke university.

I was like, cool. Like, he's like, yeah, he graduated a few months ago, top of his class, like honors list, Dean's list, all that stuff.

He got a top job at a fancy company on his first day of work.

He got an email from his boss saying something slightly critical.

My son thought it was rude and called me crying from his bed that night saying, I'm never going back there.

I won't go back tomorrow.

And he couldn't get out of bed.

He was crying and broken because of this rude email.

And I'm flashing finger quotes because who knows what the email said.

And it was the first day of the guy's job.

But he was like, what's wrong with my son?

And what do I do about it?

Because his son has shown a history of being a shining star and just bam, you get shattered by something so small.

And I think we're all to some extent feeling like that these days, we are becoming an army of porcelain dolls.

When we slip and fall on the sidewalk, we don't get up.

We just lie there crying, you know, and that is the muscle I'm trying to guide myself and others to.

That's what I'm exploring right now.

I remember I went to a pretty rough high school during a rough era.

We had CNN trucks parked outside of my high school.

No way. Just to put things in context.

This is Canada and we had like American media trucks covering, I'm assuming, violence.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, covering violence at the school and drugs and a whole bunch of other stuff.

And I remember at the time being envious of all of these other schools who didn't have these problems, all of these other kids, like I was one zip code away, basically one postal code in Canada, one zip code in the US from, you know, literally a block.

And I would have been at this other school, which was brand new, had none of these problems.

And I remember just like being so envious of the people who went there and being like, man, they don't have to deal with this.

Like my school's closed like two days a week, you know, we're tipping buses over and like letting them on fire.

And, and then it was only later in life that I was like, actually, that wasn't so bad.

I mean, it was bad.

Obviously it never happened, but it, it sort of built a lot of resilience.

So when I ended up getting divorced, when stuff happened in life, when I failed at work, when something happened, it was more contextualized than it would have been had I not had that experience.

And I'm not saying that experience is the only thing.

I mean, I had tons of, um, like everybody else, right?

No better, no worse, but different, different situations.

But I wasn't really protected from a lot of that stuff after being a teenager.

And that allowed me to handle things a little bit better in life.

And the reason I'm mentioning that is because I know when I get divorced in 2014, one of my friends got divorced shortly thereafter.

And the way that we handled it was just totally different.

And it wasn't good for either of us, but that was the first time that she had ever gone through something even remotely challenging.

And you're, you know, you're mid thirties and you have no muscles.

You don't know what to do.

It's crazy. It's really hard.

And part of what you had that your friend did not is the understanding and awareness in your mind that things would go on, you would move past it, and it would become a step towards a future you because you had been through some traumatic experiences before.

And there's an amazing study that I uncovered while researching my book by Dan Gilbert, by Ms.

Harvard, a professor and psychologist, author of the book, Stumbling on Happiness and other amazing books called The End of History Illusion.

I don't know if you've heard about this or not, Shane, but basically he and a team of people interviewed 19 ,000 people.

And essentially they asked them two questions.

It was a little bit more scientific than this, but essentially the root of the study was two questions.

Number one, what's been the last 10 years of your life like and what do you think the next 10 years will hold?

Every single person said, Oh my, the last 10 years, I mean, it was up and down.

I had this trauma. I got through this.

Like I moved, you know, me and Joe broke up and whatever.

Like it was like this tempestuous story for the next 10 years.

The next 10 years. Oh, hockey stick.

Exactly. No, next 10 years people said same as it is now.

I probably, I probably won't move.

Me and Mark are still going to be together.

Instead of a director, I'll be a VP.

Like they literally thought history stopped where they were today.

And it didn't matter if people were in their twenties, thirties, forties, or even sixties, they had this perception that history is finished where I am because I can't see that future.

So I cannot think what it would look like.

So I read this study, Shane, you know what it made me think of?

I worked at Walmart for 10 years.

I was director of leadership development there, but leading up to that role had a lot of HR roles.

And one of the worst roles I had, although there was a huge option to be empathetic in this job, was I had to help managers fire employees.

So I was in the, I was the third person in the room.

A manager is telling an employee that they are terminated and I'm the third person trying to help coach the manager before the meeting and provide empathy and compassion and clarity for the person getting fired.

I would therefore be the one walking them to their car, helping them pack their trunk in the middle of winter.

And they would say to me, what am I going to do now?

I will never find anything.

I've been here 20 years.

My life is over. The point of that story though, is Canada is pretty small and different industries are pretty small.

So I would inevitably bump into people that had been terminated years later.

Every single one of them said, I'm not kidding.

That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

If I hadn't of got fired, I wouldn't have had time with my daughter after her miscarriage.

I wouldn't have traveled to Peru like I always said I wanted to do.

I wouldn't have got a job at this tiny startup, but now I'm a C -suite.

I've got promoted twice there because it's only 20 people.

Everyone was happy with the termination in the past.

And at the time, they could not see that future staircase.

They thought history ended now.

And I think that's an important study because it helps us see it as a step for you, the divorce and I'm projecting on you, but for you, maybe the divorce was a step towards something.

And maybe for a friend, it's an end of something.

And that that difference of how you perceive a traumatic experience can help you get through it.

So in your experience then, is there ways to help people prime them in those moments where you're about to deliver bad news, but is this an innate personality thing with people or is this a learned sort of skill?

Is there anything that people delivering bad news can...

So when I was in the room, the thing I learned after all those meetings over and over and over again was say less, talk less, don't go over the big summary.

I'm supposed to go through the big termination letter and explain all the clauses and stuff.

No, it was just about being there for the person, offering your eyes, your hand, your face, your empathy, your compassion.

And being there with them, because that was the start of the beginning of the little bit of processing.

Not like roughly going through the notes.

And then in terms of which way do people go afterwards and why, I do think it is learned and I do think it comes from saying a study like the end of history illusion and how we all have to train ourselves to see other stuff.

That doesn't help much when you're getting fired or when you have, in my case, my wife told me she's done with our marriage.

That doesn't help for me to be like, oh, the left side of my brain says this is going to get better.

No, but going through it helps you get better and then you get better the next time.

But the first one really does hurt.

Part of why I wrote this new book is because I share stories of where I got through this stuff and studies that helped confirm to me why it works.

And I'm hoping to share with my kids.

It's like, you know, when you go through trauma, you will be okay, especially if you think you will.

Because here's what the research says, here's some stories, here's some things that will help you get through there.

But I don't think it's easy, Shane.

And I don't think I have all the answers.

I think the way the path you go, A, B or C, and that little mental tree diagram you just drove is a question mark.

So I want to get to your divorce.

You've written broadly on three topics, so gratitude, happiness and resilience.

Yes. We've talked a lot about resilience.

Walk me through how these fit together and why these three particular topics, how they came to be.

Sure. And let's sort of go through gratitude and happiness, too.

Sure. So my wife left me, my best friend took his own life.

I started a blog called 1000awesomethings .com.

For a thousand straight days, I wrote about one simple pleasure in life.

Things like wearing a warm underwear from air to the dryer, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, which is huge at an Indian wedding because there's 500 tables, you know, hitting a string of green lights when you're late for work.

Just little things.

I expand on them in 500 -word essays -ish.

And for a thousand straight days, I posted it, the blog went viral, it took off, it turned into my first book, which is the Book of Awesome.

That book, therefore, is all about gratitude.

It isn't one of these academic - That book became a New York Times bestseller.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I sold a million copies and it was number one, I think, for a hundred straight weeks on the Globe Mail Bestseller List.

Why do you think it was number one?

Why do you think it resonated so much with people?

The weirdest advice or the weirdest compliment I ever got.

Two things. Two, you know how people say stuff about your own work and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way?

Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast.

He's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art not giving a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing, right?

So two compliments stuck out for me, Shane.

One is this is the only self -help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do.

It shows me how to do it.

Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper.

I don't say that once.

I'm talking about the virtues of getting a mudder paneer before it's all out of paneer.

You know what I mean?

I have. So then you can start to see your own life that way.

And the second compliment I got that resonated with me was my eight -year -old son never reads anything, but he read your book.

And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is I'm trying to expand the size of the pie.

My writing veers slightly different than yours.

Like I'm aiming for the big fat mass.

I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market.

And when I get non -readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success.

Non -reader's reading is kind of one of my big ultimate goals.

And it's the topic that's enduring.

We're all taught sort of awareness of gratitude and then that we should have gratitude and nobody's sort of like, I don't know, maybe I can't say nobody.

I mean, I am trying to think of how I modeled that for my kids.

It just seems so cheesy and hokey when you hear about it these days.

You know, it's like, yeah, Oprah's gratitude journal and like write down five things on your bedside table before you go to bed.

And like, I mean, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

But it's when you do it as a practice, when you go, I always say to people, the best way to do it, quickest way to do it is go around your dinner table at night and do rose, rose, thorn, bud.

Have you heard about this?

No. So you say a rose from your day.

That's something that was a highlight for you, a gratitude.

Then say your son says one.

Okay. Your other son says one.

Whatever. Then another rose, then a thorn, which is something that did not go well because you want to get it off your chest.

You need to vent and the other people need to show you empathy.

Okay. And then a bud, bud, bud, which is something you are looking forward to tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever that little exercise helps you get all the gratitudes in that the science says really work.

Emmons and McCulloch, 10 weeks of five gratitudes a week makes you not only happier, but physically healthier after 10 weeks.

So we know it's a powerful punch to your brain to do that, but it puts it in a little around the table dinner exercise.

That's just quite like simple and easy to do.

Why is that effective though?

Like I have a theory on this.

So my theory, and you're going to prove me wrong here in a second is, because I was thinking about this, researching speaking with you and also like the things that I do at home.

And I'm like, Oh, these little moments of joy are actually really awesome, but why are they awesome?

And then I think a lot of it is just adding perspective, right?

So you get almost like this flashlight with a narrow beam and then you start, Oh, look, I'm going to find something that's really nice.

So you widen it a little bit more.

And then it's that perspective that causes you to see things in a new way, but to get the perspective, you're actually reflecting and it's the reflection.

I think there's something to do with that reflection that actually drives this sort of drives the response.

I don't know. Your brain is much bigger than mine.

So I, my instinct is to say, you're right.

No, no, that's not true.

Can I add in, can I sprinkle some salt on that with a little bit of the evolutionary biology stuff?

200 ,000 years we've been around ish, right?

Our species and plus or minus, you know, whenever they can backdate the carbon dating of the first human body or whatever.

And for the first 199 ,900 of those years, we had to fight for survival.

Luckily we, there's something in our brain called our amygdala.

It secretes a fight or flight hormone.

And when you see a saber -toothed tiger, you know, I got to fight that thing to the death with a stick where I got to run the hell away, right?

And that served us very well.

We went from a few scattered hundreds on the African savanna to the most populous mammal on the planet.

We took over this spaceship.

We won. We eat all the other ones for dinner, literally like we, they used to eat us, but we eat them now, you know, and we won.

We took it over. In the last hundred years, we no longer need that 199 ,900 years of evolutionary biology that has programmed us into thinking if it doesn't kill me, I got to kill it and I got to run.

We now live in an era of abundance and that abundance is only skyrocketing.

Think about it. That model I said, you can press the button and a car picks you up, press another button and you got dinner, press another button and you got entertainment.

Like we just press buttons now.

So we don't need that that fight or flight hormone as much, yet it's still there.

That is not, you're not just going to evolve away your amygdala.

You know, what are you going to do?

So you're going to naturally have all the neural pathways to see negative stuff first.

That is why it bleeds, it leads.

People always say to me, why isn't there a good news newspaper?

I'm like, no one would watch it.

They want to watch the fire.

We want the race car crash.

We want the hard hit in football.

We want that stuff that we, they're like, oh, everyone's rubbernecking on the highway.

It's like, of course, everyone wants to see the accident.

We instinctively, biologically, evolutionarily want to see it.

So this gratitude stuff is actually practicing to develop a whole new muscle, carving totally different neural pathways to see how awesome it is to be alive.

You got 30 ,000 days on this planet.

You will never be as young as you are right now.

And if you don't watch for all these tiny little pleasurable moments, it'll slip away and you won't see them.

And life is awesome.

And the gratitude stuff works because then you were like, whoa, I'm so happy to see you today, Shane.

I can't wait to shake your hand and thank you for your time.

I love seeing the Farm Street offices.

Wow, I can't wait to soak in your bookshelf on the way out.

It's beautiful. Like I, I want to soak that in because if I don't life's over and I missed it.

Yeah, life is so brief and so fragile, right?

And we think we naturally just sort of think, oh, life expectancy is sort of say 80 or something.

And I'm this old. So I have like all this time left in the future.

But recently, I mean, I've seen a lot of people that I know become sick or sort of suffer some sort of catastrophic injury.

And life isn't long.

Life is super short and fragile.

And we always think that we'll put off living until we're older when we retire, we're going to talk about retirement a little bit.

But we always think we can put this off until we're in a better place or we have more time.

And, but life, there's this quote by Mary Angelou that I love, which is it's on the wall in my living room, actually.

And it says, life loves the liver of it.

Oh, that's good. And I think it's so deep on multiple levels.

And it's so easily accessible too, right?

Because every day you wake up, it's like, this is your day, right?

You can live your best life today.

And so one of the routines, we were talking about sort of like routines for gratitude or perspective.

One of the things that I taught my kids to do, which I encourage all parents of young children to do if they're so inclined is when your kids get out of bed in the morning, a lot of people send them downstairs, like go watch cartoons because parents are a little slower to wake up than kids.

I don't know. If everybody's kids are like mine, like they're up and out of bed and like full bore in like 30 seconds, right?

Like I'm dressed like 5am.

Yeah. And so I was like, okay, you can't get out of your bed till seven.

Like here's the rules sort of, right?

Like at seven, you can come in my bed and we're going to cuddle, and this is how we're going to start the day.

And they're still doing it.

They're 10 and nine, although it's gone from like 30 minutes to maybe five to eight now.

But we sort of talk about like what we're looking forward to today.

Like if there was any lesson from yesterday, from a sort of an educational perspective, I did this and I got this outcome, but that wasn't what I wanted.

So I would do it differently.

We just sort of like do the spaced repetition on, oh, remember what happened yesterday.

If you've encountered the situation today, like how would you respond to that?

And then it's like, what are you looking forward to today?

And we just spend a few minutes talking and cuddling.

Wow. What an incredible practice.

I'm very jealous. I want to do that now.

I don't do that with weekends.

You can't come in my bed and cuddle with me.

I particularly want to cuddle with you.

But I think that's amazing.

And it's about pausing, and that's partly why I always say life's been in days.

I never refer to it as years.

I always refer to it as days.

I'm a big fan of the Kevin Kelly death clock idea.

Oh, I haven't heard of that.

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wire magazine, keeps a clock on his desktop that has an expected lifespan, subtracts his current age, measured in days.

So if the average lifespan, which it is in North America is 30 ,000 days, and he happens to have lived 21 ,500 of them, that thing will say, quick Neil, do the math, 8 ,500.

And then tomorrow it'll say 8 ,499.

And that literally is the number of days he has left.

A lot of people will find that too dark or too, too like, whoa, man.

I think it's empowering, right?

It gives you information that it's like, you know what?

I really don't want to spend my time this way.

Well, exactly. I really don't want to do this.

And I only have so much and like, delaying things I always find like, so weird to me, like when you know something that you want to do something and you just keep putting it off and off and off.

And you might never get a chance to do it.

It does force you to take action.

There's even a Google Chrome plugin that's called the death clock.

And I did download it, but I deleted it eventually because it was all black with like, red skulls and stuff.

And I was like, that's a little too dark.

Okay, that depends on your frame.

So that's kind of the whole gratitude piece.

Okay, the book of awesome was the manifestation of a blog I wrote every day for 1000 straight days.

Now you asked me what about happiness?

Okay, three years after that, Shane, I met someone new.

Her name is Leslie.

We fell in love. A year later, I asked her to move in with me and I got down on one knee and I proposed and she says, yeah, so I'm like, entering into, I mean, 33 years old, I'm entering into like, marriage number two, which feels super weird.

I told myself I was never going to get married again and this is it for me.

And here I am getting married.

So Leslie and I get married.

We go on a honeymoon to Southeast Asia.

We never been, neither of us had ever been there before.

She planned the wedding.

So I planned the honeymoon.

And then on the plane on the way home, she's not feeling well.

She's sick. And we have a layover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

And she's like, Neil, I really need to lie down.

Like, find me a pharmacy.

Like, where can I get some rest?

And I'm like, Les, like we're about to get on a 13 hour flight home.

Like, are you sure you're up for this?

She's like, yeah, I just need the pharmacy.

So we find the pharmacy, find a place to lie down, get on the plane.

It's like, are you sure?

She's like, I'm sure.

So the plane takes off.

We're up in the sky.

We're above the clouds.

She goes to the tiny airplane bathroom at the front of the plane.

She's there for a few minutes.

She comes back to our seats and she says, I'm pregnant.

She bought the pregnancy test in the Malaysian airport pharmacy.

She did the pregnancy test in the tiny airplane bathroom and we're on our honeymoon.

So that's why she wasn't feeling well.

Didn't waste any time.

Baby is born literally nine months of the day after my wedding day, July 12th, April 12th.

I know my friend sent me a, you're laughing.

So I have to just tell you a friend of mine sent me a YouTube clip of Mary Lemieux for shift, or for those that don't know, Mary Lemieux jumps on the ice, he gets a pass and he scores.

Like that's like Mary Lemieux for shift.

He sent me, I'm like, okay, good.

So, so anyway, but I had nine months there, Shane, and that forced a thought, a new thought, which is, how do I help my kids live happy lives?

So I ended up writing a 300 page love letter to my unborn child before he was born.

And this is the happiness equation.

That is literally the letter.

So that's just a deep exploration, reading every single positive psychology study up there, the science of happiness and trying to distill it down to frameworks and models that I and my children could understand.

And that came from a death clock place.

Cause I thought if I got hit by a bus before the kid gets born, or like before they're of an age where they can understand my philosophy, I want to at least have that codified somewhere.

That was kind of the, that, that gave me the, the sort of needle in my back or whatever the prod, the cattle prod to keep going.

How would you define happiness?

Happiness is the joy you feel while striving towards your potential.

I've borrowed and butchered and amalgamated that quote from a number of sources.

Even 2000 years ago, a lot of philosophers use that phrase.

Things about happiness I want to share though, are 2000 years ago, Aristotle said it's the meaning of life.

We've been thinking that since then.

350 years ago in the declaration of independence, they wrote, everyone gets life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

They were careful to add the legalese that you get life and liberty for sure.

But you only get to chase happiness.

You get the pursuit of it.

And then in 1996, this is the most impactful Martin Seligman and Mihaly Chakhmayhale in Pennsylvania founded the whole discipline of positive psychology.

So when I talk to friends of mine who are on the international council of global happiness, there really is such a thing with like, I might've butchered the name, it's like Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia, Martin Seligman's on it, Shawn Acor, author of the happiest advantages on it.

And I talked to Shawn and I was like, Hey, what are you guys up to on that council?

He's like, we're spending our, all our meetings talking about how to define happiness.

So to your point and to your original question a minute ago, it's, it is an almost undefinable word.

I will say my definition is the joy you feel whilst striving towards your potential.

I use that particularly because for example, while training for a marathon in the rain with shin splints, you can still be happy.

While giving birth with labor, with pain, you can still be happy because you're achieving something bigger than you, than you thought you could, or you're going, your, your version of yourself is expanding.

Point though, I want to say though is in all the scientific studies, the way they define it is they call it subjective wellbeing.

They ask people on a scale of typically one to 10, how happy they are self -reported, they ask them to do a number of different things and then they ask them at the end.

So all these studies I'm talking about like journaling, nature walks, they'll compare people doing nature walks with people on antidepressants, with people doing neither, with people doing both, and then they're able to intimate results from those studies that way.

And I went deep on the science there because I just know you would have asked me anyway, probably.

Happiness is so interesting to me.

I used to ask a lot of people, I don't do this anymore.

How happy are you? I used to ask a lot of my friends that.

Yeah, like scale one to 10 type thing or?

No, just open ended.

Like how people respond to that.

It's a very interesting question for me.

And I stopped asking that question because more and more it seemed like I was getting this, I'm happy but or I'll be happy when.

And especially with kids, I notice this a lot, right?

I'll use kids as an example and this doesn't apply to everybody.

It's sort of a gross overgeneralization but you can break parents down into two categories.

There's the parents who are in the moment with their kids, and then there's the parents who are always waiting for their kids to be in the next phase.

And I found the people I was around the most that I didn't actually like spending time with were always wanting their kid to be in the next phase.

Hedonistic treadmill.

Right. So it's like, oh, I had a baby, great.

I love this thing but I can't wait till they're out of diapers.

I can't wait till they go to school.

I can't wait till they go to high school.

And it even gets to the point where I can't wait till they're out of the house.

Yeah. You're allowed to wish for that.

You're like, well, why'd you have a kid if you wanted them to be gone.

So to me, that's like an I'm happy but or I'll be happy when.

And it always struck me that you're never in the present moment.

So the pursuit of happiness is also an interesting thing where I don't know if I actually thought about it, but I think it causes a lot of unhappiness, right?

Because you're striving for this thing and you're wanting and there's a gap between sort of what you have and what you want.

And I think that a lot of happiness is sort of like just wanting what you have or the absence of desire for something more.

And so you can think of happiness as, yeah, you can be happy running and you can be happy with shin splints because you're doing what you want to be doing in that moment.

You don't need anything else, but you're, you're present in that moment.

So I think personally, a lot of unhappiness comes from living in the past or living in the future.

That's good. Have you heard the model that adds to that saying, living with the past is depression living in the future is anxiety?

Oh, that's interesting.

No, I haven't heard that.

Yeah. Yeah. I've just been hearing a little bit of that.

I don't know. I don't have an excitable source unfortunately, but that the idea that living in the present is therefore happiness.

If you're living in the past, you are ruining something or depressed about something or regretful of something living in the future is typically anxiety because you're taking all potential future iterations of what could happen and bring them up to today.

That's anxiety. And that if you can live in your present, that's okay.

I like that. Like, I think you have to look backwards to learn, right?

Like, so you have to reflect on things that have happened and importantly, your contribution to whatever is going on in your life.

And it might be 5%, it might be 1%.

Yeah. You don't want to take living in the present to its ultimate and where you're just like, and you apply that to the future to hopefully sort of, I mean, otherwise I'd eat four funnel cakes at the fair and tomorrow I feel sick.

So, I mean, yeah, you got to take some of the future and pass in there.

So, two questions. One about Leslie, and then I want to go back to the happiness equation.

Did you know when you met her that you loved her?

Was this like an instant love at first sight or was this, she's going to listen to this?

I felt very strongly about her very quickly.

And it was scary for me because I had been divorced.

And so I was fearful of that emotion, thinking to myself, oh my gosh, I felt this lust before and it manifested itself into a marriage that did not work.

So I have to now be careful of this emotion.

So the way I navigated that was, I created a little system for myself, which was this.

I need to be dating someone.

I actually created this system before I met Leslie, so it helped to have in place beforehand.

I need to be dating someone for one year, a full year before minimum, before we live together.

I need to be living together with someone for one year minimum before we get married.

And that little two -step process actually really helped because before I met Leslie, I didn't date anyone else for a year.

And some of that was by design.

Some of that was people that didn't want to date me who I was interested in.

It was the natural human relationships.

I went on a lot of dates and they ghosted me.

You know what I'm saying?

There's a lot of that too.

So finally, Leslie and I, 100 dates later, we had this chemistry and this connection, but that model still applied and that helped me pacefully process my emotions.

I was a bit scared.

Like the story of your friend that got engaged for 24 hours, like that would have been my fear that I would rush into another marriage and be divorced again.

And that's a fear based on what happened in the first marriage.

Yeah. So correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but you came home one day in your first marriage, she said, I don't love you anymore.

Tell me about that conversation.

Um, yeah, so that is the phrase I use in my Ted talk and in speeches.

And when I try to describe how that relationship ended, um, because this is a podcast and it's long form, I can take you zoom, I can zoom into it in a little bit more granularity to say that it wasn't exactly like that.

That's just the, that's the, um, way I summarize it.

So what happened was we'd been married, um, I think two years at this time and I was working at Walmart.

She's a high school teacher.

Um, I get home, I get home one night and, um, she's trying to process something big and, and she's crying and she's, she's scared and she's, uh, sad and all these emotions.

So I'm trying to comfort her.

What is it? What are you thinking about?

And she's like, I, you know, I'm worried that we're kind of different.

And I was like, well, opposites attract, you know, like the classic, uh, maybe, um, you know, naive response.

And she's like, yeah, but you know, you proposed so quickly eight months after we started dating, I proposed.

Then you went to Harvard for two years for business school.

So we were long distance through our engagement and our marriage.

We got married the summer between the two years.

She came down to Boston to try to live there.

She didn't work because she couldn't find a job, visas and issues, et cetera.

So she went home and then we got together and bought the house and she's like, I think we're just starting to get to know each other now, two years into the marriage.

And now I'm feeling like maybe we're not connected and I'm not sure if I love you.

And that was the death blow that phrase because I grew up in the Western world.

Love is the ultimate, not like my parents.

Like, you know, my parents wouldn't supersede love overall, but I'm like, I've been surrounded by music and movies and songs my whole life.

Like love, if love is the answer, you know, and all you need is love.

And, and so to hear that she was not sure that she was in love with me anymore, that was what cracked it kind of open.

And, um, what happened next?

Well, uh, what happened next is we had to, um, get a divorce, man.

We had to, like, we had to, like, did you go to marriage counseling?

How did this conversation flow?

Was it like, well, so one thing I don't talk about very often is that there was somebody else in her life.

So I don't talk about that very often out of respect to her, but there was somebody else that she did have some emotions for.

And so, um, there was that presence and that person also, um, had emotions for her and it was also in a relationship.

So it was really two relationships ending at once so that they could be together, uh, doing so, I think as carefully and tactfully and, and positively as possible.

But I knew that there was, she had emotions elsewhere.

And so it wasn't a choice really.

And, um, I also, despite thinking to myself so strongly and seriously, like, I want this to work.

We just bought a house.

We're about to have kids.

Like this is it. I'm in my, I'm in my late twenties and like, this is what I'm supposed to do, right?

Like buy a house, get married, have kids.

Like, when all that cracked open, we did not pursue marriage counseling.

And I don't remember why, if we explore that or not.

We went to the divorce, uh, lawyer and he's like, well, why don't you make a list of everything you guys own and just write a name beside it all.

And we did that in one night because it was like we didn't own anything.

Like the hardest thing to split was like who gets the wedding album.

And I was like, I don't want that.

So she's like, oh, that'd be great.

I really liked those pictures, you know?

And I'd be like, Oh, I'd like the couch.

She'd be like, well, I'd like, like we, we had one car.

Like it was trying to split very little assets.

And so we did that.

And then, um, uh, unfortunately my friend, uh, took his own life at that same time.

So, um, and that was my best friend from Harvard.

His name's Chris and, uh, um, that's what amplified, uh, kind of the emotions at the time.

And that's partly why either one of those things in their own would be so tough.

Yeah. And both of them had, uh, a run -up, right?

Like Chris had attempted suicide once before again, that's something I don't talk about a ton.

I knew his psychiatrist.

I knew his medications.

I had emergency phone number.

I was supposed to call if I saw anything.

Um, and with my wife, there were some previous conversations that I can now look back on and say, Oh, that was a big sign.

Oh, that was a big, remember one day we went hiking in the Adirondacks and we got to the top of the mountain and I was like, that was the worst day of my life.

There was bugs, there was mosquitoes.

I thought I heard a bear.

I'm covered in blood.

She was like, that was the best day of my life.

I love, I want to do this every day.

And I was like, whoa, how possibly could we be so different?

And so you can look back and decide on stuff.

So then this fall apart, the marriage falls apart, I lose my close friend.

And that's where I really started putting like 10 hours a day outside of work into that blog.

Like I just dove deep into 1000awesomethings .com because I had nowhere else to go.

I had no other place to channel my energy.

I had no one else in my phone book.

I had no, I don't want to get in touch with mutual friends because they were mutual friends.

So they also knew her.

Like I was like, I got to find a bachelor apartment downtown Toronto, find a place to live by myself.

I got to like fix my, and I started going to therapy twice a week because that's how much I needed to talk about process.

And it was just like a mess.

And a lot of it was breaking down a lot of the systems I carried around in my head East Indian culture, you know, whatever baggage around what I should be doing by when in my life.

I already failed at being a doctor.

You know, that was already a mess.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, East Indian culture is supposed to, you know, great work leads the big doctor, right?

If not, then like maybe you fail and be a lawyer and engineer.

But not never mind that.

Then you got to be married, have kids, certainly heterosexual marriage, certainly kids, probably two kids, ideally a boy and a girl.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Like I didn't intuit this from stuff my parents told me.

It was just stuff I saw growing up.

Every family I saw growing up was like, the dad's a doctor.

The mom stays at home.

They got two kids. The kids are probably becoming a doctor or an engineer.

All of the parents talk about is what grades their kids get in school.

And like, you know what I'm saying?

That's the culture I grew up in.

If you're not East Indian, you don't get this probably.

If you are, you're like, sing it, baby, because this is exactly what you feel like too.

So that shattering of all those assumptions and all those things I thought I wanted was hard to process.

Never mind the idea that I was a failure at something.

In whose eyes? To myself.

I failed at marriage.

I got a divorce. I suck at relationships.

I am unlovable. These are the stories.

Exactly. I'm ugly. I am not someone people want to be with.

I'm too neurotic. I talk too loud.

I'm hard to be around.

I'm not good in bed.

Maybe we didn't have kids.

Maybe this is a function.

Like your mind goes where it goes.

And for me in those times, in those years, in those days, I was thinking like, I'm sunk.

I'm over. How did you stop those narratives or change them or replace them?

Like walk me through that because there's no, like I have this theory on narratives being so powerful in our lives.

Like the stories we tell ourselves, like in a relationship, you have your story.

You sort of have either a story of your relationship.

You have the story of your parents and what's expected of you.

And like, how did you, how did you replace those narratives?

How did you change them?

Was that through therapy?

So there's kind of like a low level answer and a high level answer.

So the low level answer is therapy.

The blog. Remember my blog was a daily journaling practice to focus essentially on gratitude and positivity.

That really helps. Right.

So I found an outlet.

I talked about it. I had a therapist.

Like I, I had great family to, I went and bunked with my parents every weekend while I was processing stuff and crying and processing all this.

So there's a lot of that.

But the higher level answer is I learned to tell myself a different story.

So you called it, these were stories you were telling yourself.

And I love that you said that because that would have been an enamel that I wouldn't have been able to see at the time.

But truthfully, what was happening, Shane, was I was telling myself all these stories and I had to work to revise and replace those narratives.

So there's a really famous study called Too Fat to Fit Through the Door by universities at Utrecht University.

If I'm they asked people who had anorexia and people who did not, a very simple non -challenging question to answer, but something that mentally distracted them while they walked through a doorway.

So they were not paying attention to the doorway.

The anorexis shifted their body much more than the non -anorexics believing they were too fat to fit through the doorway.

Although, of course they were not.

The story they were telling themselves is I'm fat.

So when I walked through a door, I got a I got a shuffle sideways to fit through here.

That study was a real breakthrough for me as I was writing about resilience in my new book, because I saw myself in that story.

I'm unlovable. I'm ugly.

No one will date like these stories become fact.

And part of the language that you have to learn is learning to see the story.

I feel biology is a lot different than I failed my parents.

First one's a fact.

Second one's a story.

I'm an alcoholic is a lot different than no one will trust me again.

First one's a fact.

Second one's a story.

So on top of the I am divorced fact, I was layering on top all these endless stories.

And I've done that to myself throughout my whole life.

I tell a story about discovering I had one testicle in grade nine gym class in this new book and I know I always thought everyone had one.

We have one nose, one mouth, one heart, one who's to say you need it too?

I didn't know. Then my grade nine gym class teacher made some horrible comments referring to a guy that he wrestled with in a wrestling tournament.

He crushed the guy's testicle.

And he said after that I all me and everyone called him half a man and everyone in the gym class burst out laughing.

This is grade nine gym class.

And that's when it dawned on me that oh my gosh, everyone else has two.

And so guess what happened, Shane?

Once again, I told myself a zillion stories.

I am disfigured. I will never have children.

I might have a high pitched voice.

I do you see what I'm saying?

So part of that process was learning to see the story.

Just learning the you're the one that's the best at this.

You're all you get so high level on the models that we use inside our brains.

And like this is one that I'd love for you to explore because you can help me with it.

But like seeing how learning how to see the story.

That is a big scale.

That takes time. You have to peel away the onion over and over and over again until you get to the root core objective truth.

And oftentimes when you get there I have one testicle.

I am a person who has been divorced and that ain't so bad.

That ain't that bad at all actually.

It's not that but it takes a while to get to the core objective truth.

And then you realize like cares about that.

There's this old man at this coffee shop that I go to.

I don't even know his name.

I talk to him all the time though.

Just briefly passing by I always say like how was you.

How are you doing today.

And he's like I woke up.

It's a good day. Right side of the ground.

And I find it actually it's great right because sometimes walking in there and I'm like lost mentally in the stories that we're telling ourselves for whatever reason.

And it snaps me out of it.

And it's just like yeah oh my god my day could be so much worse.

Right. Like if this was the case and it helps you gain perspective it's easier to see the narratives of other people.

And I've sort of just started exploring this narrative idea a little bit.

But one of the narratives.

Oh go ahead. No no I was going to say have you heard of that study called.

It's from The Telegraph saying have you had enough one night stands.

No right. So I want to tell you about the study because I think you might find this interesting.

So basically it's like there's a study in the Telegraph where they looked at people who had found long term true love.

OK. So they were by all definitions with the one and they said to them so how many people did you date before this one.

How many one night stands did you have.

How many times you were cheated on.

How many times did you cheat on someone else.

It's a bizarre research study obviously.

But what they found and I'm going to read this to you right now.

According to the study the average woman number this is in a committed long term loving relationship will kiss 15 people have seven sexual partners for one night stands for disaster dates three relationships less than a year two relationships more than a year fall in love twice be heartbroken twice

cheat once be cheated on once all before they find a lifelong partner the male statistics are very similar average man will kiss 16 people have 10 sexual partners six one night stands for disaster dates for relationships that last less than a year two more than a year fall in love twice be heartbroken

twice cheat once and be cheated on once all before he finds a long term partner.

If you ask the average person would you like to go through all that to find the one they would say no wait be cheated on have 10 disaster dates like you kidding me but the story that you might tell yourself later is that was all in service of finding the one I can now say confidently that without that divorce

I would not have found Leslie I wouldn't have been in that apartment building I wouldn't have met Rita the friend who entered like nothing would have happened that would have led me to her with the benefit of hindsight I can now refer to that as a step which we talked about earlier and a story that I've

changed in my mind and I like this study from the telegraph although even though it's a little funny it does point you to the idea that hey maybe everything happens for a reason and actually you can reframe things towards your the ultimate more positive place you hopefully are projecting towards.

I like that I think asking yourself what story you're telling yourself is really important and I think to understand other people asking yourself what story they're telling themselves about themselves is the key to sort of understanding and gaining perspective and seeing the world through their eyes

and empathy and empathy so one of the stories you told yourself uh at Harvard yeah was that you don't belong there and that you're the worst yeah walk me through that so first of all there's a joke at Harvard Business School called the admissions mistake joke so it's like everyone's like well I'm the admissions

mistake like people refer to themselves as admissions mistake people are like well I've so and so is probably the admission it's like this like classic like little joke within Harvard and I actually thought I'm sure many people they're dead like no that's actually me like how did I get in I wasn't even

Dean's List in my undergrad I had 70s I'm at Harvard they must have made a mistake you know they must have miscalculated in their internal secret algorithm what my other experiences were because I got there and I was blown away by every other student so I always felt like the bottom of the class kind

of thing and the funny thing happened was I got this scholarship to go there because I was so poor you know they when you when you apply to undergrad they ask you for your parents tax returns but when you apply your master's they ask you for your tax returns so my tax returns were crap so they were like

congratulations you're so poor and we have an 18 billion dollar endowment so you get a little bit of it so mine was called the John H.

MacArthur fellowship I write a letter to this dude who I don't know because he's paying for my tuition for the two years of the NBA turns out he's the former dean of the place he was the dean of HBS from 1980 to 1995 he was a Canadian so he set up a scholarship for future Canadians to go down there

any Canadians listening uh if you're poor you apply to HBS this guy might give you a free ride okay so I end up getting invited to meet him for lunch and while I have lunch with him he looks at me in the eyes he's like how's it going how's school and I'm like it's stressful man it's stressful I'm going

out every night like winding and dining with millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under their eyes we all want to be millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under our eyes too so we're like hobnobbing with them and applying and first -run interviews and second interviews and blah

blah blah it's overwhelming it's stressful he's like well why are you doing that I was like well I had no money when I came here I'm hoping to correct that problem and he's like do you're you're at the beach right now he didn't say dude okay he's like 80 years old but he was like you're a guy outside

the beach you're looking in the beach there's a fence right in front of your face and inside are 10 sunbathing beauties make whatever gender you want but you are with a thousand other people outside that beach and when they open the beach all thousand of you are going to run in to try to get that google

job or that amazing hedge fund opportunity whatever it is but there's only 10 of them so your odds of getting any of them are so low I was like yeah I know that I know that I already feel that I feel like a loser here he's like so get off the beach go to the library find the nerd find the broken bankrupt

companies who don't have money to send a private jet to harvard to do their fancy campus recruiting and if you call up those companies and if they take you inside you will get a bigger job with more learning and more experience than you can possibly imagine your voice will be worth something at the table

you will be a big fish in a small pond get off the beach and go to the library guess what shane I never applied for a single job through harvard business school ever I made an excel spreadsheet of every company I could think of that I wanted to work at it had also been through a hard time a flat stock

price for a decade a pr crisis something that would make it interesting but also that they weren't coming to harvard cold called 100 companies got 50 responses got about 25 people doing what I called first -word interviews what were just five minute interviews got about 12 first -word interviews from that and a five

offers all from places off the beach I accepted that job at walmart which at the time if you remember was like not a very cool place at the time you know they're killing main street and blah blah so I got a job walmart and guess what I was the only one was like the background I had in the entire office

of a thousand plus people and different is better than better while I didn't know a ton more than a ton the stuff I did know in the meetings was different than the stuff everybody else knew so I was promoted quickly I was given leadership positions he was right he was basically right and so I learned

and I discovered through researching it afterwards this line of thinking holds true across the world in every culture and demographic if you put yourself in a small pond then your academic self -concept or how you think of yourself goes up for up to 10 years after you leave the pond so you think you're

great for way longer than you're in that position and it stays with you so now one of my keys to resilience is can you find small ponds we now live in a giant pond called a global community with eight billion people you'll never be good enough ever I can tell you a hundred people that have more followers

than you have more views than you have more podcasts downloads than you and you know them too and even Oprah's looking at Justin Bieber's followers like no one wins so in this global community it's important to develop resilience by giving ourselves games that we can win sign up for the marathon in the lowest

slowest category tee off from the tease closest to the pin rig the game so you can finally win something and then you'll feel better about yourself and you'll use that confidence and energy to keep going it's so underrated in terms of uh standing out right like who you're competing against if you're

uh a type a person they're prone to competing against other type a people would be a lot easier to compete against type c people uh people that don't work is hard people that don't learn as quickly you know uh you're gonna you're bound to go further and the contrast that you're creating will make you

stand out and it's hard to stand out and in a world that's brutally competitive I mean this is the pain I think a lot of us feel on a daily basis because I can tell you a hundred metrics that I have that I'm like oh someone's so higher someone's so better so like this is just where our brains go it's

back to our evolutionary thinking but yeah if you can put yourself in a game you can win then you feel better after I always say this would happen my keynote speaking you know after the book of awesome got popular a bunch of speaking bureaus caught me up and said hey you want to speak for us and I said

sure how much do you think it should cost and they told me some crazy number whatever it was like ten to fifteen thousand dollars I'm like what are you kidding me someone's gonna pay me that much money like to fly and give a speech and they're like yeah and I'm like who else is getting paid that much

they're this New York Times bestseller this gold medal winning Olympian this and I'm like oh I know all those people like those are like rock star professors like those are those are winners like those are people I know what about the lowest what's the lowest fee category you have and they're like five

thousand dollars remember I'm like that's the lowest and they're like yeah so we work for commission that's the lowest we have and I'm like who's in that category and they're like listed a bunch of people that no offense I just didn't know them I never heard of any of their names so I said put me there

guess what Shane that meant I was practicing essentially in like boardrooms of 50 people rather than like Vegas casinos for a thousand so my ability to think I could do it shot up that's really interesting and it stayed up as I kept moving to higher and higher stages that's really fascinating going

back to Walmart for a second uh talk about how narratives changed from Walmart eating the world and killing Main Street to will they survive in a world with Amazon exactly exactly one of the things I wanted to touch on with you is untouchable days what are those so I worked at Walmart for a decade and my

writing uh all the stuff I've been talking about with you so far today Shane was always on the side it was a side hustle but then I had this brilliant epiphany when Leslie and I got married had kids I'm like I actually want to see my kids I don't want to be the guy grinding till 4 a .m every night and away

every week and doing a speech so I'm gonna have to quit one of these either that's the writing that I do every night or the Walmart that I do every day took a long time I came up with the help of a mentor with a two question test to decide the deathbed test which will I regret not doing more on my deathbed

and the plan B test which is what will I do if it fails the writing passed both those tests I thought I would regret it more and I thought if I failed that I'd like to go knocking on a door again for a job so I did the writing job full time starting in 2016 right after the happiness equation came out

problem was Shane I was my purported goal of doing that was to write my next book and after six months I was like I ain't written shit like nothing's been written like I how did that even happen I have no other job and then people would say like how's the new book coming I'd be like oh you mean now

that I quit my job terribly it was so embarrassing they're like well what do you do aren't you just with a web developer and before the speech just you can imagine this endless meetings so I took what I called a very strong position at the time and I um uh started carving out one day per week as what I

called untouchable I wrote it in all caps like literally UNTO UCH ABL in my iCal and I planned them 16 weeks in advance why 16 weeks because the speaking calendar is arranged typically six to twelve months in advance but nothing else is so I could see which days I'd be traveling but the rest of the week

looked empty you know 16 weeks in advance so I mean one day a week untouchable guess what would happen on that day nothing I would have no internet no cell phone no connection to anybody not even my wife nobody could get hold of me no one could contact me I could nothing it was like an untie I was literally

untouchable and guess what happened instead of writing 500 words through bits and spurts on a normal day I wrote 5 000 words like 10 days worth of writing one day a 10x increase in my production so that's where my next book came from my my I launched three books my podcast from those days I like everything

good that I've done in the last couple years has only come from untouchable days so this article for Harvard Business Review about it it went viral Adam Grant said you gave a name to something that I've always done I never knew what it was called and in this era of endless ephemera and constant pinging

and ringing phones it's even more important that we each take one day a week to be totally untouchable to the world it's easy for us as like entrepreneurs to do that right in a sense we can structure our lives around work and we can create this and one of the feedbacks I often get from people is what you

can do that but I can't I used to work in an office and I was like well I used to work in the biggest office in the mall which was the government yeah and I was like what I used to do I couldn't do days but I would do morning right so I would just block in my calendar uh three to four days a week there

you go and try to block off the mornings and try because most people just generally when you're scheduling the the admins are sort of like looking through calendars going oh this is blocked off they can't always see what's going on and so they'll try to find the first common space that's available to

everybody and this dramatically cut down on my meetings and totally increase my productivity in the sense of every day I would basically have like two three and I still do that to this day with the exception there's exceptions now but most mornings I won't schedule anything and then I'll schedule all

the stuff that I don't want to be doing sort of like the calls the lawyers the accountants that talking to the web guys all of that stuff always in the afternoon yeah and probably later in the week too and later in the week right because I'm at my best sort of like monday recharge we came with the kids

and sort of like come back to work and I'm ready to go right and I find this harmony sort of which we were talking about this a little before we started recording but this harmony between sort of family and work and how they feed each other and I want to I want you to talk about we'll the flywheel in a second

here but it enables me to do stuff and it's it's really the uninterrupted time I'm not distracted I don't have to find the time and that's the other thing right like I'm not searching for it it just exists I don't have to look for it I know every day I'm free from you know basically when I get to work

until 12 yeah and then if I have a lunch meeting I do a lunch meeting and then all of the stuff when I don't want to be doing or like I have to do to run a business or all of that stuff goes in the afternoon when I'm lowest energy already and I'm also quicker at it then right because it seems like in the morning

I'm like oh we can explore this and like but it really doesn't matter right like you know exploring this for 20 minutes versus 10 we're probably going to get to the same outcome putting that in the afternoon is also more productive even on the individual basis okay so talk to me about Bezos and the flywheel

oh sure uh one thing I want to say on the touchable day is just quickly before for anyone listening that's like I'm in an office I can't do it is do what Shane did first of all and second of all is if you just check email from 9 a .m to 10 a .m and 4 to 5 p .m while I've done the study that gives everyone

the perception that your all was on yet you've created a 10 a .m to 4 p .m oasis of blankness even though you're like still answering email twice a day for an hour so there's ways to build it into corporate corporate culture even if it is slower and more difficult um so basis in the flywheel I was lucky

enough to hear Bezos be interviewed by his brother down in Los Angeles um a couple years back and one of the things he said really stuck with me he said there is no such thing as work -life balance when you hear that word balance what you probably picture is a scale like one of these things where like

one side gets goes down the other side goes up more in one pot is less than another but he said no it's not like that it's a flywheel think of that thing that like fills with water and then it spins and then the more water has in it the faster it spins meaning if you're at work and you're loving your

work and you are in the zone in your work and you are having killer breakthroughs and you are making a difference in the world or whatever it is that makes the work awesome for you then guess what version of you goes home the awesome version of you the version that's thrilled to see your kids and can't

wait to jump into making a great dinner because you have so much energy because of how fulfilling your work was and when you have an awesome night being super dad if you're my case at night with your family you're running around you're dancing with your kids you make a great dinner you tuck them into

bed guess what that gives you energy for because you were super dad it gives you awesome energy to go even faster harder or deeper the next morning at work meaning that it's not work -life balance it's a flywheel the more energy you pour into either side of your life the faster and more energy you can pour

into the rest and i found that model so inspiring i was already doing that without knowing that that was a thing i was always under the mistaken assumption that they were trade -offs rather than a thing that grows a pie that constantly grows with maximum energy and at no limit on its potential well we

often think of it as balance right and this is how people talk to me like my work -life balance is out of um sort of equilibrium it's always strikes me as weird because it's like that implies taking something from one aspect and putting it in the other and it's like if you take away family time you're

going to be more balanced or it never sort of intuitively hit me and it also i think strikes something that you were talking about earlier in terms of using your phone right so when you're at home and you're on your phone you're not dancing with your kids you're not really feeding that flywheel you're

there but you're not there right you're physically present but you're not mentally embodying that presence so you're not all in so you're not feeding the flywheel you're not sort of like charging up and i always find that i'm better and more productive after time with my kids but time with my kids not time

where i'm sort of with my kids and doing work exactly this also springs to mind what chris anderson often describes ted as being which is a series of incongruent ideas presented to you so that at the end you make huge awarenesses and insights so if you're all in with your kids then you're all in with work

then you're all then you're essentially creating incongruent experiences rather than being tethered to a cell phone at all times so i'm fully agreeing with you but it's kind of like opening your mind to totally different things is what also provokes your best ideas maybe that's why you feel so energized

after your kids i think so yeah um talk to me about one thing we have in common we both sort of think retirement is a bit of bunk walk me through your thinking on that so in high school i had an awesome guidance counselor and i'll use the name mr mr uh i won't even use his name because i'm afraid i'll

use the right name instead of the wrong name but i had a guidance counselor and he was awesome and we loved him he was like the best guidance counselor ever he high -fived kids in the hallways he was friends with like the sort of like the good kids and the bad kids the nerds and the in the in the in the you

know everyone was loving this dude but then in age 65 in ontario in canada we had mandatory retirement so we had one of those mr holland's opus kind of final scenes or like everyone said goodbye to this guy two weeks later he had a heart attack and he died and i remember when i heard that from the guidance

counselor secretary thinking well how the heck did that like he just he was so happy but then it hit me like we took away from him everything that he loved his social connection his stimulation his sense of learning the story he was part of in our high school and those three s's i purposely dropped

social stimulation and story because i do believe we need all those three things so i start looking around while researching the happiness equation i discover that retirement was invented in 1889 in germany by this dude named autovan bismarck coolest head of state name ever like the bus driver and the simpsons

and he was like oh oh we got 20 youth unemployment rate uh yeah if you're like 65 let's say and you want to stop working like you don't have to but if you want it we'll give you a little bit of money to bridge you to 67 which is the average lifespan like average lifespan was 67 in late 1800s germany

so it's like a two -year gap and penicillin wasn't invented for 40 years i mean our lifespans were a lot shorter guess what happened that number he kind of artificially decreed 65 became the western barometer through the 1935 social security act in the us uk canada 65 is suddenly the year meanwhile our

lifespans have extended greatly if anything we've artificially depressed that desirable retirement age freedom 55 and you know we actually want to retire earlier there's a lot of people preaching like retiring at like 40 and 30 and stuff and what we're doing i think is creating this vacuous gap where like

what are you going to do like golf's going to get old and in fact you're going to rob yourself of the social connection you need the stimulation of always learning something new and the story of being part of something bigger than yourself fortune magazine says the two most dangerous years of our lives

are the year we are born and the year we retire lots of people have stories of someone that did not do well post retirement and in fact some of the healthiest societies in the world like the blue zone studies um from dam butner at national geographic they've pointed to countries or places like okanawa japan which has the highest

ratio of people over the age of 100 of anywhere you know what they call retirement no they don't either they got no word for it they have no word in the language of in okanawa that describes the concept of ceasing work completely but they have a different word chain and it's the word i love the word

is ikigai i k i g a i it roughly translates as the reason you get out of bed in the morning okay so that's why they have like 95 year olds there that are like teaching boxing and like spear fisherman that are like 110 like they because they have a reason they have a purpose when they open their eyes

so leslie and i uh we made little cards for our bedside tables of what our ikigai is so mine says helping people live happy lives and her says teaching empathy because she's a elementary school teacher and she thinks the big root issue what she's doing is teaching empathy in the classroom so when you

open your eyes it's the first thing you see and that is a guiding nice principle for your day i don't believe people want to retire i believe it's very dangerous i believe you lose a lot of the social connection the stimulation of learning and the story which you could call a nikigai and instead you

want to have purpose and you want to be doing meaningful and productive work right till your last day and i will never retire and it's a huge load off on retirement savings too i sort of see things very similarly i i think purpose plays a large role in it right and it will if we lose our purpose then

um it sort of sets us on a different path but getting out of the psychology which i don't know very well i just sort of feel or into it in this case i think a lot of people look forward to retirement because they're doing something they hate and they think that they're trading sort of like chips now

to get chips later i'm just gonna do this until i'm 55 and then yeah and we're coming back to this again right and then i'm gonna live my life and then i'm i'm free but it it never sort of works out that way and that life is never guaranteed right in terms of where you are and what's going on in life

and how your health is and your relationships and so you notice how i said the three s's but i didn't say one of those s's was salary purposely so i'm not saying if you're about to punch out for your last day at the meat packing plant like sign up for another couple decades i'm not saying that i'm saying

volunteer at the library i'm saying start that blog you've been dreaming about i'm saying go down with the craft show and actually turn your woodworking into a viable hobby on ebay or at the craft it doesn't have to be making money just to be doing something you love there's a reason that mississauga ontario

is mayor hazel mccallion was like 95 when she retired she lasted through eight canadian prime ministers eight canadian prime ministers in a row she was the mayor and when people asked her well why don't you retire she's like well i don't know what i'd do she wasn't doing it for the money my point is in the chip

example you gave i'm not saying it has to be something earning you an income i'm saying it just has to be a doing of some kind that gives you meaning fulfillment gives you that that's a good clarification i also think i use the more provocative headline obviously no it never retires as a little bit

juicier on npr i do think it's sort of worth exploring if you're living life in that way where i'm doing something today uh that i and you know there's aspects where this makes sense like saving money and there's aspects where it doesn't where it's like going to work and spending one third of your life

doing something that you you hate or dislike in the hopes that you will be happy all of a sudden at 55 that's i will be happy when that's another manifestation of this um i love the model you draw in the happiness equation called the space scribble um around simplifying sort of decision making can you

walk me through this sure so it's a two by two matrix yes it's two by two matrix so basically shane what happened was um uh i basically did this analysis on myself uh of how many decisions i make per day so guess how many decisions you make on an average day and i will tell you how many i made after you

tell me you're a guest i'm gonna say over a thousand okay so my actual number for me was like around 300 okay but it was simple like do you want lettuce on the sub do you want onions on the sub which way do you want to turn left or right like i always use the example of like uh going to the gym when i

was at walmart it was like do i want to go to the gym yes okay do i want to do cardio or weights cardio well do i want to do the elliptical the treadmill or the staircase oh the elliptical oh well do i want to do uh hill or manual or like intro i want to start at 10 reps or should i do what i'm saying

it never ends and so i came up with this model as a way to simplify decision making because as i'm sure you know decision making energy is a finite resource when it's gone it's gone a lot of research on this in the book willpower john tyranny i think if i'm getting the author right they say when you're

done with your with your decision making energy there's only two ways to replenish it but number one is sleep and number two is glucose or anything that turns into glucose in your body so at the front of the supermarket if you've chosen between 12 kinds of eggs and 10 kinds of salsa there's a wall full

of sugar which people are too low resilience to say no to so how does this two by two work i argue that every single decision you make in your life takes a certain amount of time that's one axis and takes a certain level of importance that's the other it's different i should notice than the uh time

versus urgency model that steven covey has in the seven habits of highly effective people for anyone that may know that i'm saying time versus important what do you do in the lowest uh quadrant when it's a low time and a low importance decision my argument is you need to automate that decision so i

wear the same exact clothes whenever i do any media or speeches like i literally have 10 of the same socks 10 of the same chains like i don't think about it obama mark zucker you've heard of this mark zuckerberg wears the same hoodie doesn't matter right that's an automatable decision maybe so is a friend

of mine has amazon automatic ordering on every consumable item in his house he has figured out the frequency rate of even things like hand towels oh wow like he's done obviously like you know i get new dish soap once a month and i get new uh yogurt once a week or whatever but even like we need hand towels

once a year or whatever like i'm using an extreme example but every consumable item in his house automated is automated okay that's extreme but can you automate it that's the first question a lot of the stuff is yeah you can it's like for example you drive to work just use ways like just use the traffic

app don't think about how you get to work it's because i was deciding freeway or city roads and what's faster listen to the radio no be an uber driver follow the map okay what do you do but things that um take a lot of time but they're not very important that's the top left quadrant so it's high on time

but low on importance this one you need to regulate uh email is a great example i mentioned earlier i think if you do two hours of email a day and two one hour windows it's a regulated time freeing up your day another example is my wife and i um we bought our first house it was super old house so something

broken in every day patio stones wobbly fence is squeaky blah blah blah was killing us so eventually we said uh the old house was at number 276 on the street so we said oh we're half 276 day once a month i sent my wife an invite on iCal she accepted it it was a recurring invite every Saturday morning

from 9 to 12 on the first Saturday of the month we had 276 day for the other 29 days of the month we made a list on the inside of one of our kitchen coverage of everything that broke and on that one three hour regulated burst we fixed everything regulating high time low importance things into a window

totally frees up your mind what do you do about stuff that's high importance but doesn't take very long like i'm like picking your kids up from daycare or like saying hi to your team in the morning this is important stuff but doesn't take very long the word i had to google to discover to rhyme is effectuate

that means just execute just do it because it doesn't take very long and the importance of the model is of course the top right quadrant as it often is with the high time high importance decisions you have freedom now to debate them where am i going to live who am i going to be with what school will i

go to uh these are the chewy ones these are the ones you should be thinking about that you should be contemplating but which you have no space for because of the endless series of dings and pings forcing you to make decisions on things that are not important so i am carving out this two by two matrix

with the express purpose of taking more time to debate the bigger things which you're the master of like this is your sweet spot debating thinking about things at a level of depth that other people can't get to uh i want to end on two minute mornings so uh last question talk to me through your two minute

mornings and how they impact your day sure every single day i wake up in the morning and i write down three things i write down uh i will let go of i am grateful for and i will focus on i believe that with the decline of the church and the rise of secularism uh by the way national geographic reports

that the fastest growing religion is no religion and certain countries like i believe france australia uk are about to cross into a majority secular population for the first time we've also lost confession which is a root belief system in a lot of world religion you know the catholic confession chamber

but also mormonism judeism islam have have confession built in bless me father for i have sinned i put big tony and a vice under the deli you know remember from the movies and stuff so we've lost that so i think we see a huge uptick in things like postsecret .com which has collected a million postcards

of people mailing confessions it's the largest advertisement free blog in the world like a billion heads and i do this for myself every morning i will let go of is a way to crystallize and eject an anxiety that i start my day with and there is one every single day i will let go of compare myself to

tim ferris i will let go of the fact that this guy has a book on the best hour list and i don't there's always stuff the five pounds i gained over the holidays and my stomach like damn now i need to go to the gym i am grateful for we talked about earlier this is the practice of gratitude we know from the research

is super powerful just read a few simple specific things we didn't talk about that but they have to be specific you can't just write family and friends that doesn't do anything you have to say like my husband put the toilet seat down you have to be like specific and i will focus on is maybe one of the root

issues we've been exploring today is carving from the giant clay block that is your endless could do and should do list one thing you will do each day there is nothing more satisfying to me than at the end of the night crossing off the one thing i'm gonna do that day and guess what i wrote this morning

talk to you and i will cross that off when i fly home tonight and it will feel awesome because no matter what else i could have and should have done which by the way there's lots and i probably did half of i'll feel good because my day was a success i will let go of i am grateful for i will focus on is a two

-minute morning practice to reveal to heal or create contemporary confession and a positive path of thinking for the day i think that's a great way to wake up right it refocuses and reframes if you can't get the kid cuddling in well i mean maybe incorporate it with the kids right and that might be a better

way to do it but this has been an amazing conversation y 'all thank you so much thanks jane i love what you're doing i love the work you make i love your art i think it's beautiful thanks for having me on the show i appreciate it you too you can find show notes on this episode as well as every other

episode at fs .blog slash podcast if you find this episode valuable share it on social media and leave a review to support the podcast go to fs .blog slash membership and join our learning community you'll get hand edited transcripts of all the podcasts and so much more thank you for listening

[Mastering Resilience, Happiness, and the Art of Living: A Conversation with Neil Pasricha]-[#72 Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits]

📋 Summary

Cultivating Resilience and Happiness in an Age of Abundance

The Anatomy of Resilience

The 40% Solution: Intentional Activities

Reframing Narratives and the "Small Pond" Strategy

The Power of Untouchable Days and Ikigai

Conclusion: The Flywheel of Life

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript