The Secret to Happiness with Harvard professor Robert Waldinger
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You might know this because you are a psychist st. How many psychist st does that take to change a light bulb? One, exactly one. But the light bob has to really want to change.

I love that joke.

We all want to live a happy life, of course. In fact, we wanted so much that there is a whole cottage industry built around helping us find IT. But what does a happy life actually look like? The one nine hundred and thirties, some harvard scientists started tracking seven hundred and twenty four teenagers.

They kept the detailed records about how they live their lives and what gave them satisfaction. They track all seven hundred and twenty four people for their entire lives, only ten of them to live in today, and they are all in their hundreds. But just like the people, the study tracked, and the scientists got old too.

So the director of the study was handed to subsequent generations. And doctor Robert wallinger is the current director, a position he's held for the past twenty two years. So he knows a lot about what actually leads to a happy life.

I wanted to know the things he's learning. I also wanted to know how he's changed his own life as a result of the data he reads. And let's just say i'm making a few changes to how I live my life to this is a bit of osm.

I don't .

have to ask this without IT sounding not polite, but the only way I can it's the only way I can fix to ask how to come. They pick you to lead the the happy to study. Well.

you're not going to ask that question. Question.

did you draw the shorts? draw?

You know, I might have drawn the short, strong. What happened was my my predecessor, George valiant, as a couple of other people. And they said, no, they said, this is a great, big, messy albatross. You know with data that goes back to one thousand and thirty eight. So he got turned down.

He proud he got his third choice.

I think I was at least his third choice.

So so what made you say? Yes.

let's go there then. Oh, wow. The research project that I beg them to fund, the federal government said now were not so interested.

So I was in that place and my processor said, come over to my office and just read through one person's file. And so I said, okay, until he, the file was probably a thousand pieces of paper. And I started reading through.

And I read about this nineteen year old guy and what he hoped for, for his life, and what was most important to him, and what I was like to be dating. And then I read about his forty year old aspirations. And then I flip to his sixty year old discussion of his marriage, and how disappointing that you read his whole life. I had his life, I said there, and read his life, and I was like, this is like the coolest thing I could .

do based on the the actual people you studied. Tell me something. They get right as they are Young kids in their teens and they, or even in their early twenties. And they start to think about what will make them happy, and they get IT right.

A lot of them care about making a difference in the world, and they care about the world and the people who stay with that, who they may not be the same purpose all the way through their lives, but the people who stay with that aspiration, I think they engaged in life, and I think that's what they get. right?

That's really significant, right? If we look at how we're teaching our children, universities advertised as a reason to choose them over another the starting salaries of their .

graduates yeah and .

our guidance councillors, they don't ask us the right questions about how we want to contribute to the world. They ask is what we can do and what we think we can get employment. What I find very significant about what you're saying is what if our guidance councillors, what if our deans, what if our parents start instilling in us at a very Young age, the importance is simply wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Forget about actually achieving IT, simply wanting IT. That, as you said, the data shows that people who at a Young age want to contribute to something big to themselves, they will somehow pursue that ideal for the rest of their lives, which keeps them at above average happy rates.

yes. And I think what happens is that many people have posited a kind of psychological that involves wanting to be part of something bigger than the cell. Yeah, erikson, I don't know if you heard of his stuff, but he was looking.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no. He was A A psycho analyst from viana in the thirties and forty aimed to boston who taught for a while at harvard. And he started talking about the stages of adult development.

Nobody had talked about adult development. Everybody was interested in kids because they saw obvious ly, right? But he said, you know, adults go through these stages. And one of his stages, he called generativity versus stagnation, and the generativity was wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, realizing, oh, I want to help raise kids, or I want to mentor people, or I want to do something that you, not just me. And he said that the people who do that become the people who are gonna look back on their lives with less regret, with more of a sense that that my life was good enough.

I think we're living in a time where, though we intellects know that because the subject of so many social media posts, I think we're living in a time where people don't feel connected to something bigger than themselves. In general, we don't work for companies for thirty or forty years anymore.

Church attendance down, even the great power competition of us versus the soviet union that we were proud to be a part of this side versus that side, like even even at a global politics level, like there are things gone away and I think you see on the left and the right politically, people latching onto absolutely anything yeah, that gives them that sense of belonging. But IT doesn't last. Those attachments don't at last, but you can see them just grasping for IT, the intense latching onto whether a far left or far right point of view about how the world should work.

And they latch onto IT as if it's their life's purpose. But IT isn't right. Last for a period of time and then onto the next door dissipates.

right? Or an identity as a certain kind of influencer or an identity as a certain as a person living a certain style of life materially. I mean, they're all all these vary identities that people are struggling for.

I think you're right. Robert patton um is a political scientist. He wrote a book of bowling alone yeah and yeah right.

So you know about that so he he tract, he tracked how we've stopped belonging, right? We've stop to all the things you just said, and we've stopped joining clothes and volunteering and having people over to our houses. And what he's found is that it's gotten worse since the digital revolution.

The digital revolution has accelerated the trends that we're already there. And so the path of least resistance now is social isolation, greater and greater isolation. And and we're all kind of desperate for what to do about that and how to feel like we belong.

I wonder if we need a new word. And I tell you what I mean, because the technology has corrupted words, right? So a desktop used to be a horizontal surface, yeah, yeah.

And now a desktop is a vertical surface. yeah. And a folder was something used to put away in alphabetical order.

And now a folder, something you click on, it's taken words and things to make the transition to living in a digital world. I know why they do IT, it's because it's easier. But the word community used to mean like showing up and wearing a fz, you know.

you know, in the .

secret handshakes. And there was a time to meet up, and there was free food and community meta thing. And now that word has been corrected to like being on an email list, because now what you and I are talking about, we're attempting to offer an archaic definition of what community is. And I wonder if, instead of trying to fight IT, we just need a new word, and then people will want the thing that the new word, because community already belongs online.

But I worry that the word where substituting is something like tribe. And tribe has all those connotations of who we exclude, who we make other, you know, all that stuff. I think we're all stuck in this place where we don't know how to belong without making other people enemies. Yeah.

I want to scratch this just a little bit more, because when I articulated the concept of why, the reason I called that the why was a, was a semantic problem that I faced, which is, I got tired of debating with people what comes first? Visionary mission. And the debate would go on forever.

And so I finally realized we were having a semantic debate. yeah. And so I asked the people who believe vision was permanent, what is the definition of vision to you? And they said, is why I get at a bit in the morning and I went to who believe mission was premature.

And I said, what's a mission to you? And they said, well, it's why I do what I do. So everybody, where there was purpose or brand or whatever, whatever word they thought was the thing, they all gave me the same definition.

And so I said, okay, so let's call IT the why. And now we can all agree what IT is. And now we can actually figure out how to do IT rather than debate what comes first.

right? right? exactly.

And so I I wonder how people are defining community. And maybe you have some data that explains that. Like, it's one thing to say, I want my life to be a part of something bigger than itself. I want to feel a sense of purpose, but what actually, based on this lunch al study, what actually do people mean when they say these words?

The people who talked about at the most meant something quite fluid and quite individual. So the people who are the best of this would have like work mates over for barracades, but they're mix in their family, they'd mix in cousins and theyd mix in people from their church, and they'd introduce each other. And so you have these people who become like the nodes of a group of people that get connected.

They become, if you will, connectors, but that means that each person might be the node of a unique collection of people. Yeah, I suppose to one thing, you know, going to a church, going to a senga, great. Yeah, you can do that.

And that is defined community. But most of us have these things that are more fluid and individual. One of my friends who is the best, that this keeps connecting his friends from random parts of his life. And it's really fun to get to be part of that group of people because it's so diverse.

I think you're touching on something that I think is really magical, right? If we're saying it's important for us to build community and i've done this. I've gone to dinner parties and it's the same ten people at somebody at a just a different house yeah you know and they say we care about community, but as you're defining IT, it's not really community.

It's just the same time people different houses. And I think what you are talking about is the importance of the salon, the old the old school salon, which is instead of hosting a dinner party, which should take IT upon ourselves to build salons, which is, i'm going to invite some tried and true friends. I want to invite some people who I just met recently.

I want to invite somebody who I met at a different in the party, and I may or may not give a subject to discuss at the table, but this is what's gonna happen, because then i'll go to somebody else's is in the party who was at mind. And it's a lot of new people for me, too. And I love this idea of us not just hosting dinner party for the people we know, but for specifically hosting dinner parties for people we know, that our friends .

don't know exactly because the same ten people is in a silo, right? Yeah like it's almost IT could be hermetically sealed and so you know what each other, you know you know each other. But the most exciting conversations happen for me when people come who do completely different things, who come from different backgrounds.

I mean, today I was on a call with a researcher who was growing nerve cells from schizo ophrys ics. And he's trying to see, is a nerve cell different in how IT makes connections if it's got the genes of someone with kizlar hania and therefore someone who has delusions to the connections that a nerve cell make, are they different for people with delusions? And unlike. I'm like buzzing all these ideas, right? It's because a student of mine is also a student of his and brought us together yeah and our has started to explode with excited possibilities.

And I think what you're talking about is we connect not on the interest. That stuff is superficial and that stuff is good at, you know so of getting people in the room yeah but we're talking about deep, deep values that are deeper than our political points of view because I can have the same values to somebody with a different political point of view than me. And I think people confuse those things. Sometimes I love how long if you have, you let the the how long if you've been the boss of the study.

twenty two years, twenty two years.

what did you learn from the data that you've been able to apply to your life that has made you happier?

I now call up my guy friends, and I say, let's go for a walk. Let's go out to dinner. We're not just gona wait for our wives to do this thing, to organize our social lives.

We're gonna do this. And and at first it's really awkward like we don't do this. We're guys and then it's been a wonderful thing in terms of really getting to know individually people who were otherwise part of the social group, part of the same ten people, if you will.

Yeah yeah. But we never dug more deeply into knowing each other. And so IT made me do that because I thought otherwise. I'm just gonna sit here on my computer all day long, doing my research stuff, doing my academic stuff, and pick my head up and have no friends.

That's a really good one. Yes.

somebody said, take care of your body like you're gonna needed for a hundred years. And I realized that, boy, this really, really matters, that in our data, the people who took care of themselves, so we're talking and regular exercise, not abusing drugs and alcohol, not becoming obese, all that stuff, they lived on average ten years longer and stayed healthier. So even though it's not rocket science and it's not news, I could see in my own data how much IT really matters. People, I seemed .

starting to die now in the study, this, a lot of them have died.

right? Most of the original folks have died. Seven hundred, twenty four original people, right? Fewer than ten are still alive. And there are all over age one hundred.

Okay, so of the ones of those seven hundred and twenty four, the ones who live the longest, you know, because biohacking is a thing, mal. And like there's an obsession with the longing vy. And so the people who lived the longest was there a pattern that you were able to discern? And the people who lived the sure dest, was there a pattern that you were able to die?

Ah, yeah, ah the longest was literally taking care of physical health and being really socially engaged in the world. Okay, those were the two things. And the people who live the shortest, st. IT, was the opposite. People who became alcoholic, who became obese, who didn't take care of themselves and who were isolated.

This is why I think your work is very, very important, is because I think a lot of the longevity people in biohackers and by talking about and and they pay lip service to community, whereas their giving the exact dosages of vitamins that I should be taking of daily basis, but nobody is giving me a prescription to how to hang out with my friends.

because community doesn't make money. You can sell vitamin d. You can sell something m in fancy ways. You can sell lem on a podcast, right?

I appreciate them so much. You have no idea.

I am so sorry. No, I think you're a one .

hundred percent right. I think your hundred percent right. There is a financial incentive to sell half a solution.

exactly. You know what I struggle with. So as you know, i'm a physician, i'm a psychist st, and one of the difficulties with medicine is that the vast amount of diseases is preventable.

But you don't make money in medicine preventing disease. You make money curing disease or trying to imitate disease with medications with procedure res. You don't make money preventing disease by encouraging people to socialized, by encouraging people to exercise.

I mean, you've been doing this for twenty two years. Do you get tired talking about IT?

Ah actually no, I mean, okay, I did. I don't because you're getting the same .

quite like you can do a bunch of pot, you can have to answer the same questions five times in a row.

You about how they get asked so different. I mean, talking with do right now is really fun, right? Because of the way we're talking, no, but really because there's this kind of there's a real back and forth, right? It's where have a conversation.

There are other times when it's like just shoot me if someone says i'm you are really looking forward to reading your book, can you explain to our listeners what you do? That's that's like fingernails on a blackboard. The interviews .

that I that I hate doing is where the people are so overprepared to talk to me ah that they ask me questions about my book like Simon, what are the five elements of the infinite game and I was like what you you know the answer you you say that like why you ask me questions, you know the answers to you ask me questions. You don't know the answer to that. More fun.

Absolutely, absolutely. And so so when something spontaneous happens, like is happening now with you, I could do this forever. But when the other happens, I just, I just want to be done and never.

So I have, I have, I mean, you might know this because you are, uh, psychiatrist. How many psychist st does that take to change light? Bub, one, exactly one. But the light bulb has to really want to change.

I love that you, I love that.

What was your journey? How did you get into psychiatry like wise when you decided you want to go to meet school? Why the mind?

Well, when I decided to go to my school, I wasn't gonna be the mind. I'm a jewish ID from the moon. I I want .

jewish from close. No, no.

We had about a thousand jewish families in the. We had three and a half synagogue. O but yeah, but most of the psychiatry I knew work with seriously mentally ill people in asylum.

Psychotherapy was not a thing you did in the morning unless you were really ill and needed to be in a hospital. So I didn't know anybody, but I knew I really like working with people. And so when I got to meet school, I realized that psychic was like, by far, the thing that excited me the most.

But psychic is the step child of medicine. So a lot of my professors said, you know, either you're at the bottom of the class or you yourself are crazy, because there be no either reason for you to go into psychiatry. So I took me a long time before I finally admitted, like her, my kidding, this is really the most interesting thing, because otherwise IT was memorizing the twelve types of five tumors.

And I didn't care about the red tumors unless somebody I knew had one. But I I care deeply about the mind and especially how my own worked. So I had to come around to IT despite the stigma of being a psychiatrist.

How did you get over the sigma? Because it's there's a lot of pressure to become an account or choose the the line of medicine that's most in demand right now because it's a Better business option. Like you followed passion.

I did. I did what? Partly I follow a passion because what I i'm not good at doing, things i'm not passionate about, actually all my energy drains and I start to shut down and I start to feel terrible.

And I started to do that. I realized I don't care about most of medicine. So yes, I could become a cardiologist like many of my ants and uncles wanted me to do, because cardiologist is a nice field, right? But I realized I would just die.

I would just weather on the vine. And what i've finally learned to do over time is to listen to that gut that says i'm drawn to this and i'm not done to that. That's probably the hardest lesson i've had to keep learning throughout my life.

So good segway. If we look at the world as IT is now, IT seems that Younger people who are trying to figure what to do with their lives, their quota code, passion for something, seems to be, I don't know, it's driven by gut, but seems to be driven by extraordinary rewards structure. You know, the number of Young people say I want to be an influences is like people who come up to me and say, i'm, can I get your advice? I'd love to be a speaker.

And I go amazing where I want to be an author. I am like, great. What do you want to speak about? Like, I don't know yet.

I'm like, know you ve got IT in the wrong order. Like, I want to be an influencer. Influencer is a mechanism to spread something. But what does I think your passionate about to spread the thing that they think they're passionate for is something that looks cool, sounds cool, gets a lot of iteration, gets a lot of money, gets a lot of fame. And at an aged old question, how do I know what i'm passionate for?

For me, IT literally has been learning to tap into my energy. Is my energy higher or lower in this moment then? IT was a few minutes ago, literally, and I had to learn that, for example, i'm really during this conversation, my energy is higher.

yeah. And if i'm in a conversation where IT starts to lower, I get IT right away. And one of things i've come to understand is that we get trained to ignore those signals.

I was at least think about all the times you had to sit in a classroom in school and you'd have these urges to do something or explore something. But of course, you have to sit still and watch the clock until the class was over. We've been taught to suppress these inner voices. I think since we were in special I think you're right.

but there's a new one to you that's very important. And I needed on rapid for me, which is we evaluate friends, like are our friends generative unbaLance ed, not every time, because sometimes were tired, sometimes very tired, but in in general, when I hang out with x friend versus my friend.

Is that from generative and how I feel do I leave my time with them happier, elated as you said, like up right and paying attention to that that I want to spend more time than verses. Um well, we've been friends for fifteen years, so I guess i'll go out with them and I think that's true IT with our work as well. IT obviously conflicts with things like responsibility because sometimes you have to suppress that feeling because I have to be responsible. It's an imperfect standard.

right? I don't always feel like changing that that right?

exactly. And I think you're touching upon IT, which is folks like us are giving advice like trust your gut, follow that elation. But the problem is, is that I don't know if people are running towards IT or when they don't feel that they rebel against IT.

So for in a work environment, right, we see this a lot. Where is particularly Young people, but not not exclusively. They just have more courage. I think if they are in a job that doesn't do that, they're very vocal and sometimes rejecting of the the culture leader, the boss, the job itself.

And I think there's more about speaking out against the fact that i'm not the thinking that by speaking out against that I will find the elation rather than doing more of the thing that relates me like going to work and say, hey, boss, this is me in general. This elates me less in general. Can I do more of that please, rather than rejecting, thrown the whole the baby out with the bath water?

absolutely. It's there's more of A A need to take responsibility for that, right, to have a sense of agency OK. If I if if this job is draining as IT is, what can I do? right? What can I do? And and some of that, as you know, has to do with connecting with people on the job. Like one of things we know is that if people have have friends on the job, they have people they want to show up for, that inner of itself is energizing even if you're making wilts in a way that's guarantee we're .

creating a problem here. Do you realize that because we're saying don't run away from run towards, run towards you, run towards the contribution to something bigger and yet I think people, if if they are listening, will say, ah, I think i'm running away more often than i'm running towards. I'm running away from relationships rather than towards new ones, are running away from a job I hate, rather one toward the one that I think i'm gonna love. So now begs the question, how do I know what to run towards OK?

Have an example. Come on the mind. I loved doing theater as a high school kid, as a college kid.

And if I just around tored what I loved, I would be a failed actor today. So what I had to do was really taken the whole picture to realize, okay, I do. I love theater. I still love theater. But the whole picture was, I came to understand that doing theater involved a lot of rejection IT involved getting bad use of place, sometimes encouraged, involved getting turned down for parts, and involved feeling like I was acting with people who I didn't think were any fun to be with all that right.

And what I had to do was taking the the larger picture, not just the isolated passion that I was looking at, right? And so some of this is a kind of designers where you say, okay, what goes with the whole package? So if we go back to the chief, what I found was that security has a whole package, is one of the lowest paid specialties in medicine, but it's got one of the best lifestyles. On the other hand, cardiology is a way Better paid, but I don't like doing IT. So there's a kind of discrete that's required for what do I run toward, what do I hang back from a walk away from, but the chAllenges to take IT earlier, not just to say agreement of focus on this one, one tiny part of IT.

So you're asking people to do a 1 alyssum yeah because I yes， and I think that's right. You know, I love photography, and i'm an active photographer, and I actively did not choose a career in photography because I, in turn, at a couple photo studios, when I was Younger, I kept meeting people who were artists. They define themselves as artist photographers.

And yet here they were shooting bottles of catch up for an add campaign, and they are love. And I ask them, you eve a shoot for art anymore? They said, I either don't have the time or I don't have the energy.

And so their passion became a job. I mean, that pejoratively, yeah, yeah. IT became work.

Yeah and I think that's where .

when people say I want to be in theater, I want to be in fashion, I want and I think they forget that they're just businesses. They are just businesses. And I can tell you somebody who was passionate for fashioned, who who's a job and fashion living their child to dream and they hate their life. And I can show somebody who stumbled and bumble and found themselves and manufacturing making a we get like they're making a screw that fits in the back of a thing that nobody ever sees and that they're happy as people alive. In fact, that I was talking to A, A, A, A contractor, and I asked him, just out of the blue is out of making small to just not a curiosity.

Do you like your job? yeah. He said.

I love my job. He said, I love IT and I, he said, IT with such passion, know what the word for IT. And I was like, what do you love about IT?

He goes, I get to build things with my own hands, and I get to see them built. I get to see what I built. You know, I start with nothing. I start with a pile of wood and some nails and some sheet rock. And then when i'm done, you get that. And then I go due again and again and again and again, whether it's a kitchen remodeling or whatever is and he had such elation to see the fruit of his actual labor.

right? What you're saying reminds me of something i've come to understand, which is there's grant in anything yeah there's boring work in anything. And so really what we have to figure out is what is the thing we are aiming toward that has enough in IT that we love that is worth doing all the the boring parts, right? And so i'm sure not every bit of his contracting work, his construction enlivening, but boy, seeing what he's built lights them up, right? And he can he can hold under that vision while is pounding at on tiny nail.

I'm having an insight here. Here's where we make a mistake. We're looking for the work to be the thing that is that is passionate and it's not the work that is.

The thing that is passionate is what that work produces, right? Cause raising kids is awful. You know, in the early part, you don't sleep, you got, as you said, changing diapers in the middle night, you get peed on and thrown up on.

And then they get a little older and they become teenagers, and they are painting the as to be around. And then one of them gets bad grades, and you got to deal with that. Another one who gets a fight school and punches a kid, and then you ve got to deal with that.

And like, where is the joy? I thought that having kids be joyful, right? But but then you have these unpredictable glimmer of your kids helping each other, or another parents saying your kids great, or the teacher is saying your kid helps all the other kids. You you get these unexpected glimmer that make all of that worth IT in an instant.

Yes, yes. And I know that for my work.

like writing books is the is the worst thing in the world. I don't know why anybody I don't. People like I want to be an author and like don't.

It's the worst. But when you put something out in the world that resonates with people, it's instantly worth all of that. And I do IT again, yeah, even though every time I written a book, I said, this is the last one.

And I think people are looking for the passion in the wrong place. They're looking for the passion in the labor, but they're not looking for what the labor produces. And maybe this is one of the problems with knowledge work, which is knowledge work is kinds sitting at a desk.

I don't even how you define what caught labor is in a lot of knowledge work. And then what's the result of that labor? And do we appreciate the result of like we don't think about what the things we make.

We don't think about the impact they have in the world. I'll give you an an awful example. I I met somebody recently who has a very niche specialty SHE helps project manage the building of super yachts for the mega wealthy. There you go. Of course.

My first question was how that held you get into that, you know, really and I asked this is, do your clients ever say thank you so much? Why didn't you take the yacht with your family for a week? And SHE said, it's never happened.

So I said to, so what you're telling us, these multibillion areas who build these yachts for many hundreds of millions of dollars that they use for two weeks a year, and they sail around the world just in case the family might want to use that. At no point on this empty yacht has anybody ever said to you, thanks for your hard work. Why did you borrow the yet? And he said, it's never happened.

And I said, well, how does that make you feel? SHE says that that also occurs to me that what they have good am I doing in the world? And so tremendous of labor, I am sure, incredibly well compensated.

But there's no glimmer. There's no what an amazing opportunity that I have to give to my family, the opportunity to go on a mega yet that none of us could afford, that none of us will ever have the opportunity. I'm going to take my friends that I grew up with who have medical income jobs, and i'm going to show them something and give them an experience. And that makes all of the shit worth IT. Because I get to give that to people that I love, and he never gets that glimmer.

Is SHE happy in her job? No, yeah, no, yeah, no. IT pays well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But do you think that has to be a combination of getting there and the outcome? Because like when you talked about kids and you listed, are you named i've been through every horrible scenario and many more in raising my children, but there's also stuff along the way that is hilarious and wonderful and wacky, right?

If there's like stuff puntuated all the crap that is absolutely wonderfully wild and and and like getting to relive your own childhood is part of that for me. I got to go to all these kids movies that I would ever go to. I got to be on roller costers.

So I think for me, it's some of both. I couldn't do the work that I do if IT was only the outcome because the outcomes are so far into the future, like writing a book, right? You know, one of my friends set us in publishing. He said only write a book if it's going to move along your own thinking in some ways. And it's true like I and I bet for you too, that IT wasn't just that you were regenerated that that was I I was .

learning along the way. Yeah, I had insight along the way that as i'm writing, I feel electric because a new idea is pouring out of me in that moment.

Yeah, and I bet that was part of what kept you going, not just the outcome of having IT. To put you what we're defining here.

you know, we're defining, we're defining a purpose of life. Because if you think what purposes, purposes, idealism and idealism, by its very definition, is unrealizable, right? All when I created equal, never gonna happen.

Never, ever, ever, not in a million years. However, it's the striving towards that. And to your point, it's the the mile markers.

I don't have to define them. But like for example, women suffer civil rights. Abolition of slavery is like, oh, wow, look, we got we're getting closer guides.

We're getting. Closer, let's keep going, right, right? To your point, I think if IT was just awful work the whole time waiting for the final outcome, then we then should we should absolutely quit. And I think you're right. I think that goes back to those glimmer, which is the the little glimmer that say, you know what, this is worth that I to I to keep on this i'm going to keep doing this kid wearing thing and not put them up for adoption because, you know, that was a fun family dinner last night yeah.

exactly, exactly, exactly.

I so I think so, I think if we talking about purpose driven life, we go right back to the beginning of this conversation. And then this comes directly from your data, which is what I love, which is from a very Young age, we are still in people. We are still in our, in our Youngest generations.

IT is good to be an idealist. IT is good to strive ve to contribute to something bigger than yourself. You won't know how to get there. You'll change your mind one hundred times, but you have to keep your head above the looking beyond the horizon. And so long as you feel like you're getting closer to the horizon, even if it's a windy s as long as you have elements that say, I think you're a good path here, you will have a happy life.

And as long as there's something nourishing along the way, there's gotta something along the way to .

keep me any role in people's happiness. According to your study.

IT does that. What we find is that you need to get your basic needs met in order to be happy, and that every dollar you make toward getting your basic needs met, like you know food food and shelter and educating your kids like every dollar you make, makes you happier, we know that. But then then you buy that hundred million dollars and yet and doesn't really make you happier yeah on average like you know, if you if you took all the hundred million dollars yet, owners, they they would they wouldn't be happier on average than the people who basically had enough who only have .

a fifty million dollars .

yeah yeah yeah exactly but you .

but you know comparison is relative, right? Because billionaire aren't comparing themselves to us. Billionaire are comparing themselves to each other.

Yes, because sometimes these billion's are in great pain. Because they have a couple fewer billion than somebody else means it's hard to imagine. And yet I know IT in my own life, like I I can compare myself on the most trivial things to other people. And then I tried to pull back from that and notice what i'm doing.

unrelated. I'm just going to say because it's fun. You you want to understand the difference when in a million, in a billion tell when people talk about millionaire and billionaire yeah so and easy way I don't understand the difference. A million seconds is eleven and a half days. A billion seconds is thirty one and a half .

years OK. And that's .

the difference between being .

many billionaire.

It's not even .

close yeah but you know the most valuable thing we have is time. So it's I like your analogy, gy, that you are talking about seconds, but those seconds are are far more precious, ultimately ate then those dollars .

because money is a is a redeemer commodity. We spend IT. We lose IT. We can make more but spending time or energy, these are non redeemer commodities and everyone gets the same amount from day one. Everybody gets twenty four hours in a day.

but we don't know how much we get, right? That's the thing.

Oh, well.

in terms of life span, yeah that's even .

that's even more interesting yeah so you .

we we all have twenty four hours.

we all in a day, but we don't know how many twenty four our .

we get exactly I mean.

so will we give that precious commodity to another human being when we when somebody y's struggling at work and we sit down with them and we we give them some tough love. When your kid is struggling at school and the teacher spends an hour after school, our friend is moving and we go to their house and we pack boxes.

Yeah.

the expensive time as a gift. I mean that as a gift. Yeah, I am totally enter them.

You that you have to use all that time to be productive of as well because I think sometimes zoning up and watching T V is the best use of that time. I'm not making the analogy that you have to make use of all your time. I'm talking very specifically about the value of time as a gift to another human being. Yes, is more valuable than any gift on the planet.

I have a quote here from one of my then teachers. His name is john kerry and he said, attention is the most basic form of love. If you think about an our undivided attention is the most valuable thing we've got to give.

The only thing we have these days is divided attention ah, and we can't even watch T, V without also checking social media and sending attacks.

absolutely. I mean, research shows we typically have two or three screens open at one.

So the only thing we have these days is divided attention. And yet the best way to express love to someone is undivided attention.

Yeah.

you're blowing my mind a little bit. I want to ask you two final questions. How happy do money and fame actually make?

People don't make people not happy either. Why actually fame may? Because fame can can make people, in truth, on your life and stuff.

So fame actually might make you less happy. Money doesn't make you happier or not happier. Once you get above a certain level, you don't get much of a bump.

You get some bump, but not that much fame. Fame is really a double age sod. And you might be able to say something about that because you've received a lot of public attention and ensure it's not all one.

I think I think if IT is cost, yes, right? I don't think if IT is good or Better, you like, I never sort IT out. I am happiest in the shadows. That's my happy place. I like being behind the scenes. My goal is to spread the message and to leave this world in Better shape than I found IT and contribute to the lives of my friends and the people I don't know as well. And part of the cost of that is some loss of privacy and it's worth IT because the benefit so outwit that very small cost.

Ah can I tell you so when my ted talk went viral, so i'm i'm very seriously involved in then and someone settle now, you should put up a website and I had no web present at all no and I said, no, I wasn't gonna do that that was all ego that was all go over to the dark side and my then teachers said, you have the ability to convey ideas to people that will matter to them. Don't do that and so they pushed me, told what you're describing, which is they said, don't stay in the shadows if you can be of use .

yeah that is my experience that in the early days when I my work started to gain traction, I was militant about keeping my face and name of everything. Like I wanted to put my name on the book in like mouse type, because the idea I never would put my picture on the cover of a book I still want, because i'm not the thing and I refused to have my picture on my website for years, and I wouldn't let my name be the URL because it's not about me. And then at some point I made the realization that I ensure this as well, which is you, you actually live two versions of yourself. You are, you obviously, but you will also the representation of your message.

absolutely.

And how did I selfishly deny the representation of my message? Because people don't follow ideas. They follow people.

Because ideas are abstracting. People are real. So we create representations of of a set of value.

Of Martin, of the king is a representation of a set of values. We follow Martin luth the king, but not really. We would really follow the ideals that he stood forward. Because I stand for those ideals too. There my ideas as much as they are his, for example.

And in that sense, europe placeholder, if you will, you all set of values and aspirations. That's a function that's important to serve.

Here's another question for you. What's the best thing we can do right now for our happiness?

Two things, engage with people and engage in things you care about. So ideally, engage in things you care about with people you care about. That's the sweet.

But but what a joy.

what an absolute .

joy I leave related and buzzing me too.

Actually, this was a pleasure and unexpected pleasure.

Thank you so, so much. I truly appreciate.

Take care.

If you enjoy this podcast, would would like to hear more, please subscribe whether you like to listen to podcasts, and if you would like even more optimism, check out my website, Simon dot com, for classes, videos and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A bit of optimism is a production of the optimism company is produced and edited by lizy garvinus, David jaw and David Johnson. Our executive producers are hindi at a conrad and greg rooter ship.