Does Happiness Lead to Failure?
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This is The Unhappy Millionaire, where entrepreneurs and other top performers discover how to go beyond the bank balance to create thriving, joyful lives. For more, visit theunhappymillionaire.com. And now, on to the show.

Satal, there's an entrepreneur marketing thinker I really like, Alex Hermosi. But I recently was listening to a video of his where he essentially argues that there's no such thing as a happy entrepreneur. He's stressing entrepreneurialism to be successful requires this relentless focus, this relentless drive. You have to push everything else to the

the side and that the people who do this are not the people out for happiness. The people who actually do this are the people who are, as he puts it, they're motivated, they're afraid and insecure. They're trying to prove something about themselves. And anybody who's after happiness, they're not going to be able to do what it takes to succeed. And so I wanted to throw this question at you. Is the whole premise of our podcast wrong? Can you actually be a happy millionaire?

Let me answer with an example. When I go talk to younger people, I show a series of images on a PowerPoint and I show people partying, driving in a convertible, throwing their hands in the air, having a lot of fun, people on the beach, someone relaxing in a beautiful resort, someone with his daughter on his shoulder. And then I go into somebody in the office with a serious face looking at the screen and somebody is like someone who's like a

I don't know, an engineer or someone working on a design of something and someone in a lab looking in a microscope, writing notes. And I ask them which one of them is happy. And of course, the most happy. So I give them a five, six option. And of course, it's always the father with his daughter on the shoulder. It's kind of evokes the most emotion. But, you know, people like the partying part where people are really having fun. They seem like they're really enjoying themselves and so on. And

Very seldomly somebody would say, no, I actually connect with a guy in the office or the engineer on some kind of a design where they're fixing the design of a product. And that shows you how the culture looks at this. And this is, I think, the source of his mistake. He doesn't even know that he's happy. That's the tragedy of people like that. For me, it was true for many years where I did everything right. I got myself to where I needed to be.

I did the things I wanted to be and I didn't know I'm happy. And that's a tragedy because if someone won first place that they wanted to achieve, I'm just trying to simplify it. You won the race and nobody tells you.

And nobody gives you the medal. Well, somebody gives you the medal and you throw it away for some reason. I think there's a lot to talk about here, which is why doesn't he see that what he's doing is the process of happiness? And I call it, do you know what happy looks like? That's the question I would ask him back. Yeah, I think if I was going to name one fundamental error, that would be is what are we even...

mean by happiness. But I want to break down, and I agree with everything you said, I want to break down some of the points and kind of explore them. And I want to start with what I think Alex gets

gets right. So first of all, just on the point of what success requires, the idea that it requires drive and focus, I think is definitely true. And certainly, as somebody who's worked with you for a few years, this idea of focus as being at the heart and soul of achieving a difficult, challenging goal, I know is something that you believe deeply and try to build your teams around. And

But maybe say a little bit about drive and focus, and then we should talk a little bit about how that integrates or whether it integrates with other values in life, such as being the father with the daughter on his shoulders. My definition of happiness, it's a result of a process. And it's a

It's a continuous process that you're engaged in. And the fact that you're in that process generates the outcomes that are what I call happiness, the sense of purpose, the sense of self-esteem, that I know who I am. And that process involves pursuing goals.

Specific things we call values. And in a career context, when you define a value, usually what it means is you want to achieve an outcome. You want to achieve growing your company or finishing the product or whatever it is that you're engaged in. And that is mental focus. Even people who are, I don't know, my gardener who wants to be the best gardener, it might require what looks like physical work, but it's

you know, getting me as a customer and getting me to pay me what he wants and manages employees and so on. It all requires mental focus. And by focus, I mean, you know how we all feel, and I love the metaphor of holding the reins of your mind towards a specific direction. It's like holding the horse you're riding into, like, I want to go there, right? Because I

that's where my value is. And if you're not holding the reins of the horse you're riding, which is your mind, towards a specific direction, you will not get there. You will not get there. And you'll find yourself to the right or to the left of that mountain you want to climb. It's like, no, I'm not where I wanted to be. And it's going to be frustrating.

So success does require drive, the horse itself to get on the horse and get out of the couch and do things. But also when you do things, it's towards a specific direction. And that is the prerequisite of the process that then eventually brings you happiness. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was doing freelance work, somebody offered me just a very large amount of money to do something. And the project he wanted to get me involved with was pretty interesting.

But that would have taken me away from writing my last book, Effective Egoism. It would have just swamped it out. Now, Effective Egoism wasn't paying me anything, but like that's what I was trying to achieve. I was trying to create this book. And so that idea focuses, I think Johnny Ives talked about how Steve Jobs would press him and say like, what have you said no to? And

And Johnny would talk about, well, this, this. And Steve would say, no, no, no. You don't want to do any of those. What have you wanted to do but you said no to because you're focused on your central priorities? And I definitely agree. That's central. But then how do you think about that as integrating with other values in life? Because as an entrepreneur, was your experience that

you had to give it all of your thought and focus? Were you able to pursue other values? Was it different at different time periods where there's certain stretches where, no, I really just, I had to be in the office morning till night and pay the price with health, family, other things like that. What does focus mean in the context of a whole life? There's a right way to think about it and a wrong way to think about it. And

While I was in the Silicon Valley, I saw that a lot of it is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's like you have to suffer in order to succeed. That's the premise, kind of a very malevolent view of what does success require. So let me start with the wrong way and then I'll move to the right way. The wrong way is to say other values in your life have to suffer.

You have to sacrifice them in order to succeed. You won't succeed otherwise. The hard things about the hard things, right? It's always suffering, suffering, suffering. And by the way, if you read in that book of the hard thing, a lot of what I see there, it's like he thinks this is necessary, right? Now, I like the book. It's a very good book. But there is some areas where you need to suffer. Here, let me describe to you how I missed my child's birth.

you know, and how I neglected my wife and my relationship with her. So for me, that's the wrong way to think about it because at the end of the day, the optimization that you're trying to do here is for the integration of values of your life. If it's your career, your romantic relationship, your health and rejuvenation, your

pleasure, wealth, and so on. And that's the wrong way. For me, it's a disintegrated view of it. But where is it right? And this is why it's confusing. In some periods of your time, specifically in specific milestones of building a company or achieving something very hard, you do need full focus. And the rational way to think about it is like, I have to go to my romantic partner and tell her

tell her, look, this is going to be very hard. I'm just about to finish my dissertation. I'm just about launching a product. I'm just about preparing for the biggest event of my life. I'm going to be just not here. Mentally, I'm going to be focused on

So for the next two, three weeks, I'm gone. This is what is important to me. And I think if they're rational and they love you, they will say, go get it. And after you do this concentrated effort, usually what happens, you're exhausted. And then you see that you have to wind down a little bit because your mind and your body need that rest. So an integrated view of your happiness and well-being, I think, requires that. So peaks are...

of effort is are required. That that is true. But let's not confuse it with like all the time. To take a really extreme example of this, I grew up in a military family. And every few years, my dad would have to go away for six months on deployment.

And you had to set up a lot of infrastructure to keep relationships strong. There was a lot of community of the wives that would get together and keep each other sane during those periods. But it was exactly what you talked about. Hey, this is the job. Are you in? How are we going to make it work? Let's figure out a way to honor our values. But for these six months, I'm literally all in on my work. I'm in the other side of the globe. Thankfully, most jobs don't require anything

that extreme. Yeah, but if you think about even relationships of top athletes, they're very strained, but the partner knows what they're getting into. I want to turn to then one other point that I think is true. And this is the idea of, I do think that many, I don't know how to quantify it, but there is a significant number of people who do get their drive and focus from trying to prove something about themselves, from

Trying to, they're insecure and want to show the world I'm somebody. Or they want to show their father or mother, I'm not the nobody you think I am. I think that's true. I think it's revealing that success doesn't benefit them. I think this is one of the reasons that you tend to see high rates of success.

drug and alcohol abuse and suicides by people who think, okay, I'll finally feel good when I get the world's adoration or when I have a million dollars or a billion dollars in the bank account. And then they get it and find that, no, I still feel the same way. And a lot of celebrities and sports figures, they'll talk about this.

And then it leads to a real crisis because it's, well, what do I do? Like my whole life strategy, I achieved it. I didn't get the results I thought. What's plan B? So I think it's true as a sociological thing. I don't think it's anything like 100%. I don't think that's the only thing that

leads people to really put drive and focus in the pursuit of ambitious goals. But I do think you have to concede at least, like this is a widespread phenomenon of why some people will outwork others, is because for them, their whole self-esteem, their whole self-concept is on the line. There's a mix there that I think is important to point out. The type of motivation that you have can be more pure or less pure.

For instance, I just saw a documentary about Serena Williams. And she was on an all-time low and then she was coming back. And then somebody told her she's fat. And she took it as a motivation to prove to the world she's not. And that's her figure. And she saw it as an insult because of the way her body looks like, calling her masculine and so on.

And she took that as a drive and it really motivated her. I get how she took it as a drive, but it's not the same or as pure or as rational as, let's say, Steve Jobs saying, I want to build beautiful computers. And Richard Feynman told a story that I'll never forget. He said, one day my dad took me out and showed me how he puts a ball on a cart and

And he says, look at the ball. I'm going to pull the cart to the right. What happens to the ball? And he looked at the ball and the ball was moving left. But something was going wrong with that. So the father left and he for days moved the cart right just to observe. And he realized that the ball is actually moving right, but less slower than the cart. And it drove him crazy. It's like, why is this happening? And he was fascinated. And this is how a kid decided on a career in physics. And he...

For me, that's pure motivation. That is a motivation by love.

It's not motivation by hate or fear or I need to show myself to other people. So check the purity, like the octane of the field you're running on. And if you want to, the best octane in the world that will take you further is to connect the things that without anyone else around you, you find fascinating. It's not your father. It's not your mother. So if someone insults you and said you're no good, your teacher who told you you'll come to no good.

It's what it is that you love. And that is a very important thing to distinct. That leads into where I think Alex gets wrong. And so the way I would put the first point here is that there is such a thing as being motivated, not by proving something about yourself or overcoming fear, but just love of the work. And I really love this phrase.

by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. He was being asked about the movie that was made by him. And he kind of laughed it off, but he made a really profound point, which was that the whole motivational structure of this movie is that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to get girls or something like that.

And his view is what people don't understand, what they have no clue about is that there's such a thing as people building things because it's fun to build things. And this idea that it's the actual work, the actual sitting down and coding or writing a book or building a company or trying to understand why a ball moves the way that it does. It's that process of thinking, figuring out and creating things.

That can be the most deep, all-consuming passion that drives a person's life. And if you don't understand that, I don't think you'll ever understand happiness and success. And again, you talked earlier about the tragedy of not knowing that you're happy. It's because people do things that should make them happy and they just don't pay attention. From time to time, I talk to an employee and I ask, what is the most

joyful part of your job and they think about it's like oh that's a good question what is the most enjoyable part of my job and then they're like it's when I'm facing a challenge and in this process of trying to maybe it's the research and I'm trying to figure out what to do and then I try and I fail a couple of times and then it succeeds and that that is very rewarding and

And you ask yourself, if they had to think so long, do they even pay attention that this is happening? So this is why I think introspection is such a forgotten skill. Now in the day where everything around you is trying to grab your attention for the next second or two, and we don't contemplate, we don't think about, wait a second, what is the most enjoyable part of all of this? Because there's a lot of stuff you have to do in order to pursue value,

sometimes most of it is not really enjoyable because it's just those things that needs to be done. But there's a core, there's a kernel of the idea that this is why I built bridges. This is why I'm a photographer. So I think this is the thing that people need to understand

remind themselves of and reconnect to and sometimes it gets lost for me for many many decades I played the drums and I enjoyed it so much and sometimes you ask yourself do I really want to play anymore and it's like no I'm going to take a break for me maybe months until I reconnect with that kernel of like I want to play well again and so connecting to the source of

excitement, motivation, interest is something that we are so good as children and we lose it. Not just because they tell us it's not important, but we lose the ability to silence the noise and say, from all of what I'm doing, what is it in me that is so attracted to it?

Yeah. And like the site in psychology, there's a whole realm of research on this. If you know, Chicks and Me, I has written about flow, which I don't like. I don't like the word. Yeah, I think it I think it trivializes something. But there's another concept that he uses for it that he calls optimal experience.

That sense where you're like time fades away, you're totally immersed in the task. It's a difficult task, not so difficult that you feel paralyzed, but you're pushing yourself outside of what your current capability is and working at a really high level and

at something that you think is worthy of your time. And I think that really captures the experience side of what it feels like to build something. But part of the optimal experience is that when they talk to people after these kinds of experiences, like universally the idea is, I would rather be doing that than anything else. That is just a peak kind of experience. And that it's very different from even things that can be pleasant and pleasurable.

going to a party, all those are great. And you wouldn't want to live a life without social outings and watching good movies and so on. So what is it for you, Don? I know when you were just describing this, I was like, when is that moment for me? I can see it. I can feel it. What is it for you?

Well, I could say writing, but it's actually at a higher level of abstraction because it encompasses writing, but it encompasses other things. And it's any kind of creative problem solving. Anytime I'm trying to figure out, okay, I want...

I want to achieve this goal. What would be a strategy to achieve this goal? And I can figure out. Where are you when you're figuring out the problem? Almost always. You mean physically? Like really concrete? It's early in the morning. I've just woken up five o'clock, six o'clock. I come down. I have a little black journal that I have probably 50 of them that have been filled in. I sit down with a pen and I write out what problem am I trying to solve?

And then my deliberate goal is to come up with a new idea that's going to solve it. And that is like, that's literally how it happens. And then if I get stuck, I have one other place that happens, which is I set down the journal. Yeah. I go on a walk and I talk it through until the solution emerges. Yeah. For me, when you were describing like,

let's say the annual conference for me last time, it was a really hard narrative that I was trying to convey. And it took me weeks and months to prepare. It's just like, how I'm going to say that? Do I use a video? Do I do this? Do I do that? There's a big announcement. Where do I put it in the beginning, in the end, and so on. And it was in the limelight.

where I couldn't see the audience. Lighting is all on me. I'm getting on stage. And I have a sense of confidence that I know this is going to go well because I'm so prepared. And it's in the minute, it's like I have two minds when that happens. One mind is the one responsible for the presentation. And the other one is the one watching me doing it.

And it's very hard to explain, but for me, that's the elevated sense optimal experience or elevated experience. It's exactly there. It's almost like the peak of months of preparation, which are a result of a lot of doing where you are actually reporting on what happened. And you ask yourself and you see that moment.

is a culmination of so many other things that you do. And it is almost like the source that I reconnect to explain why am I working so hard. For me, that annual event is like, okay, that's where it's the peak of all the things, all the doing, all the planning, all the management.

culminates into that moment. So I think it's very important that what we just did here is introspective. It's important. So, okay, so that is the moment I'm working for. That is the source of my enjoyment. And of course, when we talked about how do you get the gold coins of doing this, that's another thing we have to be very good at to reward ourselves. The point I would want to leave people with is if it were really true that success is

required throwing away happiness, then I'd say to hell with success. To hell with being a millionaire if I can't be a happy millionaire. But it doesn't, and on the contrary, that the whole core of what makes somebody happy are a crucial piece of the puzzle, the central piece of the puzzle.

is finding that life-affirming work and dedicating yourself to it and building everything else in your life around it. It does not require throwing everything aside and becoming a martyr to a profit statement. It goes back to the motivation. And I love when Steve Jobs says, I just saw it the other day,

Yeah, I was worth a million when I was 23. I was worth 10 million when I was 24. I was worth 100 million when I was 25. And people ask me, how did your life change? It didn't.

I'm not doing it for the zeros, how many zeros I have in the bank. I'm doing it because this is what I love doing. And people seem, it's hard. I read the news every day in the morning just to the highlights. And you can see that the reporters are interested in how many billions did this guy earn or lost today? Who cares?

Do you think that the NVIDIA CEO cares if he's worth $91.8 billion or $86.4 billion? What's the difference? So the difference is for the sad reporter who thinks that's the meaning of life. You know, the 91 is better than the 86. He has no idea. And the fact that he thinks he should report on it is the sad state of the culture.

This is where we are. But let's end on a positive. I think, again, the hell with success in the sense that success is the prestige, the money, the accolades, all of the wrong motivations. The right motivations are way more introspective and way more results of self-knowledge, of self-observation of who am I, what triggers me. You described your moment. I described my moment. Every person has that moment.

And working with a lot of people, I just found out that all of us know that when we're kids. We know that as children. And then we just forget or it's beaten out of us. So reconnecting with that skill of knowing what is the essence of the things that makes me tick, makes my heart sing, is just the center of it all. I'm Don Watkins. He's Tal Sifani. And this has been The Unhappy Millionaire.

Ready to take the next step in your journey? Visit theunhappymillionaire.com where you can find powerful resources for building a life that you love and details on how you can work with Tal and me.