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The Happiness Equation

So here we are. You made it your in the 20 minute video. Who were We've been so far. Well, first we talked about how a model for happiness is totally backwards. We said it doesn't go great work leading to big success leading to happiness. In fact, it's the opposite. You have to be happy first, and then you do great work and then it leads to big success. We know that being happy first, actually, least a 31% more productivity, 37% higher sales and three times more creativity. That's why you do the great work in the first place. So we talked about that, and then we talked about how you actually do that. How do you actually be happy? First, we talked about the 20 for 20 challenge committing toe, one of three happiness exercise that you can do for just 20 minutes a day for just 20 days in a row. Uptick. Your happiness. So now what are we going to talk about? Well, there's three gigantic issues I want to share with you in the world today. Number one is we all have fears in our life. There's ...

things you don't want to do. You don't even want to think about them. But we have to know how to turn our fears into our biggest successes. Number two is we're all too busy. We got so much going on, we're gonna solve that one together. And finally, I want to talk about the concept of retirement. I call it the Drilling. We'll have those completely wrong. I'm gonna show you how to fix your mentality about retirement in just a couple of easy steps. The first thing you need is to learn how to turn your biggest fear into your biggest success. In my early thirties, I'm embarrassed to admit I couldn't swim. I had ear infections my entire childhood at a traumatic experience at a young age where I fell into the deep end and I couldn't swim. And so I got good about eliminating swimming in my life. I didn't want us when I didn't bring my trunks of the pool party. My friends at university wanted to go swimming. Lives just hung on the treadmill. I didn't think I could swim, so I didn't want to swim, so I didn't swim. And that's how it works. For all of us, isn't it? You got to think you can do it first, then you want to do it and then you do it. Capability comes before motivation, which comes before action. All that changed for me when I met Leslie on one of our first dates. I was already falling in love with her, and she asked me So do you like swimming? I thought, Be patient, be cool. Pasricha. Don't admit that you can't swim and I said, That's not really a big fan, She said. Oh, that's too bad. You see, my families have a cottage for generations up on an island way up north. And every single day in the summer, my year old grandparents, my five year old cousins, the 20 of us jump into the lake and swim around the island. I guess you can't come well that night without thinking about whether I could do it, whether I wanted to do it, I just did it. I just signed up online for adult, learned to swim classes at the downtown city pool. I got on the pool deck that day, had my life jacket, my goggles. I was nervous. My heart was beating. And you know what I discovered? Everybody sucked. People were from landlocked countries. They had more traumatic experiences than me. Trust formed quickly within half a Knauer. I was flutter kicking in the shallow and wearing a life jacket. And you know what? Once I did that, I thought I can do this. And then the next week I wanted to do it. You see, what I learned that day is that motivation doesn't exactly lead toe action. In fact, action leads the motivation. Yes. If you place do at the top of a circle instead of the end of the line, then you think you can do it and then you want to do it. You want to write that great book you don't need the perfect coffee shop, the perfect mole skin. The bright idea. Just write down one bad paragraph, then you think you can do it and then you want to do it. You dream of running that marathon. You don't need the perfect shoes. The right playlist, the running buddy. You just need to run to the stop sign in your dress Shoes Doesn't matter. Just by doing that little step first, you'll think Well, I can do this, so I think I want to do it. How do you turn your biggest fear into your biggest success? You place action in front of capability and motivation. You see, the big thing I learned that I want to share with you is that it's much easier toe act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting. Just do it. Take it from Nike. When they started using that slogan in the late 19 eighties, their market share was in the low 20% and there were $800 million company. By creating that slogan just do and striking a nerve that we all feel deep in our hearts, they increase their business to a $10 billion company with over 60% market share. Just do it. Take it from Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist of all time. You know, the man you know, discovered gravity invented calculus pretty good resume. So wouldn't be saying this first law motion, he said. An object in motion will remain in motion and less acted upon by an equal or greater force. Set another way, if something If you're already doing it, it's harder to stop. The hard part is getting started. The second big secret I can share with you for the rest of your life is how do you stop being busy all the time. Solution for this one is creating space. We are all too busy. Everyone says it every single day. How are you busy? Everyone's busy. There's too much business in our lives in our world. We all have too much going on. And there are three numbers I wake up to every morning and that scare me for the day. And they are 147 152 195. Why did they scare me? Because 147 is the average amount of e mails We get a day. It's the average. Some people are more than that. My mom gets six. You might get 301 150. That's the number of times we check our phone on average, which means three times to check your phone. There's up in there because 147 side, there's an email waiting for you. But 150 times we check our phones. What about the 2 95? Well, based on my personal research, this is the average number of decisions we make a day. And you know what? Decision fatigue is a particularly tiring form off mental work. We don't even realize we're tired, but we're making decision after decision. If it decision, we're deciding what to eat. Do you work in an office? It's like, Hey, do you want to go out for lunch? Do you want to go to the restaurant? Which restaurant? When do you want to go? Who do you want to invite? What do you want? Your sandwich. You won't let us You want to manage. You want pickles? It's enlists. We have so many decisions in our lives, and there's they're draining us. They're draining our energy When you go shopping at the grocery store, there's 20 kinds of salsa. There's 10 kinds of fish sticks and 30 kinds of diapers. And you know what? All the decision making fatigues you when you get to the front of the supermarket, you know what's waiting for you there Sugar candy and chocolate bars. And you know why? Because there's only two ways to replenish your decision. Making energy. One is glucose, and that's why you take the sugar head on. The 2nd 1 is sleep, and it's not very comfortable falling asleep around the floor at the front of store. When we've lost our decision making energy, we have only two options. One. We can make a bad decision or two. We can say no to making any decision what I mean by making a bad decision. You know, at the end of buying a car, you spend so much money that you just add $3000 rust proofing for no reason or if you've ever had the experience like I have of using the tells on gun serves scan for a wedding registry in the morning. You're excited. You want red bulls or blue bulls, tall glasses or short classes eight or 12. By the end, you're adding $300 ice bucket that you don't need, and sometimes people just say no to making any decision. Here's 30 kinds of investment plans for your for a one K. Most people have the form back and take the default. Sheena Ionger actually found that Procter and Gamble when they reduced the number of kinds of head and shoulders on the shelf got a huge uptick in sales. When we have less decisions to make, we actually want to make more of them. So what's the secret to never being too busy again? Well, it's called with space scribble and let me tell you how it works. Well, I interviewed billionaires, CEOs, artists, New York Times, bestselling authors and I said, How do you simplify the decisions in your life? What do you do to create space? And I synthesize their answers into the space scribble. What you see here is a little map that shows where all decisions in your life can sort into. You see, every single decision in your life is a certain amount of time, and it's a certain amount of importance. It's either takes a long time or it takes a little or and it's not very important or it's a big deal. So what do you do to make simple decisions in your life? The first thing is you automate the low time and low importance to Suze. Yes, everything in the bottom left corner can be automated. So for me, I use a traffic GPS app to get to work in the morning. I have the same thing for breakfast every day. My friend Chad has Amazon automatic refills for every single consumable item in in his house. If it's low time and low important, you need toe automate those decisions. The second group of decisions are the ones that August on the most. These are the low importance decisions that take a high amount of time. And for these ones, we need to regulate them. I'm talking about e mails, for example. You know you get 147 of them a day. But if you just checked emails from 3 to 4 PM, is anyone gonna mind the people that email you in the morning? They still get an answer. And the people that email you at night, they weren't expecting until the next day. Anyway, coming up with a way to regulate the low importance high time decisions is crucial to creating space. And how can you regulate at home? My wife and I live in old house. Something breaks every two days. Something needs oiling or greasing. Someone needs to be swept up. We keep a little charred on the inside of our kitchen, covered. We call a to 76 day because their addresses to 76 we just make a list of all those tiny chores as that up. And then one Saturday a month from nine AM to noon, we have to 76 day. It's the day that my wife and I spent the entire morning do all the house maintenance. You see, we regulate those things that bog us down into 1/ day a month. It suddenly makes it easy to do it. Third box. Okay. What do you do for the high importance, low time decisions? I'm talking about saying hi to your team in the morning. I'm talking about picking your kids from day care. If it is low in time but high in importance, you simply have to effectuate. It's a big word with a small meaning. It means just do it, get her done, execute. And you know what the beauty of this model is? It is if you automate if you regulate and you effectuate Guess what? You finally have time to debate the high time, high important decisions that matter. But where am I gonna live. What am I gonna do? Who am I gonna be with the big, tough things that we actually need Time to mentally chew on. You create space in your life and you have time to debate them so that you're making a better quality decision. So what's the secret step? Never being too busy again. It's following the space scribble for all the decisions in your life creating space by automating, regulating and effectuating almost all your decisions. So you can pay attention to the ones that matter. And the third big secret is called The dream will have. That is completely wrong. You know what that agreement? It's the concept of retirement. Retirement was invented out of the blue in 18 89 in Germany when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared that anyone aged 65 or over could if they wanted to voluntarily leave the workforce. Why don't we do that? You know why? Because there was a huge youth unemployment issue in Germany and you know what the average life span was back then? 67 penicillin wasn't invented for another 40 years. But by doing that, Chancellor von Bismarck created an arbitrary world standard for the age of 65. Today we're living way longer and we all want to retire earlier. But why? Leaving the workplace? Leaving doing productive work actually robbed us. Of the four s is at work. We get social stimulation. We have the structure in our day, which affords us the ability to do creative work or whatever we want outside of it. We've got stimulation of learning new things. And we've got this story of being part of something bigger than ourselves. Losing social structure. Stimulation story is so costly and detrimental to our happiness. And that's why we should never retire. The healthiest societies on the planet actually don't even have a word for retirement. Take Okinawa, for example. National Geographic researchers discovered that literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely. Instead, they have word called icky guy, which roughly translates as the reason you get up in the morning when you haven't icky guy. You have a purpose in your day and no matter what age you are, whether you're working for money or not, the point is you know what direction you're going when you open your eyes and that leaves the happiness. So here we are. We just had a great conversation about happiness. Let me tell you a little personal story. After my wife and I got married, we went on a honeymoon and on the way home from that honeymoon, she wasn't feeling well. We stopped for a layover, and she went to the farm seat before getting on the plane in Malaysia for a 12 hour flight home. On that plane, my wife went to the airplane bathroom, and then she came to me in our C, and she said to me, You know what? I'm pregnant. When we landed at home, I was struck by a new energy. I spent months almost a year writing down every single thing I could to my child on how to live a happy life. It turned into a 300 page letter, which has become a new book called The Happiness Equation. That book includes the Nine Secrets Happiness and together today we've talked to most of what about the other six. While for those I love for you to check