Teaching Happiness with Jackson Kerchis

My outcome was not that you have more knowledge of happiness, but that you are actually happier.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than a star combo of Ashish Katari and Anil Ramjiani who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey, Happiness Squad, it's great to have you with Asha Schnein and our next guest. Meet Jackson Curtis, a young man who identified at a very young age and has leveraged his initiative to create a happiness course at his university. He's a deep believer in meditation and has set out to achieve his life work to both study and teach happiness. In fact, his friends fondly call him the happiness Nerd. This was a real moving episode for Ashish and I as we discussed Jackson's experience at the age of 18 to create a happiness course at the University of Alabama, how he found the importance of happiness in the science, and inviting parents and faculty and course members to really embrace how they can come together to celebrate how happiness unlock their human performance. At the end, you'll learn how Ashish calls. We have an opportunity to go from being managers of content to leaders of context. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Jackson to the Happiness Squad and rewire together. Jackson, Ashish, it's a pleasure to have both of you together. How are you both doing?

Hey, I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Having the time of my life, my friend. Thank you. Lots of exciting stuff happening. And yeah, it's a beautiful sunny day in Boulder. Birds are chirping, there's a little rabbit running around in the grass. Life is beautiful.

Love it, love it. Same temperature over on this side. So we've got yourself, Jackson, on the east coast. Got myself here in Amsterdam. So hopefully, everyone, when you listen to this, you've got lovely weather. So, Jackson, you know, we love to straight jump right in. One of our favorite questions to ask our guests is happiness. It's a. It's got various definitions for folks. What is happiness for you? And as we talked about as we were prepping, you know, clearly what you achieved and what you did Within a university, maybe tell us how your experience, university may have changed that definition of happiness for you.

Yeah, Even like, you know, and I would love for you, Jackson, to get a little bit into like what you knew in kind of middle school, high school years. Right. All the things that we learned. And then how did that actually shift out of college and through your own experience as you dove into this field?

Well, so I guess maybe thinking first how it evolved. Right. I started thinking there's the definition and then there's almost the sort of the orientation.

Yes.

And orientation to me certainly shifted from maybe in my younger years being more interested in like theory and like philosophy of what is happiness. And I would say during my time in university it shifted to becoming a lot more practical.

Right.

So I became less interested in like what is happiness as much as how does an individual or a collective become happier. So that was one shift. So it was becoming a lot more practical. And then I guess in terms of kind of how I think about happiness more broadly, I sometimes use the term happiness with a capital H because, you know, people I think tend to think of. And another shift that I underwent is when you're maybe younger, you know, in our culture especially, it's sort of like once I do X, then I get happy, or once I get something, then I feel happy. And that's certainly an element of happiness. But what we're talking about here is something that sort of transcends just the moment to moment and it's sort of a deeper sense of flourishing or well being. And I think the systems view, the systems thinking is a helpful perspective. So an analogy from, from that field is you have, say you have some tires and some rubber tubing and a metal frame and another piece of metal and a chain all sort of laying in a pile. And it's like, well, do you have a bicycle? It's like, well, no. Right. It's when the parts are sort of all arranged in a specific pattern that the property of bicycle ness emerges right at the level of the system. And so I view happiness actually as an emergent property. When several factors of your life, psychological health, physical health, spiritual health, etc. When all of these different factors, and we can talk more about those later if you wish, are aligned, happiness sort of emerges from the system of your life.

Yeah, I think it's beautiful. It's quite in line with, you know, how we've been discussing it with so many of the experts who we had on our call in our own work. Right. The things that resonate so much. Jackson Right. This notion of happiness ensues. You can't pursue happiness. Right. Viktor Frankl mentioned this around success, but like, happiness is the same. You can't pursue it. It ensues if you actually have the right elements in place. You know, the Stoics talk a lot about that, you know, and for them the word was eudaimania. A meaningful life. If you're doing things that are filled with meaning, you talk a lot around well being. And I also love, and I would love to get into this with you because I am with you. A lot of people don't actually understand what happiness is or why people like you and me and Anil and Tal and Emma, like, focus on happiness, right? I'm like, you know, isn't everybody should be happy? And like, why are you wasting your time worrying about happiness? But I think it's this notion of the big edge happiness as more than an emotion. Right. And also this notion of happiness is an emotion we feel when we get something versus an inner state of being. An inner state, in fact, you know, the technical definition, subjective. Well, being is. Takes. Communicates so little about that just inner state of, you know, feeling your life is meaningful, you're making a difference, you're feeling well, et cetera, et cetera. So I love those. Jackson, tell us a little bit. So you joined the University of Alabama. You were going to become a future management consultant. But talk to us a little bit about what happened in your first couple of years at college that actually made that shift for you where you said, you know what, I actually want to go do something else. And then got into doing all the amazing stuff you did at the university.

Yeah, of course. Well, I would say actually maybe the first seed was planted even before college. And then I took a gap year to kind of travel the world. I was living alone in Portugal and during that time was very challenging time, sort of leaving the big fish in a small pond, so to speak. My town is like 4,000 people, like a hundred kids in my class being alone in. In Europe. And at that time I watched a video or TED talk by Matthew Ricard, who.

Yes, the happiest man in the world.

Yes, that's his. One of his many titles. And in that talk he sort of explained the contemplative neuroscience. Right. So you study the brains of meditators and whatnot. And essentially his thesis was kind of Buddhist psychology meets science. And he said, look, the typical view we think of as happiness, where he is like, the first piece of chocolate cake is really good, and the second one is kind of okay. And then the third one is like, shame. So that view doesn't work so much. It's really in the same way that an Olympic athlete is a result of many years of physical training, so too happier people as a result of mental training. So I sort of had that incubating in my subconscious, so to speak. And then, yeah, in college, I finished my economics major in, like, two years, basically, and was on the consulting track, helping me run a startup. And I sort of had the typical college student crisis, you know, what should I do with my life?

And this was in which year, Jackson?

This would have been, I think, the end of my sophomore year.

Okay.

And so I'm sort of thinking through, you know, what. What should I do? I could get in that master's program. I could do I want to be an academic, do I want to do it, be an investor, whatever. And I sort of had this train of thought that was like, okay, I can study anything, because I'm basically a nerd. In fact, one of my titles they gave me on Canadian radio is the Happiness Nerd, which I kind of like. But I'm like, I could study anything. And then I was like, okay, well, what is the actual fundamental purpose of life, Right? We're just floating around on this blue green rock in the middle of space. I was like, well, anything that I want to do or study, right? It's sort of a means to an end. I want to be an investor so that I can make money in order to be happy. I want to be a doctor so that I can help people to be happy. I'm kind of like, well, what if I just studied happiness? Like, kind of like, cut out the middleman. And so once I had that realization of, like, oh, all these other things are just a means to the ultimate end of happiness. I, literally, as cliche as it sounds, woke up one morning and just had this idea of a happiness major pop into my head, kind of creating the major. And that day, I reached out to some Alabama people, my mentor, Kwok, and just said, hey, I know I want to do this. So.

So for our audience, who's listening? Jackson, how old were you?

I think at that time, I would have been 20 or 21.

20 or 21, right in your sophomore year. And it's really important, dear friends. And that's why I wanted to have Jackson on this podcast. If you look at the mental health crisis that we are going through right now, for the first time ever, you know, in the history, the mental health of our younger generation is Worse than the mental health as you get older. You know, we always used to have an inverted U curve where in your 30s and 40s, you were actually for 30s, 40s and early 50s, you were literally at your lows, right? And then, you know, people who were younger were happier. People who were older were happier. But, you know, you had this classic midlife crisis thing. If you look at the state of mental health today, our teenagers are struggling more. College has become what I call the newest Vietnam, where one in three kids are struggling with stress, anxiety, depression, they're on therapy or drugs. And I love it, Jackson, because here's you who at 20 says, you know what, we don't teach anything around psychological resilience, around well being in our colleges. We teach people, as you said, go work hard, go get an mba, go to your accounting degree, go become an accountant. We teach all the ways this, you know, one step and then you will be happy. And you say, hey, you know what? Screw this. I think I am actually going to just directly teach people how to get to the end, right? So it's really, really beautiful, you know, what you did. And Anil, I go back to kind of, you know, this whole notion that we've had, right? You're an athlete, you're at Nike, you know, you study athletes a lot. So I want to pull in your words and your voice. My friend, on reflection on what Jackson talked about, connecting it to Matthew Ricards of the superpower that happiness can actually create for people.

No, totally. I mean, happiness can be a superpower. I mean, it's the means to any end, right? If you have that, if you're enjoying the journey to any outcome you want to achieve, and you're integrating happiness as part of that journey, the outcome is whatever goal you want to achieve. And you know, again, as a fellow athlete, what I love about it is, and we talked about this with Jessica Ashish, happiness is human performance, right? It allows you to unlock so much more. Research shows happier people are more successful, they're more resilient, they're more creative, they're healthier. So how we are able to help, you know, whether it's at a younger age, when you have the endurance, you have the energy, more able to perform, work tireless hours, as you get older, that athleticism as well at the workplace starts to diminish. We need to find the right way to help folks when they're younger to really tap into that, the power of happiness. But at the same time, as we get older, how do we unlock? And as we talk about actually shift from success to significance. We climb that second mountain. How can we unlock that superpower? Because it's within us. It's an inner game.

So tell me something, Jackson. So how did you convince your professors? And then how did you get your first set of students enrolled to study with you around this course?

Well, and so one additional thought, Ashish, on your point, I really love Martin Seligman, right? The founder of positive psychology. Or maybe not the founder, but he.

Is the fake player. I call him the father of positive psychology. Right? 2000. First started studying how psychology can be actually used to create happiness and joy rather than how can we increase performance rather than study illnesses. Yeah, no, I love his work.

Yeah. Well, so I took one of his courses online as part of my major. And one of his first lectures, he opens with two questions. Okay, Question number one is, what do you want for your children?

Right?

What do you want for your. For your kids? What do you want them to get out of life? And what do you want out of life? Question number two, what did you learn in school? So he sets it up right off the bat, right? You're thinking about, well, what do I want for my kids and for myself, right? I want happiness. I also want to be successful, but what I really want is to love and be loved, to have an amazing quality of life, et cetera. And then what did you get in school? Well, you got trigonometry and you got art history, and you got Spanish. And nothing against those subjects, right? But we didn't really necessarily get what we wanted. So I think that's. That's one of the most powerful sets of questions I've come across. But getting back to your question, I mean, part of it was sort of almost that's like the question that I would ask administrators or professors or people around me to kind of influence. It's like, look, this is what it's really about, isn't it? Another thing that I used that was helpful was a connection to retention. Like something when I work with businesses and organizations, we work with the military, for instance, I always try to keep in mind that as much as I'd love to just be happiness for the sake of happiness, it needs to drive tangible objectives. So in the case of college, the same factors, and I know this because as part of my studies or entrepreneurial stuff there, I talked to probably close to 50 administrators. The same factors that drive retention in students are the really the same factors that lead to happiness, Like a purpose and a sense of why behind your college experience. Self management. Or self discipline and self efficacy, kind of self control and then quality relationships, same thing happens or attention. So that of course helps. And then I was very fortunate too to have I think a good infrastructure to do a lot of this work at the University of Alabama. There's a program there that, where you can kind of, they facilitate students doing some like self directed study and independent study. And I actually worked, I had a very high trust relationship with one of the administrators there and they kind of set it up to say, all right, well what if Jackson, we make you the sort of the teacher and I will be the instructor of record because there's tons of bureaucracy here earlier point. And so we worked the system a little bit and then opened the signups and one of my favorite things I did was I kind of increased, I added in a little extra hurdle to the sign up and that it was a little bit harder than it would be to sign up for other classes. And that was also sort of my filter for having kids in there that really wanted to be in there and were really high quality students.

What was that filter?

I think it was something to the effect of you just had to go. It was like not the standard class registration process. You had to do the standard registration and then do like one more thing because of the way that the course was coded or something like that. So it wasn't crazy. But I kind of jokingly called it the idiot filter.

But no, when I was in college I took a course called Light and Color Thinking that, come on, how difficult could this class be? It was a physics based course and it kicked my butt. So I barely got to be in that class. So let alone let that be a lesson to folks. Just because you've got an interesting title in the name doesn't necessarily mean it's a, it's a class for everyone. You know, I really want to give you credit here on this one because like you said, you had to kind of go against the grain. You had to think outside the box, really had to work with university to think differently because again, happiness is not something that we talk about in mainstream. So if you say hey, I want to create a course, you know, I think what is the course going to have a big smiley face on it? No, it's, it's that this actually, there's science to this. This actually has credibility and it can help the lives. I mean just as as mentioned, you know, we know kids are suffering from mental health challenges. We know they're suffering from. How can this course actually help? So I really Respect that, you know, because on our side, we are actually doing a program of our own called Rewire. And what we're looking to do is we are actually trying to help individuals rewire away from fear and again, trying to talk to them about how happiness can be. Human performance has been a difficult conversation, so we might need to pick your brain at some point to see how we can actually leverage some of the ideas that you had to kind of overcome some of those hurdles and some of those mental blocks to get people involved, registered with that. So I love that. What I'd love to also understand from your side, Jackson, is maybe dive in. Tell us, what did the course include? What habits, what practices did you want to facilitate with the group and which.

One were the highest impact? Start from that. You know, I'm sure you had a set of practices, but in the student body in particular, where people are at that stage, which ones made the biggest impact? Jackson, for you and for the group who were kind of. You were teaching.

Yeah. Well, so in terms of the course structure, I was about to say, like, I really love what we did with the course structure. And like. Well, of course I loved it. I. It was mine. It was, I would say, unique. And like going back to what I said about driving outcomes, and it's like my outcome was not that you have more knowledge of happiness, but that you are actually happier. And so the structure of the course, I think was aligned with that in that I sort of structured it like this. So each week we have a lecture. And that lecture is sort of on a. What feels like a more traditional, like a theme. Right. So I think, like, I don't have the syllabus in front of me, but it was like second week History of Happiness, right. Where we talk about how it's changed over the ages. And then, you know, as we progress through the course, we get into specific kind of subtopics like relationships or mental training was one, what should I do with my life was another. So it was sort of the classes themselves were in the sort of topic base. But the first half of the course is semester course. I assigned reading each week and I would review it in class. That was actually reading a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I think is one of the most well written practical books on behavior change. And so the first half of the semester you're. They're basically reading that book. And then the midterm project check is for you to having read that book, basically implement, I think it was three happiness habits into your daily life and build out like a, basically an implementation plan based on the principles of atomic habits. And then the second half of the course, your ongoing project is to actually begin executing those habits. Right. So you, you're leaving the course ideally with three new tangible, actual habits that are going to support happiness for the rest of your life. So in terms of the impacts, I think just that habit orientation piece in itself was a really big impact. And then it's hard for me to remember exactly. Right. There's always two different themes hit home for different people. Definitely one that comes to mind for me was, I think during the relationships theme I talked about that and I had folks, students do a, a gratitude letter exercise, right. Where it's the classic positive psychology intervention. And I remember one student saying basically that she wrote this thank you letter to her grandparents and called them and she was like, as soon as I called them to read. Right. Because in this intervention, for context, people don't know, basically write this thank you letter recognizing someone for the impact they've had on their life and then you deliver it to them in person and read it or call them and read it. And she's like, as soon as I called my grandparents, I started crying and it was this big. You know, it's sort of a life changing event in some cases. So that was one specific kind of intervention or theme that I, I remember.

Yeah. When Professor Seligman did that work and he writes about it in his, in his book Flourish. You know, it's very similar. Right. Story around how actually moving it is and how impactful it is not just for the person who's receiving the letter, but for you. Right. On writing the letter and kind of this level of inner level of kind of being seen, being supported and gratitude. Right. That flows over you. It's beautiful. Jackson and I love some of the other topics that you included in your course for your students. Right around purpose. It's a really big word. But it can also be about how do you integrate more of what you love and what you're good at into your day to day. Right. The talk a lot about how do you design a career you love rather than a job you hate. There's so many who graduate from college in jobs they hate. But you know, design a career, use the college in an experimentation period. Right. Which is such a, such a beautiful, beautiful element. I also liked your pieces around connections and relationships to some extent. You know, first time you're getting into relationships, you're by yourself, you're falling in love for the first time. Maybe you're Experiencing heartbreak for the first time. But this notion of how do you create enduring relationships to make that truly be something that brings you eternal joy from within. Loneliness is one of the biggest epidemic of our times, where people are more connected but more lonely because they never really feel comfortable showing their authentic self. Right? Come on, everybody's supposed to have sunshine, flowers, rainbows and unicorns, right? So how can I show up if I'm feeling down? So, no, it's beautiful. I mean, I can imagine how impactful Jackson, that work would have been for the students. And I really, you know, friends, if you're listening, look, I mean, this is what your kids are going through right now in colleges. And I would look into the curriculum in your colleges. I would invite, I would look into your curriculum of your kids in colleges. And if there isn't a program on flourishing happiness, call your college. It's one of the most important lessons you could be imparting to your kids, an important step in their education. And, you know, if you face the setback where people say, yeah, but we don't have the resources, we don't have the curriculum, it'll take a long time. We are incredibly busy. We're just coming out of COVID If you get any of those excuses, call us. We have a fully integrated 12 month program that we will be more than delighted to offer. Give to colleges, give to students that they can take. This is all science backed. Jackson, in his time at college could leverage the amazing work, stand on the shoulders of giants like Marty Seligman, Emma Sepla Tal, Ben Shahar, and so many others who have done the science around the practices that work. We should not be keeping this from our kids because this can literally change their life and can be a big antidote towards the crisis of mental health, stress, anxiety and depression that they're going through. And ask your kids to be the next Jackson. Right? Take it up. Take it up. And if the school doesn't offer it, just say, hey, listen, what if I take an initiative and I create a group and we leverage and you lead it? Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it. And we all have to say, I'm a big believer in Jane Goodall's Roots and shoots program where it's about identity. Any person, even a kid 12 years old, can be the force of change, can be an agent of change. We all can. We can't let the system come up with solutions. We are the system. So if we take initiative as parents, you ask your kids to take initiatives, we collectively can actually turn the tide.

Hi, friends. We hope you're enjoying the tips discussed in this episode. If you're on the career treadmill, seeking the next promotion, experiencing stress and anxiety, or reached the top of your career and wondering if the sacrifices to get there were worth it, Ashish and I have been there and we're ready to support you. The Happiness Squad rewire program is designed to integrate the nine hardwired for happiness practices into your day. Within five minutes form proven habits to experience more success, resilience, satisfaction and creativity. You won't be alone in your journey. Check out the rewire link in the show notes. Make happiness your competitive edge to achieve your goals. Now back to the episode.

I want to just compliment that and actually ask another question to Jackson on the back of what Ash just mentioned. You know, you've got this opportunity with these students and I. You know something, Ashish, you and I have talked about sometimes some of these books, some of these programs, you can do it on your own and it's great. But when you actually have peers that you can actually discuss this with, you know, you can actually interact with them, you can discuss it, you get a deeper understanding, a deeper appreciation. As you mentioned, you're not doing it alone. And I kind of want to understand Jackson from your side. What shifts did you see what conversations to hear? How did that dynamic kind of having happiness as a topic within a classroom setting, how did that work for you? What did you experience? What did the students experience?

Yeah, well, I thought it was a. Maybe more than anything to this idea that I think, I forget one of you said it earlier, but this idea that happiness ensues, right, you don't pursue it. It's kind of orthogonal attention. I think it's the word Viktor Frankl maybe used. Similarly, I feel like one of the main benefits of the class was that, you know, we're kind of talking about happiness and life's big questions in there and as sort of a something that ensues from that indirectly is just building connection and cohesiveness in a forum of peers. And I think that's really valuable because a lot of, I think figuring out, so to speak, of. Of life's big questions, you know, what should I do with my life? What do I want in life, what I want to go to college, et cetera, comes through what I would say is sort of not a very analytical sort of thinking, but more of just, hey, discussions, whatever. My one business school professor, you're great, great mentor and strategist, used to say kind of the most productive thing you can do for your career at this stage right now is, you know, meet up with one of your friends and have late on a Friday, have a big glass of milk and his joke and just talk through, hey, what should I do? Right? So I felt like a big part of it was just creating a forum for students to talk about these sorts of things that I don't think you necessarily get anywhere else. Right. It's not common that you have that pretext in college, even if you're in like a club. Right. Maybe the club's focused on a certain topic and when you're doing a club event, you have a few minutes after where you're in a group and you have these sorts of discussions. But I think creating that sort of container or that space just to have that sort of peer to peer forum in a small group is powerful.

Just to have.

I love it. Jackson, you've been now taking what you created in colleges and have been doing this amazing work with companies and with institutions. Right. You've served the army. I know you've served several other companies. Tell me about as you engage with companies around this, what is the biggest shift or what is the biggest gap? You know, what is the biggest obstacle to happiness that you see and what is your biggest intervention that you invite your people, leaders that are in these companies to embrace? So biggest obstacle to happiness and the biggest tip to get around it?

Yeah, well, an organizational context. I'd say maybe the biggest obstacle is it might honestly be a lack of measurement and a lack of contextual understanding of the problem, so to speak. So when we think about our work with the military, they do some command climate assessment. It's called like every, I think it's every year and it's been back and forth. There's a lot of competing priorities. And it seemed like there was somewhat even when we started the engagement, it was like, you know, we had to do a lot of flushing out around. Well what is like the actual challenge and then like outcome that you want us to have. Right. Then same thing with one of our other big clients is transportation company. You know, what was maybe an issue for them is slightly different than what was an issue for the military. But it's like what are the sort of internal measurements you have in place to actually understand what is the problem or what is our cultural health, so to speak. So a lot of those kind of that obstacle, a lot of it's kind of internal customer discovery, we call it. So, you know, search within the organization for pain points or challenges, etc. Then also trying to have some consistent. I use the analogy of, hey, if you want to keep an eye on your weight and your health, you gotta just step on the scale once a month. So we try to encourage like short, informal sort of leading indicators of cultural health. Right. So that's kind of one obstacle. And then again it depends a lot on the context of the organization. But I think probably the most common obstacle is that leaders, there's sort of again, two dimensions to leadership. I similar I said earlier, there's sort of like the skill of leadership and then there's the skill of whatever the industry or the business activities are, Right. So if I'm a manager running a fleet of trucks, right. There's the skill of the management and then there's the skill of the operations of the fleet of trucks. Almost every organization out there that is not bankrupt has really strong leaders in terms of the operational kind of specifics of the content. But at the same time, shockingly few of them have kind of leadership specific training. So when we think about that specific training, the things we tend to focus on, I'd say are how do you cultivate as a leader psychological safety and how do you do so kind of using the skill of emotional intelligence. So that's kind of a specific skill set I think that we can really move the needle on.

Yeah, I love both of them. Right. I think it's as core to kind of our belief systems as well. And friends, think about it. Data. We use data and measurement in every other aspect of business. Performance. If you're a retail CEO, you go look at store productivity data every hour. If you are a manufacturing oriented company, you look at your line performance, you know, how many units are being produced and what's the rate? Almost every minute, every hour. So if you really care about really human performance, if you want your human assets to be at their best, why wouldn't you measure at least once a month the equivalent of what Jackson called getting onto the scales, Measure health, measure health once a month, measure it at a level that you can actually apply and action it. And then the second one, Jackson, it's so true. You know, I think it's what you leave behind in college. You're never taught, we're never taught some of the things around emotional regulation, emotional intelligence. And even if it's taught, we're not told how to practice. I'm going to tie it back to kind of what you said with your college time. It was not about studying happiness, but it was making it practical. And so this notion of how do you Actually help leaders integrate what you're learning into the day to day. How do you apply? How do you really apply and use data and the skills to transform and become good leaders of context in addition to becoming great leaders or managers, I should say of content. Beautiful. Thank you. Anil to you, my friend.

Sure. I think this is what's interesting about measurement. I think sometimes people get scared, you know, they don't know how to measure performance. I think this is something that we're tapping into, something we are looking into because we feel that's absolutely important to understand how performance can improve happiness, as you mentioned earlier, as a habit, as an atomic habit as well. What I'd like to do is ask you, Jackson, as we start to wrap up, one thing we'd love to know is of the nine hardware for happiness practices that we share with you that Ashish has pulled together, which is your favorite of the nine and how do you integrate it into your day to day?

Well, so this was a tough one for me because I was stuck between, I think number eight was building community and number nine was intention. And I sort of say, well on one hand I often say that relationships, right. The Waldinger study, which you can look up his TED talk, I won't go through all of it. Essentially they found that quality relationships are the key to happiness. And I think that applies dually. I design it more as connection and psychological safety. But same thing, I think it's essential to organizational well being. But that being said, I'd go with number nine, which is intention, because I think that intention ultimately is what underlies anything that has to do with happiness. And when I talk about organizational or personal happiness, always in the foundation, right. I include basically health and wealth. So again, if you're a person, health and wealth to your business, basic financial performance and safe livable conditions and setting for employees. But then the third thing I always layer in is some element of intention, right? Because it's all you manage your time. I sometimes say you're like an investor and you have a portfolio and time is the money that you're investing when it comes to happiness and well being, right. So that intention you could define as maybe agency or self efficacy. But the sense that I'm going to intentionally choose what actions and behaviors I engage in, then I'm going to actually take action and engage in those behaviors. So living on purpose to me is the foundation for all these other ones. Because you say, well, I want to have good relationships, right? Well then I need to have some sort of intention to Design a strategy or system that builds good relationships. So I'm going to call one old friend per week, whatever, same thing. I want to practice gratitude. Well, first you have to have an intention to actually design habits around gratitude. I'm going to write down five things that I'm grateful for every day. So to me, that's ultimately kind of the first piece in this whole topic of I want to be happier or I want to have a happier organization.

I actually love that. Go, Ashish.

Yeah, I think it's beautiful. I think it's, you know, we become what we practice, right? This knowledge of this gap between knowing and doing and doing and being. So, yeah, intention is, you know, my favorite is however, gratitude. But I do. It's important. Intention is really, really important for me. Gratitude changed my brain. I literally say that because I know what my brain was and I could notice every little things that went wrong and it had a huge effect. And gratitude changed my brain like much to. I've become very annoying now. My wife always tells me, like, when things don't go well, like, how are you not affected by it at all? I'm like. Because I always see the fact that if something didn't go well, there was something in place for that thing that I've enjoyed something going well for a long time for it not to go well for a lot of people. That is not a state, right? Your car breaks down. How many people don't have a car? So let's not get all worked up about the car breaking down. Let's actually celebrate the fact that we had a car. And by the way, there are people out there who can fix the car. So. So who cares?

But anyway, so hey, as we wrap up, what I want to suggest is because living intentionally is absolutely powerful. And I, Ashish, I quote you, you say, you know, either living intentionally or you're living accidentally. What we're going to do is we're going to include in the show notes a template that Ashish has created where you can actually look at four quadrants of your life as well as there are 168 hours in a week. What's one shift you can make if you were to drop that pearl into another bucket? It's another part of your life. So I think that's something we will offer to our listeners because we definitely think it's absolutely critical, like you mentioned, to really set that intention and let that be your North Star, to keep focus on where you're looking, to go where you want to be. So now comes some play so Jackson, what we'd like to do is just a couple of rapid fire questions as we wrap up. So the first one is what is your favorite show to binge?

This is tough because I don't really watch, I don't watch tv. I'm more of a reader, which is again very nerdy. The last show I think I actually watched was Chimp Empire which is kind of a Planet Earth style documentary following a bunch of like a huge society of chimps in Africa. Nature shows are probably my favorite.

Love it, Love it. I, I will say that's a deviation. And I love that spice mix list because we've had other shows like Successional. I actually am going to check that out now, so appreciate the suggestion. The second is on the back of what you do love. What was the last book you read?

Oh gosh, I have so many just sitting around that it's almost hard for me to remember what did I just finish.

Or your favorite book that you just read?

Yeah, the Autobiography of a Yogi. So that was the last one I read. It was found. The reason I picked it is it was big for Michael Singer references it. He's the author of the Untethered Soul, which is one of my favorite books. So it sort of profiles the firsthand life of a very mystical yogi and there's some kind of crazy stuff that's said in it. They're very out there sort of mystical. But it was interesting.

Yeah, I've read it. It was, I read it very early in my journey of the 600 books that I've now that are sitting in my bookshelf here. But it's a beautiful story, dear friends. It's a story of Yogananda Paramhansa and. Paramhansa Yogananda. And it is quite transformative. Steve Jobs read it. It's truly, truly transformative. And yes, it has some really interesting mystical elements of it. But the teachings in it are actually quite beautiful. Deeply spiritual actually going to be added to my list.

I think what we're going to do is we're going to give people. If you've not picked it up on the back of Ashish's book, we got a book list, book recommendations where I threw that on social too. There's some amazing books that are coming through here. The last question I want to ask my friend is what is your favorite song that picks you up when you're feeling down?

Probably country roads, you know.

Love it. Love it.

Can't be bad.

Well, hey Jackson, this was truly appreciative in terms of just really understanding the change that you've done, how you went against the grain, creating course, university, sharing your insights with us. I mean, hey, appreciate having met you, having spoken to you. Thank you. Appreciate you.

Same here, Jackson. And you know, listen, we are all about helping others. You know, you, me, so many others, right, who are united together. I call them the warriors of light against the Kanavok, the entire army of darkness. Love it. I think it's. We need to band together. It's our. It's such a pleasure. I connected with you on LinkedIn immediately. The work you were doing kind of shown the impact that you were having. So it was such a pleasure to have this conversation. Thank you for what you're doing to make the world a better place and actually doing it both through the work in colleges, but most importantly, reaching out to organizations and helping them lead differently, teach people how to be good people, leaders, leaders of context, not just managers of content. Thank you.

Yeah, well, hey, thank you both too for the work you're doing. It's an incredible show. And yeah, one of my favorite quotes, I'll paraphrase, but a Joseph Campbell, he says basically that societies have always been sorrowful, inequitable, screwed up. And so if you really want to help people, what you'll have to teach them is how to live in it. And so how do you engage in the sort of joyful sorrows of life as it is? So I like to think that's what we're all doing here.

Thank you, my friend. Be well.

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