Interview: The Happiness Equation with Neil Pasricha

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Neil Pasricha, who is a new friend and fascinating guy who wrote the great book the Happiness Equation, which just came out. I highly recommend it. He is a Harvard MBA who's the former Director of Leadership Development for Walmart, who also has one of the most popular TED talks in history, created something called 1000awesomethings.com and most recently created something called the Institute for Global Happiness. And he also has a book series called the Book of Awesome, which has sold over a million books. And just a great guy. Really enjoyed the book and just thrilled to be connected. Neil, I appreciate you taking the time. I'm excited to explore some big ideas.

Thanks, Brian, for having me on the show.

All right, well, let's start at the top. The Happiness Equation is the title of the book. Tell us why you named it that and what the equation is, please.

Sure, absolutely. Well, listen, I was on the flight home from my honeymoon when my wife wasn't feeling well. We stop in a layover. She buys a pregnancy test, does it on the airplane, and tells me I'm pregnant, you know, on the actual plane home from our honeymoon. So, you know, cut to the scene of like us kind of freaking out 50,000ft above sea level, scoring a free muffin. When we told the flight attendant, it was just like one of these opening scenes of a movie. So we land home in Toronto. I start writing a letter to my unborn child on how to live a happy life. In fact, the first sentence I wrote Brian, and you can maybe relate as a dad, is, dear baby, I wanted you to have this in case I didn't have a chance to tell you, Love, Dad. And then I started getting up at five in the morning every day for nine months writing this letter. It evolved into a document which today is called the Happiness Equation. It is the book, but you asked specifically about the title. And you know what's interesting? It's so interesting on the title because letters don't have titles. Like, have you ever sent someone a letter and it's like the title of this letter is like, you don't do that. You just start writing. So I didn't have a title. And my first book is called the Book of Awesome. So this kicked off, I want to say, about a year long discussion inside my publisher, which drained the life out of me. But it was like, do we want to call it the Book of happiness. Is it nine secrets to happiness? Is it happiness? And then eventually it came to be that the three segments of the book, want nothing, do anything and have everything, I had always mentally thought of them as an equation. I didn't articulate that in the letter, but I thought it's, you know, want, want nothing, Contentment plus do anything. Freedom equals have everything, happiness. And so that's what gave my editor, Kerry Coleman, the thought that, you know what? It's really about a happiness equation. And I was sort of pushing for the nine secrets of happiness. And she's like, that sounds too listicle y. We live in buzzfeed world. So let's try to communicate the wisdom in the book that I had researched and tried to put in. And so that was the origin of the name the Happiness equation. It's about finding the happiness in your life in a step by step way. And for me, what I want to leave to my son in case anything ever happens to me is like, here's the manual you could open when you're hitting a rough patch in your life, when you inevitably go through that low point of a divorce or losing a friend or losing a job or a loved one. Here is the nine steps you can take to kind of get back on your feet. And that's what the happiness equation is about.

Right on. Yeah. And I totally felt the. I love that story. First of all, I didn't realize it was actually. You bought it at the airport. That's fantastic.

Yeah, in Malaysia. And she wasn't feeling well, so she's walking by all these like steamed noodle bowls and like, just like kind of cringing and she's like, I don't know if I'm going to make it on the plane, but yeah, she did the test in the airplane bathroom, which is, I think a pretty rare thing. Rare place to do it.

Opening scene of a movie, as you said. That's so good. Yeah. I created something called Optimal Living 101A class soon after my son was born three years ago. And that was exactly the intention of. Okay, let me just capture the best I know. And if I didn't have a chance to share with him, here it is. I just love the spirit of that. And you can feel it in the book nine secrets to Happiness in those three sections. Want nothing, do anything, have everything. I'd like to start with the big seven. You talked about the science of Happiness. I'm a huge fan of positive psychology and you mentioned seven things. We don't need to go into all seven, but what are your favorite research studies that have most impacted your life?

Sure, absolutely. I'll give you three of them. And they all take just 20 minutes a day. So the first one's the 20 minute replay. This is the famous study done at the University of Texas, which has the best study name ever, by the way. How do I love the. Let me count the words where they had couples in relationships journal for 20 minutes at the end of the day about a positive experience they had that day. And of course, those who did so, even though it wasn't a the couple or anything, were 50% more likely to stay together after three months, which is a really long time for a relationship to last on a university campus. And I think this journaling thing is so powerful because, you know, our minds have no GPS signal in them, right? So when we're writing down the story of Joe buying you the coffee in the morning, you relive that experience. It's like you're there again. And if you were to read your own journal, you relive it a third, third time. So part of the reason I like this one so much is because that's what I was doing without realizing it on 1000awesomethings.com, I did it for 1000 days in a row. It was the last thing I did before I went to bed every night. And it was really nice to sort of justify all these, like, bizarre essays on fat baseball players and popping bubble wrap and, you know, hitting a string of green lights when you're late for work. Because I'm like, yeah, science says I was making myself happier. So that's the first one, the 20 minute replay. The second one I'll give you is really. It's called Two Minute Meditations. It's a really common, famous study from Massachusetts General Hospital that shows that meditation increases the prefrontal activity in our brain, the part of our brain responsible for attention and focus. And I'm not a good meditator. I shouldn't say that so strongly, but I'm saying it's a practice for me. I. I try the Headspace app. I've taken transcendental meditation classes. I'm trying to insert that into my life. And, you know, any day, I actually do close my eyes and do deep breathing and get past the hump of the distractions our brain always gives us first. I find I'm so much more relaxed and so much more able to prioritize the rest of my day. So that's the second one I'll give you, which is the two minute meditations and the third one is the best, which is just three 20 minute walks a week. So Michael Babiak and team have shown that if you go on three brisk 20 minute walks a week, actually on a happiness level, you can outperform folks on antidepressants or folks doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants. Just the walking alone outperformed both other test groups. So just to summarize, like, three of the big seven are the 20 minute replay, the journaling activity, the two minute meditations, or getting as much as you can do, and finally, the three 20 minute walks a week.

Right on. Yeah, those are three of my favorites as well. So much more we can go into there, but I want to move on to the next one, which is the icky guy. You have a great section on retirement and purpose. I want to talk about both. So however you want to kick into that discussion and then we'll unpack it from there.

Sure. It turns out the secret number four of, of the happiness equation, which is called the dream we all have, that is completely wrong, is turning into the most controversial one. I'm starting to piss off. People that have done 30 years of time at the meatpacking plant are like, hey, buddy, you want me to do 30 more? That's not likely. So what I'm trying to say is that retirement as a concept was invented in 1889 in Germany when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck said, hey, if you're 65 or older and you're infirm or you need some and you want to voluntarily leave the workforce, we'll give you a little bit of money until you die. And of course, the startling observation is that the average lifespan in 1889 in Germany was 67 years old. We were 40 years away from discovering penicillin. We didn't live that long. But yet 65 became the world standard, at least the western world standard. I'm in Canada, you're in the U.S. we adopted those numbers, 65. And today we all live much longer. We all want to retire much earlier and why. And so to research the happiness equation, I came across this incredible study done by a team of folks at National Geographic. And they found that the people of Okinawa, who live an average of seven years longer than Americans, actually have no word for retirement in their language. Like literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely. Instead, they have a word, as you pointed out, called ikigai I k I g a I, which roughly translates as the reason you get out of bed in the morning. So, okay, Retirement is dangerous. That's why I'm going to argue. Fortune magazine says the two most dangerous years of your life are the year you're born and the year you retire. But if we don't want to retire because that affects our happiness, we what do we want? Well, I say it's the four S's. They are social fulfillment, a structure of your days and weeks, the stimulation of learning new things, and frankly, a story to be part of. Or the icky guy that gets you out of bed in the morning. Not the icky guy lying beside you in bed in the morning, but the icky guy, that sense of purpose that sort of helps you jump out of bed and say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Today I want to increase happiness in organizations, which is mine. Or today I want to educate future leaders, which is my wife's, who's an elementary school teacher. And that's where the power of the ikigai comes from, from that story from Okinawa. And that's why I believe secret number four, the dream. We all have this completely wrong. We should all never truly retire.

So well said and so great. Just to reflect on that. They don't even have a word for retirement is just crazy. The reason for getting up in the morning, you shared a story in the book about the fact that you actually wrote down eurekigai on a little. Was it a card of some sort? Then you put it on your knife.

Yeah, this is a great kind of Christmas present idea for anyone listening who has a partner that maybe doesn't listen. Okay. It's like I said to my wife, Leslie, I was like, okay, I want to live to the age of 100 with you. And I've studied some of the things that help you get there and help you live happier lives. One part of the present was these little 10 cent cards. I called them ikigai cards. Which, you know, you fold it like a tent, you put it on your bedside table, you write down the reason you get up in the morning. Okay. I complemented that with a bottle of wine that has, you know, it's from Sardinia that, like, is known for having great, great properties. And then you complement it with a few other things. It's sort of I planned her birthday party for when she's 100. I have a little birthday card with like the date and the time and so on. So it was kind of a neat present idea. Wasn't a super expensive present, but it was trying to communicate, like, if we're going to live and love and grow old together, like, we need to Always remember to have an icky guy in our lives.

That is awesome. Everything about that is awesome. You mentioned we were chatting before about contract that you created with your wife, which I don't think was part of the book, but talk to us about that. Just when we think about getting to 100 and doing so, flourishing and joyfully.

Sure. Well, I had a. I was really lucky earlier in my career to work directly for the CEO of Walmart Canada. He's an incredible leader who I still look up to, and he's now CEO of Walmart International. And so he said to me, when I was taking on a new job one time, he said, neil, you have a contract between yourself and Walmart, right? And I said, yeah. He said, that contract specifies what you do at work, right? Yeah. It's got hours on there, it's got a salary, it's got stuff like that. He's like, do you have a contract for. For your wife? I'm like, well, what do you mean? He's like, well, you got a new job, it has a certain amount of travel, it's got a certain number of commitments. Do you have something written down for home? And it was a really interesting point. He said, I recommend you write one down. And so what Leslie and I did is we wrote out a little contract. It's fantastic because I'll explain in a second, but basically what we did is we said, okay. X number of nights away from home per month. X number of nights away from home per year. And one day a week, we will have a family day. So my wife, myself and my son will have time, just the three of us, including, you know, no interaction with anybody. No cell phones, no birthday parties, no family, nothing. Like just the three of us. And once a week, I will have an nno, which is a Neil's Night out. Neil gets to go do whatever he wants. He can go watch a documentary by himself, he can go play checkers with his friend, whatever he wants to do. And one night a week, Leslie has an LNO. And we must take those LNOs and NNOs because if she goes swimming, she's more invigorated to be a better mom the next day. If I decide to browse all night at a bookstore, I come back with new energy to be a better dad and a better husband the next day. So those four bullet points provide a contract at home, where we have a loose framework to orient ourselves around. It prevents us from slipping. Brian prevents us from slipping and saying, like, oh, yeah, we really gotta start seeing each other more or you gotta travel less. It's like. But now we have numbers. Now we say, oh, it's been a rough month, how about next month I only go away two nights or whatever it is that an obligation is taking me towards. But because we have that contract. And you're right, I don't talk about in the happiness equation, but it's a big part of our lives and it helps orient ourselves to making sure that we're fulfilling our, you know, husband, wife, mom, dad, best son, best daughter, best sister, best brother. Those type of obligations too.

Right on. Yeah. It's so inspiring. And one of my things I hadn't created the. Although I might need to take it and run with it. The 100 year birthday party, 50th wedding anniversary is one of the things that is most important to me in my life. And you really just helped articulate some of the things that we've been doing more of, but we haven't actually concretized. But that Neil's night out idea where you have to. The other person has to do it for the other person's benefit. Right?

Yeah.

You need to go do this because it's best for you. And you know, I know how challenging it is for me and for my wife to do that and how important it is to do it. So that's super inspiring. Love it.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it encourages me to do something I might not otherwise do. Like, I wouldn't necessarily make a commitment to like a weekly floor hockey tournament or floor hockey, you know, league in Toronto because I'm like, oh, I can't be out every Wednesday. Like, who's gonna take care of the baby? But because I'm like, well, I'll just commit, you know, the next eight Neil's night outs to that. Then suddenly it's like, but I'll be around every other night. Then it's like I justified to myself and I then do so guilt free and of course, you know, come back with more energy the next day.

No doubt. And then it goes all the way around to not only is it guilt free, it's actually for the benefit of the other. Right. Be happy first. Right. And let that precede showing up fully in every aspect of our lives.

Absolutely.

This is good. Okay. So then another one of my favorite ideas was to add an hour to your day. Tell us how we go about doing that.

Sure. Okay. Well, while I was working at Walmart and still in my, in my current role, you know, I counted up the number of access points I have to myself. So they are Things like email, social media, text messages, office instant messenger. Someone actually walking up to my desk and tapping me on the shoulder, right? Like, we have so many access points. And the thing I learned in the research is that your brain actually has to bookmark, prioritize, and switch between any new task. Which is why, and I know this is a common theme with you, is it's why multitasking is such a bane. You know, it's like you're constantly switching rather than doing.

And.

And Cal Newport, of course, on the deep work, it's like, yeah, we're spending too much time switching. So how do you add an hour to the day with only one small change? You reduce the number of access points you have to yourself to one. Sounds dramatic because it kind of is. I set my voicemail at work to simply say my email address twice. Like, I spell it out. And I set it on vacation mode so there is no beep. The light never turns red. You know, I stopped working at my desk because at my desk anyone can come up to you, but if you just decide, like, I'll just work out of a meeting room or the cafeteria, it's like, then you get more productive work done. I deleted the office instant messaging program, the office text messaging program, and my, you know, my personal social media accounts, you know, for Neil Pasricha on Facebook. Like, deleted them. Completely deleted them. Because then if I can channel everything to email, take off all email notifications so they never beep and buzz, then suddenly I. I'm doing deep work. I'm adding that hour of productive work a day. And when I want to check email in a regulated window, there it is, sitting there waiting for me. And I can confidently say, anything important will come to me through this one channel. I don't need to check four different browsers, three different email addresses, and two social media accounts. I'm just like, it's all going to.

Come right here again, Genius. You mentioned Cal Newport and his deep work. As you know, I'm a big fan. And his most recent Harvard Business Review article on the end of email or a world without email or something like that inspired me to actually get out of email. And so my one touch point right now is my right hand guy who slacks me. And then my assistant, who, if someone sends an email to me now they get an autoresponder saying, hey, please, if it's important, email my assistant, who then puts it in a Google Doc. And it's crazy how much time I've saved. I was inspired to do that in part by Cal, and in part by what you described right now, it's nuts what happens when we're able to reduce those access points, remain accessible, of course, but not diminish our attention throughout the day and kind of live in that shallow land of never doing anything important. I love it. At least nowadays. Right.

Well, I love what you just explained in terms of Slack and as an entrepreneur and so on. A lot of what my models came from for the happiness equation was my decade of working at Walmart, right? So I'm in a corporate Fortune 500 environment. I love the environment, but it's got parameters that I can't necessarily control. Like we all have to be on Microsoft Outlook using the same email program. And so in that situation, I looked up to One of the CEOs I interacted with, and I noticed he thought of email like a hot potato. So if you're in that situation, it's like email is responsibility given to you by someone else. Right. And so his whole thing was don't answer it, period. Because if you can have the intellectual kind of confidence not to answer it, one of two things will happen. Either one, people will figure it out on their own. They will work around you or make their own assumptions to move past you. That happens, he says, 95% of the time or in the 5% of the time that someone forwards you their sent email saying like, hey, hey, buddy, where are you? Like, question mark, question mark. On the second or third one of those, he's like, sorry, I've been away. Here you go. He does answer those ones, but because of the 95% rule, the majority take care of themselves.

Yeah, it's so good. Again, so much. We can go into there, but let's move to the next idea, the dew circle. And your favorite physicist, talk to us about that.

Sure. I am 36 years old. I could not swim when I was in my early 30s. My family could swim. My sister could swim like a fish. But I had chronic ear infections as a child. I had chronic tubes. I had a traumatic experience, which I won't get into now, but I fell into a pool and I couldn't swim. And so I never learned how to swim. And you know what, Brian? The way action works in all of our minds is there's three steps. The first step is can do. Okay. Capability. The second step is want to do. That's the motivation. And then the third step is do the action. So again, it's can do, wanna do, do. When it came to swimming, I said, well, I certainly can't swim. So I never got past that step. And by the way, I never wanted to swim. I'll look silly. I don't know how to do it. I'm not proud of my spaghetti noodle arms. And then I never got to action. I never even owned a bathing suit. It was that deep. My fear of swimming, I just had totally eliminated it from my life. So all that changed on my second date with Leslie when she actually says to me, you know, far before we got married, but second date, she says to me, so, do you like swimming? And I was thinking to myself, oh, play it cool, you know, don't let onto her that you don't know how to swim. I'm embarrassed about that. And I say to her, oh, no, no, I'm not really a big fan. And then she says, she says, oh, no. She's like, My family has a cottage that's been in our family for generations. It's on an island a few hours north of here. Every single day in the summer, the 20 of us, my five year old cousins, my 80 year old grandparents, we jump into the lake and swim around the island. I guess you can't come, you know, and it was just like, oh my gosh. That night, without thinking about whether I can do it or I want to do it, I just, I signed up for $40 for eight weeks, City of Toronto Adult learn to Swim classes. And I strutted onto the pool deck with my heart beating, you know, harder than I was walking onto the TED stage. You know, it was like I was so much more nervous for this than anything. I'm wearing the goggles, I've got the life jacket on. And within five minutes I realized, wait a minute, everyone here sucks. Like, no one here can swim. They're from landlocked countries. They had more traumatic experiences than me. So we are, we've got our flutter boards. We're in the shallow end of the pool with our life jackets on. I'm like, wait a minute, I can do this. And then the next week, I wanted to do it. I put action ahead of motivation. So the second week, I've got the, you know, I've got the flutterboard in the deep end with the life jacket. The third week, I've got the flutterboard without the life jacket. By the end of the eight weeks, I was doing the front crawl.

I.

The thing I learned is motivation doesn't lead to action. That's what we all think it does. In fact, action leads to motivation. If you start by doing, that line becomes a circle and suddenly you Teach yourself that you want to do it and that you like that you can do it. Right. So you want to write a novel. Forget the moleskin, the perfect coffee shop and the great idea. Just write one sentence by the phone on a post it note. You know, just get started. Right? And so same as if you want to run a marathon, like just run to the stop sign in your running shoes. The act of doing so will convince yourself that you can do it and then you'll want to do it. And Brian, you know, you asked me, how does this compare to my favorite physicist? Well, Isaac Newton, you know, discoverer of gravity and calculus. Like, this guy had his first law. It says, an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an equal or greater force. Yeah, we think about that in terms of physics, but we very rarely think about that in terms of ourselves. But if you put that law another way, it just means if you start doing something, you'll continue. It's harder to stop. Which is why after I signed up for Adult learn to swim Less like level one classes and I was done, I signed up again. I signed up four times because I didn't want to think about my Wednesdays not doing my swim. I loved it so much by then. And no, I did not take Adult Learn to swim too. I just took the same one over and over again. But I love doing it so much and it turned me into a swimmer. And I swam around the island that summer, which was kind of the ultimate goal.

Right on the deuce circle. Turn that line into a circle. Action causes motivation. We talk about this a ton, and I just love the way you described it. I forget which secret was which one was it where we talked about Saturday morning helping people discover their purpose. Be you and be cool with it. Which one was that?

Yeah, that secret right near the end of the book. Secret number eight. The simple way to master your most important relationship. Do you want me to just jump into that a little bit?

Yeah, please.

Yeah. So everyone these days is saying, be authentic. You hear that all the time. Be you. Be you and be cool with it. I'm at fault for that as well, because I've always articulated these three A's of awesome, like, attitude, awareness, authenticity. But I'm thinking if I'm not here, and my son really does want to know this, and this is all presuming as a dad, both of us were like, that our kid will ever read our book and our output, but say that is true. Then it's like. And he asks if he were to Ask me how do I become authentic? What's the step by step process to that? There wasn't much out there. And so I've put together three tests that I do on myself about every six months. And I recommend everyone do the same. There are three tests to finding your authentic self. They are the Saturday morning test, the bench test, and the five people test Quickly, the Saturday morning test. Asking yourself a question on the Saturday morning when you've got nothing to do, or if it's a different day of the week, fine. But ask yourself, what do I do on a Saturday morning when I have nothing to do? What do I naturally lean towards? Do I go to the gym? Well, that might mean you could be a great person trainer or you might be great at coaching a baseball team or starting a supplements company, right? If you love reading, you read, read, read, read, read. You might be the next Brian Johnson. Right? Like you could do so much when you find out what you love. I had someone in my life tell me that they loved playing the ukulele. Like honestly, that was the thing that they loved the most. I say honestly, probably insulting all your ukulele listeners, but I just mean. He then started ukulele importing business, bringing them over to Canada and started a music oriented company where his love of the ukulele turned into like a business related to that. So that's the Saturday morning test. The second one is called the bench test and I love this one. It's a story of my friend Fred who got into a number of Ivy League universities, far smarter guy than I am. And rather than read about whether Yale had new treadmills or taking the like, you know, campus tour at Dartmouth, he actually decided to rent a Jeep, drive to all the campuses that he got into, and actually sit on a bench in the middle of campus for an hour silently and patiently observe his natural reaction to all the conversations around him. He reasoned that less than 20% of his time would be spent in classes and the vast majority, the 80:20, would be in conversations, right? With other students, with mentors, teachers, et cetera. And so he patiently observed his natural reaction, then found the campus that fit him, which ended up being Princeton, where he met his wife and loved. But you know what, it's just immersing yourself in a situation first in a job interview, you can call it the office tour test. If you're buying a house, you can call it the sidewalk test. It's about immersing and testing your natural reaction in a patient way. Finally, the last one is the five people Test. Some of your listeners may remember a very famous article in the New York Times a few years ago called are your friends making you fat? You can see why that was a popular article because it's got a really hooky headline. But even more so, the answer was yes. Famous business book called Connected by Nick Fowler and team shows that we are all connected. If our friends friends start smoking, we might start smoking even if we don't know that person. And so the third test on defining your authentic self is asking you to ask yourself, who are the five people I'm surrounded by? Remembering that I'm probably the average of their career ambition. I'm probably the average of their creativity or their business passion or their level of, you know, how passionate they are about reading, whatever. And that way for those with low self awareness, and I count myself in that bucket too, from time to time. It's like I got a quick gut checkpoint on, like, where I am, knowing that the science suggests we are the average of the five people around us, right?

On Saturday morning, bench and five people, be you and be cool with it. That was definitely one of my favorite ideas. And let's go to the. I think it was the last secret. You offered some advice. What was your advice?

I can hear your tongue being planted in your cheek here. You know what? I had a mentor or CEO in my life at one point who actually said to me, neil, do you know that 97% of lung cancer patients are smokers? And I was like, no, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me. And then he said, but do you also know that 97% of smokers never get lung cancer? And I was like, sorry, what? And he's like, my point is that all information can be contorted, like Play DOH or Plasticine into whatever shape we want it to hear. It's called torturing the data until it confesses. You know what I mean? And so that phrase always stuck in my head. And listen, I wrote the book of awesome, okay? It's purportedly in the self help section of the bookstore, but it's about popping bubble wrap. So I was, as I put together the happiness equation or this letter to my son, I didn't want him or any reader to think at the end, like, okay, thank you, guru on the mountaintop, for bestowing upon me your nine pearls of wisdom. I don't want this book to have that feeling. And so ultimately, I ultimately want any behavior change. The reader has to come from within. It has to come from themselves. So secret number Nine is the best piece of advice you'll ever take. And the advice is don't take advice. Because truthfully, as Charles varlet said in 1872, when we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. The most concrete advice of all totally conflicts. The pen is mightier than the sword. Conflicts with actions speak louder than words. Right? You're never too old to learn or you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder or out of sight, out of mind. I have tons of these in the book. The point is, all advice conflicts. At the end of the day, when you're done reading the Happiness Equation or done listening to this podcast, if you agreed with three out of the four major thoughts we talked about today, Brian, fantastic. You resonated with those thoughts because you already had that inside you. It already just put some color around the thought you already had. And if you disagreed with one, fantastic. That means again, you provided further definition to your own values and beliefs. And I think that's still a win regardless.

I love it. I love it. And you said in the book that there are certain phases of one's life where advice is helpful. As a father of a three year old and you're almost two, watch out for cars, don't eat worms, flush the toilet, and don't touch the toilet bowl. These are helpful pieces of advice. But beyond that, as you said, think deeply, trust yourself and have the courage to go out and do what most resonates and feels most true for you. Such good stuff. I love it. Appreciate you and excited to have explored this. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you get fired up about?

I mean, I just get fired up about everything. So I mean, I just found this great conversation. I love what you're doing. I can't believe that we weren't connected kind of before a couple months ago. And I just applaud the work you're doing. The community you've built is astounding because now that I know you, it's like so many of my friends are like tweeting me and sending me messages like, you know, I watched this video that Brian did about you and that your book did about. That you did about your book. It's like amazing this worldwide community that you have created and nourished and so I'm really proud to be part of it and I can't wait to continue the conversation.

Right on. Me too. I appreciate that. And shout out to Ryan Holiday for connecting us. Where can people go? What's the best place for them to go, in addition to Amazon or wherever they buy books to get the happiness equation. Where can they find you online?

Yeah, sure. So you mentioned I'm directing the Institute for Global happiness. That's@globalhappiness.org what we're trying to do there is give people a number of free tools and resources, articles, workshops, et cetera, that you can just download for free and use to increase happiness in organizations. We just know that the place that we're spending most of our time is also for most people, the place that they are the unhappiest. And sadly, that is work. In a big study done from Harvard Dr. Matt Killingsworth. So it's like there's the big kind of 8020 opportunity. What we're trying to do is give managers tools that they can readily deploy to increase their happiness. So globalhappiness.org and of course, that has context to everything else about me. The writing, the speaking, my personal email address, which I'd love to hear from people. Neillobalhappiness.org and there's just a whole bunch of stuff there.

Right on. Okay, this is great. Thank you, Neal.

Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate you having me on the show.

Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient Wisdom plus Modern Science plus common sense plus virtue plus mastery plus fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at Brian Johnson. Me Join?