PNTV: The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Nodes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha. The Happiness Equation Subtitle Want nothing plus do anything equals have everything. Neil Passriccio is a fascinating guy. Harvard MBA, director of leadership at Walmart, who created something called 1000awesomethings.com, which became a book that has sold over a million copies. He also has one of the most popular TED talks ever. Ryan Holiday connected us. Ryan wrote the Obstacle is the Way. Check that out. Awesome book. Putnam sent the book early. Thank you, Putnam. Packed with big ideas. I had a hard time picking my favorite ones to put into the Philosopher's Note. But here are five of my favorites. In addition to all those other things I mentioned about Neil, he's also a great funny writer. Highly recommend the book. Awesome stuff. So first big idea is Ikigai's Ikigai. Yeah, ikigai. That is a Japanese word. It's an important word for us to remember. It basically means your reason for getting up in the morning. Your icky guy, your reason for getting up in the morning. And get this Okinawans in the thing it was the northern part of the island are some of the longest lived people on the planet. In the blue zones, which I need to cover and Neil tells us about, we learn that individuals in this part of Okinawa live on average 7 healthy years longer than than the average American. That's crazy. Seven more years of healthy living and they have the Most people over 100 years old on the planet. How do they achieve that? Well, there are a lot of different variables, but the authors of the Blue Zone, the author of the Blue Zone, says one of the number one reasons is this. They have an icky guy, they have a reason for getting up in the morning. And Neil says, hey, what are these people in Okinawa? What do they call retirement? What word do they use? And he says they don't call retirement anything because they don't even have the word retirement in their language. What does that mean? To stop working and then just to go hang out on putting greens somewhere warm. They don't understand what that means. They keep a reason for getting up in the morning present in their lives, throughout their lives. And that leads to longevity. We need to have a reason to get up in the morning. If we want to feel good and day in and day out and live over a long period of time, we need to wake up with an ikigai. The good Kind of icky guy. And Neil tells a story of how he created a little card for himself and for his wife. Ikigai cards that they can put on their nightstand. And when they wake up in the morning, they can remind themselves, yeah, this is my icky guy. This is why I'm getting up in the morning. His wife had a beautiful one. Something along the lines of inspiring young minds to become future leaders. And his was something along the lines of reminding people how awesome life is. Right. Mine is to help you optimize as I create one of the greatest collections of wisdom ever. That fires me up. I get out of bed, I high five my icky guy and I get to work. I have a reason for getting up in the morning. What's your reason for getting up in the morning? What's your icky guy? Write it down in your little card here and keep it at the front of your mind and live on purpose. Side note, speaking of purpose, I'm going to record purpose 101. I'm filming that next week. An icky guy is one of the primary ideas that we're going to look at. More on that soon. Second big idea is to plus one hour in your day. How do you add an hour to your day? Neil tells us block access to you. In another episode on Procrastination, we talked about the fact that simply radio removing email notifications, quit distracting yourself with those email notifications would actually add an hour of time. No, it was a month to your year. This is what these guys, the experts in procrastination, said. You'd add a month to your year if you simply removed email notifications. That's crazy. Add an hour to your day and you add 250 hours over the course of a year. That's over six weeks again, how do you do that? Block access to you? Too many people are constantly available from anyone at any time, via any medium. You can text me, you can email me, you can call me on this number or that number. You can do whatever you want to do. Right? Get in touch with me. I'm always available. Well, when you're always available and you don't block access to your mind, you can't get any deep work done Cal Newport style. Right? You need to create those time blocks where people can't get in touch with you. And as you do that, you're going to do better quality work and a higher quantity of work. He talks about, and we talk about it a little bit more in the note. Having a bell that people can ring right if you really need someone, if someone really needs to get in touch with you, fine, they can do this. One way to get in touch with you, right? But you don't have an infinite number of ways. So think about that. Create those deep work time blocks by blocking access to you, and you're going to boost the number of hours you have in a day. Neil also talks about the myth of multitasking. I won't go off on that right now, but we talk about it all the time. We will now go to our third big idea, the do circle. So most people, when they think of motivation, think of it along these lines. They think that it needs to go, okay, well, I can do. I think I can do something. And then in order for me to actually do it, I also need to want to do it. And then if those two things are in place, I will do it. Right? This is how I certainly often think about motivation. I need to think I can do it, I need to want to do it, and then, boom, I get to doing it. He says, well, that's one way to do it. But a much more effective way to do it is to make the do a circle. So rather than thinking, you need to go through this equation, why don't you just do it? And then as you do it, you get a deeper belief that you can do it, and you create a momentum such that you want to do it the do circle, starting with the do. Rather than think, you need to have these things in place first. And what's funny is the day that I got this book, the day after I got this book and I was reading it, I took a break to interview Tall Ben Shahar. Tal. Ben Shahar is one of my favorite teachers, one of the world's leading positive psychologists, and he has a great idea on dealing with procrastination called the five minute takeoff. So I asked him about that, and it's basically the do circle. And. And he said, look, he's a professional writer. Basically, he's a teacher, and he writes, and he loves to write. But most morning, he says he doesn't feel like it. He doesn't want to write in the morning, but that doesn't matter. He knows because he's a scientist studying these things, that feelings often follow behaviors that by taking action, you actually feel inspired, even if you didn't feel inspired in the beginning. So this is the whole Chuck Close inspiration is for amateurs. The professional gets this dew circle, and they just do it. And when you do it, Neil goes back to his favorite physicist. Right, sir. Isaac Newton, first law, Right is an object in motion tends to stay in motion. When you start doing something, there's a momentum that's created and the positive feelings follow you engaging in the behavior. So remember you, if you're telling yourself you need to feel like you can do it, you need to really want to do it in order to do it, you can flip that around, just do it, and then you're going to have a growing sense of being able to do it and wanting to do it, etc. We talk about this all the time. Feelings follow behavior. It's a huge idea. And Tal says, look, five minute takeoff. Whether I feel like it or not, I just put in five minutes. And he says, more often than not, I feel really inspired. It's 15 or 20 minutes. And that idea was one of the most transformative for me. I used to want to write when I was inspired or do whatever. When I was inspired, I had to kind of feel like it. Now that has nothing to do with it, right? And now it becomes a fun exercise. When I don't feel like it, it's when I most lean into it. I told him in our interview that that is exactly how it's worked for me. Sit down. Some of the days I just don't feel like I've got it, don't want to want to, I don't want to do it, but I do it anyway. And literally, oftentimes it's 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes later, and I wonder what I was thinking before I started going. So feelings follow behavior. Do it. Let the other energy follow. The fourth big idea here is a great one. Saturday morning. So Neil tells us about how important it is to have a great relationship with ourselves. Most important relationship we're ever going to have is with ourselves, he says. Be you and be cool with it. One way to help us discover what we're here to do is to imagine it's Saturday morning. It's Saturday morning. You have nothing to do, right? Isn't that nice? Saturday morning, nothing to do. Hmm. What do you do? What do you do on that Saturday morning where you have nothing to do? He says, that's a really powerful question to ask yourself to get more clarity on what it is you really, really love to do. But write that down. Think about that right now. What would you do on a Saturday morning on which you had nothing to do? And then think about all the ways you can do more of that. You can structure your entire life around that. If you really, really, really, really wanted to, you can map Out. He says hundreds of things. If you want to go to the gym, if what you do on a Saturday morning is go to the gym. Okay, cool. Well, maybe, maybe you want to be a personal trainer, maybe you want to coach a baseball team or maybe you want to run a supplements company. There are literally dozens and hundreds of different ways you can, you can integrate that clear passion you have for physical fitness, become a physical fitness teacher, phys ed teacher, whatever. Right. For me. Well, Alexandra, my wife, her thing is a hybrid of working out and reading. Interesting. Well, she used to be a trainer and now she basically reads all the time and teaches and stuff. My thing Saturday morning, I have nothing to do. What do I do? I read. If I want to get away from work, what do I do? I read. So years ago, 15 years ago, I asked myself, how can I get paid to do what I love to do? Well, I love to read. How can I get paid to read? I've spent the last 15 years figuring out, well, how can I get paid to do that? And it's been a lot of fun and it's been a lot of false turns, which is part of the process. Right. We get a little more clarity each step of the way. But this is a really cool exercise. Saturday a.m. what do you do? I'll share this in the purpose 101 class as well. I'm going to share 20 of my favorite journal exercises. Like this fifth big idea is a fun one. This is the final. He has nine secrets in the book. This is the final secret. Don't take advice is his advice. He says the best advice you're ever going to get is don't take advice. There's some advice. Don't take advice. Why is that? Because when people give you feedback on whatever it is you're going through, they're really saying more about their lives and the lens through which they see the world and than anything else. And at the end of the day, advice is important at certain stages. And I joke in the note that as a father of a three year old, you need to give certain advice. There's a certain phase in our development where advice is very, very important. Neil jokes about it and says, flush the toilet, don't eat these different things. Advice is important. But you get to a point in a stage of development where taking advice is no longer helpful. We have the wisdom within. We need to tap into that. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, we need to trust ourselves. Every heart vibrates through that iron string. He says, what is it within you that feels true? Quit going outside of yourself and trying to navigate your life through everyone else's perspective. Take your own advice. That's the final big idea. And it's why he says and I talk about in this work the things that resonate with you the most. There's a reason, there's truth already within you. That's just being kind of tickled, right? Being reminded of what's already within you. When I end these episodes, I nearly always say, what was the idea that resonated the most with you? Everything's not going to resonate, but what was the idea that resonated the most? And how do you make that a bigger part of your life right now? So don't take advice. The best advice we're ever going to give and get Remember our Saturday morning. What are you going to do on a Saturday morning where you have nothing to do? And can you structure more of that activity in your life? And if you really want to go nuts, can you make your life that the central part of your life? You can the do circle feelings follow behavior. You don't need to go through the can do, want to do and do phase. You can just do create some momentum. You'll feel great. Plus one hour to your day by blocking access Airplane mode is a good thing. And then our icky guys. What's on your icky guy card? What's your reason for getting up in the morning? That is a super quick look at the happiness equation. Thank you Neil. Thank you again, Putnam. And thank you again Ryan. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. Me. Two basic things. One our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And two, our Optimal Living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there. Philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that Goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my Optimal Living classes. 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