The Happiness Equation

This book has a bunch of great stories backed by great research. As you know, I LOVE positive psychology. (Check out our collection of Pos Psych Notes + Positive Psychology 101 class.)

Let’s take a super quick look at our Big 7 ways to boost our happiness and remember that science says the Happiness Equation STARTS with happiness.

It’s Happiness —> Great work —> Success NOT Great Work —> Success —> Happiness.

1. Three Walks

   . Exercise is as effective as Zoloft in reducing depression. Even just three brisk walks can do the trick! Remember that *not* exercising is like taking a depressant and get out there and MOVE YOUR BODY.

2. The 20-Minute Replay

   . Writing for 20 minutes about a positive experience is a GREAT way to boost your happiness. Scientists call it savoring. Groove the good stuff!

3. Random Acts of Kindness

   . Did you know that THE fastest, most reliable way to boost your mood is to do something nice for someone else? Yep. Find ways to do something nice!

4. A Complete Unplug

   . We’ve gotta make waves. Fully on. Fully off. Repeat. Are you training your RECOVERY as much as your “on” phases? Remember that it’s not that we work too hard but that we don’t recover enough. #waves

5. Hit Flow

   . Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us that the optimal state of human experience is found when we are engaged in activities that stretch us such that the challenges match our skills. Too much challenge = anxiety. Too little = boredom. The right match? FLOW. Find it!

6. 2-Minute Meditations

   . Meditation is huge. As we discuss in Meditation 101, you don’t need to be a levitating monk in the Himalayas to experience significant benefits. Even just a couple minutes a day keeps the gremlins away.

7. Five Gratitudes

   . As Neil says,

   “If you can be happy with the simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.”

   Find things to be grateful for and focus on them often. What are YOU grateful for today?

There ya go. The Big 7. Which is your favorite and which one do you want to lean into more?!

Ikigai.

Quick context: Okinawans are basically the longest-living people on the planet. They live an average of 7 healthy years longer than Americans and have the most people over 100.

AND THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE A WORD FOR RETIREMENT.

Neil walks us through the incredibly recent invention of “retirement” and how absurd + detrimental the idea is to our well-being.

Quick re-cap there: Otto von Bismarck instituted mandatory retirement at age 65 in Germany in 1889. He wanted to free up jobs for younger people and guess what the average life expectancy was at that time? 67.

Then, in the 20th century, other countries started instituting a mandatory retirement at the arbitrary age of 65 and—get this—marketing gurus spent a ton of money CONVINCING us that leisure was awesome, work sucked, and, well, here we are.

Longer chat but the short story is simple: Retirement sucks. If we want to feel great and live long, we need a reason to get up in the morning. We need to wake up with our Icky Guy! :)

Neil shares the story about how he created little ikigai cards with his wife. They wrote down their reason for getting up. His wife’s: ‘To turn young minds into future leaders.” His: ‘To remind myself and others how lucky we are to be alive.”

He makes the important point that you don’t have ONE ikigai now and forever. Roll with it. Whatever inspires you. But you need to have one!! (His was “Finish writing The Happiness Equation” for a while.)

What’s YOURS?

(Mine? “Help people OPTIMIZE by creating the greatest collection of wisdom ever.” Makes me smile just typing that and hop out of bed, high five the Icky Guy and get to crushing it. :)

I LOVE this Idea.

Makes me think of Cal Newport’s Deep Work and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, and Piers Steele’sThe Procrastination Equation. Check out the Notes on all those great books.

We MUST protect our brains if we want to get truly great work done.

And you can LITERALLY (!) get an hour of your day back by setting up the systems to limit access to you. Let’s do the math on that. An hour a day = 250 hours per year = 6 (SIX!!!!) more working weeks a year. <— That’s a TON.

And, not only will you get a higher QUANTITY of hours at your disposal, you’ll get a greater QUALITY of work done as well.

In a time in which deep work is, as Cal Newport tells us, increasingly more rare, it’s also becoming increasingly more valuable. It pays to go deep. And the best way to do that is to block access to your brain.

Neil walks us through some details on how to go about doing that and establishes the science of why “mulit-tasking” is a myth. Check out the book for more.

For now, let’s start with the obvious stuff like turning off your email notifications and checking email in discrete, limited times. Put your phone in airplane mode when you want to go deep and turn off the Wi-Fi if you’re engaged in non-Internet based writing/thinking/planning/whatever.

Spotlight on YOU: What’s one thing you can do to go Deep today?

P.S. That’s from the chapter on “Secret #6: The Secret to Never Being Busy Again.” Neil shares a couple other genius Ideas on how to create space in our lives. Here’s a quick look at the other 2:

1. Remove choice

   from your life by systematizing/ritualizing/automating all the little decisions that drain your willpower. Mark Zuckerberg has dozens of the same gray t-shirts. He has more important things to think about than what he’s going to wear. As Scott Adams says, he never wastes a brain cell in the morning deciding what he’s going to do because he just WORKS HIS SYSTEM. We need to find ways to put as much of our lives on autopilot as we can so we can focus on the stuff that matters. (Check out

   for more Ideas.)

2. The counterintuitive way to ADD time to your life is to

   REMOVE time

   . Remember Parkinson’s Law which states that the amount of time something takes to complete will always expand to the amount of time you give it. In short: Want to get something done efficiently? Remove time. Make it due now. :)

This is from a chapter on “Secret #7: How to Turn Your Biggest Fear into Your Biggest Success” in which Neil introduces us to his “Do Circle.”

Do Circle? Yep. Do Circle.

Too often we think that doing something moves from thinking we can do something + we want to do it and then we do it.

Like this: CAN DO —> WANT TO DO —> DO

Such that, if we don’t think we can do it and/or don’t “feel like” it in the moment, we can’t do it.

Neil challenges that notion and says it’s more like a circle with no endpoint. You can start doing something and THAT doing leads to a sense of “can do” + “want to do” that creates a ton of momentum and keeps you going.

HUGE distinction that we come back to in different ways throughout these Notes. In fact, I took a break reading this book yesterday to interview Tal Ben-Shahar (one of the world’s leading positive psychologists) about his bookChoose the Life You Want (see Notes).

In our chat I asked him to tell us more about this Idea from his book: “Fortunately, the research into procrastination has also identified practical ways that can help overcome the tendency to procrastinate. The single most important technique is called ‘the five-minute takeoff.’ It consists, simply, of starting to do the thing you have been putting off, no matter how little you feel like doing it. Procrastinators often believe that to do something one has to truly want to do it—to be in the right mood, to feel inspired. This is not the case. Usually, to get the job done, it is enough merely to begin doing it—the initial action kick-starts the process and often brings about more action.”

Tal said that this was one of the Biggest Ideas he’s implemented in his life—sharing that, although he loves to write and gets paid to do so, MOST mornings (!!) he doesn’t *feel* like it.

But (IMPORTANT “but”)… He just gets started—KNOWING that his feelings will follow his behavior. As he said: “Action leads to inspiration at least as much as inspiration leads to action.”We DO *then* we feel like doing. Just getting started with something creates the momentum that KEEPS us going. But… If we wait till we feel like it, we may never do anything.

This is one of the Biggest Ideas we’ll ever explore.

Thank you, Neil and thank you, Sir Newton.

P.S. We also lean into this Idea in Stephen Guises’s great book Mini Habits. If you haven’t explored that Note yet, get on it.

It’s Saturday morning. You have nothing to do. Ahhhh… What do you do?

That simple question is a GREAT way to get more clarity on your authentic self. And, embracing the true you is a HUGE part of the Happiness Equation. As Neil says in Secret #8, we need to optimize the most important relationship in our lives: Our relationship with ourselves.

The most direct way to dial that relationship in? BE YOU. “Be you and be cool with it.”

Back to your Saturday morning. What are you up to? And how can you make related activities a more prominent part of your life?!

P.S. On Saturday morning’s with nothing to do I read. I’ve spent the last 15 years figuring out how to get paid to do that full-time! Hah. So fun!

Big smile typing that. Of course, advice is very useful at a certain stage of our development. As the father of a three-year-old, I can type that with confidence. (Hah.)

And… At SOME point, we need to cultivate an unshakable trust in ourselves and recognize that the advice we receive from others says more about THEIR lives than ours. We need to know that all the answers we need are already within.

This is why I wrap up nearly every MP3 + TV of a Note with the question, “What Idea *most* resonated with you? What Idea reminded you of something you already know and just need to embody a little more?”