Good Life Project - Fewer Things Better.

Episode Date: February 22, 2018

Ever wonder, where is the sweet spot between pushing multiple projects forward simultaneously until you see which one is most likely to succeed AND drilling too many wells at the same time, ensuring that even though all may have serious potential, you never get enough traction in any to hit oil in any, let alone signal it’s the right one to move forward? That’s why my motto for this year has become "fewer things better. And, that's what we’re talking about on today’s riff.Good Life Science Update. And, on the science side of things, today, we're diving into a cool new study on the relationship between money, happiness and fulfillment. And, as always, for those who want to go to the source, here's a link to more about the study.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, hello, it's Jonathan. So before we dive into today's show, I've got an update about the format of the podcast moving forward. So as longtime listeners know, and newer listeners are about to know, we're always working on exploring ways to bring you more of what you want, and less of what you don't want. So we've been looking to and listening to trends, both on our show and across the podcast universe. What we realized was that while we love producing two shows a week, it's been a lot of fun. It's also been creating a bit of, let's call it overwhelm for a lot of people. And in fact, our last survey let us know that once a week is the sweet spot by a pretty huge margin. There's just too much to keep up on these days.

And we're all about ease, not overwhelm. So with that, we sat down and we made a fairly tough decision to put our Thursday show on hiatus, at least for the spring, and see how that feels. So today's show will be the last Thursday update, at least for a while. But don't worry, we're not leaving you hanging. I'll still be sharing some of the longer thought pieces that you've been hearing on these Thursday episodes, but as more essays on various places around the interwebs instead. And honestly, many of you have actually been asking for text versions for quite a while now because they're easier to read, to revisit, to bookmark and to share. And we'll be adding a super short, literally three-minute GLP news and tips for better living spot at the beginning of our Monday episodes now, where I'll share sort of a very short and sweet update about what we've been working on,

fun adventures, mini shout outs, and other cool discoveries. And that's also the place that I'll let you know when I drop something written. So be sure to tune into the Monday show, which will keep rocking as always, and even add these fun new mini segments to keep you in the good life know. As always, we love being here to serve you and will continue to listen to experiment and evolve to keep things interesting and meaningful. Okay, now on to today's show. So ever wonder where is the sweet spot between pushing multiple projects forward simultaneously until you see which one is most likely to succeed and drilling too many wells at the same time, ensuring that even though all may have serious potential,

you never actually get enough traction in any to, quote, hit oil, let alone signal it's the right one to move forward with. Well, that's what we're talking about on today's Riff. And in our science update, some updated research on money, happiness, and fulfillment. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but in a different way. It's the idea of parallel versus serial creation or making or exploration. We have a tendency, actually, let me change that. I have a tendency, and I know for a fact that I am joined by many, to want to push many things forward

simultaneously. And the problem with that is that in the early days, it feels like the right move because you don't know which one of the things is going to work, is going to have potential, is going to bear fruit. So you figure you need to push them all forward until one starts to show some sign that this is the one, and then you can prune, you can pair, and focus only on that one. Problem is sometimes that process takes a brutally long time and never really reveals itself. And it destroys everything that you're working on. So a couple years back, I had the opportunity to sit down with a guy named Bob Taylor. Bob Taylor founded Taylor Guitars. Taylor Guitars, I believe now is the largest handmade guitar manufacturer in the world. They have an incredible facility just outside of San

Diego that I toured after speaking with Bob. And it was incredible to see how this process unfolded. And in fact, it inspired me to make my own guitar, which I'll be doing later in the spring and sharing that experience. But what he said to me really brought a particular point home. He said in the early days when it was a smaller place and fewer people, and he was really scrambling. And his process was more sort of machine line type of practice where on any given moment, he would have anywhere from 10 to hundreds of guitars in various pieces of assembly, but none done. And what he was realizing is he was working fiercely. He was paying a ton of money for product, for personnel, for rent, for all these different things.

And he just kept investing effort, effort, effort, money, money, money. And there were a ton of these things that were getting further down the road, but kind of like they were all going through, okay, so now the fretboard goes on and across a hundred of these, and now the frets go on and now this happens. And he would go months and months of pouring money and effort into what he was doing and actually never have a single guitar that he could sell in order to turn around and make him okay and fund what he was doing. And here's a guy who's getting tons of orders. He's investing.

He's got a great product, yet he's in serious financial pain. And he ended up having a conversation with somebody else who kind of looked at his process and said, here's what you do. Shut the whole thing down. Make one guitar from end to end, and then another, and then another, and then another. And the thought is, but this kills my ability to go big, to go broad, to have like, you know, an assembly line where we're shipping tons of this stuff. And maybe down the road, years down the road, that might be a more viable thing. But in the early days, you need to actually push things through the sequence as quickly as you can so that they can get to market and then generate income and impact that then you can reinvest in doing two end-to-end and then three end-to-end, not just sit there and have all outflow

and no inflow and no impact. And that has really landed. And I've kind of been revisiting that conversation myself recently because I'm taking a long, hard look at sort of what we're doing and how we're building things. And this is a place I'm landed. So I'm now in the process of figuring out which wells to quote, stop drilling, in the name of hitting metaphorical oil with one well or, you know, with a single project, a lot faster, and then leveraging that to more quickly drill the next and the next and the next. So it's the idea of serial creation from end to end, not parallel creation in an assembly line, everything moves forward at the same time.

Or in Bob Taylor's vernacular, I need to start finishing and shipping a smaller number of complete guitars generating revenue, momentum, and impact, albeit in a much more narrow, targeted way, rather than having 10 times that number of guitars perpetually in production, but never actually finishing anything and never out there in the market benefiting anyone on any level in any way. So think about what you're doing. Think about the way you're investing your time. Think about the way you're investing your energy. And ask yourself, you know, if you're

building a business, or if you're in the early stages, and you have five different ideas, and you're pushing these five different ideas forward simultaneously, and you're investing time and money and energy and maybe resources, and maybe you're leveraging yourself to be able to push them all forward, either because you don't quite know which one of them is going to be the one that shows potential, or because of FOMO, fear of missing out. You can't stand the thought of leaving any one of these behind. You want to do them all. Those tend to be really bad ways to move forward in the early days of any endeavor. And it's the same thing, whether we're talking about entrepreneurship, the same thing, whether

we're talking about any sort of personal interest or passion project or hobbies or pursuits or, you know, or relationships to a certain extent also. When you are just constantly juggling a whole bunch of things and trying to move them all forward a tiny bit simultaneously, very often you end up doing them all a disservice, doing you a disservice, doing those who would be involved in and benefit from them a huge disservice, because they never get, none of them, none of them ever get to a point where they're actually finished enough or good enough to make a difference to anybody. And that's just unfortunate. And I

have caught myself in that place. It's always kind of funny when your own words come soaring back to haunt you. And when the words of mentors and teachers of yours kind of drop back into your life and you're like, huh, oh, so I'm doing that now, aren't I? So, uh, you know, we make decisions to make changes and, um, and put things on hold. And I have shared recently that my mantra for this year has become fewer things better. And I started out the year thinking that I had to juggle a whole bunch of balls simultaneously, parallel, not serial creation. And in fact, I was pushing them all forward. And it became really clear that doing that, you know, in the name of pushing forward until one shows real potential, it's actually not working for me.

That they were all moving so slowly that I was doing a disservice to all of them and to me. So I'm making choices. And I think it's actually a really good time to kind of reflect on that as we move out of the winter, start to head towards spring, and start to sort of shift gears a little bit. I know I'm doing that. So that's where I'm at with this idea of thinking about focusing and not keeping a large number of things pushing slowly forward, but letting go or saying not now

and keeping one moving forward at a profoundly faster pace and seeing where it leads. So by the way, you may be wondering, what am I letting go of? And what am I keeping afloat? There are certain things that are in development. There's actually a bunch that's been sort of behind the scenes, double top secret projects that I'm either putting on hiatus or letting go of. And one of the things, don't worry, by the way, we've had a lot of inquiries about our camp good life project camp glp which happens every august and is our annual celebration which is just stunningly

beautiful and welcoming we are not doing anything to wind that down that is one of the projects that we are fully committed to every year we up the game with what we do we will be inviting last year we had a little over 400 amazing humans and we expect about the same and we're already more than half sold out. It is the perfect way to spend three and a half days vanishing away from the world, stepping out of the day-to-day madness of life

and melting into 130 acre beautiful sleepaway camp with incredibly kind, open, creative humans to learn, to play, to laugh, to celebrate. If you want to learn a little bit more about that, by the way, go to goodlifeproject.com slash camp. We are in the window now where there's a $200 super early bird discount. But that is in fact one of the projects that we love and look forward to. This will be year five. And part of what we're doing here now is creating more space to continue to just do the best possible job and make this an incredible experience. And in kind of an interesting way, there's a bit of Italian with all this stuff. And today's Good Life Science update, which we'll be diving into, which explores a different aspect of how we invest our energy and what we get in return for it is the relationship

between how much we earn, how happy we are, and how satisfied we are with our lives. And those are actually two very distinct, the related measures. And we're back with today's good life science update, where I share my geekery, where I'm constantly devouring research that is out and around the world that touches in some way, shape or form on living good life in some way on the three good life buckets, connection, optimizing relationships, vitality, optimizing your state of mind and body, and contribution. And that is cultivating deep and meaningful work for most people.

Today's study is fascinating to me because I've actually done a fair amount of research on this myself. And I wrote about it a little bit in my last book, How to Live a Good Life. That is the relationship between money, how much you earn, and two different measures,

happiness and life satisfaction. And interestingly enough, they are not the same. You can actually be pretty satisfied with your life at any given point, but if I ask you on that day, are you happy? You could say, no, I'm pretty unhappy. Or you can be in the emotional doldrums, but say like on could say, no, I'm pretty unhappy. Or you can be in the emotional doldrums, but say like on the whole, yeah, life is pretty good. And the opposite can

be true as well. You can be happy for a moment, but be deeply dissatisfied with your life in general. So they're actually two different measures, which is kind of important to think about. Now, here's the deal. This research comes from Purdue University, and they took a look at a massive, massive data set, the Gallup World Poll, which is a survey sample of more than 1.7 million individuals from over 164 countries. So it's one of the biggest cross-sections where they're able to actually correlate between amount earned and these two different measures. And I call them happiness and satisfaction. But

in this particular study done by the Department of Psychological Sciences, they use two sort of like very specific, more academic terms. And that is your level of life evaluation. Life evaluation is more satisfaction, fulfillment. Do you feel like, you know, like overall you're satisfied with and living a good life? And then they use this other term and that term for them is emotional wellbeing. And emotional wellbeing is more about how are you feeling in any given moment in time? A lot of people equate this with happiness or sadness. You know, like it's those moment to moment emotions. And they looked at the data and they're trying to correlate, okay, so is there a cutoff?

Is there a threshold which says that earning up to a certain amount of money makes us happier? You know, it gives us a higher life evaluation and higher emotional well-being. But is there a cutoff where above a certain number, those things stop happening? You know, like you could earn twice that, but it's not going to make you happier. It's not going to change your emotional well-being. It's not going to make you happier. It's not going to change your emotional well-being. It's not going to make you more satisfied or fulfilled with your life. There's a whole bunch of research that's been out before this that says, yes, in fact, there is a threshold. And then some of that research has been debated as well.

And mostly the research just speaks to one measure, which is happiness. And people have said, and this was all over the press a couple of years back, that there is a threshold, over a certain threshold, that doesn't make you any happier because happiness was kind of the emotion du jour for the better part of a decade. Not as many people looked at the relationship between income and satisfaction with life being fulfilled, which again is a different measure. This study actually deconstructs this massive data set, and they're talking about dollars looking at the US,

but this can be extrapolated across nearly every other country in the data set. So this is just representative. And what they found was that for life evaluation, meaning, yes, I'm generally satisfied, I feel fulfilled with my life, that in the US, a single individual income point, the threshold is about $95,000. So for every $1,000 you earn up to that, you say you're more satisfied with your life. Once you hit $95,000, then you could earn another 10 or 20 or 30, 40 or 100 or 200, and it's not going to change your overall level of life satisfaction. They found that that is

sort of the ideal threshold for emotional well-being. And you can short that and hand that as happiness if you want, moment toto-moment happiness, they found the threshold is actually lower, that it's about somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000 a year in income. And again, this is for individuals. These numbers go up for families. That for every $1,000 that you earn up to that, yes, you actually will report that you are a little bit happier. Your emotional well-being is overall more positive on a moment-to-moment basis. But if you earn 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 or twice that, it's not going to change your moment-to-moment emotional state, your happiness all that much. In fact, what they showed, and this is actually the first time that I've seen this correlation, is that as you start to go over these thresholds, you may actually start to make yourself less

satisfied with life and reduce your emotional well-being, meaning you're less fulfilled and less happy. Why that happens is still a pretty giant question. There's no super clear answer. But some sort of theories are that most people, when they start to make substantially more money, most people don't actually spend it on experiences, which is the thing that can actually really add to life. Most people spend it on accumulating stuff and accumulating stuff very often, you know, materiality, a focus on material accumulation, actually very often

lowers well-being. And it's driven by a drive for relative wealth, because you are comparing yourself to others. And that is notoriously disastrous on our emotional well-being and our overall happiness and satisfaction with life. So something to think about here, you know, because we're always thinking about there's such a quest, especially in Western culture, to earn more, to rise up the ladder. And some of it, granted, is driven by the desire to feel secure. And I get that. Trust me, I get it. You know, got a family to support. And at the same time, what the numbers have been showing pretty consistently for years now is that correlation between these two different measures, and again, they're different,

emotional well-being, shorthand is happiness if you want, and life evaluation, shorthand that as satisfaction, fulfillment, that there is a threshold. And if you go above that, you can kill yourself to earn more. You can work more hours, but you're very likely not going to experience much of the benefit of it. And you may, in fact, if you end up spending so much more of your life toiling to earn that money, have so much less of your life to spend doing the things that genuinely do make you happier and more fulfilled. And those include things like being with people you love, having experiences with people you love. If you're working all the time to make twice as much money, it doesn't matter because you can't do those things.

Something to think about. It's always on my mind as I'm constantly dancing with what I'm doing in the world, the way that I'm building my work and contributing and filling my contribution bucket, and the way that I spend my time and who I spend it with. Do I really need to launch this thing? Do I really need to build another venture or product or project? What will that do?

What will it add from an income standpoint? Will that addition matter to my happiness or my overall satisfaction in life? And what will the added effort to get that, what will that stop me from doing? Who will it stop me from being with in the name of more Benjamins in the bank? So I'm going to think about, as always, hope you found it interesting, useful. We will drop a link to the actual study report for those who want to go deeper into the analysis in the show notes. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

Hey, thanks so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we've included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action,

that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Results will vary.