Good Life Project - How Systems Free Us & Community Lifts Us Up | Neil Pasricha

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Here’s a weird statement, my friend, Neil Pasricha, is simultaneously one of the free-est, and also most rules-based and systematized humans I know. He’s got a system or ritual or set of rules for just about everything from how many nights a month he can be away from his family - that’s written into his signed family contract by the way - to what he does the first two minutes of every day to how and we he can hang out with friends, wander the streets in solitude, workout. Even the very thing that exploded him into the public consciousness about a decade ago, his wildly-popular blog about tiny pleasures and awesome things, was pre-designed around a countdown from 1,000 to 1 day. You might think this would make life feel rigid, boxed in, devoid of freedom and room to play. But, for Neil, it’s the exact opposite. All these systems and rules and rituals and routines remove so much decision-making burden it’s like he has tons more time to actually just do the things he loves and that make him smile. And that includes everything from playing with his wife and kids to traveling, speaking, writing a series of blockbuster books and more.His new book - Our Book of Awesome: A Celebration of the Small Joys That Bring Us Together, for the first time ever, invites hundreds, actually, it might even be thousands of people into his writing and sharing and community-building process to share awesome things from people’s lives, large gobsmacking to short, sweet and funny, from all over the world.It’s a wonderful read that I highly recommend, and today we’re diving deep into Neil’s compelling take on saying yes to systems as a way to bring more freedom and joy and space into your life and then inviting the community to share in both the awesomeness and the process of creation.You can find Neil at: Website | Instagram | 3 Books PodcastIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Susan Cain about the creative power of bittersweetness.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount CodeseharmonyThe Unmistakable Creative Podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The first entry in the Book of Awesome was flipping to the cold side of the pillow. And the first entry in this one is carrying the ice cube tray from the sink to the freezer without spilling. That's really what I'm aiming for, is that universal feeling of something that you just don't talk about, but which we all share. And then hopefully it just pushes us a little bit to realizing and recognizing that we're all the same. I really think that now's the time where we need each other more than ever before too. So here's a bit of a weird statement. My friend, Neil Pasricha,

is simultaneously one of the freest and also most rules-based and systematized humans that I know. He's got a system or a ritual or a set of rules for just about everything from how many nights a month he can be away from his family, which is actually written and signed into a family contract, to what he does the first two minutes of every day, to how often he can hang out with friends or wander the streets alone in solitude, work out, create, write. Even the very thing that exploded him into the public consciousness about a decade ago, his wildly

popular blog about tiny pleasures and awesome things. It was pre-designed around a countdown from a thousand to one days, so he knew the constraints before he said yes to it. And you might think that this would make life feel kind of rigid, boxed in, devoid of freedom or room to play. But for Neil, it is the exact opposite. All these systems and rules and rituals and routines, they remove so much decision-making burden, so much friction. It's like he has tons more time and energy and bandwidth to actually just do the things he loves and the things that make him smile. And that includes everything from playing with his wife and kids to traveling, speaking, writing a series of blockbuster books and more.

In fact, it's given Neil the time and space to travel the world, give over 50 speeches a year, host an Apple Best of award-winning podcast called Three Books, where he is on this epic 15-year long quest to uncover the thousand most formative books in the world. And along the way, it's given him the space to write nine books in journal, selling over 2 million copies, including the Book of Awesome, The Happiness Equation, and his new book, Our Book of Awesome, where for the first time ever, he invites hundreds, actually it might even be thousands of people into his writing and sharing and community building process to share awesome

things from people's lives, large gobsmacking things to short, sweet and funny things from all over the world. It's a wonderful read that I highly recommend. And today we are diving into Neil's compelling take on saying yes to systems as a way to bring more freedom and joy and space into your life. And then also his take on the role and value and power of community and what happens when you invite them in to share both in the awesomeness and the process of creation. So excited to share this with you. I'm Jonathan

Fields, and this is Good Life Project. a good life project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever. Flight risk. 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. It's always kind of interesting when I sit down to dive into ideas and topics with somebody who I consider chosen family, where we've spent a lot of time over a lot of years going deep into all sorts of different areas. You have a new book, our book of awesome, which is a really fascinating, I don't want to call it a continuation, but it's sort of like this evolution and expansion of something that you started over a decade ago. And I do want to

circle around to that, but I want to start out somewhere a little bit different. And I think we'll probably get to it because you wrote to me, and I hope you're okay with me sharing this, not too long ago. And what you wrote was that you have always felt somewhat troubled by the insanity of life. And we're not talking about over the last couple of years where everybody has been dropped into that slipstream. We're talking about something that seems like it's existential for you, And it has been since you were a kid. Take me deeper into this. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I mean, I remember being in the basement. So I'm 43 now. I remember being in the basement of my parents' house with my first,

not girlfriend, but alone with a girl. And first girlfriend wouldn't come for many, many years. And I remember starting to go on this talk about, you know, what do you think's out there? How far does it go? And, you know, are we just here? And, you know, what is it? And she was like, I never, I remember her face, I never think about that. And I said, oh my gosh, I think about that every day. I can't, I'm mystified at what this is. What is this? What are we? Where are we? What is the universe? The more we look, the less we know. And I kind of carry that with me. Occasionally I bump into quotes that I feel hit me in a way that resonate, like the Mark Twain quote, you know, I was dead for a million years and I'll be dead for a million after this. What happens inside me, Jonathan, is it ends up coming out in this sort of, sometimes I think try a trivial way where I'm like, seize the moment, seize the day, write an awesome thing to cheer yourself up, do a little habit in the morning to kind of make it a great day. But below all of that is that

existence. It's definitely that existential, like, unknowing that I think permeates all of us at some point. And we typically plaster and pave over it with what we call, you know, a career or, or a series of, you know, religions or, you know, whatever it is that you cling to that gives some semblance of, you know, this is what this is. I still don't have that for myself. I still, I'm still looking for what that is for me. I'm curious when this shows up for you as a kid, because I was thinking back, you know, and for me, it showed up in sort of like drips and drabs, but not as this persistent through line or sort of like an undercurrent. But when that shows up for you as a kid at a younger age, because you're already growing up in a place where there are any number of other reasons for you to feel othered.

Does this sense of almost like existential quest bordering on angst add to that feeling of like people just don't get me or I don't get people or the world. Yeah. So yeah, my mom's from Nairobi, Kenya. My dad's from Amritsar, India. They had an arranged marriage in England. They come to Canada. They settled in the suburbs because my dad's from a village in India, actually outside of Amritsar. I'm the only brown kid in my school, you know, visually and in any form of media or any type of cultural awareness our house smelled we had gold elephants in the front hallway and nobody else had those you know and so there was yeah there was a constant sense of othering I think actually what maybe the existential you know pondering did is give me a zoom out that was actually pacifying and helpful.

And it allowed me to feel like this, this town of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, this, this school, i.e. the universe and kind of why we're here and my work now, which is, you know, around simple pleasures. I mean, there's a real good argument to be made that this guy is so obsessed about simple pleasures as a sort of a decoy, you know, away from chewing on the big things. Maybe that's why I kind of read the big, you know, I kind of read the stuff. I kind of read that place, but I'm writing about, you know, hearing a stranger fart in an elevator. Like kind of read that place, but I'm writing about hearing a stranger fart in an elevator. Where is that coming from? It's a pacifying force for me. It gives little joys and a stronger unifying sense of reality to me than I think I may otherwise have had. Yeah. So it's almost like in the unknowing, rather than dropping into a state of existential

fear from that. You're kind of like, oh, but we're all in there together. It's scary, though. I mean, I do feel lonely in space a lot, too. I always resonated with that Jerry Seinfeld story that above the writer's room of the TV show Seinfeld, he put up the then famous Hubble telescope photo of all the other galaxies that were out in space. He did it because for him, it pacified him and said, you know what? We're writing jokes for a TV show here, you know? But I heard Judd Apatow say, that gives me stress. So maybe there are two, maybe there's just sort of a little fork in the road on the reaction.

And if I'm honest, I probably oscillate between those. And that oscillation is sort of like another through line for you, you know, because it lands as paradox or at least sort of like acknowledging this sense of this and that and that and this like throughout your life. And this is, you know, when it's almost like when you're sort of like in the question of the bigger questions of what is everything, the foreverness of the universe, which is, I think, a phrase that you shared with me at one point, you know, the vastness of the universe, which is, I think, a phrase that you shared with me at one point, the vastness of the unknowable. And then on a day-to-day basis, that often drops down into just this litany of paradoxes that you bump into all day, every day,

that keep inviting you to say, huh, how can these exist? And how can I exist with them? So I gave a TED Talk in 2010 at TEDx Toronto. And in the very end of that speech, I used the phrase, you'll never be as young as you are right now. And I conjure up a visual of it's really bored from Carl Sagan. Actually, you know, the pale blue dot speech that some people may know and some people may not worry says, you know everybody on that pale blue dot every actor every actress every person you love everyone you ever will you kind of use my own writing of that and say they're all gone you know in a hundred years and at the end of the book the first book the book of awesome it was the same thing i have the same mental zoom out so i keep coming back to that in work, but yeah, the other 399 pages of the

book is about wearing warm underwear out of the dryer. So I guess if I'm hearing you right, one of the paradoxes you're pointing at is the infinite endlessness and to enjoy the look of cream spinning into coffee. The one second mini daily enjoyment that kind of you know sits on top of the endlessness that makes that gives you pleasure pleasure you know i think pleasure has been taking a bad rap the last few years jonathan you know we've been everyone's all on joy yeah let's not throw pleasure out here pleasure's got some good things too and then other practices we could go into i've i think think maybe all of our lives are like this, but there's areas in my life where I'm trying to put on top of this gray that is everything. I'm trying to layer on top systems and rules and designs, and I have a morning practice that takes two minutes, and's just three questions and it's all backed by research.

And of course, I share that and it resonates and people use it and I use it myself. And at the end of the day, I also miss it a lot. And I also wake up cranky at 4 a.m. because there's a kid crying. And I also sometimes feel perhaps the word shackled by the systems, you know, instead of freed by them. And I can't really embrace that feeling because I've been really public and open about wanting to use the system. So you don't want to kind of present to the world this like, you know, spinning kind of place.

Having said that, of course, through conversations like this and the ones you've had with me over the years, you grow. You grow from them and keep trying to figure yourself out. I want to dive into this a little bit more because the notion of living a life of paradox and small scale, intimate, everyday, fundamental decisions, and then really big, vast, huge decisions. And then the notion of you just shared of building systems to deal with that is fascinating to me because on the one hand, you know, a lot of people look at like, well, if I systematize every part of my life, if I have sort of like a rule for this or a process for this, I feel like what I'm doing is effectively like shrinking the size of the box in which I live. I'm constraining, I'm limiting my freedom. The way that you've described it to me,

and maybe you can walk me through this a little bit, just in terms of the mindset of dealing with paradox through building systems is in the name of creating, not constraint, but freedom, a sense of expansiveness. Okay, so let's go way back to 2008. I launched a blog called 1000awesomethings.com. Look even in the title. It's called 1000 Awesome Things. Almost any other blog at the time, I mean, I want to say almost

every one, was infinite. Post secret, infinite. Stuff what people like was a count up blog. He only finished when he was done. Fail blog. These are other blogs that are popular in the day and age that mine came about. So I created a fine. First of all, I put a finite thing on there. And then again, my first post was 1000. So I started counting down. I also set up a system that it would publish a post every single night at 1201 AM in the WordPress back end. So I had this like little pressure point. And what that did for me, Jonathan,

was it created freedom because now all those endless decisions of what this blog is, how long it lasts, when it posts, how frequently it posts, those are, I never think about those. I never have to think about those.

And I also didn't put ads on it. And I decided to leave the comments unedited and unfiltered. So there's spam in there and there's some occasionally nasty stuff, but it was also another decision to systemize, like, I'm not going to manage the comments, but I'll leave them open. You know, so I came up with the design of that originally, and then it enabled for the next four years to write these posts.

And just because I had a full-time job too, I'm like coming home from work at five o'clock to start my kind of start my creative job. The freedom it provided was that I could focus on the art. That's the really big freedom that it provided. And also, to whatever extent, there's tremendous amounts of research about the sort of benefits of public pressure. I was like, maybe this is the anxious,

young Indian Neil talking again, but like if I know my homework's due Friday morning, it's going to be handed in on Friday morning. And so similarly, if I know that the system is publishing at 12 or 1am every night, well, I got to have the post written by then. And so I almost just settled up to like, it was a servant in service of the part of me that always wants to kind of get the gold star. I try to design it and then forget it. So I had to then, I kind of had to forget that I came up with the design. You know, I had to kind of forget that I was the one that made these rules.

Therefore, I could break them. I like to think of them as the rules were made. And now I have to follow them. Because that is what I think, let me do it. Writing a thousand blog posts in a thousand days is hard. It's the hardest creative thing I've ever done before or since. Still, I wouldn't do it again. Put it that way.

Like I know already before starting, that's too challenging. Yeah. And it's like what you did was you build a system that effectively removed as much decision making and administration and process from the experience so that you could just take all of your bandwidth and say like, okay, I just want to have one job, come up with the thing for the day and not have to worry about anything else. I mean, isn't that what we're doing often? I mean, we kind of routinize ourselves, even if it's not buckled in the floor, people will take the same route to work,

they'll stop at the same coffee shop, they'll walk through the same door. They'll touch the door on the same part of the handle. They'll go to the bathroom at the same time. They'll sit in the same desk in the same. So I just a little bit more overt about stuff like that. You know, you're looking at me right now wearing the, it's a Friday as we talk. I've worn this sweatshirt every day, the whole week. And I only wash my sweatshirts on the weekend and I'll just switch to a different color hoodie. But, you know, it's like, it's just that I haven't thought about all

week what I'm going to wear. And that's freeing for me. And especially, you know, let's flash forward in the story, I'm remarried and we have small children. It's like, I have therefore another five minutes per day, you know, to read a small story with a baby. I think of it that way. It's what in your life do you value the most and how can you design systems to give you more of that stuff? Oftentimes, you know, this conversation's definitely way further along because, you know, I'm puzzling with myself as I talk to you. But oftentimes the questions are like, how do you get so much done? How do you do all, how do you have a blog and, and a podcast and, and how do you do it all? And so my answer has always been the system where you're going, it sounds like is, yeah. So, so what are

the costs of that? What are the ramifications of that? What's the paradox of living the systemized life? Yeah. Because I mean, there's always, there's a give and take with everything, right? You know, and we've talked about this, you know, like you, a solid chunk of your life and your living is, is, is speaking and it has been for a very long time. And before times you were, you were traveling a whole bunch, you switched over to a lot of virtual and now you're sort of like doing more of a blend. And as you said, like you're, you're married, you know, you have a house full of little kids right now. You love what you do. You enjoy being out there. You enjoy speaking, enjoy writing, enjoy sharing the ideas and living in the world of ideas. And you love your family. You love your wife. You love your kids. And so many people

listening to this struggle, whether they feel like they love their work and they love their family, or they love their passion or their devotion or whatever it is. They feel torn between these three or multiple different things. And the idea of systematizing it, it feels like, oh my God, this is another layer of like things that I need, like heaviness that I need to, like it's, there's rigidity and people just want freedom. Share the way that you've dealt with this with your family, because I think it's fascinating. So like the notion of the family contract. Just on the specific thing. Yeah, exactly.

So I was going to say, most ills that people feel around this stuff can be solved with a piece of paper and a pen and your signature at the bottom, even if it's just to yourself. Okay. And there's a lot of research behind this. They did this wonderful, interesting study

over in the United Kingdom where they had people either get their next dentist appointment card and they write down your next day or time of employment or you write down the next day or time of employment as you can surmise. If you write it down, you're way more likely to do it and to go and not be late and not forget it. So for Leslie and I, we have written down a family contract. In our family contract, it specifies that I can only be away from our family for four nights per month. And the blackout is, we blacked out July and August because the kids are off of school. Well, four nights per month, four nights per month times 10 months a year is 40. And so we just made the mental choice that daddy or me, Neil, being away for 10% of the year,

that was an okay number for us. Okay. We could deal with that. 20% would feel too high. 50% would feel too high. I always feel bad when I go to the speaking events and I asked the, you know, the AV team kind of when they were last home and like, they've been on the road for like 28 straight days, that was not going to work for us in our relationship and the relationship I want to have with my kids. So that four number turned into a really healthy number. It works out great the other way, once, of course, people know, and I speak openly about these boundaries with clients and so on. Well, once they know that, it's also a nice rule that people can follow on your behalf, right? They can help you follow your own rule because you're public about it.

Well, that's one thing in our family contract. Another thing in our family contract, Jonathan, is we have to also have four family days per month. And we define family day as a day with nothing else. No screens, no in-laws, no birthday parties, no, like it's just us. And those days are so nourishing, right? We'll go on a hike, a long hike together, or even if we just lie around the house together without interruptions, without, you know, that is really healthy. And four per month, of course, it's like one per week,

but we might miss one and have to do two because there's a six-year-old birthday party or whatever it is. That's a really healthy piece of our puzzle. We also have four NNOs and four LNOs per month. I'm Neil, so an NNO is a Neil's night off and LNO is a Leslie's night off. Literally this morning, Leslie said, if you want to and four LNOs per month. I'm Neil. So an NNO is a Neil's night off. An LNO is a Leslie's night off. Literally this morning, Leslie said, if you want to have your LNO this week,

tonight's a good night. She happens to have extra chocolate coming over her. Her sister's coming over for tea or whatever it is. So tonight might be a good night for me to get my NNO. We actually track these. So I might say, I haven't had an NNO in two weeks. Oh, I should get two this week. An NNO is I can do whatever I want. I can see see a buddy for a dinner i can go to a movie by myself i can go get a massage i can go i can go hunker down and write if that's what i wanted to do in the evening but it enables a payment system if you are in a relationship where you're co-parenting because my on the no doesn't cost anything it's paid for by the lno like i'm taking care of all the kids by myself when she's off. So they just fine pay for each other.

And they create this important vital force in any relationship, which is new stories. You know, you just want to have new stories to tell to each other because you're sick of everything you've said. You know, so those four points, I would say, provide the basics for us. We also threw in another bullet point on vacation time that we wanted to have and specified that. And the big insight I had from working in HR at Walmart for 10 years is that you should decide how much vacation you have, not the organization, because there's typically systems inside most organizations around unpaid leave and sabbaticals, as you know, that you can design to kind of just maybe get a little bit more if you want to. So we did this when I was at Walmart and we're still doing this today. So we put all this down on paper. We signed it like we actually have Leslie Richardson's signature and Neil Passericci's signature at the bottom of the paper. And I

don't even know where the paper is, but the fact that I know it exists and it's somewhere in my house acts as a nice tethering force as I continue to make decisions. And of course we break it. Of course there's a – I think last month I was on the road six nights or whatever instead of four. But I'll also lean into saying, ah, for this next month, could it be two or could it at least be three? So we use it as a dashboard. It's a way to tell yourself if you're going the right way. And what's interesting also, right, is that if you know that these are the rules,

the constraints, like this is the system in advance, let's say you have your four nights on the road a month, then when you're thinking about what do I say yes to? When different inquiries, different opportunities, different ways to to contribute to go out on the road and like spend that time, come in, what do I say yes to and why? And then how do I structure that knowing that this is the frame I'm working in, which I would imagine is on the one hand, you know, it's almost like this fun, creative, like exploration on its own. Like, how do I put this together in a way where I can actually maximize my time, maximize my impact, maximize my creative expression in this short window that I have every month? And then like, how do I say, yeah, like who do I decide what to say yes to? And then how do I put it together? And then how do I communicate that to clients to say,

this is why, like, this is the only time that I'm available and this is how it has to happen. That's gotta be like, because the family contract that you'm available and this is how it has to happen. That's got to be like, because the family contract that you have with Leslie and your kids, like then leads to sort of like you making very different decisions. Absolutely. And that's just on the family side. I also have other things in place for my creative output. Like I, I have a dashboard that says I need to write a chapter of a book every month that I need to interview and record two podcasts per month that I need.

You know, I have other things I'm trying to do kind of creatively. And some of those things, Jonathan, on my monthly dashboard are things like have one unique or interesting experience. You know, taking my 77 year old father to the Flaming Lips concert recently was this month's, you know, was this month's unique experience. And then, of course, I also have my physical things, you know, in terms of I wanna have, you know, four workouts per week and I wanna have, you know, four cardio or, you know, long walks per week. And I define a long walk as like, you know, two hours or more outside, you know?

So I put all these things in place because they helped me prioritize my life. You know, our mutual friend, Derek Sivers, would call this the know or hell yes philosophy, right? If it's a hell yes, you do it. And if it's anything else, a maybe, or I wanna, or I should, or I think I can, it all gets distilled down back into the no bucket to ultimately make room for you to live your

life, which I'll remind us all is only 30,000 days long in North America, which is higher than the global average of 25,000 days. So for whatever it is that this is, this life, whatever it is, it's not long. We know that for sure. And these systems, in my mind, free me to prioritize my time in such a way that it's very valuable.

And I know your listeners are big readers. I will say the essay on the shortness of life by Seneca, written 2,000 years ago, which is available free because it's way out of copyright, is a profound essay that I leave printed out in multiple copies in my suitcase, on my bookshelf, everywhere. And I just reread that whenever I need to remind myself about why I'm setting things up like this. Yeah, I agree. That one piece of writing is so powerful. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

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Charge time and actual results black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. A couple of different directions I want to go with you. You brought up Derek.

One of the few things I actually don't agree with is the hell yes rule. And here's why. And I'm curious how this lands with you. I kind of followed it for a long time. I was like, well, of course, that makes total sense. Life is short. I only want to do things, allocate energy to a fixed know, I fixed amount of bandwidth, fixed amount of love, fixed amount of energy, fixed amount of resources. The only thing I want to be able to do is say

like things that just touch me in my heart immediately explode me into it. That's the only thing I want to be doing. And then things drop into my life where the early days it's like, well, that's kind of interesting. It's like a hell maybe, right? But I don't quite know. I don't know enough about myself. I don't know enough about it. And I might not be skilled enough to actually be able to interact with this opportunity on the level that makes me feel genuinely, hell yes, this So like there, some of the most things that have turned into the most profound things in my life that have sustained for decades and decades started as hell maybes. And had I said no to them, I'd be living a very different life.

I mean, I think you had Shonda Rhimes on, on Good Life. I haven't yet, but hopefully one day. Okay. Well, I, I, she has that famous Ted talk called the year of yes, where I think she was talking about how through a challenging period in her life, she ended up saying yes to everything. And I will say Jonathan far before I heard of this note, Nora, hell yeah. Philosophy by Derek Sivers after my divorce and I moved downtown, I have three contacts on my phones and all my friends are married in the suburbs. You can better believe that I was saying yes to anything, just anything. Cause I didn't know I didn't have

any thing. So when anyone asked me to go anywhere, I was like all in. And it was only later that I changed into no or hell yes, but it's really a function of where you are, what you're doing. Did you just move to a new town with a new job? Say yes. You know, are you trying to balance, you know, having four little kids and a busy job and taking care of aging parents? No or hell yeah. So I think part of it is just like,

at least it's another system, you know, it's just choosing which rule you're going to adopt at which time of your life. But I totally embrace the idea that the maybes can flourish and turn into things. I mean, ask anybody there how you met your partner story. And there's a whole lot of maybes in those stories at the beginnings of them. And oftentimes they turn into the most important long lasting relationship of your life. Yeah. No. So right there with especially on the relationship side. The other curiosity

that I don't think I've ever actually asked you about is with the level of systemization that you have and with what it gives you and with a gaggle of little kids running around your house, they feel the effect of all of these choices that you've made, all of the, like the contracts, the roles, the systems, are they aware of them? And do you have a sense for like you wanting them to approach their lives that way too? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, um, my eldest child is now eight years old and he has been taking once a week music class. And when he did it last year, he wasn't practicing at all. So I made a system for the wall, which is we discussed openly as a family how often he thinks he should practice.

We came up with two times per week, 15 minutes per time, okay? And so I made an eight-week grid with two dots in each, and we had fun, I will emphasize, coloring them in every time I did it. Well, at the end of the year, he wanted to quit music. He didn't like music. Did the rehearsal, did the performance, played We Will Rock You on the drums and sang it. It was great. And he wanted to quit. And that's fine. There's a lot of research that says you shouldn't quit music, depending on what you read. And so now leslie's in charge and her philosophy is

very different and i will point out that my wife is a genius educator okay so she is uh her system is no system and it's it's one of embracing a love of music and she just works into daily conversation in a natural way him banging on the keys here and there, and the music will come on and we start dancing. And what she's doing, Jonathan, is much more magical than the conscriptive kind of thing I had on the wall. However, I didn't think I had the ability to do what she's doing, which is very softly, gently,

all, I will say, invisibly, for my future child who listens to this, to him. I will say invisibly to him, she is teaching him how to love music and in a much more wider and, you know, nurturing way than my system was really allowing for because it looked like work that you had to do and check off. And so it kind of went into that extrinsic motivator sort of category. We know the research on this that if, side note, because it's one of my favorite studies, when 11-year-old girls were given the job of teaching the piano to girls beside them, the ones that were told to do it for the joy of teaching

stayed longer, were more patient, and had better students than the ones who were given a movie ticket for it. The extrinsic motivator blocks our brains from seeing the intrinsic motivator. So how do we get our kids to flourish with intrinsic motiv a movie ticket for it. The extrinsic motivator blocks our brains from seeing the intrinsic motivator. So how do we get our kids to flourish with intrinsic motivators? That was it.

Now, I grew up in an East Indian immigrant household in the suburbs of Toronto, and you better believe my parents said, what's the homework? What'd you get wrong on the test? Which one? And if I got 97 out of 100 on the test, well, we sat down that night,

and it wasn't in a strict or harsh way. There was no, there was no anger. It was simply, well, let us, let us read and do all those ones again until you get them right. Like let's work on that. And so perhaps in my brain, you know, what got developed was this idea that the only way to do, you know, in quotation marks, the word do, the broadest sense of the word do was to create some type of rigidity that forced a behavior, you know, and perhaps what I've missed as I, as I, I'm 43 now, and I hopefully have a lot of years left, but who knows, is perhaps what I've missed and what I want to embrace more is, you know, learning from my wife and those people around me who can, who have figured out how, how better to surf the waves

rather than simply deciding whether or not to go in the water or not based on the weather or whatever it is, whatever the metaphor is that I'm doing, you know? And so that's kind of where I'm at now. And as always, you astutely figure out where I'm at and just kind of poke right there. And so that's what makes it a good conversation. Yeah, it's interesting also, right? Because part of what you're describing between your approach and Leslie's approach is also this acknowledgement that there is no right way for every human being. You know, I think we love to kind of say like, show me the diet, show me the workout, show

me the plan, show me like the productivity system, show me the methodology. Even the research, we're so hell who's like this luminary in behavioral economics and science and all this stuff who had a wildly, wildly popular book, millions and millions of copies sold, where a couple of years into it, had to remove an entire chapter of the book because the science, and this person was a leading voice in that field, science was completely disproven. In my mind, I'm like, if somebody who is one of the smartest people in the world in this particular domain bought into the science on a level where they literally included an entire chapter about it in a book, how do we even look like the barrage of data and research that's coming to us from really smart people and really like well-established labs and really well-funded and figure out what is real and what's not. And I keep coming back to our own lived experience, you know, is the ultimate, like that N of one is the ultimate determinant of what is right for us. And the wisdom of generations.

Yeah. And so maybe the N of one comes from the wisdom of generations. And thank goodness our culture is starting to understand and embrace things like, you know, indigenous medicine and how to take care of a forest, you know, from like thousands of year old ways, as opposed to like, you know, planting a million of the same maple tree beside each other, whatever it is that we've been doing for the last four years. But what I'm trying to say is part of the reason I think that I have been able to give speeches for a long time is if you were to cynically look at what I'm actually telling people to do, it's basic stuff. It's all so basic. It's things like around physical activity,

around getting outside, around reading books. Yes, I know, yes, I present them in a, in a palatable, fun and funny way with a story and a research study and a hooky line. But at the end of the day, I'm telling you to read a book. I'm telling you to go outside. I'm telling you, I might do so in a way that provides the research for why we have NDD and a nature deficit disorder and kids these days spend only 7% of their time outside. It's the lowest level in history. You create those things because they help provide the temples that make the story. And the story is what we understand. But this N of 1 often is the stuff your grandmother said was right.

There's a reason that 2,000 generations have existed before you. And they got to you. So they probably knew what they were doing a bit. So we got to embrace a lot of that, I think, a lot more in our culture and in our society. And I think we also have to hold on and remember that. Because I was on a – I'm embarrassed to admit this to you, but I was on tiktok feed of uh peter attia the other day and he was interviewing a guy who was saying it's critically important to have 30 grams of protein right when you wake up and here's why you know here's the reasons why and the reasons sound you

know that they there's words like lipids being thrown and like bioprotein words i don't even understand and peter's nodding and i and i don't know either of these guys so you know kudos to them but what was most interesting jonathan was the comments and the comments were like but david sinclair you know harvard medical school longevity expert says this but tim ferris says that and i was like oh there it is again there's the old headline in the newspaper again the one that says the the New York Times reports that vitamin D, you know, we all need to have 5,000 whatever megs of vitamin D. And the other paper on like literally saw this in the same, I wrote about this in the happiest equation, one of my books, which I think is last time I was on Good Life Project. It's like the Toronto Star the same day had a report saying, you don't need vitamin D. The thing's wrong. And so once again, isn't there a cliche for everything? And then maybe it does get back to your end of want. Is it actions speak louder than words, or is it the pen is mightier than the sword, right? Like we could do, is it the early bird

gets the worm, or is it good things come to those who wait? And you could do this about everything. And so is it that we're such a storytelling species that we cling to what makes sense? Or is it that we ultimately, to get back to the very beginning, ultimately, we do not know. We simply do not know. And it's under that big grand umbrella that we're seeking to operate and live what I call intentional lives. Right. And so often we look to the wisdom and the experience of other people, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but when we surrender our own lived experience, when we surrender our own intelligence to somebody, like just wanting somebody to tell us, this is the thing that will save you, that will help you, that will make you more productive, that will create the most incredible relationship. I'm a huge fan of devouring knowledge, like doing a lot of my own

research and devouring research and talking to, I mean, spent over a decade doing this now, talking to the wisest, most accomplished people in the world. And then at the same time, like one of the things that I've learned, and this circles back to the way that you develop your systems, is that when it comes time to actually creating the rules or the framework of the system for you, the way you step into your life, your health, your relationships, right? The way that it functions best is when you don't look for the most popular thing that's been sort of like proven by science and then try and step into that. It's when you take all of that knowledge and then you have like enough data points

and your own lived experience in the form of data points and intuition and say, well, what actually is best for me? So when I think about the systems you've created, like you haven't gone out and adopted a bunch of other people's systems. You've said like, what works for me? And let me build it around

that, not let me step into some other like, quote, proven system that works for the vast majority of like X population of this blah, blah, blah. And that I think is the leap that so often we don't make that is the difference between really good intentions and really ineffective or bad outcomes. Well, I think this is partly why our mutual friend Susie Batiste says that the number one way she makes decisions is by closing her eyes, putting her head down and putting her hands on her stomach and trying to feel the answer within. And I think it's partly why a book I wrote called The Happiest Equation in 2016, which in my mind, Jonathan, was full of all kinds of charts and graphs, scribbles that I made up out of thin air. I mean, I really remember making them all up. The three S's of success, the four boxes of how to grow confidence. I mean,

the space scribble, I made all that stuff up. But the number one piece of feedback on the entire book is, yeah, this confirms everything I already knew. You know, I like the book. It's just, it's a classic reminder, you know, and stuff like that. And I'm like, classic reminder. This was all new to me at the time that I wrote it in my early 30s, you know? And so there's a big correlation between wisdom and age is what I'm trying to say. You know, at the end of the day, to your point, it's like you just assemble more. But I think the thing you didn't say, which i'd like to insert into this conversation is you know it's getting increasingly more difficult to listen to

ourselves it's just getting increasingly more difficult to hear that inner voice in the cacophony of everything with what we're deeming to be the noise but you know when elam must tweet something like you know 20 million tweets came out a second, I'm like, my reaction is like, oh, my gosh, like, how grotesque, you know, like how unbecoming of us that that's what we're doing. That's just spewing everything, all the times everywhere. Thoreau said, read not the times, read the eternities. And there's something eternal about your conversations, which I think is probably why they've attracted such a strong and loyal following. You get into the deeper issues that other than a cerebral podcast, like how often am I having conversations even like this? Not often. I don't have many friends like you. I need more.

Everything that you shared around systems, around paradoxes, this whole conversation, really just exploring and just your last thought around, it's getting harder and harder to hear our own voices among the chatter that just both our own self-chatter and discerning what is real, what is valuable, what do I follow in that? And then so much of that chatter is informed by what's happening in the world around us and sort of like the flood of things that are coming into us. And yet we don't want to cut ourselves off from culture, from society, from community, and I think which kind of like flows beautifully into like your new book, you know, because you're somebody who has created a lot of really hard boundaries between you and the world around

you, you and the social world, you and the app world, you and a lot of the things that people tell you you have to do to be part of business. But there's been this ongoing dialogue between you and this growing global community for, what has it been, 12? Over a dozen years now, something like that? I started A Thousand Awesome things in 2008 and the book of Austin came out in 2010. Right. There is this dialogue structured and bounded, but there has been this dialogue going on with you with a global community of human beings as you navigate life.

And there's a back and forth and there's a sharing. So I'm curious, you know, like as we have this conversation, it's sort of like on the eve of this next book, our book of awesome coming out. And while it is sort of, you could see it in the, you know, like within the larger franchise of books of awesome that you have, you have shared over this, this window of time, this feels different. And it feels like your compulsion or you're like, your reason for doing this is different. And it builds around this. It's a much more relational thing where you are inviting everybody into this experience in a way that I haven't seen before. Yeah. Thanks for noticing that, you know, Waldinger, I think his name is the guy who runs

that longest ever study at Harvard. You know, he says you could essentially boil it down to social relationships your strength your relationship with your friends and family daniel gilbert who wrote stumbling on happiness 2006 maybe one of the most formative positive psychology books says the same says the same thing i think his quote is if i knew everything there was to know about you your health your income your nationality your gender your income all of it would fall away in favor of the strength of your relationships with your friends and family and i've always felt personally that books are the greatest form of compressed wisdom we have ever known.

And they still hold that mantelpiece today. It was really satisfying when technologist, futurist, Kevin Kelly said to me, yeah, we still haven't found anything better than books. Like, you know, this is a guy that kind of lives in that world. And he's like, it's still books. Everything else fractures, decays, becomes obsolete. Like a book actually rides the waves of time. Would you believe it?

Better than almost any other form of technology we've ever known. Even paper from 2000 years ago hasn't decayed. Try using a chip from 10 years ago on anything. You can't plug it in. There's no slot. Like, you know, that old story about Isaacson doing Steve Jobs biography, a chip from 10 years ago on anything. You can't plug it in. There's no slot. Like, you know, that old story about Isaacson doing Steve Jobs' biography and they couldn't get a bunch of his old journals because even he, with the reaches of Apple at his fingertips, couldn't get his old files because it was just saved in the wrong format on some old

floppy drive or whatever it was. Now, if we know that to be true about community, if we know that to be true, and we also know that books are the greatest form of compressed wisdom, but they're typically a relationship between you and, in the nonfiction world, the narrator, like the guy who writes the book. In fiction, and believe me, Jonathan, I wish I could write the way George Saunders could write or Celeste Ng could write. I can't yet. I mean, I'll keep the door open to maybe one day down the road. But for me as a nonfiction writer, I was like, how do you work in this idea of community being so fricking important to our sense of happiness? That's the reason why we're turning on Facebook, right? Because we want it to give us the social pleasures that it seems to almost always kind of do, but never really do based on the research. And so the idea underpinning our book of awesome is it starts with me talking, but then there's comments and the comments are real comments from real people that I've edited

and curated, but they're, they're not me. I did not ghostwrite them. And then it amplifies a little bit more into letters. And then there's submissions from other people. And the way the book ends is this gigantic, slow forming cacophony of awesome things from, I hope you can hear the voices, written from literally over 10,000 people who submitted them to me through my blog and my books from the last time. I have tried my best to keep it feeling like you're in a room of people talking, even though you don't have to be online. That was kind of the challenge in myself. Buy, and this is for the book nerds out there, stripping out of the book, the acknowledgement,

the dedication, the about the author, the author photo, the table of contents, the index, there's nothing else in the way. I've always personally hated it when you drop $35 on a book and you get home and it says for Susie. I'm like, who's Susie? I'm the one that bought this thing. So I've tried to strip off what I call this shrapnel that naturally exists in a book. And I'm not, you know, poo-pooing it for the experience of reading it like you're there offline, but with other people. 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.

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You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So when you say yes to doing something like this, and I don't know if you create an intention whenever you say yes to writing a book. I remember years ago talking with somebody who said they'll never actually say yes to the process of writing a book unless

they believe that not only will it have an effect on other people, but the very process of creating it will transform them individually as human beings. So when you say yes, having written a number of books already, when you say rest to writing this book and then to inviting the community into it, do you have an intention for that when you invest? Because this is a lot of energy that you've been clear. You bound your energy. You make choices very, very intentionally. This had to have been, according to your rubric, a hell yes. So what's the intention behind something like this that gets you there? Well, one thing that I should also share for all the makers out there, which I know there are many, is that part of what this book did for me personally, and the part of the reason

why it was such a hell yes, is because it gave me a break from the other book that I've been struggling to write for four years around trust. And I was able to give a South by Southwest talk on it. But what has happened in my basement, if I just stepped aside this room, is I've got cue cards all over the walls. I've got stuff all over the floor. I've got things ripped out from newspapers and I'm drowning in this other book. So as a writer, and that is an identity that I kind of hold on to, I do think of myself as a writer who speaks, not a speaker who writes. I kind of hold on to that loose grip,

but that's kind of who I think of myself as. If I had to distill it down to one word on the occupation form on the customs border crossing, I'd say writer. And when I went so deep on the trust book and couldn't get out, awesome provided a ladder that I knew how to climb. And while climbing up there, like we talked about with Wisdom, it turns out that I've changed, you know, in the times since I wrote.

Remember, I retired the books of Awesome after the first two years. I thought, that's enough of that. I got to do other things, you know, and so it felt like I was climbing, I guess I should change the metaphor to down a ladder, but I climbed the ladder either way, whichever direction you want. And eventually, I realized that I've changed. So then the things themselves change in the format change. And look, the back of the book, remember, I said it culminates in the voice. One of the things I'm most proud of is the whole back of the book is literally 200 all new awesome things from all these people that are written in one point i don't know how i

still don't i don't i think someone's gonna say like how'd you get away with this because you can barely read it but it does give you the sense of swimming amongst the sea of other people and that provided the hell yeah for me because i wanted to live there i wanted to put my brain in that place to take a break from this other thing that I can't seem to figure out. I mean, that's interesting. So it's almost like this was a respite from, you know, you've been deep into this other book for four years and it's just like things are not coming easily and you have the awesome community,

which has still kind of been following along and it's something that you know. Yeah, I have a daily email that goes out every night at midnight with an awesome thing. It's a small-ish email list, but it's got 5,000 people get that every single night. So that keeps me honest. Yeah, and then with you as saying like, okay, so your primary identity from a professional standpoint is writer, So that keeps me honest. When you then decide to say yes to writing something where you're literally like the whole idea behind it is I am going to share my thoughts for sure, my stories and experiences. And I'm going to fold in as many thoughts and stories and experiences and observations from potentially thousands of people as possible.

How does that affect your identity as the quote author or writer of this when you step into a project like this? It makes me feel more peaceful because I think of myself as, you know, stepping back into the trees a little bit, you know, ashes to ashes. In an ideal world, my name wouldn't even be on the cover and I would be like the formulator of it. I'd be putting it all together. I wanted there to be even more comments and submissions and letters. My publisher said, you know, people want to hear from you.

This is your book. Let's not, we even got into a little tiff about putting and friends on the cover. I want it to be like a standup comedy poster. You know how it's always like Sarah Silverman and friends. You know, they put the headliner on, but they're trying to acknowledge the people that are there with them. I think the writer identity is already, it already is flaking off a bit. And,

you know, it's getting closer and closer to person. And if it keeps evolving, it will probably get closer and closer to animal. I mean, you know, I've taken up birdwatching. Every time I go birdwatching, I feel less human in a good way and more alive in a good way. You know, I feel less species forward than I normally am when I'm human all day. It's nice to be in the forest with birds and realize they've been here way before us. They'll probably be here way after us. They're on the whole earth. How relieving is that? Nothing I do matters. It's like, how relieving is that for ever? That's partly why the two-minute morning practice that I do every morning, the very first question is, I will let go of. I just happen to be someone

perhaps through the intergenerational traumas that I carry or through the ways that I grew up or through this kind of self-creating world that I've made up. Someone who at the end of every day or the start of every morning, well, wouldn't you know it? I always got something to write down. It's not like I'm like, hmm, like you've seen me many times be like, how do I get more of this or that? I'm always anxious about something.

But the birdwatching that I will let go of, which by the way, it's grounded in almost every, you know, that's almost every world religion has some form of confession or repentance or a practice there, but we have the highest rate of secularism of all time. So a lot of people don't know this, that this is a practice that can be very helpful. It's about distilling and getting that identity to loosen, loosening the identity. I don't like LinkedIn for what I deem to be like the fake resume-ness of it all. You know, the endlessly labeling, the endlessly creating of what you did and why

and what your title is. It's too bad that we have to live in a world where it's too difficult to try to figure out who everybody is at a deep level when you talk to them for five minutes on the bus. But it's so nice to hold on to that knowledge that that is who they are, that they're as deeply complex as you are, and to shirk those identities so that we can live in a real more connected and less divisive way. Yeah, which I think is something that whether you intended or

not, you started with the original book of awesome. And with like this, the recent iteration where you're bringing in all these different people, now we can start to see, Oh, when people lead with like, this is who I am from an accomplishment standpoint or from a status standpoint, you can't get to the, you know, it's really hard to get past the projection. But I think part of the brilliance of what you've done here is when you distill it down to the most essential observation about like something that is just genuinely pleasurable that we usually don't even think about that may actually happen every day, but it's actually, we're making it aware. And then you're like, you're having all these people share something about themselves, but on that most essential level, it's like what effectively it

feels like to me is like you're creating this tool to sort of like rehumanize us on in a communal way and start to recognize each other. It's like, oh, you too. There's something really beautiful and powerful about that. Oh, thank you for seeing that and illuminating parts of it that perhaps I didn't even see myself. I still remember when Bill Clinton came to Harvard Yard and he gave that famous speech they have everybody, somebody does every year at commencement, and he said, 99.9% i was like wow that is so interesting that he would point that out as a way that we're all more common than we are apart and it's unfortunate i think that the algorithms are so incentivized to radicalize our thoughts to the extremes because our amygdala wants to look at the rage and the and the and the nudity and the sexuality and the extremism of all time. So as a result, what happens is we end up falling into camps and into tribes and into places where we have an us or them mentality. And we can hold on to, but we don't need to hold on to that anymore.

We don't need to hold on to that anymore. It's short. We don't have much time. This is a, this is, you could use the word brother't have much time this is a this is you could use the word brotherhood you could use the word community you could use the word connection but i mean all you got is just the people that are alive with you right now plus anyone else's wisdom that you've happened to annex into a codified form whether that be seneca from 2000 years ago or a good life project conversation that you might listen to in 2020 that was recorded in 2010, you know? Yeah. I mean, that's what it all comes sort

of like circling back to. I remember reading, it was one of the entries in the book actually about driving down this old road with trees that kind of arc over and form this canopy and touch each other and like the, the light speckling through it. And I grew up in the Northeast and like with all these old growth trees. And that was like, and where I am actually in Boulder, Colorado right now, we've landed in a part of town where like the most majestic part about it to me, like I can look to the right and I'm in the front range of the Rockies with these gorgeous mountains. But if I like stand out in front of my house, not right now, because there are no leaves on the trees, but in the

spring and the summer and the fall. And I just look like I literally would stand in the middle of my road and just like early in the morning and just like look down the block and see this canopy of green with the sun, like early morning sun flickering through. And to me is so essential, but also so magical. And then I read sort of like this observation in the book and I'm like, oh, so it's not a me thing. It's a we thing. Like how cool is that? That like we can connect at that level. There's a reason why I put the first entry in the book of awesome was flipping to the cold side of the pillow. And the first entry in this one is carrying the ice cube tray from the sink to the freezer without spilling.

And the reason I chose those ones in both situations was because I just thought that's really what I'm aiming for is that universal feeling of something that you just don't talk about, but which we all share. And then hopefully it just pushes us a little bit to realizing and recognizing that we're all the same. And it's not going to be too long before I hope that we feel that way. Colors are all going to look pretty similar soon, eventually, or geographically, we're mixing a lot more. We're going to have to stay together in the face of, I think, the potential dangers that technology is posing to us and how we have to band as humans.

And I'm a big fan of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff and those types of books. I think that there's Johan Ari's book, Soul and Focus. I really think that now is the time where we need each other more than ever before too. Yeah. And to be able to connect, to see yourself in another through the simplest, simplest observations that somehow move you, it bypasses any of these sort of like rational, logical, cognitive defenses or any like barriers that we put up and just says, oh yeah, that's me too. Super, super powerful. It feels like this is a good place for us to come full circle as well. So I have asked you this question, but as you've noted, it was quite a number of years ago and

you have grown, I have grown, the world has grown in this container of good life project. If I offer the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? It means that for as many minutes as possible, in as many days as possible, you spend time loving yourself, loving the people around you, the people that are your family, people that are outside your front door, people that are across the world or across the universe potentially, and sitting as long as you can in that place of love while also forgiving yourself as you will naturally will do, as I naturally will do for slipping out of it all the time and just sort of walking your way back in.

I will say, and I don't say this lightly, I don't know how you do this, but every time I talk to you, you do that to me. So thank you for that. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode,

say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Susan Cain Thank you. favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. fly this thing mark wahlberg you know what's the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk the apple watch series 10 is here

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