Good Life Project - How to Live a Good Life

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

What is a good life and how do we live it? In today's special episode, Jonathan Fields debunks the three Good Life Lies, then shares a simple, yet powerful model - the Good Life Buckets - that'll help you begin crafting and living your best life. Not someday, but today. For a much more in-depth look at the Good Life Buckets, along with 10 specific ways to fill each, check out Jonathan's book How to Live a Good Life.SPECIAL ALERT: This is the second installment in our 3-episode "Good Life Launch Pack." Last Thursday, in our episode entitled "To Succeed at Anything, Do This," we shared a game-changing achievement framework designed to help you accomplish big, meaningful goals, dreams and visions. If you haven't yet listened, check it out once you're done with this episode. We've actually learned that last week's episode did not load properly into many people's podcast apps, so if you didn't see this, be sure to go back into the show's main page and download it.And, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss next week's final Good Life Launch Pack installment, which will focus on how to reclaim and reimagine your work as a source of meaning, joy, potential, and expression. Translation - how to find, do or create work that makes you come alive!----------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE 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.

Hey, super excited. Today is the second installment in our three-part series to help kind of kick off the year where it's just me talking this time. I know, don't worry. If you like that, awesome. If you don't like that, it'll be over soon enough. And it started last week where I introduced something called my success scaffolding. Also, quick note, we have learned that there was a bit of a glitch in one of the major podcast listening apps last week. And for some reason, last week's episode, which is entitled to succeed at anything, do this. It didn't download onto certain people's devices. So if for some reason you're a regular listener and you didn't see that last week,

then definitely go back to our general show page and you should see it there now. And be sure to hit download on last week's episode, again, entitled To Succeed at Anything, Do This. And that is a framework for action taking. It's basically the inner and outer game of making big things happen in your life. It's all the missing pieces that are rarely sort of brought together in a way which teaches you how to not just set a goal, not just make a plan, but actually do big things and create an environment and an inner world in a way that allows them to actually happen rather than just dreaming about it and watching those dreams slip away. So if you missed that, for sure, check it out.

This week, my focus is on something different in this part too. It's all about how to live a good life. I know, I am the quote good life guy, which is kind of funny because I don't feel like I always live a good life. I'm not always happy, go lucky. I'm not always the shiny peppy person. I'm not always feeling physically great.

But the truth is that is one of the big myths about living a good life. And the reality of living a good life is that you can experience everything and still truly be living a good life. We're going to dive into today what that looks like. I'm going to share a model with you that I call my three bucket model. You may have heard it before. Even if you have, stay tuned because there's going to be a lot of new insights. It's been out there for a number of years. I introduced it for the first time in my last book, How to Live a Good Life. And since then, since that book has been in the wild and so many people have interacted and shared stories,

there are just deeper and different insights that I want to sort of explore with you today. And I'm going to take you deeper into some other ideas also, something I call the three good life lies, which happen to be really pervasive across social media and self-help landia. And then we're going to deconstruct it and talk about what we can actually do to live better lives, to live truly good lives, not just someday, but today. Super excited to dive into all of this with you in today's episode. 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 eight 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. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On 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. When I actually published my last book, How to Live a Good Life, which was the end of 2016 now, we created a tool to help people kind of get a feel for how empty or full what I call your good life buckets are. Think of it this way.

Life is about three big areas or buckets. I call these your good life buckets. One is vitality. The second is connection. The third is contribution. These are just my words. You can overlay whatever else works for you. And in just a few minutes, I'm going to share a lot more about each one of those buckets, how they work, why I chose them, why they matter, and some ideas on how to fill them. But I also wanted to just bring home what we've learned through our own research. Sure, we can look at all the news and the reports and the academic studies on health, disease, mental illness, connection, purpose, meaning, work, but we've also seen this in a more personalized way. So over the years, thousands

of people have completed a simple tool we call the Good Life Bucket Quiz. We created this and we put it out into the world back at the end of 2016 when we launched the last book. And the idea was that we want to create a fast and easy and free tool for people to be able to quickly get a beat on how full or empty their three different good life buckets are so that they could figure out which ones to focus on and what to do, and then be able to come back to it a couple of weeks or months, maybe even years later, and be able to track in a relatively objective way how the levels are changing so they can see what's working and what's not working.

And what I can tell you is that once we actually started to look at the data that was coming in behind the good life bucket quiz, and this is thousands and thousands of people having completed it, you start to see patterns. And the patterns that we saw were really alarming. The average score for all three buckets, not just one, but all three buckets, if you were giving it a grade in school would be an F. And that's not so much an F for failed, although technically the numbers are pretty much what would have scored as an F in academic worlds. But when we look at that, that's a capital F. In my mind, that's F for flatlined. Not so bad, but not so good. thinkers over so many years now here on the project and also elsewhere is that a good life is not about living in the gray. It's about living in the full bloom, in all the colors,

the feels, the experiences, what Zorba and Zorba the Greek called the full catastrophe. And I've known this deep down for a long time. But for me, a single moment, a number of years ago, was one of the things that really cracked me open to the sense of urgency of the need to figure out what actually matters and to start doing those things. And that for me, that sort of inciting incident was 9-11. I'm a New Yorker, lived in New York for a number of years before and still live here. I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing. I was in my apartment on 55th and 9th Avenue. I was at home with my then three-month-old daughter.

We had a brand new home, a brand new apartment that we owned. We were married and turned on the TV and saw this happen. And of course, the first thing my mind goes to when I saw it was, well, I'm kind of a long-time New Yorker. I wonder if I knew anyone who was in those buildings. And there was pretty much nobody in the city that left that day, having not known at least one person. And the next thing I also went to was I had literally just signed a six-year lease for a floor in a building where I wanted to turn that into a yoga center, hopefully the premier yoga community and center in New York City, which eventually did happen. But in that moment, you know, I was flitting and thinking, who, what is going on here? And I realized, in fact, after talking to my wife, that we did, in fact, have a friend

who was in one of the highest floors in the firm where almost the entire firm was gone at the end of that day. And that friend was married, had two very young children, had no plan, or even there was not even the slightest sense in your mind that you're going to go to work that day and not come home ever. And yet that's what happened. I remember grabbing our daughter, throwing her in a car seat with my wife. We drove up to our friend's wife who was sort of like sitting vigil with friends and then everyone left eventually. And it was just us. And my wife and our friend went upstairs to put one of the younger baby down for the evening. And I went upstairs, walking up the stairs to read a good night story to the older kid who was then two and a half years old, who was just sitting there up in bed,

tucked in with a storybook on his lap. And it was my job to read this book, having no sense of whether he'd ever see his dad again. And in fact, he didn't. And driving home from that was heartbreaking, upsetting in so many different ways. Also gave a sense of deep gratitude for all the things that were still working, all the people who were still with me and alive in my life. And really pushed me to question the choices that I was making. And it showed me front and center that we have no guarantees. That every day, on some level, even the worst days where we just feel awful and pounding headaches and whatever it is, every day that we open our eyes and we are here to take a breath is a day that is better than not being able to do that. And I felt a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency to use these days moving forward differently, to not just let them

pass, but to embrace them and to fully engage with whatever came my way, the good, the bad, just with everything. Now, have I done that? No, of course not. I'm a human being. I've had moments and windows and seasons where I've been all in and moments where I've been largely checked out, but I keep returning to this sense of urgency, which has never left me. Not to get things done, but to be as fully alive as I can, as often as I can. And to question, to explore, what does that even mean? What are the essential elements of it? This became a catalyst for a life of deeper exploration into the question of what it means to live a good life. And also, it became a bit of a long tail inciting incident for what would eventually become

Good Life Project, the community, the so many different events and programs we've had over the years, and also this podcast. And it led eventually to this thing I call the Good Life Buckets. We're going to go deep into these in just a few moments. But before we get there, I in social media for some reason. So let's talk about them for a minute or two so that we can do a bit of myth busting, maybe build in a bit of forgiveness for our own humanity and the place that we are in this moment in life and say, realize and acknowledge that that's okay. And then be able to dive into the good life buckets with a lot more clarity and conviction and hopefully freedom. So that first good life lie, what is it?

Well, it's all about money. First good life lie is that a good life is a rich life, rich in terms of money, that you need to be wealthy in order to live a good life. And this is really interesting because it's sold in a lot of the world of entrepreneurship and small business and biz ops. It's sold in a lot of mainstream media. It's sold in a lot of books, movies. It's this sense that once we get X dollars in the bank, we own a house of this size. We own

this number of cars that that is the thing that's going to make everything okay. That is when we know that we're quote there, right? Beyond the fact that there's a ton of research that shows it's completely a lie. We know this on a lived level, because if you've ever said to yourself, I need X dollars in the bank, or I want to buy this type of thing, and then you actually do the work and you get it, then one of two or both of two things happen. One, you get it and you realize really quickly

that you get a momentary hit of glee, and then something happens called habituation. Basically, it doesn't affect us anymore. After a really short window of time, we get a bump in our momentary happiness, and then we habituate back to a different level, right? So the money actually doesn't make a huge difference from that level. And we also very often get to that place. And the second thing that happens is, well, we just need a little more. It's not quite enough. And we keep moving the benchmark a little further off, deluding ourselves that we will feel differently if we just get a little more, a little more, a little more money. And in fact, we don't. Here's what we do know. Here's what the research actually tells us about money and a life well-lived.

And you may have heard part of this story because there's a lot out there saying, you know, there's a lot of popular mythology that's trying to sell, you know, like get really wealthy and that's going to be a good life. Research says it's pretty much not true. The research does show that there's a relationship between money and happiness, and there is a different relationship between money and what is called subjective well-being, or in human language, just being satisfied with your life, living a good life. So let's talk about both of those and do some myth busting here. One, money and happiness. We do know from the research that if you are really, really struggling financially, if you do not have enough money on an ongoing basis to take care of your basic survival needs, to make sure that you have food on the table for you and a family, a roof over your head, a comfortable place to be that's safe, if you're not able to sort of like satisfy your basic needs for sustenance and safety, then every dollar that you earn that gets you closer to that does make a really big difference, right? It does make a really big difference. And to deny that is just wrong.

What we know though, is that once you get past that, that there is a sort of a rule of diminishing returns, that bell curve, that line between money and happiness where it keeps going up for every dollar more you earn, you're going to be a dollar more happy or tick more happy. It keeps going up until you hit a certain amount of money. And then that curve starts to just go sideways. It flatlines. You can keep earning more money, but it actually won't make you any happier. And what we do know is that this number, what is that magic number? Well, it's different based on different cultures and different countries. The latest research I saw has actually been, it was done a handful of years now. So it's probably ticked up just a slight bit since then. But for the United States, that number was a household income of about $75,000 a year. And that is because it kind of

ties in roughly with what it takes to just kind of be okay with not living hand to mouth and supporting the family. And if you decide that you're going to work 10 hours a week more because you want to make $25,000 a year more, what the research shows is that may put more money in your bank account, but it is not going to affect your happiness in a meaningful way. You won't be happier, although you will be working more. So if you love your work, awesome. If you don't love your work, then what you're going to be doing is sacrificing time doing things that you may

really enjoy more with people who you may enjoy more in the name of putting money in the bank that will not make you happier. So something to think about there. But I want to talk about the more nuanced relationship here that I almost never see talked about anywhere. And that is the relationship between money and life satisfaction or the sense that, yeah, life is good, which is not the same, by the way, as happiness. Happiness is generally a snapshot. It's a picture in time.

Life satisfaction is this broad measure of just being generally satisfied that the nature of the quality of life is good. It turns out that there is a different relationship in the research here between money and life satisfaction or living a good life. There is a direct relationship, meaning the more you earn, generally speaking, the more you will say I'm satisfied with life. Unlike the money and happiness relationship, there is no measured leveling of that relationship. It's not like it goes up and up and up and then just kind of flatline. So the more you make, it's not going to affect how satisfied you are with your life, how good you say your life is. Actually, it shows that up until where the cutoff of the research was, which was an income of about $250,000, there was a direct relationship. It wasn't showing any

fall off. So the more you earn, the more likely you were to actually say that you lived a good life. Now, people don't know exactly why this is, but there is a hypothesis and a lot of it actually points potentially to healthcare and the idea that you are living, you have the ability to actually have access to a higher level of health care, which allows you to maintain better life and better well-being, less illness, less disease. And that that is actually the thing that translates to you saying, the more money I make, the more satisfied I am with my life, which kind of brings it around to the final thing about the relationship between money and a life well-lived. And that is this. When we talk about money, happiness, and a life well-lived, it's less about how much you earn and it's more about how you spend it. Spend it on stuff, spend it on merchandise, spend it on things, and it's much less likely

to actually do anything meaningful for you. Spend it on experiences though, and spend it on services, things that actually affect you in a meaningful way that move you emotionally. Those are the things that are actually more likely to make a difference, to move the needle. So on the services side,

this is better healthcare. That is very likely what's behind the increase in life satisfaction. Trips, experiences, travel, moments. So experiences and services over things. That is kind of the magic. So the real relationship here, it's not about how much you earn, it's about how you spend it. So that is sort of one of the good, the three good life lies is that a good life is a life that is filled with money. And the lie is that yes and, and no and, and it really depends what you do with it. And that may be a much stronger indicator of how it affects both your happiness and your well-being over time. Oh, and before we move on to the second good life lie, one other really interesting slash

weird quirk about money and happiness. And that is that how much you make in a vacuum is not what really matters. It's also how much you make in comparison to those around you. Really fascinating research shows that if you're making a really solid living, but those around you are making, say, 25% more than you, you will be less happy than if you made the exact same amount of money and those around you were making 25% less than you. We are wired for comparison. Love it, hate it. It causes a lot of angst and anxiety and anguish. But for most of us,

when we live in the world and we surround ourselves with other people, and very often other people who are sort of like in similar parts of the world or places in life, we are constantly comparison machines. And this can cause a lot of suffering and also, depending on who you are, status-based happiness, none of which is lasting. But I think it's interesting to just sort of like note that, that one of the ways to instantly get happier is to surround yourself with a different group of people, if that is something that's sort of like in your realm of possibility. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X 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 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.

Okay, so let's move on to the second good life lie. That is, this is going to kind of seem weird to you. A good life is a happy life. How could that be a lie? So you may have already kind of sussed out that these good life lies are not entirely binary. That the lie part of it is that they're offered almost always as these absolute statements, like is or isn't with no shades of gray, no nuance, which is never true about anything in the world. So whenever you hear a good life is a happy life, you got to question that. Here's something

interesting. I have been now hosting conversations on Good Life Project for many years, sat down with so many different people from all walks of life, from all different countries, all different parts of the world. And at the end of pretty much every one of those conversations, I asked the exact same question. You all know this, you've been listening. If you've been listening for a long time, you have heard it. And that question is,

what does it mean to you to live a good life? So what has surprised me? Well, there've been a lot of surprises in there, but one of the things that actually has surprised me over time is that I can probably count on one hand, the number of times that somebody has said a good life is a happy life. These are some of the most accomplished, most engaged, most alive, most joyful people who have survived some of the most horrific things on the planet and are sitting here and saying, my life is good. Some of the smartest, most accomplished scientists, academics, researchers, CEOs, everybody on the planet, right? And very few, very few.

I can't actually remember one offhand right now who sat here and said, happiness. It's all about happiness. Because I think we come to learn at a certain point that happiness is a little bit weird and that it's generally not something that you pursue directly. So here's the interesting thing about happiness. Happiness as a general rule, it is a snapshot, right? It's measured as a moment in time, not a span or a window or a season. And pretty much all of us can access that feeling of being happy for a moment. But what we know, and we know this in the science,

and we know this because of how people report it, it becomes brutally hard when you try to lock it down and make happiness a persistent state because that can actually make you persistently less happy because it is not designed to be a persistent state. Becomes a bit of a futile quest. This is like the athlete, right? Who is training for competition. Maybe a weightlifter who's training for a show. Maybe you're playing basketball and you're training for a

championship or a big game, maybe you're a gymnast or a dancer, whatever it may be, what top-level athletes who are able to access elite-level performance all know is the idea of cycling. And that is that you are only in a peak state of performance, of readiness, both psychologically and physically and physiologically for a very short window of time because our bodies and our minds simply are not designed to sustain those states for long measures of time. We can cycle in and out of them, but we can't just make that the movie of our lives. At least most people, and we're going to talk about that in just a moment too. So when we try and actually say,

I am going to make as my aspiration, every waking moment of my life happy, then the average person starts to experience it as impossible. And that leads to a sense of futility, which actually leads to a sense of giving up and leads you to become less happy, less happy. So first entering it and saying, you know what? Happiness is a snapshot. It's not a movie. And it will be great to have as many moments of happiness as I can, but also accept and understand that in that movie, there will be moments that cycle me through all sorts of different feelings, and that that is okay. And the aspiration is not so much to make you perpetually at 100% always uptime happy, but simply to do things that will allow you to experience those moments often and to be fully

in them when they happen. In fact, what we know is that happiness is not entirely within our control and how much of it is or is not within our control is very individualized. We each touch down with a certain happiness thermostat or set point is what the researchers would call it. So part of that set point is controlled by genetics. And part of it is controlled by our environment and our behavior, the way we live our lives. Now, researchers, you know, will dispute, but generally it's agreed that somewhere between 40 and 50% of your ability to control or alter your happiness or your happiness set point is genetically controlled. So call it 50, 50, 60, 40. What we know is that a big part is controlled by your genes. And then another big part is controlled by your environment and

your behavior, your actions and your choices and your decisions. So what does that tell us? Well, that's a good news, bad news, happiness story. What it tells us is that we are never entirely at the will of our genes when it comes to happiness, right? We always have a significant amount of input into that puzzle. What it also tells us is that we are never fully in control of our sort of happiness, is that we all have a certain set point that we tend

to revert to without exerting energy to move away from it. Now, for some people, that set point is really high. You just land on the planet and genetically your happiness set point is super high. So you default with no effort to just being kind of happy-go-lucky. You're that person. For other people, your set point, your thermostat may be dialed in closer to kind of neutral or maybe even a bit melancholy, right? And if you are that person and you buy into the gospel of happiness that says your job on the planet is to be happy, always happy all the time, that is the definition of a life well-lived and your aspiration should be that. But your genetic set point is more towards melancholy than you will perpetually bump up against your own biology in trying to attain a goal of what

you're told should be everybody's way of being, that will be brutally hard for you to sustain. And again, what that does is not only makes you less happy, but it actually leads to a sense of futility and judging and comparison and makes you feel shame because now you are not able to achieve what you are, quote, supposed to achieve if you wanna be happy and live a good life. Rather than saying, you know what?

I kind of have a sense for where my set point is because I know where I default to when I don't do anything to affect it. And know that that plays a role in it. And then make a choice. If you're happy with where you default to, then keep on keeping on. If you would love to default to sort of a higher level,

know that you are going to need to exert energy, make choices, take actions that will kind of keep you persistently above that reversion point, that thermostat where you naturally tend towards. And that becomes part of your commitment, your job, your practice is to do those things. And that's awesome.

But when you accept this, you move away from that sort of like delusion that everybody should have the same level of happiness and it should always be 100% all the time, up time, on. And that gives you a sense of forgiveness. We also know to bring it full circle on happiness, that there is research that shows that a thing called emodiversity, meaning not just experiencing happiness, but experiencing the full spectrum of emotions,

including sadness and stress and all these other things is a much stronger indicator of a life well-lived, of a flourishing life, of a good life. It takes the pressure off so you can live an amazing life and also move through moments, even entire seasons that may leave you with a certain sadness or frustration, unmet expectations. It's all part of the story you're telling and experiencing the full spectrum of emotions is actually way more fulfilling in the context of living a good life than always sort of like set pointing to only one particular mode.

And we now have research that shows that's true. So a little eye-opening and a little forgiveness for people around the idea that a good life is an always happy life and you should strive to be constantly super happy all the time. And that is the aspiration. Let's get to the third one. A good life is an easy life. Could that really be a lie? I mean, don't we all kind of want things to be easy? Isn't that the aspiration? Like let's get all the obstacles out of the way. Yeah, it is for a lot of us. And the thing about it is that if everything came easy, this is a little counterintuitive, but if everything came easy, your life would not necessarily be better. In fact, it would very likely be worse.

How in the world could that be possible? How is that possible, right? If everything came easy, wouldn't life just be awesome? So the thing is, we look at struggle. We look at effort. We look at time as the enemy. And sure, we all want the experience of ease as often as possible. But we also need a certain amount of adversity in life.

We need at least some things to not come easily. We need the opportunity to grapple with things, to think, to fail, to come back stronger, to figure things out. So why is that? Because a good life is actually a life filled with the experience of growth. We know there's so much research that tells us that we are here to grow. We are happier. We are more fulfilled. We're more nourished. We will answer all the scales that indicate a better life when we are learning and growing, when we are not just staying as static, sideways, flatlined human beings. No growth equals flatline. Flatline is not a life well lived, right? So we need to challenge ourselves, not to the point of failure or futility and not all the time,

but enough and frequently enough to require us to dig deeper in the name of figuring out how to move through things that don't come easily. And when we do that, we experience growth and that growth becomes a profoundly satisfying part of the experience of a life well-lived. Without it, we do not grow or we do not grow on anywhere near the level. So we want it. Yes, sure, we want the experience of ease. We want to be able to eventually figure out the things that are challenging us. But the same idea, the idea of the ultimate aspiration for everybody is that life is just straight up easy with no barriers, no obstacles. That actually is likely to be more damaging to a good life than enhancing because it leads to a flatlined existence. It leads to complacency. It leads to a lack of growth.

And it also eliminates the incredibly enriching and joyful feeling that comes from having worked really hard at something that didn't come easily and eventually getting it done. I mean, when I write a book, this is hard, right? Writing a book is not easy. No sane person does this. Trust me, I know. I'm surrounded by writers. None of us are entirely there, right? But the fact that it didn't come easy, if I sat here and just, it was breezy easy, it flew out of me every time I did it. And I put it out into the world. The fact that I actually finished it and I was proud of it and I was done with it and put it out into the world, it wouldn't matter on the same level to me as the fact that this did not come easy.

I grappled with it. It changed me along the way. The process of doing this was filled with things that were hard, that made me understand myself in a deeper way, that made me struggle to reorient the way that I see myself and the world and come up with new ideas. That process does not happen when everything just comes easy. There is no growth when that happens. And a good life is a life filled with growth. So this is why that sort of line about, a good life is a life that is easy,

where everything is easy. And the aspiration just to make everything come as easy as you can, bundled with the thing that I see all the time on social media and sort of like self-help platitudes, personal development world, which is like, if it's not easy, it's not right. No, that is completely and utterly wrong. Sure, you want a bunch of stuff to be easy. Sure, you can make things as easy and efficient as you can. And at the same time, just because something is

not easy doesn't mean it's wrong. In fact, the very fact that you have to work hard, that obstacles drop into your way, and that you have things that you will learn from and overcome them is what makes it worth doing in the first place. Bundled with the truth that no matter what you start, even if it starts easy, if it's really deeply meaningful and it's going to be changing in a meaningful way over time, at some point it will get hard. And if you walk away from that simply because it's not easy anymore, you will lose the opportunity for a profound dip into the world of growth and the chance to live a better, more full contact engaged life.

So let's just get rid of that. A good life isn't always easy life. The power of acknowledging these three good life lies is that it lets us forgive our humanity. It lets us accept that we can be in or live through moments and windows where there is struggle or unease, where hopes and expectations don't match reality, where we're not where we aspire to be. And at the same time, we can still access a certain experience of goodness, of grace, of connection, of belonging, purpose, and possibility, we can still, zooming the lens out, live good lives, right? We don't have to buy into

this unforgiving set of lies that we must always be happy, that we must always aspire to wealth. That we must always aspire to things being easy. This is not what makes life good. Sometimes, yes, in a nuanced way, yes. But forgive the fact that you will move through windows and seasons and moments of your life where that just is not your reality. But if somebody asks you, how you doing? You can still answer with a straight face. You know what?

I'm struggling right now, but context of things, there's a lot that's good in my life. There's a lot I'm grateful for. And yeah, my life is still pretty good. So we've talked about how with so much abundance and invention, there's still so much unease and suffering in the world. So few people are living truly good lives. We have talked about the three good life lies, and I've hinted at these things, the good life buckets. And now it's time to dive into this

powerful and really actionable model so we can start to figure out how to guide our behavior and really lean into that good life. The beautiful thing about the good life buckets is you hear it once, you remember it for life, you can validate it quickly through your own experience. And it literally tells you where to focus your energy on any given day and what to do to get closer to living your best life. The good life buckets, they're not about fluff or platitudes, but really on the ground reality, living a life of intentional experimentation and action taking. They started with me as a sort of N of one, like using the scientific phrase. I was one subject in the experiment. Over the years, I built a number of companies in the wellness world and used my life and my career kind of as

a living laboratory, running so many different experiments, many of which, by the way, turned out horribly. Glad it happened to me and not you. I've immersed myself in thousands of academic studies, spent years traveling the world, finding embodied teachers and sitting down with them to learn, so many of them here on the Good Life Project, and had the just incredible opportunity to teach and work with thousands and thousands of people and then learn from them as I saw how they were interacting with ideas over the years. And this is where the sort of deceptively simple idea of the Good Life Buckets came

from. So let's dive in. First, the model of the Good Life life buckets, it's really simple. You might even dismiss it because it feels so simple. Truth is, it took a lot of work to make it this simple. And the reason is because if I came up with something more complex, nobody would remember it. And one of the things that I have learned over time is that if nobody remembers it, if it's so complicated, even if it works, if you don't hear it once, remember it. And one of the things that I have learned over time is that if nobody remembers it, if it's so complicated, even if it works, if you don't hear it once, remember it, and it can't guide your behavior really easily, it's useless. So the good life buckets are deliberately

simple. So let's start with your vitality bucket. Remember I said there are three of these buckets, your vitality bucket, your connection bucket, and your contribution bucket. Let's start out with the vitality bucket. So your vitality bucket is about optimizing your state of body and mind. We've all heard the line, if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. And we all get that when it comes to physical pain

and illness, no big news there. That makes a lot of sense. But what's becoming bigger news, I think, is that there is no such thing as pain or illness that stops at the body or sadness, stress, or depression that stops at the brain. Vitality is a feedback loop. It isn't just about your state of body. It's about your state of body and your mind and your life. One thing feeds into the other, which feeds into the other. So when we talk about vitality, we talk about, well, let's talk about your body.

And then let's talk about your mind as if they're two separate things. This is not just an illusion. It is a delusion and it's damaging. It is damaging to actually entertain the notion that we can talk about one without talking about the other because they are not different. There are two parts of an infinite and perpetual and constant feedback mechanism. So we can talk about them. We can talk about different elements of them, but always with the understanding that one affects the other, right?

So if I strengthen my muscles over a period of months, my increase in muscle tone and capability is actually going to feed back to my state of mind, my state of confidence, my sense of capability and esteem and possibility. And same thing if I am suffering with illness or with pain, that is going to feed back into my mood, my state of anxiety, my sense of possibility,

my mood and depression, right? And this is actually measurable these days. We can actually see how these things will affect our endocrinology, our nervous systems, the electrical system in our body. So the big thing I think to understand here is that vitality matters. It's not just about the mind. It's not just about the body. It is about both and how they feed back to each other, right? So when we think about the vitality bucket and we think about, okay, so the idea here is that I want to fill this bucket. And the idea with all three buckets is that a good life happens when all three buckets

are as full as they can be. And we keep them as full as they can be, and we keep them as full as they can be, right? So our job becomes to sort of perpetually scan your vitality bucket, your connection bucket, your contribution bucket on any given day, notice how full or empty they are, and give a little love to the buckets that need some love to try and bring them up

so that they're all as close to brimming over as they possibly can be. So when we think about your vitality bucket, what are the things that would help fill that bucket if it's feeling a little bit low? So there are a couple of big categories here. And guess what? When it comes to this, most of us know what these things are. It's not a matter of not doing this.

When it comes to all of this, very often, it's really not a matter of not knowing what these things are. It's not a matter of not doing this. In fact, when it comes to all of this, very often it's really not a matter of not knowing what to do. It's just that we don't do it. Sometimes we don't understand it. But what I found is that the stuff that we all learned, you know, from our parents and then their parents, the stuff that the ancient Greeks knew and wrote about, you know, the stuff that has been around for thousands and thousands of generations, guess what? It works. So it's a matter of us actually doing it. So what goes into

filling that vitality bucket? Well, I think first we look at movement. Our bodies were made to move. They've always been made to move. We evolved through history as beings where we had the physiology, the biology to be able to move. And in fact, it is enhanced and revved and kept as healthy as humanly possible when we are moving, which has kind of become a challenge. Because we now live in a world where we are largely sedentary unless we intentionally do things to stop that from happening. The average person sits an insane number of hours every single day, just a huge amount. And all systems in our body and our mind suffer when that happens. We've all seen the news that famous phrase that's sort of been bandied about that sitting is the new smoking, that when you don't move your body, it's actually much more nuanced than that.

It's not the position of sitting, it's being sedentary. Our bodies are designed not to be sedentary. They're designed to move constantly throughout the day. And when we become sedentary, all of our systems begin to malfunction and we become more subject to disease, to illness, to immediate and acute incidents that will end our lives or greatly diminish the quality of them, right? And the answer is to start to move a little bit.

And on two levels, one, embrace whatever form of exercise, not just works in a laboratory, not just as effective, but actually has some level of intrinsic joy connected to it. And for most people, that means whatever also engages your mind along the way, not just about repetition and distraction, but what do you actually look, what would you look forward to doing? The other thing is think about your workflow. Think about reworking the way you work in order to mobilize your workflow. I'll give you an example from my world. There are long windows where sometimes if I'm interviewing a bunch of people for programs or I'm being interviewed, then in theory, I would

be sitting either on a phone call or on a microphone, or if I'm having meetings with somebody, be sitting at a meeting with somebody, and I would just be sedentary that whole time. I have completely retooled those experiences. So if you ever get me on a telephone or on a call or something like that, I will be wearing a headset. It will be, if it's for something that is designed to be recorded and then broadcast, I will be wearing a broadcast quality headset

with a 10 foot cord so that I can move around. I literally pace around in our studio while I'm on that line. If it is a meeting or a conference call, I will be wearing a wireless headset and I will be either walking around my apartment or I will be outside in the middle of Central Park, moving the entire time, right? Because I want to integrate my own ability to move my body with my workflow. If you want to have a meeting with me, if you want to, you own ability to move my body with my workflow. If you want to have a meeting with me, if you want to, you know, whatever, the classic cup of coffee or lunch meeting, I will almost always designate one point to meet you and

I will meet you out front. We'll grab a cup of something and then we're not going to sit down. We are going to go walk for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or an hour or two hours, whatever it is. And if we need to take notes, we're very likely going to do it as audio notes on somebody's note-taking app or voice memo app on their device, because this is part of my commitment to keep my body moving. So think about it on two levels, right?

Both the sort of like designated time for exercise, but how can you reorder, rework your workflow in order to integrate movement into it? This also happens, I mean, we explore, we use standing desks or standing stands so that we can go up and down. We can change, I can change my body position, you know, different hybrid seating arrangements

or rocker boards for my feet. So constantly kind of switching things around and playing with how to both move my body in a quote, exercise way, arrangements or rocker boards for my feet. So constantly kind of switching things around and playing with how to both move my body in a quote exercise way, which for me, I try and do in a play type of way, and also just mobilize my body through changing my workflow throughout the day. And this same thing affects your mind, right? So what we know is things like moving your body when you exercise, especially at a sort of like levels of intensity, that actually releases a chemical called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor in your brain, which has been described as a miracle growth for your brain. It literally is one of the things that is involved in neurogenesis or growing new brain cells. So literally on a physiological level,

exercise changes your brain in addition to the chemistry changes and the electrical changes that will affect in a very measurable way, your mood, your affect, things like anxiety and depression. And that brings us to mindset, right? Because mindset is the other part of the vitality puzzle, right? So we want to pay attention to our state of mind and the practices that we engage in there beyond moving our body, which has a really big effect on our state of mind, would be attention-based practices I have found to be incredibly valuable and effective. Those can be meditation. It can be neurofeedback. It can be different types

of games even that have been developed now. And the idea is it's things that allow you to train your brain to focus your awareness in a particular way. And that enhances both your ability to be present in the things that are good and grateful for it and the things that are good and grateful for and the things that are good, but it also rewires your brain to be calmer, to be less reactive and more intelligently and thoughtfully responsive, to experience stress differently, to not respond as much and be able to dissipate the negative effects of it

more quickly, to be able to not feel quite so bad when things aren't going your way, to have a greater sense of equanimity in the face of uncertainty and high stakes, and also can be effective in, again, certain levels of anxiety and depression. Again, I'm not making any medical claims here,

so definitely check with your qualified healthcare provider with all of these. But there's fascinating research around all of these things. So mindset for me, my mindset practice beyond moving my body, which is a big part of it, is also a daily meditation, a mindfulness meditation. And I sort of developed my own approach, which integrates different techniques into it. And also breathing exercises, which come from my background in the world of yoga, teaching something called pranayama, which is effectively a way to control your breath as a way to alter the state of your

mind and body. And it works really powerfully. And there's modern Western research that shows that it actually works in a really effective way. I know that I can breathe in one specific way that will rapidly diminish any sort of stress or anxiety response that I have. In fact, that was my lead into yoga initially because I was a lawyer in a very past life and freaking out on a pretty much daily basis. And it was the breathing exercises that allowed me to be in my office in a really tough moment, in a really adversarial call, and somehow find a way back to being baseline. Okay. So think about that. We have other things. I think the other thing that always comes to mind here is food. Food is a really big area of controversy. So I'm not going

to tell you what to eat or how to eat, both on a humanitarian level or what's good and right for you, because there is no universal thing that works for everybody. Maybe if there is a single universal thing for almost everybody, it is that more plans tend to be better no matter what your approach to eating are. So think about how you're going to fuel your body. It makes a profound, profound difference. Two other things that I think are really important to talk about. One is sleep. We all know that sleep is one of the greatest contributors to both positive and negative vitality, both in terms of your physiology, your psychology. It makes a tremendous difference. Basic sleep hygiene can really affect sleep. Stress affects sleep. And it's this, again,

we see the feedback mechanism here, right? Stress affects your state of mind and it affects your sleep. And then it also affects your energy to exercise. Exercise helps diminish the feelings of stress and anxiety and depression, gives you energy, right? There is research that also shows it helps you sleep better. So when you start to embrace these things, if you're thinking about, I need to sleep better, I want to sleep better, counterintuitively, one of the things you may actually look at doing is moving your body, because it starts to rewire the cycles in your body to allow you to sleep more effectively. And again, there are basic set of sleep hygiene things that you can pretty much

find anywhere. If you want to my last book, How to Live a Good Life, there's a section on that where you can kind of go through the list and say, okay, these are the basic ways to set up my bedroom. And these are the things to do in the hour to two hours before I go to bed that can make a real difference. You add that to better food, to mindset practices and to moving your body. And you create this fully supported scaffolding that allows your vitality bucket to really start to fill itself on a regular basis. So that's your vitality bucket. 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 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

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between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Let's talk about that second bucket, your connection bucket, your connection bucket. What do we mean by connection? Connection is about what happens between you and those around you. It's also about what happens between you and yourself. So one of the longest running studies of human flourishing known as the Grant study looked at the lives of a group of men over a period of something like 70 or 80 years and measured almost every aspect of their behavior, their physiological, their biological, their health markers,

their relationships, their jobs, their income, everything. And they're trying to figure out, you know, like how do these people end up being the same? How do their lives diverge? And what are the factors that really contribute to the flourishing of human beings, at least the people in this study? Yes, I agree that it would be amazing if this study was replicated, not just with men from a certain window of time, but with a broad range of people. And hopefully that is happening now or will happen because I'd love to see that data. But what we do know from the Grant study, from one of the longest running curators of that study, Professor George Valiant, was asked, of all of the things that you measure, of all of the things that you measure,

that were uniquely indicative of a life well lived, is there any one that really stood out? His answer was that it was all about relationships. His shorthand answer is yes, it was love, full stop. It was the quality of loving, connected relationships. Didn't necessarily mean partners or spouses, but also friendships, loving friendships. It was about being connected. That was the single biggest contributor to flourishing within this group of people. This idea is also replicated in a lot of different books and research.

One of the earliest books in the world of positive psychology by Jonathan Haidt, who's also been on the podcast, he introduced the idea that a good life is about what happens in the, what he calls the in-between people. It's that interrelatedness that is critically important in our ability to live good lives. The reason is because our wiring for socialization is DNA deep. Yes, even us grumpy, curmudgeonly introverts raising my hand here.

I love to be on stage. I love to be in a small group of people. I love to have friends over for dinner. I am very much an introvert as many sort of in our community know. And that doesn't mean that I'm antisocial or don't like people. It just means that I am what my friend Susan Cain would call selectively social. And that I like to be with sort of like groups of people in the right way for the right amount of time, sort of like around certain social dynamics. And that fills me rather

than empties me. But even us introverts, we are wired for socialization. We are wired for a relationship just in our own unique way, right? So when I talk about the in-between, when I talk about those relationships, what we're talking about here on a connection level is friends, romantic love, attachment love, nature, something bigger than yourself, whether you define it as source, God, Akashic field, whatever it is,

that sense that you're a part of and in relation to something bigger than you also yourself, also yourself. So when we look at sort of like that first one, they're friends. We know that this is so critically important, the connection bucket to fill the connection bucket, right? We want to look at friendship because friends, they give you a sense, not just of love and acceptance, but of belonging. We are happier, more resilient, less anxious, less fearful when we have friends.

Research shows that if you have a bestie at work, you're likely to be seven times more engaged with your job. You endure pain with a greater sense of ease. You recover faster from illness. You live longer and you feel better. Life is just better when you've got friends and you've got their back and they've got your back. Really fascinating study. Took a group of people into a room with an fMRI,

which measures your brain waves while you're doing something. And I'm massively oversimplifying this, but you'll get the point. And what they did was they told people that they were gonna get a certain prompt, and then there was like a 20% chance that when they saw something, they were gonna get an electric shock.

Not enough that it would actually hurt them in any way, but it wouldn't be pleasant as described by them. Now, one of two things happened there. They could either hold the hand of a stranger while they were going through this, or they could hold the hand of a good friend. And what the research found was that when they were holding the hand of a stranger, someone they didn't know at all, as soon as they got that signal that they were potentially about to get shocked,

they got very anxious and uncomfortable, and it was not a happy experience. When they were holding the hand of a friend, they were way calmer, more relaxed, and they experienced the shock even when they got it as being much less painful. So simply holding the hand, simply knowing that there is somebody physically there with you, helps you endure suffering and pain in your life. Completely changes the experience of suffering, which at some point we are all going to go through. When we're disconnected, all of our systems from our mind and body begin to fail. Beyond the obvious effect of making us unhappy and isolated and alone, it increases the likelihood of anxiety, depression, hostility,

meaninglessness. You're more likely to suffer a heart attack, depression, hostility, meaninglessness. You're more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, have a compromised immune system. Loneliness is as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day when you look at the research that's been coming out lately. And you're twice as likely to pass younger from loneliness than from obesity. We are wired to befriend and belong. And the problem is that the places that used to bring us in connection with friends and also give us a sense of belonging, they're not really doing it all that much anymore, or they're not existing anymore. Houses of worship, right? Organized religion. The thing

that people are fleeing faster than any other time in our sort of like modern history were central sources of friendship and belonging. And now those are becoming less so. Local organizations and trade groups, leagues, clubs, these things kind of are going away really fast. Employment used to be a source of friendship and belonging. And now, because people are jumping around so quickly and there's so much brand disloyalty, that is going away. And what we're seeing is that one in five people are now persistently lonely and that the age group of 45 to 65 are among the loneliest. And technology, we can't talk about this without

talking about technology, on the one hand, can really be a salve. It can be a great opening move to find people who are similar to you and start a conversation that may lead to a friendship, which may lead to a community, which may lead to a sense of belonging. But, but, it very rarely gets you to the same place

as actual friendships that are developed and sustained and deepened in real life. So not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not an entire solution. And for some, the fact that many of the conversations happen without video and because they're asynchronous when they're text-based, people actually think about and formulate their responses rather than doing it very quickly and being more real and vulnerable. And that strips empathy from the relationship

and it stops it from getting deeper. Because what we know is that at the heart of all of this stuff, at the heart of connection, is vulnerability, empathy, and disclosure. We want to know who people are. There's a really fascinating study done by Arthur Aaron, who was out at University of Stony Brook at the time.

And this actually became published eventually in a modern love column in the New York Times and eventually became a book by Mandy Len. But it was based on Aaron's research where he got really curious. Can we take relative strangers, put them in a room for a 45-minute experience, and introduce them to a set of questions that would lead to a conversation that would end in a fairly high level of friendship and intimacy? So he created what he called his 36 questions, right? And he brought people into the room and these 36

questions were designed to slowly start fairly surface level and then ask people to answer the questions to each other in a way where you start to reveal a little bit more about yourself. You get a little bit more vulnerable and then a little bit more. And then you start to share things that you've never shared with anybody else to a perfect stranger because you feel like you know them. And also because it is reciprocal, right? You are never sharing more than what's being shared back to you. And that makes you feel like there's something real happening here. Two complete strangers in a manufactured environment, reading and responding to pre-scripted questions who ended up in relationships very often that they described later as being closer to that one person after this 45

minutes to an hour than they were to many of their closest friends. At the end of this experience, the two different people would actually gaze into each other's eyes for four minutes and the outcomes were kind of mind-blowing. They reported feeling closer to their partners than they felt to so many other people. And the researchers have since used these questions to foster closeness from everyone from students of different race to police in their communities.

It's really, really powerful. I was actually fascinated by this and I kind of wanted to try it out. For a number of years, we were running retreats with groups in Costa Rica. What we did was we took those 36 questions and when 36 strangers came together in a foreign country, in a different environment,

completely otherworldly environment, at the end of the day, we divided them into smaller groups and we took the 36 questions, we segmented them and adapted them a bit so that they were more appropriate for the setting. And we asked people to go around in these smaller groups and answer these questions. Now this is a hundred percent anecdotal, but what I can tell you is that the level of closeness was staggering at the end of these four or five days together. And I was convinced.

And it really reinforced also that the power of friendship and belonging is transformative. And it is all about not just shared interest and similarity, but also a sense of safety and a willingness to be vulnerable and to self-disclose in a reciprocal way. So something to really think about when you're thinking about filling or refilling your connection bucket. We eventually sort of expanded a lot of these ideas. For five years, we ran one of the largest adult summer camps in the world, Camp GLP. And this was an absolutely stunning experience where towards the end, 400 something people would come together

for nearly four days in a camp setting. And the depth and the beauty and the grace of those relationships was like we had never seen before. It was a really, really powerful, moving experience. And the bonds of that community remain to this day. Connection is just so critically important to a life well-lived. It starts with friendship, develops into a sense of belonging. And we also have the idea I mentioned of love. When most of us think about love, we think about romantic love, and that sure is meaningful and important and can add to this

sense of connection. But friendship love, friends can love each other. It's a different kind of love. In fact, when you look at the research, there are four types of love commonly identified. One is companionate love, which is friendship. One is romantic love, right? That is romance. One is compassionate love. That is a sense of empathy and the desire to relieve suffering in others. And one is attachment, which is just this sense of long sustained history where we feel like we have shared something substantial and we feel in some way connected to each other. And these are all meaningful.

They're all meaningful ways to go about filling your connection bucket. But I also mentioned a couple of other things. I mentioned nature in there. Really powerful research shows that when we're disconnected from nature, we also suffer. And when we are connected from nature, it literally down-regulates our nervous system,

up-regulates our immune system, up-regulates our immune system, and our happiness, and our mood. So we want to be exposed to natural environments as often as possible. I've written about, in fact, this was also in my last book, How to Live a Good Life. In Japan, there are forests that are designated as Shinrin-yoku forests, which translates roughly to forest bathing. Because they know through research that when you actually enter forests on a regular basis, it literally changes the way that you feel about yourself and your physiology and psychology change along with it. So think about getting back in touch with nature. This is one of the reasons why I kind of double dip when I have

my telephone calls and I wear a headset and I go into the middle of the woods in Central Park. So I get my movement, I get my connection, and I get my nature. Okay, so that's triple dipping actually right there. So you can kind of bring them all together to make it all work optimally. One of the other things that I mentioned was this connection to a sense of something bigger than yourself, right? It doesn't matter what you call it. For some, you may call it God. For some, you may call it source.

For some, you may call it some feel. There's some sense of something where we're all connected. But what we do know is that when you feel like you are a part of something bigger, participating in something bigger in relation to what that something is and those others who are in community with that same set of beliefs and experiences,

it also helps you have the experience of feeling more connected and living a better life. So these things all matter. When you're thinking about how to fill your connection bucket, I'm gonna give you a really simple starter tip about how to fill your connection bucket. I'm going to give you a really simple starter tip to begin to fill that bucket. Really, really simple. Anyone can do this. Before the end of the day, before you close your eyes today, take out your phone or your computer,

whichever one's going to work better for you. Think about somebody who you actually like. Think about an old friend, a family member, and maybe you haven't talked to them in a while. You haven't texted them. You haven't gotten on a call with them. And not because anything happened, it's just life got in the way, right? And then randomly out of the blue, pulled their name up and send them a text that says something like, hey, I was just thinking about you.

You know, it's been a while. I know we're both just so busy, but you mean a lot to me. And I just want to let you know, I really appreciate you. And I would love to just reconnect for a quick hello. You're on my mind. Thanks so much. That small thing multiplied over a series of days, that little thing can be a really powerful way to begin the

process of filling or refilling your connection bucket. Okay. So that brings us to our contribution bucket. And you're probably thinking to yourself, wait, this has been going on for a little while now. And what is this going to be like a four hour podcast? No, it's not going to be. In fact, getting to this point, I'm realizing I'm going to do a little bit of a pun to here. Your contribution bucket is the third bucket. It is massively important. Your contribution bucket is about the way you contribute to the world. For most people, we equate that with work.

Now, it may be the work that you are paid to do. It may be your, quote, J-O-B. Maybe you're an entrepreneur or a founder, or you actually are the one in charge. You can formulate it. Maybe you're a professional or a solo practice or an artist, and maybe it's entirely up to you. Or you may work for some large organization. It doesn't really matter. You may also find that your primary form of contribution is something that is not a, quote, J-O-B. It is not the thing you get paid for. Maybe you're a parent. Maybe you're a caregiver. Maybe that is the thing that is

deeply and truly nourishing to you. And that is amazing, right? Your contribution bucket. It's about finding a way to do the work that you do, to do something, to make your contribution, to exert effort in a way that makes you come alive and stay alive. And what I found over time is it exists at the sweet spot. If you think about a Venn diagram of meaning, the thing you're doing matters to you and it matters maybe to someone else. Of excitement and enthusiasm, you're really engaged in this thing.

Of flow, a sense of being lost in time, absorbed, like you just start doing this thing and you blink and a day has gone by and it's like you become it and there's no sense of difference between you and it and you just cannot get enough of it. A sense of expressed potential, like what you have to offer is being fully tapped

and not stifled or ignored. And also more broadly that this combination of things, this exertion of effort and what's coming from it is giving you a sense of purpose. Not necessarily quote capital L life purpose, capital LP life purpose, because I honestly don't even know what that means, but a sense of purpose in the way that you're doing it. Like this full suite of things, when you overlap at that spot, you feel like you are absolutely alive. I call this state sparked,, you feel like you are absolutely alive. I call this

state spark, but you can just call it feeling alive. Aliveness is what it's about. And it's the intersection of these different contributing elements. When you contribute to the world, at that sweet spot, everything changes, right? Sometimes, like I said, it can come from your job. Other times, it's the thing that you do on the side. Sometimes it's a blend. And sometimes it is the effort or the work that you do completely unrelated to any form of compensation because it is simply the thing that you can't not do. You come most alive when you do it. All options are valid. All options are okay. The focus of much of my deep work over the last chunk of years has actually been in this one domain. It has been going much deeper into understanding this idea of the contribution bucket of these components of fully sparked work. These components that allow you to feel and come alive in the way that you're contributing to the world. And that led to sort of a quest where I started to try and ask, how do I define that? Are there a set of universal imprints for work that makes people across all domains, all geographies, all cultures come alive? And if so, can I map them? And that led to a lot, a lot of work, which was amazing.

And we distilled it down to a set of 10 archetypes or imprints. And I call those sparkotypes. And we spent almost the entirety of 2018 building an assessment tool, an online tool, to try and figure out, can we actually create a simple, straightforward tool for people to figure out what is this thing for them? What is your unique imprint or sparkotype? The archetype, the source code level answer for work that makes you come alive. And we released that to the world at the end of last year. And that really sort of became my deep dive into understanding and creating tools and ideas and an entire body of work that would allow people to much more rapidly and effectively fill their contribution bucket,

to find and do or create work that makes them come alive. When we released that, it's been about just around a year now since that went out into the world. Over that time, what we have learned with now more than 300,000 people having completed the Sparketype assessment since it went live and having heard now so many stories and case studies and had conversations and captured just an incredible volume of more nuanced insights and realizations and awakenings and have the ability now to analyze more than 15 million data points from people who have interacted with this, is that there is so much opportunity that we don't even see to find and do work or to make subtle shifts in the work that we're already doing that will allow us to feel the sense of aliveness, to feel sparked in a way that we didn't even know

that we had access to. At the same time, this is a much bigger conversation, introducing you more deeply to the sparkotypes, to the 10 different types and to how they guide your behavior and how you can actually put them into action in your life. So what I'm gonna do, and this is why I say it's a little bit of a punt, especially because we're going kind of long on today's episode, but it's perfect because it sets up our third and final, one of these sort of kickoff the year immersion episodes

with just me before we deliver you back into our regular twice a week conversations is for the next week's third and final episode of these, just the JF episodes, I'm going to take you deep into the contribution bucket with a fierce focus on sparkotypes, discovering yours, what it actually means, how that relates to the way that you're going to bring yourself to the world and fill your contribution bucket. So be absolutely sure to tune into next week's expanded conversation about the sparkotypes, how to find work that makes you feel alive

or reimagine the work that you're already doing to get you a lot closer to that feeling. Coming full circle on the good life buckets. Remember, a good life is a meaningful life of contribution sparked by something that pulls you from ahead rather than you feel forced to have to do. A good life is a life of deep and abiding friendship and love and expansive connection and belonging. It is a life carried forward by a vital mind and a capable body. But even more, a good life is a life of action, a life of awareness, a life of focused attention

that moves beyond knowing and is defined by relentless and repeated doing, being and doing. None of that is possible without actually taking the first step. So if you ask me in the end, what is a good life? It's a life that moves beyond fascination and steps into the arena of action taking, of being alive and in motion.

And the motion that we're talking about here is first understanding. There are these three buckets that really matter. Vitality, connection, and contribution. Understanding, asking yourself, wake up in the morning, just kind of like do a quick scan. Hey, how do my buckets feel today? Which one feels really full?

Which one feels a little empty? You'll get a quick intuitive hit. If you want to get more granular, you can take our good life bucket quiz. We'll drop the link in the show notes. It's free. Just go and take it. It takes a couple of minutes and it will give you a much more specific and granular number that actually tells you on any given day how full or empty your three good life buckets are. It's based on a combination of behavior and state. And then the most important thing, once you actually understand that, commit to taking at least a single action every single day

that will fill one of, if not all of your good life buckets. When you do that over time, when you turn this into a daily practice, then over time, all three buckets will start to fill. And without you even realizing it, without making any big disruptive changes by this simple practice of doing a little something every day to fill your good life buckets, all parts of your life will start to rise. And the buckets will start to fill each other and bubble over and fill into the other one. And you will notice that things just feel differently. Things feel good. And that's where we all want to be. Hope you enjoyed this. I hope you found it useful. Super excited to do our final deep dive with you into the contribution bucket and the sparkotypes and help you come alive and work in next week's final of our three episodes.

And for today, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you 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 have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do.

You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share.

Share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold.

See you next time. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

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