Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Robert Waldinger on What Are the Keys to Living a Good Life EP 239

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

In today's episode, I talk to Harvard Professor Dr. Robert Waldinger about the keys to living a good life. Dr. Waldinger is the current Director of the Harvard Study on Aging and author of the book "The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness." --►Purchase The Good Life: https://amzn.to/3XcpVFy  (Amazon Link) What We Discuss About the Keys to Living a Good Life What is the key to a good life?  It is a question that preoccupies us all and one that the longest and most successful study of happiness ever conducted strives to answer. What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to our guest today, psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/robert-waldinger-the-keys-to-living-a-good-life/  Brought to you by Shopify and Green Chef. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview:  https://youtu.be/88vpv7B-8Vc   Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. If you were going to make one choice to try to help yourself be happier and have a better life, just one choice it would be to invest in your relationships. And in some ways it sounds obvious, it sounds trivial, but it's really important. What we find is that the people who take care of their relationships, who are more active in keeping in contact, who are more active being engaged with other people, that those are the people who have better lives in so many ways. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher

the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 239 of PassionStruck. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn, had to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here or you would just like to introduce this, who are Friend or Family member, we now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize in a convenient topics to give any new listener a great way

to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com, Slice Starter Packs, or Spotify to get started. I also wanted to thank you for your continued support of the show and your ratings and reviews. If you love today's episode, I would so appreciate it. If you gave it a five star rating and shared it with your friends and family members.

I know we and our guests love to see your reviews and hear your comments. Now, let's talk about today's episode. What is the key to a good life? It is a question that preoccupies all of us, and one that the longest and most successful study of happiness ever conducted, strives to answer. What keeps us happy and healthy as we grow older? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone. But according to our guests today, psychiatrist Robert Waldenger, you're completely mistaken.

Robert is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest. He is professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and directs the Harvard study of adult development, one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever done. His TED Talk is one of the most popular ever with over 40 million views. He is the author of the brand new book which launches today The Good Life, Lessons From the Worlds Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your

journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. So excited today to have the opportunity to have Dr. Robert Waldinger on the Passion Struck podcast. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, we're going to spend the majority of our time today talking about your brand new book, which releases today, The Good Life, which has been the culmination of decades of your life and research that you've done. But before we get into that, I wanted to ask you because this was the culmination of decades of research that you and other

scientists before you compiled. I wanted to understand your individual path to Harvard and your ambition and passion for wanting to make this your life's work. Well, my path was full of fits and starts and bumps in the road and all of them ended up getting me to this place, but we're not what I'd planned. I didn't plan to go to Harvard. I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, where nobody thought about leaving Iowa. Very few people did.

And I had a cousin who went to Harvard and said, this is a great place you should come. And then I trained as a psychiatrist eventually after med school and was going to do clinical work and be a hospital administrator. And then I realized that what I really wanted to learn to do was research. So I went back and retooled in my 40s to do research. After getting fired from one of my first jobs as a psychiatrist in a hospital, because they didn't have room for enough of us anymore.

And there were so many ways in which the things that happened to me ended up leading me along a path I didn't expect to things that I've ended up loving. I like being able to tell a bit of that story because often we look at someone and imagine they've had a very straight path in their life. And most people I know have had all kinds of twists and turns myself included. I know have had all kinds of twists and turns myself included. Well, I know myself. I've had many twists and turns that have taken me on this journey, but I think it's those twists and turns, and it's something we're going to discuss a lot about today and the relationships that I've developed over my life that in some ways have brought me pain and other ways have brought me tremendous happiness and success.

So, thinking that we're going to just have this life, and it's going to be this just glorious ride, the entire time, is a fallacy that I wish I had learned much younger than I am now. Me too. Actually, as we'll talk about this study that I've done of lives all the way across eight decades shows exactly that it isn't a smooth life for anybody. Well, I was thinking earlier today as I was doing my last preparations for this interview, how to best dive into this. And I think I'm going to do it in this way. I am the father of two Gen Z children. My son just missed the cutoff for being a millennial. But in 2007, you surveyed a group of millennials about their most important life goals. What did you find the majority say it was?

about their most important life goals, what did you find the majority say it was? Well, actually 80%, so eight out of 10 of those millennials said their most important life goal was to get rich, not just to be comfortable, but to get rich. And then about half of those same millennials said that a major life goal was going to be to become famous. And this rich and famous aspiration that we seem to have instilled into our young people turns out not to make us happy. So it's always been a puzzle for me and one of the drivers of my own research. Well, then I read in the book that you went back and you surveyed them again.

I think it was a decade later. Did the results change? Not very much. Some millennials are beginning to understand that life purpose, having work that's meaningful, that those things are really worth pursuing. But a great many people still said that wealth and fame were what was going to make them happy, which surprised us. But I think that what we've understood now is that we get all these messages all day long from the culture, telling us you buy this car you're going to be

happier. If you serve this kind of pasta at your family dinners your family is going to be harmonious. We get all these messages about material things making us happy and I think that's part of why so many young people say well that must be what we'll do it for me. So I better get rich. Yes. Well, before I dive into the study, I wanted to ask you this question. Why is a good life forage with things that make it hard? Well, I know from knowing just a bit about your own history that you understand this well, that in fact, when we can meet challenges and work with them, we grow stronger and we

grow more mature, our lives become richer. So the hope is that we meet challenges that we have the resources to cope with, and that if we do that, we get to be more interesting, better developed people. What you also know, and we find, is that if terrible things happen that no one has the resources to meet, we can be traumatized. And then we need a lot of help recovering from that. But normal life challenges are part of the good stuff in life it turns out. I wanted to let you know that over the course of this year,

I've had at least six people that I've interviewed. Most of them were psychologists or psychiatrists or social scientists, bring up the study we're about ready to discuss. And if people haven't listened to or watched your TED talk, I would point them to that as well, because your over 40 million views show just how important a topic this is to so many people. But for those who are unfamiliar with what this study is, I was hoping you could discuss it because it's the only one like it in the world. Yeah, sure. So our study, as far as we know, is the longest study of the same people

followed through their whole lives that's ever been done. It's about to enter its 85th year. It started in 1938. I'm the fourth director. It started with a group of Harvard undergraduates and a group of young men from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and from some of the most troubled families. So two very different groups. One very advantaged, privileged, one very not privileged, and disadvantaged, and then we followed them, and eventually we added their wives,

and then we've now reached out to their children, baby boomers now, more than half our women. So now we have a much broader study before it was just a study of young men. And now it's a study of men and women from two generations. And my understanding is as you've looked at these lives that they have included,

people who have gone on to become the president, if I do my math right, and I know you don't like to disclose names, I'm guessing it was John F. Kennedy, who was part of this. And we can disclose that because it was disclosed publicly by someone else. We're not allowed to disclose who's in our study, but if it's made public elsewhere, we're allowed to talk about it. So you're absolutely right. Your math is correct.

John F. Kennedy. OK. Well, there's people like him, there's people who've become destitute, there's people who've had psychiatric issues, there's people who've had no issues at all. And so it's turned out, although at first, it started with looking at just men, it's turned out

to really give this diverse view. And my question would be, after examining these lives for the 75 years, what was the fundamental finding that came out of it? Actually, two findings. One, finding won't surprise you. It's that taking care of our health really matters for keeping us happy and healthy and having us live long.

But the finding that surprised us, that we didn't believe at first when the data began to show it, was that our connections with other people actually keep us healthy or longer and they help us live longer that literally seeing more people in a given week having warmer connections with other people predict that we're going to develop the diseases of aging later if we develop them at all and that we're going to live longer and And we didn't believe

that because we thought how could your relationships get into your body and actually change how your body works. But many other research groups have found this now and we've spent the last 10 years trying to understand exactly how relationships do change our physiology. Yes, and I think that there were three major sub findings that you found on why good relationships keep us happier and healthier. And I was hoping at a high level, you might be able to tease that,

I was out for the audience. But was things like social connections are good for us and loneliness kills? Yes, absolutely. In the about the last 25 years, scientists have revealed through their research that loneliness is a huge factor in our health, that people who are more isolated from other people than they want to be have poor health, both mental health and physical health and their brains decline sooner in old age than people who are as connected as they want to be. experience. So you can be lonely, surrounded by a huge family. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be perfectly content and not lonely, living alone on a mountain. So loneliness is

that very personal experience that people can tell you about. Either they'll say, yes, I'm lonely or no, I'm not lonely. But that turns out to be a strong predictor of health and happiness. In fact, around the world, as you mentioned, about a third of people on any given day would say that they feel lonely. And it's gotten to be such a big issue that, for example, the United Kingdom appointed a government minister of loneliness because they recognized that this was such a common issue that needed work. That's funny, a chief lonely officer. Yeah. Well, I did a solo episode four or four weeks ago and I covered this epidemic of loneliness and some of the statistics that I ended up finding

were just shocking. So Brazil is the most lonely of all countries and over 57% have acknowledged feeling lonely. There was another study that just ended in 2021 that examined 133 countries over a 20-year period and found just what you said to be true. That a third of the people that they surveyed came up with that response. And then R.P. recently did a review of adults in America and it showed over 45%. So the numbers are just staggering once you start looking at it. And it's important. It's not just a US thing. This is a global issue as you brought up that is it doesn't matter what little part of your width it doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. As you're saying, it's just people are feeling it now more than ever.

Yes. In fact, they did a survey. The Gallup organization did a survey of workplace loneliness, and they found that half of all CEOs report feeling lonely. So it's at all levels, as you say. So it's at all levels, as you say. One of the questions I wanted to ask was the original gentleman who were in this, most of them went into World War II. And so if you look at that body of men, they faced trauma very much like a lot of today's veterans have faced.

And we see this growing issue of veteran suicide, veteran issues with PTSD, etc. Did you find any correlation between trauma and their overall happiness and relationships that they had longer on? Yes, we did. My predecessors were really insightful in that they asked questions about trauma in 1947 when these young men came back from World War II. They asked all the symptoms of what we now recognize as PTSD, even though it hadn't been defined

as post-traumatic stress disorder back then. And we found that quite a number had been in combat situations. Quite a number had PTSD symptoms, nightmares, flashbacks, avoidance of things that reminded them of the traumatic events, and that quite a number of them then suffered of things that reminded them of the traumatic events, and that quite a number of them then suffered from anxiety, from depression. It was a time when people didn't talk about this at all. So as you may know, very few people

who come back from combat situations feel like they can talk about it, and particularly back in that generation. But some people had good relationships, for example, good marriages, good close friendships, and those seem to make a big difference in buffering them from the worst long-term effects them from the worst long-term effects of the trauma. And now we understand that it is other people and are warm connections with other people that can go a long way to helping survivors cope with PTSD. Yeah, I mean, I think you bring up a good point back then even when I served in the 90s,

PTSD wasn't even talked about. In fact, you were advised not to go to see anyone, one because of what other people in the unit would say, but because, two, it could impact your ability to deploy, in my case, my security clearance and other things. And so I think for generations, we were kind of taught to suppress this. I know when I talked to my deceased grandfather who fought in World War II and my dad, that their way of coping with it was just to never talk about it, to just suppress the memories. And I think we're doing a better job with this today, but I can tell you, having personally gone through it,

if you don't talk to anyone about it, if you're not expressing it, then eventually, you're gonna meet numbness like I did because it just boils up inside of you until everything starts crumbling apart around it. So I just wanted to bring that up because it was real for this generation, it's real for today's generation.

And if a listener's hearing us talk, my advice is to deal with it and don't let this thing linger. Absolutely. And the more people like you who are open about it and talk about it, the less stigma there will be, right? If people like you who are leaders and run podcasts and do all kinds of other public work, and I had this experience and I got good help and it can get better, that message is essential to helping

more people get the help they need. Well, I think one of the most fundamental questions that people come to this podcast for is not only how do I become my best self, but if I'm going to go after it, where should I place my time and energy? And I wanted to direct that at you because I think this is something that the book, if I had to summarize the whole aspect of it, is trying to answer. Yes, that's what we wrote the book about. That if you were gonna make one choice

to try to help yourself be happier and have a better life, just one choice, it would be to invest in your relationships. And in some ways it sounds obvious, it sounds trivial, but it's really important that what we find is that the people who take care of their relationships, who are more active in keeping in contact, who are more active, being engaged with other people, that those are the people who have better lives in so many ways. They get so much more support from others. Their bodies stay healthier.

What we've started talking about is what we call social fitness. Kind of like physical fitness. The idea is that when we think about physical fitness, if I go for a workout today or I have a good walk and I am and move my body, that's great. But I don't say to myself, okay, I've done that. I don't need to do that ever again. And it's the same with our relationships that actually our friendships don't just take care of themselves. Our family relationships, our intimate relationships, that they need attention and they need time.

That's what we've found in our study of all these lives. That's what we wrote the book about. The book is about all the different kinds of relationships in our lives, not just intimate relationships, but friendships, work, relation, casual relationships. The person you buy your coffee from it, Dunkin' Donuts, and what we talk about is what the science tells us both about what the benefits are of taking care of those relationships and then how to do it. Like how could you actually make choices today to

improve your relationships, to keep them strong? And so that's what the book is meant to do. What's interesting, I have talked often on this podcast about a concept I call transition points and similar to the transitions as a writer, you will know them between the different paragraphs that you write. I think we have these transition points in our lives between the major of milestones that end up occurring. Yet, we end up putting a lot of our focus on these big events, these things that seldom occur. And we put so much less effort on the transition points in between.

And I like in it too, when I was in the military, a transition point is that time that you're in a humvee going to the assignment that you have or the objective you have. And there's this natural tendency to let your guard down, because you're focused on that big event that's going to be able to happen. The same thing once you leave it. And what I found is it's in those moments when oftentimes people got hurt, people died, because your guard is down. And it's interesting because I've, as I mentioned, I've interviewed a ton of behavioral scientists

and social scientists, people like your period Harvard, Max Bezerman, Don Moore at Berkeley, Katie Melkman at Penn. And what all of them talk about, and you just alluded to it, is it's the micro choices that we make, and we make hundreds of thousands of them a day that ultimately determine our health, our success, our overall longevity, our happiness.

And I think it's such an important point to bring up. I just wanted to ask if there's anything you might want to add on that. Absolutely. It's those micro choices. So I'll give you an example at how this has affected my life. So my research actually has changed the way I live. I'm a professor, so I could spend all day every day doing homework. I always have papers to review or emails to answer.

As we all do, there's so many chores we could all do, right? And I have to stop and think, I haven't seen my friend Mike in several weeks. I need to get in touch with him. I need to ask him to go for a walk. And so what I've done is reminded myself to be proactive. It's that micro choice of, I'm not gonna spend all Saturday doing work on my computer. I'm gonna get out, go see my friend, do something both to get myself active and to connect more with a person

that I don't wanna lose touch with. And so I think those kinds of small choices, they also help us weather the big transition. So if we keep up our connections with people, then when a great big problem comes along, we have got people around to help us to give us moral support, to give us financial support sometimes when we need it or rides to the doctor, whatever it might be, that the more we keep our connections strong, the more resources we have when the hard times come.

This is the Passion Struct Podcast with our guest, Dr. Robert Waldenger, we'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. Here at that little chit-ching, that's the satisfying sound of another sale on Shopify. The all-in-one commerce platform trusted by millions of entrepreneurs to create their online store. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving mere mortals like you

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You'll find all the codes and URLs. All those things are there. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now back to my conversation with Dr. Robert Waldinger. Well, I was recently interviewing NYU professor Dolly Chug who studies the science of good people and she has a new book out called A More Just Future and in it she's really looking at biases and how biases impact the culture of a nation, they impact the culture of a family. And this is something that in chapter two, you tackle as well.

Why is every culture from the nation that I just mentioned to that inside a group of friends or a family partially invisible to its participants? That's such a good question. Why culture is partially invisible? I think of it in the same way I think of growing up in a family. It probably took a long time for you to get to the point

when you were a kid where you looked around and said, wow, this isn't the only way families can be. This isn't the only kind of dad you can have or mom or of that when we're young, families are our whole world. And it's like the air we breathe. Well, this is how it works. This is what families do.

And then as we grow up and we look around, we meet other people, we meet people from other kinds of families, we stop and reflect on our own family differently. Whoa, it wouldn't have to be this way. One of my sons came home from college after meeting lots of very different people at college, and he came home and said, Dad, we had a pretty boring childhood.

And I said, oh, I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm glad that there wasn't too much difficulty in care because he began to reflect on the culture of our home, right? So I think one of the things that's really helpful is to look at other cultures both in our own country because there are many different cultures, many different kinds of communities in our own country, but also to travel to other countries because you begin to see different ways that people live in different ways that they organize their lives. And when we do that, it helps us look back at our own lives and say, oh, this is how it

works here. It's just one of many possible ways that people can live their lives. So I think that it's a long way of answering your question, but the reason why culture is invisible or partly invisible is that we don't have a lot of opportunities to compare our own culture with other possible cultures. And the more we can do that, the more we both appreciate our own culture and can be constructively critical of some

of the things in our own culture that could be different and could be better. Yeah, well one thing I have definitely realized over this past year is that it is the victors who determine what history says. And I think the easiest example of that is to look at Native Americans and how differently if you have exposure to them, they will talk about history and what happened compared to what we've all been taught. And I think it's fundamental biases like that,

regardless of where you live, that affect this culture, and we become invisible to it, because that's what we've been taught to believe. Well, and it sounds like you were curious enough to talk to people from Native American cultures. Well, what was your experience like, and how do you look at our history, our shared history?

And I think that curiosity is a huge factor in helping us out of those cultural biases. If you can really genuinely want to know what's it like for these other people, and I think this is especially important now in this time when we are so polarized as a nation and people are deciding that other people are the enemy, that if we can turn that around and just be curious about how people see the world and how they see it differently and why, that it can go a long way to bridging some of these divides

and reducing some of the biases we have, that take us away from the fact that most of human life we have in common, and our experiences are much more in common than they are different. I think that's a great way to end that statement because it's absolutely true. And I wish everyone had the opportunity to go out and visit other cultures.

I've been lucky enough over the years I've been to over 45 different countries and most of the continents. So I've been able to see at times how fortunate we are to live where we live. In other cases, I've seen how in other cultures, things could be better than what we have here. So it's really something I wish more of us got to get exposure to.

Well, one of the fundamental questions I think that comes out of this book is, how much of our happiness is actually under our control? Great question. There is a social scientist, Sonia Lubamirski, who actually researched that question. And she estimates that about 40% is under our control. If you can even put a percentage on it. But her estimate is that about 40% is our genetics. So each of us has a temperament.

We've all met people who are kind of gloomy all the time. And we've met other people who are optimistic all the time, almost no matter what's happening. And then most of us are somewhere on a spectrum between eoers and triggers to use the Winnie the Pooh analogy of seeing the glass as half empty or half full. But I think what Lubamir's case works says is that maybe 40% of our happiness is under our control because we can create the conditions that promote happiness by being more active in promoting our own well-being,

and doing the things that we know help people thrive. And 40% is actually a lot. What is, what? Interestingly, Katie Melkman's research found that a similar number of 40% of the reasons why people face premature death is because of the life choices that they make. So it's an interesting correlation that I'd kind of just brought together.

Well, in chapter three, you cover the question of participants that were in the study, once they reached the age of 50, started to not see things or issues as important as they were when they were younger. Can you discuss why that was the case and how did they try to master these issues and you introduce West Travers in this chapter? So I was thinking he would be a good way to describe what happened. Well, a couple of reasons why we change our perspective in mid-life, one is through experience. So we've lived through a bunch of experiences and we often then realize that, gee, this thing that I thought was so important turned out to be

not that important. Or this thing I thought was going to be terrible turned out to be difficult, but actually have some good outcomes. So we've learned that life isn't always as cut and dried as we think it's going to be when we're in our 20s and 30s. The other thing that changes for us when we're in our 50s and even a little earlier is we become much more aware of the finiteness of life. We become much more aware of our own mortality.

That yeah, we know we're all going to die when we're younger, but most of us think, well, it's such a long way off, or maybe I'll be the exception to that rule. And then somehow, in midlife, in our 40s, 50s, 60s, the awareness of the limitation of time grows stronger. And what that does, instead of making us more depressed, it actually makes us prioritize our wellbeing. So it makes us not sweat the small stuff as much. Because you say life is short, do I really want to spend my time getting upset about this? And so we start putting away,

letting go of some of the more trivial things, and we start paying more attention to things that give us more lasting satisfaction and feel meaningful. And that's a very predictable psychological shift in the course of midlife, in the transition from young adulthood to later adulthood. Yeah, the other thing and maybe I'm not universal in this feeling, but as I have gotten older, I feel much greater calling to serving others and trying to impact society when in my younger years I was a lot more individualistic. Is that something that you found in the survey as well? Absolutely, that there comes a time in adult development where we begin to say, the world isn't just about me and not just that because that's not quite fair

that really partly in our younger years, in our 20s, for example, we're really asking the question, am I going to find work that I care about that means something to me? Am I going to find somebody to love and somebody who will love me? Those are big, important questions. And once a lot of that gets settled, then we begin to say, okay, what do I want to have live in the world because I'm here? And what do I want to have live on after I'm gone? Those are questions that we start to ask more when we're in middle age.

And so it's not surprising that you found that you really wanted to serve others in new ways as you got older. The same thing happened to me. So you know, for years, I've been publishing research papers in research journals and they're very technical. It seems like it's important to do and I'm glad because the science is important, but nobody reads those research journals. I mean, just a handful of people read those articles, people in my field. And I began to say that to myself, I need to bring

these research findings out to the world. I need to let people know that their science that tells us what helps us thrive. And so I began to have more of an intention to use your very helpful terminology. I wanted to live more intentionally to bring this science out to the world. And so thanks to people like you, I'm getting to do that. But it's a really important way of trying to serve a broader world. Well, as I look at servants who are trying to influence the world for the better, one of the people who comes top of mind for me is the Dalai Lama. And I understand you have a special place for him as well. And I was hoping you could tell the audience why. Well, I am a Buddhist.

Actually, I was raised Jewish and loved being culturally, but my spiritual home is Buddhism. And for me, it's Zen Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, is the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community. But I'm a huge admirer of him as a person and of what he teaches and he really teaches about taking care of other people. In fact, he has a quote that I love. He said, the wise selfish person takes care of other people.

And so what he means is that even if you're totally self-intested, what you get to realize is that taking care of other people brings so much goodness back to you that it's worth it, even if you're only interested in yourself. And I think what he teaches is this kind of expansive generosity toward the world that I so admire, and it's my attention to keep living more of in my own life.

Well, it's interesting you bring that up. I have had several people on the show who've actually met the Dalai Lama. Two of them that I'll bring up are Dr. David Vago who's a professor of neuroscience at Vanderbilt. And he is one of the foremost experts in the world on meditation. And it's interesting when he met the Dalai Lama, his holiness told him that his work was some of the most important that he has discovered and that it could change the world.

And then I talked to another David Yaden who is a scientist, also a neuroscientist, but he's at Johns Hopkins and he is studying self-transcendence and how do you make it happen? And it's interesting that the Dalai Lama in a private session he had with him as well hold him the same message that the work that you're doing, he manning he needs because people need to understand how to be self-actualized. But in both cases, he talked about generosity and he also talked about that true generosity comes when we fray ourselves to help others.

So I just wanted to bring that up because I think it ties into everything that we've been talking about. Yes. And the Dalai Lama knew that he could inspire people to do good work. And that's what he does. And I think what we want to do is keep inspiring each other to be generous in the world and to do the work that might change the world in these ways. Well, I had another guest, a previous on the show, who ties very much into your work. She studied your work heavily. And that is Dr. Cassie Holmes, who's a professor at UCLA, Anderson School of Business. And she released a great book this year, one of my favorites called Happier Hour.

And she's an expert on happiness and time management, but she alluded to that they're predictors of happiness. And in your book, you laid out a couple as well, and I was hoping you could discuss those with the audience. Yes, so the main predictors are what we've been talking about in terms of connections with others, that the warmer your connections are with others, the happier we tend to be. In addition, investment in things beyond the cell, that we find that people who really self that we find that people who really put their energy and their time into causes that they love,

into people and ideas that they care about, that those people tend to be more content with life, they feel they're having more meaningful lives, and then the other thing we know is that people who take time to refuel and replenish are happier. And so that means finding what replenishes you. So it might be time alone. For me, meditation really replenishes me. It fills my tank up again. For other people, it might be gardening or it might be basketball. It might be any number of things, but to take that time to make sure you create that time in your day and in your week to replenish

is a really important predictor of happiness. Well, throughout our entire discussion today, I think two themes have really come across. And one is you have to be conscious about the choices that you're making. And the other thing is you have to be intentional about the relationships that you're forming and ensuring that you're trying to build quality ones.

In chapter five, you start talking about attention. And I think attention and our ability to focus is one of the biggest things that's impacting generations right now. And it's interesting. I recently had Robin Sharma on the show and he said this quote, I'm paraphrasing it, but he said, you could either change the world

or you can pay attention to your phone. You can't do both. And my question out of that is, what are you finding is the impact of social media and this digital economy we're in on our ability to cultivate and maintain relationships? That's such a key question. And there needs to be a lot more research on this.

So we're in our infancy as researchers studying this, which is to say not a lot is known yet, but some things we're beginning to understand. So first of all, digimedia are not going away. And so the question is not Do we get rid of these things? But really how can we use them to enhance our well-being as opposed to Decrease our well-being one of the things we know is That these screens are designed to capture and hold our attention that the more they hold our attention The more money they make,

the more ads they sell. And so literally, it's a financial incentive for social media, for digital media to capture and hold us captive, hold our attention captive. What we know from research is that people who use social media actively to connect with other people and then to connect online, but also when they came to connecting real time, those people can be quite energized by it and they can be happier. But the people who use media passively, who doom scroll through somebody else's Instagram feeds, through somebody else's pictures of their beautiful vacations or fantastic dinners, those people get more depressed or more anxious. They feel like they're

missing out on life, they compare themselves negatively to others when we passively consume media. And so one of the things we're learning from research is that if we are more active and intentional in what we do with media, and then when we turn off our media, when we turn away from the screens as your other interviewer was saying, that those are really important decisions

to make all day long, like active decisions, intentional decisions. I'm going to use my screen now for this purpose, and then I'm going to stop and put it away. I'm going to do other things in the world. Yes, and I recently, myself, did a whole talk on, put your phone away because it's destroying your relationships. As you say, there needs to be a lot more research on this. What you're telling everyone is absolutely correct. Facebook has no desire in creating communities of people because that's not where they get their revenue.

Their revenue is driven by creating individuality and focusing on you. And since I own Instagram, same things happening there, we'll see what transpires with Twitter in the future under Elon Musk. Your last couple chapters start really examining the role of the family. And I could ask a ton of different questions here, but I'm gonna ask two for you.

The first is, what is the impact of family feuds on our happiness and our relationships? The impact of family feuds is terrible. That if you think about all the energy that we waste arguing with each other, family feuds, destroyed families, they destroy our health, they destroy our communities. And so, yes, disagreements are common. There are arguments and disagreements in families. It's inevitable. The question is how we work with this disagreements. And if we can

prevent them from becoming fused, these ongoing conflicts where people don't talk to each other, and they badmouth each other, all those things, that what we find is that the people who are the happiest are the people who avoid that, who sideststep that? Who mend fences, who resolve conflicts? Or who step away if a conflict can't be mended? Just step away with kindness rather than maintaining feuds. I mean, if you think about the feuds that are tearing apart our country right now, so much wasted energy, actually mostly about issues that

don't matter a lot to most people. The things that matter a lot to most people, like family and having a roof over our head and good food to eat and health care and education for our children, those things matter to everybody. And yet we're arguing about things that really are less important. Families do this as well. Families argue about who did what at Thanksgiving dinner. Families can argue about money and inheritance. When we know that in fact mostly those things matter less than having decent, if possible, warm connections with each other. So, to the extent that people can heal those rifts

or step away from family fused, it's a huge saver of energy and it's a huge benefit to our health and happiness. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a fairly popular song right now about a group called Band of Horses called the funeral. And I dug into what was he talking about. He resembles family gatherings to him as having to attend a funeral. So it's an interesting analogy.

Yeah, well, the flip side of this that I wanted to ask you is, why are family important when it comes to our happiness? Families are important because they can be our tribe in the best sense. They can be the people who will always have your back when you need somebody there. And we all need somebody there at many times in our lives. I would say we need that every day but certainly there are times for all

of us. When our study members were asked who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared? Some of them could list quite a few people, many of them family members. Some of them couldn't list a few people, many of them family members. Some of them couldn't list anybody, nobody on the planet who they could call in the middle of the night if they were sick or scared. And so I think what family can do for us, it can provide that safety net of people who will just be there if you need them. Even if you don't love everybody in your family equally well and some of them annoy you, some of those, many of those people will step up if you're ever in a pinch.

And that's what we don't want to lose if we can help it. Okay, and I'm gonna jump to the very end of your book, your last page for this final question. And that is, what is your advice for the listener on how they move further along their own path towards a good life? Well, the last page, as he tells you to do one small thing,

which is to think about someone in your life who has really been important to you and that you haven't told that to as much as you'd like to, that you haven is simply to stop, to reach out to them right now and tell them how much they mean to you. If you could do one little thing right now when you're done with this podcast, think about who you'd like to appreciate and reach out through a text or an email or a phone call or go over to their house. Just do that one thing and watch all the wonderful ripple effects that are likely to occur when you do that. Okay, and Dr. Waldinger, if there was one universal place that the listener could go to, if they want to learn more about your work, this book, etc. What would that be? Well, you could go to our book website, which is thegoodlifebook.com, but you could also

go to our study website. It's adultdevelopmentstudy.org. So adult development study is all one word and then dot ORG and you can go there and see some more about the study. You can even read some of our scientific papers if you're so inclined. Well this is an amazing book. I'm gonna just put it up here one more time and I wanted to tell the audience we have just touched the tip of the iceberg. I don't like to go through too much of the books because we both want you to buy them, but if you're a fan of Arthur Brooks

or Dan Pink or Susan Cain or many other great writers, this book is going to be right up your alley. With that, I just wanted to say thank you so much for giving us the honor and privilege of having you on the Passion Start podcast. Well, John, thank you. This was a really great interview. Thank you. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Robert, and I wanted to thank him, Simon and Schuster, and Alyssa Fortnato, for the honor of having him as a guest on the show. Links to all things Robert will be in the show notes at PassionStruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from

the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for our listeners. YouTube videos are at John R. Miles, where you can also find our clips at PassionStruck Clips. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm at John R. Miles, both at Instagram and Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Jennifer Edwards and Katie McClarry. And we discuss their brand new book, Bridge the Gap, breakthrough, communication skills to transform work relationships from challenging to collaborative.

I think this is a really simple and complex idea. I like to call it simplicity. So it's a lot to get there to say, I'm going to show up, I'm going to choose to be in the spirit of proactive communication and collaboration with another, even when I struggle to understand, like respect them, there may be some weird energy around us. I don't know how they're receiving me, but I'm going to choose to show up the best that I can in that moment. It's actually really hard to do because we're all wearing a human suit and we can't sit our human suit on and off and they're all of these what we call invisible forces that are constantly attacking our human suit. We have our brain, a dynamic that is, we talk about quite a bit in the book that our biology is constantly affecting how we show up. Fear, shame, worry, whether perceived or actual, it impacts how our prefrontal cortex makes meaning of the world.

The fee for this show is that you share it with family and friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who's looking for some keys to communication and collaboration, then definitely share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-passion struck. live life passion struck.