The One You Feed - Neil Pasricha on the Happiness Equation

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

Neil Pasricha is a New York Times bestselling author with books published in over a dozen languages. He’s spent 7 years (and counting!) on best-seller lists and his books have sold millions of copies. You may know his blog – 1000 Awesome Things – it’s won 2 Webby awards for the Best Blog in the World and has had over 50 million hits. His most recent book, The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything, is what we focus much of this interview on. You’ll learn really practical advice, grounded in research and science, on what you can do to be happier.Fin – Do you feel like you can never get everything on your to-do list done? Get a little extra help getting tasks crossed off with Fin, a digital personal assistant which can do things like book travel plans or find contractors to fix things around the house. Send Fin a couple of requests for free! Use the link www.fin.com/wolfAncestry DNA – give the gift of finding out your family history www.ancestry.com/wolf $59Quip – an electric toothbrush that makes brushing better at an affordable price $25 www.getquip.com/wolf get your first refill pack freeIn This Interview, Neil Pasricha and I Discuss…His book, The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have EverythingThe 9 critical steps in achieving the happiness equationThe 7 ways to be happy right nowThe benefits of 3 brisk 30-minute nature walks each weekThe power of random – or conscious – acts of kindnessA complete unplugWhy you should never retireSocial, Stimulation, StoryThe importance of structureThe bench test for all major life decisionsHis upcoming audible book on resilienceThe war between more and enoughNeil Pasricha LinksHomepageInstagramTwitterNeil’s New Audible ShowSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We cannot get into any deeper thinking, any deeper meaningful challenge, when we're constantly flinging between pings and dings all day. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,

and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow

us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. and love. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Neil Pasricha, a New York Times bestselling author. Neil's books have been published in over a dozen languages, and he's spent seven years and counting on bestseller lists and sold millions of copies. His first book, The Book of Awesome, was based on his blog, 1000 Awesome Things, which scored over 50 million hits and twice won the Webby Award for

the best blog in the world. His new book is The Happiness Equation. Want nothing and do anything equals have everything. Hi, Neil. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. We're going to discuss your most recent book called The Happiness Equation. Want nothing plus do anything equals have everything. Nothing plus do anything equals have everything. But before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at his grandmother and he says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, I find my bad wolf coming out sometimes, right? And usually when that happens, when I yell at my kids or when I get into a fight with my wife or when I'm rude over email to somebody that works for me,

I take a step back and you know what I always notice is that I have failed to feed the good wolf. I have failed to get a good night's sleep or go to the gym or eat nutritious and healthy food or eat every meal. And that's self-care, feeding that good wolf. It takes time, right? So if you subtract that time from a day when you think you have a busy day, you suddenly are like, I don't got time to do that. But then you have the anxiety bubbling up, the low resilience and the poor decision-making. So for me, it's a reminder to always take care of myself

first before I take care of others. Even if those things appear to take time, they're actually just building in more effective use of my time later. That's such an important point. And it's a hard lesson that I think I learn and then I have to learn again and I have to learn again. But those fundamentals, you know, just like you said, sleeping well, exercising, eating well, you know, for me, meditation, like, those are like just the core fundamentals to me doing everything else well. And I surely wish there were easier fundamentals than those, but they are what they are. Yeah, absolutely. And I think all those fundamentals, as you just listed them, are also ensconced in little behaviors, right? So for me, sleeping well includes no screens an hour before bedtime. It includes having a good book of fiction literally at my bedside table,

so I have something to clear my mind before bed. It means having my eye patch or at least good blinds that are closed. It means no screens when I wake up in the morning for an. Like there's all these elements that include good sleep. So I can't just be like, oh, I'm going to go to bed at 10. It works. I have to remember the little habits and behaviors that go along with creating it. Yep. I agree completely. Sleep has been a little bit of a problem for me. I have pretty good sleep hygiene and all that, but I also have a condition called restless legs and they have just been coming back lately and it has been a real drag. But that's one of those times that like all the advice about sleep starts to backfire a little bit because you're like, I know it's so important and I'm

not sleeping. Oh my God. You know, so I have to be like, all right, it is good to sleep. It's important, but I'm not, you know, I'm not going to die because I'm getting less sleep. And again, you know, I'm doing everything I can to sort of figure it out. Well, let's go into your book. You have nine different steps that you think are sort of critical to getting this, you know, the happiness equation. And we're not going to go through all of those, but we're going to get through some of them that I thought were particularly interesting. And I wanted to start with, you know, you've got these nine different things, but you've got, you've also got, you're like the Buddha, you got all kinds of lists, seven ways to be happy right now.

And there were just a couple of those I wanted to hit. And the first was the idea of three walks. Mm-hmm. Okay. Basically what happened was this guy named Michael Babiak down in Pennsylvania did this incredible research study and he showed that doing three brisk 30-minute nature walks a week actually outperformed a test group who was taking antidepressants and outperformed a second test group who was doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants. And you're like, what? How is that possible? How could just walking alone outperform the other two groups? Well, you know what? If I'm ever in a large audience, I'm always like, well, who here has a dog? And people put up their hand. And you're like, do you ever have to walk your dog at 10 o'clock at night in the middle

of winter and your partner's in a Netflix coma? And you're like, whose stupid dog is this? But by the time you get around the block, after putting on your hat and your gloves and your mitts and everything, by the time you get around the block and you get home, you're re-energized. You're like ready to build a snowman. And that's what the study says. The two key words, of course, are brisk and nature.

So a walk through a forest is better than a mall. And Eric, you've probably been following this new research that's been coming out this year that's saying, hey, actually, there's this kind of like chemical released by trees that we didn't know much about before called phytocins, P-H-Y-T-O-C-I-N. And they're saying that this chemical actually reduces cortisol or the stress hormone in our body. So there's over a thousand licensed forest bathers in the U.S. now that will take you kind of on a meditative forest bathing trip through the forest. I mean seriously, we used to call them hikers. Which is a term I prefer, but. But the point is like, literally, you just got to be somewhere in nature. You got to be somewhere

in nature. And so that's the three walks. You said, what's one, you know, I had seven in the book. Well, that's one of them. All the ones I have in the book and the happiness equation are 30 minutes or less. And that is one of them. Just get out in nature three times a week. so hugely important for me and one of the first to go as I get busy. Like I'm pretty good about the diet, the exercise, the meditation. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm 90% adherence to what my goals are or, or more, you know, over a long period of time. But nature is the first one to go as I start to get busy and all of a sudden be like, I haven't done that in a month. Yeah. It's just, it's one to watch for for me. Well, we let it slip. Nature doesn't say anything when you ignore it.

You know, there's nothing that comes at you and sort of reminds you. I had a friend who worked in Manhattan and was totally stressed out, anxious, couldn't sleep, working for one of the huge, big, famous kind of companies that won't kind of out him. And he went to the in-house kind of consulting company therapist and she said, I want you to collect three souvenirs from nature every day and just leave them on your desk at work. And he said, literally the act of looking for a really nice crisp maple leaf or a certain rounded stone from the edge of a fountain on his way to work in Manhattan was so grounding and centering amongst the sort of concrete jungle. That is a great one. I've never heard of that one before. That's a really, really good one. It reminds me of another sort of thing, which is to take at least one or two

beautiful pictures a day, right? Because then your eye is tuned towards beauty. But that's just another variation that I think is a great one. Totally. Absolutely. All right, let's talk about, you know, this is another one that is pretty commonly known, but I want to hit on it again because it seems like I heard a lot about it for a while and then I don't hear as much recently is, you know, random acts of kindness. So, Sanya Lubomirsky, really famous kind of kingpin in the positive psychology world at Stanford and now at the

University of California, she published an amazing book called The How of Happiness. And one of the studies she did was showing that performing five, you know, I call them random acts sometimes, but really they're more conscious acts of kindness a week actually is shown to increase your happiness more than almost anything else. And the interesting reason why, you probe into this, you're like, okay, holding a door for somebody, buying a coffee for my doorman, bringing flowers home for my husband or wife, why? Why does it make you feel happier? The amazing, interesting insight from the study is because your own ego fills you up with the positive feedback. So when you're

holding that door for everybody leaving a meeting room, or you buy coffee for your doorman, and he says, thank you so much. For the rest of the day, you think, I'm awesome. I am super nice. I am the friendliest, nicest, caringest guy around. And that self-fulfilling kind of statement that you're saying to yourself makes you happy for the rest of the day. Is there any data in those studies about it being important to remember it or dwell on it or, you know, think about it during the day? Because it's one of those things that I do notice, like I do it and it feels good, but they just kind of go by pretty quickly for me. Like I do it and then I'm off to kind of the next thing. go by pretty quickly for me. Like I do it and then I'm off to kind of the next thing. And I'm also curious whether any of the studies you've read have anything to do with that the more you do it,

the less efficacy it has. Which I'm not saying like, oh, you know, start cutting down on your kindness so each one feels better. But I'm just kind of curious, like, you know, if you're somebody who always holds the door, do you really get much of a boost out of doing that if you do it all of the time? Well, it's interesting you ask that question because most of the studies are over a very short time frame, right? Like a week, two weeks, three weeks, that type of thing. A really famous one that we've seen is with employees at Google, where we actually had them put a little reminder in their calendars every single morning at 9am. And for your listeners in a corporate setting, they might find this interesting.

What was the reminder for? And by the way, when you put a reminder at 9 a.m., it doesn't block your calendar. It's not like 9 to 9.30 or 9 to 10. It's just a ding, you know, pops up. And all it says is, write a three-sentence email to an old boss or coworker. So you say, you know, hi, Sonia.

You may not, you know, this is Neil. You may not remember this, but five years ago when I was just a new person on board at the company, you told me to talk less in meetings and try to listen before speaking. I want to let you know I'm still doing that today. Thank you so much. Neil, that's it. A three sentence email thanking an old boss or coworker for something they taught you over time. And why does that work? Because I don't know what your email response rate is like, Eric, but mine is like, I don't know, 50%.

Well, it's 100% on these emails. When you write a thank you to somebody, they always write back within an hour saying, oh my gosh, you really touched me. You made my day. And you feel good all day. So we had the Google employees do this for 21 days, three weeks. And what do you notice? No surprise, massive uptick on their happiness levels, right? Because now you're going through the day thinking there's someone out there who's thanking,

who's thanked me back. I feel good about myself. I recognize I learned a lesson, you know, along the way. And it adds this positive glow throughout the day. Yeah, that's a very interesting study for sure. Again, you've got seven ways to be happy that take less than 30 minutes. We've covered a couple. Let's talk about a complete unplug. I'm laughing because this seems to be the biggest problem we have in the world right now. Okay, so a couple stats before we jump into this one. Just over five years ago, the average person used their smartphone for 18 minutes a day. This year, 2018, the most recent data I've seen says that we are using our smartphones now for four hours and 20

minutes a day. In fact, according to a research company called Descore, based in the US, we now touch our cell phones over 2,500 times a day, which is more like a constant fondle, right? And if you are as obsessed with your phone as I am, as everybody is, I highly recommend you download an app called Moment, M-O-M-E-N-T, Moment. Because all this app does is every single day at noon, it just tells you what your screen time was the day before. That's it. All it does is tell you what it was. And so if you follow Peter Drucker's old adage, what gets measured gets managed. You won't be surprised to learn that people who use Moment actually reduce their screen time by something like 18%,

just by having this app. So why does a complete unplug actually work? Well, it means, and what does it mean, first of all? It means when you get home after work or when you check in to your family on the weekend, whenever that is, put your phone on airplane mode, plug it into the basement, and do not check it until the next day. I mean, just even getting it, Eric, even just getting it out of the bedrooms is kind of a win these days, right? Everyone's like, it's my alarm clock. I need it. I'm like, go to Walmart, buy a $10 alarm clock, you know, because what's happening right now is our brains are constantly distracted, we are losing our ability to focus, we are lowering our attention spans, and we cannot get into any deeper thinking, any deeper project work, any deeper meaningful challenge when we're

constantly flinging between pings and dings all day. Therefore, at the end of the day, where all you're doing is bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks, which is the actual language the researchers use, bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching, you don't feel like you got anything done. And that's what actually is reducing our happiness. It's not the actual things that we're looking at on our phone. It's the fact that at the end of that, we don't feel like anything happened. You click on enough hyperlinks, you get so many dopamine doses of pleasure. And at the end, you're like, oh my gosh, it's 10.30 p.m. Where did the last hour or two hours go? I just got sucked in. Right. And I don't remember any of it. I don't remember any of it. There's nothing long-lasting. Meanwhile, I have this, like, dusty book on my bedside table that I've been meaning to read, and I'm still on page 14.

Meanwhile, my child is downstairs, like, building a block tower, and, like, it would have been fun to spend two hours playing with my kid, and just ignored him because of because of instagram like you you get all these disgusting emotions you know i don't want to judge the emotions i've been there that's why i'm labeling them but it's like the complete unplug is the exact opposite of that it's putting the phone away shuttering it and a great um hashtag to follow for anyone interested in this is called hashtag device free dinner. There's this big movement happening right now on the internet. They're just saying, can everyone just put their devices away for dinner? It sounds like a return to Leave it to Beaver, but we've just come so far away from that that we need to have a hashtag for it. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

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Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. You mentioned Moment is such an interesting app because A, it'll tell you how much screen time you have.

The other interesting stat it has is how often, how many times did you pick up your phone, which is sort of staggering. You're like, wow, I picked that thing up 30 times in an hour? Like, that's every two minutes, you know? And the other thing I like about Moment, if you actually, I think you might have to pay for this version of it, but you can go in and put things that are screen time that you consider valid. You could take those out of what's counted. So for example, if I'm using my phone to read a book, right? I can take that time out of the screen time because I feel like, well, that's time. That's not poor use of time, right?

And so you can make some of those judgments yourself. But I love that app. Yeah, can I just go on like a little extended, tiny rant on the cell phone thing here right now? Because I didn't cover this in the Happy Screen. But as you probably know, Eric, I have this podcast, it's called Three Books. And it's all about getting rid of devices

and focusing on reading actual real books again. And all I do on the podcast is try to uncover the three most formative books of inspiring people. Why am I focusing on that? Because I hate cell phones. They have three problems, and they all start with the letter P. Physical, psychological, and physiological. What's the physical problem of cell phones? Well, when you tilt your head down to look at your phone, you add 60 pounds of pressure to your spine.

when you tilt your head down to look at your phone, you add 60 pounds of pressure to your spine. I went to the physiotherapist last year for my thumb. Literally, my right thumb stopped working. I couldn't bend it. It hurt so much. And what my physiotherapist said to me was, all we do is thumbs now. You ever see a kid with a cast on their arm and leg anymore? No. They just have bags under their eyes and broken thumbs. So there's a huge physical problem with phones. The second one is psychological. You're always online comparing your director's cut life with everybody else's greatest hits.

You know, no matter what you're eating for dinner, this amazing homemade lasagna, like you go on Instagram, someone's at a lobster buffet in the Maldives, right? Everyone else is doing something cooler. And it's impossible to be the best anymore. You can't be the best anything. You can't be the best high school basketball player because there's someone better.

You can't even be the best person in video games. This is depressing to me. As a kid, I was like, I could get to the end of Mario 3 or Contra. And now it's like, now there's someone who defeated the entire game on YouTube in 12 seconds, right? So psychologically, you're just never good enough. And the third problem is physiological. And I mentioned earlier about the no screens before bed.

Well, this is based on research from Australia that's showing that when you expose your brain to bright screens within one hour of bedtime, physiologically, your body doesn't produce melatonin overnight. It's the sleep hormone. So you have a less restful sleep. What does that mean? It means when you wake up the next morning, you have lower resilience for the next day. You have less energy to deflect microaggressions on social media. You get a little snappier in meetings. You might yell at your wife or husband because you haven't rested your body yet. And so when you're not rested, what do you look at in the morning? What did Trump tweet? Like you're interested because you don't have the resilience to focus on something deeper. So we've got these three huge piece of problems with cell phones and it's really, really troubling.

And so device-free dinner is one. Plugging your phone in the basement is another one. No screens an hour before bed is a third. And my biggest advice of all is just live in airplane mode. Turn that entire device from a push device, which sends you alerts and texts and notifications all day, into a 100% pull-based device, where once or twice a day, you consciously exit out of airplane mode, face the barrage of alerts and notifications, recognize that none of them are very important, and then go back into airplane mode. Yeah, I survive on do not disturb mode. I mean, I am on it very, very often. You know, just put the thing on do not disturb for a few hours, and I do it constantly. And that's why you have a podcast with 10 million downloads. Like seriously,

with hundreds of, no, I'm serious. That's why you have that. You've created this incredible podcast because you're not being disturbed. Yeah. So question for you around the screen light situation before bed, you know, the phone, some of the newer phones have night shift mode, that takes that blue light out. And I'm really curious if you've seen anything about how that works. And the reason I ask is that I do most of the reading for the show on my Kindle because I take notes. It's just the amount of time it saves me is dramatic, right? Because I just highlight it and then I've just got a whole process built around it. But I also do worry, like, am I exposing myself to screens more than I should before bed? You know, I've got the night shift mode. I just haven't heard anything about whether that actually works. worry, like, am I exposing myself to screens more than I should before bed? You know, I've got the

night shift mode. I just haven't heard anything about whether that actually works. Yeah. And it's, thank God that we have more awareness around it. And I think, you know, blue light and there's red light and this yellow light, you know, all these things are helpful aids. They sort of reduce the, what you're, what the worst case scenario is, was like a really blindingly bright white screen in your face, which tells your primal brain that it's daytime. Right, right. So I'm awake.

But I'm just going to tell you my solution. And I'm not comparing or contrasting, but this is where I've gotten to, is that I've switched entirely to analog books, like pretty much 100%. And I've purchased a red reading light that I wear on my forehead like a crazy person

because my wife goes to bed. David Sedaris just told me in an episode of Three Books, he said he picks garbage on the side of the road for 8 to 12 hours a day. David Sedaris. I know. It's a crazy thing.

Your craziness is correlated to the number of things you wear on your head. David Sedaris. Yeah, no, I know. It's a crazy thing, right? And he's like, yeah, he's like, you know, your craziness is correlated to the number of things you wear on your head. And he has like a light and a hat and stuff. And I was like, yeah, I guess I'm the same because I have a red, like essentially camping light that I wear on my forehead because the research I've done shows that it's not as bad for my brain as a white light. So I have a red reading light on an analog book for typically one to two hours before I fall asleep, often with the book on top of me. And it's almost always fiction, by the way. I read nonfiction in the morning and fiction at night. Yeah. Oh, if I'm reading fiction, I try to almost always have the book. I just prefer the physical book.

But just like I said, for the show and all the reading I do, it's just such a, the Kindle is such an amazing device for that. Okay, let's change gears here now to one of your nine sections in the book. One is called Never Retire. And I love this one because it rings so true to me. And you've got a quote in there, a woman who's sort of saying like, you know, a lot of dogs are working dogs, like they have to work to be happy. And she describes herself as a working dog. And I realized like, that's me to such an extent that like, I feel like I want to be doing things that are meaningful.

And when I'm not, I don't feel so happy. And, but you kind of talk about, it was fascinating to me that the concept of where retirement came from, when it came from and what its purpose was and what it did. So you have picked up on, of the nine secrets in the happiness equation, you have just picked the most controversial one by far. So I'm glad you picked it because it's a provocative conversation. Why did I go and rail against retirement? By the way, I'm living in a culture, in a society, in my East Indian culture. I'm East Indian. I'm Canadian. I live in Toronto. Everywhere you look, it's promoting retirement, right? In my family, on TV, it's about freedom. It's about quitting early, retiring early, all that stuff. And I'm like, no, this entire thing is backwards. And to prove it, I went into the research, okay?

Where did the phrase retirement come from? It came from the late 1800s in Germany, when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck declared that anybody over age 65 who was infirm, like they weren't able to work, could, if they wanted to, so it was not mandatory, it was optional, leave the workforce and receive a small amount of money from the state. Three interesting things about that announcement. First of all, he made up the number 65. And the only relevance of that number was that the average lifespan was 67. Like penicillin wasn't invented for 40 more years, right? Like people lived to 67.

It's like saying 90 now, you know? So that's the first thing. The second thing is youth unemployment in Germany at the time was in like – it was like between 20 and 30 percent. So he had a huge like political problem, which is that young people had no work. So he was also trying to move people out of the system to make jobs. What happened? Every Western country followed that number, 65. Like the 1935 U.S. Social Security Act. I'm in Canada.

We followed it too. England, whatever. Everyone copied that number, 65. So in the Western world, 65 is this arbitrary number which bears no connection to our lifespan anymore, which has extended another 20, 30 years. And it presumes a few things. It presumes that we want to leave the workforce. It presumes that we can afford to. And it presumes that we can afford to pay others to do it. Okay. So then I zoomed out again. I'm like, wait a minute. Is this like, let's go back to first principles. Let's look around the world. What do you find when you look around the world? You find societies in Eastern cultures that are

healthier and happier than ours, who live longer than ours. For example, the famous blue zone of Okinawa, Japan. And when I say blue zone, I'm citing a national geographic study called the Blue Zones by Dan Buechner. So you go look at Okinawa, Japan. They live seven years longer than we do, Eric. That's a lot longer, seven extra years of average lifespan. And then you look in their culture, and guess what? They don't even have a word for retirement. Literally no word in their language describes the concept of leaving work completely. It doesn't even exist. the concept of leaving work completely. Doesn't even exist. Instead, they have a different word there. It's called ikigai, which is spelled I-K-I-G-A-I, ikigai. And it roughly translates as the reason you get out of bed in the morning. So it turns out you don't actually want to retire.

You actually just want to be doing something that you love. And I argue in the happiness equation that you need what I call the three S's. They are social, like having friends and a connection point at work. The stimulation, second S, stimulation of always learning something new. And the third S, which I call story, because icky guy was an I and I wanted to start with S, which means you have a reason to get up in the morning. You have like a, you're doing something that you couldn't do by yourself. It's like most comparable is the company's purpose, right? Or mission statement. So if you work at Google, you're organizing the world's information. If you work for Wikipedia, you're giving the sum of human

knowledge to every earthling for free. If you're working for the Red Cross, you're creating health and troubling situations. So whatever it is, every company has some gigantic high-level purpose that they couldn't do without all the people working for them. And if you're not working for a for-profit organization, fine. You probably are, maybe you're part of the community or you're helping spread literacy or you're, you know, whatever, connecting people through a coffee shop. It could be anything. But those three S's of social, stimulation, and story are actually what we're craving. We do not actually want to retire. We just want to do work we love right till the very end.

Right. You know, when I think of retirement, I think of like, oh God, I can do all those other things that seem so meaningful that I don't have time to do. I think the other S, and I feel like I maybe didn't include it in the three S's, but was in the book in other different places is the S of structure, right? That's one of the things that work does. And whether that, again, whether that work is the work you do to get paid, whether that is after you've retired, the volunteer work you do, or, you know, anything that you do, it provides a structure, you know, and what I noticed with people, you know, I do a lot, a lot of coaching work with people, and boy, the people that don't have structure, externally enforced structure, have to work really hard to create an internal structure for their own lives, because without any structure, we get lost, you know, I always say structure liberates. So I think that's the other important piece to why having something to do that matters to you at any age is so important.

Totally. And I 100% agree. It also takes an awful lot of pressure. You look around, you're like, I'm saving up for this. I'm saving up for that. I'm putting away 10% of my income. You're like, are you crazy? Why don't you just abandon that concept and realize that. And by the way, can I just also add in here,

fortune magazine has done a study that shows the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year that we are born and the year that we retire. And almost everyone I talked to knows like some distant uncle or a brother-in-law that like retired in that year, they had a heart attack. You know, like it's a commonly held story in our culture that once somebody loses their sense of purpose, their sense of connection, their sense of learning, they lose themselves as well. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

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how to eat well, right? It's just like, oh my God. I mean, you know, every time you turn around, somebody's got a different opinion. You should do this. You shouldn't do that. You should, you know, you mentioned in the book reading on one day in the New York times, a study that says vitamin D supplements don't do any good, right? Waste of money. And then the next day, the Toronto star has, you know, here's all the benefits of taking vitamin D. And then in the book, you go through and you list all these, I thought this was great, you list all these cliches. And that for almost every cliche we have, we have another cliche that's almost exactly its opposite. And I just thought that was so great.

So let's just talk a little bit about how all advice conflicts and how do you recommend people find their way through this morass? First of all, the interesting thing I discovered while researching this was that cliché is actually a French word, as maybe you know, because it sounds French. But basically, in old printing presses, a cliché was an actual physical metal printing plate, which also used to be called a stereotype. And over time, it made sense to cast commonly used phrases on one single slug of metal instead of letter by letter. So a cliche was literally a collection of words used together often, okay? So then I started looking up what we call cliches today, this most kind of timeless advice of all. And sure enough,

kind of timeless advice of all. And sure enough, every single cliche you find has an equal and exact opposite. So birds of a feather flock together, or opposites attract, or there's clothes make the man, or you can't judge a book by its cover. There's absence makes the heart grow fonder. And then there's out of sight, out of mind. There's nothing ventured, nothing gained, or better safe than sorry. There's you get what you pay for, the best things in life are free. It goes on and on. The good things come to those who wait. The early bird gets the worm. And this is my favorite one, the pen is mightier than the sword, or actions speak louder than words. And it's like, suddenly they look flimsy, right? And so then this is a real problem because I'm in this self-help universe, right? Like we're

talking about the happiness equation. I've got a whole new book coming out all about resilience right now. And like, I'm in this self-help ghetto and it's lots of snake oil salesmen, right? Like, it's a lot of like, do this, do that, do this, do that. You know, be vegan, be paleo, as you said. There's all these exact opposite things. And by the way, you know, my wife, Leslie, is expecting. It's even worse in the parenting world. You know, it's sleep with your baby. Never sleep with your baby. Only breastfeed. Don't breastfeed. Like, don't worry about breastfeeding. Like, it's just nonstop. So, what do what do you do well you have to put yourself in situations where you can confidently test things yourself so one of my favorite examples of this is something i call the bench test so rather than following advice you just do the bench test

what is the bench test my buddy fred is super smart and he got into like every ivy league school and if you go on if you are in the same boat and you get into every Ivy League school, you go visit Harvard and you go visit Princeton, you go visit Yale, and what do they do? They give you a tour of campus. This is the classic thing. It's like, here's the residences and here's the gym. And you're like, I'm evaluating which school to spend my four years in based on how new the treadmills are? Like, it's really weird. So my friend Fred came up with this idea called the bench test. He drove to all the Ivy League schools that he got into, and he found a bench in the middle of campus, and he sat there for an hour

in each one. All he was doing was patiently listening to and observing the conversations around him, the people's mannerisms, the sense of culture. And he thought, really, my four years at this school is going to be a sum of all these conversations. So where do I feel my heart connects most, right? So in his case, it was Princeton. He went to Princeton. He met the love of his life. He met his best friends. He's happily, blah, blah, blah. Everything's great. And so why do I mention the bench test? Because when you're going for a job interview, you can call it the office tour test. I was in HR for 10 years at Walmart. Hardly anyone ever asked me for a tour of the office.

But when you walk around the office, you see, do people say hi in the hallways? How is it structured? Is there a hierarchy that's clear? What do people dress like? Like, you notice all that stuff. And if you're thinking buying a house, it's called the sidewalk test, right? Like don't just visit the house, like walk around the neighborhood and almost every situation people are like, well, I, you know, my parents won't let me live with my boyfriend or girlfriend

like cultural culturally. And I'm like, go on a trip together. Like there's a version of the bench test for almost every major life decision you encounter. I think that's a great one. Spending time like that and learning to trust your own intuition is so important. The other thing that I find really helpful is to look for the commonality. So if I look at the diet stuff, right? And I look at eat a ketogenic diet, eat a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a paleo diet. What I look at, what they all agree on is way less processed food, eat whole foods. And I'm like, okay, that seems like, okay, here's a point of commonality. You

know? Um, I also love when I see modern science proving something that's been part of a long-term, uh, wisdom tradition. Cause I'm going, all right, I'm getting it confirmed by both ends. It's stuck around for this many thousands of years and there's all this stuff to it. And science is saying, look, this seems to be really good. I'm like, all right, that's a double confirmation. So those are a couple of things that I also do. And then I think ultimately it's just realizing, there is no one right answer to anything. I mean, again, if we want to get very specific about is there a right answer to whether there's climate change, or is there a right answer to. My son and I did this with school. I was like, you know, do the best you can to make the best decision you can. But you know what? There's pros and cons to every one of these places and every one of these things. So just do the best you can and then realize that there isn't the right answer. There's just the one you chose.

Yeah, my dad always used to say growing up, the best decision is the one you made. Yeah, that's great. My dad always used to say growing up, the best decision is the one you made. Yeah, that's great. He'd always say that. And in the happiness equation, I quote this quote from Charles Varley in 1872, which I love saying, and I don't want to take credit for it. And the quote is, when we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice. Yeah, that's great. And I remember that.

If I'm like, oh, do you think I should buy this or not? I'm like, oh, I'm just looking for someone else to tell me that I should, you know, or shouldn't. Like, I'm just literally looking for someone to agree with a thought I'm not willing to even tell myself. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, we are coming near the end of time. You and I are going to have a post-show conversation where we talk about your upcoming audible book on resilience and resilience is something I've been so interested in lately. Like, you know, how is it that some people have really difficult things happen and they turn that into

positive or they survive or they come out stronger and lots of other people get beaten or broken. So we're going to discuss resilience in the post-show conversation. Listeners, if you're interested in that, oneyoufeed.net slash support, you can get access to all of those. But for the last part of this conversation, I want to talk about something you say in the book. You say that, you know, we have a few different wars going on inside of us, right? We started the show with the parable, you know, battle between good wolf and bad wolf, right? We started the show with the parable, you know, battle between good wolf and bad wolf, right? But one that you use is the war between more and enough.

And I thought we could hit that kind of on our way out here. Yeah, exactly. Okay. My argument is that we used to live in a culture of enough. So for hundreds of thousands of years, the history of our species, all you needed was enough. You scrounged for enough. You tried to get enough to eat. You hoped to find enough of a mate that you could mate with of the 17 people you met in your life. One of them was, you know what I'm saying? You literally needed enough. And then something

happened, which is that in the late 1800s, there was a huge cultural shift, and we switched to this culture of more. Why did that happen? Because really the big shift that was happening was the invention of appliances like the fridge and the washing machine and the dishwasher. These appliances took out so much time and so much labor that was in our days, and suddenly we had conspicuous consumption came into fashion and like, you know, showing off wealth and all these things that didn't happen before. And a very famous comic strip was developed around this time called Keeping Up With The Joneses, which is where the phrase is actually from.

And it ended up becoming the longest running comic strip in the world at the time, ran for like 30 years and thousands of papers and all this stuff, because it was about this idea that we're now going into this culture of more. We have to have more. And the way I kind of close off the section is by actually quoting Kurt Vonnegut, who I know is one of your favorite authors, when his friend Joseph Heller died. So Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, died. Kurt Vonnegut published a very

strange obituary of him, The New Yorker. And I say strange because it was really just like a few sentences. He said, true story, word of honor. At a billionaire hedge fund's party on Shelter Island, Joseph Heller and I kind of went as special guests. And I said to Joe, hey, how do you feel having written one of the most prominent works of literature in the 20th century? How do you feel about the fact that this guy made more in a day or a month or whatever it is than you've made over your entire life? And Joseph Heller said, it's true, but I'll have one thing that he'll never have. And Kervani said, well, whatever could that be? And Joseph Heller said, the knowledge that I have, enough. And what I'm arguing for in the happiness equation is a return

to the awareness of how much we need versus how much we want. It is a possible tool to save us from so many of the ills that we have today, tying together our conversation about cell phones, social media, psychological addiction on social media. It ties together like finding purpose and retirement. It all comes back to thinking for yourself, what is enough to me? How can I articulate it and how can I define that? And you recognize it's a lot less than you probably already have. Yeah, that's such a great place to end the conversation and bring it around full circle. You know, a lot of the show is about just being conscious about what we think, what we choose, what our brain is doing. And that is one of those fundamental questions, I think that we can come back to over and over again is, do I have enough? And it's

correlate there is one that you talk when we talked about the seven different things you can do in less than 30 minutes, right? One of them of them's gratitude right which is we just hear over and over and over again but again we hear it over and over again because it works and gratitude is is a form of reflecting on i have enough or even more than that like you know that i have enough and i and there's lots of wonderful things right within where I'm at. Beautiful and an incredible way to remind me that I should be thinking about that the same way you do. Well, that's why I do every one of these interviews, because I need them. Well, thanks, Neil, so much.

Like I mentioned, you and I are going to continue talking a little bit more about resilience. But thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Absolutely. My pleasure, Eric. And I always say to the people at the very, very end of any podcast, these are my favorite people in the entire world. They really are. And so if anyone listening wants to drop me a line,

I'm just at neilatglobalhappiness.org, neilatglobalhappiness.org. And the reason I throw that out there is just because, like I said, the people who listen to podcasts all the way to the very end, especially on my favorite shows, are my favorite people to meet around the world, and I always love the connections.

Wonderful. And we'll have links in the show notes to your book, your website, and we'll have links also for your new Audible program that we're going to discuss here in the post-show. So thanks, Neil. Thank you. Bye. was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over

to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com.

And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B,

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