The School of Greatness - 780 Help Others and Yourself with Will MacAskill

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

DO GOOD ALL THE TIME. Some people have an idea of giving that is not sustainable. You can’t self-sacrifice endlessly to help others. You also have to take care of yourself. Giving can be a win/win situation. In fact, it should be. Helping the world is only worth it if you are also helping yourself. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Will Macaskill where he shared this idea as one of his principles of effective altruism. William MacAskill is a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He is also the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, the co-founder and vice-president of Giving What We Can, and the co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism. Learn how to help others in the most meaningful way in Episode 780. In This Episode You Will Learn: One of the core principles of effective altruism (2:00) How to create a win/win while making an impact (3:00) Why additional income doesn’t make you happier (4:00) How to give without sacrificing a lot (5:00) Follow me on: instagram: @lewishowes twitter: @lewishowes

This is 5-Minute Friday! Our guest today is Jack Canfield. Now, Jack is an incredible guy. I've had him on before. It was an extremely successful episode. We'll have that linked up as well. And he knows what motivates, drives, and inspires people to do the impossible. He's a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance. He's also the co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and author of The Success Principles. The problem with rehab is that you've got to, well, first of all, AA, somewhere about a 20%, if you can believe the statistics, recovery.

Only 20% of people go, keep going. 20% of people go to AA, keep going. Yeah. Gotcha. And that number is suspect because we don't know how clear it is. But let's give it to them. Rehab, 15% to 30%, and that's also a suspect because there's no real long-term longitudinal studies. You're talking about recover or 15 to 20%? Recover, that's what they say. Rehab. But we have 80%, 79.5% to be exact recovery rate after five

years still sober from the first coaching program. And now after the book, it's, you know, when we did the beta test, four to five months, still sober. So the reality is that with, with rehab, you go there, rehab has some challenges. There are some good rehab centers, like there's good therapists, there's bad therapists, but a lot of rehab centers, especially the ones with places like Malibu and places, they're basically real estate investment opportunities. I'm going to buy this big mansion. It's worth 6 million in 10 years, it'll be $12 million. And you're going to pay my mortgage every month because you're charging me $30,000 for the 12 or 15 people there. And the staff, other than your therapist for a week, once a week for a therapist, once a week for a counselor, you have a 12-step meeting every day, maybe a yoga class, maybe get a massage. Now you got like 13 hours left.

What do you do the rest of the time? What do you do? And you the time? What do you do? And you're sitting around with other people who have these addictive challenges. It's like prison where the prisoners are like, you don't know how to be better prisoners, you know, better criminals. And so they're bored. And you've got really lovingly dedicated people who are young, who've been through rehab, who now want to help, but they don't have the skill sets they need.

Right. So one of the things we're saying with this book, if you're a rehab counselor, get a copy of this book. Start doing this stuff with the people in your rehab center. If you're an addiction counselor, Bridget Lank, who's an addiction counselor, she's a psychotherapist up in San Rafael, is building a whole program around this book. She said, oh my God, this is what we need. This is what people need. They need a systematic approach. and that's the thing if you don't have a system you know you went you played football your coach had a system

for exercise for training for fitness nutrition practice plays all that kind of stuff and if your system worked you won games and you won championships and better systems beat bad systems right and so this is a system. And as we said earlier, you could apply this to overeating. You could apply this to pretty much any addiction you wanted. When we realize, okay, there's an addiction that I have that I want to end and I want to move on to something more positive in my life. And I'm sure you probably have this in here.

But is there a process you think that everyone should follow in the morning to get them ready for the day and at night to get them ready for a day specifically focusing in on that addiction is there yeah you want to get up in the morning and you want to visualize going through the day with not doing the addiction okay there's something in the we call it the evening review at the end of the day where you close your eyes you say where could have i been more on purpose or more on focus for this commitment I have? Oh, you know, you did that thing. You did that thing. You did that thing.

And so you're just checking in, checking in, checking in. You want to program your day. Schedule your day. What are your activities going to be? The problem is, see, if something shows up at 5 o'clock and I'm bored and I don't have anything to do, I'm in trouble. And there's this thing called decision fatigue. And there's also something called compassion fatigue. They first learned this in prisons where they were doing parole boards.

In the morning, 70% of the people who were up for parole got paroled. In the afternoon, it was like anywhere between 10% and 30%, depending on the prison. People got tired of making decisions. They just thought oh, screw it. I'm not getting out. Wow. And so what happens is as the day goes on, your willpower wanes. Willpower is like a meter. And so in the morning, if you're going to do an exercise, if you're adding exercise into your day, do it first thing in the morning. Put your shoes and your running shoes, you have to trip over them before you go into the bathroom.

And if you have a partner. Wear your shorts, your workout shorts to bed. To bed. There you go. There you go. And so, and then having that accountability partner, someone else you're doing it with that you're, you know, you can have it. Like you could be my accountability partner for this. I call you every day and say, okay, here's what I'm going to do today.

This is my rule. And at five o'clock, I'm going to do this exercise or I'm going to go do a solution in a book or I'm going to play my guitar for an hour, whatever it is. And we give people 101 alternative activities that bring joy into your life other than drinking in one of the chapters. So you can pick one every day and do it, or you pick one and stay with the same thing every day. And then, I mean, one of my favorite ones is listening to comedy albums. I mean, there's so many great comedians now. Go to iTunes and download a comedy album. Just laugh. And laughter secretes endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are natural opiate. You don't

need to drink if you're laughing. And so laughter is really important. But I can wake up in the morning and just laugh, or I can listen to a comedy thing in the morning and laugh. The other thing is you want to do a gratitude exercise. One of the things we found, and we were kind of surprised by it. We knew it was important, law of attraction and all that. But one of the top things when we asked people what was the most important in the book? Gratitude. People basically, a lot of

them drink because they think their life sucks. But when you really start realizing that half the world lives on $2 a day, your life doesn't suck that bad. Look at all the technology that you have in this office here and the people that are supporting you and the fact that someone made this table and someone printed that book and Steve Jobs gave you the computer you got there and it works really well

and you can communicate with people in Singapore. And you can just literally go around the room for five minutes and just appreciate everything. It gets you blissed out. So that's a really good thing to do in the morning as well. And meditation and breathing.