The Secret to Happiness with Harvard professor Robert Waldinger | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

you might know this because you are a psychiatrist how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb one exactly one but the light bulb has to really want to [Music] change we all want to live a happy life of course in fact we want it so much that there is a whole cottage industry built around helping us find it but what does a happy life actually look like in the 1930s some Harvard scientists started tracking 724 teenag they kept detailed records about how they lived their lives and what gave them satisfaction they tracked

all 724 people for their entire lives only 10 of them are still living today and they are all in their hundreds but just like the people the study tracked the scientists got old too so the director of the study was handed to subsequent generations and Dr Robert waldinger is the current director a position he's held for the past 22 years so he knows a lot about what actually leads to a happy life I wanted to know the things he's learning I also wanted to know how he's changed his own life as a result of the

data he reads and let's just say I'm making a few changes to how I live my life too this is a bit of optimism I don't know how to ask this without it sounding um not polite but the only way I can think to ask it how come they picked you to lead the the the the happiness study well well I you're not the only one who asked that question I asked that question did you draw the Short Straw you know I might have drawn the Short Straw what happened was my my predecessor George Valiant

asked a couple of other people and they said no they said this is a great big messy albatross data that goes back to 1938 so he got turned down so he proudly got his third choice I think I was at least his third choice so so what made you say yes let's go there then oh well so the research project that I begged them to fund the federal government said nah we're not so interested so I was in that place and my predecessor said come over to my office and just read through one person's file

and so I said okay the file was probably a th thousand pieces of paper and I started reading through and I read about this 19-year-old guy and what he hoped for for his life and what was most important to him and what it was like to be dating and then I read about his 40-year-old aspirations and then I flipped to his 60-year-old discussion of his marriage and how disappointing it was you read his whole life I read his life I sat there and read his life and it was like this is like the coolest thing

I could do based on the the actual people you studied tell me something they get right as they are young kids in their teens and they or even in their early 20s and they start to think about what will make them happy and they get it right A lot of them care about making a difference in the world and they care about the world and the people I think who who stay with that who they may not be the same purpose all the way through their lives but the people who stay with that aspiration I

think stay engaged in life and I think that's what they get right that's really significant right because if we look at how we're teaching our children universities advertise as a reason to choose them over another the starting of their graduates yeah and our guidance counselors they don't ask us the right questions about how we want to contribute to the world they ask us what we can do and where we think we can get employment and so what I find very significant about what you're saying is what if our guidance counselors what if our Deans what

if our parents start instilling at us at a very young age the importance of simply wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves forget about actually achieving it simply wanting it yeah right that that as you said the data shows that people who at a young age want to contribute to something bigger themselves they will somehow pursue that ideal for the rest of their lives which keeps them at above average happy rates yes and I think what happens is that many people have posited a kind of psychological maturity that involves wanting to be

part of something bigger than the S Eric Ericson I don't know if you've heard of his stuff but he was Viking yeah yeah yeah no no he was a a a psychoanalyst from Vienna in the 30s and 40s who came to Boston who taught for a while at Harvard and he started talking about the stages of adult development nobody had talked about adult development everybody was interested in kids because they so obviously developed right but he said you know adults go through these stages and one of his stages he called generative ity versus stagnation and

the generativity was wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself realizing oh I want to help raise kids or I want to Mentor people or I want to do something that's yeah not just me and he said that the people who do that become the people who are going to look back on their lives with less regret with more of a sense that the my life was good enough I think we're living in a time where though we intellectually know that because it's the subject of so many social media posts I think we're living

in a time where people don't feel connected to something bigger than themselves in general you know we don't work for companies for 30 or 40 years anymore Church attendance is down right even the great power competitions of US versus the Soviet Union that we were proud to be a part of this side versus that side like even even at a global politics level like those things have gone away and I think you see it on the left and the right ially people latching onto absolutely that gives them that sense of belonging but it doesn't last

those attachments don't last but you can see them just grasping for it yeah yeah in a way that maybe I'm idealizing but I don't have memory of people doing in the past the sort of the the the intense latching onto whether it's a far left or a far right point of view about how the world should work and they latch onto it as if it's their life's purpose but it isn't right it lasts for a period of time and then onto the next or it dissipates right or an identity as a certain kind of influencer

or an identity as a certain as a person living a certain style of life materially I mean there are all all these various identities that people are struggling for I think you're right Robert putam is a political scientist he wrote a book called bowling alone yeah and yeah right so you know about so he he tracked he tracked how we've stopped belonging right we've stopped all the things you just said and we've been stopped joining clubs and volunteering and having people over to our houses and what he's found is that it's gotten worse since the

digital Revolution the digital revolution has accelerated the trends that were already there and so the path of least resistance now is social isolation greater and greater isolation and and we're all kind of desperate for what to do about it and how to feel like we belong I wonder if we need a new word and I'll tell you what I mean because the technology has co-opted words right so a desktop used to be a horizontal surface yeah yeah and now a desktop is a vertical surface yeah and a folder was something you used to put away

in alphabetical order and now a folder is something you click on absolutely it's taken words and things to make to make the transition to living in a digital world I know why they do it it's because it's easier but the word Community used to mean like showing up and wearing a fez you know there were secret handshakes and there was a time to meet up and there was free food and Community meant a thing and now that word has been co-opted to like being on an email list exactly now what you and I are talking

about we're attempting to offer an archaic definition of what community is and I wonder if instead of trying to fight it we just need a new word and then people will want the that's the new word because Community already belongs online but I worry that the word we're substituting is something like tribe and tribe has all those connotations of who we exclude yeah who we make other you know all that stuff yeah um and and I think I think we're all stuck in this place where we don't know how to belong without making other people

enemies yeah I want to scratch this just a little bit more because when I articulated the concept of why the reason I called it the why was a SE was a semantic problem that I faced right which is I got tired of debating with people what comes first Vision or Mission and the debate would go on forever yeah and so I finally realized we were having a semantic debate yeah yeah and so I asked the people who believed Vision was preeminent what is the definition of vision to you and they said it's why I get

out of bed in the morning and I went to people who believed mission was preeminent and I said what's mission to you and they said well it's why I do what I do yeah so everybody whether it was purpose or brand or whatever whatever word they thought was the thing they all gave me the same definition and so I said okay so let's call it the why and now we can all agree what it is and now we can actually figure out how to do it rather than debate what comes first right right exactly and

and so I I wonder how people are defining community and maybe you have some data that explains that like it's one thing to say I want my life to be a part of something bigger than itself I want to feel a sense of purpose but what actually based on this longitudinal study what actually do people mean when they say these words the people who talked about it the most meant something quite fluid and quite individual je so the people who are the best at this would have like work mates over for barbecues but they'd mix

in their family they'd mix in cousins and they'd mix in people from their church and they'd introduce each other and so you have these people who become like the nodes of a group of people that get connected they become if you will connectors but that means that each person might be the node of a unique collection of people right as opposed to one thing going to a church going to a synagogue yeah you can do that and that is a defined Community but most of us have these things that are more fluid and individual yeah

one of the one of my friends who's the best at this keeps connecting his friends from random parts of his life and it's really fun to get to be part of that group of people because it's so diverse I think you're touching on something that I think is really magical if we're saying it's important for us to build community and I've done this I've gone to dinner parties and it's the same 10 people at somebody at a just a different house yeah you know and they say we care about Community but as you're defining it

it's not really Community it's just the same 10 people at different houses and I think what you're talking about is the importance of the salon the old the old school Salon which is instead of hosting a dinner party we should take it upon ourselves to build salons which is I'm going to invite some tried andrue friends I'm going to invite some people who I just met recently I'm going to invite somebody who I met at a different dinner party and and I may or may not give a subject to discuss at the table but this

is what's going to happen because then I'll go to somebody else's dinner party who was at mine and it's a lot of new people for me too yeah and I love this idea of us not just hosting dinner party for the people we know but for hosting specifically hosting dinner parties for people we know that our friends don't know EX exactly because the same 10 people is in a silo right like it's it's almost it could be hermetically sealed and so you know what each other thinks you know each other but the most exciting conversations

happen for me when people come who do completely different things who come from different backgrounds I mean today I was on a call with a researcher who was growing nerve cells from schizophrenics and he he's trying to see is a nerve cell different in how it makes connections if it's got the genes of a someone with schizophrenia and therefore someone who has delusions are do the connections that a nerve cell make are they different for people with delusions and I'm like I'm like buzzing with all these ideas and it's because a student of mine is

also a student of his and brought us together and our heads started to explode with excited possibilities and I think what you're talking about is we connect not on the interest that stuff is superficial and that stuff is good at you know sort of getting people in the room yeah and but we're talking about deep deep values that are deeper than our political points of view because I can have the same values of somebody with a different political point of view than me and I think people confuse those things sometimes I love this how long

have you have you led the the how long have you been the boss of the study uh 22 years 22 years and what did did you learn from the data that you've been able to apply to your life that has made you happier I now like like you read you were reading some data and you're like huh I'm gonna start doing that and you did I now call up my guy friends and I say let's go for a walk let's go out to dinner um we're not just going to wait for our wives to do

this thing to organize our social lives we're going to do this and and it first it's really awkward like we don't do this we're guys and then it's been a wonderful thing in terms of really getting to know individually people who were otherwise part of a social group part of the same 10 people if you will yeah yeah but we never Dug Dug more deeply into knowing each other and so it made me do that because I thought otherwise I'm just going to sit here on my computer all day long doing my research stuff doing

my academic and pick my head up and have no friends that's a really good one yep somebody said take care of your body like you're going to need it for a hundred years and I realized that boy this really really matters that in our data the people who took care of themselves so we're talking regular exercise not abusing drugs and alcohol not becoming obese all that stuff they lived on average 10 years longer and stayed healthier so even though it's not rocket science and it's not news I could see in my own data how much

it really matters people I assume are starting to die now in the studies most of the original folks have died 724 original people right fewer than 10 are still alive and they're all overage 100 okay so of the ones of those 724 the ones who lived the longest you know because biohacking is a thing now and like the obsession there's an obsession with longevity and so the people who lived the longest was there a pattern that you were able to discern and the people who lived the shortest was there a pattern that you were able

to discern yeah yeah yeah yeah the longest was literally taking care of your physical health and being really socially engaged in the world okay those were the two things and the people who lived the shortest it was the opposite people the opposite who you know who became out alcoholics who became obese who didn't take care of themselves and who were isolated this is why I think your work is very very important is because I think a lot of the longevity people and biohackers and all of that they're all talking about vitamins and exercise and sure

sure sure that stuff's great and they pay lip service to community whereas they're giving exact dosages of vitamin D that I should be taking on a daily basis but nobody's giving me a prescription to how to hang out with my friends because Community doesn't make money you can sell vitamin D you can sell supplements you can package them in fancy ways you can sell them on a podcast right I appreciate the cynicism so much you have no idea I'm so sorry that's no I think you're 100% right I think you're 100% right there is a

financial incentive to sell half a solution exactly you know and what I struggle with so as you know I'm a physician I'm a psychiatrist and one of the difficulties with medicine is that the vast amount of disease is preventable but you don't make money in medicine preventing disease you make money curing disease or trying to ameliorate disease with medications with procedures you don't make money preventing Disease by encouraging people to socialize by encouraging people to exercise you've been doing this for 22 years you get tired talking about it yeah actually no I mean okay I

do I don't get you're getting the same qu like you could do a bunch of pod you're GNA have to answer the same questions five times in a row yeah but how they get asked is so different I mean talking with you right now is really fun right because of the way we're talking no but really because there's this kind of there's a real back and forth right it's we're having a conversation there are other times when it's like just shoot me if someone says I'm you know I'm really looking for forward to reading your

book can you explain to our listeners what you do that's that's like fingernails on black the interviews that I that I hate doing is where the people are so overprepared to talk to me that they ask me questions about my book like Simon what are the five elements of the infinite game and I was like well you you know the answer you you say it like why you ask me questions you know the answers to ask me questions you don't know the answers to that's more fun absolutely absolutely absolutely and so so when something spontaneous

happens like is happening now with you I could do this forever uh but but when the other happens I just I just want to be done in so I have to I mean you might know this because you are psychiatrist how many psychiatrist does it take to change a light bulb one exactly one but the light bulb has to really want to change I love that joke I love that joke what was your journey how did you get into Psych like why when you decided you want to go to med school why the Mind well

when I decided to go to med school it wasn't going to be the mind I'm a Jewish kid from De Moine Iowa I did not know the Jewish kid from De Mo Iowa well close no no we had about a thousand Jewish families in De Mo we had three and a half synagogues wow but yeah but so most of the psychiatrists I knew worked with seriously mentally ill people in Asylum and Psychotherapy was not a thing you did in De Moine unless you were really ill and needed to be in a hospital so I didn't

know anybody but I knew I really liked working with people and so when I got to med school I realized that Psychiatry was like by far the thing that excited me the most but Psychiatry is the stepchild of medicine so a lot of my professors said you know either you're at the bottom of the class or you yourself are crazy because there'd be no other reason for you to go into Psychiatry so it took me a long time before I finally admitted like who am I kidding this is really the most interesting thing because otherwise

it was memorizing the 12 types of thyroid tumors and I didn't care about thyroid tumors unless somebody I knew had one but I I cared deeply about the mind and especially how my own worked so I had to come around to it uh despite the stigma of being a psychiatrist how did you get over the stigma because there's a lot of pressure to become an accountant or choose the the line of medicine that's most in demand right now because it's a better business option you followed passion I did I did well partly I followed passion

because what I I'm I'm not good at doing things I'm not passionate about actually all my energy drains and I start to shut down and I start to feel terrible and I started to do that I realized I don't care about most of medicine so yes I could become a cardiologist like many of my aunts and uncles wanted me to do because Cardiology is a nice field right but I realized I would just die I would just Wither on the vine and what I've finally learned to do over time is to listen to that gut

that says I'm drawn to this and I'm not drawn to that that's probably the hardest lesson I've had to keep learning throughout my life so good segue if we look at the the world as it is now it seems that younger people who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives their quote unquote passion for something seems to be I don't know if it's driven by external reward structure you know the number of young people who say I want to be an influencer it's like people who come up to me and say

Simon can I get your advice I'd love to be a speaker I'm like oh amazing or I want to be an author I'm like great what do you want to speak about they're like I don't know yet I'm like well then no no you got it in the wrong order like I want to be an influencer influencer is a mechanism to spread something but what is the thing you're passionate about to spread exactly that the thing that they think they're passionate for is something that looks cool sounds cool gets a lot of adoration gets a

lot of money gets a lot of Fame and it it's an age-old question how do I know what I'm passionate for for me it literally has been learning to tap into my energy is my energy higher or lower In This Moment than it was a few minutes ago literally and I had to learn that for example I'm really enjoying this conversation my energy is higher and if I'm in a conversation where it where it starts to lower I get it right away and one of the things I've come to understand is that we get trained

to ignore those signals I was at least think about all the times you had to sit in a classroom in school and you'd have these urges to do something or explore something but of course you had to sit still and watch the clock until the class was over over we've been taught to suppress these inner voices I think since we were in preschool I think you're right but there's a Nuance here that's very important and I need you to unwrap it for me which is we evaluate friends like are our friends generative you know you

know unbalanced not every time because sometimes we're tired sometimes they're tired but in general when I hang out with x-friend versus yri is that friend generative in How I Feel do I leave my time with them happier elated as you said like up right yeah and am I paying attention to that that I want to spend more time with them versus H well we've been friend for 15 years so I guess I'll go out with them you know exactly um and I think that's true with our work as well and it obviously it conflicts with

things like responsibility because sometimes you have to suppress that feeling because I have to be responsible it's an imperfect standard right uh I don't always feel like changing that diaper right exactly I think you're touching upon it which is folks like us are giving advice like trust your gut follow that Elation but the problem is is that I don't know if people are running towards it or when they don't feel it they rebel against it so for in a work environment right we see this a lot where it's particularly young people but not exclusively they

just have more courage I think which is if they're in a job that doesn't do that they're very vocal and sometimes rejecting of the the culture the leader the boss the job itself and I think there's more about speaking out against the fact that I'm not elated thinking that by speaking out against that I will find the Elation rather than doing more of the thing that elates me like going to work and saying hey my boss this elates me in general this elates me less in general can I do more of that please rather than

rejecting throwing the whole the baby out with the bath water absolutely it's there's more of a need to take responsibility for that right to have a sense of agency okay if I if if this job is draining as it is what can I do right what can I do and some of that as you know has to do with connecting with people on the job like one of the things we know is that if people have have friends on the job if they have people they want to show up for that in and of itself

is energizing even if you're making widgets in a way that's boring to you yeah creating a problem here do you realize that which is because we're saying don't run away from run towards run towards a feeling run towards the contribution to something bigger and yet I think people if they're listening will say ah I think I'm running away more often than I'm running towards I'm running away from relationships rather than towards new ones I'm running away from a job I hate rather than one toward the one that I think I'm going to love so now

it begs the question how do I know what to run towards okay I have an example coming to mind I loved doing theater as a high school kid as a college kid and if I just ran toward what I loved I would be a failed actor today so what I had to do was really take in the whole picture to realize okay I do I love theater I still love theater but the whole picture was I came to understand that a doing theater involv d a lot of Rejection it involved getting bad reviews of plays

sometimes in college it involved getting turned down for parts it involved feeling like I was acting with people who I didn't think were any fun to be with all that right and what I had to do was take in the the larger picture not just the isolated passion that I was looking at right and so some of this is a kind of discernment where you say okay the what goes with the whole package we go back to Psychiatry what I found was that Psychiatry has a whole package it's one of the lowest paid Specialties in

medicine but it's got one of the best lifestyles on the other hand Cardiology is way better paid but I don't like doing it so there's a kind of discernment that's required for what do I run toward what do I hang back from or walk away from but the challenge is to take it all in not just to say okay I'm going to focus on this one one tiny part of it so you're asking people to do a cost analysis yeah I guess I am and I think that's right I love photography and I'm an active

photographer and I actively did not choose a career in photography because I interned at a couple photo studios when I was younger and I kept meeting people who were artists they defined themselves as artists photographers and here they were shooting bottles of ketchup for an ad campaign absolutely and they their love and I asked them do you ever shoot for art anymore they said I either don't have the time or I don't have the energy and so their passion became a job I mean that pejoratively yeah yeah it became work yeah and and I think

that's where when people say I want to be in theater I want to be in fashion I want and I think they forget that they're just businesses right they're just businesses and I can tell you somebody who was passionate for fashion who's a job and fashion living their childhood dream and they hate their life and I can show you somebody who stumbled and bumbled and found themselves in manufacturing making a widget like they're making a screw that fits in the back of a thing that nobody ever sees and that they're the happiest people alive yeah

in fact I was talking to a a contractor and I asked him just out of the blue I sort of making small talk I'm like just out of curiosity do you like your job yeah and he says I love my job he says I love it and I he he he said it with such passion no other word for it and I was like what do you love about it he goes I get to build things with my own hands and I get to see them built yeah I get to see what I built I

start with nothing I start with a pile of wood and some nails and some Sheetrock and then when I'm done you get that right and then I go do it again and again and again and again whether it's a kitchen remodeling or whatever it is and he had such Elation to see the fruits of his actual labor right what you're saying reminds me of something I've come to understand which is there's there's grunt work in anything there's boring work in anything and so really what we have to figure out is what is the thing we

are aiming toward that has enough in it that we love that it's worth doing all the boring parts right yeah and so I'm sure not every bit of his Contracting work his construction work his enlivening but boy seeing he's built lights him up right and he can he can hold on to that Vision while he's pounding that um teenth nail I'm having an Insight here here's where we make a mistake we're looking for the work to be the thing that is that is passionate and it's not the work that is the thing that is passionate

it is what that work produces right because raising kids it is awful in the early part you don't sleep you got as you said changing diapers in the middle of the night you get peed on and thrown up on and then they get a little older and they become teenagers and they're pain in the ass to be around and then one of them gets bad grades and you got to deal with that and another one gets a fight in school and punches a kid and then you got to deal with that and like where's the

joy that I thought that having kids are supposed to be joyful right but but then you have these unpredictable glimmers yeah of your kids helping each other or another parent saying your kid's great or the teacher saying your kid helps all the other kids you you get these unexpected glimmers that make all of that worth it in an instant yes yes and and I know that from my work like writing books is the it's the worst thing in the world yeah I don't know why anybody I don't people like I want to be an author

I'm like don't it's the worst yeah but when you put something out in the world that that that resonates with people it's instantly worth all of it and I do it again yeah even though every time I've written a book I've said this is the last one yeah and I think people are looking for the passion in the wrong place they're looking for the passion in the labor but they're not looking for what the labor produces and maybe this is one of the problems with knowledge work which is knowledge work is kind of sitting at

a desk I don't even know how you define what quote unquote labor is in the lot of knowledge work and and then what's the result of that labor and do we appreciate the the results like we don't think about what the things we make we don't think about the impact they have in the world I'll give you an awful example I I met somebody recently who has a very Niche specialty she helps project manage the building of super Yachts for the Mega wealthy there you go of course my first question was how the hell did

you get into that you know really and I asked her this is do your clients ever say thank thank you so much why don't you take the yacht with your family for a week and she said it's never happened never right so I said to her so what you're telling me is these multi-billionaires who build these Yachts for many hundreds of millions of dollars that they use for two weeks a year and they sail around the world just in case the family might want to use it at no point on this empty yacht has anybody

ever said to you thanks for all your hard work why don't you borrow the yacht and she said it's never happened and I said well how does that make you feel she go it also occurs to me that what the hell good am I doing in the world and so tremendous amount of Labor I'm sure incredibly well compensated but there's no glimmer there's no there's no what an amazing opportunity that I have to give to my family the opportunity to go on a mega yacht that none of us could afford that none of us will

ever have the opportunity I'm going to take my friends that I grew up with who have middle-income jobs and I'm going to show them something and give them an experience and that makes all of this worth it because I get to give that to people that I love and she never gets that glimmer is she happy in her job no yeah yeah no no it pays well yeah yeah yeah but don't don't you think it has to be a combination of getting there and the outcome because like when you talked about kids and you listed

you named I've been through every horrible scenario and many more in raising my children but there's also stuff along the way that is hilarious and wonderful and wacky right there's like stuff punctuating all the crap that is absolutely wonderfully wild and and and like getting to relive your own childhood is part of it for me I got to go to all these kids movies that I would never go to I got to be on roller coasters I couldn't do the work that I do if it was only the outcome because the outcomes are so far

into the future like writing a book right as one of my friends said who's in publishing he said only write a book if it's going to move along your own thinking in some ways and it's true like I and I bet for you too that it wasn't just that you were regurgitating stuff that was tried I was I was learning along the way yeah I had insights along the way that as I'm writing I feel electric because a new idea is pouring out of me in that moment yeah and that that I bet that was

part of what kept you going not just the outcome of having it to put into the world you know what we're defining here you know what we're defining we're defining a purpose-driven life yeah because if you think what purpose is purpose is idealism and idealism by its very definition is unrealizable right all men have created equal never going to happen never ever ever not in a million years right however it's the striving towards that and to your point it's the the mile markers I don't know how to define them but like for example uh women's

suffrage civil rights abolition of slavery it's like ah ooo look we got we're getting closer guys we're getting closer let's keep going right right to your point I think if it was just awful work the whole time waiting for the final outcome then we should then you should we should absolutely quit and I think you're right I think th it goes back to those glimmers which is the the little glimmers that say you know what this is worth it I'm going to keep I'm going to keep on this I'm going to keep doing this kid

rearing thing and not put them up adoption because you know that was a fun family dinner last night yeah exactly exactly exactly I so I think so I think if we're talking about purpose-driven life if we go right back to the beginning of this conversation there's the and then this comes directly from your data which is what I love which is from a very young age we instill in people we instill in our in our youngest Generations it is good to be an idealist it is good to strive to contribute to something bigger than yourself

you won't know how to get there you'll change your mind a hundred times but you have to keep your head above the looking Beyond the Horizon and so long as you feel like you're getting closer to the Horizon even if it's a windy difficult road so long as you have elements that say no no no I think you're on a good path here you will have a happy life and as long as there's something nourishing along the way there's got to be something along the way to keep me going does money play any role in

people's happiness according to your study it does but that what we find is that you need to get your basic needs met in order to be happy and that every dollar you make toward getting your basic needs met like you know food and shelter and educating your kids like every dollar you make makes you happier we know that but that then you buy that hundred million do yacht it doesn't really make you happier yeah um on average like you know if you if you took all the hundred million do yacht owners they there would they

wouldn't be happier on average than the people who basically had enough who only have a $50 million yacht yeah yeah yeah exactly but you but you know comparison is relative right because billionaires aren't comparing themselves to us billionaires are comparing themselves to each other absolutely and so this is the part of the problem right it's a relative scale yes because sometimes these billionaires are in great pain because they have a couple fewer billion than somebody else I mean it's it's hard to imagine and yet I know it in my own life like I I can

compare myself on the most trivial things to other people and then I try to pull back from that and notice what I'm doing unrelated I'm just going to say it because it's fun do you want to you you want to understand the difference between a million and a billion tell you when people talk about Millionaires and billionaires yeah so an easy way to understand the difference a million seconds is 11 and a half days a billion seconds is 31 a half years wow whoa whoa yeah okay and that's the difference between being a millionaire milona

a billionaire billionaire it's not even close yeah but you know the most valuable thing we have is time so it's I like your analogy that you were talking about seconds but those seconds are are far more precious ultimately than those dollars and money is a is a redeemable commodity we spend it we lose it we can make more but spending time or energy these are non-redeemable Commodities and everyone gets the same amount from day one day get but we don't know how much we get right that's the thing oh oh in terms of lifespan yeah

that's even that's even more interesting yeah so you but you're right we all have 24 hours we have 24 hours in a day but we don't know how many 24hour days we get exactly and so when we give that precious commodity to another human being when we when somebody's struggling at work and we sit down with them and we we give them some tough love when your kid is struggling at school and the teacher spends an hour after school when our friend is moving and we go to their house and we pack boxes yeah these

these the expense of time as a gift I mean it as a gift yeah not not in terms of are you being because I I'm totally anti that you have to use all that time to be productive as well because I think sometimes zoning out and watching TV is the best use of that time so I'm not I'm not making the analogy that you have to make use of all your time I'm talking very specifically about the value of time as a gift to another human being yes is more valuable than any gift on the

planet I have a quote here from one of my zen teachers his name is John tarant and he said attention is the most basic form of love and if you think about it our undivided attention it's the most valuable thing we've got to give oh the only thing we have these days is divided attention yeah and we can't even watch TV without also checking social media and sending a text absolutely I mean they research shows we typically have two or three screens open at once so the only thing we have these days is divided attention

and yet the best way to express love to someone is undivided attention yeah you're blowing my mind a little bit I want to ask you two final questions okay I'm having such a good time by the way this is ask another 100 then okay how happy do money and fame actually make people huh they don't they don't make people not happy either well actually Fame May because Fame can can make people intrude on your life and stuff so Fame actually might make you less happy money doesn't make you happier or not happier once you get

above a certain level you don't get much of a bump you get some bump but not that much Fame uh Fame is really a double-edged sword and you might be able to say something about that because you've received a lot of public attention and I'm sure it's not all wonderful I think of it is cost yeah right so my goal is to spread a message and to make a leave this world in better shape than I found it and contribute to the lives of my friends and the people I don't know as well and part

of the cost of that is some loss of privacy and and it's worth it because the the benefit so outweighs that very small cost oh can I tell you when my TED Talk went viral so I'm I'm very seriously involved in Zen and someone said you should put up a website and I had no web Presence at all yeah and I said no I wasn't going to do that that that was all ego that was all going over to the dark side and my zen teachers said you have the ability to convey ideas to people

that will matter to them don't do that and so they pushed me toward what you're describing which is they said don't stay in the shadows if you can be of use yeah that is my experience that the in the early days when I my work started to gain traction I was militant about keeping my face and name off everything like I wanted to put my name on the book in like Mouse type because the idea never would put my picture on the cover of a book I still won't because I'm not the thing and I

refused to have my picture on my website for years and I wouldn't let my name be the UR L because it's not about me and then at some point I made the realization that I and you're this as well which is you you actually live two versions of yourself you are you obviously but you are also the representation of your message absolutely absolutely and how dare I selfishly deny the representation of my message because people don't follow ideas they follow people because ideas are abstract and people are real so we create representations of a set

of value so Martin Luther King is a representation of a set of values and we follow Martin Luther King but not really we really follow the ideals that he stood for because I stand for those ideals too they're my ideals as much as they are his for example and in that sense you're a placeholder if you will for a whole set of values and aspirations right and that's a function that's important to serve here's another question for you what's the best thing we can do right now for our happiness two things be engage with people

and engage in things you care about ideally engage in things you care about with people you care about That's The Sweet Spot Bob what a joy yeah this was fun this what an absolute Joy I leave elated and buzzing me too actually this was a pleasure an unexpected pleasure thank you so so much I truly appreciate it all right take care if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts and if you'd like even more optimism check out my website simon.com for classes videos and

more until then take care of yourself take care of each other