How To Stop Comparing Yourself With Others and Be HAPPY | Marie Forleo

Now if you've ever felt like you're falling behind and you're afraid that there's no room left at the top this episode is for you today's question comes from brit and she writes hi marie let me first say how much i adore you and your insight you're genuine and loving it translates through everything you do thank you i recently started an online interior design business and it's getting off the Ground slower than i hoped i'm watching friends succeed in similar business models quickly and easily so here's my question how does one not become frustrated and jealous

of those who are achieving the things you so desperately want i want to be happy for them but part of me feels like there are limited spots on the podium thanks so much love brit brit this is a great question now i want you to know something i have never met One creative entrepreneur present company included who hasn't felt frustrated or upset when they feel like other people are just zooming past them so you are not alone but the short answer here is no there are not limited spots on the podium we do not live

in a zero-sum world and there is more than enough opportunity to go around for everyone however the comparison impulse is really what's crushing you here it's addictive and It's deadly and it will destroy your business and your happiness if you let it so first and most importantly my friend put down the compare schlager brit you have got to go cold turkey people say comparison is the thief of joy i've called it the hamburglar of happiness but when it comes to your small business it gets even more dire because comparison really is the robber of results

the pillager of profits the Pickpocket of prosperity and those are three things that every entrepreneur needs in order to survive all right ma'am so uh when did you notice your prosperity was missing did you see the guy who took your prosperity we've had a lot of complaints of comparison working this neighborhood yeah sounds like comparison again we'll keep an eye out for you though this is serious brit because every time you do a shot of compare schlager you Are slowly killing any chance your small business has of succeeding you know most people don't realize it

but they actually waste hours every single day comparing themselves to others and the only way to stop is by cutting yourself off so take a look at your habits are you following certain people on social media are you constantly checking certain websites and then feeling like crap after identify the specific behavior patterns That just trigger you and stop it here's a hint don't rely on willpower unfollow people you compare yourself to on social media if that's one of your vices even better take those apps off your damn phone woman do the equivalent on your laptop

too so you can google free website blocker and you'll find loads of options that prevent you from visiting sites that just waste your time now once that's done the very best Remedy for feeling behind is getting ahead i went ahead and did a little research on you brit to learn more about you and your business and it's clear by your testimonials that you are so good at what you do and i also love how much you love animals but there are some changes i suggest you consider that will help just create a better user experience

for your customers and ideally get you more clients so let's take a look All right first thing brett you need a clear tagline and a headline that really tells us what you do we don't even know what you offer until we scroll way down simple solutions for home you'll love i mean that could be stools it could be countertops it could be a store that sells finishes it could be software that helps you plot out a room so first i'd suggest swapping out this tagline in the upper left corner from simple solutions for home you'll

love to Affordable interior design services next you should have a clear headline on this big hero image and make sure the headline is above the fold why you may be asking well because you have about three seconds or less when someone comes to your website in order for them to decide whether you can help them solve their problem or not remember this if you confuse people you lose people now often the best headlines come directly from the mouths of our customers and i Found this great headline way down at the bottom of your site that

explains exactly what you do professional design on a diy budget now down the road you may not want to focus on budget but for now that seems to be the promise you make and a point of differentiation for your business it is way more specific than simple solutions so it's much better all right let's move on the next thing i want you to do is simplify there's a lot happening on your Home page and as a potential customer i'm not sure exactly where to look or what to click one quick fix eliminate social media from

your homepage here's why if you're lucky enough to get someone to your website do not send that traffic away to the distraction mecca of social media you're doing it three times here on your home page so let's remove those immediately also i think your navigation could be simpler and more customer focused so for example i'd Suggest losing the how it works from your navigation and simply going with services which is crystal clear to anyone who might want to hire you you can easily make three drop downs for each of what appear to be your core

services virtual interior design in-person interior design and home staging for realtors or sellers i'd also suggest removing home and shop from your top navigation and recommend Changing the copy from get in touch to contact people know they can always click on your logo to go back home okay next up testimonials so brit your success stories are great however right now they scroll by way too fast i can't even read them before they go on to the next one and i think they're way too far down on the page so i'd love you to move them

up perhaps underneath your hero image and either slow them way down or allow your user to control the scroll so They can take the time and really read what people have to say about your good work next let's take a look at your portfolio so this is an area where there's a lot of opportunity for growth and for you to really showcase your amazing work so first up i would not suggest that the first image on your portfolio page be a quote card it needs to be a really great high quality photo of an inspiring

interior that you help pull together or Your best before and after now another challenge in this section the copy stays the same as i scroll which is a missed opportunity to describe each photo and how you helped your client create the results they wanted and the functionality of scrolling through is a little bit confusing as it is right now this is an area where i think it would be helpful to look at other design sites and take inspiration from how they lay out really clear before and after photos Brit again it is clear from your

testimonials and from your pictures that you're really talented and so good at what you do and trust me i know how much work it takes to get any website up so congrats on all you've done so far hopefully these suggestions will help you continue to evolve and grow your business tell us about the happiness of pursuit finding the quest that will bring purpose to your life so what inspired You to write this new book okay so since we last talked i had been wrapping up a personal project it was a quest to visit every country

in the world we might have even talked about it a little bit last time i've been working on it for about eight years or so then um so it was a ten year quest in total i just kind of came to the end of it last year and it was something that was initially just a personal project it was Something that i believed in for myself and i loved travel and i loved the value of exploration and the discovery and so as i pursued this quest i knew i wanted to write something about it but

fortunately i didn't just write a book about myself i didn't just write a travel memoir because that would be kind of boring so all along the way i was meeting lots of interesting remarkable people who were All pursuing a quest or some kind of adventure of their own and i wanted to know why did they do it and what lessons did they learn along the way and how were they changed through the process um what did they sacrifice or give up in order to pursue it um and and why bother you know what can the

rest of us learn about quests and then um lastly it's not really meant to be a sociological study it's not just like a Collection of like this person did this and this person did this blah blah the book actually has a clear message and the message is that a quest can improve your life a quest can actually bring purpose and meaning to your life too i love it so let me ask you this were you as a young person or as a young boy were you always into adventure and did you have quests when you

were little I don't know if i had quests per se um i was always a list maker this is something that i noticed is actually really common and all the people i talk to i would i really like to write things down and i like to write down my tasks and write down my ideas and outlines even in rough you know form i really like to kind of you know break things down into small little you know projects or things so i think it was maybe a value that i had and then i kind of

grew Into it more and then i started traveling and it wasn't like i went to my first country and i was like oh i'm gonna go to like you know the rest of every single 193 countries in the world i kind of gained confidence as i had some experience um that was something else that i saw with a lot of different people is they started with a small vision and they kind of came to a bigger one later on interesting so if i heard you right and please correct me if I'm wrong when you started

traveling to different countries it wasn't necessarily like well obviously because you might have done some travel you did some travel um earlier on in your life but then as you got that appetite wet for travel you saw an expanded vision and said hey why don't i set this adventure goal for myself to see every country in the world so it wasn't even like you started off like this is my quest it's something That evolved yes absolutely i had no idea um that this would become something that would consume my life you know for more than

10 years uh i i just started traveling i loved traveling i lived in west africa for a while and through that i kind of gained some confidence and just to really experience the joy of being in different places and then i think it was after i had been to like 50 countries or so i was like but still though it's not that difficult you know After i've been to like 50-ish um i thought let me set a personal goal because i always liked goals of trying to go to 100 countries right so that was the

first one and then i started getting close to that and i thought um how can i take it up a level because if i'm just going to half the countries in the world i could kind of cheat a little bit because you know i could just pick the easy country so yeah it was Something that i grew into totally and i really for me what made a difference was combining travel uh with goal setting combining travel with something specific with structure with a little bit of a container to it and that that just kind of

changed the whole purpose and focus for me and you saw that with the people in the book as well that they perhaps started something their appetite got wet and then all of a sudden a new bigger world Opened up to them that became this quest this adventure they wanted to go on yeah yes very often and the specificity helped a lot there's one story robin devine in omaha nebraska she's a knitter and she's like super excited about knitting and she's an artist and she makes stuff and she had this project to make hats for people

and that's how it was at first she was like i'm just gonna make hats so she made hats for her friends and her family just Like a lot of knitters do but then she had the idea of creating some specific structure to it and at first she thought i want to knit a thousand hats like what would that look like you know et cetera so she started working toward that and figuring out how much time and how much money and are there any other costs you know all that and then she decided to increase the

goal and go to 10 000 hats um so now it's like her life quest which i forget how many years it's going to Take you can actually go to her website and request a hat there may be a waiting period uh but eventually she's going to make ten thousand hats so yeah a lot of people um they found that their vision expanded but then also as they work towards something they made it more specific so let's talk now about the link between quests or adventures that we can go on if we want to call it

that and happiness what did you discover not only for Yourself but what did you discover from the stories of everyone that you interviewed for the book so for myself you know when i started traveling and then pursuing the goal i think it kind of came out of a sense of discontent or dissatisfaction which doesn't mean that i was miserable it's not like i was terribly unhappy like i had a good life you know i had i had become an entrepreneur i was working for myself But yet i guess i felt like i wanted to challenge

myself i wanted more and a lot of the people that we talked to who are in the book they have the same kind of discontent it was it was a yearning for something it was a yearning to connect something broader in their life you know they often were happy they had good families they had good jobs or good businesses or something but yet you know they had this desire to to go further um and so that's where i saw really a link Between the happiness and the pursuit of a goal uh the pursuit of a

goal you know bigger than ourselves i mean something that is really significant something that is really challenging because there's also a link between a quest and a challenge i think i think uh you know if your if your quest is like to go down the street and get coffee and come back it's not really a quest right but when you combine it with something that's challenging Maybe hard but also rewarding you know that's where i think a lot of us can find happiness have you seen that people are working on multiple quests at once or

do most people kind of choose something that feels challenging meaty maybe a little bit scary totally exciting or sure i mean i think there's there's more than one way you know to do it um i'm always the kind of person that i like to work on a bunch Of stuff at once it's just my personality you know for better or worse right yeah um but i also think you know a true quest a true adventure it does involve some kind of sacrifice you know it does involve some kind of trade-off i mean if sacrifice is

too heavy a word let's say trade-off you know um to go to every country in the world like it was a pretty big thing like there were a lot of things i had to say no to in order to Say yes to that like what like what like what like like building my career you know like um you know i was i was on the road in in central africa and central asia and bangladesh and all these places 100 days a year often and i couldn't really work on my business very much you know during

that time and that was okay i had to say no to a lot of lots of opportunities you know that are coming through um But i guess i really believed in this project i really believed in doing it and every time i would start to think oh maybe i you know shouldn't get on that plane and go to chad or whatever like no i have to do like this is the root of everything this is the foundation that everything else is built on so yes i think you can do a lot of stuff but i

guess also if you really believe in something like it's going to take Something from you as well yeah no i love this discussion because especially chris i love that you shared the self-doubt that can creep up i think for anyone who's creative if you you know call it a quest or if it's a project you know to write a book or if it's something to build a business or create something that's never that's never been created before and part of that adventure is you bringing it into the world I think that self-doubt is so uh

it's a topic that many of us we don't like to talk about you know i love hearing that you are like okay should i get on this plane to chad and i have all these different opportunities coming in i mean i'm working on another writing project right now and i feel like daily the self-doubt voices are like god are you do you even know enough to write this does anybody care it's amazing did you notice that the other folks that you Interviewed as well had those wrestlings with self-doubt in in pursuit of their adventure or

their quest absolutely like almost all of them yeah almost all of them in different ways and they spoke about it in different ways you know people use different language um but everyone experiences that i think i think the bigger the challenge maybe the more the self-doubt or the more the fear but also maybe more of the stirring That you have to do it you know it's this idea that's not going to leave you alone and i think a lot of them maybe were focused on the long term and their focus on the outcome and they

thought about that book that they wanted to write or whatever it was and they imagined having that out and they thought about the people who would be helped by it and that's kind of what got them through you know that the the focus on the other side i mean i think a Lot of them also the other interesting thing i noticed they had in common was a lot of them had what i called an emotional awareness of mortality and this also sounds kind of heavy but it doesn't need to i love it we talk about

death on marietv all the time because i think i just think it's one of the most sobering and um it wakes you up it wakes you up to value each moment so not to interrupt but Let's talk about that let's talk about that reality of mortality right so the emotional awareness of it as opposed to the intellectual awareness i think everyone has an intellectual awareness of mortality which i define in the book as just the fact that everybody dies right it's just a fact right but the emotional awareness and mortality is what i noticed a

lot of these people talked about as i interviewed them and they brought it up like i didn't even Ask like hey what do you think about death you know like it's just it's not really the best interview question um but a lot of them talked about different experiences they'd had uh either with like an accident that they'd have or a close call that they'd had or someone that they loved and lost something that just brought them closer to the awareness that not only everyone else in the world is going to die one day but i

too you know will die and Just the the the focus on the fact that life is short we should live with urgency you know that that also kind of helps to overcome some of the self-doubt i think i think you think okay what really matters you know yeah i've got my on my own stuff i've got my own anxiety or whatever that that thing is that most of us struggle with but i also have this dream and i also want more i want to improve my life you know i'm taking time to watch marietv because

not just i want To be entertained but i want to improve my life i want to take steps toward that um so that's something else that that people had in common that i think is actually helpful yeah and that's one of the values of this that's one of the values of your book and why i'm so happy that you wrote it and that we're sharing it today is so many of us can find ourselves different parts of the journey struggling with you know is there more is there more meaning i Think one of the most

touching stories uh for me was about the young man who lost his wife can you tell us a little bit about that story oh yes um this is a beautiful story it is a sad story as you alluded to but it's also a beautiful story this is a story of a young couple who met in south korea and he was american she was canadian and they were both teaching english there they met when They were really young say young 20s or so and they fell in love and they were beginning to plan a life together

but unfortunately she received the diagnosis of breast cancer so they returned to north america and she got treatment but unfortunately the treatment was not successful and so she didn't end up going into hospice and before she died she had been writing a blog She had her own bucket list of all these things that she wanted to do in her life and she began you know working toward them and after she died which of course is very sad adam the young man decided to take on her quest for himself and he decided to take over writing

her blog and pursuing all of those items uh you know on the list so she wanted to to learn how to knit and so now you know he Learned how to knit she wanted to run a marathon so he began training for that she wanted to work volunteer in india so he made a commitment to go and do that and it is a beautiful story of how he adopted the legacy that that she was preparing so it's sad but he also talked about how uh how he found purpose and that he found purpose and that

um through his own grief yeah um but then you know also through his own foundation uh for the Future and and he said that she had always been inspired by megan uh and it had been inspired by this list that she had so he hoped to to follow it up it was so touching and it like brings tears to my eyes right now because this life is so short and it's so fleeting and it's just incredible um anyway really really great great story so the other thing i know travel obviously huge passion of yours it's

a passion of mine many many folks in our Audience but if someone perce you know let's say they don't have the means to travel or perhaps some kind of huge big um adventure is just not in their cars right now let's talk about some of the smaller quests and the smaller adventures that people took that were equally as fulfilling oh yeah and exciting and and also really creative oh absolutely and i don't even necessarily think that they were smaller you know in Some way you know i feel like they're just different and and um you

know each of us has our own abilities our own desires and capacities blah blah so one of the stories i really really liked um is from sasha martin who's in oklahoma city and sasha had grown up overseas i think her dad was working for some european company or something so she had this international perspective but then she met a guy and kind of settled down and she had a daughter and wasn't able To travel much but she also had a culinary arts degree and she wanted to raise her family with an international perspective you know

she thought oklahoma is cool but like i want you know to have a broader world view than just that so because she wasn't able to visit every country in the world she decided to make a meal from every country in the world um and this wasn't just like a half-assed kind of thing this was like a once a week she Would devote like lots of time to researching all these different recipes and she would play the music from the country and she would like get the flag and it should turn it into a community thing

and people are starting to visit right and so her daughter like her daughter's first solid food is afghan chicken and her daughter is like three years old now and is equally proficient with chopsticks or silverware or her fingers you know depending on the food And she's just talked about how it's made such a huge difference in her family and also connecting it to people all over the world because she's been posting her recipes online and sharing this whole journey with other people so it's something that started also as a personal project just like mine but

it became you know much more impactful over time that was one of my other favorite stories from the book because i really saw How fun that could be and how this idea of having a quest that we can do it right from our own house just using our imagination and our hearts and our desire to connect with something bigger than ourselves and to stretch ourselves which i think is is really um it's something that i love doing in my own life but i've never quite seen it put in the framework in the context of what

you wrote which is again why i'm so excited to have you on Um so let's talk about something else that i thought was really interesting we have a lot of multi-passionate entrepreneurs and a lot of creative folks in our audience who again we talked about do lots of different things and one of the things that struck me about this idea of a quest or an adventure and having a set container a beginning middle and an end was the power of finishing something so many of us i know certainly myself You get these great ideas and

you kind of like okay i'm going to do yoga all the time or i'm going to meditate every day or i'm going to completely change my diet and people take on so much or they start a new project they start a new business they start a new product or program they want to put out into the world and it's kind of half finished how uh strong is the connection between Having you know a quest and the power of finishing what can that teach us well one of the things i had to decide in the very

beginning was what is a quest right because for the previous book you know i'm writing about small businesses who got started without spending a lot of money that's really straightforward you know and i found a lot of people who fit that category when i thought about quests i kind of had to go back like okay let's let's go way Back right like what is a quest in like ancient days you know there's someone who's going out to like find the holy grail or defend his village or something or find this magic ring or something and

there's always a destination in mind there's always an end goal right and it might take a long time there might be like many different you know trails and side tracks and things that happen along the way lots of challenge and transformation etc etc but there is a Goal right there is a destination something that you're working toward and so that's the framework that i used for my quest and that's what most of the people that i talk to as well you know it is very much about the process and the journey but we are working

towards something you know we are hoping to to reach that destination at a certain point and i too work on lots of different stuff and often get sidetracked But i think one reason the quest was successful and why it kept me focused is i knew where i was going and i had 193 countries and i could check them off as i went along i put them in my evernote i put a little x next to them and i watched it grow and then and i got tired at different points but i could see the progress

i had made and it became like a cost-benefit analysis after a certain point i'm like well i've got 100 countries already am i going to stop you Know i've got 150 countries there's only like you know 40 more to go or whatever um and so it helped a lot again like with the other examples making a meal for every country she could have just said oh i'm gonna make a bunch of foreign food right but not really that specific and and robin's quest as well to make ten thousand hats you know she always liked knitting

and she could just keep doing that it's fine And that's fine but she talked about how having the number gave her a purpose the other thing is i like deadlines i think deadlines are our friends you know if somebody ever gives me something without a deadline i always tell them that's dangerous because it you know it's just going to get pushed probably right yeah i mean it's parkinson's law too if i'm accurate on that one i mean works expands to fill the time a lot and it will just expand forever and ever and Ever unless

we put some kind of container around right so deadlines are great that's why i like doing live events because there's a deadline i can't you know if i've got like thousands of people coming to town for something i can't just be like oh i need two more days you know come back you know or at the book launch or something but for me i chose my 35th birthday as the deadline you know for the quest and i Chose that seven years prior to finishing right and so as i got closer and there were different opportunities

and i felt pressured in different ways it kind of helped me to keep that in mind i was like no i know i need to do like at least 20 countries a year you know to achieve this goal and if it gets hard i just have to figure it out right so so deadlines are our friends structure is our friends right structure deadlines parameters You know there's another quote that i liked in in the book um this is from elise flaha cripe she talked about how um everybody's always saying like entrepreneurs and creatives should get

out of the box right but for me i want to get in the box i want to define my own box i don't want someone to be like here's your box right i want to make my own box but once i've made it i want to actually have clear parameters and rules and that's the that's the scope of what I operate in and i'm actually going to be more productive i'm probably going to help the world a lot better if i'm in my box than if i'm just anywhere everybody get in your box you heard

it from chris gillabo and of course my mind is going places you don't want to go but just get in your box people because it's good in there sorry that was a long thing no are you kidding me i liked it and i can probably see the tweetable of this episode marie And chris are telling you to get in your box um which is brilliant get in your box um so i have to comment on something else though because i think you and i are a little similar and uh probably lots of folks that are

listening right now the absolute joy that comes from crossing something off your list immense uh in our team we have these priorities docs that have very clear structure and Guidelines for the things that we're working on and so we can all see what we're doing and the team including myself we get so freaking excited when we cross things off and i was thinking about this in the framework of quest and how much fun that is when you've defined that container and you have something you're excited about working on and just putting those lines through it's

like really acknowledging the journey and the joy and looking forward to the Destination which is great i'm just starting to build my team but i'm not sure how to keep everyone motivated and on track we all work really hard but maybe because we're virtual in different parts of the country and different time zones it's feeling hard to get the team to really gel what can i do to help people stay motivated and engaged and actually like working together thanks laura awesome question laura you know i talk a lot About team forleo so this is the

kind of question that i get asked all the time it's a big topic team building but today i'm going to share one kind of unorthodox tool that we've been using for years that helps people feel a real bond and a sense of connection you know it was originally created for couples but i use it for business and no it's not these murray you really don't have the keys i have no idea where they are that's Great wonderful okay but seriously the tool that we've used for years now is the blockbuster hit from the 90s it's

gary chapman's the five love languages now since gary came out with that book he actually created another one that's specifically for the workplace and it's called the five languages of appreciation now we still use the love languages because we're touchy-feely like that now here's the Basic idea each one of us gives and receives love in our own unique way we each have our own love or appreciation language so to speak there are five love languages quality time words of affirmation acts of service gifts and physical touch so the key to making another person feel loved

and appreciated is to express love and appreciation in their primary love language so on our team one of the gals Her name is kristin we know that her primary love language is physical touch so every time we get in person it is a huge hug fest because we know that's how she feels most loved and appreciated and conversely louise on our team one of her primary love languages is words of affirmation so all of us know that for louise to feel truly loved and appreciated we let her know verbally and in writing how amazing she

is just think if only don draper thought to do this With peggy it's your job i give you money you give me ideas you never say thank you that's what the money is for hey don i think peggy's love language is words of affirmation so now when anyone joins our team it's the very first thing that we make them do so how about you do you know your love language or your team's love or appreciation language if you don't you should go and check out gary site Because he has a free test and it's awesome

we will put the links below and of course i recommend the books too because they are amazing this will help you so much not only to help build your team and help everybody gel together but it'll really support every relationship in your life in fact one of my guy friends recently got engaged and i had told him you gotta do this you gotta make your woman do this you have to do it and he reported back a little bit Later and he told me it was the one of the best things they've ever done but

back to you and your team i promise if you give your team love and appreciation in their love language you're gonna help set them up to do their best work they're gonna stay fully engaged and they're gonna love working with you over the long haul you know i think the late great stephen covey said it best when he said next to physical survival the greatest need of a human being is Psychological survival to be understood to be affirmed to be validated to be appreciated you share that you have the key to your own happiness but

the last place we look is ourselves whatever we want whatever we think another person needs to do we need to do i feel like this is kind of the heart of the turnaround question right whenever our lovely mind is demanding that someone behave a certain way or do Something for us the genius of it is what if i turn that around yeah yeah it would be like um you left the door open you know like saying like let's just say stephen left the door but you left the door open well turned around i left the

door open and when i feel the emotions it takes you should you should you know uh it Implies he did it wrong but i could just walk over and close the door and and it doesn't stop me from saying um honey did you leave the door open because for all i know he didn't do it yes yes yeah and but on on there's something wrong with him turned around there's there's something wrong with me And then to ponder that it doesn't mean it's true it's just something to ponder that's what these turnarounds are they're not

exchanging a negative belief or a positive they're there to ponder to um to meditate in on like there's something wrong with him turned around there's something wrong with me in this moment i was judging i haven't you know this turned around There's something right with him and then to notice in the moment um there's the whole world there to be seen yeah when i look at my past behavior i could see why um people would avoid me why they wouldn't you know on and on and on and on and on and of course i'm going

back a lot of years um to see that but um those you know my behavior was the Teacher that brought me to this this moment where um life is really good and i appreciate it all yeah yeah something else that you shared too you said if you want world peace bring peace to your world not mine yours we all live in our own world and that to Me was uh one of those especially like like mind-blowing moments because i think uh so many beautiful earnest loving people want to do good for the world and envision

a world where it is more peaceful and i loved when you shared that because once again it's like oh this is my business right i need to do my business if that's the experience of the world that i want Yes you know i i spoke with um with a a person earlier today that uh you know billions of dollars it's like a genius and has a a lot of people that that are pretty close to that you know and all in that area and they want to save the world but you know we have to

save our own world first But while we're in that process while we're in that you know in in the way that you and i have been discussing here but and but that doesn't mean we're going to stop trying to fix the world we're in some dire times um from what people are seeing there's a lot of fear here yeah but but but how much of that fear am i Interjecting into that in my mind where am i contributing to that kind of fear fear slows us up peace is where we do our best thinking and

our and our best action but on on how how can the unenlightened mind a fearful mind in other words um give it its best shot right a fearful mind we just um You know kind of stumbling over words now but but you first take care of your life first what you're thinking and believing and then you make wiser choices as you get to know us and um i live in a world that is the extreme opposite of where i began when inquiry found me yeah and i was agoraphobic weeks or months of of being unable

to even leave my bedroom it was Horrible and um i just wouldn't want anyone to have to suffer a moment of that and even physical pain um is is is either remembered or anticipated but you know these are lofty words but they're they're understandings that are true and and and valued and and and and Become deeper and deeper like you you know we're we're on a path that we're responsible for and um and you know what kind of grace is that but save save yourself and the world follows it just works that way because it's

your world um your world is is the one that matters and i'm speaking you know um i'm saying that for all of us Hey there real quick if you're loving these tips then you are going to love my free audio coaching program even more it's called how to get anything you want and inside you're going to learn three proven steps to turn any dream into reality i am not kidding you need to go download it now at marieforleo.com subscribe that's marieforleo.com subscribe i'll see you there happiness it is somewhat a nebulous term right it's really

difficult to define and from What i've learned from you you know it's a composite of things so as you've shared that while yes we cannot really measure happiness we can measure the facets of it there are three big ones can you tell us about those yes so the first one and the and the the most um uh the most commonly used question uh is around something called life satisfaction so a researcher will ask You if you think of your life as a whole with your best imaginable life being a 10 in your worst imaginable life

being as one where would you place your happiness and when that's done at the population level you can get a really good reading on how well people and places evaluate their lives then there's a second kind of measuring happy measure of happiness where you get at how people experience their lives Because you only remember about two percent of your life you tend to remember your your high points when you got married or had your first child in your low points when you got dumped by a girlfriend or boyfriend or when your grandma died um and

what happened in the last 24 hours asking people to remember their lives isn't a perfect way to measure well-being but if you ask people in the last 24 hours how much have you smiled how much have you felt joy how Much have you felt stress and you do that a few times you get a pretty good snapshot at how people experience their life that's called positive affect and then there's a third kind of happiness measurement that asks people how often they're able to use their strength to do what they do best that's in the academic

parlance how you measure purpose so when you ask those questions among populations around the world in a uniform way you can start to see number One where people are happiest in these three measurements and number two the things that associate with happiness or correlate to happiness and so tell us about some of the happiest places so blue zones of happiness and the cover story i wrote for national geographic sought to illustrate each of these three types of happiness so we chose singapore as the place to best demonstrate Life satisfaction so singapore is a place where

it's very easy to live out your values it's very secure it's a place that will appeal to the type of people who like success laid out in a very simple path go to the right school get the right job keep your head down work hard and at the end you'll have status you'll be financially secure and that's a type of happiness it's mostly happiness in the rearview mirror I think i'm happy therefore i must be in costa rica specifically cartago in the central valley that's a place where people are experiencing their life very well from

day to day it's a it's a high valley where the temperature only varies 10 degrees a year between about 65 degrees and 75 degrees best coffee in the world but more importantly it's a place where the cities are designed so you're Bumping into people with some frequency all the time you go to the market you run into the people selling you their your fruits or your vegetables or or your fish you um this the towns are built the streets are built for human beings and not just cars one of the biggest predictors of whether you'll

be happy on a day-to-day basis is how many hours of face-to-face uh Time you have with people you like that the happiest people in the world are interacting face to face about seven hours a day and cartago has an environment where it's easy to do that and then we chose northern denmark a place called alborg to to exemplify purpose because uh denmark's a place where uh health care is taken care of everybody nobody has to worry about what happens if i get sick education is taken Care of nobody has to worry about can i save

enough money to put my kid through college because kids now go to college they get paid to go to university and while i'd be okay when i'm old so that those are big drivers of whether or not you take a job it's also a place where status is not really celebrated so you get no extra credit for wearing prada by driving a mercedes um in fact it's kind of proud upon so people aren't taking jobs for status or Health insurance they're taking jobs because they love it in america only about 30 of workers actually like

their job this comes from gallup data in denmark it's about 80 they're working 35 hours a week they're doing jobs suggestive of flow furniture design niche technology that's what they excel in in denmark so these are jobs that Really engage people's passions and their artistic abilities uh it's not so hard that they give up and not so easy to get bored they work 35 hours a week take six weeks of vacation have plenty of time for the social interaction we know is really fundamental when it comes to happiness and was it interesting for you like

being energetically in these different places could you feel just For yourself like whoa when you're in costa rica that sense i mean i've been to costa rica costa rica several times and what's the saying of the country it is uh viva vida yeah exactly yes yes i would say more so when um in costa rica but but then than the other places because um you really have to live there it's not quite as easy to go there i mean you Get of course you get the vacation effect you know i don't have to work today

for crying out loud but in the sun shining the beach is near and all those things so that's a different experience than actually living there and in the reality we find that most when it comes to happiness most people are misguided or just plain wrong in fact we more often than not aim at the wrong Target when it comes to lasting authentic happiness and if you really want to understand those places it can't just be a facile well i went there i felt happy and people danced and we went to parties that's that's not it

yeah let's talk more about that though how people are aiming at the wrong things because i've read that you suggest we think about happiness more like a retirement portfolio and that it should be balanced Yes yeah so yeah people to ask me what's the secret to happiness and that's like going to your doctor and say doctor i'm sick make me well right you know you have to you have to do some diagnostics so for example so we talked about life satisfaction how you experience life and purpose you want those three to be balanced yeah you

could work 70 hours a week and make Quarter million dollars a year and and feel financially secure and your friends are all impressed with you but your day-to-day experience is crappy that's not happiness yeah even though you've kind of checked all the boxes in life so um we we actually have a on our website bluezones.com we have a true happiness test which is a diagnostic we did with the university of pennsylvania that will Ask you about 40 questions to be able to diagnose you are you experiencing mostly life satisfaction or or experience happiness or lack

of purpose and and we we assess where you are in those three and then we we give you a prescriptive it's free by the way i love it right we'll make sure that we include that in the blog and we'll include that in the email as well so um according to science we humans have control of about 50 of our Happiness right the other 50 is about um genetics and luck yeah so lasting happiness from your perspective is something that everyone can create so how do we start to take charge of that fifty percent i

think to realize that so 50 is is um genetically prescribed for each of us so we all have what i call um a set range so imagine scale 1 to 10 and you're a really happy person and on A good day you're a 10 and on a crappy day you're a six but somebody down the street who was born with a a bad set of genes on a good day there are six on a crappy day there are two so you have control of where you are within your set range you might be able to

get out of it a little bit but really you're sort of for lack of a better hormonally endowed with a certain Capacity for happiness so i argue in blue zones of happiness that if you want to maximize your set range you want to shape your environment so you're more likely to be happy and now there's big data around happiness gallup the world um whirlpool world database of happiness for the the book and the national geographic art we sucked in 100 million data points and and did the Regression analysis to find out exactly what you can

do to stack the deck in favor of happiness tell us dan tell us [Laughter] well there's a number of things you can do um so if happiness were a cake recipe it's important to you need food and shelter and and and education that's by the way why bhutan is not a very happy place bhutan is number 91 in the world everybody Thinks bhutan's a happy place it's not a happy birthday they did a good marketing campaign right they did a good marketing campaign and they do deserve credit for coming up with the idea of gross

national happiness so if you can't measure you can't manage it so they get big kudos they just don't have an economy or distribution scheme so that enough people have the basics in life so you need the basics You need education you don't need to have a doctorate degree but really important to have at least a high school and some college to maximize your happiness you need satisfying work you're more likely to be happy if you if you're in a committed relationship than not uh having kids by the way is a mixed bag um you you

want to have a feeling of giving back but the most important ingredient The ingredient with the most variance is where you live and we know that because watching immigrants move from moldavia an unhappy place in the soviet black country to copenhagen and when we watch people from unhappy places in africa and asia move to canada which is a happy place those immigrants they don't change their sex their gender they don't change their education status much they don't inc they don't Change their set their genetic endowment they don't change their sexual preference they're the same people

and all they do is move and within one year they report the happiness level of their adopted home so moldavia for example the average score is three they move to an eight wow and in canada they move from a four or five to an eight so and all they do is mo so your environment uh where you live or how you shape your surroundings is the biggest most Important and most impactful thing you can do to favor your own happiness let's talk about that for a second because we have viewers excuse me in 195 countries

around the world and there will be a certain portion of people listening to this who hopefully will dive into all of your work that's what i want them to do and they may discover you know what i am going to pick up and move i'm not a tree So they might be able to and we'll talk about more about what makes for a great environment in terms of where you live but i know there are many many other thousands of people watching go okay well if i can't pick up and move or necessarily change where

i live at least right now let's talk about some of those shapers of our immediate environment and what we can do to stack the deck in our favor yeah so the first and foremost is curate A group of friends around you we we know we now know that unhappiness and loneliness are contagious so if you sit around people are unhappy and are lonely i'm not telling you to abandon your old friends because they need a hand but if you're continuously doing that's going to be contagious you can actually measure that a guy named nicholas christakis

has found that you want three to five friends who number one You have you can have meaningful conversations with them and i mean conversations of the heart not just sports or celebrity uh these should be friends you can call on a bad day and they'll care that's kind of the litmus test if my chips are down are they still going to be with me and number three you actually have to like them and you want to since been face to face there's no really good research showing that that um connecting on facebook or snapchat or

Something is the same as what we're doing right now yeah connecting face to face number two when it comes to your financial life the impact of financial security is about three times more powerful than consumption what does that mean that means if you just got a raise or there's some money left over in your paycheck over time you're actually better off Paying down your mortgage buying insurance joining one of these automatic savings plans then you are going out and buying a new pair of shoes or new gadget because the luster of that new thing will

wear off in nine to 14 months but financial security can last years decades or lifetime so that's that's more important i would say when it comes to uh your work life this comes from more than two million Surveys from from gallup um the biggest determinant of whether or not you're like your job is not how much money you make not how much recognition you get not what your boss tells you about yourself it's do you have a best friend at work i loved this insight tell us more yes so if if you're if you don't

like your job or sub optimal the making the effort to invite a Co-worker out um to organize the happy hour uh i actually i run these blue zone projects around the world or well around the country actually about 40 cities and we have over 100 uh workplace sorry workplaces that um that work with us and one of the things we do we actually create moais we require moai is a committed social network and we get all the employees to Come together and we have a process by which we help them break into groups of five

and then we organize them around either walking a healthy activity or eating blue zones food which is to say plant-based whole foods and um we find that about 60 to 70 percent of the time these people these kids are these workers stay together and become best friends It's amazing i was talking about this to someone the other day and um i was telling you off camera that we have a virtual company and so we don't see each other face to face every day but um team four leo which we call ourselves everyone really asked where

did you get that i don't know it was such a creative brainstorm but everyone really likes each other and one of the things that's been really satisfying for me as a boss Is oftentimes when my team has break time or we go on vacation or um you know there's down time they get together in person on their own and it makes me so happy because they want everybody winds up sending pictures and like oh i visited my friend here but then i'm gonna go see so and so and it's such a great feeling to know

how connected everyone is and then when we talk with folks who don't have a culture like we have and i see so much pain Because they don't feel connected to anyone at work it becomes really apparent because we're spending what 8 10 12 hours a day five days a week if not more most of your waking life yeah do you do you actually vacation together so last year we um i took the entire company they're off camera raise in hand we actually all went on vacation together to mexico and there was absolutely no um business

meeting at all We danced we drank margaritas we went it wasn't we went in the in the ocean at midnight because we were like dancing and sweating and we're like we need to cool off um but it was one of the best things that we've ever done as a company and especially that's so smart yeah it was really great and we have memories that'll last a lifetime and then it also kind of sends the message by the way that that um your employees aren't just um here to Further the interest of the company that you

actually care about oh yeah they know that that's transparent yeah absolutely they i mean you got how do you feel do you you know mama loves you mama i like that mama marie well i don't have biological kids i have a step son but i caught affectionately known as mama marie so let me one of the other things i love about your perspective because it's so fresh that you're not a huge advocate of Positive psychology techniques like savoring or appreciation or gratitude not that they don't work but only in the short run so tell me

about um why not that and why again i agree with you optimizing our environment is the way to go yeah i could not find any research that shows that the positive psychology interventions have any long-term it you know it's a lot like a vegan diet so there is Um indisputable evidence that eating a vegan whole food diet will help you lose weight and live longer but people can't stay on that diet diets last on average um well they work for 10 of people for three months within seven months you lose 90 and within two years

you lose about 97 i believe it's the same with these positive psychology interventions Savoring appreciation journals gratitude they're all great ideas and they all work i don't dispute the studies but the studies are all done in three months or something like that so when it comes to happiness it's got to be a long-term pursuit and uh i i don't know of any way to uh establish gratitude for more than a year well i think most of us as humans if we look at our own lives And again i have to say this because i know

my audience and i know they're going to be like ah no dan especially because chris carr and i are our best friends she should be like vegan is not a diet it's a lifestyle so yes everyone for those of you who have adopted and you eat vegan as a lifestyle we love you what dan's talking about his research and slightly different again i have this ability to hear people's um what they're going to say What are they what are they worried about um remember when you said well the vegan diet like people only do it

for a short amount of time i know people that they're that way yeah you know that's their life like chris carr for example right so i'm i just mean yes and and you're right uh vegans is more of a a moral way of living uh ethical way of living but i i should say to just getting on any diet trying to adopt a new diet and there are hundreds of them That come on the on on the scene every year and there's been no diet in the history of the world that works for more than

two or three percent of the people for over two years so um trying to ask somebody to remember to do the right thing and to have the discipline to do the right thing by themselves will almost always fail yeah And that's why i like this idea about really setting up your environment to nudge you you know we were talking again uh before we had the cameras rolling um i spend uh some of my time here in new york city and i also spend some of my time in los angeles specifically in venice where i ride

my bike a lot and i notice how happy i am there because i'm riding my bike i'm walking around there's less congestion typically than there is here in new york city and i Think it's just so interesting that um rather than like striving to be happy i feel like what your perspective is out is kind of laying out for us it's like the lazy way to do it in the sense where you set up your environment it almost starts to happen automatically that's right exactly yeah and by the way um when you're in venice there

is something called the sun bonus so if you control for everything else if you live in a Sunny environment you're about five percent more likely to be happy that's what it is for me and also if you live by the water yeah well it's actually water or mountains so those two you're just more likely to be happy and it may be because water's serene or maybe because you get to swim or it may be because um you like sunsets but but Yeah moving to a sunny beachy areas stacks of deck in your favor one of

the things i love in the happiness project is that you actually give us a fantastic set of questions to consider designing our own so i just want to read the first three if that's okay oh yeah some questions so what makes you feel good what activities do you find fun satisfying or energizing you guys will probably put these up in the lower third And so you can write them down for yourselves what makes you feel bad what are sources of anger irritation boredom frustration or anxiety in your life and then this third one is there

any way in which you don't feel right about your life do you wish you could change your job or city or family situation or other circumstances these are such brilliant questions good i love them are These like i feel like these are the kind of questions that you can ask yourself at any time to launch any type of self-improvement project on a small scale or a large scale do you still ask yourself these questions no absolutely and it's interesting because i think you kind of need everything like you need more fun and enjoyment and pleasure

and like a life where you just experienced nothing negative would not be happy but on the other hand i think There's this you know because the negativity bias we experience the negative more strongly yes so like at least i think for my happiness project it was much more about trying to bring up the negatives um when you say bring up the negatives like okay like i'm not getting enough sleep so i'm really exhausted so how do i get that how do i fix that um how do i maybe i feel guilty because i like i

was losing my temper with my kids all the Time what do i do so that i'm not losing my temper um but i think you're right it's a it's a it's a constant process because everything's always changing in our lives and so you have different you have different challenges and maybe you get one thing under control so then you kind of want to up your game or try something different yeah i think these questions are are amazing um let's talk about the arrival fallacy from happier at home Right one of the persistent follies of human

nature is to imagine true happiness is just out of reach you share we start off with you're too young for that or it's too soon for that or i'll have plenty of time for that later but it quickly becomes it's too late for that or i'm too old for that and i'm wondering if we can talk into that and also share about um waiting too long to make a snowman Yeah with the arrival fallacy is just this idea like once when i get my house i'll be happy when i publish my book i'll be happy

when i lose 30 pounds i'll be happy when i uh when it's you know the new year i'll be happier or my my version of the arrival fallacy is to think well everything will calm down everything's gonna calm down after the holidays everything's gonna look oh it's gonna be really quiet in the summer yes and it Never it never comes down it never gets quiet um it never does and so i think you can it's but it's this idea that or it's another way that's kind of a version of the arrival fallacy it's not the

same thing but it's very tomorrow's focus is to think well this will be easier tomorrow yes oh starting in starting in 2020 i'm going to exercise starting you know on my birthday that's when i'm going to start like really watching the budget because it always Seems like things are going to be easier tomorrow you're going to be happier tomorrow and everything's going to be easier tomorrow you're going to have more willpower you're going to have less like temptation you're going to have less time pressure no it's like whatever tomorrow is it's probably a lot like

today yeah so i think maybe the fix is catching ourselves when we are falling into that fallacy yes and recognizing Now's the time yes it's interesting there was just an article in the wall street journal it was talking about um there are many many more people living single today than there ever have been um and one of the things they said that for to be happy as a single person one of the things you have to do is to be like if i want to buy an apartment i should buy an apartment now if i

want to go to mexico i should go to mexico now like don't Wait for some kind of future when you're gonna have a different kind of situation really do everything that you can to to feel as happy as you can right now and to take it and to like live your life the way you want rather than thinking like well i'm sort of in a temporary position right now yeah your life is your life like do what you want right now and then tomorrow who can say and can you tell us the story about the

snow and the snowman With this it was around you watching the snow do you remember this i'm probably trying to drag your memory yeah you were watching the snow out the window oh yeah yeah yeah yes no i experienced this all the time in fact i was thinking about this for my next book actually which is this idea of like i don't need to i don't need to experience to the uttermost the weather conditions because there's always going to be another time Like we can always there'll always be a snow snow to make a snowman

or there's always going to be a beautiful sunset i don't have to go out there or i don't have to go out and look at the moon because i have my whole life to look at the moon but then the snow goes away and you never made the snowman or the whole winter goes away and you never made the snowman and so i i know and i was thinking about that um With all of nature it's like i think oh i should walk in the park and make sure that i see all the cherry blossoms

and i'm like oh well i'll wait a week or two it's like okay they're not gonna be there in a week or two yeah you know and i'm like oh i could see them next year it's like there's no guarantee that's right you know that's really that big one there's really no guarantee this week here in the us we are celebrating one of my favorite holidays Thanksgiving come on guys can we hear it for some thanksgiving now here's the deal i love this holiday because it's not about material gifts it's about friends it's about family

and connection and food glorious food do you guys know how much i love to eat i love to eat now as you may know a typical practice is that people sit around the thanksgiving dinner table and they often take turns sharing what they're grateful for well This season i have got something new for you to try and here's what's great it's something that you can do all year long so instead of saying what we're grateful for what we're gonna do is say what we appreciate now you might be thinking hold up marie are those really

the same thing and my response to you is not really so for our purposes i want you to think about gratitude as the quality of being Thankful now most of the time when we talk about things that we're grateful for we're referring to things we have in our life like i don't know i'm grateful for my job or i'm grateful for my husband now there's nothing wrong with that gratitude is a very transformative force but appreciation is different it's about recognizing something great in someone else and letting them know about it and as stephen covey

taught us the greatest need of a human being is to Be understood validated and appreciated so this year why not go around the holiday table and publicly appreciate each person so talk about something specific that you love or admire about them i want you to brag on them just give them a shout out kind of like this zach i appreciate how creative you are how thoughtful you are how much you judge the set of marietv and most importantly how you are willing to do The flash dance solo anytime anyplace jams i appreciate your sense of

humor your laughter and you my friend are a snazzy dresser i appreciate how you laugh at my jokes when nobody else does and that's the thing i care about the most mashed potatoes i appreciate you i appreciate how creamy and fluffy and light and delicious And salty you are you get better every year and you make me feel so warm and fluffy jams that was really sweet but can you make it to a person mashed potatoes is my nickname for eric [Music] now i think you get the idea right and if you're not used to

giving people compliments here is an appreciation template to get your creative juices flowing First name i so appreciate your blank and here you're going to insert a quality like courage or tenacity or thoughtfulness or sense of humor next you'll say i say that because of blank then you're going to share some specific details and evidence of how they embody that trait or how they make people feel if you put some thought into this i promise you will find truth in this here tweetable What you appreciate appreciates now even though i love that statement i did

not make that one up you know it's one of those classic bits of wisdom that's almost impossible to trace back to a single source but i do know that lynn twist the author of one of my favorite books called the soul of money has done a brilliant job spreading this idea too and here's what it really means to me you know the grass is always greener where you Water it and this is especially true in our relationships the more you can express genuine appreciation for people in your life the stronger your relationships will become and

the more fulfilling your life will be how do i deal with the guilt let me explain i've recently shifted my business focus to an area which i have strong skills and which i greatly enjoy during work the other day i found myself Very very happy that stopped me in my tracks and suddenly i was full of guilt whether it came from someone in my family my nanny my school teachers or just being raised female in the society i have a lot of baggage around enjoying my work if this new path works out i could conceivably

not only make enough to support myself but to allow my overworked generous and supportive spouse to shift to a less stressful career too i find myself Wondering with so many people in the world forced many literally to do work they hate just to survive what gives me to write to pursue work that feeds me mentally and spiritually as well as financially please help me get to a positive perspective on this so that i can move forward your fan cynthia in virginia cynthia this is a beautiful question you have a lot of empathy you're a very

caring person that means you actually give a damn about the Welfare of others that is a beautiful thing but this is a big but obviously as you shared this guilt thing is tripping you up and if you don't get it handled it can really screw up your happiness and your success now i have a few ideas that can help number one is your misery doesn't serve anyone and it certainly doesn't help those people who don't have many options right now in terms of their livelihood it's not like you being miserable at work or feeling guilty

over Loving your work is somehow creating more work options because it's not you need to wake up and break this association that you have with guilt and it being useful guilt is not useful it's wasteful it's indulgent and it does not make you a better or more caring person you're assuming that misery loves company and that may not be true give them some credit that they don't want more people suffering alongside of them and also give some credit to the people That don't have the options that you have but they make the best of it

basically it's time to wake up and smell the happiness coffee in fact you know what i'm gonna have myself a happacino right now this is with almond milk right [Music] number two you can't give away what you don't have so if you want to make a difference in this world on any level you can't give that which you don't have for yourself and when it comes to the Important things like love and compassion and happiness you have to cultivate that within so then you can extend it to others number three happiness is not a limited

resource so unlike resources like time or water there's no limited quantity and happiness in the world so stop thinking that you're going to use it all up in fact the more happy you are in your work the more it opens up that possibility for others and i like this idea so much That we are making it a tweetable happiness is not a limited resource so help yourself and there will be plenty left for everyone else number four who is anyone to be happy so cynthia in your question you wondered out loud what gives me the

right to pursue work that feeds me mentally spiritually and financially and i say what gives anyone that right i mean what if anyone who's ever made a significant positive impact said that and what if we all said that It would all be like great let's all be miserable at work yay thanks cynthia just kidding number five you want to turn your guilt into giving so this may be the only redeeming quality of guilt in this situation so if you don't have an active practice of giving back to others whether that's money or time or mentoring

or your community or whatever You need to get that practice going and make it a permanent part of your life so this isn't about relieving guilt this is about expressing the wholeness of who you are as a human being and living that fully in your life one thing that i found to be true is the more you give the more you live that's why we have our change your life change the world initiative now if this floats your boat cynthia you need to come and join our kiva lending team it's awesome little Link is below

this way you can make a direct impact on people's livelihoods all over the world so of course i'm not attached to where or how you give but if inside you feel like you're not doing enough right now i want you to turn your guilt into heartfelt giving oh my goodness you made it all the way to the end good on you but let's not stop here keep the momentum going you're gonna love this next episode click it watch it now and i'll catch you there you can be Utterly completely head over heels in love with

some parts of your life and absolutely be totally unhappy in other parts and i don't think we should ever just freaking settle