The Happiness Equation: ‘Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything’

It’s very easy to get stuck into constantly striving for more, growing our business, taking the next step in our career, beginning that next project… but we very rarely actually stop and let ourselves be happy. This good gives some simple, practical advice and different approaches to injecting a little more happiness into your life.

 

Happiness Secret #1: Be Happy First

Most people think that the path to success looks like this:

• Great Work -> Big Success -> Be Happy
• Study hard -> Great Job -> Be happy
• Work Overtime -> Get Promoted -> Be Happy

The idea is that if we do all of the right things now, then at some magical point in the future we’ll be happy. If we trudge through the mud and the slime, if we get battered and bruised by the storm, then once the sun comes out the other side we’ll find our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

But this model is broken.

We find ourselves in a never ending loop between step one and step two, never allowing ourselves to get to that all-important step three. We work overtime so we can get a promotion, then we just go back to working overtime so that we can get the NEXT promotion. We learn new skills to get a good job, but rather than being happy we go back to learning the next set of skills. We work hard, achieve our big success, then go straight back to work on the next project. We never get to happiness. Why stop at that college degree when you can keep studying and get a masters? Why stop at a Director when you could work a little harder and become a Vice President? Why stop at one investment property when you could keep working and keep saving and buy a second? We keep pushing happiness further and further away.

Thankfully, there is a simple solution. We just need to flip the equation around: Be Happy FIRST. Here’s what your new path should look like:

• Be Happy -> Great Work -> Big Success

Harvard Business Review reported that happy people are 31% more productive and made 37% higher sales and were 3 times more creative than their non-happy counterparts. Maybe we’re thinking about it all wrong. Maybe it’s not the success that leads to happiness, but our happiness that leads to success.

Happier people are better at work, progress further in their careers, they’re better at home and better in their relationships, so we should all just be happy all the time. This is easy to say: be happy. But you know that it’s not quite that simple in reality. That’s because we’re thinking about “happiness” all wrong. Happiness does not mean the absence of negative thoughts. We all have negative thoughts all the time! There is no such thing as an eternal optimist – negative self-talk always creeps in. So the problem is not that we have negative thoughts in our brain, the problem is that we think we shouldn’t have negative thoughts.

Until just a few short centuries ago, the entire purpose of our day was basically to get food and build a shelter. But if you’re reading this book, we’re going to guess that you’ve got access to more food than you could ever need and you’re living more comfortably than your ancestors. So with the two most important goals ticked off, sustenance and safety, our focus shifts. It used to be that if you didn’t have enough food you were going to die, now we feel that if we don’t have enough happiness we think we’re going to die.

As Yuval Noah Harari says in his book Homo Deus, the American Declaration of Independence stated that we should have “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Now that has morphed slightly. We believe that we’re entitled to “life, liberty and happiness”. Where we used to feel entitled to pursue happiness, we now think we’re owed happiness all of the time. If we’re not happy, then something is wrong! We don’t realise that everybody else has negative thoughts all of the time as well, so whenever a negative thought creeps in we feel like a failure.

In some villages in China, you pay the doctor for every month that you are healthy. If you get sick you don’t have to pay for that month. This is the exact opposite of the Western approach. In the East, the doctor’s job is to keep you healthy, so you pay them every time they do their job and you are healthy. But in the West, we’re always looking for problems. If you’re healthy then nothing happens, it is only when you have a problem that you go to a doctor and pay them to solve the problem. This is one example of the fact that we’re always looking for problems. Rather than enjoying what we have, we’re focused on what we lack. Rather than being content with our current position in life, we’re always looking to what may come next. Rather than being happy, we’re focused on the negative thoughts.

If you’re looking for a problem to solve… you’re going to find a problem. Instead of always looking for what is WRONG with our life, why don’t we focus on what is RIGHT for a change? Be happy first.

Secret #2: Remember The Lottery

There is a constant war inside our brain. The war is between “more” and “enough”. We’re always striving for more: more money, more stats, more power. But this is in direct conflict with having enough. By definition, when we’re trying to get more of something, it means we’re not content with what we already have. When we’re not content with ‘enough’, we’re not happy. We have access to pretty much everything we could ever need to survive, yet we’re never happy with what we’ve got.

We’re too busy focusing on what we lack instead of remembering what we have. We’re always comparing up, looking at the millionaires and billionaires that have so much more than us. We never take the time to give ourselves a dose of humility by recognising how many people on this planet have so much less than us. To get to the point where you are today, you’ve basically won the lottery a billion times over. Yet you’re still crying out that you don’t have enough.

The biggest lottery jackpot was with ‘Powerball’, on January 13 in 2016. It went to the Robinson Family. They showed up with their dog and scrappy attire to claim the prize. The lucky bastards went home with $528 million. There life had changed forever, they could be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want to do for the rest of their lives. Imagine if you won that lottery… And imagine if you won that lottery 100 days in a row! Life would be a dream and could finally live happily ever after.

Well, you already have won that lottery. And a lot more luck than the equivalent of winning it a thousand times over. Don’t believe us? Let’s do the math.

The first lottery you won was that the planet Earth can support life. The anthropic principle says that there were so many variables throughout the entire history of the universe that had to be just right for us to get to where we are today. A 0.001% change in either direction a billion years ago and none of us would be here today.

The second lottery you won was that you were born into a species that dominates the planet. You could be a poor antelope chewing grass on the savannah, not hearing the lion sneaking up behind you about the rip your leg off. You could be a lab rat, bred specifically to be tortured to learn more about human life. You could be a dairy cow, getting artificially inseminated by cold machines so that you produce milk all year round. But lucky for you, you were born a human.

The third lottery you won was to be born today. You could’ve been born centuries ago in a time without medicine, where a little cut got infected or you got bitten by a snake and you died in your hut a few days later.

The fourth lottery you won was that your great-great-grandparents took a liking to each other and got a little frisky one night. If any of your thousands of ancestors didn’t happen to meet, or any of the millions of other sperms made it to the egg before you did, you wouldn’t be here today.

The fifth lottery you won is that you’re alive today. Out of the 108 billion humans that have ever lived, there are less than 8 billion alive today. If you’re reading this book and your heart is still beating, that’s reason enough to be happy.

The sixth lottery you won was to be born into relative comfort. If you’re reading this book, your life is probably pretty good compared to the rest of the world. You might look up to the big dogs in your country and cry poor on your measly salary, but you’re ignoring the rest of the world. There are a billion people living in poverty. The average worldwide salary is about $5,000. If you’re making $50,000 a year, you might not be in the top 50% of your COUNTRY, but you’re in the top 0.5% of the WORLD. You’re making more than 99.5% of the rest of the people on the planet.

This is just a taste, to put things into perspective. Just to get to where you are, just to even be alive in the first place, the odds are the equivalent of winning the lottery billions of times over. Yet we still don’t have enough…
Epictetus said: “wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants”. A Persian proverb says: “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet”. And more recently, The Rolling Stones said “you can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, well, you might find you get what you need”. Don’t get caught up in the endless pursuit of MORE. Instead, be grateful for what you already have, realising that it might already be ENOUGH.

Remember how lucky you are to be here. Remember the lottery.

Secret #3: The Third Bucket

Each week is 168 hours long. We can divide that pretty roughly into three buckets. Let’s put 56 hours a week, 8 hours a day, toward sleep. Then let’s put 56 hours towards work, the usually 40 hour work week plus all of the time you need to get ready in the morning and commute to and from the office. That means we’ve got a third bucket. We’ve got 56 hours left in the week to do whatever we want.

You might think that you can draw from buckets 1 and 2 to put even more time into bucket 3, but 56 hours a week should be plenty. And buckets 1 and 2 – working and sleeping – are exactly the things we need that give us the time/energy/money/structure to do whatever we want in bucket 3. But most people waste it!

I (Ashto) went to a pretty good school. It’s a select entry school where you have to do an exam to get in, and you can only get in if you score in the top 2% of the state. Our school normally finishes second in the high school rankings, only losing out to our sister school (the all-girls school seems to trump our all-boys school every single year!). Students go on to study the top university courses and join the top professions – medicine, dentistry, law, finance, engineering. One mate, Matty, went into management consulting. Every Monday morning he flies to a different city to visit a client, returns late on a Friday night, then spends all of Saturday writing up his reports and recommendations from the week. Another mate went into law and a high-powered legal firm. Most days he works from about 7am to 9pm, plus a couple of hours on the weekend to make up for anything he couldn’t get done during the week. Both of these blokes are living in small one-bedroom apartments in an inner city high rise.

Where is their third bucket??? Both these blokes are making about $120k a year, but have to work 80 hours a week to get it. That works out to about $28 an hour. Plus, they’re both pretty miserable and hate their jobs.

Compare this to my brother, Nigel. He also went to the same school, but took a very different approach to most – he became a primary school teacher. He loves it! He gets to impact the lives of kids at a crucial age. He moved to the bush because he didn’t agree with the implied philosophies that the city schools were drilling into their susceptible children. He was able to buy a house after just two years in the workforce, because house prices in the country are less than half of what they would cost in the city. Every day he’s home by 4 or 5 and work is done. It doesn’t bleed into the evening. It doesn’t bleed into the weekend. Primary schools in Australia have 4 terms of 10 weeks each, so he basically gets 12 weeks a year of holidays. When you do the math on these, Nigel is making… about $28 an hour too! And he loves what he gets to do every day. His third bucket is fuller than most, giving him the freedom to do whatever he wants all night and all weekend.

If happiness is the goal, then it’s important to realise that there is a different path. Rather than looking at it on a salary per year basis, if you’re calculating your hourly wage there are two ways you can make more money than a Harvard MBA: earn more money, or work less hours. You can take time from your third bucket and overfill your work bucket so that you can make more money. But will that lead to more happiness? Alternatively, you can recognise that by being happy with ‘enough’ money, you can enjoy your life far more by living with a full third bucket, have the flexibility and freedom to do whatever it is that makes you happy.

 

The Happiness Equation (dot point) Summary

Unstructured ideas from our notes and preparation for our podcast episode

Ch3 -the one thing your doctor, teacher and tom hanks all have in common

Fear is still programmed into our heads
In some villages in China, (Derek Sivers TED talk), they view the doctor’s job is to make you healthy. So, you pay them every month that you’re healthy, and if you’re sick, you don’t pay them.

• In the West, we pay the doctors to fix our problems.

This is indicative of our outlook on life: rather than looking for what is GOOD and what is WORKING, we always look for the problems

1. look for problem 
2. find a problem
3. make it better

our brains are wired to look for problems and by always looking for (and finding) problems, our happiness is reduced significantly

 

4 – how much can we control

Quote by Charles Swindoll, Texan preacher, called ‘Attitudes’

• “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens and 90% how I react”
• 10% of what happens (the circumstances) is almost completely outside of our control
• If I knew everything about your life circumstances, your job, your marital status and income, I could only predict 10% of your happiness
  • The rest comes from your attitude and how you perceive it
• 90% of how we react is almost completely within our control

 

5 – 7 ways to be happy now

The 20 minute replay

• Write down for twenty mintutes about a positive experience
• Helps us remember the things we like about people and experiences

‘Three Walks’

Pennsylvania State researchers reported in the Journal of Sports & Exercise Physiology that ‘the more physically active people are, the greater their general feelings of excitement and enthusiasm’

Key finding: “Half and hour of brisk walking three times a week improves happiness”

Action: instead of grabbing lunch and eating it at your desk, go outside and walk for 30 mins.

Random Acts of Kindness

“Carrying out five random acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness”

eg: pay for the coffee of the person two people behind you in line eg: mow your neighbours lawn eg: write a thank you note to the door man of your building or the receptionist

Hit flow

• In the zone

Complete unplug

complete downtime allows us to switch off, recharge, and replenish oursslves

eg: turn your phone off after dinner eg: turn the internet off whilst on vacation

2 minute meditations

-parts of the brain associated with self awareness and compassion grow, and parts associated with stress shrinks

5 gratitudes

-find 5 things to be grateful about each day

 

6 – a final lesson from the convent

Be happy first

• Happy people don’t have the best of everything
  • They make the best of everything

Happiness Secret 2: Do It For You

• Setting never ending external goals
  • He uses blog example
• Set internal goals instead, not external

2 – what’s the biggest problem with external goals?

Two types – extrinsic and intrinsic

kids coming home after school yelled abuse at him from the street

• He said “come back tomorrow and yell insults at me on my porch and I’ll give you all $1 each”
• The next day they came back and yelled and yelled, even more than usualy
• he said “thnak you – please come back tomorrow and do it again. Unfortunalely I’ll only be able to give you 25cents each though”
• The kids came back and yelled again the next day
• he said “thank you, please come back again tomorrow, but I can only afford to pay you 5cents each this time)
• “Forget it”, they said “it’s not worth it”
• And they never bothered him again

Extrinsic motivators kill intrinsic motivators

• You’re not doing it for yourself, for others
• External motivators
• When you get external validation, you’re flying in
  • Lots of emails, lots of comments
• But when they’re slightly negative, you’re devastated
• Critical comments make you feel like a loser

eg: instead of wanting to write a best-sellering book, just focus on writing the book for the joy and satisfaction of having written a book!

eg: Instead of making a podcast to climb into the Top 5, just do it for the constant learning and growth you’ll get

 

3 – 4 simple words that block all criticism

1. Do
2. It 
3. For
4. You

Do it for you

#3 (Remember The Lottery)

Secret 3 – click?

• There is a wat going on inside your head every day
  • Amygdala (oldest part of the brain, responsible for scanning for problems then releasing adrenaline and stress hormones, sending us into fight or flight)
  • War = we can’t control our emotions at all. We can try to control our reactions to those emotions

Our problem-scanning machine (amygdala) and our serenity mood tape (prefontal cortext are at war)

2 – 

Second war=

• Second war = the war between MORE and ENOUGH
• None of us can control our emotions. We can only control our reactions to our emotions

Our problem-scan

3 – the one thing billionaires want but can’t have

• “the knowledge that I’ve got enough”
• We are living in a culture of more, instead of a culture of enough
• You can move to a shack in the woods, but you’re missing out on a lot

4 – what does a Greek philosopher have in common with the Rolling Stones

Epictetus: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants”

Persian Proverb: “I cried because I had no shows, until I met a man with no feet”

 

Ch7 – how to use the three words on your very worst days

1. Being alive

Pale Blue Dot in the billions of galaxies out there

There are about 7 billions people on Earth right now. There are about 115billion who have ever lived

So there are 108 billion dead!

Being alive means you’ve won the lottery

1. Your income

• The average world income is $5,000 – If you earn more than this, you doing pretty well against the avergae
• If you earn more than $50,000 a year, you’re in the Top 0.5% of the planet
• “You already have more than almost everybody on the planet” – our culture constantly pushes us toward MORE, which means that we can never have ENOUGH
• Step back. Push those thoughts out. Remember the lottery – because you have already won.

REMEMBER THE LOTTERY

Part 2 – do anything

Secret 4 – the dream we all have that is completely wrong

#4 (Never Retire)

3 – what can the healthiest 100 year olds in the world teach us

Men and woman in Okinawa live an average of seven years longer than Americans and have the longest disability free life expectancy on Earth

• Ancient Chinese legends “the land of the immortals”
• Whats the biggest difference?
  • They don’t have a word for retirement

• The closest word they have is ikigai 
• In Okinawa
  •  there is a 102 year old karate master whose ikigai is to carry forth his martial art
  • There is a 100 year old fishermen whose ikigai is to feed his family
  • A 102 year olds ikigai is to carry  her great great grand daughter
• In the study, those with an Ikigai live longer
• With an ikigai card , when you wake up, you know where you’re going

4 – the single greatest lesson we can learn from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• “one day she hit a fork in the raod and sawa  Cheshire cat in the tree”
  • “which road do I take?” she asked
  • “where do you want to go?” was his response
  • “I don’t know” Alice Answered
  • “Then… it doesn’t matter”

5 – the horrible idea the Germans had that ruined things for everybody

• The idea of retirement came out of Germnay in 1889 and established the concept for all of us
• People retired at 67,,,, but the average life span was 67
• The number of those working above 65 is decreasing fast
• Concept by marketing companies was to glamorize leisure and to make every older adult feel like they have a right to it
• Insurance companies, deeply involved in the pension business got into the act of mass advertisement of retirement preparation classes that encouraged separation from society and focused on consumption and self-preoccupation
• This began the transofrmation of retirement as a time of rest, relaxation and fun that every American would look forward to as a reward of a lifetime of labour

 

6 – when you’re through changing, you’re through

-We’re planning social security, 401Ks and pensions

• But how many of us are planning for our social activity accounts?
• By laying the basis for future activities in the midst of the current careers, we reject stultifying retirement and seize opportunitity for a serious second wind
• [AJ – better making a pay cut now, for something you enjoy and don’t have to retire from, than earn more for something that you have to retire early]

“when you’re working you become part of something bigger than yourself. Volunteer at the library and you spread knowledge toe the community. Teach at the college and you’re developing productive members of the society”

• What does retiring do?
  • It chops you out of the productivity story
  • You aren’t part of something bigger than yourself any more
  • It hampers your ikigai
  • So don’t give up work, don’t retire

NEVER RETIRE

Secret 5 – how to make more money than a Harvard MBA

THREE BUCKETS

Let’s divide that up into 3:

• 56hr = sleep
• 56hr = work (usually 40hr/wk work, plus travelling, getting ready, washing, etc)
• 56 = COMPLETELY FREE TO DO WHAT YOU LIKE

working provides this structure, working pays for this structure, working and sleeping for buckets 1 & 2 allow you the time/money/energy/structure to do whatever you choose in the Third Bucket

• most people WASTE this…

1 – what does Harvard do for your salary

the campus is amazing: trees, lawns, wooden doors, brown leather couches, expensive art, state-of-the-art gym, etc

• also makes you ACTUALLY rich
  • Avg American salary = $24,000
  • Avg Harvard grad salary = $120,000
  • So you’re 5X the average the first year you start work!
• so the answer – if you want more money, go to harvard???

 

2 – is everyone nuts?

But it’s not all rosey…

• Mark = management consultant: fly out early monday, fly home late Thursday night, visiting the client, Friday = working to write uyp everything from the week
• Chris = principal at massive private school, Works 7am-9pm plus a few hours on the weekend
• Ryan = private equity, 10am-11pm seven days a week
• Sonia = silicon valley tech giant, ~80hr/wk

WHERE IS THEIR THIRD BUCKET???

Looks like their life is almost completely consumed by work (and sleep), so they have no third bucket to do anything else…

 

4 – calculations

$120,000/year = 120000 divided by 1 year

but you don’t work all year and get paid for that year of work… you can’t compare 120000/yr and 50000/yr if you don’t know what that ‘year’ entails

• INSTEAD: make a calculation to view it as a $/hr
  • first job = Toys R Us stacking shelves for $11 or $12/hr
  • we worked together at a pub, $21/hr?
  • I work at the MCG at the footy, casual job, $42/hr
  • Full time work ($ divided by time) probably $26-28 per hour

 

Harvard calcs?

• HARVARD MBA: $120,000/yr, 2 weeks vacation, 85hr/wk for 50 weeks, 4250hr/yr = $28/hr
• Retail asst manager: $70,000/yr, 2 weeks holiday, 50hr/wk for 50 weeks, 2500hr/yr = $28/hr
• Teacher: $45,000/yr, 12 weeks holiday per year, work 40hr/wk for 40 weeks, 1600hr/yr = $28/hr

How do you make more than a Harvard MBA?

1. Make more $$$ per year (but work more hours)
2. Work way fewer hours per year (but earn less total $$$, but more per hour

YOU HAVE THE CHOICE: WORK MORE HOURS, OR USE YOUR THIRD BUCKET FOR SOMETHING ELSE

(free pay rise, don’t work back so late, drop the hours keep the salary)

Overvalue you

 

Secret 6 – the secret to never being too busy again

• How to turn your biggest fear into your biggest success
• MOST PEOPLE THINK: “The DO Line”
  • Can do -> Want to do -> DO
  • Rather than doing, we have to first assess if we WANT to do it or not, and we have to BELIEVE that we CAN do it at allv
  • eg: Neil believed he couldn’t swim, which made teh others redundant (didn;t WANT to, so he didnt DO)
• INSTEAD: “The DO Circle”
  • do -> can do -> want to do -> do -> can do -> want…
  • Forget about belief and want, if you just DO, you get the belief and the desire in order to KEEP DOING
  • ‘fake it til you make it’ sort of stuff – if you “Just Do It”, the rest takes care of itself as you cycle through
  • Most people think you need motivation in order to start, but really, you start first and that gives you the motivaiton
  • rather than ‘it’s easier said than do’, instead it should be ‘it’s easier done than said’

“worst thing that happens if you speak up at the company meeting? You fail miserably… But at least you know

• What are the chances of failing miserably? LOW
• But the great leaders try and then try again
• Sure you’ll fail at some things, but you’ll keep moving
• And then you’ll succeed and have little wins
• Which turn into bigger wins

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