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Episode: The Secret to Happiness with Harvard professor Robert Waldinger

Author: Simon Sinek
Duration: 00:45:30

Episode Shownotes

We all want to live a happy life, but what does research say about how to actually achieve it? For more than 86 years, researchers at Harvard University have been trying to answer that question. In one of the longest-running and most comprehensive studies of human happiness, Harvard tracked 724

teenagers through every stage of their adult lives since 1938. Some of them are still alive today and the findings are clear: lasting happiness isn’t about wealth or fame—it’s about something much deeper.Robert Waldinger, a professor and psychiatrist, has directed the study for over 20 years. His TED Talk about it went viral with nearly 50 million views, and in 2023, he wrote a book about it - The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.I asked Robert to share what the study has revealed about happiness over the decades, how its insights have shaped his own life, and the one essential ingredient for a joyful, meaningful existence.This…is A Bit of Optimism.To learn more about Robert and his work, check out:The Harvard Study of Adult Developmentrobertwaldinger.com

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
You might know this because you are a psychiatrist. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One? Exactly. One. But the light bulb has to really want to change. I love that joke. We all want to live a happy life, of course.

00:00:17 Speaker_02
In fact, we want it so much that there's a whole cottage industry built around helping us find it. But what does a happy life actually look like? In the 1930s, some Harvard scientists started tracking 724 teenagers.

00:00:30 Speaker_02
They kept detailed records about how they lived their lives and what gave them satisfaction. They tracked all 724 people for their entire lives. Only 10 of them are still living today, and they are all in their hundreds.

00:00:43 Speaker_02
But just like the people the study tracked, the scientists got old too. So the director of the study was handed to subsequent generations. And Dr. Robert Waldinger is the current director, a position he's held for the past 22 years.

00:00:55 Speaker_02
So he knows a lot about what actually leads to a happy life. I wanted to know the things he's learning. I also wanted to know how he's changed his own life as a result of the data he reads.

00:01:08 Speaker_02
And let's just say I'm making a few changes to how I live my life too. This is a bit of optimism. I don't know how to ask this without it sounding not polite, but it's the only way I can think to ask it.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
How come they picked you to lead the happiness study?

00:01:33 Speaker_00
Well, you're not the only one who asked that question. Did you draw the short straw? You know, I might have drawn the short straw. What happened was my predecessor, George Valiant, asked a couple of other people and they said no.

00:01:49 Speaker_00
They said, this is a great big messy albatross, you know, with data that goes back to 1938. So he got turned down. So he probably got his third choice. I think I was at least his third choice.

00:02:06 Speaker_02
So what made you say yes?

00:02:08 Speaker_00
Let's go there then. Oh, well, the research project that I begged them to fund, the federal government said, nah, we're not so interested. So I was in that place and my predecessor said, come over to my office and just read through one person's file.

00:02:28 Speaker_00
And so I said, okay. And so he, the file was probably a thousand pieces of paper.

00:02:33 Speaker_00
And I started reading through and I read about this 19 year old guy and what he hoped for, for his life and what was most important to him and what it was like to be dating. And then I read about his 40 year old aspirations.

00:02:50 Speaker_00
And then I flipped to his 60 year old. discussion of his marriage and how disappointing it was. You read his whole life. I read his life. I sat there and read his life. And it was like, this is like the coolest thing I could do.

00:03:04 Speaker_02
Based on the actual people you studied, tell me something they get right as they are young kids, in their teens, or even in their early 20s, and they start to think about what will make them happy, and they get it right.

00:03:21 Speaker_00
A lot of them care about making a difference in the world, and they care about the world.

00:03:28 Speaker_00
And the people who stay with that, they may not be the same purpose all the way through their lives, but the people who stay with that aspiration, I think stay engaged in life. And I think that's what they get right. That's really significant, right?

00:03:43 Speaker_02
If we look at how we're teaching our children, Universities advertise, as a reason to choose them over another, the starting salaries of their graduates.

00:03:54 Speaker_02
And our guidance counselors, they don't ask us the right questions about how we want to contribute to the world. They ask us what we can do and where we think we can get employment.

00:04:04 Speaker_02
What I find very significant about what you're saying is, what if our guidance counselors, what if our deans, what if our parents start instilling in us at a very young age, the importance of simply wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves?

00:04:17 Speaker_02
Forget about actually achieving it, simply wanting it.

00:04:21 Speaker_02
As you said, the data shows that people who at a young age want to contribute to something bigger than themselves, they will somehow pursue that ideal for the rest of their lives, which keeps them at above average happy rates.

00:04:35 Speaker_00
Yes. And I think what happens is that many people have posited a kind of psychological maturity that involves wanting to be part of something bigger than the self. Eric Erickson, I don't know if you've heard of his stuff, but he was- The Viking?

00:04:52 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. He was a psychoanalyst from Vienna in the 30s and 40s who came to Boston, who taught for a while at Harvard. And he started talking about the stages of adult development. Nobody had talked about adult development.

00:05:10 Speaker_00
Everybody was interested in kids because they so obviously developed. Right. But he said, you know, adults go through these stages. And one of his stages he called generativity versus stagnation.

00:05:24 Speaker_00
And the generativity was wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself. realizing, oh, I want to help raise kids, or I want to mentor people, or I want to do something that's not just me.

00:05:37 Speaker_00
And he said that the people who do that, become the people who are going to look back on their lives with less regret, with more of a sense that my life was good enough.

00:05:51 Speaker_02
I think we're living in a time where, though we intellectually know that because it's the subject of so many social media posts, I think we're living in a time where people don't feel connected to something bigger than themselves in general.

00:06:02 Speaker_02
We don't work for companies for 30 or 40 years anymore. Church attendance is down.

00:06:08 Speaker_02
Even the great power competitions of us versus the Soviet Union that we were proud to be a part of this side versus that side, even at a global politics level, those things have gone away.

00:06:18 Speaker_02
I think you see it on the left and the right politically, people latching onto absolutely anything that gives them that sense of belonging, but it doesn't last. Those attachments don't last, but you can see them just grasping for it.

00:06:32 Speaker_02
the intense latching onto, whether it's a far left or a far right point of view about how the world should work. And they latch onto it as if it's their life's purpose, but it isn't.

00:06:43 Speaker_02
It lasts for a period of time and then onto the next, or it dissipates.

00:06:48 Speaker_00
Right, or an identity as a certain kind of influencer, or an identity as a person living a certain style of life materially. I mean, there are all these various identities that people are struggling for. I think you're right.

00:07:04 Speaker_00
Robert Putnam is a political scientist. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. So you know about this. So he tracked he tracked how we've stopped belonging, right? We've stopped all the things you just said.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
And we've stopped joining clubs and volunteering and having people over to our houses. And what he's found is that it's gotten worse since the digital revolution. The digital revolution has accelerated the trends that were already there.

00:07:36 Speaker_00
And so the path of least resistance now is social isolation, greater and greater isolation. And we're all kind of desperate for what to do about it and how to feel like we belong.

00:07:48 Speaker_02
I wonder if we need a new word. And I'll tell you what I mean, because the technology has co-opted words, right? So a desktop used to be a horizontal surface.

00:08:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

00:08:01 Speaker_02
And now a desktop is a vertical surface. And a folder was something you used to put away in alphabetical order and now a folder is something you click on. Absolutely. It's taken words and things to make the transition to living in a digital world.

00:08:14 Speaker_02
I know why they do it. It's because it's easier. But the word community used to mean

00:08:20 Speaker_02
Like showing up and wearing a fez, you know, or, you know, there were secret handshakes and there was a time to meet up and there was free food and community meant a thing. And now that word has been co-opted to like being on an email list.

00:08:35 Speaker_02
Because now what you and I are talking about, we're attempting to offer an archaic definition of what community is. And I wonder if instead of trying to fight it, we just need a new word.

00:08:47 Speaker_02
And then people will want the thing that's the new word because community already belongs online.

00:08:53 Speaker_00
But I worry that the word we're substituting is something like tribe. And tribe has all those connotations of who we exclude, who we make other, you know, all that stuff.

00:09:07 Speaker_00
I think we're all stuck in this place where we don't know how to belong without making other people enemies.

00:09:15 Speaker_02
Yeah. I want to scratch this just a little bit more because when I articulated the concept of why, the reason I called it the why was a semantic problem that I faced, which is I got tired of debating with people, what comes first, vision or mission?

00:09:33 Speaker_02
And the debate would go on forever. And so I finally realized we were having a semantic debate. And so I asked the people who believed vision was preeminent, what is the definition of vision to you?

00:09:43 Speaker_02
And they said, it's why I get out of bed in the morning. And I went to people who believed mission was preeminent. And I said, what's mission to you? And they said, well, it's why I do what I do.

00:09:51 Speaker_02
And so everybody, whether it was purpose or brand or whatever word they thought was the thing, they all gave me the same definition. And so I said, okay, so let's call it the why. And now we can all agree what it is.

00:10:03 Speaker_02
And now we can actually figure out how to do it rather than debate what comes first. Right, right, exactly. And so I wonder how people are defining community. And maybe you have some data that explains that.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
Like, it's one thing to say, I want my life to be a part of something bigger than itself. I want to feel a sense of purpose. But what actually, based on this longitudinal study, what actually do people mean when they say these words?

00:10:29 Speaker_00
The people who talked about it the most meant something quite fluid and quite individual.

00:10:39 Speaker_00
The people who are the best at this would have like workmates over for barbecues, but they'd mix in their family, they'd mix in cousins, and they'd mix in people from their church, and they'd introduce each other.

00:10:51 Speaker_00
And so you have these people who become like the nodes of a group of people that get connected. They become, if you will, connectors. But that means that each person might be the node of a unique collection of people, as opposed to

00:11:09 Speaker_00
One thing, you know, going to a church, going to a synagogue, right? Yeah, you can do that. And that is a defined community. But most of us have these things that are more fluid and individual.

00:11:21 Speaker_00
One of my friends who's the best at this keeps connecting his friends from random parts of his life. And it's really fun to get to be part of that group of people because it's so diverse.

00:11:33 Speaker_02
I think you're touching on something that I think is really magical, right? If we're saying it's important for us to build community, and I've done this, I've gone to dinner parties, and it's the same 10 people at somebody at just a different house.

00:11:44 Speaker_02
Yeah. And they say we care about community, but as you're defining it, it's not really community, it's just the same 10 people. at different houses.

00:11:54 Speaker_02
And I think what you're talking about is the importance of the salon, the old school salon, which is instead of hosting a dinner party, we should take it upon ourselves to build salons, which is I'm going to invite some tried and true friends.

00:12:07 Speaker_02
I'm going to invite some people who I just met recently. I'm going to invite somebody who I met at a different dinner party. And I may or may not give a subject to discuss at the table, but this is what's going to happen.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
Because then I'll go to somebody else's dinner party who was at mine, and it's a lot of new people for me too.

00:12:21 Speaker_02
And I love this idea of us not just hosting dinner party for the people we know, but for specifically hosting dinner parties for people we know that our friends don't know.

00:12:32 Speaker_00
Exactly, because the same 10 people is in a silo, right? Yeah, like it's it's almost it could be hermetically sealed. And so you know what each other thinks, you know, you know each other. But the most exciting conversations happen for me,

00:12:48 Speaker_00
when people come who do completely different things, who come from different backgrounds. I mean, today, I was on a call with a researcher who was growing nerve cells from schizophrenics.

00:13:02 Speaker_00
And he's trying to see, is a nerve cell different in how it makes connections if it's got the genes of someone with schizophrenia and therefore someone who has delusions?

00:13:14 Speaker_00
do the connections that a nerve cell make, are they different for people with delusions? And I'm like, I'm like, buzzing with all these ideas, right? It's because a student of mine is also a student of his and brought us together.

00:13:29 Speaker_00
And our heads started to explode with excited possibilities.

00:13:34 Speaker_02
And I think what you're talking about is we connect not on the interest, that stuff is superficial, and that stuff is good at, you know, sort of getting people in the room. Yeah.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
But we're talking about deep, deep values that are deeper than our political points of view, because I can have the same values as somebody with a different political point of view than me. And I think people confuse those things sometimes.

00:13:53 Speaker_02
I love this. How long have you been the boss of the study? 22 years. 22 years. And what did you learn from the data that you've been able to apply to your life that has made you happier?

00:14:08 Speaker_00
I now call up my guy friends And I say, let's go for a walk. Let's go out to dinner. We're not just gonna wait for our wives to do this thing, to organize our social lives. We're gonna do this. And at first it's really awkward.

00:14:25 Speaker_00
Like, we don't do this, we're guys. And then it's been a wonderful thing in terms of really getting to know individually people who were otherwise part of a social group, part of the same 10 people, if you will.

00:14:40 Speaker_00
But we never dug more deeply into knowing each other.

00:14:43 Speaker_00
And so it made me do that because I thought, otherwise, I'm just going to sit here on my computer all day long, doing my research stuff, doing my academic stuff, and pick my head up and have no friends. That's a really good one. Yep.

00:14:59 Speaker_00
Somebody said, take care of your body, like you're going to need it for 100 years.

00:15:07 Speaker_00
And I realized that, boy, this really, really matters, that in our data, the people who took care of themselves, so we're talking regular exercise, not abusing drugs and alcohol, not becoming obese, all that stuff, they lived on average 10 years longer and stayed healthier.

00:15:25 Speaker_00
So even though it's not rocket science and it's not news, I could see in my own data how much it really matters. People, I assume, are starting to die now in the studies. A lot of them have died, right? Most of the original folks have died.

00:15:38 Speaker_00
724 original people, fewer than 10 are still alive, and they're all over age 100.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
Okay. So of those 724, the ones who lived the longest, because biohacking is a thing now, and there's an obsession with longevity. And so the people who lived the longest Was there a pattern that you were able to discern?

00:16:01 Speaker_02
And the people who lived the shortest, was there a pattern that you were able to discern?

00:16:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The longest was literally taking care of your physical health and being really socially engaged in the world, okay? Those are the two things. And the people who lived the shortest, it was the opposite.

00:16:20 Speaker_00
People who became alcoholics, who became obese, who didn't take care of themselves, and who were isolated.

00:16:27 Speaker_02
This is why I think your work is very, very important, is because I think a lot of the longevity people and biohackers and all of that, they're all talking about vitamins and exercise and sure, sure, sure, that stuff's great.

00:16:36 Speaker_02
And they pay lip service to community, whereas they're giving exact dosages of vitamin D that I should be taking on a daily basis, but nobody's giving me a prescription to how to hang out with my friends.

00:16:48 Speaker_00
because community doesn't make money. You can sell vitamin D. You can sell supplements. You can package them in fancy ways. You can sell them on a podcast, right?

00:16:58 Speaker_02
I appreciate the cynicism so much. You have no idea. I'm so sorry. No, I think you're 100% right. I think you're 100% right. There is a financial incentive to sell half a solution.

00:17:10 Speaker_00
Exactly. You know, and what I struggle with, so as you know, I'm a physician, I'm a psychiatrist. And one of the difficulties with medicine is that the vast amount of disease is preventable. But you don't make money in medicine preventing disease.

00:17:26 Speaker_00
You make money curing disease or trying to ameliorate disease with medications, with procedures. You don't make money preventing disease by encouraging people to socialize, by encouraging people to exercise.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
I mean, you've been doing this for 22 years. Do you get tired talking about it? Yeah. Actually, no. I mean, okay, I don't- Because you're getting the same question. You're going to have to answer the same questions five times in a row.

00:17:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, but how they get asked is so different. I mean, talking with you right now is really fun, right? Because of the way we're talking. No, but really, because there's this kind of there's a real back and forth, right? It's we're having a conversation.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
There are other times when it's like, just shoot me. If someone says, I'm, you know, I'm really looking forward to reading your book. Can you explain to our listeners what you do? That's like fingernails on a blackboard.

00:18:29 Speaker_02
The interviews that I hate doing is where the people are so over-prepared to talk to me that they ask me questions about my book like, Simon, what are the five elements of The Infinite Game? And I was like, well, you know the answer. You say it.

00:18:44 Speaker_02
Why you ask me questions you know the answers to? Ask me questions you don't know the answers to. That's more fun.

00:18:49 Speaker_00
Absolutely, absolutely. And so when something spontaneous happens, like is happening now with you, I could do this forever. But when the other happens, I just want to be done and never do it.

00:19:03 Speaker_02
I mean, you might know this, because you are a psychiatrist. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One? Exactly. One. But the light bulb has to really want to change.

00:19:16 Speaker_00
I love that joke. I love that joke.

00:19:19 Speaker_02
What was your journey? How did you get into psychiatry? When you decided you want to go to med school, why the mind?

00:19:26 Speaker_00
Well, when I decided to go to med school, it wasn't going to be the mind. I'm a Jewish kid from Des Moines, Iowa.

00:19:32 Speaker_02
You're the Jewish kid from Des Moines, Iowa.

00:19:35 Speaker_00
Well, close. No, no. We had about a thousand Jewish families in Des Moines. We had three and a half synagogues. But most of the psychiatrists I knew worked with seriously mentally ill people in asylums.

00:19:51 Speaker_00
Psychotherapy was not a thing you did in Des Moines, unless you were really ill and needed to be in a hospital. So I didn't know anybody, but I knew I really liked working with people. And so when I got to med school, I realized,

00:20:06 Speaker_00
that psychiatry was like by far the thing that excited me the most. But psychiatry is the stepchild of medicine.

00:20:14 Speaker_00
So a lot of my professors said, you know, either you're at the bottom of the class or you yourself are crazy because there'd be no other reason for you to go into psychiatry. So it took me a long time before I finally admitted, like, who am I kidding?

00:20:29 Speaker_00
This is really the most interesting thing. Because otherwise, it was memorizing the 12 types of thyroid tumors. And I didn't care about thyroid tumors, unless somebody I knew had one. But I cared deeply about the mind, especially how my own worked.

00:20:45 Speaker_00
So I had to come around to it, despite the stigma of being a psychiatrist.

00:20:50 Speaker_02
How did you get over the stigma? Because there's a lot of pressure to become an accountant or choose the line of medicine that's most in demand right now because it's a better business option. You followed passion.

00:21:01 Speaker_00
I did. I did. Well, partly I followed passion because what I'm I'm not good at doing things I'm not passionate about. Actually, all my energy drains, and I start to shut down, and I start to feel terrible.

00:21:18 Speaker_00
And I started to do that, I realized, I don't care about most of medicine. So yes, I could become a cardiologist, like many of my aunts and uncles wanted me to do, because cardiology is a nice field, right?

00:21:30 Speaker_00
But I realized I would just die, I would just wither on the vine. And what I've finally learned to do over time is to listen to that gut that says, I'm drawn to this and I'm not drawn to that.

00:21:44 Speaker_00
That's probably the hardest lesson I've had to keep learning throughout my life. So, good segue.

00:21:52 Speaker_02
If we look at the world as it is now, it seems that younger people who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives

00:22:01 Speaker_02
their quote-unquote passion for something seems to be, I don't know if it's driven by gut, but seems to be driven by external reward structure. You know, the number of young people who say, I want to be an influencer.

00:22:12 Speaker_02
It's like people who come up to me and say, Simon, can I get your advice? I'd love to be a speaker. I'm like, oh, amazing. Or I want to be an author. I'm like, great. What do you want to speak about? They're like, I don't know yet.

00:22:20 Speaker_02
I'm like, well then, no, no, you got it in the wrong order. Like, I want to be an influencer. Influencer is a mechanism to spread something, but what is the thing you're passionate about to spread?

00:22:30 Speaker_02
The thing that they think they're passionate for is something that looks cool, sounds cool, gets a lot of adoration, gets a lot of money, gets a lot of fame. And it's an age-old question. How do I know what I'm passionate for?

00:22:44 Speaker_00
For me, it literally has been learning to tap into my energy. Is my energy higher or lower? in this moment than it was a few minutes ago, literally. And I had to learn that. For example, I'm really enjoying this conversation. My energy is higher.

00:23:03 Speaker_00
And if I'm in a conversation where it starts to lower, I get it right away. And one of the things I've come to understand is that we get trained to ignore those signals. I was at least.

00:23:14 Speaker_00
Think about all the times you had to sit in a classroom in school and you'd have these urges to do something or explore something, but of course you had to sit still and watch the clock until the class was over.

00:23:27 Speaker_00
We've been taught to suppress these inner voices, I think, since we were in preschool.

00:23:34 Speaker_02
I think you're right, but there's a nuance here that's very important and I need you to unwrap it for me. which is we evaluate friends. Like, are our friends generative?

00:23:43 Speaker_02
You know, unbalanced, not every time, because sometimes we're tired, sometimes they're tired. But in general, when I hang out with X friend versus Y friend, is that friend generative in how I feel?

00:23:54 Speaker_02
Do I leave my time with them happier, elated, as you said, like up, right? And am I paying attention to that, that I want to spend more time with them versus, oh, well, we've been friends for 15 years, so I guess I'll go out with them.

00:24:06 Speaker_02
And I think that's true with our work as well. It obviously conflicts with things like responsibility, because sometimes you have to suppress that feeling, because I have to be responsible. You know, it's an imperfect standard. Right.

00:24:20 Speaker_02
I don't always feel like changing that diaper. Right, exactly. And I think you're touching upon it, which is folks like us are giving advice like, trust your gut, follow that elation.

00:24:30 Speaker_02
But the problem is, is that I don't know if people are running towards it or when they don't feel it, they rebel against it. So in a work environment, right? We see this a lot where it's particularly young people, but not exclusively.

00:24:43 Speaker_02
They just have more courage, I think. If they're in a job that doesn't do that, they're very vocal and sometimes rejecting of the culture, the leader, the boss, the job itself.

00:24:54 Speaker_02
And I think there's more about speaking out against the fact that I'm not elated, thinking that by speaking out against that I will find the elation, rather than doing more of the thing that elates me, like going to work and saying, hey, boss, this elates me in general.

00:25:13 Speaker_02
This elates me less in general. Can I do more of that, please, rather than rejecting, throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

00:25:20 Speaker_00
Absolutely. There's more of a need to take responsibility for that, right? To have a sense of agency. Okay, if this job is draining as it is, what can I do, right? What can I do?

00:25:35 Speaker_00
And some of that, as you know, has to do with connecting with people on the job. Like one of the things we know is that if people have friends on the job, if they have people they want to show up for, that in and of itself

00:25:48 Speaker_00
is energizing, even if you're making widgets in a way that's boring to you.

00:25:54 Speaker_02
We're creating a problem here, do you realize that? Because we're saying, don't run away from, run towards. Run towards the contribution to something bigger.

00:26:05 Speaker_02
And yet, I think people, if they're listening, will say, ah, I think I'm running away more often than I'm running towards. I'm running away from relationships rather than towards new ones.

00:26:14 Speaker_02
I'm running away from a job I hate rather than one toward the one that I think I'm going to love. So now it begs the question, how do I know what to run towards?

00:26:24 Speaker_00
Hmm. OK, I have an example coming to mind. I loved doing theater as a high school kid, as a college kid. And if I just ran toward what I loved, I would be a failed actor today.

00:26:41 Speaker_00
So what I had to do was really take in the whole picture to realize, OK, I love theater. I still love theater. But the whole picture was I came to understand that doing theater involved a lot of rejection.

00:26:57 Speaker_00
It involved getting bad reviews of plays sometimes in college. It involved getting turned down for parts. It involved feeling like I was acting with people who I didn't think were any fun to be with. All that, right?

00:27:13 Speaker_00
And what I had to do was take in the larger picture, not just the isolated passion that I was looking at, right? And so some of this is a kind of discernment where you say, okay, what goes with the whole package?

00:27:27 Speaker_00
So if we go back to psychiatry, what I found was that psychiatry has a whole package. It's one of the lowest paid specialties in medicine, but it's got one of the best lifestyles.

00:27:40 Speaker_00
On the other hand, cardiology is way better paid, but I don't like doing it. So there's a kind of discernment that's required for what do I run toward? What do I hang back from or walk away from?

00:27:56 Speaker_00
But the challenge is to take it all in, not just to say, okay, I'm gonna focus on this one, one tiny part of it.

00:28:04 Speaker_02
So you're asking people to do a cost analysis. Yeah, I guess I am. And I think that's right.

00:28:10 Speaker_02
I love photography, and I'm an active photographer, and I actively did not choose a career in photography because I interned at a couple of photo studios when I was younger. I kept meeting people who were artists.

00:28:23 Speaker_02
They define themselves as artists, photographers, and yet here they were shooting bottles of ketchup for an ad campaign. And I asked them, do you ever shoot for art anymore? They said, I either don't have the time or I don't have the energy.

00:28:36 Speaker_02
And so their passion became a job. I mean that pejoratively. It became work. And I think that's where when people say, I want to be in theater, I want to be in fashion. And I think they forget that they're just businesses. They're just businesses.

00:28:53 Speaker_02
And I can tell you somebody who is passionate for fashion, who's a job in fashion, living their childhood dream, and they hate their life. And I can show you somebody who stumbled and bumbled and found themselves in manufacturing, making a widget.

00:29:03 Speaker_02
They're making a screw that fits in the back of a thing that nobody ever sees, and that they're the happiest people alive.

00:29:09 Speaker_02
In fact, I was talking to a contractor, and I asked him, just out of the blue, sort of making small talk, I'm like, just out of curiosity, do you like your job? And he says, I love my job. He says, I love it.

00:29:21 Speaker_02
And he said it with such passion, no other word for it. And I was like, what do you love about it? He goes, I get to build things with my own hands and I get to see them built. I get to see what I built. I start with nothing.

00:29:35 Speaker_02
I start with a pile of wood and some nails and some sheet rock. And then when I'm done, you get that. then I go do it again and again and again and again, whether it's a kitchen remodeling or whatever it is.

00:29:49 Speaker_02
And he had such elation to see the fruits of his actual labor.

00:29:54 Speaker_00
Right. What you're saying reminds me of something I've come to understand, which is there's grunt work in anything. There's boring work in anything. And so,

00:30:06 Speaker_00
Really what we have to figure out is what is the thing we're aiming toward that has enough in it that we love, that it's worth doing all the boring parts, right?

00:30:17 Speaker_00
And so I'm sure not every bit of his contracting work, his construction work is enlivening, but boy, seeing what he's built lights him up, right? And he can hold onto that vision while he's pounding that umpteenth nail.

00:30:34 Speaker_02
I'm having an insight here. Here's where we make a mistake. We're looking for the work to be the thing that is passionate. And it's not the work that is the thing that is passionate. It is what that work produces, right? Because raising kids is awful.

00:30:52 Speaker_02
You know, in the early part, you don't sleep. As you said, changing diapers in the middle of the night, you get peed on and thrown up on. And then they get a little older and they become teenagers and they're a pain in the ass to be around.

00:31:06 Speaker_02
And then one of them gets bad grades and you got to deal with that. And another one gets a fight in school and punches a kid. And then you got to deal with that. And like, where's the joy? I thought that having kids was supposed to be joyful, right?

00:31:17 Speaker_02
But, but then you have these unpredictable glimmers. of your kids helping each other, or another parent saying, your kid's great. Or the teacher saying, your kid helps all the other kids.

00:31:30 Speaker_02
You get these unexpected glimmers that make all of that worth it in an instant. Yes. Yes. And I know that from my work. Writing books, it's the worst thing in the world. I don't know why anybody... People are like, I want to be an author.

00:31:44 Speaker_02
I'm like, don't, it's the worst. But when you put something out in the world that resonates with people, it's instantly worth all of it. And I do it again. Yeah. Even though every time I've written a book, I said, this is the last one.

00:31:58 Speaker_02
And I think people are looking for the passion in the wrong place. They're looking for the passion in the labor, but they're not looking for what the labor produces.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
And maybe this is one of the problems with knowledge work, which is knowledge work is kind of sitting at a desk. I don't even know how you define what, quote unquote, labor is in a lot of knowledge work. And then what's the result of that labor?

00:32:19 Speaker_02
And do we appreciate the results? We don't think about what the things we make, we don't think about the impact they have in the world. I'll give you an awful example. I met somebody recently who has a very niche specialty.

00:32:33 Speaker_02
She helps project manage the building of super yachts for the mega wealthy. There you go. Of course, my first question was, how the hell did you get into that? Really?

00:32:45 Speaker_02
And I asked her, do your clients ever say, thank you so much, why don't you take the yacht with your family for a week? And she said, it's never happened.

00:32:57 Speaker_02
So I said to her, so what you're telling me is these multibillionaires who build these yachts for many hundreds of millions of dollars, that they use for two weeks a year, and they sail around the world just in case the family might want to use it.

00:33:11 Speaker_02
At no point on this empty yacht has anybody ever said to you, thanks for all your hard work, why don't you borrow the yacht? And she said, it's never happened. And I said, well, how does that make you feel?

00:33:23 Speaker_02
She says, it also occurs to me that what the hell good am I doing in the world? And so tremendous amount of labor, I'm sure incredibly well compensated, but there's no glimmer

00:33:34 Speaker_02
There's no what an amazing opportunity that I have to give to my family, the opportunity to go on a mega yacht that none of us could afford, that none of us will ever have the opportunity.

00:33:42 Speaker_02
I'm going to take my friends that I grew up with who have middle income jobs and I'm going to show them something and give them an experience.

00:33:48 Speaker_02
And that makes all of this shit worth it because I get to give that to people that I love and she never gets that glimmer.

00:33:56 Speaker_00
Is she happy in her job? No. Yeah. No. Yeah. No, it pays well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But don't you think it has to be a combination of getting there and the outcome?

00:34:09 Speaker_00
Because like when you talked about kids and you listed or you named, I've been through every horrible scenario and many more in raising my children, but there's also stuff along the way that is hilarious and wonderful and wacky, right?

00:34:26 Speaker_00
There's like stuff punctuating all the crap. that is absolutely, wonderfully wild. And like getting to relive your own childhood is part of it for me. I got to go to all these kids' movies that I would never go to. I got to be on roller coasters.

00:34:43 Speaker_00
So I think for me, it's some of both. I couldn't do the work that I do if it was only the outcome, because the outcomes are so far into the future. Like writing a book, right?

00:34:55 Speaker_00
You know, as one of my friends said, who's in publishing, he said, only write a book if it's going to move along your own thinking in some ways. And it's true.

00:35:04 Speaker_00
And I bet for you too, that it wasn't just that you were regurgitating stuff that was tried and true.

00:35:12 Speaker_02
I was learning along the way. Yeah. I had insights along the way that as I'm writing, I feel electric because a new idea is pouring out of me in that moment.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
Yeah. And I bet that was part of what kept you going, not just the outcome of having it to put into the work.

00:35:27 Speaker_02
You know what we're defining here? You know what we're defining? We're defining a purpose-driven life. Because if you think what purpose is, purpose is idealism. And idealism, by its very definition, is unrealizable. All men are created equal.

00:35:39 Speaker_02
Never going to happen, never, ever, ever, not in a million years. However, it's the striving towards that. And to your point, it's the mile markers. I don't know how to define them, but for example, women's suffrage, civil rights, abolition of slavery.

00:35:56 Speaker_02
It's like, ah, ooh, look, we're getting closer, guys. We're getting closer. Let's keep going. To your point, I think if it was just awful work the whole time waiting for the final outcome, then we should absolutely quit. And I think you're right.

00:36:11 Speaker_02
I think it goes back to those glimmers, which is the little glimmers that say, you know what? This is worth it. I'm going to keep on this.

00:36:18 Speaker_02
I'm going to keep doing this kid-rearing thing and not put them up for adoption because, you know, that was a fun family dinner last night. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

00:36:28 Speaker_02
So I think if we're talking about purpose-driven life, if we go right back to the beginning of this conversation, and then this comes directly from your data, which is what I love, which is from a very young age, we instill in people, we instill in our youngest generations, it is good to be an idealist.

00:36:43 Speaker_02
It is good to strive to contribute to something bigger than yourself. You won't know how to get there. You'll change your mind a hundred times, but you have to keep your head above looking beyond the horizon.

00:36:56 Speaker_02
And so long as you feel like you're getting closer to the horizon, even if it's a windy, difficult road, so long as you have elements that say, I think you're on a good path here, you will have a happy life.

00:37:05 Speaker_00
And as long as there's something nourishing along the way, there's gotta be something along the way to keep me going.

00:37:13 Speaker_02
Does money play any role in people's happiness according to your study?

00:37:17 Speaker_00
It does. What we find is that you need to get your basic needs met in order to be happy.

00:37:23 Speaker_00
And that every dollar you make toward getting your basic needs met, like, you know, food and shelter and educating your kids, like every dollar you make makes you happier.

00:37:33 Speaker_00
We know that, but that then you buy that hundred million dollar yacht, it doesn't really make you happier. Yeah.

00:37:41 Speaker_00
On average, like, you know, if you, if you took all the hundred million dollar yacht owners, they, there would, they wouldn't be happier on average than the people. who basically had enough.

00:37:52 Speaker_02
Who only have a $50 million yacht. Yeah, exactly. But you know, comparison is relative, right? Because billionaires aren't comparing themselves to us. Billionaires are comparing themselves to each other.

00:38:04 Speaker_00
Yes, because sometimes these billionaires are in great pain because they have a couple fewer billion than somebody else. I mean, it's hard to imagine.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
And yet I know it in my own life, like I can compare myself on the most trivial things to other people. And then I try to pull back from that and notice what I'm doing.

00:38:25 Speaker_02
Unrelated, I'm just going to say it because it's fun. You want to understand the difference between a million and a billion? When people talk about millionaires and billionaires?

00:38:33 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:38:34 Speaker_02
So an easy way to understand the difference. A million seconds is 11 and a half days. A billion seconds is 31 and a half years.

00:38:45 Speaker_01
Wow.

00:38:46 Speaker_02
Okay. And that's the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire.

00:38:53 Speaker_00
It's not even close. Yeah. But you know, the most valuable thing we have is time. So I like your analogy that you were talking about seconds, but those seconds are far more precious, ultimately. than those dollars.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
Because money is a redeemable commodity. We spend it, we lose it, we can make more. But spending time or energy, these are non-redeemable commodities. And everyone gets the same amount. From day one, everybody gets 24 hours in a day.

00:39:27 Speaker_00
But we don't know how much we get, right? That's the thing.

00:39:30 Speaker_02
Oh, in terms of lifespan. Yeah. That's even more interesting. Yeah.

00:39:36 Speaker_00
But you're right, we all have 24 hours in a day.

00:39:38 Speaker_02
We all have 24 hours in a day, but we don't know how many 24 hour days we get.

00:39:41 Speaker_00
Exactly.

00:39:43 Speaker_02
I mean, so when we give that precious commodity to another human being, When somebody is struggling at work and we sit down with them and we give them some tough love.

00:39:54 Speaker_02
When your kid is struggling at school and the teacher spends an hour after school, our friend is moving and we go to their house and we pack boxes. Yeah. The expense of time As a gift, I mean it as a gift. Yeah.

00:40:10 Speaker_02
Because I'm totally anti that you have to use all that time to be productive as well. Because I think sometimes zoning out and watching TV is the best use of that time. I'm not making the analogy that you have to make use of all your time.

00:40:23 Speaker_02
I'm talking very specifically about the value of time as a gift to another human being is more valuable than any gift on the planet.

00:40:32 Speaker_00
I have a quote here from one of my Zen teachers. His name is John Tarrant, and he said, attention is the most basic form of love. If you think about it, our undivided attention, it's the most valuable thing we've got to give.

00:40:50 Speaker_02
Oh. The only thing we have these days is divided attention. Yeah. And we can't even watch TV. without also checking social media and sending a text.

00:41:06 Speaker_00
Absolutely. I mean, research shows we typically have two or three screens open at once.

00:41:13 Speaker_02
So the only thing we have these days is divided attention, and yet the best way to express love to someone is undivided attention.

00:41:21 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:41:23 Speaker_02
You're blowing my mind a little bit. I want to ask you two final questions. How happy do money and fame actually make people?

00:41:31 Speaker_00
They don't. They don't make people not happy either. Well, actually fame may because fame can make people intrude on your life and stuff. So fame actually might make you less happy. Money doesn't make you happier or not happier.

00:41:44 Speaker_00
Once you get above a certain level, you don't get much of a bump. You get some bump, but not that much.

00:41:51 Speaker_00
Fame is really a double-edged sword, and you might be able to say something about that because you've received a lot of public attention, and I'm sure it's not all wonderful.

00:42:01 Speaker_02
I think of it as cost, right? I don't think of it as good or bad or, you know, like I never sought it out. I am happiest in the shadows. That's my happy place. I like being behind the scenes.

00:42:13 Speaker_02
My goal is to spread a message and to leave this world in better shape than I found it and contribute to the lives of my friends and the people I don't know as well.

00:42:23 Speaker_02
And part of the cost of that is some loss of privacy, and it's worth it because the benefit so outweighs that very small cost.

00:42:32 Speaker_00
Oh, can I tell you, so when my TED Talk went viral, so I'm very seriously involved in Zen, and someone said, well, now you should put up a website. And I had no web presence at all. And I said, no, I wasn't going to do that. That was all ego.

00:42:48 Speaker_00
That was all going over to the dark side. And my Zen teachers said, you have the ability to convey ideas to people that will matter to them. Don't do that.

00:43:01 Speaker_00
And so they pushed me toward what you're describing, which is, they said, don't stay in the shadows if you can be of use.

00:43:07 Speaker_02
Yeah, that is my experience. In the early days when my work started to gain traction, I was militant about keeping my face and name off everything.

00:43:17 Speaker_02
I wanted to put my name on the book in mouse type because the idea was I never would put my picture on the cover of a book. I still won't because I'm not the thing. And I refused to have my picture on my website for years.

00:43:28 Speaker_02
And I wouldn't let my name be the URL because it's not about me. And then at some point I made the realization that I, and you're this as well, which is you actually live two versions of yourself.

00:43:40 Speaker_02
You are you, obviously, but you are also the representation of your message.

00:43:45 Speaker_01
Absolutely.

00:43:46 Speaker_02
And how dare I selfishly deny the representation of my message Because people don't follow ideas, they follow people. Because ideas are abstract and people are real. So we create representations of a set of values.

00:44:00 Speaker_02
So Martin Luther King is a representation of a set of values and we follow Martin Luther King, but not really, we really follow the ideals that he stood for because I stand for those ideals too. They're my ideals as much as they are his, for example.

00:44:10 Speaker_00
And in that sense, you're a placeholder, if you will, for a whole set of values and aspirations. That's a function that's important to serve.

00:44:20 Speaker_02
Here's another question for you. What's the best thing we can do right now for our happiness?

00:44:25 Speaker_00
Two things. Engage with people and engage in things you care about. So ideally, engage in things you care about with people you care about. That's the sweet spot. Bob, what a joy. Yeah, this is fun.

00:44:39 Speaker_02
What an absolute joy. I leave elated and buzzing.

00:44:44 Speaker_00
Me too, actually. This was a pleasure, an unexpected pleasure.

00:44:48 Speaker_02
Thank you so, so much. I truly appreciate it. All right.

00:44:50 Speaker_00
Take care.

00:44:57 Speaker_02
If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsinnick.com, for classes, videos, and more.

00:45:10 Speaker_02
Until then, take care of yourself and take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Jha, and Devin Johnson.

00:45:24 Speaker_02
Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Ruttersham.