Thanksgiving Special 2019

Hey Guys, Matt here I wanted to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours and even if you don’t celebrate thanksgiving and no matter where you are in the world I wanted to let you know I AM GRATEFUL for you. It’s people like you listening to the show that keep us going, keep us reaching out to guests, and keep us evolving to find new ways to help you grow, to motivate you, and help you live the life you were meant to live.

That’s why this week I and my producer Austin put our heads together and came up with something a little unique. This week we’ve put together a mashup of some of our favorite points made by guests about gratitude. This includes insights from many past guests such as Kamal Ravikant, David DeSteno, Chase Hughes, and more.

Think of this as a quick hour-long masterclass on some of the best ways to embrace gratitude, learn how to find joy, and take stock of what you’re grateful for. Our plan is to put together more of these in the future to bring you curated episodes that go SUPER deep on one topic or important life skill. Let us know what you think! Any ideas on which topic or skill should be next! Hit me up at EMAIL and also be sure to join our mailing list for even more great content at successpodcast.com.

Once again Happy Thanksgiving and keep on being you! Let’s unleash our human potential together. Without further adieu, here are some of our favorite guest insights on gratitude.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 4 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

Hey! It's Matt here. I wanted to wish you and your loved ones happy Thanksgiving. Even if you don't celebrate Thanksgiving and no matter where you are in the world I wanted to let you know that I am grateful for you. It's people like you listening to the show that keep us going, that keeps us reaching out to guests and keeps us evolving to find new ways to help you grow, to motivate, you to help you live the life that you were meant to live.

That's why this week, my producer, Austin, and I put our heads together and came up with something a little bit special and unique. This week we've put together a mash-up of some of our favorite points made by previous guests about gratitude. This includes insights from many past guests, including Kamal Ravikant, David Desteno, Chase Hughes and several more.

Think of this as a quick one-hour master class on some of the best ways to embrace gratitude, learn how to find joy and take stock of what you're really grateful for. We may even do more of these deep dive episodes in the future. So let us know what you think about it.

Once again, I just wanted to say I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Keep on being amazing, and thank you so much for everything. With that, let's hear a little bit about gratitude.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we’ve put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on their along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That successpodcast.com, or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word SMARTER. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode we brought on Grant Cardone to give you a real look at what it means to be successful and what it really takes to get there. He shared the exact shift you have to make in order to 10X your life. We uncovered why you should ignore most people's advice. How to push yourself to a new level beyond what you even think is possible. Why learning isn't enough to get to the highest levels and much more. If you're serious about 10X in your life, listen to our previous interview with Grant Cardone.

Now, for our special Thanksgiving episode.

[00:03:08] MB: What drives people to help others, as opposed to hanging it back? The kidney chain is obviously one example of this. What happens in the world and to other people when we start to shift our approach towards paying it forward?

[00:03:26] WB: There's two explanations for paying it forward, what the motivations would be for doing that. One I mentioned, which is that you help me and I feel grateful for that help and I pay it forward and I help a third person. If you talk to economists, they'll say there's a more self-interested reason for helping, which is that I'm willing to help someone who has not helped me, because I want to look good. It's all about impression management. It's all about my reputation. I'm going to appear generous, so therefore, other people will be more likely to help me in the future.

Now that's fine and I have no problem with that. The interesting thing is that the research on these two different motivations, being I'm going to help someone who hasn't helped me to build my reputation that will make me appear as a generous person, I'll be helped in the future. Versus the idea of paying it forward out of gratitude. Those research has been done in two different streams. I did a study with Nat Buckley, where we put together both of those and ran what we call a horse race. We said, “Okay, we're going to collect a whole bunch of data and we're going to analyze statistically those two reasons, those two motivations and we control it for a host of other factors through all these statistical models.”

We're going to run this horse race. We're going to see which worse crosses the line first. I'll cut right to the finish line. It turns out that both horses cross the finish line, but the one that wins the race is the gratitude story, the idea that we pay it forward. We help people who haven't helped us, because we're so grateful for all the help that we have received from other people.

[00:04:53] MB: That's fascinating. The work that you've done around paying it forward and this may be, I don't know if I'm characterizing exactly correctly, but either led to or was a part of the creation, or discovery of what you call a reciprocity ring. Tell me a little bit about that and what are those and how do they work?

[00:05:16] WB: Yeah, reciprocity ring is a group level activity based on this whole principle of paying it forward. It was an activity that my wife, Cheryl, and I created about 20 years ago. We had an interesting conversation one evening. I'll never forget it. She said, “Okay, you teach your MBA students how to analyze their social networks.” I said, “Yup, that's what I do. That's what I know how to do.” She says, “Well, what do you do when they ask you how do I put this into practice and how do I build my network appropriately and how do I use my network?” I said, “Well, I have some stories and some antidotes and essentially, I hope the bell is going to ring and class would be over, because I don't have a whole lot.”

That centered a whole conversation about the idea of social capital. I think about human capital as our strengths, education, skills, the things that usually appear on your resume. Social capital is the network that we’re involved in and all the resources that it contains. I said, social capital is a combination of the networks that we have, but also this principle of generalized reciprocity, which is the fancy academic term for paying it forward.

We had a discussion about that and one thing led to another and we created a prototype of the reciprocity ring. After some trial and error, really settled on a formula or a recipe that really works quite well. I could describe it very briefly and will sound very simple, but there's a very structured way it has to be done. In fact, we train people to run a reciprocity domain, because they have to follow a certain recipe. Essentially, everyone gets an opportunity to make a request. We have criteria for what's a well-formulated request and that's something we might talk about later on in the show.

Everybody gets to make a request, but they spend most of the time helping other people meet their requests. Either they've got the answer, or the resource and they could share it, or they get tap their outside network and they could make a referral, or a connection. Those are the two ways that people can help. When people do this in a group, people discover that they get help from a lot of people, but it's not the people that they helped. It's more of this indirect generalized reciprocity, or paying it forward.

Now we do this in groups of about 24. I think over a 150,000 people around the world have used the reciprocity ring. It’s used in most of the major business schools, a lot of different companies. It was used recently at the Harvard Business School, where they had 900 MBAs engaged in this. We had about 40 different rings running at the same time. My favorite one and I think that's the most moving example of a request that was fulfilled was about a little girl who lived in Romania. Her name is Christina.

Christina suffered from a condition called craniosynostosis. The human skull is made up of different bones and they're joined by sutures, these fibrous tissues. This design allows the skull to expand as the brain and the head grow. Well every now and then, one of those joints or sutures will fuse prematurely and then the brain can't grow. The outcomes are awful. You can have a misshapen head, learning difficulties, blindness, seizures, even death.

Well, the chances of finding a surgeon who could correct this on Romania were pretty slim. This little girl's fate was up for grabs. Well, it turned out that her aunt Felicia lives in France and she works at the business school INSEAD. They used a reciprocity to ring every year for all their incoming MBA students. Part of being trained to run a ring, that's what Felicia was going to do, she was on the staff, she had to make a personal request. The trainer said, “Make sure it's meaningful. Something really important.”

She thought of her little niece back at Romania. Made a request for her, saying describe the whole situation and said, “I need help. She needs help.” Turns out that someone else who was in the reciprocity ring that day, who was also being trained, he was adjunct faculty, worked at a pediatric hospital and said, “I know surgeons who can do that operation. I'll introduce you.”

One thing led to another. Christina and her family flew for Romania to France. She had the surgery. It was a complete success and she's now living a happy and normal life. It's amazing. I have a picture of her that I keep on my desk to remind me of the power of asking for what you really need. When you do, miracles can happen, just like that story with Christina.

[00:09:39] MB: Wow. That's a really moving story and a great demonstration of the power of reciprocity rings. It really demonstrates a point you made earlier that everybody's network –every single person's network has a tremendous amount of untapped potential, or as you called it social capital that we're just not fully maximizing.

[00:10:04] WB: Oh, absolutely. What I've learned over the years is that there is a wealth of resources out there just beyond your fingertips. The only way you can get to it is by asking. That turns out to be the crux of the problem, is that most people are very reluctant to ask for what they need. There's a lot of reasons for it. There's eight reasons, in fact, of why it's hard to ask. Some of those are just incorrect beliefs. I can give you a couple of examples.

Sometimes, we don't ask because we're afraid we're going to look foolish, or incompetent, or that we can't do our jobs. You don't want to ask a trivial request, because then that's not going to raise your perceptions of your confidence. What the research shows and this was done by a team of researchers from Harvard and Wharton, they found that as long as you make a thoughtful, intelligent request, people will think you are more competent, not less. People fear that asking is going to make them appear to be incompetent.

As long as it's a good request, it’s a thoughtful request people will say, “Hey, you're confident. You know your limits.” You don't keep banging your head against the wall, working on a problem where it could be solved much more effectively and easily by reaching out to your network and getting some help from other people.

Another barrier is that we often underestimate other people's willingness and ability to help by a really big factor. One of my favorite studies was done by Frank Flynn and his team when they were at the Columbia University. They decided to test this with a field experiment, which is they were going to send people who are participating in the study out into New York City to do this. They had to go to a stranger and ask to borrow their cellphone. That's all they could say. They said, “Could I borrow your cellphone to make a call?” They couldn't explain, or beg, or plead, or come up with a sob story. That's all they could do.

It was really interesting, Matt. A number of the people who signed up for this experiment and you get paid for doing it, for participating. When they discovered what it was about, they quit and they said, “There's no way I'm going to go do that. I'm not going to walk in through a stranger in New York and ask to borrow a cellphone.” Some people did participate in the study. Before they went out, the researchers asked them, “Well, how many people do you think you're going to have to ask before you get a phone?” They were saying, “Five, six, seven, 10, infinite number of people, I'll never get one.” Well, it turns out that you only have to ask one or two strangers now.

If the first person doesn't let you use their phone, the second person probably will. There's a lot of other studies that support that that we often don’t ask because we think no one can help us. In fact, people have lots of resources. They have great networks and people are very willing to help, but they could only help you if you ask.

[00:12:52] MB: So I think we've talked about why and kind of how self-control is so highly correlated with pretty much every positive life outcome. Let's dig a little bit now into some of these strategies. How do we develop more self-control and what are these kind of emotions that we can cultivate to have more self-control?

[00:13:12] DD: Sure. The three that I focus on are gratitude compassion and pride, but let me give you just a sense of how this works. So, if what I'm saying is right, then when you're feeling, let's say, grateful, you should do better at the marshmallow test, right? You should show more self-control. So we wanted to actually put this idea to the test, but we wanted to do it with adults, not kids and most adults don't like marshmallows, but they do like cash. So we constructed an adult version of the marshmallow test, and the way this works is people come to the lab and we have them reflect on a time they felt grateful, reflect on a time they felt happy, or just tell us the events of their normal day, which is kind of a neutral control. Then we had them answer a series of 27 questions of the form. Would you rather have X-dollars now or Y-dollars in Z-days? Where Y was always bigger than X, and Z varied over weeks to months. So a typical question might be, “Would you rather have $35 now or $70 and in three weeks?” So basically, would you rather have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later?

We told him to make it real. We're going to honor one of their questions. So if we pick that question, you said you wanted $35 now. We’d hand you $35. If you wanted $75 in three weeks, we’d mail you the check for $75 in three weeks. What we found is most people were pretty impatient. So we can kind of calculate how impatient they weren't. So an example is people who were feeling neutrally saw $100 in a year is worth $17 today, or another way of saying that is if I gave them $17 right now, they’d forgo getting $100 in a year. I don't know about you, but if you don't need those $17 to survive today, passing up an opportunity to quintuple your money in a year is a pretty dumb idea given what the banks are paying. But if we made people feel grateful, they wouldn't take that, right? They became much more patient.

For them, it took them over $30 before they were willing to forgo the hundred dollars, and what that translates to in marshmallows is they were much more willing to wait. They valued the future reward more than the present, or they at least discounted the value of the future reward less than most people would. If you value a future goal more than you normally would have, you're not in a state of conflict trying to make yourself aimed toward it. If you value it more, it just becomes easier to pursue it.

So we found that over time, we measure people's daily levels of gratitude. People who experience more gratitude generally in their life are more future-oriented. They have more self-control. We give them these financial tasks. They want to wait for the larger reward, and other people have done the same thing with pride and compassion.

So what this means is if you begin to cultivate these emotions regularly in your life, they’re kind of like a booster shop for self-control. So we've seen compassion is tied to less procrastination, more perseverance toward your goal, whether we’re talking about academics or athletics. We found that pride actually makes people persevere toward their goals. They’ll spend 40% more time working to hone skills that they believe are important, and it's a way of just changing what the mind values, making it value the future, which just makes it easier to persevere toward those long-term goals.

[00:16:23] MB: So how do you measure kind of the longer term impacts of these pro-social emotions outside of sort of an isolated lab experiment? Let's say the impact of gratitude 3, 6, 9 months down the road.

[00:16:37] DD: Yeah. So what we said is we would follow people in their daily lives and then give them these financial tests, but there're lots of people who actually study this in organizations. So, for example, there is great work out there by Adam Grant and Francesca Gino, which shows that – Talk about an environment where you need some level of grit. They looked at people working in call centers, basically calling people all the time were hanging up on you and your job is to persevere through this.

What they found is that if the manager of a group expresses gratitude for people's efforts or expresses – They anticipate that they'll feel proud of their efforts because the manager will appreciate them, gratitude and pride, actually significantly predict people's efforts. They’re work longer and they're more successful and they’re less stressed and they're happier at pursuing whatever their job task is. We see the same thing at Google, right? The teams that are actually the most successful, the biggest predictor isn't the technical prowess of the team. The biggest predictor of a team's success at Google is that team does the manager instil a culture of empathy and compassion among the people there where the individuals who they feel that other people to team care about them, trust them, are interested in them as people, they’re willing to work harder and they're happier and less stressed at doing it. So what we do in the lab, we have tight control over these things to manipulate and see what they do, but the evidence from the real world showing that it increases self-control is pretty prevalent.

[00:18:13] MB: So in essence, this kind of emotional strategy is much more sustainable and powerful way of cultivating self-control. It's almost like the kind of idea of pushing versus pulling. You're not constantly struggling to maintain it. It's sort of a foundation or a font within you that's kind of welling up.

[00:18:31] DD: That's exactly right. We talk about these emotions as kind of fonts of virtue. That is, if you cultivate these, they’re like parent virtues. They increase lots of other things that people admire, and you're not constantly having to remind yourself from the top down, “Oh, okay! I know I don't want to work, but I've got a work, or I know I don't want to practice, or I know I don't want to not eat the Ben & Jerry's.

If you just feel these emotions, you don't have to remind yourself to do the right thing. They simply make you value those future goals more and then it’s just easier to persevere toward them no matter what they might be. But they also solve another problem that we’re facing these days. So people talk about kind of an epidemic of feeling isolated, or loneliness, or lonely. There's a recent statistic that shows 53% of people report feeling lonely in their public lives and at work.

We know that loneliness is about as bad for your health as is smoking in terms of what it does to human’s longevity because of the constant stress people are under when they feel isolated. When you cultivate these emotions as part of your daily life, I like to say they not only give you grit, they give you grace. That is, they alter your behavior in such a way that makes you not only willing to work harder to achieve your own goals but to invest in others and help them, and what that does is it reinforces that social side, that social network that is so important for our well-being.

David Brooks likes to talk about a distinction between what he calls resume virtues. Those are the virtues that we need to get ahead at work in our careers, like being nose to the grind stone, assertive, hard-charging, and eulogy virtues, those things that we want to be remembered for, things like being generous, being kind, being fair. He laments that these are different aspects of life and how do we balance them.

My argument is they’re only different aspects of life and seems separate because the way we live our lives now. For most of human history, there wasn't a difference. The way that you succeeded was having good character, was being generous, was being trustworthy, was being kind, because that's how you formed relationships that allowed you to cooperate with others, whether it was in hunting, in agriculture and whatever it might be. It's only now, because of the way we live our lives, you can kind of succeed as an individual and get enough money to pay for your other needs.

So if we cultivate these emotions, they build both of those virtues simultaneously. They build our self-control, but they build our social networks and our social support. There's lots of evidence showing that people who express gratitude, who express compassion, who express appropriately calibrated pride, and by that I mean pride in skills that they actually haven’t developed, not kind of egoistic, hubristic pride. We find that attractive. We want to be with those people. We want to work with those people. So I think that's why this is a much more resilient route to kind of building success and building perseverance than the kind of nose to the grind stone willpower way.

[00:21:30] MB: So tell me a little bit more about the evolutionary basis of these pro-social emotions.

[00:21:36] DD: Sure. People always ask me, “Dave, I want to be successful. So should I be a jerk or should I be a nice guy?” I say, “Well, what's your time frame?” Because if you are a jerk in the short term, you will rise to the top. So there are these wonderful evolutionary models out there. Some of the best done by a guy named Martin Nowak who’s a professor at Harvard, and what he finds is that over the short-term, if you're kind of selfish and you don't cooperate with others and you don't pay back your debts and you don't help people, you will accrue a lot of resources because you’re exploiting other individuals.

But over time, people will recognize that you’re kind of like this and no one will want to cooperate with you. So you’ll lose all the gains that we normally get from working with others. So over time, as individuals who are cooperative, who show empathy, who to help others, who are fair, that gain the most resources.

What we know is that it's emotions like gratitude and compassion that push us to do these things. So, for example, another study in my lab we do is we bring people into the lab and we make them feel grateful or we make them kind of not feel anything in particular, and we give them financial tasks where they can cheat others and make more money for themselves, or they can split profits equally. What we find is when people are feeling grateful they are much more likely to choose a decision where they're going to split money equally with someone else rather than take more for themselves with the other person's expense, even though the other person won’t have any chance to kind of seek vengeance on them for so doing.

So what these emotions are doing is they’re making us behave fairly and, in essence, that's an issue of self-control. For me to behave fairly, I have to be willing to devote some resources to you in the moment and not hung them all off myself for future payoff. So these emotions do the same thing. Same thing with compassion, I feel compassion for someone. I’m willing to give them time, money, shoulder to cry on, things that all might not be the most fun for me to do in the moment, but I do that because in the future I know I'm going to reap those rewards back when I'm in that position.

For millennia and even today, it's these emotions that underlie those behaviors, and what we’re finding is, as I said, they not only make us willing to sacrifice to help other people, but also our own future selves. And that's the best way to ensure that we’re going to be successful down the line.

[00:24:06] MB: Yeah, it's so key. As soon as it becomes easy for, you need to find kind of that next challenge and start pushing through the resistance.

Going back to these five key factors that you can use to hack authority, we got dominance, discipline, leadership, gratitude and fun/sense of adventure. Tell me about — I guess is leadership kind of encapsulated in authority as well or is that sort of a separate piece of the puzzle, and then what about gratitude and fun? I think those are kind of surprising things to see on a list of hacking social authority.

[00:24:40] CH: I think that gratitude and self-discipline are both extremely contagious and they're both extremely visible on your body. Somebody else might call it energy, and I don't profess to know how. It just beams out of you, but it really does. You can tell when you meet somebody that's really got their stuff together. It just shines through everything that they do. It almost puts every person into kind of a followership role to where they want to keep experiencing that. Leadership and authority are very, very closely related. Authority is something you want people to perceive and leadership is something that you're doing internally, the thought processes that you have.

[00:25:31] MB: What are those internal thought processes behind leadership?

[00:25:35] CH: I would say the number one thing you can do is just continually ask yourself how can I lift this person up or these people up. The authority would be a natural byproduct of having your stuff together and just managing your life.

[00:25:54] MB: Essentially, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding this, but essentially the idea is that if you have your life together, if you're firing on all cylinders, you’re having fun, you’re grateful, you have kind of positive energy beaming out from you, you’re organized, you’re getting things done, that sort of state naturally puts people around you into a mode where they defer to you almost or feel like they want to do what you tell them to do.

[00:26:23] CH: Yes. We’ve got a huge section on there on how to kind of hack that for lack of a better term. That definitely makes the agentic shift start to happen. Just as an example of this, how looks matter. They did a crosswalk, what they called a crosswalk study in Texas and this was decades ago. It’s been repeated several times, but this guy in a blue jeans and t-shirt in a downtown area, busy traffic, decides to break the crosswalk signal and just — Of course, the street is open, like there's no cars coming, but he goes against the crosswalk signal that tells him not to go. A couple of people follow him, and the same guy goes back to his apartment or wherever and changes into a really nice business suit and decides to break that crosswalk and go ahead and cross the street. The chances of people following him were increased by 89%, just because of his clothing. Just changing your clothes or changing that guy’s clothes made people break the law where they otherwise wouldn't have.

[00:27:34] MB: Fascinating, and that's a really good sort of crystalline demonstration of the idea that even simple shifts in the way that people perceive you can lead to massive changes in the way that they react to you and their behavior.

[00:27:49] CH: Absolutely, and it's not just how they perceive you just your clothing. You will, once you start getting that self-discipline, and you’ve got your social skills all these stuff start to get handled, you will walk differently. You don't need a tactic anymore. You don’t need conversation starter tactics anymore. Once all of these stuff happens and once you get those five qualities kind of hammered down, everything else starts to become a byproduct. The success is a byproduct of having that stuff figured out.

[00:28:23] MB: I want to dig in to how to create or manufacture your own luck, but before we do, I'm really curious if you could share maybe an example or two or a story from some of the research you did around luck, because I know there's some really kind of interesting and compelling examples.

[00:28:38] RW: We had a lot of them, and there's enormous consistency. I think the lucky people, always in the right place at the right time, lots of opportunities, they always fall on their feet and so on. In terms of the unluckiest people, we had one woman who had five car accidents in one 50-mile journey, which she put down to her jinxed green car, and then one day she came to the University and watched her trying to park the car, and we realized there were a few other factors in there. She’s also unlucky in love, so she signed up with a dating agency and first date came off his motorbike and broke his leg. The replacement day, walked into a glass door and broke his nose and eventually when she found someone to marry, the church they're going to get married in was burned down one day before the wedding, and that was how her whole life had gone. That was very typical of the unlucky people. Everything I touch was an absolute disaster.

Then on the flip side, you have these lucky people who wanted to start with a new kind of business venture and went to a party and met somebody there by chance and that person was exactly the person they needed in order to catapult themselves forward, and they became millionaires and so on. So very big differences between the two groups.

[00:29:55] MB: And how can somebody, for example, the woman who was consistently unlucky, how could she sort of transition or become someone who is lucky, and what were some of the differences between her and a lucky person?

[00:30:07] RW: Well, if we start with the differences, one was very interesting, almost perceptual different actually in terms of how they were seeing the world, and this was the form, the basis for an experiment we did. This then became quite well-known in terms of having people look at the newspaper.

We asked people to come into the lab to flick through a newspaper and just count the number of photographs in the newspaper. It's a fairly dull thing to do. What we didn't tell them is there were two large opportunities placed in the newspaper. One was a half-page advert with massive type that said, “Stop counting. There are 42 photographs in this newspaper,” and the other was another half page advert that said, “Say, you’ve seen, tell the experiment you’ve seen, and win,” whatever it was, 100 pounds or something.

What was fascinating was the lucky people tended to spot those opportunities, and so they would stop and go, “My goodness! That's great. I don’t need to count all the photographs, or could I have my prize now?” The unlucky people literally turned the page and didn't see them, and that's to do with this notion of attentional spotlight, that when we look at the world, we’re not seeing everything that's in front of us. We’re seeing a small part of it, where we place that active attention. When you become worried and anxious and concerned, as the unlucky people were, that becomes very small. You become very focused, and in doing so, you don't see something if you don't expect to see it.

The lucky people were far more relaxed and far more cheerful, had a large attentional spotlight, and so more likely to see opportunities they don’t expect and also act on them. That was the type of study we’re doing in order to try and tease really what was happening, why one group would say, “My goodness! I get all these opportunities,” and another group would say, “I never get a break.”

[00:32:06] MB: I love the newspaper experiment. That’s one of my favorite examples, and I’m so glad you shared it, and it just demonstrates really clearly that it's not necessarily sort of fate and random chance that's causing people to be lucky or unlucky. Obviously, there is a factor of that, but in many ways you can kind of create your own luck.

[00:32:26] RW: Absolutely. That was the premises of the research. Then what we did was to go on and test that. So hold on a second. If we take a group of people who are not particularly lucky or unlucky and we get them to think and behave like a lucky person, does that increase their luck? That data forms the basis, the luck factor book, and we found very simple exercises. The simplest one, but one of the most popular and which is now a well-known exercise, but at the time it wasn't, which is just getting people to keep a lucky diary and at the end of each day writing down the most positive thing, positive thought that they’ve had during that day, or one negative event that used to happen is no longer happening, or some sense of gratitude they have, their friends, or family or health or job or whatever. That starts to reorient people quite quickly.

So one of the issues with focusing is that if you are an unlucky personal or think you are, you literally do not see the good things in your life until you start to carry out that exercise. It’s a very, very simple intervention found, well it’s the simplest of interventions that had the most powerful effects, but you could see dramatically over the course of a month or two people becoming more positive, becoming luckier because of those interventions.

[00:33:47] MB: I’d love to kind of dig in and understand how you define loving yourself, because I think it’s something that I think you and I and many listeners may kind of intuitively grasp it, but I can definitely see somebody listening to this and thinking, you know, that seems kind of egotistical or selfish, and I don’t think it’s that at all.

[00:34:03] KR: You know, it’s actually interesting. Someone pointed that out to me once, and I thought about it, and I thought, “Okay, here’s what’s egotistical and selfish. Hating yourself. Because that’s being self-absorbed, just saying negative things to yourself. That is selfish.” Because you know what? It makes you worse, and it makes your relationships worse, it makes the world worse. That is the ultimate selfish thing I can do.

Loving yourself actually is the most positive thing you can do, because it’s not narcissistic. It’s not looking in the mirror and saying I’m so beautiful, and it’s not like — there’s no narcissism in it. It’s actually feeling love. Feeling love, which is probably the most beautiful emotion that exists. Every great song, every great poem, there’s a reason why over history, all this has been written about it, because it is the truest emotion.

If we’re going for the one true thing that really every human has within, that actually — love for a child, love for our parent, love for our significant other has caused such great actions in human history, you know? Sacrifice. Imagine sacrificing for yourself versus like all the sacrificing for others.

By the way, sacrificing for yourself is called self-discipline, which only results in good things. For someone listening, someone sent me an email once and said you know, I’m skeptic about this. I’m like dude, if you’re actually taking the time to email me, it means that you're not where you want to be in your life. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be bothering. You’d be too busy living your life. Why don’t you just try this? Why don’t you try it and see, and worst case, turns out you were right all along, you had lost nothing. You’re still miserable. Or, it could actually work and you’re better off.

I don’t really understand too much when someone says they don’t get the whole love yourself thing. I’m like, you know, I think if you were ever a baby, you know what love is. We may have lost touch with it, but it’s in us, and it’s truly like the fundamental human emotion that ultimately we all crave and we need. If we start from a place of giving that to our selves, so we’re not coming from an empty place, life has to be far better.

[00:35:59] MB: That reminds me of something else that you’ve talked about that I think is a really powerful concept, which is the idea that life is not happening to you, but it’s happening for you.

[00:36:09] KR: Yeah, that’s actually something I’ve noticed with people that I found to be significantly successful and happy or fulfilled. That’s why I work in Silicon Valley, and now because of my books, the kind of people I get to meet, I know quite a few insanely successful people, but I don’t know that many successful and fulfilled, or successful and consistently happy people. The ones who have that are the ones who basically — everything in life is basically an experience where they have to grow and learn, and use for their personal growth.

It’s not like they don’t get sidelined by life when you have that attitude. I came across a few months ago, there’s actually — in one of Rooney’s poems he says that. There’s nothing, this isn’t anything new under the sun. These are fundamental human truths that people have been figuring out since we’ve been around.

Imagine like, living from that place. Everything that’s happening is actually for your benefit. Cheryl Richardson has become a dear friend, she’s a very successful self-help author, and she said to me once, I got through a breakup and I was sad about it, she said, “You know? Try looking at it this way: rejection is God’s protection.” I mean, if you think about that, because if someone, if things end with someone, we as human beings don’t know what’s way down the road. You know, it could be magical now, it could be the worst thing that ever happened to you 10 years from now, right?

If it ended now, it could actually be a great gift. If you start looking at it as everything is happening for my benefit from that place, it makes life a lot simpler, and it actually makes us happier. Call it a simple mental hack, it works.

[00:37:36] MB: Yeah, that’s so powerful. I love that phrase. Rejection is god’s protection. I think many times, looking back on my life, there’s so many things that I desperately wanted or wished would happen, and the fact that they didn’t happen was the best thing that could have happened to me.

[00:37:49] KR: Yeah, look. I was writing for over a decade. Obsessively, you know, teaching myself, reading the great authors at night after work, and on the weekends just writing, rewriting. You know, sending out material, getting rejection letters, and the rejections hurt. I remember I would be depressed for a week or two, and then I would think, “Okay, I’m going to be a better writer,” and I would work harder the next round and get more rejection letters.

You know what that gave me? Over a decade, I became a way better writer because of that. That allowed me to be the kind of writer who could write Love Yourself and take his ego out of the way and just write only every word that mattered and cut everything else out. If I hadn’t got those rejections for a decade, I wouldn’t have written Love Yourself. If I had gotten like, published early on, I’d be writing this really clever drivel. It’s very easy to write clever stuff. I mean, I do it all the time, and then I throw it in the trash, because I know now how to write pure from the heart, but that took a lot of time and a lot of work to get to that place. That was all because of the rejections.

[00:38:44] MB: You touched on earlier kind of the difference or the distinction between someone who is successful and someone who is fulfilled. Could you explain that distinction?

[00:38:52] KR: I always make this distinction of someone who is successful AND fulfilled. Fulfilled, right? A couple of things I’ve noticed with that. One of the key things is their attitude tends to be that everything that’s happening is actually for their benefit. They work it out, they’ll handle it, they’ll figure it out, they’ll be in a better place because of it.

Success and fulfilment. I think, in that case, I think fulfillment for me is when you’re really living your life in a way that your life is an expression of you. The true you, what you’re putting out in the world, where you’re being, if you’re walking the earth, being you, and putting out to the world a real you. That is natural fulfillment.

It’s actually a beautiful way to be. Now having success from that place is more amazing. You’ll never have any issues with that success, because it’s just you being you. The real you, not the ego, not the scared person, just you, the gifts you got. I would say like, of all the things I’ve done, startups, building companies, venture capital, all these things. The thing that I found most fulfilling, even though it’s also the hardest work I’ve done, is writing and putting these books out. It is by far the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life. Blows everything else away. Because it’s a pure expression of me.

[00:40:05] MB: One of the things you’ve talked about is the idea that if something scares you, there’s magic on the other side.

[00:40:11] KR: Yeah.

[00:40:11] MB: I’d love for you to kind of explain that.

[00:40:13] KR: That’s just a rule I’ve developed for myself. It’s just a personal rule, and one, whenever I live, just results in magic. Like, for example. I was terrified of putting the Love Yourself out to the world, I was petrified. I wrote it, and I remember, just being like, I was just as likely to just trash it than I was to publish it, right? It was actually crossing that fear that actually changed my life, transformed my life.

I’ve noticed other things. If there’s like, they’re really scared, you know, okay, if you’re scared of throwing yourself in front of a truck, yes, that’s a legitimate fear, but like most of our fears that come from within, they’re actually, I think, often a signal of where to go rather than where to run away from. It’s kind of funny how that works.

I think in our gut, we’ve learned to listen to in a very weird way as humans, but like this fear of going and asking that girl out. What’s the worst that can happen? Eventually, you could meet the girl of your dreams. Publishing the book where I’m going to be a laughing stock in Silicon Valley. Everyone’s going to be like, “What the hell, dude? You’re writing this book about loving yourself, with this strange cover, and now you’re doing like, mantras in your head?” I thought I would never be able to raise a dollar for a company again. By doing it, it changed my life. So many CEO’s I’ve met told me how it’s transformed their lives and made them better. That was a huge thing.

It’s almost like I look at life as a cliff. These things in life, it’s a cliff you're standing on and we’re waiting to jump, and we think, you know, we’re going to jump after our wings grow. The irony is that they never will. We have to actually jump somewhere along the way. While we’re falling is when they grow, because it’s like life tests us. I think life gives us more than we could ever ask for, but we have to step up. It’s life that requires us or of us. I think that’s a fine deal.

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