The Science of Success Podcast

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The Big Lie About Happiness with Neil Pasricha

Lace Gilger
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In this episode we expose the lie that success makes you happy and discover the truth about engineering happiness into your life. Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confront the reality that in today’s world we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived failures. We discuss how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your mental strength and resilience. All of this and much more with our guest Neil Pasricha. 

Neil Pasricha is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which has been published in ten countries, spent over five years on bestseller lists, and sold over a million copies. He is one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, and today serves as Director of The Institute for Global Happiness. Neil has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe including Fortune 100 companies, Ivy League Deans, and Royal Families in the Middle East. His work has been featured in thousands of outlets including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, and many more!

  • The myth of the idea that great work leads to big success and being happy. That’s totally backwards. 

  • Looking at over 300 studies on the science of happiness, the model is the opposite. 

  • Be happy —> Great Work —> Big Success 

  • Being happy increases productive by 31%, Sales by 30%, and creativity by 300% 

  • Happy people live longer! Happy people live an average of over ten years longer.

  • Many people don’t think that happiness, compassion, understanding and emotional intelligence are not important to business success, that couldn’t be further from the truth

  • 50% of your happiness is genetic, 10% of your happiness is circumstantial, and 40% is based on your intentional activities

  • The average human is awake for 1000 minutes per day. Could you take 20 of them, 2% of those hours, to make the other 980 (98%) minutes happier? 

  • 3 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Increase your Happiness

    • Go for a 20 minute walk in the woods 

    • Journaling is a great way to have a powerful happiness practice 

    • Reading 20 pages of fiction per day.

  • Reading fiction, especially literary fiction, helps improve your emotional intelligence. 

  • You have to STRUCTURE your day to enable these contemplative, happiness creating routines

  • How to be a lazy person and still get lots of things done. 

  • How to structure a “family contract” to have more quality time with your loved ones. 

  • "Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action."

  • Everyone gets 168 hours per week. You have 168 pebbles and you can spend one every hour. 

  • 168/3 = 3 buckets of 56 hours

    1. 56 hours of sleep

    2. 56 hours of work

    3. 56 hours of family & enjoyment

  • Most people that work 70-80 hours per week have tons of wasted and dead time in their day. 

  • What are you spending your buckets on?

  • We are all getting more anxious, lonely, and depressed - despite the fact that we are healthier and safer than we’ve ever been.

  • We no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure. 

  • How do we get mentally tough?

  • The ascendance of the smartphone has created a 30% spike in anxiety in the last five years. 

  • 3 strategies to build mental strength and resilience. 

    • Get your cell phone out of your bedroom.

    • Do a “two minute morning"

    • Spend your lunch time doing a weird hobby or an unusual activity 

    • Intermittent Fasting from TECHNOLOGY 

  • The “two minute morning” exercise:

    • I will let go of..

    • I am grateful for..

    • I will focus on...

  • Gratitude has to be highly specific, not just “my wife” - it needs to be “when my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek this morning” - otherwise your brain doesn’t actually think about it. 

  • Carve a “will do” from your “could do / should do” list. 

  • Nobel prize winners are 22x more likely to have a weird or amateur hobby than their peers. 

  • Your learning rate is the steepest when you know the least 

  • How you can avoid “cognitive entrenchment” and mental fragility. 

  • The person who is the most successful in life is not the person who has had the most successes, its the person who has the most failures. You have to increase your failure rate to increase your success. 

  • When you overly specialize, success blocks future success. 

  • Spend money on cultivating randomness in your life. 

  • What other success could you have had, should you have had, or would you have had, if you had let yourself stay broader for longer? 

  • How do you mentally unfurl yourself form all the identity sleeping bags you’re rolled up in?

  • Homework: Start or finish your day by reading 20 pages of fiction from a good book. “A reader lives 1000 lives before he dies" 

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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 five million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode, we expose the lie that success makes you happy and discover the truth about engineering happiness into your life. 

Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confront the reality that in today's world, we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived failures. We discuss how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your own mental strength and resilience. All of this and much more with our guest, Neil Pasricha.

Are you a fan of the show? And have you been enjoying the content that we 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 there, 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 home page, that’s successpodcast.com or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word ‘smarter’. That's “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we brought you a holiday special with some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, courage, and so much more. We brought in some familiar guests, like Brene Brown and Oscar Trimboli, as well as some guests from the archives like John Wang, Dacher Keltner and so many more. If you want something to ground you during this holiday season and really focus on gratitude, listen to our previous episode

Now for Interview with Neil. Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Neil Pasricha. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which is sold over a 1,000,000 copies. He's one of the most popular Ted speakers of all time and today serves as director of the Institute for Global Happiness. His work has been featured in thousands of outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, and much more. 

[0:02:30] MB: Neil, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:34] NP: Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

[0:02:35] MB: I'm really excited to have you on the show. Your work is so interesting and inspiring, and there's a lot of takeaways that I think we can share with the listeners.

[00:02:43] NP: I can't wait.

[0:02:44] MB: I want to start with an idea that you shared in some of your early work of this notion that people often have the equation backwards. They think that they have to work hard, do great work, be successful and that eventually they'll be happy, and you pointed out that perhaps that's not the right way to sequence things.

[00:02:34] NP: It's definitely not the right way to sequence things. And I blame all of our parents for this, because our parents said the same thing to all of us as we were kids. And it is six specific words. You mentioned all the Matt. Great work, that’s two, leads to big success, that’s four, leads to be happy, that’s six. Great work leads to big success leads to be happy, however, after reading over 300 [inaudible 0:03:28], like all these studies on the science of happiness, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, the model’s exactly reversed. It actually goes, be happy, leads to great work, leads to big success. 

Based on a study published in Harvard Business Review by Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, we know that being happy actually increases productivity 31%, increases sales 37%, and increases creativity 300%. What happens after that? Well, the big success comes. That’s the end, after the great work. Two kinds number one happy people are 40% more likely to get a promotion in the next 12 months. Not surprising when you think about your company, your office or workplace, you're like, “Well, that person probably gonna get promoted. They're in a good mood. We like working for that boss. We like working for that colleague,” and happy people also live longer. This is interesting, comes from the nun study at the University of Kentucky. It shows, happy people live in average of over 10 years longer. When you think about how short our life spans truly are, an extra 10 years is quite a big increase, just from priming your brain to be positive each day.

[0:04:32] MB: It's so interesting and this underscores to me one of the biggest takeaways or lessons that I've pulled from doing the podcast, which is this notion that a lot of these seeming soft skill things, emotional intelligence, happiness, gratitude, all of these things – people often think that they're not real business skills, that they can't help you be more productive, that they can help you be more successful. And yet the research is pretty resoundingly clear that, in fact, many of these soft skills, these woo-woo things like happiness are actually the cornerstones of being a highly productive and successful person.

[00:05:09] NP: Yeah, I like you framed it as, like, these are potentially kind uplifts as well, for sure, but I also want to just enter into the conversation. Another little injection here, I was director of leadership development at Walmart. That was my job title for a number of years, and so my job was to help really, really good leaders become great leaders, i.e, help vice presidents become senior vice presidents, help senior vice presidents become executive vice presidents, help executive presidents become C-suite leaders. Guess what everyone got fired for. Guess what? 

If you weren't going to make the leap, guess what reason it was. It wasn't because you couldn't do the numbers. It wasn’t because you couldn’t show confidence in meetings. It wasn't because you couldn't lead a team. It was because people didn’t like you. Like that's what it was. It was because nobody want to work for you. You were hard to get along with. You weren’t empathetic in meetings. You didn't show compassion and understanding. People got a rough feeling from you. 

And then when enough people feel that way, guess what? Your 360 scores, your managing up surveys, all that kind of stuff comes back negative so they can't promote you. So the number one de-railer in an office environment or an executive environment is actually your soft skills. Your EQ. So I like how you kinda said, “Hey, this is good. This helps you go up.” I'm also saying, it also helps prevent you from getting the boot. EQ is the hardest thing to grow, and we aren't spending enough time growing it.

[0:06:21] MB: I couldn't agree more. And I want to look at this because you could ramble on and you've shared some great statistics, but you could talk, you know, ad infinitum about the benefits of happiness. But I'm sure somebody could hear you say that and tell themselves. “Okay, great. That's awesome for people who are happy. But I'm not happy or I'm naturally not as happy.” So what does that mean? Am I left out of the cold?

[00:06:43] NP: Yeah. No, doesn't. And I'm gonna quote Sonja Lyubomirsky again. She's a real titan in this positive psychology world. Professor at Stanford University of California. She's positive model and her famous book called The How of Happiness that actually shows – it's a model, okay, so not like a proven concept, but she has the background and the chops – I’ve seen a lot of your guests at these kind of similar backgrounds. 

You know, you had [inaudible 0:07:04] etcetera on the show, like she's got the horsepower to say, “Look, guys, based on the research I've done 50% of your happiness is actually genetic. 10% of your happiness is circumstances, circumstantial or circumstances (based on what's happening in your life) and 40% of you happiness is based on your intentional activities. Again, 50% genetic, 10% circumstances, and 40% intentional activities.

So to the person who's saying, “Well, I'm just not a naturally happy person.” I get that. That's your genetic baseline. That is the 50%. Unfortunately you can't control it. You can control however the 40%, the part of the glass that you refill. Like I say to people, “The glass isn't half empty or half full. It's refillable.” What do you put into that 40%? So what I always preach to people is this. You, Matt, me, Neil, and everyone listening, we’re all awake on average for 1000 minutes a day. That is the average amount of minutes people are awake for a day. 

I'm obsessed with the number 1000 by the way, which we could talk about later if you want. That number is fascinating to me for many reasons. We’re awake a thousands minutes a day? My argument is could you take 20 of them? A 2% lever. Could you take 20 of them to make the other 980 minutes the other 98% of your day happier? When I ask that question, most people nod their heads like, “Yeah, I could do that. It makes up 90% of my day happier. Like I'm all in. We know it makes me or productive, or higher sales. I'm more creative, I’ll get along well with people. I'm going to get promoted. I'm in. So what do I do?”

Well, this is where all the positive psychology research comes in. So what you do is you read through all these studies. You distill them down the simple, most simple stuff you could find, and I'll tell you right now, I'll give you three of them. I could give you five or seven. Let's just leave it at three for now. Go on a 20 minute nature walk in the woods with no cell phone, okay. Trees release a chemical called phytoncides that actually reduce your cortisol level. You actually get happier by being in nature. 

[00:08:52] NP: We all have NDD these days or nature deficit disorder. So this is a healthy thing. Number two is Journal. Famous Research from the University of Texas, Slatcher and Pennebaker showed that couples in a relationship who journaled were 50% more likely to stay together in their romantic relationship after three months. I always joke that three months is a very long relationship at the University of Texas or any college campus. Also a friend of mine, Shawn Achor, positive psychology researcher has teamed up with the national MS Society to show that patients with chronic neuro-muscular pain, if they journal for six weeks, can have their pain medication at the six month mark reduced by up to 50%.

 Turns out in your brain, you’ve got something called the visual cortex when you rewrite something happy from your day, okay, a good conversation, the friend you bumped into, the hot coffee that somebody brought you, whatever, that your brain actually replays it in that visual cortex. An area called Area 17 lights up a second time or third time if you read your own journal. So journaling, again start of the day, end of the day, is a great way to have a 20 minute happiness practice.

And the third and final thing I'll mention. Again, there’s many we could talk about, but is reading 20 pages of fiction, okay. 2011 Annual Review of Psychology showed that reading fiction, especially literary fiction, opens up the mirror neurons in your brain, the parts of your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, understanding, all the EQ stuff we were talking about. 

If you want to be a better person, the best way to do that is to inhabit a totally other conscience for 20 minutes or 20 pages a day, because that teaches you how to be another gender, another religion, another culture, another geography, another nationality, another time period, etcetera.

So, quick summary. Yes, there's a genetic set point, but even though that's 50% of our happiness, we've got 10% based on circumstances and 40% on intentional activities, focusing on that 40% which is the part we can control, I say, spend 20 minutes a day doing one of three activities. Go for a 20 minute nature walk, do a 20 minute journaling exercise or read 20 pages of fiction from a good book.

[0:10:51] MB: All three of those are great suggestions, and the math on that is so powerful. I often tell people the same thing, which is just try to carve out a little bit of time for what I call contemplative routines, essentially things like journaling, meditation, reflection, stepping back from all the noise and dizziness and chaos of life. And I love the math on 20 Minutes is essentially 2% of your day, and is it possible to carve that out? It makes so much sense on paper. And yet it's so easy to get caught up in the business [inaudible 0:11:24] everything going on and feel like you don't have 20 minutes.

[00:11:27] NP: Well, you have to structure it, right. So these days I'm giving a bunch of speeches, and one question I always ask audiences, is, “How many of you sleep within 10 feet of your cell phone?” And honestly, Matt, like 95% or more hands go up, okay? And you know the same excuses that we all hear. “It’s my alarm clock.” You know, ah, “What if there's an emergency?” Stuff like that? Well, I say, plug your cell phone in the basement, buy an alarm clock from Walmart and start or finish your day with either a journaling practice or reading a good book. If you don't have your cell phone in the bedroom, that's a start. 

Look, if you drank a bottle of wine before bed every night, slept within 10 feet of a bottle of wine during the night and drank a bottle of wine when you got up in the morning, we would all call you an alcoholic. These days we're all phone-aholics. Our cell phones are terrible for us, and I could expand on why if you are interested but cell phones are horrible for us, and yet we sleep right beside them. We check them last thing at night and first thing in the morning as if it's no big deal. It is a big deal.

So system wise, in order to structure it, put your cellphone in the basement. It doesn't matter where you cell phone lives, it matters where your charger lives. If you're paranoid about emergencies, do what my wife and I have done: get a landline. They’re $20. It's illegal for telemarketers to call you at night, but your friends and family can call you if there actually is an emergency, which, by the way, there never is. 

And then start or finish today with the journaling practice or reading a good book.

[0:12:49] MB: That's a good example, and it really highlights – you said something a moment ago that is so important and often gets missed in the discussion of these routines and habits. And it's that you have to proactively structure your day to create the space for these contemplative routines. And if you don't do that, then they never happen. And if you do carve out just a little bit of time, even 20 minutes or more a day, that has a huge, compounded return on everything else that you do

[00:13:22] NP: Exactly, and by the way, I'm partly preaching to myself. I'm actually a very lazy person. People don't believe me when I say that because they are like, “No, you get so much done blah, blah, blah. Didn’t you write all these books?” No, it's just because I'm structured. Like it's just because I just made simple rules around things, right? So one rule is the cell phone lives in the basement. That's a rule. I can’t in my mind break it. So that allows me. What am I gonna do to record that? I got a journal sitting beside there. I got a book, so I flip it open. It's because I just natural – it's easier for me to do that than nothing, you know. 

So that's why I do that. And there's many things like that that Leslie and I, my wife have in our life. Another example just to throw in here, Matt, for those listening, like, “Okay, that's one, buddy. What else you got?” Is, we have a family contract. So my wife and I have written out on a piece of paper and signed in ink the number of nights I'm allowed to be away per month, the number of days we must have together as a family. I mean, no screens, no other people, like just our family. The number of days we get of vacation as a family, and the number of nights she and I both get to do our own thing each month. 

By the way, the number for all those things happens to be four. Okay, Neil's away four nights per a month because, I mean, that means I say no to lot of stuff. But, you know, we just talked earlier or we jumped on here like I can't do certain things because [Inaudible 0:14:39] cookie exchange. I was able to do that because I already maximize my nights away. So this is a little family contract. Does it actually – like If I break it, do I get in trouble? Do I get arrested? No, but because I wrote it out and I signed in ink, it’s a system that now guides my behavior. I'm a lazy person, so I just now follow this rigid ‘rule’ that I made for myself.

[0:14:57] MB: I tell people the same thing all the time, which is that I'm very lazy, but I use structures and routines to ensure that I both select the most important activities and get them done despite all of the other things constantly distracting and pulling me in so many different directions. 

[00:15:13] NP: You're a smart man. 

[0:15:14] MB: Well, this whole conversation, though, reminds me of something else that I've heard you talk about in the past, which is this idea that in today's culture, it's almost a rote response to say, “How are you doing?” What is somebody always respond back with? 

[00:15:28] NP: I'm busy. 


[0:15:29] MB: I‘m busy. That's what everyone says. And I've stopped saying that. I stopped saying that maybe a year ago, but it's amazing how almost everybody has that response, and we have this culture that promotes this this myth of having to be busy and always being busy as if it's a badge of honor, but it really, to me, in many ways is a detriment.

[00:15:50] NP: Yeah, there's a great essay on this by Tim Kreider called The Busy Trap, just published in The New York Times. Maybe you could share it out with your listers somehow or in the show notes or whatever. This really prompted my thinking. And then, of course, Tim Ferriss’s  words. And I think for our work weeks that the word busy is an excuse. It is somebody who is a lazy thinker and indiscriminately acting. You know, busy is a sign of, you don't know how to manage your priorities. And I love that. 

And so, in The Happiness Equation, the book I wrote before, You’re Awesome, before this one, I actually lay it out as a bucket model. I say, you, Matt Bodnar, me, Neil Pasricha, everyone listening, Oprah, Warren Buffett, Tim Ferriss, Tim Kreider, all these people, we all get the exact same number of hours per week, right? It's a 168. That’s how many everyone gets. Doesn't matter how old you are, how rich you are. You get 160 hours a week. 

I like to think of it like Monday morning at midnight or whenever the week starts on your calendar. Monday morning at midnight is like I got 168 like pebbles, and I spend one an hour and I’m – by the end of the week, I'm like, out of pebbles. That's all I got and I get another 168 for next week. The beautiful thing about that number 168 is it naturally divides by three. So you divide it by three, and it's three buckets of 56 hours each. 56 56 56. 

Well, guess what? Every doctor will tell you you're supposed to sleep eight hours a night. Eight times seven days a week is 56 hours. So one entire bucket per week for most people on average should be 56. What about work? Well, most people work about a 40 hour week job. Yeah, there's some higher, some lower, but let's round it up. Let's round it up for commuting time, maybe some emails home, maybe you do work on the weekend little bit. Let's just call it 56. We're gonna give you, like almost a 50% increase on your ’40 hour week job’.

[00:17:38] NP: And by the way, there's a lot of research says that people that say they work 70, 80, 90 hours like are kind of lying. You know, there's a lot of research that says they're not really working. I feel like that's crazy number of hours and most people don't work that much, even if they think they do, okay. There’s a lot of dead time and wasted time in there. Let's call it 56. Guess what Matt? Those two buckets, the work bucket and the sleep bucket, pay for, justify, and create your third bucket. Are you busy? Or are you filling up your third bucket with crap. 

For me? I worked 10 years at Walmart, right? And I, for eight of those years, on the side, you could call it the side hustle these days, I wrote. I wrote athousandaweseomthings.com. I wrote my books. I gave 200 speeches. I gave some TED talks. That was all in my 3rd 56 hour week budget. It's worth pointing out. I was not married at that time, and I did not have children. So I was able to put, pour all that time into my ‘fun bucket’ of writing and speaking.

Now I did get remarried. My wife, Leslie, and I have children. And guess what? My third bucket is now being an intentional, you know, and attuned and present father. So that's why I ended up quitting the WalMart job because I’d shifted that writing bucket from my third bucket into my second ‘work’ bucket. That mental structure really helps me. It aids me, and once every six months or year or so, I always just re-consciously think about what am I spending my buckets on? And is it the right thing to be spending them on? I'm not ever busy. I'm just conscious about spending my time.

[0:19:06] MB: Yeah, I love that distinction, and it's amazing once you step back and just spend even 20 minutes as we talked about earlier thinking about how you should be spending your time and looking at how it's actually being spent, you can come up with some pretty, pretty insightful takeaways about ways that you're wasting time or spinning your wheels on dead time or doing things so that you feel like you're being productive when you're really not?

[00:19:31] NP: Yeah, I think there's a famous quote. I can't remember who said it. It said you know, show me your calendar and I'll tell you your priorities. Of course, that assumes that your schedule is up to date and filed and all that stuff. But that is a really good indicator of what you actually care about. It's how you spend your time.

[0:19:47] MB: Hey, what's up? It's Matt. I want to tell you about the most epic and life-changing thing that we've ever done here at The Science of Success. It's about to happen, and I wanted to personally invite you to join me. We're launching an incredible, live, in-person two-day intensive for fans of the show that want to take their lives to the next level. This will be an intimate two-day in-person deep dive with me where we will go over all of the biggest lessons and greatest life-changing insights that I've personally pulled from years of interviewing the world's top experts on The Science of Success, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to apply and implement them to 10x-ing your own life in 2020 and beyond.

I've spent months planning the life-changing content for this live in-person intensive, and here's what we're going to dig into. You can bring your own unique challenges and desires and get highly specific, tailored feedback on exactly what you need to do in order to achieve your biggest goals. We will personally dig into what's holding you back and find out exactly what you need to do to take your life to the next level. I'll show you how to become a master negotiator and deal with any conversation, no matter how tough. You’ll get the exact tools that you can apply right now to influence anybody using Jedi mind tricks. I'll show you what to do to banish fear from your life and to get rid of negative emotions.

We’ll reveal exactly how you can overcome procrastination and overwhelm, and increase your productivity by more than 10X, and I'm gonna show you how to finally end self sabotage and overcome what's holding you back. And this is only scratching the surface of the epic things that we're gonna cover in this live two-day event. Here's the most important thing. This is not a listen and learn session. This intensive is an immersive implementation experience where you'll walk away with a comprehensive model to take your life to the next level.

After these two days, you'll have a tailored blueprint to see massive results in your productivity, your happiness, your influence, your creativity, and ultimately, in achieving your biggest goals. Because I want to make this a truly amazing experience and I want to give tons of personal one-on-one interaction and engagement with every single person who attends, there’s only 15 seats available for this intensive, and seats have already started filling up. 

[0:22:18] MB: I am personally committed that for every single person who attends this live intensive, that I will help you create massive results in your life, and I will do everything that it takes to make sure that you have an incredible experience and get the maximum amount of value possible. To find out more and to grab your seat for the intensive before it sells out, just go to successpodcast.com/live. That's successpodcast.com/live  to find out all the information.

The intensive is gonna be here in Nashville on January 27th and 28th. All the details and logistics are available at successpodcast.com/live. Grab your seat now. I cannot wait to see you and hang out with you and take your life to the next level here in Nashville in January. success podcast.com/live Grab your ticket today. 

[0:23:16] MB: So you touched on a minute ago, the new work that you've been doing about resilience. I want to dig into that a little bit. It's such an important topic. How did you come to take that on as a new project or a new area of focus?

[00:23:21] NP: Sure, it's really an evolution. So I'm 40 years old now at the time of this conversation. In my late twenties, my wife left me and my best friend took his own life. These are super hard and difficult things for anybody. And for me, I was a wreck. I was – I lost 40 pounds to distress. I got a therapist for the first time and I started my blog. 1000awesomethings.com was my personal therapeutic project to cheer myself up. That evolved into my first book, which is all about gratitude, and it's called The Book of Awesome. Five years later, I met Leslie. We fell in love. We got married. I'm giving you like the quick version here and on the plane home from our honeymoon she told me she was pregnant. 

I mean, on the plane. She bought the pregnancy test in the Kuala Lumpur Airport Pharmacy and she did the pregnancy test like 50,000 feet above sea level. We land home in Toronto. I then write a 300 page love letter to my unborn child about how to live a happy life. That love letter turns into a book called The Happiness Equation. So The Happiness Equation, my last book, is all about happiness and a lot of the stuff we've been talking about so far is kind of like from that kind of, that work and research and writing that I did.

Now, at the time of recording this, it's 2019 and I don't know when this will come out, but right at the end of 2019 we’re reporting and I'm 40 years old. I'm purportedly successful. Why, then that am I super thin skinned. Why, then when I get two likes on a photo am I like, “Nobody likes me”? Why, when I get a rude email from someone, am I like, “I need to delete this person from my life forever.” Like I want to like, just like – I can't handle it, you know? I'm actually weak, I'm fragile. I'm thin skinned and I look around and I see my own children, and I'm like, they're kind of like that, too. 

Is it a genetic thing? So I look around a little bit more. Guess what? It's all of us. We're all getting more and more anxious, lonely, depressed. We're living like an army of porcelain dolls. Why? Well, I have a thesis about this, and this is something I share in the introduction to my new book on resilience which is called You are Awesome. And that is this. We live in an era of the greatest abundance of all time. You're in Nashville? I'm in Toronto. We're having a conversation like we're old friends. Like that’s amazing. Like, you couldn't do this not that long ago. 

Not only that, we live longer than we've ever lived. We are healthier than we've ever been. We are safer than we've ever been. We have more money than we've ever had. By the way these are all generationally true, okay. Compare ourselves to previous generations or previous generations, higher education. Everything's better. Like we live in an era of infinite abundance.

And the point about safety is really valid. We don't have any gigantic huge famine. No great depression. No plague. No one's getting forcibly shipped off to war, which happened, like just a generation ago. We have it good. Unfortunately, and here's that here's the ‘ah ha’, the side effect of all this abundance is we no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure. Like the two likes on the photo, or the rude email. 

So the muscle I think we all are so desperate to build these days is resilience. How do we get mentally tougher? Because the world certainly will not help us. They will rampage us with messages telling us how much we suck and stink, and social media will feed us everyone else’s is pretty picture and six pack abs and the lobster buffet the mouths they're on to make your lunch look like crap. So you're on your own. So mental toughness or resilience is now my current focus area. And that's exactly why.

[0:26:47] MB: Such a great, insightful point. I wrote this down in bolded in my notes. We no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure.

[00:26:57] NP: Yeah, and this is the thing. Part of the problem right now is cell phones. Dr Jean Twengie, a researcher and professor at San Diego University has written about the fact that anxiety rates are up 30% over the past five years. By the way, anxiety rates have not gone up even double digits before that. Like, it's like a gigantic huge hockey stick-like curb, suddenly. In her report, she says this is due, her words not mine, to the ascendance of the smartphone.

I made some flippant comments earlier and I’ll right now, but the cell phones kill our productivity. 31% of our time is bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks now, they hurt us physically because bright screens before bedtime reduce our melatonin production, and we're all having 60 pounds of pressure when we’re texting and stuff like that tech neck and stuff. You've heard about it. And third of all, they're hurting us psychologically. You can no longer be the best anymore. You can't be the winner anymore. You can't be the best basketball player for your high school anymore because someone else is better on the Internet. 

Someone has more followers. Someone has more friends. You and I can have a quick conversation about our podcasts. You and I can name five people that have more downloads than us or five people have more better shows than us or bigger shows. We can. We will. Even when our shows double or triple in popularity and downloads, whatever, we will still be able to name five people, right?

Even Oprah is looking at how many followers Justin Bieber has on Twitter. You can't win. It's impossible. So that's why our anxiety rates are skyrocketing. It's not just that our loneliness rates are skyrocketing. We have purported connection with technology that actually creates disconnection because it's superficial, and we have higher rates of mental illness and depression and suicide than ever before.

[0:28:37] MB: You're painting a pretty bleak picture, and I agree in many ways, especially about smartphones, and you've made some really good points and I'm sure we'll dig into some strategies here in a minute, but you've named a ton of researchers and books, and resources. All of those are gonna be in the show notes for listeners who want to check them out. I'll also throw some other resources we have around breaking phone addictions and so forth too. 

But let's think into that. Tell me more about how we can, zooming out a little bit, how we can cultivate resilience, how we can start to learn to handle failure. And what are some of the specific things that we can do to really take action on that?

[00:29:13] NP: Sure, let me give you three tips to build mental strength or resilience. And these are things you can do, one in the morning, one during the day, and one at bedtime, okay? In the morning, I already told you, get rid of that cell phone. You have to get rid of it. The two most common excuses are, “It's an alarm clock.” Buy an alarm clock from Walmart, or, “It's needed for emergencies.” Get a landline. They're super cheap because no one has one and give it to your friends and family. Get the phone out of your bedroom. 

Instead, you could start your day with the 20 minute journalling exercise like I suggested. Or if you only have two minutes. Let me give you a two-minute research backed, mind strengthening practice that I do every morning when I get up. I shouldn't say every morning. I try to do it every morning. I do it most mornings. I call it Two Minute Mornings, and here's how it goes. Number one, answer the question, “I will let go of –” Number two, “I am grateful for –” and number three, “I will focus on –” That's it. I will let go of – I am grateful for – I will focus on – 

‘I will let go of’ is the first one. We used to go the Catholic confession chamber, you know? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. The Gospel believes it's good to get things off your chest. There's research in Science magazine called Don't Look Back in Anger by Brasson and colleagues that also suggest that minimizing regrets as you age is good for you, okay? It makes you happier and live longer. It’s not just Catholicism by the way, Buddhism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, all have a form of confession built into their religious practices. However, Matt, guess what the fastest growing religion is in the world right now?

[0:30:38] MB: I don't know. Buddhism?

[00:30:39] NP: No religion! According to the National Geographic it is no religion. In fact, some countries, like Australia, France, UK, are about to cross into a secular majority, okay? So we need a form of contemporary confession. ‘I will let go of’ helps you crystallize and eject an anxiety and prevents it from swimming subconsciously your mind all day. I will let go of the 5 pounds I gained over the holidays. I will go of comparing my book to Tim Ferriss’s book, comparing my podcast to Tim Ferriss’s podcast. 

I will let go of the fact that I yelled at my toddler yesterday like I feel like a terrible dad, but I will let go of it. ‘I am grateful for’, this is based on research from Emmons and McCulloch that shows that if you write down 10 things you're grateful for at the end of the week, you’ll not only be happier but physically healthier after a 10 week period. The research, though, says that the gratitudes have to be specific, so you can't just write down like, “My husband, my kid and my job.” You have to write down, “When my husband, Antonio, put the toilet seat down. When my three year old son gave me a picture that he drew in school. When my boss gave me a compliment in the big morning meeting.” 

Specific. Specificity is important. Otherwise your brain is not really thinking about it. And the third thing is, “I will focus on.” I will focus on his way to carve a will do from your endless could do should do list, right? We all suffer from decision fatigue. Taking that 30 seconds in the morning to decide what the thing is that you're going to do today is awesome because then you can cross it off the next morning and you're done, okay.

“I will let go of. I’m grateful for. I will focus on,” is the morning practice I recommend to strengthen your mind for the day. Now I said I had three things. I said I had a lunchtime practice in an evening practice. You want the other two? 

[0:32:13] MB: Absolutely. 

[00:32:15] NP: Lunchtime. Okay. What should you be doing at lunchtime? First of all, I want you to be the most – If you work in an office environment, I would like you to become the most antisocial person in your office. Do not take your cell phone in your pocket, jump into a Toyota Corolla with four people heading over to the you know, local – what’s the chain I'm trying to think of. I don't know. I can literally picture – Oh Chili's. I was like picturing the red devil chili pepper. I was like, “What's the name of that restaurant?” Chili’s. 

Forget it. Don't do that. Do not participate in the team lunch. I'm sorry, but I want you to be antisocial. Instead. Leave your cell phone on your desk and go out and spend your lunch time doing a weird hobby. An unusual activity. According to research, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely than their peer group, their scientific peer group, to take part in a strange, unusual or amateur hobby far outside their scientific discipline, like glass blowing or teaching magic or learning in the musical instrument or staring in a local town play.

Could you sign up for a cooking class? Could you go for a nature walk somewhere that nobody else goes? Could you take a – an aerobics class that you've never taken before or get a personal trainer if you're scared of the gym, like get a personal trainer, start – do something that's unusual for you. According to the research, this will avoid something called cognitive entrenchment, which is what happens to all of us as we get older and we increasingly specialized, we get too mentally fragile. It's the opposite of resilience. 

If you wouldn't develop greater resilience of mental strength, you have to broaden yourself. Do things far outside your comfort zone. If you can't do it at lunch, fine. In the evenings, take a cooking class, take a music class, pick up an instrument you don't know anything about, etcetera. Do something really weird and different because that will bring new learnings back to your core discipline or core focus area. 

By the way, side note, I interviewed Chris Anderson for my podcast, so my podcast is called Three Books. I ask people which three books changed your life. Chris Anderson runs TED. The whole thing. TED Conference. He said, “Neil, this is exactly how I designed TED. It's a series of incongruent ideas, presented as TED talks, where by the end of the conference, every single attendee has a gigantic ha ha. They have a cool new insight related to their core discipline because they were presented with such incongruent thinking. 

Most famous example, of course, is Steve Jobs taking that calligraphy course at Reed College, which helped to make that thought on the Mac computer, like many years later. Have a weird hobby, okay.

Number three. At night time. We all talk about this thing these days called intermittent fasting like, do you know what I am talking about, Matt, intermittent fasting?

[0:34:38] MB: Yes, for sure

[00:34:38] NP: You heard about it. Everyone's heard about it. Your listeners are probably all over the stuff. What we should be talking about is intermittent fasting on our cell phones. What we should be talking about intermittent fasting on our technology. For how many hours of the day can you completely untether yourself from The Matrix? That's to me the bigger question and why should we do it? 

Well, there's research that shows that when you aren't connected to your cell phone, you let your thoughts ferment, congeal, spark. You're more creative. You're more impassioned. You stopped doing things right and you go to doing the right things. You move from the front of the deck ship to the captain's seat on the ocean liner, you know? You go from living in the washing machine to looking at the washing machine. It helps you zoom out. 

So there's a couple ways to do this. One is you can try my technique, which is on Friday afternoons. I give my wife, Leslie my cell phone, and I say, “Hide this from me till fantasy football starts on Sunday.” Okay, which I know it sounds like not that much, but from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, that's a lot. That's like 48 hours for me. No cell phone a week. Okay. And every night I got, I told you, I put cell phone in the basement and I put it in airplane mode. So I also have, like, untethering that happens at end of the day. 

If you can't do that, then there's a product I just learned about called Pom Box. The website is getpobox.com. It's a small, beautiful wood looking box. You put cell phone in, you set the timer and it locks you from your cell phone until the timer dings or opens it up. So a woman emailed me and told me about this. She said me and my husband were starting to realize we were distracted at dinner like from her own kids, you know. And we don't like that. We don't want to be distracted from our own kids. So we got a Pom Box, and from 5:30 to 8:30 each evening we go untouchable is what I call it. You are awesome. Going untouchable. And we put our phones in there for three hours. So that we could do like the bed, bath, and dinner routine as a family and actually make eye contact with people. 

Those three things, just to summarize, are a two minute morning practice. “I will let go of, I'm grateful for, I will focus on.” A lunchtime or some other time during the week, unusual or weird hobby that gets you out of your comfort zone. Remembering that you're learning rate is the steepest when you know the least. And finally at night or on the weekends, going untouchable, unplugging from the Matrix and thinking about how to intermittently fast on your cell phone.

[0:36:54] MB: All of those are great strategies and really, really interesting. The stat about the Nobel Prize winner is being 22 times more likely to have a weird or amateur hobby is so interesting. I'm curious on all of these things, and this is something that I've heard in the past or people who hear some of these strategies. How much of this notion of, let's say, getting off of your phone or carving out time for deep focus? How much is that apply or specifically, focus around someone who's a creative? Let's, say, a writer, an artist, et cetera, versus somebody who's, for example, managing a company or managing a team are trying to grow a business?

[00:37:32] NP: Two things on that. One is – So I'm 40. I am Indian, so I was supposed to be a doctor. So my life was an undergraduate business degree from, at the time, the top ranked business school in Canada, a master's of business degree from Harvard Business School, 10 years working at Walmart as project manager to our CEO and director of leadership. 

So my whole background  is kind of about that world. But I also deeply believe that everybody inside them has some little flame that is their creative mojo. And whether that’s singing, whether that's making music, whether that's stand-up comedy, when that's doing a podcast like you do, Matt, whether that's like selling stuff on Etsy. Like everyone's got, like this thing that they just really want to do for another reason and they love to do it. And so I hope that the strategies I've presented here kind of applied to both. Meaning that I spent 10 years in corporate kind of coming up that chain and also now I'm leaning more into my creative side because I think everybody has that. 

So I think you can apply it to both. Certainly, the time management stuff, the structuring stuff and how to kind of turn your mindset around each day with the 20 minute exercise. I think that applies everybody,

[0:38:39] MB: You know, you touched on something else that I think is really important and ties back to another concept of yours that I think is great, which is the notion of being a novice, being a beginner, getting out of your comfort zone, and as that as you called it. I think previously the idea of a failure budget. Tell me a little bit about that concept?

[00:38:55] NP: Sure. And I mentioned this idea called cognitive entrenchment. And if you want to read a little bit more on staying wide longer, a great book on this topic is called Range by David Epstein. E-P-S-T-E-I- N. That's where I got the the Nobel Prize Winners research study was from. I don't think he did the study, but he quotes that study in that book. It’s where I first became aware of it. 

So say you believe me on all this stuff and you're like, “Okay, the person used the most successful life is actually not the person who has had the most successes.” That's what we are inclined to think. That is not true. It is actually the person who has had the disproportionately higher amount of failures. Example, wedding photographer. “How did you get 50 awesome pictures of this wedding?” If you ask them, they always say the same thing. “I have 1500 bad ones. Like I took 2000 or I guess 1550 if I do my math, photos at this two-hour wedding. So of course I got 50 good ones.”

 Look at sports. The guy who has the most wins. Cy Young also has the most losses. The guy who has the most strikeouts, Nolan Ryan, also has the most walks. The most active quarterback with the most Super Bowl championships, Tom Brady, also, the active quarterback with the most Super Bowl losses, Tom Brady. 

See what I’m saying? If you’re wishing on this, then you believe that you have to increase your failure rate. It's hard to do that, especially isn't adult because we overtly specialize and we get good at one thing and success blocks future success. So what do you do? I, on January 1st of every year, my wife and I each take money from our joint account and we put into our personal account. We call it our failure budget. 

One thing that comes out of that is like frivolous stuff like my fantasy football stuff comes out of there, for example. But also I use that money as like a no excuses way to just spend on randomness. Again, examples like flying to some city with a friend to hear a concert by a band that he or she really likes that you've never heard of because you just decided to do it. Taking a sport up. Taking a sport up as an adult is so healthy for you. Remember ninth grade gym class? You do it different sport every week. What does every adult do? Nothing. Or maybe like one thing. Just jog. Or they like just play basketball. 

But pushing yourself in your comfort zone is much, much, much healthier. So failure budget helps and the reason it helps us because you could just make it a small percentage of your income. If you make $50,000, you could say I spend $50 anything I want to try. Or just move the decimal place over a few points, and then you have no excuses, so you are more likely to try new things. And when you try new things, you learn more. So, your failure rate goes up and your success rate eventually goes up.

[0:41:25] MB: Great point. And David Epstein's book, Range, one of the best books I read in the last 12 months. Probably my most recommended book of 2019. And I’ll  throw in, we did interview him a couple months ago. Throw it on the show notes for listeners who want to dig in. But even, you said something there that I thought was really interesting, which is this notion that success blocks future success. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

[00:41:45] NP: Yeah, here’s the thing: most of us were born as blobs were little bob blobs of brains of them. And so your parents’ goal is to expose it to a breath of things. You look at shapes and colors and you do drawing and you do sports and you're doing everything. Everything. Eventually you specialize. You feel like you have to. And maybe you stay brought his long felt. Maybe take liberal arts education or you dabble in the bunch things where you spend your twenties, I think as you should, doing a bunch of different things. 

Okay, I think the twenties are the decade of experimentation in many ways you just try as many new things in that decade as possible. Because it's the after the two decades of like forced learning and before your like seven decades of like living or running a family, if that's what you want to do, or being part of a family. So, it’s like twenties are your decade to play. Okay? The play decade, the experimentation decade. 

But here's what happens to most people in their twenties. You do something that works. Let's just say you sell a condo. Let's just say you get your real estate license and you sell one condo. You are not sure if you like real estate. You're not sure if it's for you, but you sell one condo and you get a $10,000 commission, and you're like, “Oh, my gosh, like I'm good at this.” So you tell people, “I got some business cards made. I'm a real estate agent now.” And when you go to parties, people know you as their real estate agent friend. You have had success in that area. They want to talk to you about interest rates, their house, when they should list with you or sell their house or blah, blah, blah. All those conversations served to deepen your own specialty in that one area. 

What's the downside? Well, say you become a millionaire by the time you're 30 as a real estate agent. You might think you made it, and maybe you have. But here's the question. I would ask you, “What other success could you have had, should you have had or would you have had if you had let yourself state broader longer?  Could you have pursued ballet till the time when you were dancing at the Met?” Right? We don't know because that success you had as a real estate agent blocked the future success you could have had in other areas. 

What's the way out of that? How do you mentally unfurl yourself from all the sleeping bags you’re rolled up in? Go to parties where you don't know anybody. Have a failure budget where you're trying new things. Put yourself in situations out of your comfort zone. Keep letting yourself experiment and play being open to Black Swan opportunities so that you jack up your mental strength and your resilience and make yourself, I hate to use the word, like more polymath-ish. You know, so you can do what I was talking about earlier and get a series of incongruent ideas in your mind so that you are stronger as a person. 

[0:44:05] MB: Very good advice. And that's something that I personally struggle with as well and having so many different projects and interesting things, it’s always confusing to try and yeah, at a cocktail party where you know, people it's easy to get pigeonholed, and it's hard to sometimes break out of that.

[00:44:20] NP: Yeah, that's what you have to try. A great book is The Black Swan by Naseem Taleb. Go to parties where you don't know anybody. Put a chip on a roulette wheel on every number and give it a spin. People ask me, “Neil, why did you start Three Books?” Like, “Why did you start your podcast?” And I said, I say to them, “It's because it turns out that the stuff I love doing since I was a kid, writing and speaking, it turns out, as I'm getting closer to 40, I'm getting paid for that stuff. I'm always getting paid for it, and I and nothing to push myself wider, all over the place. Just in crazy directions.” Is to start my podcast. Three Books. I'd purposely made it no ads so that I won't be beholden to anybody. 

I want to do it for 15 years so I can uncover the 1000 most formative books in the world. And who am I interviewing Matt? I just told you before, I'm trying to interview like, I interviewed the world's greatest Uber driver about customer service. I interviewed the woman who has founded the world's largest feminist magazine. Do I know much about feminism or feminist magazines? No. So I got to ask her like, “What's feminism? What's first wave Feminism? How do you define a feminist?” You know, I ask dumb questions because it's a way to broaden myself and put myself in situations where I get to play the fool. Because I am a fool, because we're all fools because the world's too big and complex to really know anything. And the podcast Three Books is a way for me to expose myself to endless Black Swan opportunities. 

It's an excuse, because it's being recorded and released, for people to start to say, “Yes,” to talking to me. Malcolm Gladwell I don't think we have said yes to my show if I was just like, “Hey, Malcolm, can I come over to your living room and, like, talk to you about books?” That answer would've been No. I was like, “Hey, could I talk to you about your three most formative books and release it when your new book comes out? Sharing with people what I thought of your new book, Talking to Strangers and your three most formative books?” Now the answer is yes. And I get to benefit from that conversation and, of course, record it and share it with people. 

So to me, it's like putting a learning kind of accelerated hill in my life. And I made it a countdown and I made it scheduled. All that stuff I did, Matt, that’s what it forces me to do it. Same with my blog back in the day, 1000awesomethings.com It was one awesome thing, every single week day at 12:01 a.m. for 1000 week days in a row. The system creates the laziness in a way, because I have to do it by the deadline I set.

[0:46:23] MB: Yeah, such a good perspective and and I couldn't agree more about podcasting as a powerful framework to open up all kinds of doors and opportunities? I want to dial this back to something really simple. For somebody who's been listening to us that wants to concretely implement or take action on one thing that we've talked about. What would be the one piece of homework or action item you would give them to start implementing these ideas?

[00:46:50] NP: Start or finish your day by reading 20 pages of fiction from a good book. Reading is – books are magic and reading his medicine. A few years ago, I read five books a year. Then my wife made fun of me and I read 50 books a year. In one year. I wrote an article about how he did that called Eight Ways to Read a Lot More Books This Year. It got published in Harvard Business Review in January of 2017. It became the most read article on the whole website, HBR Network, over that year, and you could link to it in the show notes. That tipped me off that everybody wants to read more. It wasn’t that the article was so well written. It was like when you see the headline Eight Ways to Read a Lot More Books, everyone’s like, “Well, I would like to do that, but I can't. So what did this guy do?

You click the article. Guess what? My advice is no brainer. It's like move the TV to the basement, put a bookshelf at your front door, commit to what you're going to read. So I started an email list of what I'm gonna read. Now because I have the books podcast now, the Three Books Podcast and I like totally eliminated like television, news media, I canceled two newspaper subscriptions, canceled five magazines subscription. All my time and energy outside of my day to day is reading.

I now – this year I'm gonna read like, something like 175 books a year, which I don't think that is sustainable, to be honest with you. But I have to reach 75 year just for my podcast. And because I'm starting and finishing the day with books, it adds up and it makes me, and it will make you a better leader, a better writer, a better speaker, a better father, a better mother, a better sister, a better brother, a better parent. 

Everything goes, gets better when you inhabit multiple consciences. It comes from the quote from Game of Thrones, which is ‘a reader lives 1000 lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.’

[0:48:27] MB: Love the Game of Thrones reference. What a great way to put a bow on that. So Neil, for listeners who want to find more about you and your work online, what is the best place for them to do that.

[00:48:36] NP: Well, my podcast is called Three Books, and my website is called neil.blog.

[0:48:42] MB: Well, Neal, thank you so much for sharing all this wisdom and all these insights with the listeners.

[00:48:47] NP: Matt, thank you. You are doing an amazing service for the world. I love your podcast it's a real flattering honor to be invited. Thank you for having me.

[00:48:56] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say, “Hi,” shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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