Revisited: The Secret to Happiness with Harvard professor Robert Waldinger

We're taking some time off to bring you even more episodes of A Bit of Optimism that you're going to love! In the meantime, we're revisiting some of our favorite episodes, like this one with Harvard professor Robert Waldinger. We all want to live a happy life. But what does the research say about how to achieve it? For more than 86 years, researchers at Harvard University have been trying to figure out how humans can live happier lives. In one of the longest-running and most comprehensive studies of human happiness, Harvard tracked 724 teenagers through every stage of their adult lives since 1938. Some of them are still alive today and the findings are clear: lasting happiness isn’t about wealth or fame—it’s about something much deeper. Robert Waldinger, a professor and psychiatrist, has directed the study for over 20 years. His TED Talk about it went viral with nearly 50 million views, and in 2023, he wrote a book about it - The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. I asked Robert to share what the study has revealed about happiness over the decades, how its insights have shaped his own life, and the one essential ingredient for a joyful, meaningful existence. This…is A Bit of Optimism. To learn more about Robert and his work, check out: The Harvard Study of Adult Development robertwaldinger.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Simon Sinek?

  You might know this because you are a psychiatrist. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  One.

• 0:07Simon Sinek?

  Exactly. One, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I love that joke.

• 0:14Simon Sinek?

  We all want to live a happy life, of course. In fact, we want it so much that there is a whole cottage industry built around helping us find it. But what does a happy life actually look like? In the 1930s, some Harvard scientists started tracking 724 teenagers. They kept detailed records about how they lived their lives and what gave them satisfaction. They tracked all 724 people for their entire lives. Only 10 of them are still living today, and they are all in their hundreds. But just like the people the study tracked, the scientists got old too. So the director of the study was handed to subsequent generations. And Dr. Robert Waldinger is the current director, a position he's held for the past 22 years. So he knows a lot about what actually leads to a happy life.

• 0:59Simon Sinek?

  I wanted to know the things he's learning. I also wanted to know how he's changed his own life as a result of the data he reads. And let's just say I'm making a few changes to how I live my life too. This is a bit of optimism.

• 1:18Simon Sinek?

  I don't know how to ask this without it sounding not polite, but it's the only way I can think to ask it.

• 1:28Simon Sinek?

  How come they picked you to lead the happiness study?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Well, you're not the only one who asked that question. I asked that question.

• 1:38Simon Sinek?

  Did you draw the short straw?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  You know, I might have drawn the short straw. What happened was my predecessor, George Valiant, asked a couple of other people, and they said, no. They said, this is a great, big, messy albatross, you know, with data that goes back to 1938. So he got turned down.

• 1:58Simon Sinek?

  So he proudly got his third choice.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I think I was at least his third choice.

• 2:06Simon Sinek?

  So what made you say yes? Let's go there then.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Oh, well, the research project that I begged them to fund, the federal government said, no, we're not so interested. So I was in that place and my predecessor said, come over to my office and just read through one person's file. And so I said, okay. And so he, the file was probably a thousand pieces of paper. And I started reading through and I read about this 19 year old guy and what he hoped for, for his life and what was most important to him and what it was like to be dating. And then I read about his 40 year old aspirations.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  And then I flipped to his 60 year old discussion of his marriage and how disappointing it was.

• 2:56Simon Sinek?

  You read his whole life?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I read his life. I sat there and read his life. And it was like, this is like the coolest thing I could do.

• 3:04Simon Sinek?

  Based on the, the actual people you studied,

• 3:08Simon Sinek?

  tell me something they get right as they are young kids in their teens and they, or even in their early twenties and they start to think about what will make them happy and they get it right.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  A lot of them care about making a difference in the world and they care about the world. And the people who stay with that, who, they may not be the same purpose all the way through their lives, but the people who stay with that aspiration, I think stay engaged in life. And I think that's what they get right.

• 3:41Simon Sinek?

  That's really significant, right? If we look at how we're teaching our children, universities advertise as a reason to choose them over another, the starting salaries of their graduates.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:54Simon Sinek?

  And. Our guidance counselors, they don't ask us the right questions about how we want to contribute to the world. They're asking us what we can do and where we think we can get employment. What I find very significant about what you're saying is, what if our guidance counselors, what if our deans, what if our parents start instilling in us at a very young age, the importance of simply wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves? Forget about actually achieving it, simply wanting it.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 4:20Simon Sinek?

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

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Yes. And I think what happens is that many people have posited a kind of psychological maturity that involves wanting to be part of something bigger than the self.

• 4:46Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Eric Erickson, I don't know if you've heard of his stuff, but he was a-

• 4:50Simon Sinek?

  The Viking?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. He was a psychoanalyst from Vienna in the 30s and 40s who came to Boston, who taught for a while at Harvard. And he started talking about the stages of adult development. Nobody had talked about adult development. Everybody was interested in kids because they so obviously developed.

• 5:13Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  But he said, you know, adults go through these stages. And one of his stages, he called generativity versus stagnation. And the generativity was wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, realizing, oh, I want to help raise kids, or I want to mentor people, or I want to do something that's not just me. And he said that the people who do that become the people who are going to look back on their lives with less regret, with more of a sense that my life was good enough.

• 5:50Simon Sinek?

  I think we're living in a time where, though we intellectually know that, because it's the subject of so many social media posts, I think we're living in a time where people don't feel connected to something bigger than themselves in general. We don't work for companies for 30 or 40 years anymore. Church attendance is down.

• 6:08Simon Sinek?

  Even the great power competitions of us versus the Soviet Union that we were proud to be a part of this side versus that side, like even even at a global politics level, like those things have gone away. And I think you see it on the left and the right politically, people latching on to absolutely anything.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:24Simon Sinek?

  That gives them that sense of belonging, but it doesn't last. Those attachments don't last, but you can see them just grasping for it. The intense latching on to whether it's a far left or a far right point of view about how the world should work. And they latch on to it as if it's their life's purpose, but it isn't.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:44Simon Sinek?

  It lasts for a period of time and then on to the next or dissipates.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Right, or an identity as a certain kind of influencer or an identity as a certain, as a person living a certain style of life materially. I mean, there are all all these various identities that people are struggling for. I think you're right. Robert Putnam is a political scientist. He wrote a book called Bowling Alone.

• 7:09Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And, yeah, right, so you know about this. So he tracked, he tracked how we've stopped belonging, right? We've stopped all the things you just said. And we've stopped joining clubs and volunteering and having people over to our houses. And what he's found is that it's gotten worse since the digital revolution. The digital revolution has accelerated the trends that were already there. And so the path of least resistance now is social isolation, greater and greater isolation. And and we're all kind of desperate for what to do about it and how to feel like we belong.

• 7:48Simon Sinek?

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

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:00Simon Sinek?

  And now a desktop is a vertical surface.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:03Simon Sinek?

  And a folder was something you used to put away in alphabetical order. And now a folder is something you click on.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 8:08Simon Sinek?

  It's taken words and things to make the transition to living in a digital world. I know why they do it. It's because it's easier. But the word community used to mean like showing up and wearing a fez, you know?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:25Simon Sinek?

  You know, and there were secret handshakes and there was a time to meet up and there was free food and community meant a thing. And now that word has been co-opted to like being on an email list.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:36Simon Sinek?

  Because now what you and I are talking about, we're attempting to offer an archaic definition of what community is. And I wonder if instead of trying to fight it, we just need a new word. And then people will want the thing that's the new word because community already belongs online.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  But I worry that the word we're substituting is something like tribe. And tribe has all those connotations of who we exclude, who we make other, you know, all that stuff. I think we're all stuck in this place where we don't know how to belong without making other people enemies.

• 9:15Simon Sinek?

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

• 9:33Simon Sinek?

  And the debate would go on forever. And so I finally realized we were having a semantic debate.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:38Simon Sinek?

  And so I asked the people who believed vision was preeminent, what is the definition of vision to you? And they said, it's why I get out of bed in the morning. And I went to people who believed mission was preeminent. And I said, what's mission to you? And they said, well, it's why I do what I do.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:51Simon Sinek?

  And so everybody, whether it was purpose or brand or whatever, whatever word they thought was the thing, they all gave me the same definition. And so I said, okay, so let's call it the why. And now we can all agree what it is. And now we can actually figure out how to do it rather than debate what comes first.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 10:09Simon Sinek?

  And so I wonder how people are defining community. And maybe you have some data that explains that. Like, it's one thing to say, I want my life to be a part of something bigger than itself. I want to feel a sense of purpose. But what actually, based on this longitudinal study, what actually do people mean when they say these words?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  The people who talked about it the most meant something quite fluid and quite individual. So.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  The people who are the best at this would have like workmates over for barbecues, but they'd mix in their family, they'd mix in cousins, and they'd mix in people from their church. And they'd introduce each other. And so you have these people who become like the nodes of a group of people that get connected. They become, if you will, connectors.

• 10:59Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  But that means that each person might be the node of a unique collection of people.

• 11:07Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  As opposed to one thing, you know, going to a church, going to a synagogue, right? Yeah, you can do that, and that is a defined community. But most of us have these things that are more fluid and individual. One of my friends who's the best at this keeps connecting his friends from random parts of his life. And it's really fun to get to be part of that group of people because it's so diverse.

• 11:33Simon Sinek?

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

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:45Simon Sinek?

  You know, and they say we care about community, but as you're defining it, it's not really community. It's just the same 10 people at different houses. And I think what you're talking about is the importance of the salon, the old, the old school salon, which is instead of hosting a dinner party, we should take it upon ourselves to build salons, which is I'm going to invite some tried and true friends. I'm going to invite some people who I just met recently. I'm going to invite somebody who I met at a different dinner party. And I may or may not give a subject to discuss at the table, but this is what's going to happen. Because then I'll go to somebody else's dinner party who was at mine, and it's a lot of new people for me, too.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:21Simon Sinek?

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

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. Because the same 10 people is in a silo, right?

• 12:36Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Like, it's, it's almost, it could be hermetically sealed. And so you know what each other thinks, you know, you know each other. But the most exciting conversations happen, for me, When people come who do completely different things, who come from different backgrounds. I mean, today, I was on a call with a researcher who was growing nerve cells from schizophrenics. And he's trying to see, is a nerve cell different in how it makes connections? If it's got the genes of someone with schizophrenia and therefore someone who has delusions? Do the connections that a nerve cell make, are they different for people with delusions?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And I'm like, I'm like buzzing with all these ideas, right? It's because a student of mine is also a student of his and brought us together. And our heads started to explode with excited possibilities.

• 13:34Simon Sinek?

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

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:42Simon Sinek?

  But we're talking about deep, deep values that are deeper than our political points of view. Because I can have the same values as somebody with a different political point of view than me. And I think people confuse those things sometimes. I love this. How long have you led the, how long have you been the boss of the study?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Twenty-two years.

• 13:58Simon Sinek?

  Twenty-two years. And what did you learn from the data that you've been able to apply to your life that has made you happier?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I now call up my guy friends and I say, let's go for a walk. Let's go out to dinner. We're not just gonna wait for our wives to do this thing, to organize our social lives. We're gonna do this. And, and at first it's really awkward, like, we don't do this, we're guys. And then it's been a wonderful thing in terms of really getting to know individually people who were otherwise part of a social group, part of the same 10 people, if you will. But we never dug more deeply into knowing each other. And so it made me do that because I thought, otherwise, I'm just gonna sit here on my computer

• 14:49Speaker 01

  all day long, doing my research stuff, doing my academic stuff, and pick my head up and have no friends.

• 14:56Simon Sinek?

  That's a really good one.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Somebody said, take care of your body like you're gonna need it for a hundred years. And I realized that, boy, this really, really matters, that in our data, the people who took care of themselves, so we're talking regular exercise, not abusing drugs and alcohol, not becoming obese, all that stuff, they lived on average 10 years longer and stayed healthier. So even though it's not rocket science and it's not news, I could see in my own data how much it really matters.

• 15:33Simon Sinek?

  People, I assume, are starting to die now in the studies. A lot of them have died, right?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Most of the original folks have died. 724 original people.

• 15:41Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Fewer than 10 are still alive, and they're all over age 100.

• 15:45Simon Sinek?

  Okay, so of the ones, of those 724, the ones who lived the longest, you know, because biohacking is a thing now, and like, there's an obsession with longevity. And so the people who lived the longest, was there a pattern that you were able to discern? And the people who lived the shortest, was there a pattern that you were able to discern?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The longest was literally taking care of your physical health and being really socially engaged in the world. Okay, those were the two things. And the people who lived the shortest, it was the opposite. People who became alcoholics, who became obese, who didn't take care of themselves, and who were isolated.

• 16:27Simon Sinek?

  This is why I think your work is very, very important, is because I think a lot of the longevity people and biohackers and all of that, they're all talking about vitamins and exercise, and sure, sure, sure, that stuff's great. And they pay lip service to community, whereas they're giving exact dosages of vitamin D that I should be taking on a daily basis, but nobody's giving me a prescription to how to hang out with my friends.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Because community doesn't make money. You can sell vitamin D. You can sell supplements. You can package them in fancy ways. You can sell them on a podcast, right?

• 16:58Simon Sinek?

  I appreciate the cynicism so much, you have no idea.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry.

• 17:02Simon Sinek?

  No, I think you're 100% right. I think you're 100% right. There is a financial incentive to sell half a solution.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, and what I struggle with. So as you know, I'm a physician, I'm a psychiatrist. And one of the difficulties with medicine is that the vast amount of disease is preventable. But you don't make money in medicine preventing disease. You make money curing disease or trying to ameliorate disease with medications, with procedures. You don't make money preventing disease by encouraging people to socialize, by encouraging people to exercise.

• 17:41Simon Sinek?

  I mean, you've been doing this for 22 years. Do you get tired talking about it?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, no. I mean, okay, I do, I don't.

• 17:49Simon Sinek?

  Because you're getting the same que- like, you could do a bunch of pod- you're gonna have to answer the same questions five times in a row.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but how they get asked is so different. I mean, talking with you right now is really fun, right? Because of the way we're talking. No, but really, because there's this kind of, there's a real back and forth, right? It's, we're having a conversation. There are other times when it's like, just shoot me. If someone says, I'm, you know, I'm really looking forward to reading your book. Can you explain to our listeners what you do? That's, that's like fingernails on a blackboard.

• 18:29Simon Sinek?

  The interviews that I, that I hate doing is where the people are so over-prepared to talk to me that they ask me questions about my book, like, Simon, what are the five elements of the infinite game? And I was like, well, you, you know the answer. You, you say it. Like, why you ask me questions you know the answers to? Ask me questions you don't know the answers to. That's more fun.

• 18:49Speaker 01

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

• 19:02Simon Sinek?

  So I have to, I have, you know, I mean, you might know this because you are a psychiatrist. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  One?

• 19:12Simon Sinek?

  Exactly. One, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I love that joke. I love that joke.

• 19:19Simon Sinek?

  What was your journey? How did you get into psychiatry? Like, why, when you decided you want to go to med school, why the mind?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Well, when I decided to go to med school, it wasn't going to be the mind. I'm a Jewish kid from Des Moines, Iowa. I did not know.

• 19:33Simon Sinek?

  You're the Jewish kid from Des Moines, Iowa.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Well, close. No, no, we had about a thousand Jewish families in Des Moines. We had three and a half synagogues.

• 19:42Simon Sinek?

  Wow.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  But, yeah, but most of the psychiatrists I knew worked with seriously mentally ill people in asylums. Psychotherapy was not a thing you did in Des Moines unless you were really ill and needed to be in a hospital. So I didn't know anybody, but I knew I really liked working with people. And so when I got to med school, I realized that psychiatry was like by far the thing that excited me the most. But psychiatry is the stepchild of medicine. So a lot of my professors said, you know, either you're at the bottom of the class or you yourself are crazy because there'd be no other reason for you to go into psychiatry. So it took me a long time before I finally admitted, like,

• 20:28Speaker 01

  who am I kidding? This is really the most interesting thing because otherwise it was memorizing the 12 types of thyroid tumors. And I didn't care about thyroid tumors unless somebody I knew had one. But I, I cared deeply about the mind and especially how my own worked. So I had to come around to it despite the stigma of being a psychiatrist.

• 20:50Simon Sinek?

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

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I did, I did. Well, partly I followed passion because what I'm, I'm not good at doing things I'm not passionate about. Actually, all my energy drains and I start to shut down and I start to feel terrible. And I started to do that, I realized I don't care about most of medicine. So yes, I could become a cardiologist, like many of my aunts and uncles wanted me to do, because cardiology is a nice field, right? But I realized I would just die, I would just wither on the vine. And what I've finally learned to do over time is to listen to that gut that says, I'm drawn to this and I'm not drawn to that. That's probably the hardest

• 21:45Speaker 01

  lesson I've had to keep learning throughout my life.

• 21:48Simon Sinek?

  So, good segue. If we look at the world as it is now, it seems that younger people who are trying to figure out what to do with their lives, their quote unquote passion for something seems to be, I don't know if it's driven by gut, but seems to be driven by external reward structure. You know, the number of young people who say, I want to be an influencer. It's like people who come up to me and say, Simon, can I get your advice? I'd love to be a speaker. I'm like, oh, amazing. Or I want to be an author. I'm like, great. What do you want to speak about? They're like, I don't know yet. I'm like, well, then, no, no, you got it in the wrong order. Like, I want to be an influencer. Influencer is a mechanism to spread something, but what is the thing you're passionate about to spread?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:30Simon Sinek?

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

• 22:44Speaker 01

  For me, it literally has been learning to tap into my energy. Is my energy higher or lower?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  In this moment than it was a few minutes ago, literally. And I had to learn that. For example, I'm really enjoying this conversation. My energy is higher.

• 23:02Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  And if I'm in a conversation where it starts to lower, I get it right away. And one of the things I've come to understand is that we get trained to ignore those signals. I was at least. Think about all the times you had to sit in a classroom in school.

• 23:18Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  And you'd have these urges to do something or explore something. But of course, you had to sit still and watch the clock until the class was over. We've been taught to suppress these inner voices, I think, since we were in preschool.

• 23:34Simon Sinek?

  I think you're right, but there's a nuance here that's very important. And I need you to unwrap it for me, which is we evaluate friends. Like, are our friends generative? You know, unbalanced, not every time, because sometimes we're tired, sometimes they're tired. But in general, when I hang out with X friend versus Y friend, is that friend generative in how I feel? Do I leave my time with them happier, elated, as you said, like up, right? And am I paying attention to that, that I want to spend more time with them versus, oh, well, we've been friends for 15 years. So I guess I'll go out with them. And I think that's true with our work as well. It obviously conflicts with things like responsibility, because sometimes you have to suppress that feeling. Because I have to be responsible. You know, it's an imperfect standard.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Right. I don't always feel like changing that diaper.

• 24:22Simon Sinek?

  Right, exactly. And I think you're touching upon it, which is folks like us are giving advice, like, trust your gut, follow that elation. But the problem is, is that I don't know if people are running towards it, or when they don't feel it, they rebel against it. So for in a work environment, right? You, we see this a lot where it's particularly young people, but not exclusively. They just have more courage, I think. If they're in a job that doesn't do that, they're very vocal and sometimes rejecting of the, the culture, the leader, the boss, the job itself. And I think there's more about speaking out against the fact that I'm not elated, thinking that by speaking out against it, I will find the elation, rather than.

• 25:06Simon Sinek?

  Doing more of the thing that elates me, like going to work and saying, hey, boss, this elates me in general. This elates me less in general. Can I do more of that, please, rather than rejecting, throwing the whole, the baby out with the bathwater?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's, there's more of a, a need to take responsibility for that, right? To have a sense of agency. Okay, if I, if, if this job is draining as it is, what can I do? Right? What can I do? And, and some of that, as you know, has to do with connecting with people on the job. Like, one of the things we know is that if people have, have friends on the job, if they have people they want to show up for, that in and of itself is energizing, even if you're making widgets in a way that's boring to you.

• 25:53Simon Sinek?

  Yeah. We're, we're creating a problem here. Do you realize that? Because we're saying, don't run away from run towards. Run towards a feeling, run towards the contribution to something bigger. And yet, I think people, if they're listening, will say, ah, I think I'm running away more often than I'm running towards. I'm running away from relationships rather than towards new ones. I'm running away from a job I hate rather than one toward the one that I think I'm, I'm gonna love. So now it begs the question, how do I know what to run towards?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I have an example coming to mind. I loved doing theater as a high school kid, as a college kid. And if I just ran toward what I loved, I would be a failed actor today. So what I had to do was really take in the whole picture to realize, okay, I do, I love theater. I still love theater. But the whole picture was I came to understand that doing theater involved a lot of rejection. It involved getting bad reviews of plays sometimes in college. It involved getting turned down for parts and about feeling like I was acting with people who I didn't think were any fun to be with. All that, right?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And what I had to do was take in the larger picture, not just the isolated passion that I was looking at, right? And so some of this is a kind of discernment where you say, okay, what goes with the whole package? So if we go back to psychiatry, what I found was that psychiatry has a whole package. It's one of the lowest paid specialties in medicine, but it's got one of the best lifestyles. On the other hand, cardiology is way better paid, but I don't like doing it. So there's a kind of discernment that's required for what do I run toward? What do I hang back from or walk away from?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  But the challenge is to take it all in, not just to say, okay, I'm going to focus on this one, one tiny part of it.

• 28:03Simon Sinek?

  So you're asking people to do a cost analysis?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:07Simon Sinek?

  Basically.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Yes, I am.

• 28:09Simon Sinek?

  And I think that's right. You know, I love photography and I'm an active photographer and I actively did not choose a career in photography because I interned at a couple of photo studios when I was younger. I kept meeting people who were artists. They defined themselves as artists, photographers, and yet here they were shooting bottles of ketchup for an ad campaign. And they, their love, and I asked them, do you ever shoot for art anymore? They said, I either don't have the time or I don't have the energy. And so their passion became a job. I mean that pejoratively.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:42Simon Sinek?

  It became work.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Simon Sinek?

  And I think that's where, when people say, I want to be in theater, I want to be in fashion, I want, and I think they forget that they're just businesses. They're just businesses. And I can tell you somebody who was passionate for fashion, who's a job in fashion, living their childhood dream, and they hate their life. And I can show you somebody who stumbled and bumbled and found themselves in manufacturing, making a widget, like they're making a screw that fits in the back of a thing that nobody ever sees and that they're the happiest people alive. In fact, I was talking to a contractor and I asked him, just out of the blue, I was sort of making small talk, I'm like, just out of curiosity, do you like your job?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:18Simon Sinek?

  And he says, I love my job. He says, I love it. And I, he, he said it with such passion, no other word for it. And I was like, what do you love about it? He goes, I get to build things with my own hands and I get to see them built. I get to see what I built. You know, I start with nothing. I start with a pile of wood and some nails and some sheet rock. And then when I'm done, you get that. And then I go do it again and again and again and again, whether it's a kitchen remodeling or whatever it is. And he had such elation to see the fruits of his actual labor.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Right. What you're saying reminds me of something I've come to understand, which is there's grunt work in anything.

• 30:01Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  There's boring work in anything. And so really, what we have to figure out is what is the thing we're aiming toward that has enough in it that we love, that it's worth doing all the boring parts, right? And so I'm sure not every bit of his contracting work.

• 30:21Simon Sinek?

  Oh, no.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  His construction work is enlivening. But boy, seeing what he's built, lights him up, right? And he can, he can hold on to that vision while he's pounding that umpteenth nail.

• 30:34Simon Sinek?

  I'm having an insight here. Here's where we make a mistake. We're looking for the work to be the thing that is passionate. And it's not the work that is the thing that is passionate, is what that work produces, right? Because raising kids is awful. You know, in the early part, you don't sleep. You've got, as you said, changing diapers in the middle of the night, you get peed on and thrown up on. And then they get a little older and they become teenagers and they're a pain in the ass to be around. And then one of them gets bad grades and you got to deal with that. And another one gets a fight in school and punches a kid and then you got to deal with that. And like, where's the joy? I thought that having kids is supposed to be joyful, right? But, but then you have

• 31:19Simon Sinek?

  these unpredictable glimmers of your kids helping each other, or another parent saying, your kid's great. Or the teacher saying, your kid helps all the other kids. You get these unexpected glimmers that make all of that worth it in an instant.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 31:37Simon Sinek?

  And I know that from my work, like, writing books is the, it's the worst thing in the world. I don't know why, people like, I want to be an author. I'm like, don't, it's the worst. But when you put something out in the world that resonates with people, it's instantly worth all of it. And I do it again.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:55Simon Sinek?

  Even though every time I've written a book, I've said, this is the last one.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:58Simon Sinek?

  And I think people are looking for the passion in the wrong place. They're looking for the passion in the labor, but they're not looking for what the labor produces. And maybe this is one of the problems with knowledge work, which is knowledge work is kind of sitting at a desk. I don't even know how you define what quote unquote labor is in a lot of knowledge work. And then what's the result of that labor? And do we appreciate the results of? Like, we don't think about what the things we make. We don't think about the impact they have in the world. I'll give you an awful example. I met somebody recently who has a very niche specialty. She helps project manage the building of super yachts for the mega wealthy.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 32:41Simon Sinek?

  Of course, my first question was how the hell did you get into that? You know?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 32:45Simon Sinek?

  And I asked her, this is, do your clients ever say, thank you so much? Why didn't you take the yacht with your family for a week? And she said, it's never happened.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Never.

• 32:57Simon Sinek?

  So I said to her, so what you're telling me is these multi billionaires who build these yachts for many hundreds of millions of dollars, that they use for two weeks a year, and they sail around the world just in case the family might want to use it. At no point on this empty yacht has anybody ever said to you, thanks for all your hard work, why didn't you borrow the yacht? And she said, it's never happened. And I said, well, how does that make you feel? She says, it also occurs to me that what the hell good am I doing in the world? And so tremendous amount of labor, I'm sure incredibly well compensated, but there's no glimmer. There's no what an amazing opportunity that I have to give to my family, the opportunity to go on a mega yacht that none of us could afford, that none of us will ever have the opportunity.

• 33:42Simon Sinek?

  I'm going to take my friends that I grew up with, who have middle income jobs, and I'm going to show them something and give them an experience. And that makes all of this shit worth it, because I get to give that to people that I love. And she never gets that glimmer.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Is she happy in her job?

• 33:57Simon Sinek?

  No.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:59Simon Sinek?

  No.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:01Simon Sinek?

  No, it pays well.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But don't, don't you think it has to be a combination of getting there and the outcome? Because like when you talked about kids and you listed, or you named, I've been through every horrible scenario and many more in raising my children. But there's also stuff along the way that is hilarious and wonderful and wacky. Right? There's like stuff punctuating all the crap.

• 34:30Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  That is absolutely wonderfully wild and, and, and like getting to relive your own childhood is part of it. For me, I got to go to all these kids movies that I would never go to. I got to be on roller coasters. So I think for me, it's some of both. I couldn't do the work that I do if it was only the outcome, because the outcomes are so far into the future. Like writing a book, right? You know, as one of my friends said, who's in publishing, he said, only write a book if it's going to move along your own thinking in some ways. And it's true, like I, and I bet for you too, that it wasn't just that you were regurgitating stuff. That was trying.

• 35:12Simon Sinek?

  I was, I was learning along the way.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:14Simon Sinek?

  I had insights along the way that as I'm writing, I feel electric because a new idea is pouring out of me in that moment.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that that, I bet that was part of what kept you going, not just the outcome of having it to put into the world.

• 35:27Simon Sinek?

  You know what we're defining here? You know what we're defining? We're defining a purpose driven life. Because if you think what purpose is, purpose is idealism. And idealism by its very definition is unrealizable. Right? All men are created equal. Never going to happen. Never, ever, ever. Not in a million years.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:43Simon Sinek?

  However, it's the striving towards that. And to your point, it's the, the mile markers. I don't know how to define them, but like, for example, women's suffrage, civil rights, abolition of slavery is like, ah, ooh, look, we got, we're getting closer, guys. We're getting closer. Let's keep going.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:02Simon Sinek?

  To your point, I think if it was just. Awful work the whole time waiting for the final outcome, then we should, then you should, we should absolutely quit. And I think you're right. I think the, it goes back to those glimmers, which is the, the little glimmers that say, you know what, this is worth it. I'm going to keep, I'm going to keep on this. I'm going to keep doing this kid rearing thing and not put them up for adoption because you know, that was a fun family dinner last night.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

• 36:28Simon Sinek?

  So I think, so I think if we're talking about purpose driven life, if we go right back to the beginning of this conversation, and then this comes directly from your data, which is what I love, which is from a very young age, we instill in people, we instill in our, in our youngest generations, it is good to be an idealist. It is good to strive to contribute to something bigger than yourself. You won't know how to get there. You'll change your mind a hundred times, but you have to keep your head above the, looking beyond the horizon. And so long as you feel like you're getting closer to the horizon, even if it's a windy, difficult road, so long as you have elements that say, I think you're in a good path here, you will have a happy life.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And as long as there's something nourishing along the way, there's gotta be something along the way to keep me going.

• 37:13Simon Sinek?

  Does money, does money play any role in people's happiness according to your study?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  It does. With that, what we find is that you need to get your basic needs met in order to be happy. And that every dollar you make toward getting your basic needs met, like, you know, food and shelter and educating your kids, like every dollar you make makes you happier. We know that. But then you buy that hundred million dollar yacht, it doesn't really make you happier.

• 37:40Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Speaker 01

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

• 37:51Simon Sinek?

  Who only have a $50 million yacht.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

• 37:55Simon Sinek?

  But you, but you know, comparison is relative, right? Cause billionaires aren't comparing themselves to us. Billionaires are comparing themselves to each other.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yes, because sometimes these billionaires are in great pain because they have a couple fewer billion than somebody else. I mean, it's, it's hard to imagine, and yet I know it in my own life. Like I, I can compare myself on the most trivial things to other people. And then I try to pull back from that and notice what I'm doing.

• 38:25Simon Sinek?

  Unrelated, I'm just gonna say it because it's fun. You want to understand the difference between a million and a billion?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Tell me.

• 38:31Simon Sinek?

  When people talk about millionaires and billionaires?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:34Simon Sinek?

  So, an easy way to understand the difference. A million seconds is 11 and a half days. A billion seconds is 31 and a half years.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Wow, okay.

• 38:48Simon Sinek?

  And that's the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Millionaire.

• 38:53Simon Sinek?

  It's not even close.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, the most valuable thing we have is time. So, I like your analogy that you were talking about seconds. But those seconds are far more precious ultimately than those dollars.

• 39:10Simon Sinek?

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

• 39:27Speaker 01

  But we don't know how much we get, right? That's the thing.

• 39:30Simon Sinek?

  Oh, in terms of lifespan?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:33Simon Sinek?

  That's even more interesting, yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  But you're right, we all have 24 hours in a day.

• 39:38Simon Sinek?

  We all have 24 hours in a day, but we don't know how many 24-hour days we get.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:43Simon Sinek?

  I mean, so when we give that precious commodity to another human being, when somebody's struggling at work and we sit down with them and we give them some tough love. When your kid is struggling at school and the teacher spends an hour after school. Our friend is moving and we go to their house and we pack boxes.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:05Simon Sinek?

  The expense of time, as a gift, I mean it as a gift.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:10Simon Sinek?

  Because I'm totally anti that you have to use all that time to be productive as well. Because I think sometimes zoning out and watching TV is the best use of that time. I'm not making the analogy that you have to make use of all your time. I'm talking very specifically about the value of time as a gift to another human being.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:28Simon Sinek?

  Is more valuable than any gift on the planet.

• 40:32Speaker 01

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

• 40:50Simon Sinek?

  Oh, the only thing we have these days is divided attention.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:57Simon Sinek?

  And we can't even watch TV without also checking social media and sending a text.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, the research shows we typically have two or three screens open at once.

• 41:13Simon Sinek?

  So the only thing we have these days is divided attention and yet the best way to express love to someone is undivided attention.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:23Simon Sinek?

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

• 41:31Speaker 01

  They don't. They don't make people not happy either. Well, actually fame may because fame can can make people intrude on your life and stuff. So fame actually might make you less happy. Money doesn't make you happier or not happier. Once you get above a certain level, you don't get much of a bump. You get some bump, but not that much. Fame, fame is really a double edged sword. And you might be able to say something about that because you've received a lot of public attention and I'm sure it's not all wonderful.

• 42:01Simon Sinek?

  I think I think of it as cost, right? I don't think of it as good or bad or, you know, like I never sought it out. I am happiest in the shadows. That's my happy place. I like being behind the scenes. My goal is to spread a message and to leave this world in better shape than I found it and contribute to the lives of my friends and the people I don't know as well. And part of the cost of that is some loss of privacy and it's worth it because the benefit so outweighs that very small cost.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Oh, can I tell you? So when my TED Talk went viral, so I'm, I'm very seriously involved in Zen and someone said, "Well, now you should put up a website." And I had no web presence at all. And I said, "No, I wasn't going to do that. That was all ego. That was all going over to the dark side." And my Zen teacher said, "You have the ability to..." Convey ideas to people that will matter to them. Don't do that. And so they pushed me toward what you're describing, which is they said, don't stay in the shadows if you can be of use.

• 43:07Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, that is my experience at the, in the early days when I, my work started to gain traction. I was militant about keeping my face and name off everything. Like I wanted to put my name on the book in like mouse type. Cause the idea, I never would put my picture on the cover of a book. I still won't because I'm not the thing. And I refused to have my picture on my website for years and I wouldn't let my name be the URL because it's not about me. And then at some point I made the realization that I, and you're this as well, which is you, you actually live two versions of yourself. You are you, obviously, but you are also the representation of your message.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:46Simon Sinek?

  And how dare I selfishly deny the representation of my message? Because people don't follow ideas, they follow people because ideas are abstract and people are real. So we create representations of, of a set of values. So Martin Luther King is a representation of a set of values. And we follow Martin Luther King, but not really. We really follow the ideals that he stood for because I stand for those ideals too. They're my ideals as much as they are his, for example.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And in that sense, you're a placeholder, if you will.

• 44:13Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  For a whole set of values and aspirations. That's a function that's important to serve.

• 44:20Simon Sinek?

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

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Two things. Engage with people and engage in things you care about. So ideally engage in things you care about with people you care about. That's the sweet spot.

• 44:36Simon Sinek?

  Bob, what a joy.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is fun.

• 44:39Simon Sinek?

  What an absolute joy. I leave elated and buzzing.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Me too, actually. This was a pleasure, an unexpected pleasure.

• 44:48Simon Sinek?

  Thank you so, so much. I truly appreciate it.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Take care.

• 44:57Simon Sinek?

  If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simoncinek.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by Lindsay Garbenius, David Ja, and Devin Johnson. Our executive producers are Henrietta Conrad and Greg Rudesham.