780 Help Others and Yourself with Will MacAskill

DO GOOD ALL THE TIME. Some people have an idea of giving that is not sustainable. You can’t self-sacrifice endlessly to help others. You also have to take care of yourself. Giving can be a win/win situation. In fact, it should be. Helping the world is only worth it if you are also helping yourself. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Will Macaskill where he shared this idea as one of his principles of effective altruism. William MacAskill is a philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He is also the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, the co-founder and vice-president of Giving What We Can, and the co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism. Learn how to help others in the most meaningful way in Episode 780. In This Episode You Will Learn: One of the core principles of effective altruism (2:00) How to create a win/win while making an impact (3:00) Why additional income doesn’t make you happier (4:00) How to give without sacrificing a lot (5:00) Follow me on: instagram: @lewishowes twitter: @lewishowes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:09Lewis Howes?

  Our guest today is Jack Canfield. Now, Jack is an incredible guy. I've had him on before. It was an extremely successful episode. We'll have that linked up as well. And he knows what motivates, drives, and inspires people to do the impossible. He's a Harvard graduate with a master's degree in psychological education and one of the earliest champions of peak performance. He's also the co-founder of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series and author of The Success Principles.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  The problem with rehab is that you've got a, well, first of all, AA, somewhere about a 20%, if you can believe the statistics, recovery. Only 20% of people go, keep going.

• 0:54Lewis Howes?

  20% of people go to AA, keep going.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:57Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  And that, that number is suspect because we don't know how, how clear it is, but let's, let's give it to them. Rehab, 15 to 30%, and that's also suspect because there's no real long-term, longitudinal studies.

• 1:08Lewis Howes?

  About recover or 15 to 20%?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Recover, that's what they say.

• 1:12Lewis Howes?

  Rehab.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  But we have 80%, 79.5% to be exact, recovery rate after five years still sober from the first coaching program. And now after the book, it's, you know, when we did the beta test, four to five months still sober. So the reality is that with, with rehab, you go there, rehab has some challenges. There are some good rehab centers, like there's good therapists and there's bad therapists. But a lot of rehab centers, especially the ones with places like Malibu and places, they're basically real estate investment opportunities. I'm going to buy this big mansion. It's worth six million. In 10 years, it'll be worth 12 million. And you're going to pay my mortgage every month because I'm, you're charging me 30, I'm charging 30,000 for the 12 or 15 people there. And the staff, other than your therapist for a week, once a week for a therapist, once a week for a counselor.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  You have a 12-step meeting every day, maybe a yoga class, maybe you get a massage. Now you've got like 13 hours left.

• 2:04Lewis Howes?

  What do you do the rest of the time?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  What do you do? And you're sitting around with other people who have these addictive challenges, talking. It's like prison where the prisoners are like how many better prisoners, you know, better criminals. And so they're bored. And you've got really lovingly dedicated people who are young, who've been through rehab, who now want to help, but they don't have the skill sets they need.

• 2:23Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  So one of the things we're saying with this book, if you're a rehab counselor, get a copy of this book, start doing this stuff with the people in your rehab center. If you're an addiction counselor. Bridget Lang, who's an addiction counselor, she's a psychotherapist up in San Rafael. She's building a whole program around this book. She said, oh, my God, this is what we need. This is what people need. They need a systematic approach. And that's the thing, if you don't have a system. You know, you went, you played football, your coach had a system.

• 2:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  For exercise, for training, for fitness, nutrition, practice, plays, all that kind of stuff. And if your system worked, you won games and you won championships. And better systems beat bad systems, right? And so this is a system. And as we said earlier, you could apply this to overeating. You could apply this to pretty much any addiction you wanted.

• 3:11Lewis Howes?

  When we realize, okay, there's an addiction that I have that I want to end. And I want to move on to something more positive in my life. And I'm sure you probably have this in here, but is there a process you think that everyone should follow in the morning to get them ready for the day and at night to get them ready for a day, specifically focusing in on that addiction? Is there?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to get up in the morning and you want to visualize going through the day with not doing the addiction. Okay. There's something in the, we call it evening review at the end of the day where you close your eyes and you say, where could have I been more on purpose or more on focus for this commitment I have? Oh, you know, you did that thing, you did that thing, you did that thing. And so you're just checking in, checking in, checking in. You want to program your day, schedule your day, what are your activities going to be? The problem is, see, if something shows up at five o'clock and I'm bored and I don't have anything to do. I'm in trouble. And there's this thing called decision fatigue. And there's also something called compassion fatigue. It started, they first learned this where they were doing federal, in prisons where they're doing parole boards.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  In the morning, 70% of the people who were up for parole got paroled. In the afternoon, it was like anywhere between 10 and 30%, depending on the prison. People got tired of making decisions. They just, "Oh, screw it, I'm not getting out." Wow. And so what happens is, as the day goes on, your willpower wanes. Willpower is like a meter. And so, in the morning, if you're gonna do an exercise, if you're adding exercise into your day, do it first thing in the morning. Yeah. You know, put your shoes, and your running shoes, you have to trip over them before you go into the bathroom. And if you have a partner... Wear your shorts, your workout shorts to bed. To bed, there you go, there you go. And so, and then having that accountability partner, someone else you're doing it with, that you're, you know, you can have, like, you could be my accountability partner for this. I call you every day, say, "Okay, here's what I'm gonna do today.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  This is my rule, and at 5 o'clock, I'm gonna do this exercise, or I'm gonna go do a solution in a book, or I'm gonna play my guitar for an hour." Whatever it is. And we give people 101 alternative activities that bring joy into your life, other than drinking, in one of the chapters. So you can pick one every day and do it, or you pick one and stay with the same thing every day. And then, I mean, one of my favorite ones is listening to comedy albums. I mean, there's so many great comedians now. Amazing. Go to iTunes and download a comedy album. Yeah, yeah. And just laugh. And laughter secretes endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are natural opiate. You don't need to drink if you're laughing. And so, laughter is really important. But I can wake up in the morning and just laugh, or I can listen to a comedy thing in the morning and laugh. Uh, the other thing is, you want to do a gratitude exercise.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  One of the things we found, and we were kinda surprised by it, we knew it was important, law of attraction, all that. But, one of the top things, when we asked people, what was the most important in the book? Gratitude. People, basically, a lot of them drink because they think their life sucks. But when you really start realizing that half the world lives on $2 a day, your life doesn't suck that bad. Yeah. You know, and we have, look at all the technology that you have in this office here, and the people that are supporting you, and the fact that someone made this table, and someone printed that book, and Steve Jobs gave you the computer, you got there, and it works really well, and you can communicate with people in Singapore. And you could just literally go around the room for five minutes and just appreciate everything, you know, gets you blissed out. Yeah. So that's a really good thing to do in the morning as well. And meditation and breathing.