#72 Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits

Author and happiness expert Neil Pasricha shares the recipe for resilience, an antidote for anxiety, and how his two minute morning routine primes each day for success. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Happiness is the joy you feel while striving towards your potential.

• 0:14Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a long-form conversation hosted by Shane Parrish. Our goal is simple, to learn something new in every conversation that makes us a little bit smarter than yesterday. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. The Knowledge Project is a part of Fernum Street, a website dedicated to mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Fernum Street puts together a weekly newsletter called Brain Food that comes out every Sunday. Much like this podcast, it's high-signal, timeless, and mind-expanding. You can read what you've been missing at fs.blog/newsletter. Today, I'm speaking with Neil Pasricha. Neil is

• 0:59Shane Parrish?

  the New York Times bestselling author of the Book of Awesome series, a Harvard MBA, and a ridiculously popular TED speaker. If the conversation seems more familiar and personal than normal, it's because Neil is a friend of mine. We go deep on a few things and gloss over some others, but we talk about life, business, and everything in between, including building resilience, parenting, what he learned at Harvard, why we all need an untouchable day, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:35Shane Parrish?

  I'm curious, we've spent a lot of time together, so we'll probably be more familiar with each other than most of the guests that come on the show, but one of the questions I meant to ask you last time we had dinner in Toronto was, what were the big lessons you learned from your parents?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, so many. Uh, first of all, so my mom's from Nairobi, Kenya. And she emigrated in the sort of idiomen kind of dictatorship crisis of the early nineteen seventies. She's from a wealthy family, but they lost all their wealth in the India Pakistan partition. So a suddenly poor family, the youngest of eight kids fleeing East Africa. Okay. My dad is from northern India, Emiratsar. He's from a very poor family, scrapped and saved, got his master's in nuclear physics and came to Canada as one of the first high school physics teachers. He went back to England one summer, met my mom, they had an arranged marriage, like wham bam, like one date. My dad gave my mom one test on the first date, which was the hamburger test, seeing if she eats a hamburger.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Cause he told me later, I didn't want to marry a vegetarian. That was his one.

• 2:41Shane Parrish?

  Oh, the test was whether you eat the hamburger, not how you eat it. Cause there's also like people that butcher eating hamburgers, right? Like the bun and the, the meat and it just falls all over the place.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  I will not marry a sloppy eater. A separate test. Secondary. Now, this one was just like, I, I, I, he ordered a couple of hamburgers and was like, will she eat the hamburger? She did. Uh, so two weeks later, I'm not joking, they got married. Two weeks later. The second time my mom saw my dad was at their wedding.

• 3:07Shane Parrish?

  That, okay, pause right there for one second. That's amazing. I know so many couples that are still together that within like a month of knowing each other, just knew right away, like one of my best friend's parents were engaged twenty-four hours after meeting. Not an arranged marriage. They just met, got to get still happy.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 3:28Shane Parrish?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Twenty-four hours?

• 3:30Shane Parrish?

  Twenty-four hours after they met. Isn't that insane?

• 3:33Speaker 00

  I mean, it is partly insane.

• 3:35Shane Parrish?

  Okay, back to your parents, the, the arranged marriage.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they come to Canada, kinda, my dad gets here in the late sixties, my mom gets here in the, in the early seventies. And, um. They did all the hard work. They did. They did. They came to a new country where they didn't know anybody, had no friends here, no family here, settled in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, which for those that may know it is an hour east of Toronto. Super white community, especially in that day and age. Saying you were vegetarian or didn't eat meat, like my mom didn't eat much meat, um, would be akin to like going home hungry, you know? No Hindu temples, no brown people, like no, like it was like you're on your own. And what I learned from them ultimately Shane was really the model of resilience.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  The idea that you can add a yet to any sentence you you can't do in your life and you can learn to do it later. Meaning when my, when I would talk to my mom growing up, she'd be like, well, dad would take me to the German club. And I tell myself, I don't, I don't know how to ballroom dance yet. Or I don't, I don't have any experience working in a Canadian company yet. And the idea in her head was always one of I can or I will or I might later. And uh, that sense of mental strength and mental resilience, I think, has hopefully stuck with me. And it's one I'm paranoid of, how do I teach my kids that? Cause you know, when you, when you don't go through hardships,

• 5:04Speaker 00

  how do you make sure you can handle them?

• 5:07Shane Parrish?

  Let's deep dive on resilience a little bit here. How would you define resilience?

• 5:11Speaker 00

  It's the uh, capacity to get back up or to return to your current state after a blow of some kind. Whether that is a relationship blow, uh, you know, you get fired from your job, you go through a traumatic experience. You have a death in your very close family, you lose a close friend, whatever. It's how, what, what musculature are you using on the inside of yourself to return to your baseline?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  How quickly do you do it? How well do you do it? How, how do you do it? And all of that musculature, I refer to as resilience, that inner strength.

• 5:47Shane Parrish?

  And you would say it's learned.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 5:50Shane Parrish?

  How do we learn it?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Well, a lot of people think you have to just go through all these things. You have to go through these blows. You have to, you know, go through a divorce and lose a friend and suffer from some tragedy. And then you, you develop the muscle as you're going. But part of the problem, Jan, I believe, is that right now in the world, we got it fairly easy. I mean, we, we live in the most abundant time ever in human civilization, right? You can press a button, a car picks you up. Your phone entertains you on the way home. And by the time you get to your front door, you got takeout waiting on the porch. I mean, we, we live in an era of infinite abundance. And I believe because of that, that's partly why we're seeing spiking anxiety rates, loneliness rates, depression rates, and suicide rates, because we no longer have that musculature.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  By the way, I've used the word musculature three times in the last minute and I haven't used it in two years. Like, I'm just like, trying out a new word today. But I'm like, but therefore it's so, life is so relatively easy that we have lost our capacity to handle failure or even, and this is even more important, perceived failure. So that when you get two likes on your Instagram photo, it now feels like I have no friends. You know, the, the traumatic feeling of loneliness or anxiety or depression. These things are coming to us sharper and harsher because we have lost the internal systems to handle them.

• 7:09Shane Parrish?

  We're more focused on the external sort of validation of social media versus the internal intrinsicness of it.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  That, and we don't have any famines. No one's getting shipped off to war. We, uh, do you know anyone that has suffered from the plague lately? Like, the jet, if you look, if you zoom out to like human civilization over our 200,000 year evolutionary history, it's like, pretty much always we had gigantic kind of pthunks, like pthunk, like you can't, we were going through wars, economic depressions, huge, like, like gigantic traumatic societal things. And now we live like kings lived 100 years ago.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And I'm talking about the average person. I'm not talking about the upper class. I'm talking clean water in your taps, feeling safe at the front door, marrying who you want. You used to be, you used to be thrown in jail for being gay, or certain, or beaten, or being trans, or something. These, we've gotten past a lot of that stuff. So we got, we are living in a relatively, we are living in relative ease. People listening might say, oh, this guy's out to lunch. He doesn't know what my life is like. You don't understand, like, why you think I'm going to protest? I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm just saying it's relatively a lot more abundant and a lot of a more easy lifestyle than we had even 50, 100, 200 years ago.

• 8:30Shane Parrish?

  Why are we so unhappy?

• 8:33Speaker 00

  The ultimate question, right? Professor David Myers at University of Michigan has mapped over the last 50-plus years, our increases in abundance relative to our happiness levels. And to your point, Shane, everything's gone up. Wealth, longevity, education rates, literacy rates. But our happiness has been pretty flatlined. Sonya L. Bemirsky at Stanford University has posited a model that I really love from the book, The How of Happiness. And she says happiness is 50% genetic. Let's just start there. Okay, so 50% of your happiness is like a genetic set point.

• 9:07Shane Parrish?

  So you're like predisposed somewhere on this continuum to be happy or unhappy?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  You've got two kids. You probably feel like one of them might be, have a higher or lower disposition than the other one. And I have multiple children and I kind of see that too. My parents would say that about me and my sister. Then she says 10% is circumstantial. Okay, which means what happens to you? Okay? There's a really famous sub-study I can talk about, about the lottery winners versus the paraplegics you may have heard of. You know, a year later, whether you win the lottery or you suffer a traumatic accident where you become a paraplegic, a year later, you've relatively returned to your baseline. In fact, lottery winners may even have gone lower because they have taken on all kinds of new stresses and expenses, et cetera. Now, what is the remaining 40% of that pie chart? 50% is your genetics at point, 10% is your circumstances.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  So the remaining 40%, according to the Sonya L. Bemirsky model, is your intentional activities. Okay? Now, you just asked me, why are we so unhappy? Can we zoom into that 40%? Keep in mind, Shane, it's the only part we can control on the pie chart, and it's huge. It's gigantic.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  From reviewing a ton of positive psychology studies, I can tell you very quickly what some of the specific things you, me, all of us should be doing in that forty percent. There are things like nature walks. There are things like a journaling practice. There are things like a meditation practice. There are things like reading fiction from a real book, right? There are things like a gratitude practice, et cetera. You, me, you know, listeners may have heard some of these kind of general totems in life that will help you be happier. But then compare that to how we are actually spending our time today. Look around the bus station or the airport and what is every single person doing?

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Heads down, staring at a bright screen, totally addicted to it. And the dopamine hits we are getting from the cell phones are endless. And we are swimming slash sinking into a sea of huge pain and problem, ultimately rooted in our cellphone addiction. We are totally addicted to them en masse. So when you look around, it doesn't look like an addiction. Because it looks like everyone's got it. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's doing it. And a few people are starting to really ring the alarm. People like, I believe his name's Tristan Harris for the Center of Humane Technology. People like Adam Alter, who wrote a great book called Irresistible, about the seductive properties of cell phones.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  People like, I think, Robert Lutwig, who wrote a book called The Hacking of the American Mind. It's starting, but look around. Cell phones have three Ps of problems. Number one is a productivity problem. When you're on your phone, you don't do anything else. McKinsey says thirty-one percent of our days are now spent bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks. And people listening, people like me, I feel like it's more than that. Like, we're not doing anything, you're just deciding what to do. So the first P is productivity. The second P is a huge one, which is physical. When you expose your eyes to bright screens an hour before bed, you don't produce as much melatonin, so you don't sleep as restfully. So your resilience is lower the next morning. So you instinctively reach for your cellphone, which unfortunately for most people is beside their bed.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  So you're looking at what Trump tweeted at seven AM before you've had a time to think about your day. Never mind the, uh, I'm looking down. Of course, people can't see me that the, what's it called? The hunchbacks we're all developing and the texting thumbs and all that stuff. And then the third P, which is the biggest one, is psychological. So we are comparing everybody else's greatest hits life with our director's cut. You know, no matter how good the lunch you and I have today after we record, somebody will be at a lobster buffet in the Maldives on Instagram. So I will feel like our lunch sucks. Like, I will feel like my life sucks. So the three Ps of problems are our productivity, physical and psychological. That's rooted in cell phone addiction. That's rooted in the 40%

• 13:05Speaker 00

  of how we should be spending our time, and we're spending it the wrong way. I think that's a big reason why we're not happy today.

• 13:11Speaker 02

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• 13:40Shane Parrish?

  I think as, as people are listening, they're probably thinking, but I'm too busy to go walk in nature. I'm too busy to, like, my life is so frantic. I feel like I'm barely keeping up with everything as it is. How would you respond to that?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I think those people are lying to themselves. And I think that, and I'm guilty of that statement as well. So for example, I often say this one line when I give speeches, I say, "Everybody should be reading 20 pages of fiction from a real book to open or close your day." There's research in 2011 in the annual review of psychology that shows that that's what opens up your mirror neurons. Parts of your brain respond for empathy, compassion, understanding. You know, there's a famous Game of Thrones quote called, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." You know? And so we know the power of reading. They've done MRI scans at Emory University. They show that your language centers open up. But how, no one starts and finishes their

• 14:40Speaker 00

  day with reading, Shane. And when they, when I ask them why, they say, "I don't got the time."

• 14:46Speaker 00

  And then I tell them straight to their face, you're lying ma'am or sir. Because according to the University of California, the average person reads a hundred thousand words per day today. It's called Instagram comments, Twitter feeds, blog rolls, news headlines, text alerts and notifications, and the average knowledge worker receives 147 emails today. So I'm not saying add 20 pages of fiction to your to do list. I'm saying subtract X size 20 pages of the garbage that you're currently reading. And to respond to the question of time, that would be my counter argument. Look at how you're spending your day.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  What are you spending in a non thoughtful way that you can eliminate or reduce? And for a lot of people, and I'm pointing this finger at myself too. I'm not saying I know this and you don't. Neil does this problem too. If you look at my, my schedule, I'm like, oh my gosh, what I was, I was sucked into my phone for, for half an hour, you know, instead of doing some deep work. And that happens repeatedly. It's a muscle that we have to learn how to build.

• 15:53Shane Parrish?

  I remember the last week, speaking of phone and getting lost in your phone, I was in California and I took a 90 minute car ride. And I get in the car at the airport and I left the car at the hotel. And I don't think I noticed anything over those 90 minutes. I was just like trying to catch up on email and work and actually trying to do work, not just sort of like go in the comments and stuff. But like I looked up and all of a sudden we're at the hotel and I was like, oh my God, like I felt rude because I was like, I didn't talk to this guy at all. He was like driving me and you just get lost.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  No social connection? That's what I hear there?

• 16:28Shane Parrish?

  There's no social connection and you're so focused on your phone. Like I'm oblivious to, I don't know why, but the phone is like, it's great for this intense focus because like anything could almost be happening. And you're like, that's why I don't use my phone when I'm around my kids anymore. Because I realized at some point, maybe three or four years ago, that like, I was just trying to like sneak in an email here or there, you know, trying to manage things. And then I just. Realize like I'm all consumed by this and then I'm not consumed by what's important to me.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  There's even early studies starting to come out saying that babies are having a harder time connecting with parents because of lack of eye contact. Or while women are breastfeeding, they're not looking at the baby that's cooing at them anymore, they're looking at their cellphone. And there's starting to be some early studies on like the sort of disconnection it might be causing with children. So I admire your, your putting your cellphone away when you're with your kids. I need to do that more. I'm, the only thing I've come up with Shane is I give Leslie, my wife, my phone on Friday night. And I say, do not give this back to me till Monday and don't tell me where you put it. Now, that takes a lot of willpower to even say that. And then it takes her a lot of willpower to, when I'm begging for on Saturday night to check my fantasy football, you know, who's injured?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  She's like, she's like, you told me not to give it to you. Like, I gotta log into CBS on like my laptop? You know, but that, that little pause creates a greater connection with my children. I'm sure of it.

• 17:54Shane Parrish?

  The, the little bit of friction goes a long way. How, how would you, well, actually, let's pull this back to resilience again. What stories stand out in your mind from your parents? That you, you say your parents taught you the resilience, like what are the, the moments that you remember where that happened? You might not have recognized in the moment, but thinking back now, you're like.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Okay, so my mom, I mentioned it earlier. She was the youngest of eight children. She was the fifth girl and had three boys. East Indian culture, nineteen fifties and sixties, a hundred percent of the family's resources went to the boys, education and development. Zero dollars went to the women. Okay. They were expected to cook and clean and take care of a husband later in life. So my mom, on her own, of her own volition, sat outside their house in Nairobi, Kenya, memorizing license plates of cars driving, driving by. She would see a car coming and she would try to guess the license plate if she saw like a green car or whatever. And she silently congratulated herself if she got it right.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  She ended up developing an incredible memory. And when they wrote the national exam at age twelve, all Kenyan children had to write it. She got first in the whole country. So she was whisked away under a full scholarship to the English boarding school with the children of all the kind of colonialists children. And she was given, the only one of the five daughters, an education. Okay. She learned eight languages. She memorized Shakespeare. She ate soft boiled eggs in the corner of the school cafeteria. She prayed to a god she'd never heard of before, like it was the Lord's prayer. She was like, who's the Lord? Like, she didn't have that upbringing. And that, I thought, was a great story. But then, when she was whisked into the arranged marriage with my dad,

• 19:43Speaker 00

  they never would have got married. I told you she was from an upper class family, but they'd lost all their wealth. My dad's from a poor family. Like, the caste system dictated that they wouldn't have met. But because she was the youngest of eight fleeing East Africa, and the family had lost their resources, now she's married to this poor dude, who takes her to a suburb in Canada, in a continent where she has no family, no friends, at all. That is a boom. And you're in your twenties, by the way, when this happens. So today, I had dinner with my mom last night. I saw her this morning before I flew up here. And her ability to have navigated what I would call a huge traumatic experience

• 20:26Speaker 00

  of starting fresh and turn that into a soft, quiet, calm, loving demeanor. All she ever did for my sister and I was love us. She slept, like we were babies, she slept with us in the bed. She never sleep trained us. She never, anytime I wanted to quit anything, she let us quit. She was just pure love. And I think partly why my sister and I have ended up fairly confident and stuff like that is because all we got showered with was just endless love. She channeled all of it into just pure love for my kids, giving them everything I can give them, taking care of them as best as I can. And when I see how she got to that, from where she came from, it's not something I talk about much, but it's pretty astounding to me. It always feels like a wow. I would never be able to do that.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  I think she just kept going.

• 21:14Shane Parrish?

  It's interesting that you said she let you quit things.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:17Shane Parrish?

  Because I was thinking in my head as you were saying that, I was like, wait, doesn't doesn't forcing your kids to like fulfill their obligations and do all this build more resilience?

• 21:26Speaker 00

  I don't know. That's a good question. I started beavers. I quit beavers. I started Cubs. I quit Cubs. I did soccer. I quit soccer. I was the smallest. I was the tiniest. I was the puniest. I was the nerdiest. I broke my glasses. Like, I just was like a terrible mess at most of these sports. So she let me quit them. And and maybe Shane, that's partly why I have taken longer to develop a resilience muscle in myself. Maybe that's why when I got divorced in my late twenties and lost my friend through suicide in that same time period, I struggled for years to get back up and out of that thing. I lost weight. I couldn't sleep. I lost 50 pounds. It wasn't like I rebounded. I'm not some exemplar model of like, look at me. I'm like, you know, Mr. Teflon. I just rebounded. No,

• 22:10Speaker 00

  I suffer. I was in therapy twice a week for years. Right? So maybe some of that softness was ingrained in me and I took it took me hard. It was harder for me to get tough. And I'm I'm I'm mentioning that because I also now worry about that for my own kids. You know, my wife will like put three pillows in their little beds and I'll be like, three pillows? Like, you're making these kids too soft. They're thick. No kid should have more than one pillow. Like, I'm I'm using that as an example, but it's more like, how do we, when we're giving our kids a lot, make sure that they also have the muscles to to rebound? How do how do we make sure they're not anxious? They're feeling awesome, to use a word I use a lot, right? How do we make them failure proof instead of failure

• 22:53Speaker 00

  prone? How do we make sure that they are, you know, that's what I'm anti-fragile. That's what I'm wondering about and that's what I'm trying to explore with my thinking today.

• 23:02Shane Parrish?

  I think it's really interesting because we're at this

• 23:07Shane Parrish?

  This place in time, and maybe it's just me, and maybe this has always existed. But I'm seeing my friends increasingly sort of like 30s and 40s go through some sort of life event, whether it's a divorce, or they get fired, or they're changing careers, or something happens that life doesn't go their way. And their capacity to handle that, when you talked about sort of like this muscular development of resilience, isn't really there. And I think part of the reason it's not there is because we had this generation of parents who loved us so much.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  Everyone got a gold star.

• 23:44Shane Parrish?

  Everybody gets a gold star. You get participation medals, like, and you don't sort of get feedback. And more so than that, you're sort of like prevented from failure and prevented from recovering. And I'll give you an example from like my kid's school, right? Like, they're so hawkish on the kids at this point that...

• 24:05Speaker 00

  What's hawkish mean?

• 24:06Shane Parrish?

  Oh, they're just like always on them, like no roughhousing, you can't talk, you can't touch anybody else, you're sort of... And it's really interesting to me because that goes away, right? But it goes away in grade seven and grade eight, but you get all this social feedback in like grade one, two, three, and four, where like if you're running around putting a booger on somebody, they're gonna push you. But in grade two, I mean, it doesn't really do any damage, right? Like, you're gonna cry, but you learn in that age. But if you're doing stuff that annoys other people in grade seven, they're, now they're gonna punch you, and it's really gonna hurt. So you're like getting this feedback, right?

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's it called, progressive resistance?

• 24:43Shane Parrish?

  Well, it's a natural consequence to a lot of this behavior. And increasingly, it strikes me that we're moving away, or like we're trying to prevent natural consequences from happening, or we're saying there's something wrong with the natural consequence versus the behavior causing the natural consequence. And I worry about that as parents. What are you, what are you doing for your kids to build resilience, to sort of like... Help them through this so that when they're thirty or forty or fifty or sixty and something in life doesn't go their way, they have the capacity and the strength to handle that.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Ah, that's, you just put your finger on the root issue and the root question. And it was epitomized for me in a slightly different story, but very similar, Shane. When I got off the stage and this like well-dressed fifty-something-year-old executive runs up to me, like urgently, like it's not, you always get questions after a speech, but you rarely get someone like racing to see you, like with something burning on his head. He says, Neil, how do, what's wrong with my son and how do I fix him? I was like, excuse me? Like what, who's your son? He's like, my son, he graduated from high school, uh, valedictorian, captain of the football team. You know, straight A student. He gets a scholarship to Duke University. I was like, cool. Like, he's like, yeah, he graduated a few months ago, top of his class,

• 26:04Speaker 00

  like honors list, dean's list, all that stuff. He got a top job at a fancy company on his first day of work. He got an email from his boss saying something slightly critical. My son thought it was rude and called me crying from his bed that night, saying, I'm never going back there. I won't go back tomorrow. And he couldn't get out of bed. He was crying and broken because of this rude email. And I'm flashing finger quotes because who knows what the email said. And it was the first day of the guy's job. But he was like, what's wrong with my son? And what do I do about it? Because his son has shown a history of being a shining star. And just bam, you get shattered by something so small.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  And I think we're all, to some extent, feeling like that these days. We are becoming an army of porcelain dolls. When we slip and fall on the sidewalk, we don't get up. We just lie there crying, you know? And that is the muscle I'm trying to guide myself and others to build. That's what I'm exploring right now.

• 27:08Shane Parrish?

  So. I I remember I went to a pretty rough high school during a rough era. We had CNN trucks parked outside of my high school. No way. Just to put things in context, this is Canada and we had like American media trucks. Covering, I'm assuming, violence, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. Covering violence at the school and drugs and a whole bunch of other stuff. And I remember at the time being envious of all of these other schools who didn't have these problems. All of these other kids, like I was one zip code away, basically, one postal code in Canada, one zip code in the US, from, you know, literally a block. And I would have been at this other school, which was brand new, had none of these problems.

• 27:49Shane Parrish?

  And I remember just like being so envious of the people who went there and being like, man, they don't have to deal with this. Like, my school's closed like two days a week, you know, we're tipping buses over and like lighting them on fire. And and then it was only later in life that I was like, actually, that wasn't so bad. I mean, it was bad, obviously, it never should have happened. But it it sort of built a lot of resilience. So when I ended up getting divorced, when stuff happened in life, when I failed at work, when something happened, it was more contextualized than it would have been had I not had that experience. And I'm not saying that experience is the only thing. I mean, I had tons of, like everybody else, right?

• 28:34Shane Parrish?

  No better, no worse, but different, different situations. But I wasn't really protected from a lot of that stuff after being a teenager. And that allowed me to handle things a little bit better in life. And the reason I'm mentioning that is because I know when I got divorced in 2014, one of my friends got divorced shortly thereafter. And the way that we handled it was just totally different. And it wasn't good for either of us, but. That was the first time that she had ever gone through something even remotely challenging and you're, you know, you're mid thirties and you have no muscles, you don't know what to do. It's crazy. It's really hard.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  And part of what you had that your friend did not is the understanding and awareness in your mind that things would go on, you would move past it and it would become a step towards a future you. Cause you had been through some traumatic experiences before. And there's an amazing study that I uncovered while researching my book by Dan Gilbert, famous Harvard professor and psychologist, author of the book, Stumbling on Happiness and Other Amazing Books, called The End of History Illusion. I don't know if you've heard about this or not Shane, but basically he and a team of people interviewed nineteen thousand people. And essentially they asked them two questions. It was a little bit more scientific than this, but essentially the root of the study was two questions.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Number one, what's been the last ten years of your life like? And what do you think the next ten years will hold? Every single person said, oh my, the last ten years, I mean, it was up and down. I had this trauma. I got through this. Like I moved, you know, me and Joe broke up and whatever. Like it was like this tempestuous story.

• 30:22Shane Parrish?

  The next ten years.

• 30:23Speaker 00

  The next ten years, oh.

• 30:24Shane Parrish?

  Hockey stick.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. No, next ten years, people said same as it is now. I probably, I probably won't move. Me and Mark are still going to be together. Instead of a director, I'll be a VP. Like they literally thought history stopped where they were today. And it didn't matter if people were in their twenties, thirties, forties, or even sixties. They had this perception that history is finished where I am because I can't see that future. So I cannot think what it would look like. So I read this study Shane, you know what it made me think of? I worked at Walmart for ten years. I was director of leadership development there. But leading up to that role, I had a lot of HR roles. And one of the worst roles I had, although there was a huge option to be empathetic in this job, was I had to help managers fire employees. So I was in, I was.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  The third person in the room, a manager is telling an employee that they are terminated. And I'm the third person trying to help coach the manager before the meeting and provide empathy and compassion and clarity for the person getting fired. I would therefore be the one walking them to their car, helping them pack their trunk in the middle of winter. And they would say to me, what am I gonna do now? I will never find anything. I've been here 20 years. My life is over. The point of that story, though, is Canada's pretty small and different industries are pretty small. So I would inevitably bump into people that had been terminated years later. Every single one of them said, I'm not kidding. That was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I hadn't have got fired, I wouldn't have had time with my daughter after her miscarriage.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  I wouldn't have traveled to Peru like I always said I wanted to do. I wouldn't have got a job at this tiny startup, and now I'm a C-suite. I've got promoted twice there because it's only 20 people. Everyone was happy with the termination in the past. And at the time, they could not see that future staircase. They thought history ended now. And I think that's an important study because it helps us see it as a step. For you, the divorce, and I'm projecting on you, but for you, maybe the divorce was a step towards something. And maybe for a friend, it's an end of something. And that that difference of how you perceive a traumatic experience can help you get through it.

• 32:36Shane Parrish?

  So in your experience, then, is there ways to help people prime them in those moments where you're about to deliver bad news? But is this an innate personality thing with people? Or is this a learned sort of skill? Is there anything that people delivering bad news can?

• 32:56Speaker 00

  So when I was in the room, the thing I learned after all those meetings over and over and over again was, say less, talk less, don't go over the big summary. I was supposed to go through the big termination letter and explain all the clauses and stuff. No, it was just about.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Being there for the person, offering your eyes, your hand, your face, your empathy, your compassion, and being there with them. Because that was the start of the beginning of the little bit of processing. Okay? Not like roughly going through the notes. Okay? And then in terms of which way do people go afterwards and why, I do think it is learned, and I do think it comes from, you know, saying a study like "The End of History Illusion" and how we all have to train ourselves to see other stuff. That doesn't help much when you're getting fired, or when you have, you know, in my case, my wife told me she's done with our marriage, you know, like that doesn't help for me to be like, "Oh, the left side of my brain says this is gonna get better."

• 33:57Speaker 00

  No, but going through it helps you get better, and then you get better the next time. But the first one really does hurt. Part of why I wrote this new book is because I share stories of where I got through this stuff and studies that helped confirm to me why it works. And I'm hoping to share with my kids, it's like, you know, when you go through trauma, you will be okay, especially if you think you will, because here's what the research says, here's some stories, here's some things that will help you get through there. But I don't think it's easy, Shane, and I don't think I have all the answers. I think the way, the path you go, A, B, or C, in that little mental tree diagram you just drove, is a question mark.

• 34:35Shane Parrish?

  So I want to get to your divorce. You've written broadly on three topics, so gratitude, happiness, and resilience.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:44Shane Parrish?

  We've talked a lot about resilience. Walk me through how these fit together, and why these three particular topics, how they came to be.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 34:55Shane Parrish?

  And let's sort of go through gratitude and happiness, too.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  So my wife left me, my best friend took his own life, I started a blog called 1000awesomethings.com. For a thousand straight days, I wrote about one simple pleasure in life. Things like wearing a warm underwear from under the dryer, getting called up to the dinner buffet first at a wedding, which is huge at an Indian wedding, because there's 500 tables, you know, hitting a string of green lights when you're late for work, just little things. I expanded on them in 500-word essays-ish, and for a thousand straight days, I posted it. The blog went viral, it took off, it turned into my first book, which is The Book of Awesome. That book, therefore, is all about gratitude. It isn't one of these academic-

• 35:32Shane Parrish?

  And that book became a New York Times bestseller.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I sold a million copies and it was number one, I think, for a hundred straight weeks on the Globe Mail Best Artist.

• 35:42Shane Parrish?

  Why do you think it was number one? Why do you think it resonated so much with people?

• 35:47Speaker 00

  The weirdest advice or the weirdest compliment I ever got, two things, two, you know how people say stuff about your own work and then sometimes they say stuff that helps you see it in a different way? Mark Manson once said this to me on my podcast, he's like, you know, when someone wrote this about my subtle art not getting a fuck, it made me realize what I was doing, right? So two compliments stuck out for me. One is, this is the only self-help book I've ever bought that doesn't tell me what to do. It shows me how to do it. Like, I'm not saying, oh, sit around your dinner table every night and write down this stuff on a piece of paper. I don't say that once. I'm talking about the virtues of getting a mudder panier before it's all out of panier. You know what I mean? I have, so then you can start to see your own life that way. And the second compliment I got that resonated

• 36:30Speaker 00

  with me was, my eight-year-old son now never reads anything, but he read your book. And so I think there's something to reading and books in general that I'm always scratching at, which is, I'm trying to expand the size of the pie. My writing veers slightly different than yours. Like, I'm aiming for the big fat mass. I want the most accessible writing possible because I want the widest possible market. And when I get non-readers to read, that to me is a sign of the book's success. Non-readers reading is kind of one of my big ultimate goals.

• 37:06Shane Parrish?

  And it's a topic that's enduring. Like, we're all taught sort of awareness of gratitude and then that we should have gratitude. And nobody's sort of like, I don't know, maybe I can't say nobody. I mean, I'm trying to think of how I model that for my kids.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  It just seems so cheesy and hokey when you hear about it these days. You know, it's like, yeah, Oprah's gratitude journal and like, write down five things on your bedside table before you go to bed. And like, I mean, everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But it's when you do it as a practice, when you go, I always say to people, the best way to do it, quickest way to do it is go around your dinner table at night and do rose, rose, thorn, bud. Have you heard about this?

• 37:44Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  So you say a rose from your day, that's something that was a highlight for you, gratitude. Then say your son says one, okay, your other son says one, whatever. Then another rose, then a thorn, which is something that did not go well, because you want to get it off your chest, you need to vent, and the other people need to show you empathy. Okay, and then a bud, B U D, which is something you are looking forward to tomorrow, next week, next year, whenever. That little exercise helps you get all the gratitudes in that the science says really work. Emmanzi McCullough, ten weeks of five gratitudes a week, makes you not only happier, but physically healthier after ten weeks. So we know it's a powerful punch to your brain to do that. But it puts it in a little around the table dinner exercise that's just quite like simple and easy to do.

• 38:29Shane Parrish?

  Why is that effective, though? I like, I have a theory on this.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Let's hear it.

• 38:33Shane Parrish?

  So my theory, and you're gonna prove me wrong here in a second, is, because I was thinking about this, researching, speaking with you, and also like the things that I do at home. And I'm like, oh, these little moments of joy are actually really awesome, but why are they awesome? And then I think a lot of it is just adding perspective, right? So you get almost like this flashlight with a narrow beam, and then you start, oh, like, I'm gonna find something that's really nice, so you widen it a little bit more. And then it's that perspective that causes you to see things in a new way. But to get the perspective, you're actually reflecting. And it's the reflection, I think there's something to do with that reflection

• 39:16Shane Parrish?

  that actually drives the sort of,

• 39:22Shane Parrish?

  drives the response.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Well, your brain is much bigger than mine, so I, my instinct is to say, you're right.

• 39:30Shane Parrish?

  No, no, that's not true.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Can I add in, can I sprinkle some salt on that with a little bit of evolutionary biology stuff? Two hundred thousand years we've been around-ish, right, our species? And plus or minus, you know, whenever they can backdate the carbon dating of the first human body or whatever. And For the first 199,900 of those years, we had to fight for survival. Luckily, there's something in our brain called our amygdala. It secretes a fight or flight hormone. And when you see a saber-toothed tiger, you know, I gotta fight that thing to the death with a stick, or I gotta run the hell away, right? And that served us very well. We went from a few scattered hundreds on the African savanna

• 40:16Speaker 00

  to the most populous mammal on the planet. We took over this spaceship. We won. We eat all the other ones for dinner, literally. Like, they used to eat us, but we eat them now, you know? And we won. We took it over. In the last 100 years, we no longer need that 199,900 years of evolutionary biology that has programmed us into thinking, if it doesn't kill me, I gotta kill it, and I gotta run. We now live in an era of abundance, and that abundance is only skyrocketing. Think about it. That model I said, you can press a button and a car picks you up. Press another button and you got dinner. Press another button and you got entertainment. Like, we just press buttons now. So we don't need that fight or flight hormone as much,

• 41:00Speaker 00

  yet it's still there. That is not... You're not just gonna evolve away your amygdala. You know, what are you gonna do? So you're gonna naturally have all the neural pathways to see negative stuff first. That is why it bleeds, it leads. People always say to me, why isn't there a good news newspaper? I'm like, no one would watch it. They wanna watch the fire. We want the race car crash. We want the hard hit in football. We want that stuff that we... They're like, oh, everyone's rubbernecking on the highway. It's like, of course. Everyone wants to see the accident. We instinctively, biologically, evolutionarily wanna see it. So this gratitude stuff is actually practicing to develop a whole new muscle,

• 41:45Speaker 00

  carving totally different neural pathways to see how awesome it is to be alive. You got 30,000 days on this planet. You will never be as young as you are right now. And if you don't watch for all these tiny little pleasurable moments, it'll slip away and you won't see them. And life is awesome. And the gratitude stuff works because then you were like, whoa, I'm so happy to see you today, Shane. I can't wait to shake your hand and thank you for your time. I love seeing the Farm Street offices. Wow, I can't wait to soak in your bookshelf on the way out. It's beautiful. I want to soak that in because if I don't, life's over and I missed it.

• 42:23Speaker 02

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• 42:53Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, life is so brief and so fragile, right? We think, we naturally just sort of think, oh, life expectancy is sort of say 80 or something and I'm this old, so I have like all this time left in the future. But recently, I mean, I've seen a lot of people that I know become sick or sort of suffer some sort of catastrophic injury. And life isn't long. Life is super short and fragile. And we always think that we'll put off living until we're older, when we retire. We're going to talk about retirement a little bit, but we always think we can put this off until we're in a better place or we have more time. But life,

• 43:35Shane Parrish?

  there's this quote by Mary Angelou that I love, which is, it's on the wall in my living room, actually, and it says, "Life loves the liver of it."

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Ooh, that's good.

• 43:43Shane Parrish?

  And I think it's so deep on multiple levels and it's so easily accessible to you, right? Because every day you wake up, it's like, this is your, your day, right? You can live your best life today. And so, one of the routines, we were talking about sort of like routines for gratitude or perspective, one of the things that I taught my kids to do, which I encourage all parents of young children to do if they're so inclined, is When your kids get out of bed in the morning, a lot of people send them downstairs, like, go watch cartoons, because parents are a little slower to wake up than kids. I don't know if everybody's kids are like mine, like, they're up and out of bed and like, full bore in like, 30 seconds, right? Like, I'm dressed-

• 44:24Speaker 00

  At like 5 a.m.

• 44:25Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. And so I was like, okay, you can't get out of your bed till 7. Like, here's the rules, sort of, right? Like, at 7, you can come in my bed, and we're gonna cuddle. And this is how we're gonna start the day. And they're still doing it, they're 10 and 9, although it's gone from like, 30 minutes to maybe 5 to 8 now. But we sort of talk about, like, what we're looking forward to today. Like, if there was any lesson from yesterday, from a sort of an educational perspective, I did this and I got this outcome, but that wasn't what I wanted, so I would do it differently. We just sort of like, do this spaced repetition on, oh, remember what happened yesterday? If you've encountered this situation today, like, how would you respond to that? And then it's like, what are you looking forward to today? And we just spend a few minutes talking and cuddling.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Wow. What an incredible practice. I'm very jealous. I want to do that now. Like, I don't do that with my kids-

• 45:16Shane Parrish?

  You can't come in my bed and cuddle with me.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  I particularly want to cuddle with you. But I think that's amazing, and it's about pausing. And that's partly why I always say, life's spent in days. I never refer to it as years. I always refer to it as days. I'm a big fan of the Kevin Kelly death clock idea.

• 45:34Shane Parrish?

  Oh, I haven't heard of that.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, keeps a clock on his desktop that has an expected lifespan, subtracts his current age, measured in days. So, if the average lifespan, which it is, in North America is 30,000 days, and he happens to have lived 21,500 of them, that thing will say, quick, Neil, do the math, 8,500. And then tomorrow, it'll say, 8,499. And that- Literally is the number of days he has left. A lot of people will find that too dark or too, too like, well.

• 46:07Shane Parrish?

  Oh, man, I think it's empowering, right? It gives you information that it's like, you know what? I really don't want to spend my time this way.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  Well, exactly.

• 46:14Shane Parrish?

  I really don't want to do this and I only have so much time. And like delaying things, I always find like so weird to me. Like when you know something that you want to do something and you just keep putting it off and off and off. And you might never get a chance to do it.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  It does force you to take action. There's even a Google Chrome plugin that's called the death clock. And I did download it, but I deleted it eventually because it was all black with like red skulls and stuff. And I was like, that's a little bit too dark.

• 46:38Shane Parrish?

  Okay, that's.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Depends how you frame it. So that's kind of the whole gratitude piece. Okay, the book of awesome was a manifestation of a blog I wrote every day for a thousand straight days. Now you ask me, what about happiness? Okay, three years after that, Shane, I met someone new. Her name is Leslie. We fell in love. A year later, I asked her to move in with me and I got down on one knee and I proposed. And she says, yeah, so I'm like entering into, I mean, he's 33 years old. I'm entering into like marriage number two, which feels super weird. I told myself I was never going to get married again and this is it for me. And here I am getting married. So Leslie and I get married. We go on a honeymoon to Southeast Asia. We never been, no one, neither of us had ever been there before. She planned the wedding, so I planned the honeymoon.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  And then on the plane on the way home, she's not feeling well. She's sick and we have a layover in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And she's like, Neil, I really need to lie down. Like find me a pharmacy, like where, where can I get some rest? And I'm like, Les, like we're about to get on a 13 hour flight home. Like, are you sure you're up for this? She's like, yeah, I just need the pharmacy. So we, we find the pharmacy, find a place to lie down, get on the plane. It's like, are you sure? She's like, I'm sure. So the plane takes off, we're up in the sky, we're above the clouds. She goes to the tiny airplane bathroom at the front of the plane. She's there for a few minutes. She comes back to our seats and she says, I'm pregnant. She bought the pregnancy test in the Malaysian airport pharmacy. She did the pregnancy test in the tiny airplane bathroom and we're on our honeymoon.

• 48:10Speaker 00

  So that's why she wasn't feeling well. Didn't waste any time, eh? Didn't waste any time. Baby was born literally nine months of the day after my wedding day. July 12th, April 12th. I know. My friend sent me a, you're laughing, so I have to just tell you. A friend of mine sent me a YouTube clip of Mario Lemieux's first shift. Or for those that don't know, Mario Lemieux jumps on the ice, he gets a pass and he scores! Like, that's like Mario Lemieux's first shift. He sent me, I'm like, okay, gotcha. So, so anyway, but I had nine months there, Shane, and, and that forced a thought, a new thought, which is, how do I help my kids live happy lives? So I ended up writing a 300-page love letter to my unborn child before he was born. And this is the happiness equation. That is literally the letter. So that's just a deep exploration, reading every single positive psychology study out there,

• 48:52Speaker 00

  the science of happiness, and trying to distill it down to frameworks and models that I and my children could understand. And that came from a death clock place, because I thought if I got hit by a bus before the kid gets born, or like before they're of an age where they can understand my philosophy, I want to at least have that codified somewhere. That was kind of the, that's what gave me the, the sort of needle in my back, or whatever, the prod, the cattle prod to keep going. How would you define happiness? Happiness is the joy you feel while striving towards your potential. I've borrowed and butchered and amalgamated that quote from a number of sources. Even 2,000 years ago, a lot of philosophers used that phrase. Things about happiness I want to share, though, are 2,000 years ago Aristotle said it's the meaning of life. We've been thinking that since then.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  350 years ago, in the Declaration of Independence, they wrote, "Everyone gets life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They were careful to add the legalese, that you get life and liberty for sure, but you only get to chase happiness. You get the pursuit of it. And then in 1996, um, this is the most impactful. Martin Seligman and Michal Chechmehale in Pennsylvania founded the whole discipline of positive psychology. So, um, when I talked to friends of mine who were on the International Council of Global Happiness, there really is such a thing with like, I might have butchered the name, but it's like Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia, Martin Seligman's on it, Sean Acor, author of The Happiness Advantage's on it. And I talked to Sean, and I was like, hey, what are you guys up to on that council? He's like,

• 50:19Speaker 00

  We're spending our, all our meetings talking about how to define happiness. So to your point and to your original question a minute ago, it's, it is an almost undefinable word. I will say, my definition is the joy you feel while striving towards your potential. I use that particularly because, for example, while training for a marathon in the rain with shin splints, you can still be happy. While giving birth with labor, with pain, you can still be happy. Cause you're achieving something bigger than you, than you thought you could. Or you're going, your, your version of yourself is expanding. Point that I want to say though, is in all the scientific studies, the way they define it is they call it subjective well-being. They ask people on a scale of typically one to 10, how happy they are, self-reported.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  They ask them to do a number of different things and then they ask them at the end. So all these studies I'm talking about, like journaling, nature walks. They'll compare people doing nature walks with people on antidepressants, with people doing neither, with people doing both. And then they're able to intimate results from those studies that way. And I went deep on the science there because I just know you would have asked me anyway, probably.

• 51:26Shane Parrish?

  Happiness is so interesting to me. I used to ask a lot of people, I don't do this anymore.

• 51:34Shane Parrish?

  How happy are you? I used to ask a lot of my friends that.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, like a scale of one to 10 type thing or?

• 51:39Shane Parrish?

  No, just open-ended. Like how people respond to that is a very interesting question for me. And I stopped asking that question because more and more, it seemed like I was getting this, I'm happy but, or I'll be happy when. And especially with kids, I notice this a lot, right? And I'll, I'll use kids as an example, and this doesn't apply to everybody. It's sort of a gross overgeneralization, but you can break parents down into two categories. There's the parents who are in the moment with their kids. And then there's the parents who are always waiting for their kids to be in the next phase. And I found the

• 52:19Shane Parrish?

  People I was around the most that I didn't actually like spending time with were always like wanting their kid to be in the next phase.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  Hedonistic treadmill.

• 52:28Shane Parrish?

  Right. So it's like, oh, I had a baby. Great. I love this thing, but I can't wait till they're out of diapers. I can't wait till they walk. I can't wait till they go to school. I can't wait till, you know, they go to high school.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  And it even gets to the point where I can't wait till they're out of the house.

• 52:41Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  You're a lot of people wishing for that. You're like, well, why'd you have a kid if you wanted them to be gone?

• 52:45Shane Parrish?

  So to me, that's like an I'm happy but or I'll be happy when. And it always struck me that like you're never in the present moment. So the pursuit of happiness is also an interesting thing where, I don't know if I've actually thought about it, but I think it causes a lot of unhappiness. Right? Because you're striving for this thing and you're wanting, and there's a gap between sort of what you have and what you want. And I think that a lot of happiness is sort of like just wanting what you have or the absence of desire for something more. And so you can think of happiness as, yeah, you can be happy running and you can be happy with shinsplints because you're doing what you want to be doing in that moment. You don't need anything else, but you're, you're present in that moment. So I think,

• 53:26Shane Parrish?

  personally, a lot of unhappiness comes from living in the past or living in the future.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Oh, that's good. Have you heard the model that adds to that saying, uh, living with the past is depression, living in the future is anxiety?

• 53:40Shane Parrish?

  Oh, that's interesting. No, I haven't heard that.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. I've just been hearing a little bit of that. I don't know. I don't have a citable source, unfortunately, but that the idea that living in the present is therefore happiness. If you're living in the past, you are ruining something or depressed about something or regretful of something.

• 53:58Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  Living in the future is typically anxiety because you're taking all potential future iterations of what could happen and bringing them up to today. That's anxiety and that if you can live in your present.

• 54:10Shane Parrish?

  Uh, that's okay. I like that. Uh, like, I think you have to look backwards to learn, right? Like, so you have to reflect on things that have happened and importantly, your contribution. To whatever is going on in your life and it might be 5%, it might be 1%.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you don't want to take living in the present to its ultimate end where you're just like.

• 54:27Shane Parrish?

  And you apply that to the future to hopefully sort of like.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, otherwise I eat four funnel cakes at the fair and tomorrow I feel sick. So I mean, yeah, you gotta take some of the future and pass in there.

• 54:37Shane Parrish?

  So two questions, one about Leslie and then I want to go back to the happiness equation. Did you, uh, did you know when you met her that you loved her? Was this like an instant love at first sight or was this, she's gonna listen to this, so better get this right.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  I, uh, I, I, I felt very strongly about her very quickly. And it was scary for me because I had been divorced. And so I was fearful of that emotion, thinking to myself, oh my gosh, I felt this lust before. And it manifested itself into a marriage that did not work. So I have to now be careful of this emotion. So the way I navigated that was I created a little system for myself, which was this. I need to be dating someone. I, I actually created the system before I met Leslie, so it helped to have in place beforehand. I need to be dating someone for one year, a full year before, minimum, before we live together.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  I need to be living together with someone for one year, minimum, before we get married. And that, that little two-step process actually really helped because before I met Leslie, I didn't date anyone else for a year. And some of that was by design, some of that was people that didn't want to date me, who I was interested in. You know, it was the natural human relationships, you know, I went on a lot of dates and they ghosted me. You know what I'm saying? There's a lot of that too. So took finally, Leslie and I, it, it, it kind of a hundred dates later, you know, it kind of, uh, we had this chemistry and this connection, but that model still applied and that helped me pacefully process my emotions. I was a bit scared, like the story of your friend that got engaged for 24 hours.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Like that, that would have been my fear, that I would rush into another marriage and be divorced again.

• 56:25Shane Parrish?

  And that's a fear based on what happened in the first marriage?

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:28Shane Parrish?

  So.

• 56:30Shane Parrish?

  Correct me if my understanding is wrong here, but you came home one day in your first marriage and she said, "I don't love you anymore."

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 56:38Shane Parrish?

  Tell me about that conversation.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that is the phrase I use in my TED Talk and in speeches and when I try to describe how that relationship ended. Because this is a podcast and it's long form, I can take you zoom, I can zoom into it and a little bit more granularity to say that it wasn't exactly like that. That's just the, that's the way I summarize it. So what happened was, we'd been married, I think, two years at this time. And I was working at Walmart. She's a high school teacher. I get home, I get home one night and she's trying to process something big and, and she's crying and she's, she's scared and she's sad and all these emotions. So I'm trying to comfort her. What, what is it? What are you thinking about?

• 57:27Speaker 00

  And she's like, I, and I'm worried that we're kind of different. And I was like, well, opposites attract. You know, like the classic, maybe, you know, naive response. And she's like, yeah, but you know, you proposed so quickly. Eight months after we started dating, I proposed. Then you went to Harvard for two years for business school. So we were long distance through our engagement and our marriage. We got married the summer between the two years. She came down to Boston to try to live there. She didn't work because she couldn't find a job, visas and issues, et cetera. So she went home and then we got together and bought the house. And she's like, I think we're just starting to get to know each other now,

• 58:12Speaker 00

  two years into the marriage. And now I'm feeling like, maybe we're not connected and I'm not sure if I love you. And that was the death blow, that phrase. Because I grew up in the Western world. Love is the ultimate. Not like my parents, like, you know, my parents wouldn't supersede love overall. But I, I'm like, I've been surrounded by music and movies and songs my whole life. Like love, if love is the answer, you know? And all you need is love. And, and so to hear that she was not sure that she was in love with me anymore. That was what cracked it kind of open and.

• 58:48Shane Parrish?

  What happened next?

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Well, uh, what happened next is we had to um, get a divorce, man. We had to like, we had to like.

• 58:56Shane Parrish?

  Did you go to marriage counseling?

• 58:57Speaker 00

  Oh, I see.

• 58:58Shane Parrish?

  Like, how did this conversation flow? Was it like?

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Well, so one thing I don't talk about very often is that there was somebody else in her life. So I don't talk about that very often out of respect to her, but there was somebody else that she did have some emotions for. And so um, there was that presence and that person also um, had emotions uh, for her and was also in a relationship. So it was really two relationships ending at once so that they could be together. Uh, doing so, I think that's carefully, intactfully and positively as possible, but I knew that there was, she had emotions elsewhere and so it wasn't a choice really and um, I also, despite thinking to myself so strongly and seriously, like, I want this to work. We just bought a house. We're about to have kids. Like, this is it.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  I'm in my, I'm in my late twenties and like, this is what I'm supposed to do, right? Like, buy a house, get married, have kids. Like, isn't that the model? So when all that cracked open, we did not pursue marriage counseling and I don't remember if, why, if we explored that or not, we went to the divorce uh, lawyer and he's like, well, why don't you make a list of everything you guys own and just write a name beside it all? And we did that in one night, because it was like we didn't own anything. Like, the hardest thing to split was like, who gets the wedding album? And I was like, I don't want that. So she's like, oh, that'd be great. I really like those pictures, you know? And I'd be like, oh, I like the couch. She'd be like, well, I'd like, like, we, we had one car. Like, it was trying to split very little assets. And so we did that and then um,

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  uh, unfortunately, my friend took his own life at that same time. So um, and that was my best friend from Harvard. His name's Chris and uh,

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  that's what amplified uh, kind of the emotions at the time and that's partly why.

• 1:00:39Shane Parrish?

  Either one of those things on their own would be so tough.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and both of them had a run-up, right? Like, Chris had attempted suicide once before. Again, that's something I don't talk about a ton. I, I knew his psychiatrist. I knew his medications. I had, emergency phone number. I was supposed to call if I saw anything. Um, and with my wife.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  There were some previous conversations that I can now look back on and say, oh, that was a big sign. Oh, that was a big. Remember one day we went hiking in the Adirondacks and we got to the top of the mountain and I was like, that was the worst day of my life. There was bugs, there was mosquitoes, I thought I heard a bear, I'm covered in blood. She was like, that was the best day of my life. I love, I want to do this every day. And I was like, whoa, how possibly could we be so different? And you can look back and decide on stuff. So then this fall apart, the marriage falls apart, I lose my close friend, and that's where I really started putting like 10 hours a day outside of work into that blog. Like, I just dove deep into 1000awesomethings.com because I had nowhere else to go. I had no

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  other place to channel my energy. I had no one else on my phone book. I had no, I didn't want to get in touch with mutual friends because they were mutual friends. So they also knew, like I was like, I gotta find a bachelor apartment downtown Toronto, find a place to live by myself. I gotta like fix my, and I started going to therapy twice a week. Cause that's how much I needed to talk about and process. And it was just like a mess. And a lot of it was breaking down, a lot of the systems I carried around in my head, East Indian culture, you know, whatever baggage around what I should be doing by when in my life. I already failed at being a doctor. You know, that was already a miss. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, East Indian culture, you're supposed to, you know, great work leads to big success,

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  be happy, you should be a doctor, right? If not, then like maybe you fail and be a lawyer or an engineer, but not, certainly not like what I was doing. Never mind being an artist like I'm doing today. You know, like never mind that. Then you gotta have, be married, have kids, certainly heterosexual marriage, certainly probably two kids, ideally a boy and a girl. Do you know what I'm saying? Like I didn't intuit this from stuff my parents told me. It was just stuff I saw growing up. Every family I saw growing up was like, the dad's a doctor, the mom stays at home, they got two kids, the kids are probably becoming a doctor or an engineer. All the parents talk about is what grades their kids get in school. And like, do you know what I'm saying? That's the culture I grew up in. If you're not East Indian, you don't get this probably. If you are, you're like,

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  sing it, baby, because this is exactly what you feel like too. So that shattering of all those assumptions and all those things I thought I wanted was hard to process. Never mind the idea that I was a failure at something.

• 1:03:20Shane Parrish?

  In whose eyes?

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  To myself. I failed at marriage. I got a divorce. I suck at relationships. I am unlovable.

• 1:03:28Shane Parrish?

  These are the stories you tell yourself.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Exactly. I'm ugly. I, I am, I, I'm not someone people want to be with. I'm too neurotic. I talk too loud. I, I'm hard to be around. I'm not good in bed. Maybe we didn't have kids. Maybe this is a function, like, your mind goes where it goes. And for me in those times, in those years, in those days, I was thinking, like, I'm sunk. I'm over.

• 1:03:53Shane Parrish?

  How, how did you stop those narratives or change them or replace them? Like, walk me through that because this narrative, like, I have this theory on narratives being so powerful in our lives. Like, the stories we tell ourselves, like, in a relationship, you have your story. You sort of have either a story of your relationship, you have the story of, like, there's the story of your parents and what's expected of you. And like, how did you, how did you replace those narratives? How did you change them? Was that through therapy?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  So there's kind of like a low level answer and a high level answer. So the low level answer is therapy, the blog. Remember, my blog was a daily journaling practice to focus essentially on gratitude and positivity. That really helps, right? So I found an outlet. I talked about it. I had a therapist. Like, I, I had great family to, I went and bunked with my parents every weekend while I was processing stuff and crying and processing all this. So there's a lot of that. But the higher level answer is I learned to tell myself a different story. So you called it, these were stories that you were telling yourself. And I love that you said that because that would have been an enamel that I wouldn't have been able to see at the time. But truthfully, what was happening, Shane, was I was telling myself all these stories and I had to work to revise and replace those narratives.

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  So, there's a really famous study called Too Fat to Fit Through the Door by universities at Utrecht University, if I'm saying that right or wrong in the Netherlands. They studied anorexics, okay? And they asked people who had anorexia and people who did not, a very simple, non-challenging question to answer, but something that mentally distracted them, while they walked through a doorway. So they were not paying attention to the doorway. The anorexics shifted their body much more than the non-anorexics, believing they were too fat to fit through the doorway, although, of course, they were not. The story they were telling themselves is, "I'm fat. So when I walk through a door, I gotta shuffle sideways to fit through here."

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  That study was a real breakthrough for me, as I was writing about resilience in my new book, because I saw myself in that story. "I'm unlovable, I'm ugly, no one will date..." Like, these stories become fact. And part of the language that you have to learn is, learning to see the story. "I failed biology" is a lot different than "I failed my parents." First one's a fact, second one's a story. "I'm an alcoholic" is a lot different than "No one will trust me again." First one's a fact, second one's a story. So on top of the "I am divorced" fact, I was layering on top all these endless stories. And I've done that to myself throughout my whole life.

• 1:06:30Speaker 00

  I tell a story about discovering I had one testicle in grade nine gym class, in this new book. And I always thought everyone had one. We have one nose, one mouth, one heart, one... Who's to say you need a two? I didn't know. Then my grade nine gym class teacher made some horrible comments, referring to a guy that he wrestled with in a wrestling tournament. He crushed the guy's testicle, and he said, "After that, I all... Me and everyone called him half a man." And everyone in the gym class burst out laughing. This is grade nine gym class. And that's when it dawned on me that, "Oh my gosh, everyone else has two." And so guess what happened Shane, once again, I told myself a zillion stories.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  I am disfigured. I will never have children. I might have a high pitched voice. I, do you see what I'm saying? So part of that process was learning to see the story. Just learning the, you're the one that's the best at this. You're all, you get so high level on the models that we use inside our brains. And like, this is one that I'd love for you to explore because you could help me with it. But like, seeing how, learning how to see the story, that is a big scale. That takes time. You have to peel away the onion over and over and over again until you get to the root, core, objective truth. And oftentimes when you get there, I have one testicle. I am a person who has been divorced.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  And that ain't so bad. That ain't that bad at all, actually. It's not that bad. But it takes a while to get to the core objective truth. And then you realize like, who cares about that?

• 1:08:06Shane Parrish?

  There's this old man at this coffee shop that I go to. I don't even know his name. I talk to him all the time though. Uh, just briefly passing by, I always say like, how was your, how are you doing today? And he's like, I woke up. It's a good day.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Right side of the ground.

• 1:08:21Shane Parrish?

  And I, I find it actually like, it's great, right? Because uh, sometimes I'm walking in there and I'm like, lost mentally. The stories that we're telling ourselves for whatever reason. And it snaps me out of it. And it's just like, yeah, oh my God, my day could be so much worse. Um, right? Like if this was the case and it helps you gain perspective. It's easier to see the narratives of other people. And I've sort of just started exploring this, this narrative idea a little bit. But one of the narratives, oh, go ahead.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  No, no, I was just gonna say, have you heard of that study called, um, uh, it's from the Telegraph? Um, saying, have you had enough one night stands?

• 1:08:57Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Right. So I want to tell you, I want to tell you about the study Shane, because I think you might find this interesting. So basically it's like, there's a study in the Telegraph, uh, where they, they looked at people who had found long-term true love. Okay, so they were by all definitions with the one. And they said to them, so how many people did you date before this one? How many one night stands did you have? How many times you were cheated on? How many times did you cheat on someone else? It's a bizarre research study, obviously. Um, but what they found, and I'm going to read this to you right now. According to the study, the average woman, remember, this is in a committed, long-term, loving relationship, will kiss 15 people, have seven sexual partners, four one-night stands, four disaster dates,

• 1:09:40Speaker 00

  three relationships less than a year, two relationships more than a year, fall in love twice, be heartbroken twice, cheat once, be cheated on once, all before they find a lifelong partner. The male statistics are very similar. Average man will kiss 16 people, have 10 sexual partners, six one-night stands, four disaster dates, four relationships that last less than a year, two more than a year, fall in love twice, be heartbroken twice, cheat once, and be cheated on once, all before he finds a long-term partner. If you ask the average person, would you like to go through all that to find the one? They would say, no way, be cheated on? Have 10 disaster dates? Like, are you kidding me?

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  But the story that you might tell yourself later is that was all in service of finding the one. I can now say confidently that without that divorce, I would not have found Leslie. I wouldn't have been in that apartment building. I wouldn't have met Rita, the friend who entered. Like, nothing would have happened that would have led me to her. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now refer to that as a step, which we talked about earlier, and a story that I've changed in my mind. And I like this study from The Telegraph, although, even though it's a little funny, it does point you to the idea that, hey, maybe everything happens for a reason. And actually, you can reframe things towards your, the ultimate, more positive place you hopefully are projecting towards.

• 1:11:01Shane Parrish?

  I like that. I think asking yourself what story you're telling yourself is really important. And I think to understand other people, asking yourself what story they're telling themselves about themselves is the key to sort of understanding and gaining perspective and seeing the world through their eyes.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  And empathy.

• 1:11:21Shane Parrish?

  And empathy. So one of the stories you told yourself at Harvard.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Shane Parrish?

  Was that you don't belong there and that you're the worst.

• 1:11:31Shane Parrish?

  Walk me through that.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  So first of all, there's a joke at Harvard Business School called the admissions mistake joke. So it's like, everyone's like, well, I'm the admissions mistake. Like, people refer to themselves as admissions mistake. People are like, well, I've so and so's probably the admission. It's like this like classic like little joke within Harvard. And I actually thought, I'm sure many people, they're dead, like, no, that's actually me. Like, how did I get in? I wasn't even dean's list in my undergrad. I had 70s. I'm at Harvard? They must have made a mistake, you know? They must have miscalculated in their internal secret algorithm what my other experiences were. Because I got there and I was blown away by every other student. So I almost felt like the bottom of the class kind of thing. And the funny thing happened was, I got this scholarship to go there because I was so poor. You know, when you, when you apply to undergrad, they ask you for your parents' tax returns. But

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  when you apply to your masters, they ask you for your tax returns. So my tax returns were crap. So they were like, congratulations, you're so poor, and we have an $18 billion endowment, so you get a little bit of it. So mine was called the John H. MacArthur Fellowship. I write a letter to this dude who I don't know, because he's paying for my tuition for the two years of the MBA. Turns out, he's the former dean of the place. He was the dean of HBS from 1980 to 1995. He was a Canadian, so he set up a scholarship for future Canadians to go down there. Any Canadians listening, if you're poor and you apply to HBS, this guy might give you a free ride, okay? So I end up getting invited to meet him for lunch. And while I have lunch with him, he looks me in the eyes, and he's like, how's it going?

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  How's school? And I'm like, it's stressful, man. It's stressful. I'm going out every night, like, whining and dining with millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under their eyes. We all want to be millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under our eyes, too. So we're like hobnobbing with them and applying and first round interviews and second round interviews and blah, blah, blah. It's overwhelming. Stressful. He's like, well, why are you doing that? I was like, well, I had no money when I came here. I'm hoping to correct that problem. And he's like, dude, you're you're at the beach right now. He didn't say dude, okay, he's like eighty years old. But he was like, you're a guy outside the beach. You're looking in the beach. There's a fence right in front of your face and inside are ten sunbathing beauties. Make it whatever gender you want.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  But you are with a thousand other people outside that beach. And when they open the beach, all thousand of you are gonna run in to try to get that Google job or that amazing hedge fund opportunity, whatever it is. But there's only ten of them. So your odds of getting any of them are so low. I was like, yeah, I know that. I know that. I already feel that. I feel like a loser here. He's like, so get off the beach. Go to the library. Find the nerd. Find the broken bankrupt companies who don't have money to send a private jet to Harvard to do their fancy campus recruiting. And if you call up those companies and if they take you inside, you will get a bigger job with more learning and more experience than you can possibly imagine. Your voice will be worth something at the table.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  You will be a big fish in a small pond. Get off the beach and go to the library. Guess what, Shane? I never applied for a single job through Harvard Business School, ever. I made an Excel spreadsheet of every company I could think of that I wanted to work at. And I'd also been through a hard time, a flat stock price for a decade, a PR crisis, something that would make it interesting, but also that they weren't coming to Harvard. Cold called a hundred companies, got fifty responses, got about twenty-five people doing what I called first-hand interviews, what were just five-minute interviews. Got about twelve first-hand interviews from that and a five offers, all from places off the beach.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  I accepted that job at Walmart, which at the time, if you remember, was like not a very cool place at the time, you know? They're killing Main Street and blah, blah, blah. So I got a job at Walmart and guess what? I was the only one with like the background I had. In the entire office of a thousand plus people. And different is better than better. While I didn't know a ton, more than a ton. The stuff I did know in the meetings was different than the stuff everybody else knew. So I was promoted quickly. I was given leadership positions. He was right. He was basically right. And so I learned and I discovered through researching it afterwards. This line of thinking holds true across the world and every culture and demographic.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  If you put yourself in a small pond, then your academic self-concept or how you think of yourself goes up for up to 10 years after you leave the pond. So you think you're great for way longer than you're in that position. And it stays with you. So now, one of my keys to resilience is can you find small ponds? We now live in a giant pond called a global community with eight billion people. You'll never be good enough, ever. I can tell you a hundred people that have more followers than you, have more views than you, have more podcast analysts than you, and you know them too. And even Oprah is looking at Justin Bieber's followers, like no one wins. So in this global community, it's important to develop resilience by giving ourselves games that we can win.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  Sign up for the marathon in the lowest, slowest category. Tee off from the tees closest to the pin. Rig the game so you can finally win something. And then you'll feel better about yourself and you'll use that confidence and energy to keep going.

• 1:16:49Shane Parrish?

  It's so underrated in terms of standing out, right? Like who you're competing against. If you're a type A person, they're prone to competing against other type A people. It'd be a lot easier to compete against type C people. People that don't work as hard, people that don't learn as quickly. You know, you're going to, you're bound to go further. And the contrast that you're creating will make you stand out. And it's hard to stand out in a world that's brutally competitive.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  I mean, this is the pain I think a lot of us feel on a daily basis. Because I can tell you 100 metrics that I have that I'm like, oh, so and so's higher, so and so's better, so and so's... Like, this is just where our brains go. It's back to our evolutionary thinking. But yeah, if you can put yourself in a game, you can win, then you feel better after. I always say this is what happened with my keynote speaking. You know, after the book of awesome got popular, a bunch of speaking bureaus called me up and said, hey, you want to speak for us? And I said, sure. How much do you think it should cost? And they told me some crazy number, whatever it was, like $10,000 to $15,000. I'm like, what? Are you kidding me? Someone's gonna pay me that much money, like, to fly and give a speech? And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, who else is getting paid that much? They're like, this New York Times bestseller, this gold medal-winning Olympian, this...

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  And I'm like, oh, I know all those people. Like, those are like rock star professors. Like, those are winners. Like, those are people I know. What about the lowest? What's the lowest fee category you have? And they're like, $5,000, whatever. I'm like, that's the lowest? And they're like, yeah, so we work for commission. That's the lowest we have. And I'm like, who's in that category? And they're like, listed a bunch of people that, no offense, I just didn't know them. I had never heard of any of their names. So I said, put me there. Guess what, Shane? That meant I was practicing, essentially, in, like, boardrooms of 50 people, rather than, like, Vegas casinos for 1,000. So my ability to think I could do it shot up.

• 1:18:39Shane Parrish?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:18:40Speaker 00

  And it stayed up as I kept moving to higher and higher stages.

• 1:18:43Shane Parrish?

  That's really fascinating. Going back to Walmart for a second, talk about how narratives changed from Walmart eating the world and killing Main Street to will they survive in a world with Amazon?

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:18:55Shane Parrish?

  One of the things I wanted to touch on with you is untouchable days. What are those?

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  So I worked at Walmart for a decade, and my writing, all the stuff I've been talking about with you so far today, Shane, was always on the side. It was a side hustle. But then, I had this brilliant epiphany when Leslie and I got married and had kids. I'm like, I actually want to see my kids. I don't want to be the guy grinding till 4:00 AM every night and away every weekend doing a speech. So I'm gonna have to quit one of these. Either that's the writing that I do every night, or the Walmart that I do every day. Took a long time. I came up with the help of a mentor with a two-question test to decide. The deathbed test, which will I regret not doing more on my deathbed? And the Plan B test, which is what will I do if it fails? The writing passed both those tests. I thought I would regret it more. And I thought if I failed that I could go knocking on a door again for a job.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  So I did the writing job full-time, starting in 2016, right after The Happiest Equation came out. Problem was Shane, my purported goal of doing that was to write my next book. And after six months, I was like, I ain't written shit. Like, nothing's been written. Like, how did that even happen? I have no other job. And then people would say, like, how's the new book coming? I'd be like, oh, you mean now that I quit my job? Terribly. It was so embarrassing. They're like, well, what do you do? Aren't you just empty? And I was like, no, meetings have congealed into my calendar like a virus. Cause I gotta meet with a web developer and before the speech, just, you can imagine, it's endless meetings. So I took what I called a very strong position at the time.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  And I started carving out one day per week as what I called untouchable. I wrote it in all caps, like, literally, U-N-T-O-U-C-H-A-B-L-E in my ICal. And I planned them 16 weeks in advance. Why 16 weeks? Because the speaking calendar is arranged typically six to 12 months in advance, but nothing else is. So I could see which days I'd be traveling, but the rest of the week looked empty, you know, 16 weeks in advance. So I made one day a week untouchable. Guess what would happen on that day? Nothing. I would have no internet, no cellphone, no connection to anybody, not even my wife. Nobody could get hold of me. No one could contact me. I could, nothing. It was like, I was literally untouchable. And guess what happened?

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Instead of writing 500 words through bits and spurts on a normal day, I wrote 5,000 words. Like, 10 days worth of writing in one day. A 10x increase in my production. So that's where my next book came from. I launched three books, my podcast from those days. I liked, everything good that I've done in the last couple of years has only come from untouchable days. This article for Harvard Business Review about it, it went viral. Adam Grant said, "You gave a name to something that I've always done. I never knew what it was called." And in this era of endless ephemera and constant pinging and ringing phones, it's even more important that we each take one day a week to be totally untouchable to the world.

• 1:21:51Shane Parrish?

  It's easy for us as entrepreneurs to do that, right? In a sense, we can structure our lives around work and we can create this. And one of the feedbacks I often get from people is, "Well, you can do that, but I can't." I used to work in an office and I was like, "Well, I used to work in the biggest office in the mall, which was the government."

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Shane Parrish?

  And I was like, "What I used to do, I couldn't do days, but I would do mornings."

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:22:12Shane Parrish?

  So I would just block in my calendar, uh, three to four days a week.

• 1:22:16Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 1:22:17Shane Parrish?

  And try to block off the mornings and try, because most people just generally, when you're scheduling, the admins are sort of like looking through calendars going, "Oh, this is blocked off." They can't always see what's going on and so they'll try to find the first common space that's available to everybody. And this dramatically cut down on my meetings and totally increased my productivity in the sense of every day I would basically have like two, three, and I still do that to this day. With the exception, there's exceptions now, but most mornings I won't schedule anything. And then I'll schedule all the stuff that I don't want to be doing, sort of like the calls, the lawyers, the accountants, the talking to the web guys, all of that stuff, always in the afternoon.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and probably later in the week too.

• 1:22:59Shane Parrish?

  And later in the week, right? Because I'm at my best, sort of like Monday recharge, rejoin with the kids and sort of like come back to work and I'm ready to go, right? And I find this harmony, sort of, we were talking about this a little before we started recording, but this harmony between sort of family and work and how they feed each other. And I want you to talk about-

• 1:23:16Speaker 00

  The flywheel.

• 1:23:17Shane Parrish?

  The flywheel in a second here.

• 1:23:20Shane Parrish?

  But it enables me to do stuff and it's really the uninterrupted time. I'm not distracted. I don't have to find the time and that's the other thing, right? Like I'm not searching for it. It just exists. I don't have to look for it. I know every day I'm free from- You know, basically when I get to work until 12.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Shane Parrish?

  And then if I have a lunch meeting, I do a lunch meeting. And then all of the stuff when I don't want to be doing or like I have to do to run a business.

• 1:23:45Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:23:45Shane Parrish?

  All of that stuff goes in the afternoon when I'm lowest energy already. And I'm also quicker at it then, right? Because it seems like in the morning, I'm like, oh, we can explore this. And like, but it really doesn't matter, right? Like, you know, exploring this for 20 minutes versus 10, we're probably going to get to the same outcome. Putting that in the afternoon is also more productive, even on the individual basis. Okay, so talk to me about Bezos and the flywheel.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. One thing I want to say on the Touchable Day is just quickly before for anyone listening that's like, I'm in an office. I can't do it is do what Shane did, first of all. And second of all is if you just check email from 9am to 10am and 4 to 5pm. Well, I've done this study. That gives everyone the perception that you're always on, yet you've created a 10am to 4pm oasis of blankness, even though you're like still answering email twice a day for an hour. So there's ways to build it into corporate corporate culture, even if it is slower and more difficult. So Bezos and the flywheel. I was lucky enough to hear Bezos be interviewed by his brother down in Los Angeles a couple of years back. And one of the things he said really stuck with me. He said, there is no such thing as work-life balance. When you hear that word balance, what you probably picture is a scale.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  Like one of these things where like one side gets goes down, the other side goes up. More in one pot is less than another. But he said, no, it's not like that. It's a flywheel. Think of that thing that like fills with water and then it spins. And then the more water it has in it, the faster it spins. Meaning if you're at work and you're loving your work and you are in the zone in your work and you are having killer breakthroughs and you are making a difference in the world or whatever it is that makes the work awesome for you, then guess what version of you goes home? The awesome version of you, the version that's thrilled to see your kids and can't wait to jump into making a great dinner because you have so much energy because of how fulfilling your work was. And when you have an awesome night being super dad, if you're my case, at night with your family,

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  you're running around, you're dancing with your kids, you make a great dinner, you tuck them into bed. Guess what that gives you energy for? Because you were super dad. It gives you awesome. Some energy to go even faster, harder or deeper the next morning at work. Meaning that it's not work-life balance. It's a flywheel. The more energy you pour into either side of your life, the faster and more energy you can pour into the rest. And I found that model so inspiring. I was already doing that without knowing that that was a thing. I was always under the mistaken assumption that they were trade-offs. Rather than a thing that grows, a pie that constantly grows with maximum energy and had no limit on its potential.

• 1:26:13Shane Parrish?

  Well, we often think of it as balance, right? And this is how people talk to me, like my work-life balance is out of sort of equilibrium. And it's always strikes me as weird because it's like that implies taking something from one aspect and putting it in the other. And it's like, if you take away family time, you're going to be more balanced or it never sort of intuitively hit me. And it also, I think, strikes something that you were talking about earlier in terms of using your phone. Right? So when you're at home and you're on your phone and you're not dancing with your kids, you're not really feeding that flywheel. You're there, but you're not there. Right? You're physically present, but you're not mentally embodying that presence. So you're not all in, so you're not feeding the flywheel, you're not sort of like charging up.

• 1:26:57Shane Parrish?

  And I always find that I'm better and more productive after time with my kids, but time with my kids, not time where I'm sort of with my kids and doing work.

• 1:27:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. This also springs to mind what Chris Anderson often describes TED as being, which is a series of incongruent ideas presented to you so that at the end you make like huge awarenesses and insights. So if you're all in with your kids, then you're all in with work, then you're all, then you're essentially creating incongruent experiences rather than being tethered to a cell phone at all times. So I'm fully agreeing with you, but it's kind of like opening your mind to totally different things is what also provokes your best ideas. Maybe that's why you feel so energized after your kids.

• 1:27:37Shane Parrish?

  I think so, yeah. Talk to me about one thing we have in common. We both sort of think retirement is a bit of bunk. Walk me through your thinking on that.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  So in high school, I had an awesome guidance counselor and I'll use the name Mr. Mr. Actually, I won't even use his name. Because I'm afraid I'll use the right name instead of the wrong name. But I had a guidance counselor and he was awesome. And we loved him. He was like the best guy in the counselor ever. He high-fived kids in the hallways. He was friends with like, the sort of like the good kids and the bad kids, the nerds in the, in the, in the, in the, you know, everyone was loving this dude. But then at age sixty-five in Ontario in Canada, we had mandatory retirement. So we had one of those Mr. Holland's Opus kind of final scenes where like everyone said goodbye to this guy. Two weeks later, he had a heart attack and he died. And I remember when I heard that from the guidance counselor secretary thinking, well, how the heck that like he just, he was so happy.

• 1:28:28Speaker 00

  But then it hit me like we took away from him everything that he loved, his social connection, his stimulation, his sense of learning, the story he was part of within our high school. And those three S's I purposely dropped, social, stimulation and story, because I do believe we need all those three things. So I started looking around while researching the happiness equation. I discovered that retirement was invented in eighteen eighty-nine in Germany by this dude named Otto von Bismarck, coolest head of state name ever, like the bus driver in The Simpsons. And he was like, oh, oh, oh, we got twenty percent youth unemployment rate. Uh, yeah, if you're like sixty-five, let's say, and you want to stop working, like you don't have to, but if you want it, we'll give you a little bit of money to bridge you to sixty-seven, which is the average lifespan.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  Like average lifespan was sixty-seven in late eighteen hundreds Germany. So it's like a two-year gap. And penicillin wasn't invented for forty years. I mean, our lifespans were a lot shorter. Guess what happened? That number he kind of artificially decreased sixty-five became the Western barometer through the nineteen thirty-five Social Security Act in the US, UK, Canada was sixty-five, sixty-five is suddenly the year. Meanwhile, our lifespans have extended greatly. If anything, we've artificially depressed that desirable retirement age. Freedom fifty-five. And you know, we actually want to retire earlier. There's a lot of people preaching like retiring at like forty and thirty and stuff. And what we're doing, I think, is creating this vacuous gap where like, what are you gonna do? Like golf's gonna get old.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  And in fact, you're gonna rob yourself of the social connection you need, the stimulation of always learning something new and the story of being part of something bigger than yourself. Fortune magazine says the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year we are born and the year we retire.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Lots of people have stories of someone that did not do well post-retirement. And in fact, some of the healthiest societies in the world, like the Blue Zone studies from Dan Buettner at National Geographic, they've pointed to countries or places like Okinawa, Japan, which has the highest ratio of people over the age of 100 of anywhere. You know what they call retirement?

• 1:30:34Shane Parrish?

  No.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  They don't either. They got no word for it. They have no word in the language of, in Okinawa that describes the concept of ceasing work completely. But they have a different word, Jane, and it's a word I love. The word is ikigai. I-K-I-G-A-I. It roughly translates as "the reason you get out of bed in the morning." Okay? So that's why they have like 95-year-olds there that are like teaching boxing and like spear fishermen that are like 110. Like they, because they have a reason. They have a purpose when they open their eyes. So Leslie and I, uh, we made little cards for our bedside tables of what our ikigai is. So mine says, "helping people live happy lives."

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  And her says, "teaching empathy." Because she's a elementary school teacher and she thinks her, the big root issue what she's doing is teaching empathy in the classroom. So when you open your eyes, it's the first thing you see. And that is a guiding, nice principle for your day. I don't believe people want to retire. I believe it's very dangerous. I believe you lose a lot of the social connection, the stimulation of learning and the story, which you could call an ikigai. And instead, you want to have purpose and you want to be doing meaningful and productive work right till your last day. And I will never retire. And it's a huge load off on retirement savings, too.

• 1:31:58Shane Parrish?

  I sort of see things very similarly. I, I think purpose plays a large role in it, right? And if we lose our purpose, then it sort of sets us on a different path. But getting out of the psychology, which I don't know very well, I just sort of feel or into it in this case. I think a lot of people look forward to retirement because they're doing something they hate. And they think that they're trading sort of like chits now to get chits later. I'm just gonna do this until I'm 55 and then.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:28Shane Parrish?

  And we're coming back to this again, right? Then I'm gonna live my life. And then I'm free, but it never sort of works out that way. And that life is never guaranteed, right? In terms of where you are and what's going on in life and how your health is and your relationships and.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  So you know how I said the three S's? But I didn't say one of those S's was salary purposely. So I'm not saying if you're about to punch up for your last day at the meatpacking plant, like sign up for another couple of decades. I'm not saying that. I'm saying volunteer at the library. I'm saying start that blog you've been dreaming about. I'm saying go down to the craft show and actually turn your woodworking into a viable hobby on eBay or at the craft. It doesn't have to be making money, just to be doing something you love. There's a reason that Mississauga, Ontario's mayor, Hazel McCallion, was like 95 when she retired. She lasted through eight Canadian prime ministers. Eight Canadian prime ministers in a row. She was the mayor. And when people asked her, well, why don't you retire? She's like, I don't know what I'd do.

• 1:33:29Speaker 00

  She wasn't doing it for the money. My point is in the chit example you gave, I'm not saying it has to be.

• 1:33:35Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Speaker 00

  Something earning you an income. I'm saying it just has to be a doing.

• 1:33:40Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Of some kind that gives you meaning, fulfillment, gives you that.

• 1:33:44Shane Parrish?

  That's a good clarification. I also think.

• 1:33:46Speaker 00

  I gave them a provocative headline, obviously. No, never retire. Sounds a little bit juicier on NPR.

• 1:33:51Shane Parrish?

  I do think it's sort of worth exploring if you're living life in that way where I'm doing something today that I, and you know, there's aspects where this makes sense, like saving money. And there's aspects where it doesn't, where it's like going to work and spending one third of your life doing something that you, you hate or dislike in the hopes that you will be happy all of a sudden at 55. That's I will be happy when. That's another manifestation of this. I love the model you draw in the happiness equation called the space scribble around simplifying sort of decision making. Can you walk me through this?

• 1:34:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  So It's a two by two matrix. Yes, it's two by two matrix. So basically Shane, what happened was um I basically did this analysis on myself of how many decisions I make per day. So guess how many decisions you make on an average day? And I will tell you how many I made after you tell me, or a guess. I'm gonna say over a thousand. Okay, so my actual number for me was like around 300. Okay. Okay. But it was simple, like, do you want lettuce on the sub? Exactly. Do you want onions on the sub? Which way do you want to turn? Left or right? Like, I always use the example of like, going to the gym when I was at Walmart. It was like, do I want to go to the gym? Yes. Okay. Do I want to do cardio or weights? Cardio. Well, do I want to do the elliptical, the treadmill, or the staircase? Oh, the elliptical. Oh, well, do I want to do a hill or manual or like?

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  Do I want to stop at 10 reps? Or should I do? See what I'm saying? It never ends. And so I came up with this model as a way to simplify decision making, because, as I'm sure you know, decision making energy is a finite resource. When it's gone, it's gone. A lot of the research on this in the book, Willpower, John Tierney, I think, if I'm getting the author right. They say when you're done with your with your decision making energy, there's only two ways to replenish it. Number one is sleep, and number two is glucose, or anything that turns into glucose in your body. So at the front of the supermarket, if you've chosen between 12 kinds of eggs and 10 kinds of salsa, there's a wall full of sugar, which people are too low resilience to say no to. So how does this two by two work? I argue that every single decision you

• 1:35:53Speaker 00

  make in your life takes a certain amount of time, that's one axis, and takes a certain level of importance. That's the other. It's different, I should notice, than the time versus urgency model that Stephen Covey has in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, for anyone that may know that. I'm saying time versus importance. What do you do in the lowest quadrant, when it's a low time and a low importance decision? My argument is you need to automate that decision. So I wear the same exact clothes whenever I do media or speeches. Like, I literally have 10 of the same socks, 10 of the same jeans. Like, I don't think about it. Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, you've heard of this, Mark Zuckerberg wears the same hoodie, doesn't matter, right? That's an automatable decision. Maybe so is

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  a friend of mine has Amazon automatic ordering on every consumable item in his house. He has figured out the frequency rate of even things like hand towels. Oh, wow. Like, he's done, obviously, like, you know, I get new dish soap once a month, and I get new yogurt once a week or whatever. But even like, we need hand towels once a year. Or whatever, like I'm using an extreme example, but every consumable item in his house Automated. Is automated. Okay, that's extreme, but can you automate it? That's the first question. A lot of the stuff is, yeah, you can. It's like, for example, you drive to work, just use Waze. Like, just use the traffic app. Don't think about how you get to work. It's, because I was deciding freeway or city roads and what's faster? Listen to the radio. No!

• 1:37:22Speaker 00

  Be an Uber driver. Follow the map. Okay, what do you do about things that take a lot of time, but they're not very important? That's the top-left quadrant. So it's high on time, but low on importance. This one you need to regulate. Email is a great example. I mentioned earlier, I think if you do two hours of email a day in two one-hour windows, it's a regulated time, freeing up your day. Another example is my wife and I, when we bought our first house, it was a super old house. So something broken in every day. Patio stones wobbly, fence is squeaky, blah, blah, blah, it was killing us. So eventually we said, the old house was at number 276 on the street. So we said, oh, we have 276 day, once a month. I sent my wife an invite on iCal, she accepted it.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  It was a recurring invite every Saturday morning from nine to 12. On the first Saturday of the month, we had 276 day. For the other 29 days of the month, we made a list on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards of everything that broke. And on that one three-hour regulated burst, we fixed everything. Regulating high-time, low-importance things into a window totally frees up your mind. What do you do about stuff that's high importance but doesn't take very long? Like, I'm like picking your kids up from daycare? Or like saying hi to your team in the morning? This is important stuff, but doesn't take very long. The word I had to Google to discover, to rhyme, is "effectuate." That means just execute, just do it, because it doesn't take very long.

• 1:38:48Speaker 00

  And the importance of the model is, of course, the top-right quadrant, as it often is, with the high-time, high-importance decisions, you have freedom now to debate them.

• 1:38:59Speaker 00

  Where am I gonna live? Who am I gonna be with? What school will I go to? These are the chewy ones. These are the ones you should be thinking about, that you should be contemplating, but which you have no space for because of the endless series of dings and pings, forcing you to make decisions on things that are not important. So I am carving out this two by two matrix with the express purpose of taking more time to debate the bigger things, which you're the master of. Like, this is your sweet spot.

• 1:39:29Shane Parrish?

  Debating?

• 1:39:29Speaker 00

  Thinking about things at a level of depth that other people can't get to.

• 1:39:34Shane Parrish?

  I want to end on two-minute mornings. So, last question. Talk me through your two-minute mornings and how they impact your day.

• 1:39:42Speaker 00

  Sure. Every single day, I wake up in the morning and I write down three things. I write down, "I will let go of", "I am grateful for", and "I will focus on". I believe that with the decline of the church and the rise of secularism, by the way, National Geographic reports that the fastest-growing religion is no religion. And certain countries, like, I believe, France, Australia, UK, are about to cross into a majority secular population for the first time. We've also lost confession, which is a root belief system in a lot of world religion. You know, the Catholic confession chamber? But also Mormonism, Judaism, Islam have confession built in. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I put Big Tony in a vice under the deli.

• 1:40:27Speaker 00

  You know, remember from the movies and stuff. So we've lost that. So I think we see a huge uptick in things like postsecret.com, which has collected a million postcards of people mailing confessions. It's the largest advertisement-free blog in the world, like, a billion hits. And I do this for myself every morning. "I will let go of" is a way to crystallize and eject an anxiety that I start my day with. And there is one every single day. "I will let go of comparing myself to Tim Ferriss. I will let go of the fact that this guy has a book on the bestseller list and I don't." There's always stuff. "The five pounds I gained over the holidays and my stomach, like, damn, now I need to go to the gym." "I am grateful for", we talked about earlier. This is the practice of gratitude. We know from the research it's super powerful. Just write a few simple, specific things.

• 1:41:12Speaker 00

  We didn't talk about that, but they have to be specific. You can't just write "family" and "friends." That doesn't do anything. You have to say like, "my husband put the toilet seat down." You have to be like, "specific." And I will focus on, is maybe one of the root issues we've been exploring today, is carving from the giant clay block that is your endless could-do and should-do list, one thing you will do each day. There is nothing more satisfying to me than at the end of the night, crossing off the one thing I'm gonna do that day. And guess what I wrote this morning? "Talk to you." And I will cross that off when I fly home tonight, and it will feel awesome. Because no matter what else I could've and should've done, which by the way, there's lots, and I probably did half of, I'll feel good, because my day was a success.

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  I will let go of, I am grateful for, I will focus on, is a two-minute morning practice to reveal to heal or create contemporary confession and a positive path of thinking for the day.

• 1:42:06Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a great way to wake up bright. It refocuses and reframes a lot of what's going on.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  If you can't get the kid cuddling in.

• 1:42:11Shane Parrish?

  Well, I mean, maybe incorporate it with the kids, right? And that might be a better way to do it. But this has been an amazing conversation, Neil. Thank you so much.

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  Thanks, Shane. I love what you're doing. I love the work you make. I love your art. I think it's beautiful. Thanks for having me on the show.

• 1:42:24Shane Parrish?

  Appreciate it. You too.

• 1:42:29Shane Parrish?

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