RACHAEL O'MEARA: Hi,
everybody, and welcome.
We're going to go
ahead and get started.
My name is Rachael
O'Meara and I'm
really excited to host today
our speaker, Neil Pasricha.
A few things about Neil
before we jump in--
So Neil Pasricha is
"The New York Times"
bestselling author of
"The Book of Awesome"
series, which has been
published in 10 countries
and spent over five
years on bestseller lists
and sold over a million copies.
"The Book of Awesome" was
based on his blog, 1000
Awesome Things, which has
scored over 50 million hits
and twice won the Webby award
for best blog in the world.
That's pretty good.
Pasricha is a Harvard MBA,
one of the most popular TED
speakers of all time,
and today serves
as director of the Institute
for Global Happiness.
Previously, he spent a decade
running leadership development
inside Wal-mart, the
world's largest company.
Neil has created global
leadership programs
for many Fortune 50
companies, and has
spoken to hundreds of thousands
of people around the globe.
His work has been
featured by CNN, BBC, TED,
"The Today Show," and
the "Sunday Times."
I'm very excited to
present and introduce Neil.
Today he shares his new book,
"The Happiness Equation."
Thank you and welcome.
[APPLAUSE]
NEIL PASRICHA: Thank
you very much, Rachael.
I appreciate that.
Thanks, everybody.
How's everybody doing today?
Feeling good?
What a joy this to
be a Google today.
This is just a nice
delight for me.
You guys work here, so it's
not maybe special every day.
But for me, coming
down the highway,
pulling into this
place that I've
heard so much about
for so many years,
it just feels like a bit
of a dream come true.
I'm so flattered that
you invited me to come,
so thank you so
much for having me.
You know, my whole story
kind of begins with Google,
to be honest with you.
A number of years
ago, I was going
through a really big
rough patch in my life.
I was in a marriage heading
in the wrong direction.
And I had a really
close friend that
was battling mental illness.
And in that time, I
didn't know where to turn.
So I turned to Google, and I
typed in "how to start a blog"
and I pressed I'm Feeling Lucky.
It was, like, one of the few
times I was feeling lucky.
And 10 minutes later,
I had started up
a tiny website called
1000AwesomeThings.com just
as a way to put a smile
on my face every day
before I went to bed.
So I start coming
home from work.
And I start writing
about flipping
to the cold side of the pillow
in the middle of the night.
And I pressed Post.
And then I started
writing about hitting
a string of green lights
when you're late for work.
And I'd write a little bit about
that, and then I'd press Post.
And then I started writing about
getting called up to the dinner
buffet first at a wedding, you
know, table 76 in the back!
You get the meatballs before
they're stuck together
and everything.
And then I'd press Post.
And while I started writing
this blog, my life got worse.
That marriage that was going
in the wrong direction ended.
And it was really heartbreaking.
And what made matters
much worse was
that my friend who was
struggling with mental illness
didn't make it.
He sadly took his own life.
And as I was going
through these emotions,
as was his family
and all his friends,
I found that the blog,
1000 Awesome Things,
became an escape for me,
became therapy for me.
It became some place I looked
forward to going every day.
And as you probably know,
50,000 blogs are started a day.
So nobody read this
except for my mom.
But over time, it grew
and grew and grew.
To the day where it
ended up winning awards
for Best Blog in the World,
scoring all those millions
of hits and turned into
a series of books called
"The Book of Awesome,"
"Book of Even More Awesome,"
"Book of Holiday Awesome,"
"Journal of Awesome,"
"App of Awesome," "Five
Calendars of Awesome."
It turned into
this awesome thing.
And the scary part
about all that
happening to me, as I
was writing this blog,
working at Wal-mart,
and writing these books
was, I wasn't actually happy.
That's actually the hard
part about the whole thing,
is that the front page
of the national newspaper
said, "Neil is the Pied
Piper of happiness."
And it was really hard in those
interviews to tell people--
and I didn't tell people--
that I was kind of not
very happy on the inside.
I had lost 40 pounds
due to stress.
People at work were
like, you look great.
What's your secret?
I was like, no sleep.
That's it, just stress.
And I was struggling
through a divorce
and a new apartment
and a new town,
trying to meet new friends.
And so for me, I spent a few
years getting to number one
on that blog, posting the last
entry in 2012, number one,
remember it was
1,000 awesome things,
so I wrote it every
day for four years--
1000-- until we
wrote hit number one.
And then I put the pen
down, put the keyboard away.
And I stopped
writing completely.
And I tried to shift
myself from the observation
of awesome things to
what I called in my mind
the application
of awesome things,
like buying a salt and pepper
shaker for the first time,
buying dishes, doing
this new thing, which
is really popular some people do
called cooking, which I'd never
really done, starting
online dating,
starting to meet new
people-- getting out there
and trying to live
a life, you know?
And so I didn't write
for a few years.
But I did meet someone new.
Her name's Leslie.
She's a schoolteacher
in Toronto.
And we fell in love, fast.
She baked me a cake
on my birthday,
and did things that I
hadn't had happen in years.
And it was just so nice.
And we fell in love.
We moved in together.
We got engaged.
We got married.
We go on a honeymoon.
And on the flight home from
that honeymoon, on the plane,
she says, you know, I'm not
really feeling very well.
So on the layover in Malaysia,
we go to the pharmacy.
She gets back on the plane.
She goes to the tiny
little airplane bathroom.
She comes back to our seats
and she says, I'm pregnant.
We're about to take off on
the tarmac on a 12-hour flight
home.
By the way, if anyone
wants a good secret
of scoring a free
muffin on an airplane,
you just have to tell the flight
attendant you found out you're
pregnant right then and there.
And all kinds of thoughts and
emotions hit me all at once.
How many people
here are parents?
I know there's a lot
of people online too.
How many people want
their kids to be happy?
All the same hands,
even some that don't
have kids, which is amazing.
That's incredible.
And I was kind of
like that, though.
It's true.
I didn't have kids.
But I thought deeply.
I was like, but I
want them to be happy.
That's the thing
I know the most.
And you know what's
crazy, Rachael?
I had those five years
of the blog taking off,
the books, the TED talk, invited
to speak to royal families
and big corporations and CEOs.
And I thought to myself,
but all those people, they
aren't happy, either.
I mean, I'm working for them.
I'm seeing them up close.
You work right here at Google.
You know what I mean.
It's like, it's not like
you just flip a switch
and you're successful relative
to your family and your peers.
But it doesn't mean
everyone is just happy.
It doesn't just mean that.
So we got back home to
Toronto, and guess what I did?
I opened a Microsoft
Word document.
And I wrote Document 1.
I wrote, "Dear
Baby, I wanted you
to have this in case I didn't
have a chance to tell you.
Love, Dad."
And every single day for
the next nine months,
I woke up around 5:00 AM.
I set my alarm, but
I didn't need to.
I jumped out of bed.
I picked up the pen again
for the first time in years,
and I eventually wrote
a 300-page letter
to my unborn child, called,
eventually, "The Nine Secrets
to Living a Happy Life."
I took together
everything that I'd
learned in research from
positive psychology,
everything I had learned from
seeing some of these executives
up close, interviewing them,
talking to bestselling authors
and people on stages, and my
own personal experience-- what
my parents taught me.
And I stewed it all together
into this 300-page letter.
And that 300-page
letter is the book
you have in your hands today
called "The Happiness Equation"
I'm so excited to share with
you that that just came out
a few days ago.
And if you look at the very
bottom of the copyright page,
in two-point font, like where
the Library of Congress info
is, it says, "Dear
Baby, I wanted
you to have this,
in case I didn't
have a chance to tell you.
Love, Dad."
This book is the letter
I wrote to my son
before he was born, before
I knew it was a boy.
And now I'm so excited
to share it with you.
There's nine secrets
in this book,
and I know how much
time we have together.
So what I thought
I'd ask you is,
would you like me to share
three of them with you
today at lunch?
Sounds like a good plan?
OK, so secret number
one, the first thing we
must do before we can be happy.
My mom is from Nairobi, Kenya.
My dad is from Amritsar, India.
And they got here to
Canada, North America.
And they said, Neil, you
know, it's really simple.
It's really simple.
You do great work.
Then you will have a big success
and then you will be happy.
That's how it works.
You study really hard.
And then you get good grades,
and then you're happy.
Or you work really hard
and then you get promoted,
and then you're happy.
That's what my parents beat
into me from a young age.
It's what we all hear
from our parents.
Positive psychology, study after
study, things done at Stanford,
things done by researchers
like [INAUDIBLE], [INAUDIBLE],
lots of others, have actually
shown this model's totally
backwards.
Instead, we now know
that if you be happy
first, if you choose to be
happy, then you do great work.
Your productivity goes up 31%.
Your sales goes up 37%.
You're three times
more creative.
And then you have the
big success after.
Happiness is actually
the leading indicator.
The model's totally backwards.
The six important
words are flipped.
Now, it's one thing to
be invited to Google
and to just tell
everyone, like, cool.
Everyone got it?
Just be happy.
It's easy.
And then, thanks a lot.
Where do I get my free lunch?
I heard there's some fancy food
here-- and then just take off.
But of course, it's
not that simple.
You can't just flip a
switch in the morning.
You don't just wake
up and say, OK, I'm
going to be happy today.
Everyone's got good
days and bad days.
But what do we do?
So what do we do?
Well, the research suggests
that 40% of our happiness,
four times as much
as our circumstances,
are actually controlled
by intentional activities.
I mean things we can do
in just 20 minutes a day
to actually cultivate
our own happiness.
So what I want to
share with you now
is the result of me
sifting through over 300
positive psychology studies.
And I'm bringing for you
what I call the big five.
These are five
studies anyone can
do in just 20 minutes a day.
And if you do it for
20 days in a row,
you've cultivated a
new happiness habit.
So here are the five.
The first one is
real simple, and it's
perfect on this giant campus.
You just go for three
20 minute walks a week.
Penn State
researchers have found
that exercise has a tremendous
impact on your happiness.
Professor Michael
[? Badeck ?] and his team
showed that a group of people
who went on three brisk walks
a week actually have
a higher happiness
rating at the end than people
on antidepressants and people
who were on antidepressants
and doing the walking.
The exercise group alone
outperformed the other two.
For anyone who has
a dog late at night
that wants to go for a walk,
you know what I'm talking about.
You don't want to go outside.
The last thing you
want to do is just
sort of get ready
and go outside.
It's been raining here-- it's
the last thing I want to do.
But when you come back,
you are reinvigorated.
You are energized.
The walking gets you moving and
it increases your happiness.
Number two is called
the 20-minute replay.
And for this one, it's good.
I'm getting some
free squats in today.
University of Texas
researchers did
a study called, How Do I Love
Thee-- Let Me Count the Words.
And they found that couples who
journaled for 20 minutes a day
about one positive experience
they had during the day
were 50% more likely
to stay together
after three months, which
is a really long time
at a university campus.
That's a really
long relationship.
And why does this work?
Why does journaling at the
end of the day for 20 minutes
help you be happier?
Because your mind has no
Google Maps system in it.
It's got no GPS.
You don't actually
know where you are.
When you are journaling
about the coffee
that your friend brought
you during the day,
you are there again.
You are re-living
that experience.
And when you're reading
your own journal,
you're re-living
it a third time.
You get a tripling effect
on the net positive thing
that happened to you,
just by writing it down.
Number three-- five random acts.
Professor [INAUDIBLE]
at Stanford University
had students perform or commit
five random acts of kindness
over the course of a week.
We don't often think
about buying a coffee
for the security
guard of our building.
But if you do it, you feel
better about yourself.
You're like, I'm the
coffee buying guy.
I'm the door holder opener.
You feel great
about who you are,
and your happiness shoots up.
Number four is meditation.
We all know the studies.
Massachusetts General
Hospital researchers
found that if you
close your eyes
and do a few minutes
of deep breathing,
you increase the activity in the
prefrontal cortex of your brain
that's responsible for
focus and attention.
For me, I always found
meditation so difficult.
I was thinking about
going to the basement
and shutting off the lights,
turning up the music.
I just couldn't get into it.
But my wife Leslie
downloaded the Headspace app,
which I have no affiliation
with personally.
But now we have the
little splitter,
and when the baby goes to
sleep, we do a guided meditation
together.
It makes it really accessible.
We even made the big
financial commitment
to subscribe for a
couple bucks a month,
which was a big conversation
before we did that.
But it makes meditation
accessible to us.
And we just know it
makes us happier.
If we've done none of the other
things during the day, hey,
we can do a 10-minute guided
meditation before we go to bed.
And the last one I'll give
you is five gratitudes--
five gratitudes.
Professor [INAUDIBLE]
actually asked students
to perform and write
down five things
that they were grateful
for or five events that
happened during the
week or five hassles.
Over a 10-week period,
as you can imagine,
the people that wrote
down five things
they were grateful for a
week were much happier.
I was actually doing a
speech of the day and a woman
put up her hand.
She said, hey, I think I'm doing
that at home, but I'm not sure.
Can you tell me?
You see, my husband's
a grouch and I've
got three teenage boys.
So every day at
the dinner table,
I force them to go
around the dinner table
and say one good thing that
happened during their day.
Is that what this study says?
And I said, no, not at all.
The study is five
gratitudes a week.
If you're doing five a day--
you guys are better at math
than me.
I think that's like
a 700% increase
over the minimum effective dose.
The point is, five is easy.
It's just five a week.
The hard part is
writing them down.
What do these five things do?
These are the big
five superstudies.
Three walks, a 20 minute replay,
five random acts of kindness,
meditation, or five gratitudes.
You do any of those.
Pick one.
You don't have to do five.
Pick one.
For just 20 minutes a
day for 28 days in a row,
you've developed a
new happiness habit.
So what is the
first thing you must
do before you can be happy?
You must be happy first.
You must put happiness at
the front of the equation.
Invest in it with some of
these specific practices
and cultivate your happiness.
Secret number two-- the secret
to never being too busy again.
Has anyone here ever been
busy before in their life?
You're like, yeah, this other
guy was supposed to come today.
He was too busy to come.
That's the thing.
We're all too busy.
There is so much
business in our days.
And on top of that,
there's these three numbers
that actually petrify
me every single morning.
These numbers scare me.
Does anybody know what they are?
147.
Couple people
shaking their head.
This is the average number
of emails we get a day-- 147.
I know what you're thinking.
Some people are like, I
get way more than that.
It's the average.
My mom gets six.
You might get 300.
150-- number of times
you check your phone.
That is correct.
Some studies actually say it's
once every four minutes now.
150 times a day.
But the good news is, three
times you check your phone,
there's nothing there.
The other 147 times you have
someone waiting for you.
At the end of this talk,
you'll have, like, 18 emails.
You know what I mean?
OK, cool.
This number scares
me the most-- 295,
based on my own
personal research.
Average number of decisions
people are making a day.
Average number of decisions
people make in a day.
You know, decision-making
energy is a finite resource.
We don't have an
unlimited supply of it.
As we're using it, we don't
feel like we're using it.
You go to the grocery
store, you pick
between 20 kinds of salsa,
30 kinds of potato chips.
There used to be,
like, one kind of egg.
Now there's, like,
20 kinds of eggs.
You pick out all that stuff.
You get to the front.
Your decision-making
energy is gone.
There's only two
ways to replenish it.
Number one is
sleep-- tough place
to take a nap, in front
of the grocery store.
Number two is
glucose, or anything
that turns into
glucose in your body,
hence there being a huge
display of candy bars
right at the front of the store.
That's exactly
why they're there.
My wife and I, we did a wedding
registry before we got married.
Has anyone ever had
that experience?
You go to the store.
You're super-excited You
get the [INAUDIBLE] gun.
You're like, yeah,
honey, this is great.
We don't have to
pay for anything.
Do you want yellow
bowls or blue bowls?
Shiny ones or matte?
Tall glasses or short ones?
12 of them or eight?
By the end of the day,
you are exhausted.
You are drained.
The lady came up to us.
Our eyes were glossed over.
She's like, I got a $300
ice bucket you'll love.
We're like, great.
We've never used it.
We never will use it.
The point is, we didn't need it.
Our decision-making
energy was down.
When we have no
decision-making energy left,
we do one of two things.
We either make no decision
or we make a bad decision.
Those are the only
two options left.
No wonder we're so busy.
We've got too much going on.
When I did this
study on myself, I
found I was making 50 decisions
on just food every day,
30 decisions on my commute.
Which way am I going to go?
So, what did I do to write
this letter for my son?
Well, I ended up
saying, you know what?
I've been lucky.
I've got access to
some of these people.
I'm working for some big shots.
I got access to
some other speakers.
I interviewed them.
I asked them.
You probably have a lot
of decisions in your life.
What do you do to simplify them?
What do you do to
streamline them?
Is there a practice,
a technique, anything?
I took the answers of
all those interviews
and I drew them
into one big box.
That's not very big.
Let's draw it a
little bit bigger.
I drew it into a box.
And this box is-- here we
go-- on one axis it's time.
So we got a high
amount of time takes
to make a decision or
a low amount of time.
And on the other
axis, it is important.
Like, it's not very
important or it's a big deal.
Every decision goes
somewhere in this box.
You can imagine that.
So what do you do with the low
time, low importance decision?
You guys are great at
this already at Google.
We can all get a
little bit better.
But the solution, and what
these people were doing,
these successful
people, is they were
automating those decisions.
Anything that's low time, low
importance, you automate it.
You automate it.
So now I make zero
decisions on my way to work.
Why?
Because I use your app,
Ways, and I just follow it.
If it tells me to go down
a back alley, I listen.
I don't pay attention anymore.
Woman said to me, you know what?
I do double dinners.
You guys get food here, I know.
But she just makes twice and
takes the leftovers for lunch.
People have consumables.
My friend Chad has consumables,
everything delivered
to his house from Amazon.
Yeah, it's easy for the
yogurt and for the salsa
and for the milk and stuff.
He's got his towels coming in.
Once a year, he gets
a new face towel.
Everything is just automated.
How many decisions can
you eliminate by saying,
I want to automate that my life?
Bill payments is
a classic example.
So what do you do
with the decisions
that are not very important,
but they take forever,
like the 147 e-mails you get?
The solution of course
there is to regulate them,
simply fence them off
into a part of your life
where you can
manage them better.
I have a friend that wrote
a book on productivity.
He answers all his emails
between 3:00 and 4:00 PM.
He said to me, people that
email me in the morning,
they get an answer.
Comes after lunch.
People that email me
at 4:00, 5:00, 6:00
PM, they get an answer.
They don't expect anyone
until the next day.
And they give it to him.
He's just reasoned that that
one hour works best for him
to regulate it.
My wife and I, we live at 250
on the street in Toronto-- 250.
We have an old
house, small house.
And every day or two,
something goes wrong with it.
A door is squeaky, needs grease.
Someone's got to
shovel something.
There's just always
something wrong.
It was bogging us down
when we first moved in.
But then on the inside of
one of our kitchen cupboards,
we made a little
chart called 250 day.
Anytime something's
wrong, we just
write it down on that chart.
We set a recurring meeting
between the two of us every--
the first Saturday of every
month, from 9 to 12, 250 day.
And you know what
we do that day?
We just go to that list
and do all the chores.
We've just regulated it into
once a month for three hours,
and we do a chores
blitz that day.
We fix everything in
our house, rather than
mentally thinking about it
throughout all of our time.
What do you do with the
super important stuff that
doesn't take very long,
like picking your kids up
from daycare, saying hi to
your team in the morning?
Some of this stuff,
you just gotta do.
That's why that
word is effectuate.
It's a big word with
a small meeting.
It just means get her done.
Just do it.
The beautiful thing
about this model
is that if you actually
automate, regulate,
and effectuate all of these
decisions, guess what?
Your brain actually
finally has time
to debate the big ones, to
actually think about the where
am I going to live?
Who am I going to be with?
What am I going to do?
The big heavy problems actually
weighing you down-- you
finally make room for them.
Now they're ugly and
you've got to tackle them.
But the point is,
you created space.
So what's the secret to
never being too busy again?
It is to create
space in your life.
And this model is one tool
that I found that helps.
Secret number three--
secret number three,
the secret to turning your
biggest fear into your biggest
success.
I'm embarrassed to
admit this, especially
because we're filming
this and so it's
going to be on YouTube forever.
But I'll say it right
now for the first time.
I didn't know how to swim
at all in my early 30s.
I'm 36 now.
And why didn't I
know how to swim?
My sister can swim
and everything.
It's because I had ear
infections my whole childhood,
so I had tubes in my
ears my whole childhood,
and I had a traumatic
experience on top of all that.
I fell into the pool
and I couldn't swim.
So I can almost
still see it today.
And so that's fine,
because you know what?
Who cares?
I didn't need to swim.
I live in Toronto.
There's no ocean.
I'm good.
I wouldn't even bring my
bathing suit to the pool party.
My friends wanted to go
swimming at university?
I hang out by the
treadmill-- no problem.
I eliminated swimming
from my life.
You see, I didn't
think I can do it.
I didn't think I had
the capability to do it.
And I certainly
didn't want to do it.
I had no motivation,
so I never did it.
And that's how we
think about anything.
You've got to have the
capability then the motivation
and then you have the action.
I never got to do, because
these things were never
going to happen.
All that changed
on my second date
with Leslie, when she said to
me over dinner one night, so,
do you like swimming?
And I was thinking
to myself, uh-oh.
Play it cool, Pasricha.
You don't want to scare her off.
And I said to her, nah.
Nah, I'm not really a big fan.
She says, Ah, that's too bad.
You see, my family's
had a cottage
on an island for generations.
And there's 20 of us up
there, the whole summer.
My 80-year-old grandparents,
my five-year-old cousins--
we get up every morning in the
summer, jump into the lake,
and swim around the island.
Takes about half an hour.
Man, I guess you can't come.
Suddenly that night,
without thinking
about whether I can do it
or whether I want to do it,
I just did it.
I signed up for adult learn
to swim classes at the City
of Toronto downtown pool.
And I don't know
how many people here
have seen the downtown
City of Toronto pool.
This isn't a
recommended thing to do.
It's right in the urban
center of the city.
I'm getting my life jacket,
the goggles, whole thing.
I'm walking onto the pool deck
that first Wednesday night.
My heart is beating louder
than it had in years.
I was so nervous.
But you know what
happened when I walked
in on the pool deck, Rachael?
I get out there, and you
know who's out there?
A whole bunch of people
who suck at swimming.
For once, I'm not the only one.
People are from
landlocked countries.
They had more traumatic
experiences than me.
Trust formed very quickly.
So we get into the shallow
end with the flutter board,
the life jacket, the goggles.
And within five minutes
of doing that, where
I could touch the bottom, I
was like, hey, wait a minute.
I can do that.
That's not hard.
I can do that.
And then you know what?
The next week, I
wanted to do it.
I wanted to do it,
because I was like, well,
I kind of thought
I can do it now.
And so the next
week I was flutter
kicking in the deep end.
The week after, flutter
kicking with no life jacket.
By the end of the eight weeks,
I was doing the front crawl.
The thing I realized is that
motivation doesn't actually
lead to action,
like we all think.
Action leads to motivation.
It's completely flipped.
You want to write that novel?
You don't need the perfect
coffee shop, the right idea,
and the expensive mole skin.
Just write one sentence
with a pen from the hotel
on a Post-it note.
Just doing that will tell
you that you can do it,
and then you'll want to do it.
You want to run a marathon?
Forget the good shoes,
the right playlist,
and the running
buddy-- forget it.
Just run to the stoplight
in your dress shoes.
By the time you do that,
you're like, I can do that.
And then you think
you can do it,
and then you'll want to do it.
It's the exact opposite.
It's the exact opposite.
Don't just take it from me.
You guys are scientists.
You probably trust
someone like Isaac Newton.
He's the greatest physicist
of all time, after all,
I mean, up there with Einstein.
The guy discovered
gravity, invented calculus.
Pretty good resume.
He'd probably be hired
at Google these days.
And he actually said in
his first law of motion.
I can remember grade 10
science, an object in motion
will remain in motion
unless acted upon
by an equal or greater force.
Put another way, if
you start doing it,
if you place action
first, you'll continue.
It's harder to stop.
And that's why at the end of
my adult learn to swim classes,
I signed up again.
And I signed up again,
and I signed up again.
And it was the same exact class.
I didn't go to
learn to swim two.
I just did learn to swim one.
I'm like, I love this.
It's amazing.
I could do the front crawl.
I loved it so much, I just kept
doing it over and over again.
It is easier.
It is easier to act
yourself into a new way
of thinking than
to think yourself
into a new way of acting.
Our brains are often the enemy.
How do you do it?
How do you make your biggest
fear into your biggest success?
You just do it.
You put action first.
We all know Nike's
slogan, Just do it.
What you probably don't know is
that Nike was an $800 million
company with low
20% market share
when they came up
with this slogan.
Then they struck a
nerve deep inside of us,
something we all
believe is true.
You know what?
On the heels of the slogan,
$10 billion company-- 50%,
60% market share.
That's over the lifetime
of using the slogan.
We can remember the
that jazzed you up.
You're like, I can do that.
Just get out there and do it.
And it works.
It works.
So all of these three are
three of the nine secrets
I have in my new book,
"The Happiness Equation."
I've tried to give you light,
simple, summarized versions,
of course, without
all the stories
that I have in the
book or the psychology
studies that are
supporting them.
But what I hope that they share
is the idea that all of us
have the option of being
slightly happier people.
And together, that creates
a happier organization.
So thank you very much
for your time today.
I appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
RACHAEL O'MEARA: Great.
So we'll do some
question and answer,
if anyone has
questions in the room.
NEIL PASRICHA: Yes, I'd
love to take questions.
AUDIENCE: This is kind
of tongue in cheek,
but it's also serious.
Are you happy?
NEIL PASRICHA: Thank
you for the question.
The question for those in
here is, are you happy?
First of all, happiness is a
choice and it's a practice.
And I really want to
emphasize the second word.
My view is that happiness can
only be experienced, of course,
if you have the other elements
of life to feel it again.
Right now, I'm on a book tour.
That makes me happy.
But you know who I
wrote the book for?
My son.
He's at home, thousands of miles
away in Toronto with my wife
who's pregnant with our second.
So it's hard to feel happy
when I miss them so much,
and I'm Skyping in to
eat breakfast together.
I'm trying my best.
I wrote a letter
for every single day
I'm away with a little
present he opens every day.
My wife hid little
letters in my suitcase
that I can open when I feel
lonely or when I miss them.
So we're trying
to keep connected.
We're doing our exercise.
We do rose, thorn,
bud every night.
A rose from our day, a thorn
from our day-- so gratitude,
something went wrong, and
a bud, something we're
looking forward to.
So we do it now over
voice recording.
We text it back and forth.
But these are all
things we've created,
because it's hard for
me to be happy when I'm
missing people I love the most.
And I'm away from
them for weeks.
So, as a practice,
I'm getting there.
But it's always a
daily-- it's always
something I work on every day.
I'm not uniformly happy.
I'm not an eternal
optimist who just
wakes up and flips a switch.
I do these practices
that I'm recommending.
I think about them.
I'm conscious of them.
I did a meditation this
morning before coming here.
And I'm working on it.
That's the fair answer.
AUDIENCE: I found for me
that really, happiness
is about how I choose
my goals, and choosing
the right goals for me.
So society, parents,
advertising,
all proposes lots of goals--
books propose lots of goals.
So choosing the
right goals, I think,
is really paramount
in being happy.
And I wonder if you could
talk more about that.
NEIL PASRICHA: Sure.
Sure.
The second secret in my book is
called, the four simple words
that block all criticism.
I'm really talking about
doing what you love,
and the four words
are, do it for you.
And I share a number of
studies, some of which
you may already know,
about extrinsic versus
intrinsic motivators.
Studies actually
show when they ask
girls, for example, to tutor
another girl in the piano.
And they're told, hey, you're
going to teach her the piano.
It's going to feel great.
And they do a great job.
When they're told, you teach
her the piano for half an hour
and then you get a ticket to
go to the movies for free,
well, they get frustrated.
They sort of lose faith.
And then when the
half hour is over,
they bolt, whether
they've learned it or not.
The point is, extrinsic
motivators actually mentally
block our intrinsic motivators.
We can't see our original
reasons for doing them.
You know why I started
writing 1,000 Awesome Things?
To cheer myself up.
I'll write 1,000 awesome things.
That's cool.
Then I started noticing
the blog counter.
50 hits-- I'll
try to get 50,000.
Well, that was easy.
I'll try to get a million.
I'll submit it to Fark
and Digg and Reddit.
I'll just keep
cranking on this thing.
Well, that's not monetized.
I need to have a book.
Oh, it's got to be a
bestseller, the 0.01%,
otherwise it doesn't count.
Oh, it's only been
bestseller for one week.
You've got to get on the "New
York Times" bestseller list.
Oh, it's got to be a
bestseller for 200 weeks,
otherwise it's like, I'm not
going to make any money off it
if it doesn't do that.
I became obsessed.
Drove myself into the ground,
sleeping three hours a night.
I'm buying eye
makeup because I'm
embarrassed to go to work
with black bags under my eyes.
I lost my intrinsic
reasons for doing it,
and I stopped writing.
Because I was setting goals
and just achieving them,
and they never ended.
So we need to remember
to do it for us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
said, the hardest thing
to do in the world
is to be yourself
in a world that's
constantly trying
to make you something else.
I think I butchered the quote,
but it's pretty close to that.
And that's the point.
How do you do it for you?
Especially when
everything you do
has a performance evaluation
and a paycheck attached to it.
You have to get away
from that somehow.
You've got to find
your intrinsic reasons.
You've got to write
those down, and you
gotta make sure
everything you're doing
is for those intrinsic reasons.
Advice is always
going to conflict.
You can't take what
other people say.
The pen is mightier
than the sword.
Actions speak louder than words.
Every single cliche conflicts.
Ultimately, you have
to listen to yourself
and that's the
hardest thing to do.
In the book on
secret number eight,
I have three tests to find
your authentic self, tests
that I perform on
myself every six months.
How did I do on the lake?
You know what?
I did it.
I did it.
And you know what I found?
I did it with a life jacket.
Because when I jumped in
that lake, first of all,
there was something that
there wasn't in the pool.
It's called waves.
I didn't account for
that in my training.
So it was harder for
me to swim in the lake.
There was wind in the lake
and a bit of a current almost.
So I did it, with a
life jacket, which
I couldn't have done before.
And I felt very proud of it.
Because then I
thought, I can do this.
And then-- it was a
couple summers ago--
I did it more than once.
I jumped in the lake
and went around.
It was just that mental barrier
was erased because I put action
in front of motivation.
It's the hardest thing to do.
Thanks for asking.
Yes?
How do you set expectations
that are high enough
that they're
difficult to achieve,
but low enough that
they're achievable,
and how does that fit into
your internal motivations?
You know what?
We're going to blow
ourselves up in society.
We are.
We've got a problem.
We used to live in a culture
called the culture of enough.
We probably don't remember that.
It was before most
of us were born.
It was the 250,000 years
of our species' history up
until the early 1900s.
It's called the
culture of enough.
You need enough food to eat.
You need enough of a
house to live under.
You need enough.
And then at the turn of the
century, three things happened.
Number one, mass production made
fridges and washing machines
and these things that
came into our houses that
actually increased our time.
Now we could want more,
because we could do more.
We had more time.
And the other interesting
invention that happened
was radios.
Radios were the first
time advertisements ever
entered the home.
So now we were trained
to desire more.
Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers,
1927 in the "Harvard Business
Review" wrote, we must
move society from a needs
to a wants culture.
Today, we live in
the culture of more,
from the old culture of enough.
Pop Momand from San Diego
was one of the first people
to put his finger on that.
He moved to New York.
He was a successful cartoonist,
moved to a rich neighborhood
and thought, I'm
surrounded by people
who all have more than me.
So he started to
write a cartoon.
He moved down to
Manhattan, which
was a poorer area at the time,
and started a cartoon called,
"Keeping Up with the Joneses."
He made up that phrase.
It was called "Keeping Up
with the Smiths" originally,
but didn't roll very well.
That cartoon published
syndication for over 20 years.
In the book, I have the very
first comic of that cartoon.
It's old enough that we were
able to put it in the book.
And so in this culture we live
in, one of more, more, more,
it's risky.
It's risky.
Goals and expectations are in
the context of a society that
always wants more of us.
Employers want more of us.
Our relationships
want more of us.
We want everything
to be perfect.
My wife tells a
great story where
she talked to her
great-grandmother
when she was over
100 years old, just
maybe a year before she died.
And she said,
Great-grandma, how am I
going to find a man who makes
enough money, is really funny,
is good-looking, has a great
job, is really compassionate,
and loves me?
And the woman couldn't
stop laughing.
She was like, that
doesn't exist.
You find one or two.
You look for the rest elsewhere.
Today in society, we want
everything from everybody
all the time.
It's scary.
It's scary.
And so the solution I propose
is remembering three words.
Those words are,
remember the lottery.
Remember the lottery.
Remember that we've already won.
What do I mean by that?
There are 7 billion
people in the world today.
There are 115 billion people
who have ever lived, ever.
That means by being
alive today, you
have already won the lottery.
One in 15 people are alive.
14 out of every 15
people will never
eat a bowl of
chocolate ice cream,
kiss their kids goodnight,
see another sunset,
or be in the
kitchen with a group
of friends singing happy
birthday to them ever again.
You already won the
lottery by being alive.
And the United Nations
World Happiness Report's
coming out March 20th.
Guess what?
This country's going
to be near the top
again, as it is every year.
So we're probably
most people that
don't have the time or
availability to watch this
or the people listening in.
I'm from Canada.
We're always in the top five,
us and our Scandinavian brothers
and sisters.
We already got it good.
If you have a
post-secondary education,
you're one of 7% in
the world who does.
If you make more
than $5,000 a year,
you're above the world average.
If you make more than $50,000,
you're in the top 0.05%
already.
You know the 1%?
It's all of us.
Everyone-- North America,
you won the lottery.
And if you need even more
motivation than that,
Google the image "pale
blue dot" and see the Earth
from a distance, in the vast
expanse of the universe.
And remember this is the only
place you could ever be alive.
We got to be here at the perfect
time, in the perfect place,
with the perfect amount
of oxygen and water,
and we're alive.
We have all the
things going for us
thank you so much for taking
time out of your busy schedules
to join me today.
I really appreciate it.
RACHAEL O'MEARA:
Thank you, Neil.
Thanks.
