Notes on Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits
Source: fs.
When I listened to it: January 2020
Why I listened to it: I’m a regular listener of The Knowledge Project. This episode was special. The host (Shane) and the guest (Neil) know each other well. This led to some interesting conversation across many ideas, including: why work-life balance is not a thing, parenting, happiness, and resilience.
Go to the episode page for details and to listen or scroll down to review my notes.
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My notes
About Neil Pasricha
Neil Pasricha is the NY Times bestselling author of The Book of Awesome series and a popular TED speaker. He’s one of the world's leading authorities on intentional living.
Resilience
Resilience is the capacity to get back up and return to your normal state after a blow, such as a relationship failure, job firing, or traumatic experience.
Resilience is the inner strength you use to return to your baseline.
It’s harder for young people to build resilience through experience today in first-world countries because life has become pretty easy. We live in an era of “infinite abundance” that does not force us to learn resilience. Life is so easy we’ve lost our ability to handle failure (or even perceived failure). If you zoom out to look at human civilization over our 200,000-year evolutionary history, we’ve experienced wars, plagues, and famines. Today, the average person lives as kings lived 100 years ago. We have clean water, feel safe, and choose our relationships.
Lower resilience leads to higher anxiety rates, loneliness rates, depression rates, and suicide rates.
How do we build resilience today?
Most people think resilience is learned through experience.
You build resilience when you go through a tough situation and get through it and realize you can overcome tough situations. You gain the understanding and awareness that things will go on. This leads to self-confidence.
As a parent, you want to consider the following questions about resilience. How do we make sure our kids have the muscles to rebound? How do we make sure they’re not anxious? How do we make them failure-proof instead of failure-prone? How do we make sure that they are not fragile?
Today, we make it hard for kids to build resilience. Everybody gets a gold star. You get participation medals. You don’t get constructive feedback. You’re often “prevented” from experiencing failure and from the recovery process.
We are becoming an army of porcelain dolls. We're not learning to pick ourselves up when we fall. We’re learning to lie there crying.
Progressive resistance
Progressive resistance refers to building strength by lifting progressively heavier weights.
We can use progressive resistance to build resilience. For example, the social feedback we receive as children is one form of progressive resistance.
The End of History Illusion
The end of history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.
Daniel Gilbert coined the end of history illusion in his article, The End of History Illusion, in which he and his colleagues summarize six studies on more than 19,000 individuals aged 18 to 68. In the studies, researchers asked the participants two questions. First, how much have you changed in the past decade? And second, how do you predict you will change in the next decade? Individuals of all ages believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change little in the future.
Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved over the last ten years, individuals predicted that they would remain roughly the same over the next ten years.
Walmart story
People often mistakenly think the past is better than the future. For example, Neil Pasricha worked at Walmart for ten years. In one role, he had to help managers fire employees. Neil was the third person in the room and would help them transition out. The terminated employees would tell him, “What will I do now? I will never find anything. I’ve been here 20 years; my life is over.” But when he bumped into these people years later, they’d all say: “That was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I hadn’t been fired, I wouldn’t have…” People were happy with the past, but at the time of their firing, they could not see their future opportunities. They thought “history had ended.”
When we view life-changing experiences as opportunities to improve our lives, it makes us more resilient.
How to fire people (or deliver bad news)
When firing someone, say less, talk less, and don’t go over the big summary. Don’t review all the clauses (e.g., the big termination letter). Just be there for the person. Offer your attention, empathy, and compassion.
Why are we so unhappy
Social psychologist David Myers has mapped out increases in abundance relative to our happiness levels over the last 50-plus years. Over the last five decades, wealth, longevity, education, and literacy have increased, but our happiness levels have remained mostly unchanged.
Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky shared The Sustainable Happiness Model **in her book, The How of Happiness. According to the model, happiness is 50 percent genetic, 10 percent circumstantial, and the remaining 40 percent is based on your intentional activities. You want to focus on the 40 percent you can control.
According to positive psychology studies, we should all be doing activities like nature walks, journaling, and meditation to improve our happiness. But we don’t because we waste our 40-percent time on our screens (phones, computers, TVs, etc.).
Cell phone addiction crisis
The dopamine hits we are getting from mobile phones are endless. We are in the middle of a phone addiction crisis. Some people are starting to ring the alarms, including the Center of Humane Technology, Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of the American Mind: The Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains.
Cell phones create three “P” problems: productivity, physical, and psychological.
Cell phones can reduce our productivity. When we’re on our phones, we don’t do anything else; often, we’re not doing anything meaningful. We’re just mindlessly browsing or playing games.
Cell phones cause physical sleep issues, posture issues, and hand issues.
Cell phones make us envious of others. We compare others’ curated life with our day-to-day lives on social media.
Are you too busy to walk in nature, journal, and read?
If so, you’re lying to yourself. And we’re all guilty of this. Look at how you’re spending your day. What are you consuming that you can eliminate, reduce, or replace with nature, journaling, and reading?
According to a University of California report, How Much Information, the average person reads 100,000 words per day today. This includes Instagram comments, Twitter feeds, news headlines, texts, alerts, and notifications. You’re already reading, so you don’t need to add reading to your to-do list. You need to change what you are reading. Replace social media with a book.
Cell phones reduce our person-to-person eye contact
Early studies suggest babies have trouble connecting with parents because of a lack of eye contact. For example, when women are breastfeeding, they no longer look at the baby. They’re scrolling Instagram. Put your cell phone away when you’re with your kids.
Shane Parrish combats this through a morning routine with his kids. His kids can’t get out of bed until seven. When it's seven, they come to his bed and cuddle. Then, they talk about what they’re looking forward to that day, what lessons there were from the day before, and how those lessons can play forward.
Life is lived in days, not years.
Kevin Kelly keeps a countdown clock with the estimated days he has left to live. His death clock idea is one way to remind yourself not to delay things and to take action now.
Kevin Kelly’s death clock inspired Neil Pasricha to write a 300-page letter to his unborn child. The letter became a book called The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything, breaking down happiness studies into frameworks and models anyone can understand.
How would you define happiness?
Happiness is almost undefinable.
According to Neil Pasricha, happiness is the joy you feel while striving toward your potential.
2,000 years ago, Aristotle said happiness is the meaning of life: “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
350 years ago, the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote that humans have the rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” “Pursuit” is the key word. Happiness is not guaranteed by the United States, but your right to pursue it is.
25 years ago, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi created positive psychology.
Scientific studies defined happiness as “subjective well-being.”
Happiness as “living in the present.”
When you say, “I’m happy but” or “I’ll be happy when,” you’re not living in the present moment. When you’re striving for happiness, there’s often a gap between what you have and what you want. So, maybe happiness is the absence of desire for something more. In other words, you live in the present.
Some unhappiness comes from living in the past or living in the future, but you have to look backward to learn.
Stories are powerful.
Some stories (or narratives) we tell ourselves are powerful in our lives.
For example, Anorexics tell themselves a story: “I’m fat”. There’s a study called Too Fat to Fit through the Door by Utrecht University in the Netherlands. They asked people who had anorexia and people who did not a question while they were walking through a doorway. While one person asked the question, someone else distracted them from paying attention to the doorway. The anorexics shifted their bodies much more than the non-anorexics They believed they were too fat to fit through the doorway.
To be happy, we often have to change our internal narratives. You have to learn to tell yourself a different story.
To change a story, you must learn to separate the story from the facts. You must peel back the onion until you uncover the core truth. “I’m a divorcee“ is a fact. “Noone will love me again” is a story.
Understanding others’ stories helps build empathy.
To understand other people, be curious about what stories they’re telling themselves about themselves. This can lead to empathy.
Gratitude
Practicing daily gratitude can make you happier and healthier. (RKL: Gratitude can bring you into the present moment and reduce anxiety.)
After his divorce, Neil Pasricha started a blog called 1000awesomethings.com. For 1,000 straight days, he wrote about a simple pleasure in life. The blog went viral and became The Book of Awesome, which is about gratitude.
According to Neil Pasricha, the quickest way to practice daily gratitude is a game called rose, rose, thorn, bud. A rose is something that was a highlight of the day, something you’re thankful for. A thorn is something that did not go well that day, something you want to vent about and let go of. A bud is something that you’re looking forward to tomorrow, next week, next year, or whenever. A simple gratitude practice is to think of two roses, a thorn, and a bud every day. It’s effective because it forces you to reflect.
Our species has been around for around 200,000 years, largely thanks to our amygdala, which secretes a fight-or-flight hormone to help us survive. For the first 199,900 years, we had to fight for survival, and the amygdala served us well. In the last 100 years, abundance has skyrocketed, and our amygdala can get us into trouble.
Two-minute morning routine
Every morning, Neil Pasricha wakes up and writes three things: what he’ll let go of, what he’s grateful for, and what he will focus on. You have to be specific.
National Geographic reports that the fastest-growing religion is no religion. Due to the decline of the church and the rise of secularism, we’ve lost confession. Create your own space for reflection and confession.
To advance your career, put yourself in small ponds.
The best career advice Neil Pasricha got at Harvard business school was from John H. McArthur. According to Neil, John told him:
“You’re at the beach right now. You’re a guy outside the beach. You’re looking at the beach, there’s a fence right in front of your face, and inside are 10 sunbathing beauties. Make whatever gender you want, but you are with 1,000 other people outside that beach. When they open the beach, all 1,000 of you are going to run in to try to get that Google job or that amazing hedge fund opportunity or whatever it is, but there’s only 10 of them. Your odds of getting any of them are so low. “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. 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, you will be a big fish in a small pond. Get off the beach and go to the library.”
The global population is made up of 8 billion people. It’s a big ocean. When you compare yourself to players in the big ocean, someone is always “beating you.”
Play in ponds you can win. When you put yourself in a small pond, your self-confidence goes up and you build resilience.
For example, when starting to run marathons, run with the slowest category. When trying golf for the first time, tee off from the tees closest to the pin. When learning public speaking, start with small audiences. Then, expand from there. Rig the game so you can feel better about yourself and generate positive energy and momentum to grow. Make it so you’re competing against yourself instead of others.
Two questions can help improve your decision-making.
The deathbed test. What will I regret not doing more on my deathbed?
The plan B test. What will I do if it fails?
Our decision-making energy is a finite resource.
Each day, endless decisions steal our brain power. People make an average of nearly 300 decisions per day ranging from what to wear to what to eat.
According to Willpower by John Tierney, when you’ve depleted your decision-making energy, there’re only two ways to replenish it: sleep and glucose.
The Space Scribble model is a two-by-two matrix that helps you simplify decision-making. Every single decision you make in your life takes a certain amount of time and has a certain amount of importance.
You want to automate low time and low importance decisions so you don’t have to thonk about them. For example, you could wear the same clothes everyday.
You want to regulate high time and low importance decisions into a time window to free your mind. For example, you could only review email twice per day in a batch.
You want to effective low time and high importance decisions so you just execute them. For example, go pick up your kids from daycare when you need to.
You want to debate high time and high importance decisions so you are sure to make the best decision. This is where you want your brain power to go.
Credit: Neil Pasricha
Untouchable days help you 10X your productivity and unlock new sources of leverage.
Carve out one day per week as an untouchable day. An untouchable day is when you focus on one thing with no distractions from the world. No cell phones, no meetings, and email. Block them in your calendar and plan them four to six months in advance. If you can’t do a full day, do a few mornings. Block them off and do not accept meetings during this time. (Read more here: Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week.)
Create a work-life flywheel.
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Balance assumes a scale that when one side goes down, the other side goes up. The relationship between work and life is more like a flywheel. A flywheel is a continuous energy device. The more energy you put in, the more energy you can create for both work and life. Stop thinking about work and life as a trade-off of a finite pie. Start thinking about work and life as a growing pie with no limits on its potential.
Retirement
According to Neil Pasricha, retirement was invented in 1889 in Germany by Otto von Bismark. Germany had a 20 percent youth unemployment rate, so he came up with the idea to incentivize 65-year-olds to exit the workforce and have the government bridge them to age 67, which was the average lifespan at the time. This age of 65 became the basis for 1935 social security reforms in the US, UK, and Canada. And over time, our life spans have expanded.
Beware retirement. It can rob you of social connection and relationships, stimulation of learning, and the purpose that comes with being part of something bigger than yourself. According to Fortune, the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year we are born and the year we retire.
The island of Okinawa in Japan has the highest ratio of people over the age of 100. They have no word for retirement or ceasing work entirely. They have a different word, ikigai, which roughly translates to the reason you get out of bed in the morning.
Random anecdotes
There are two categories of parents. Parents who live in the moment with their kids and parents who are waiting for their kids to be in the next phase.
Frameworks and models, along with useful examples, show others how to solve their own problems without you needing to prescribe solutions.
It’s ok to make your writing simple and easy to read.
Random Quotes
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies... The man who never reads lives only one.” ―George R.R. Martin
“Life loves the liver of it.” —Maya Angelou
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” —Aristotle