The Happiness Equation

Being happier is the biggest challenge you face every single day at work. Same if you’re a stay-at-home mom, studying through school, or traveling abroad. Teaching and training your brain to stay positively focused while navigating the bumps of life is something we’re not taught at school. I mean, have you ever taken a course called “How to Be Happier”? For the past few years, I

Looking back, I can’t believe how much time I wasted. Being happier is the biggest challenge you face every single day at work. Same if you’re a stay-at-home mom, studying through school, or traveling abroad. Teaching and training your brain to stay positively focused while navigating the bumps of life is something we’re not taught at school. I mean, have you ever taken a course called “How to Be Happier”?

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. —SENECA

Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. —LAO TZU

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? —STEVEN WRIGHT

Now everything changes. Everything changes. If we start with being happy, then we feel great. We look great. We exercise. We connect. What happens? We end up doing great work because we feel great doing it. What does great work lead to? Big success. Massive feelings of accomplishment and the resulting degrees, promotions, and phone calls from your mom telling you she’s proud of you. Harvard Business Review reports that happy people are 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales, and are three times more creative than their counterparts.

American philosopher William James says, “The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

Viktor Frankl says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Well, new research published in The How of Happiness by University of California psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky tells us exactly how much of our happiness is based on our life circumstances. And it is 10%! 10% of our happiness is what happens to us. So 90% of our happiness isn’t based on what’s happening in the world! It’s based on how we see the world.

If I knew everything about your life circumstances—your job, your health, your marital status, your income—I could predict only 10% of your happiness. That’s it! The remaining amount is not determined by your external world but by the way your brain processes it.

Professors of psychology Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are called the fathers of positive psychology because of their passion for cold hard facts. As they put it themselves in American Psychologist: “Psychology is not just a branch of medicine concerned with illness or health; it is much larger. It is about work, education, insight, love, growth, and play. And in this quest for what is best, positive psychology does not rely on wishful thinking, faith, self-deception, fads, or hand-waving; it tries to adapt what is best in the scientific method to the unique problems that human behavior presents to those who wish to understand it in all its complexity.” Positive psychology is a new and growing field.

The 20-Minute Replay Writing for twenty minutes about a positive experience dramatically improves happiness. Why? Because you actually relive the experience as you’re writing it and then relive it every time you read it. Your brain sends you back. In a University of Texas study called “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words,” researchers Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker had one member of a couple write about their relationship for twenty minutes three times a day. Compared to the test group, the couple was more likely to engage in intimate dialogue afterward and the relationship was more likely to last. What does the 20-Minute Replay do? It helps us remember things we like about people and experiences in our lives.

Three Walks Pennsylvania State researchers reported in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology that the more physically active people are, the greater their general feelings of excitement and enthusiasm. Researcher Amanda Hyde reports, “We found that people who are more physically active have more pleasant-activated feelings than people who are less active, and we also found that people have more pleasant-activated feelings on days when they are more physically active than usual.” It doesn’t take much: Half an hour of brisk walking three times a week improves happiness. The American Psychosomatic Society published a study showing how Michael Babyak and a team of doctors found that three thirty-minute brisk walks or jogs even improve recovery from clinical depression. Yes, clinical depression. Results were stronger than studies using medication or studies using exercise and medication combined.

Random Acts of Kindness Carrying out five random acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness. We don’t naturally think about paying for someone’s coffee, mowing our neighbor’s lawn, or writing a thank-you note to our apartment building security guard at Christmas. But Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, did a study asking Stanford students to perform five random acts of kindness over a week. Not surprisingly, they reported much higher happiness levels than the test group. Why? They felt good about themselves! People appreciated them. In his book Flourish, Professor Martin Seligman says that “we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”

A Complete Unplug “The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal,” say Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement. And a Kansas State University study found that complete downtime after work helps us recharge for the next day. Turning your phone off after dinner. Not using the Internet on vacation. There’s a lot more to this, and we’re going to chat about it in Secret #6. If you can’t wait, flip to here.

Hit Flow Get into a groove. Be in the zone. Find your flow. However you characterize it, when you’re completely absorbed with what you’re doing, it means you’re being challenged and demonstrating skill at the same time. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this moment as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he describes it using an image I’ve redrawn here:

2-Minute Meditations A research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at brain scans of people before and after they participated in a course on mindfulness meditation and published the results in Psychiatry Research. What happened? After the course, parts of the brain associated with compassion and self-awareness grew while parts associated with stress shrank. Studies report that meditation can “permanently rewire” your brain to raise levels of happiness.

Five Gratitudes If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy. Find a book or a journal, or start a website, and write down three to five things you’re grateful for from the past week. I wrote five a week on 1000awesomethings.com. Some people write in a notebook by their bedside. Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, five hassles, or five events that happened over the past week for ten straight weeks. Guess what happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier. Charles Dickens puts this well: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

Revolutionary findings that sent academic circles buzzing. Staggering takeaways about the power of starting with a positive lens in your life. They published the results and called them “Positive Emotions in Early Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun Study.” Here’s what they found: The happiest nuns lived ten years longer than the least happy nuns. By age eighty, the most happy group had lost only 25% of its population, whereas the least happy group had lost 60%. 54% of the most happy nuns reached the age of ninety-four, compared to 15% of the least happy nuns.

I started realizing that external goals didn’t help me become a better person. Only internal goals did.

Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. Like, we literally lose interest—as in, the interest we have becomes truly lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.

While at Brandeis University, Dr. Teresa Amabile performed experiments on elementary school and college students and asked groups to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work and some were not. What happened? Based on independent judges, who didn’t know who was getting paid, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Dr. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”

In another study, seventy-two creative writers at Brandeis and Boston Universities were split into three groups of twenty-four creative writers each and asked to write poetry. Some were given extrinsic reasons for doing so—impressing teachers, making money, getting into fancy grad schools. Others were given a list of intrinsic reasons for writing haiku—enjoying the feeling of expressing themselves, the fun of playing with words. And the third group wasn’t given any reasons at all. On the sidelines, Dr. Amabile put together a group of a dozen poet judges, mixed up all the poems, and had the judges evaluate the work. By far and away, the lowest-quality poems were from those who had the list of extrinsic motivators for doing so.

When you don’t feel like you’re competing with others, you compete only with yourself. You do it for you. And you do more, go further, and perform better. Want to hear an old joke? An old man enjoyed sitting on his front porch every day until the elementary school bell rang and neighborhood kids walking past his porch stopped to taunt him from the sidewalk. Finally, the old man came up with a plan. He offered the children a dollar each if they’d return the next day and yell their insults. They were excited, so they returned, yelled their insults, and he paid each of them a dollar. He then said he’d like them to come back the next day and yell their insults, but he could pay them only 25 cents. So they returned, yelled their insults, and he paid them a quarter each. Before they left, he said that he could only afford to pay them a penny on Wednesday. “Forget it,” they said. “That’s not worth it.” And they never bothered him again.

There is one issue that many of us have, that I know I have, that is at the basis of why we jump at external rankings. The root issue is . . . our lack of confidence. Self-judgment. We get lost in our own heads, we get confused with mixed advice, so we follow what we see. The root issue is self-confidence.

What do the truly confident people have? They have a high opinion of themselves. And! They have a high opinion of others. That is the true definition of confidence.

“If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy. All you have done is hurt yourself. If you want to stop hurting yourself, you must get rid of your anger and become loving instead.

“If—” is thirty-two beautiful lines written by Rudyard Kipling to his son John as parental advice on how to be confident, accept yourself, and do it for you. “If—” by Rudyard Kipling If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!” If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

None of us can control our emotions. We can only control our reactions to our emotions.

Sometimes you can feel the problem-scanning machine and your serenity-now mood tape blasting full volume at the same time. Say you get asked to make a presentation to the CEO late one afternoon. Your problem-scanning machine suddenly flashes bright red lights and makes that annoying alarm-clock morning buzz. NN! NN! NN! Meanwhile, your serenity-now mood tape is playing birds chirping and waves crashing onto the beach. That is your brain taking time to decide what to do, trying to think things through, instead of acting on impulses. It is a war waged inside your own head. Our problem-scanning machine (amygdala) and our serenity-now mood tape (prefrontal cortex) are at war.

“We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” wrote Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers in a 1927 issue of Harvard Business Review. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

Greek philosopher Epictetus says, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” A famous Persian proverb hung on my aunt’s kitchen wall reads, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.” And the Rolling Stones sing, “You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you neeeeeeeeeeeeeed.”

When I was a kid I lay in bed picturing my body slowly floating up and up and up over my bed and my room and my house. Then I’d picture floating even higher, above the neighborhood and the city and the clouds into low-orbit outer space. I would gaze down at the distant flickering lights of my hometown. And I’d imagine my problems way down there. And nothing felt as serious.

Being alive means you’ve already won the lottery. You are among the wealthiest people in the entire world. The average world income is five thousand dollars. Are you higher than that? Then you’re in the top 50%. And if you’re higher than fifty thousand dollars you’re in the top 0.5%. Do you need much more than 99.5% of people alive? You either have the money to buy this book or you have the time to read it. Either way, you have it good! You already have more than almost everybody on the planet. On your very worst days, you have to push your negative thoughts. You have to take a step back. You have to remember the lottery. Because you’ve already won.

wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. —THE NUMBER ONE REGRET OF THE DYING, REPORTED BY A PALLIATIVE NURSE IN THE GUARDIAN

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. —STEVE JOBS

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. —THE NUMBER ONE REGRET OF THE DYING, REPORTED BY A PALLIATIVE NURSE IN THE GUARDIAN

Researchers from National Geographic were so fascinated by Okinawans that they studied what helped them live so long. What did they find out? They eat off smaller plates, they stop eating when they’re 80% full, and they have a beautiful setup where they’re put into social groups as babies to slowly grow old together.

They don’t even have a word for retirement. Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely. Instead, they have the word ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly means “the reason you wake up in the morning.” You can think of it as the thing that drives you most.

The Nobel laureate James Watson, who started a revolution in science as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, put it to me straight a couple of years ago: “Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy.”

Here’s why I’m outta here: In an interview 50 years before, the aging adman Bruce Barton told me something like Watson’s advice about the need to keep trying something new, which I punched up into “When you’re through changing, you’re through.” He gladly adopted the aphorism, which I’ve been attributing to him ever since.

What happens in the other two boxes? Think means you’re thinking. Pretty simple. You’re reflecting, spacing yourself from doing anything, but still engaging your mind. Journaling. Writing a book. Talking about an issue at work with a friend, partner, or therapist. All great things to do. All physically relaxing, which allows you to completely indulge and engage in your thoughts. Do means you’re doing. No thinking! Just doing. Hiking a mountain. Working out intensely. Physically engaged. All your blood pounds to your muscles and lets your mind slip away and relax. — The Space Scribble says every single moment you’re in one of four boxes. And every single moment you need to know which one you’re in and which you’re going to next. Happy people alternate between boxes. They flip-flop. They swirl. They jump. They know where they are and they know how to create space.

I want to introduce the 3 Removals. Think of them as caped crusaders in menacing black masks holding big, sharp scythes. Ready to hack parts of your life away so you’re free to do other things. Space comes from hacking. Space in dense jungles comes from hacking at vines. Space in calendars comes from hacking at meetings. Space in your life comes from hacking at choice, time, and access.

How do the President of the United States and the CEO of Facebook make every decision at twice the speed? Less time spent on decisions means more time for everything else. What does President Obama tell us about making every decision at twice the speed? “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said in a 2012 Vanity Fair article. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia. What about Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook? “I own maybe twenty identical gray T-shirts. I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right?” he said in a Today interview. Mark’s not turning heads on the runway, but he doesn’t care. His goal is building the world’s largest social media company. A minute more a day picking a T-shirt is a minute less a day he’s thinking about his company.

The most exhausting idea I’ve ever had I decided to spend an entire day writing down every decision I made and then looking at which decisions I wanted to chop out of my life. Ben outsourced his clothing decisions! What could I outsource? This is the first step to understanding which decisions you can chop. An annoying process. But worth it. Here is every decision I made in one day: Should I get up now or

“I had the same problem,” he said. “Then I made rules for myself. I have three rules. I wrote them down on a piece of paper, which I leave at my desk. I follow the three rules even if I don’t want to.” Rule #1: If Checking Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investing Account. Rule #2: If Investing Account > $1,000, Move All $ over $1,000 into Investments. Rule #3: Never Break Rule #1 or Rule #2.

simple words that will help you prioritize everything You make fewer decisions. You do some ten times faster, some five times faster, and some many times longer. But it all adds up to quicker decisions and focusing on what’s important. You look at decisions you make on a daily basis and decide which ones to automate, regulate, effectuate, and debate.

But there is a secret. A secret to removing choice and making every decision at twice the speed. After studying personal leadership traits among successful Ivy League grads, Fortune 500 CEOs, and bestselling authors, I slowly discovered the most successful people use the same secret to rid their brains of all the extra weight of hundreds of decisions a day. It’s simple. The Just Do It Scribble.

Automate—Buying toilet paper and detergent. Paying the phone bill. Deciding your route to work. Picking your workout routine. If it’s low in time and low in importance, your goal is to automate. Outsource your brain completely and don’t think about it again. Set online refills to ship toilet paper and detergent monthly. Set up auto bill payments from your bank account. Download a traffic-maps app and mindlessly follow the best route to work. And set a workout schedule and follow it. Free your brain. Just don’t mistake these smaller decisions for the more important decisions in which they reside. Deciding to work out every day is important. Picking which dumbbell to lift next is not. Effectuate—Grabbing the kids from day care. Eating dinner with the family every night. Saying hi to your team every morning. Effectuate is a big word with a simple meaning: Git ’er done. Nail it. Just do it. If it’s low in time but high in importance, your goal is to just do it. There is no decision to make. Simply effectuate. Regulate—Checking email. Managing your calendar. Doing chores. If it’s high in time and low in importance, your goal is to regulate. Make rules and follow them. Set an email window. A single calendar review meeting. A chores blitz every Sunday morning instead of painfully doing one or two a day. Debate—Buying a house. Picking a spouse. Applying for a job. Moving. High-importance, high-time decisions are the ones to spend the most time on. Debate in your head, call trusted friends, list the pros and cons. Slow the decision down to molasses so you can engage in a proper debate. These are the ones that matter.

Automate, Regulate, and Effectuate all remove decisions from your head. What are you left with? Debate. Deep thinking, questioning, wondering. Weighing big decisions that matter in order to avoid making bad ones. Every now and then, thinking about the decisions in your life and writing them down in this box will help sort out for yourself what matters and what doesn’t. What can you Automate so you never think about it again? What can you Regulate so you do it in set times and windows? What can you Effectuate as something you simply just do? And what can you Debate—what big thoughts can you chew on to make sure you’re doing the right thing? Over time you will do this automatically, without thinking about it. You will have developed the muscle to automatically chunk out your decisions. Now, the secret isn’t perfect. Sometimes small decisions will leak out and become big deals in your head. But that’s okay. The goal is not to be perfect. The goal is just to be better than before. Automating, regulating, and effectuating free your mind and free your time. Your aching brain will thank you.

When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life. —ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN LENNON

“He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day,” Brad says. “He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write . . . He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red Magic Marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.” Guess what that does? Tricks his brain by giving him the incentive to see the longer and longer chain. Who wouldn’t like seeing big red X’s marking accomplishments on the wall? Now all you have to do is keep the streak going!

The 5 Greatest Regrets of the Dying are: Every time I read this list I am stunned into silence for a minute. I think how many of these regrets I would have if I died today. There are always a couple I can work on, and this list serves as inspiration. But one thing I also notice is this entire list relates to authenticity. Directly. It’s all about being you. What happens if you be you and be cool with it? Well, I would argue if you’re being yourself, then: You do live a life true to yourself. You do overvalue your time and find a job that fits your life. You do express your feelings. You do keep in touch with your friends. You do let yourself be happier. Being you removes regrets from your life. Authenticity removes regrets from your life. Here are a few additional observations from Nurse Bronnie that were shared in The Guardian. Notice how they relate to authenticity: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me—This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.” “Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.” “I wish that I had let myself be happier—This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

Always remember there are only three goals. To want nothing. That’s contentment. To do anything. That’s freedom. To have everything. That’s happiness. What are the nine secrets to get us there?