Develop your internal motivation. Focus. Be kind. Ignore the rest.
I read Neil Pasricha’s 2016 book The Happiness Equation as part of a pandemic-fatigue powered period of self-discovery. It certainly has its gimmicks and many of the concepts felt familiar to me. Still, I did appreciate the book and came away refocused on returning to being a happier person during such a tumultuous time.
Below I share a few of my notes from reading the book, though I recommend you buy a copy yourself.
My notes:
- 10% of happiness is circumstances and 90% is genetic predisposition and intentional response (what we can help train) according to The How of Happiness, a book by Sonja Lyubomirsky
- 7 tasks of happiness
- 3 Nature Walks
- The 20-Minute Replay
- 5 Conscious Acts
- High-Challenge, High-Skill Tasks
- Ten Long Deep Breaths
- Five Gratitudes
- 20 Pages Of Fiction
- In research, the happiest nuns lived on average 10 years longer than the least happy nuns
- For most of human history our lives were brutal, short and highly competitive, so our brains are wired to that context
- Do it for you (internal goals)
- Sales, social and self: only one or two of the triangle of success seem really attainable and that’s the hard choice
- We are most motivated when it’s for us, not for the money first. (NCAA vs NBA players etc )
- Decide what success you want to have and then do it for yourself
- Buddha: “Let others keep their criticism for you”
- “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” wrote Paul Mazur of Lehmann 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”.
- Epictetus: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants”
- Remember the lottery (that you are very forrtunate in the world, and be thankful)
- Three buckets of 56 hours every week: sleep bucket, work bucket, spend your third bucket wisely!
- Harvard MBAs might make three times as much but do they work three times as many hours?
- He draws a four quadrant: thinking and doing in High and low. BURN is high high; space is low low; DO And THINK are the others. Make sure to flip flop between then and know which we are in
- Fewer decisions mean faster decisions
- We prefer making decisions though even though decision fatigue and options lead to regret
- Parkinson’s law (published in the Economist in 1955): “work will expand to fill the time allowed” …. so block space and limit time
- Instead of Can Do > Want to Do > Do as a line he argues it’s a self reinforcing circle a you get Better. Motivation doesn’t cause action; action causes motivation
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,”
- When can you spend 30 seconds now to make yourself more likely to engage in a behavior you want later (like laying out gym clothes the night before)
- You are the average of the 5 people around you most (happiness, height, etc)
- The Top Five Regrets of the Dying from a 2012 book by Bronnie Ware who inspired by her time as a palliative carer.
- I wish I was more true to myself
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard
- I wish I expressed my feelings more
- I wish I kept closer to friends and family
- I wish I let myself be happier.
- Don’t take advice: All advice conflicts, seek it to find your own. Make your decision
- Charles Varlet wrote in 1872: “When we ask advice we are usually looking for an accomplice.”
