Neil Pasricha: Cultivate Happiness & Live An Awesome Life

24:43But I've just held onto the idea that in order for work to be its purest creative form, I like the idea that I need to think of it as something I would do for free. I hold onto that question because I mentioned Teresa I'm gonna be late earlier. I'll just say, you did the study at Brandeis University asking people to come up with silly collages. Some people were told they were getting rewards for the collages. Some people were not. When they ask independent judges to evaluate the collages, guess which ones were more creative? The ones that were not told they were getting a reward. They were more creative, right?

25:14James Gambrino did a study that has, like, I think, 11-year-old girls. Can you tutor younger girls? Can you tutor younger girls? Whether it's piano, math, whatever. One group of girls was told they were gonna get a movie ticket for doing it. Spend half an hour, you're gonna get a movie ticket. The other one was not told that. The ones that were not told that they were gonna get a reward, spent longer, took more care and had the people that they were tutoring did better at the end of it. And so I really hang onto this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation as a bit of a guiding tool for me. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it has become something that I hold onto because of that original golden words versus modern humorist experience.

25:51Yeah, it's really important to think about those things. And it's something that I spend a lot of time thinking about in the context of like doing this thing that we're doing right now. Like I started it 10 years ago. I did it for the love of it. I did it for a number of years without, not only did I not make any money doing it, it didn't occur to me that you could. And then it grew to the point where, it was viable to be monetized in a responsible way. And I had to make the decision like if I wanted to do that and I actually needed to because we needed the money. And so it's a balance. So it's not a binary thing.

26:33It's like, yes, this is a commercially viable entity, but I would sit down and talk with you for a couple hours for free. So how do you do both, right? How do you balance both? And so when you allow the commerce aspect of it to kind of come into the equation, then it becomes about figuring out how to balance all of that, understanding that there are not necessarily concessions, but like I have to do meetings and do phone calls and do intake on and make decisions about which sponsors I wanna work with and which ones I don't. And there's a time consuming aspect of that. But at no juncture has there ever been a situation in which a sponsor has compromised the quality or the integrity of the show.

27:22Like there is a little bit of a church and state with respect to that, that we've been able to maintain. but it is something that I think about. So it's not just intrinsic versus extrinsic, like these two things like never intersect, but it's about like how you kind of live with both of them, at least in the context of this thing. And I'd be lying if I didn't say, like I occasionally look at the rank, I wanna see like, well, how's the show doing? Like I can get caught up in all of that, right? But I know myself well enough and you know, once I start doing that, I become less happy and it becomes less about the reasons why I got into this to begin with, which was to have nourishing, amazing conversations that I get to share that people out in the world seem to extract value from.

28:13And that's really what it's about. And the minute I lose sight of that and start focusing on those externalities is the moment at which this thing and kind of begins to lose its soul and its reason for being. You are so wise the way you articulate it and the way you embrace the complexity of it and the way you can have a rhythmic, almost like a surfing of these two sides, right? The artistic side and the commercial side, how they come together on the show and just in general. And I'll add on top of that, and I'll ask you this question back. It's like, from what I see, from my perspective, it's just like a person living in the world.

28:51It's like the capitalism is aggressive and it will want the front of your podcast. Then it will want the middle of your podcast. And then it will want pieces of, and I don't mean your podcast, but just it wants our mindshare. And so what guiding principles do you use from now into the future? Because we've had conversations over the years where like elements that were sacrosanct, I think to use your word, It's like, there's a constant aggressiveness to this late stage capitalism that we're part of. And that it's getting more difficult as a consumer and especially I'm assuming as a creator to try to balance the demands of those capitalist forces with what you're trying to produce artistically.

29:34Yeah, it does get tricky. You know, like at some point, like imagine a scenario where, you know, suddenly, you know, podcasting is like this medium that everyone's like to, and there are these big companies out there, you know, Spotify and Amazon and Sirius and I heart radio. And for a minute they're dangling like big deals out there. Like, hey, come with us and we'll help you grow your show. But there are concessions that you have, like if you do that, then suddenly they're gonna be like, we need you to do ads for McDonald's or like, and then the other I heart radio show. Yeah, or start inserting ads that aren't your voice, but are for products that you don't necessarily believe in.

30:16And then you find yourself thinking, well, at what price would I be able to sleep at night with something like that? So that's where it becomes like pernicious and it kind of creeps up on you slowly. And then you wake up one day and you realize like, wow, like this isn't why I got into this or the heart and soul, the spirit with which this thing, the reason why this thing became important to a certain number of people suddenly is lost in all of that. And then you have nothing. So what do you hold on to? What are the principles or do or do nots or, you know, cause that must be tempting, not just for you, but just as a creator, I mean, I think, you know, we're reading things in general.

30:57The truth, Neil, is that like, we're doing great. Like we don't need to do any of those kinds of deals. And we're in a very privileged situation in which we can pay our bills and I can pay, you know, everyone that you see here around in this room who works very hard to create something of high quality. And the more that I root myself in the love of it and the reason why I got into it to begin with, that curiosity, like how can I grow? What is lighting me up? Who are the people I really wanna talk to? Not because they're big fancy people out in the world. And I know if I have them on that I'll get attention or it will grow the audience, but truly like when it's coming from the heart that I know I'm on the right path.

31:40And that's like kind of playing a long game. Like you're not hacking a system for the purpose of growth and understanding that growth isn't necessarily the most important metric. The important metric is making sure that you stay in love with this thing because that energy people feel it. Like they know whether that's true or kind of artificial, I suppose. And then making sure that you're nourishing the people who already care about what you're doing and not worrying so much about growth, right? Right, right, right. And that love that you say is not dissimilar to the would I do it, would I do this for free question that I try to keep as a steering guide for myself.

32:27If you could keep saying, I'll do this, I would do this for free, then that is a nice sign that you're doing it for intrinsic purposes at the end of the day. But there is so much extrinsic impulsing out there right now more than ever you talk about like, Hey, like it used to be, the New York Times bestseller, once a week you could see these lists. Now Amazon refreshes it constantly. You can get caught up in that charts. Everybody's got, however many people follow them on all these social media. It's like all of that is a distraction from the work itself. And trying to stay connected to the purity of that is something that I feel like you have done an incredible job of.

33:10And it's not for lack of like intention. Like you've created all of these systems to insulate yourself from all of those impulses that can lead you astray so that you stay rooted in like what's important to you such that the time that you spend really is dedicated to the, it's in line with your value set and it's dedicated to the things that, you know, you care about the most. Absolutely, 100%. And a lot of the systems are designed because I've fallen off the wagon and I don't like the way I feel after I fall off the wagon. I mean, you start with the morning system that I have for myself, this two minute morning idea.

33:49Why every single day, Rich, when I wake up, and I know you do a morning pages thing yourself, but why every single day when I wake up, do I not check my phone? Do I not even, I'm staying at a hotel room last night to come here. The phone's plugged in in the bathroom, right? I can't even have my phone near me because I'm so addicted to it. If I open up my eyes and it's right beside me, of course, I'm gonna check it. There's 12 texts waiting. There's 12 of these, there's 12 of that. So I have to start the day with this two minute morning practice. I grab a pen, I grab a piece of paper or I use the yellow journal that you have there.

34:16But typically it's on a pen and piece of paper. I just say, I will let go of, I am grateful for, and I will focus on. And those three phrases, I'll tell you, they wipe a wet chamois across my mind every single day. And I think you got a special moment in the morning when you talk about systems and you wake up, it's like you really you when you wake up, you haven't been jostled senseless yet by anything that anyone's trying to tell you. You got a really small window because as soon as you touch your phone, even as soon as you look at a paper, as soon as you turn on a TV, now it's something pushing its information to you.

34:48But when you're the most you, it's like right when you open your eyes. And so right when I open my eyes, the first thing I do every single day, I will let go of the worry I feel about how I'm gonna perform on the Rich World podcast today. Like it's a gigantic podcast. It's a huge show. But I'll write it down, right? I am grateful for, okay? And I'll say a bunch of things about my kids or the smell of my wife's neck I wrote today. Like I write little bits and pieces. The view out of this hotel room, what a cool view. I can see a ruddy duck out my window. A ruddy duck, by the way, currently breeding with a blue bill.

35:25It's a pretty special bird, Rich. And I could see one when I woke up this morning. It was pretty cool. And then I will focus on, I will focus on, you only got a thousand minutes, you're awake a day. That's it, thousand minutes. It's about 16 and two thirds hours, average person. You gotta have one focus. Otherwise, again, you know, the book Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. It's like, you got decision fatigue coming out of our ears. We got hundreds of decisions to make a day. So if we don't write one thing, we're gonna focus on, we're lost. At the end of the day, you got nothing done.

35:53Those three prompts help give me one system. They're one system I use of many in order to help give me a fighting chance of winning the morning. And then the morning wins the day, you know? So it's like just trying to get some of these little snowballs rolling so that they end up having disproportionate benefits. Not unlike the habit work that's very popular right now.

36:24Jonathan Fields, our mutual friend said about you that you are the freest and most rule-based person that he knows, right? And there's something interesting about that dichotomy. It's not that different from like Jocko Willink who says discipline is freedom. Like there is freedom once you set up these rules. And when I hear you talk about all the systems that you create and all these rules that kind of drive how you spend your time and reduce that decision fatigue, I can find myself a little bit overwhelmed, like, oh my God, like, you know, how do you, his life is so regimented in that regard.

37:04Like it feels somewhat robotic. But then I realized like, oh, I have rules. You know, like I don't think, maybe I don't like think about them or like talk about them in the way that you do. But I do have certain like rules that drive my decisions that make my day kind of flow in a certain direction generally. Like what? Well, like I don't drink alcohol, like they're binaries. It's like, or, you know, I don't schedule meetings or phone calls before noon. That's a great one. And I break that rule, you know, life intervenes. I don't always, but I try to hold that like - The rules break, but they're guidelines.

37:44I try to protect morning hours, things like that. You know, it sounds like you have rules around your fitness. Like early hours of the day are for like journaling and writing and meditation and training and things like that. So maybe they're a little bit more vague than yours. You got rules around your food. Yeah, rules around the food, like no animal products. Like it's just by like talk about decision fatigue, like that kind of makes it easy. Like, okay, so I don't have to really think about that. Like I just don't do that. So that removes that aspect of like, where are we gonna eat or what are we gonna do?

38:16Or should I do this or shouldn't I do that? And holding onto these rules. I mean, I've had the same thing, although when I'm traveling, I've had the same thing for breakfast for 15 years, exact same shake, exact same ingredients. I might change the fruit. But some people would say like, oh, you've just become like to the point of being robotic. Like, doesn't this make you some sort of automaton? Like this is, you're living a spreadsheet life, Neil. Right? I wrote the happiness equation in a spreadsheet. Of course you did. See, you're proving my point. Yeah, but it is to the, so for example though, I will say, so you know about my family contract, right?

38:51You know that lesson I have, I say to everybody, You write a contract with your company. They give you a piece of paper. It tells you how much money, what your job title is, who's your boss, what their expectations are. You sign this piece of paper. You go home. You got no equivalent like balance creating contract with your home life, right? That was a lesson that somebody told me when I got this big job offer at Walmart at the time. I was like, director of leadership. I was going to be the director. And the guy's like, well, are you going to take it? I was like, well, of course, it's a home run.

39:19It's like, it's going to be more travel. It's going to be more hours. Like what's it going to be like at home? And so I created a family contract. We still write and sign it every year. We've got four bullet points in it, Leslie and I. So flash forward for those that didn't catch that I was divorced, I'm now remarried. I'm now remarried. And it's like maximum four nights away per month, right? Minimum four family days per month. Those are days where it's just Leslie and I, our kids, nothing else. No extended family, no birthday parties, no trips. Ideally no screen. So family times, a minimum of four date nights per month, which has become difficult lately, but we're working on it.

39:59So prioritizing time, just the two of us, right? And you're looking at me with this funny face. No, go ahead. No, I wanna hear it all. Keep going. Okay. So I've got the nights away. I've got, so maximum four nights away. I've got the four family days. I've got the four date nights. And why do I put these structures in place? Well, because then guess what, Rich? when I get an offer to come fly out and do a podcast or come and do a speech or something, it's like a really nice and easy filter to send it right through that system and say, well, do I have four nights away this month or not yet? If I don't, well, that's a possible acceptance.

40:38If I do, it's an automatic no. And then guess what that enables? It enables the other part, which is I have four minimum, four untouchable days per month, which is one per week. And untouchable day is a day where I'm unreachable, untouchable by anyone in any way, any form, which is where the best creative work comes from. And so, yeah, it's a maximum of this one, but it's to create. You mentioned why, because I have the time and space to create them because the rules allow for that freedom. So I agree with Jocko. I agree that discipline is freedom. I never met the guy, but this is sounding good to me.

41:13And I do that because it enables the space that I think we are losing in society today desperately. There is a lack of space all over the place, mental space, physical space, mindshare. It's going down fast. And so these rules are, they're arms on the gates. Like they're ways to keep that precious sacred space. So I was able to go birdwatching this morning before coming here, walking around the pond behind the nice hotel that you told me to stay in. And I I loved it because I had created a rule that this day was about this conversation and the morning is empty. Emptiness creates space for the nourishing, the nourishment, as you call it, of fresh air, of getting out of my species by looking at another animal.

42:04I've gotten into bird watching, as you can tell, of breathing in the phytoncides that lowered the cortisol and adrenaline so I'm not as nervous. And it just is a wonderful way to live. So ultimately these are things in service of living a rich intentional life, which is what I'm ultimately doing. My icky guy is trying to help people live an intentional life, trying to help people live happy lives. Where do I start with? Me. Right. What helps the rules? Yeah, that's beautiful. And the key word being intentionality, right? I think we all, you know, have certain intentions that drive our decision-making, but by and large, we live reactively.

42:44And I'm speaking for myself. I know like I'm just bouncing around and maybe not as in command of how I allocate our most precious resource, which is my time and my attention on a daily basis. And those rules really help drive the decisions to make sure that you're valuing that precious asset and then deploying it as effectively, strategically as possible to move your life in the right direction and to honor those things that you are clear that are the things that you care about most, right? And then I have this other side of my brain where I'm like, if I wrote up a contract and said, this is what we're gonna do.

43:25And it's gonna be like this, and I handed it to Julie and I was like, let's negotiate this and sign it. She'd be like, get the fuck out of here. Like, you know, like there's also something to be said for like you do acknowledge and care about being in a state of awe and wonder and presence and an acknowledgement that like being present in that place of receiving provides space for magic and mystery and the unexpected thing that isn't on the spreadsheet or kind of lives outside the boundaries of your rubric. And if you're too regimented, like this is what I'm doing and I've got this and I got this and then this hour I do this and this, then you're robbing yourself of your availability for that.

44:21So is that like, how do you like, I would imagine that you think about that a little bit. Like how does that, it's in that space. Like you have those days where you're like, I'm unavailable. Like this is where I'm living in my expanded state of receptivity and creative cultivation and solace and like sort of courting the muse. I mean, when I was at Walmart, I had a boss named Dave Cheese, right? He was the CEO of Walmart Canada at the time. And people always mystified about the fact that this guy never answered email. He just never answered. It's like, you sent him an email, it was like sending an email to like a black hole.

44:58Wouldn't come back. And people were always like, you know, he can do that. because he's the CEO. But what they were missing was the fact that, no, he's the CEO because he did that all the way up his career trajectory. There is something about figuring out the right way to decide what to do before you have to do it each time. For me, it comes down to a two-by-two matrix that I've designed called the time versus importance matrix. I think every decision that comes to us, Rich, takes a certain amount of time and it's of a certain importance. If you think about time and importance, like let's put time on the y-axis.

45:29Low, high. Let's put importance on the x-axis. Low, high. Anything that takes a low amount of time and is of low importance, we should automate. We should not think about it. It's low in time and it's low in importance. So I wear the same thing for every single speech that I ever give. I don't, I don't, I've worn the same shoes. I wear the same jeans. I wear the same shirt. I have the same, I don't think about it. It's an automated system. Same as my breakfast, okay? A cup of water, shake a turmeric, shake a cinnamon, and throw in a couple, a frozen banana. It's this frozen, it's the same thing every single day.

46:03I automate that. Now, this is the interesting part about this two by two matrix. What do you do about the decision? This is what affects all of us a lot, which are, you know, really important, really important, but they don't take very long. Saying hi to your team when you walk in here, saying goodbye before you leave. Those ones you effectuate. That means just do it, get it done. Pick up your kids from daycare, drop them off. Those are things that are important. They don't take very much time. What about the third thing? This is maybe the most important one. Things that are

46:35high on time, but low on importance. High on time, low on importance. The best example is email. Takes forever. People are doing email all day. The average person is getting 147 emails a day. It takes so much time. You look at people's time charts, they're like, check an email all day, but it's not that important. Well, this one needs a regulated, fenced in area. Okay. I did this study on email. It turns out that the two best hours of a day to check email are from nine to 10 in the morning and from four to 5 p.m. Why? Because you create for yourself a six hour email free window in the middle of the day, an oasis that's email free, but you still have two hours on email, which is like good for if you have like a knowledge working type of job.

47:13Right? Those three things, the outsides of the two by two matrix where you're automating, you are effectuating, and you are regulating. And I'll give you another example on regulating just before I close that off. It's like Leslie and I, when we first bought a house, is an old house. Things were going wrong all the time. What was driving us the most crazy and baddie Rich was always like, oh my gosh, there's a wobbly patio stone. Oh my gosh, there's a door that's squeaky. Oh, this light bulb needs to be changed. Every single day we had something to fix on our house. So then I sent her an invite.

47:40Julie went like this. I sent her a recurring invite. It's the first Saturday morning of every month for half a day. It's called Old House Morning. She accepts it. It's recurring every month. And guess what? We made a list on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards. Anything that goes wrong in the house, we write it on the list. Now we've regulated fixing all the stuff in our house into one half day per month. It makes the other 29 and a half days a month free. Discipline is freedom. It makes the other 29 and a half days a month without the worry of the patio stone and the squeaky door because you regulate it into one specific window.

48:09Now, what's the beauty of this model? Again, it's time versus importance. Every single decision, low time and low importance, automated, right? Then you got regulated. Then you got effectuated. It creates space to debate the things that really matter. It creates space for the high time, high importance decisions that none of us have the mental capacity to wrestle with. You say all the time, conversation matters and you get into these dark, beautiful, thorny, nuanced places in your conversations. And this is partly why people like me love this show because you go there, but that space, that mental space to debate where I wanna live, who do I wanna be with, who am I really am?

48:50What job lights me up? We don't give ourselves enough space to do them because we're handling all those low time, low and worst decisions. Yeah, I mean, that's a really important point. We're constantly distracted and we fill up any opportunity to do that kind of work with additional distractions because we have phones and that can entertain us and when we're standing in line or whatever. And so never before in the history of humanity have we had to exert such discipline to craft boundaries to carve out time for that type of work. And if you're not like super intentional and perhaps even goal oriented, like I have this thing I wanna achieve, whether it's I wanna write a book or whatever, it's some creative thing, those goals will drive a recognition of the need for that type of carving out of time.

49:40But for the average person who's working a job and it's kind of doing fine or whatever, and it's busy. And it's like, I'm just trying to like do my thing and raise my kids and maybe have a little bit of fun on the weekend. It's harder to say like, hey, like they don't have the situation where they're gonna be able to carve out a day, off their phone where they're gonna like walk around Toronto and just think deep thoughts. You know, like that's a very, you have a life that affords you that because you've made certain choices and you're a writer and this is what you do. But how does that impact like the average person?

50:16Like how do they think about how to craft they have their own version of what you're talking about that is functional in the construct of their current situation. Absolutely, so there's two things. One is I will say, I do get off all the time. I was like, you could do this because you're right. And I do argue back. I am a writer because I make the space. Having said that, I also worked at Walmart for 10 years, 10 years of corporate job, office job. I was working in leadership development. Well, tell the story. Cause like we haven't even gone into that. I mean, you, so we kind of left off with you, you know, decamping New York city right before, you know, 9-11.

50:55But the other thing I didn't know about you, Neil, is that you went back to Toronto and then you owned a Quiznos franchise. Yes. This is true. This is true. Right. Yeah, there's a lot of missing pieces. Before going to Harvard Business School. Yes, that's right. Yeah, we're filling it all in today. Okay, so just cause I don't wanna lose those people that are like, wait a minute, He didn't answer the question. Yeah, I know, I know. Maybe we don't like, maybe we can park that, but like, go ahead. I'm happy to go back into that, but I'll just say, and touchable lunch. That's what I was gonna say at Walmart.

51:26We all went out for lunch. We go to the sushi place. Everyone takes their phone. At the time, it was Blackberries. Everyone takes their Blackberries. We cram them to the back of someone's Toyota Tercel. We all go for sushi. People are checking their phones and their Blackberries for work the whole time. What's the boss saying? Is the boss texting me? Do I need to rush back? I got this meeting at one o 'clock. It's 1258. We gotta rush back. Just try practice. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Practice an untouchable lunch. Practice leaving the phone on your desk and walking out of the building for one hour.

51:53That's the practice. The practice is just can you do without a phone for an hour? Can you walk in the path down the street from your office just to practice an hour? If you can do that, then let's see if you can do some tradesies with your boss, with your coworkers say, I'm gonna take one afternoon to be untouchable. I might work at home. I might work wherever you don't even know where I'm gonna work. Let's see what happens. And if you come back Wednesday morning and you've got some good ideas, this is the way to sell it back into your boss. He's like, hey, why don't you try that too? We'll take a half day off a week where we each try to this untouchable time.

52:23So I just want to say for those that were kind of latching on to your question here, let's just baby steps, baby. Just start small. Neil Pasricha, age 23, comes back from Manhattan, finishes his Queens Commerce degree. and my very first job, I don't know if you know this, was I was doing brand marketing for CoverGirl and Max Factor Makeup in Toronto. I did not know that either. So I can tell you all about the lengthening, volumizing and separating properties of mascara. If you're interested, I was running 1200 SKUs for CoverGirl. Okay, I thought it was a PowerPoint job, Rich. It turned out to be an Excel job.

52:58It was like crunching data on price changes and it was like not very creative and I failed at it completely. They didn't like me. I didn't like them. I was put on a PIP, performance improvement plan within months, which is a fancy way of saying, we'd like to fire you, but we don't have enough of a paper trail. Let's build one together. So it was like not going well. So now I'm looking for something else to do when this job was not working out well. And I bit into a Quizno itself sandwich one day. And I was like, this is the most delicious sandwich I have ever eaten. I talked to the local franchisee in Oshontera.

53:35He was telling me his sales per square footage are double that of Subways. It's a brand that no one's heard of, Quiznos. It's 2002. And so I teamed up with my dad, took a big loan out of the bank, and I bought a Quiznos sub franchise at age 23. And I was the owner, operator, manager, lease signer, managing, hiring a whole team of teenagers to work there. And I ran a minute through the oven for some warm, toasty love. And Rich, that was our slogan. and we put it out in a big sign and we sold mesquite chickens and black Angus steaks and delicious veggie sandwiches with guacamole. And I absolutely loved it.

54:12And it lost a ton of money. Really? So you go, so you write your application to Harvard Business School talking about how you lost a bunch of money owning a Quiznos franchise. Well, the cool thing about what you, so you're like, why'd you go from Quiznos to Harvard? How'd that happened? Well, basically a year and a half into running the Quizmo sub-franchise, it was pretty clear that this was just not. Look, I did say I loved it. We had no turnover. The staff all, we had so much fun there. It was just a joy being in that restaurant. We had, it was, I learned how to manage a team. I learned how to hire.

54:49When I asked the head office, how do you hire people? They said, hire the prettiest girls. The head office told me that over the phone. That was their, that was their guide. This is 20 years ago. That was their, hire the young pretty girls. I was like, this isn't going to work. So I came up with a whole hiring practice where I asked people one question. What's something you're passionate about? Tell me about it for five minutes. If the passion was demonstrated, like it was like they were excited, I was like, I could probably get them excited about sandwiches. Then I took them to another Quiznos sub, saw how they ordered the menu from the other side.

55:19How did they interact from a customer service perspective? Then I gave them, I designed a sandwich exam. So I had them memorize the recipes for the sandwiches, fill out an exam. If they got over a certain percentage, as a team of people, then their staff discount kicked in. Well, this hiring practice turned out to be so popular that they implemented it around the chain. And there's lots of things like that. It was like customer service. I called that office. Like, what's the customer service policy? They're like, I don't know, just give them a free sandwich. Like if somebody complains. I was like, no, we got to come up with a practice.

55:49We came up with a practice called LAST. Listen, apologize, solve, thank. We branded it on stickers. We stuck it on the cash register. My very first day that we were open, a woman calls me up the very first day and saying, my whole family's puking at home right now thanks to four expired chunk filled chocolate milks we just bought from your store. I was like, listen, I'm so sorry. Apologize, that's the second part. Solve, what's your address? I deliver a six foot sub to her that afternoon on a big wooden plank to try to make it up to her. And then we add, thank, thank you. Because of you, we've now added, check the expiry dates on the chocolate milks for our morning checklist.

56:26So that last process also got implemented around the chain. So it was a failure financially, but it was a real growth from a leadership perspective. And I got to develop some instincts and some ideas for how you form and shape these things inside organizations. So after I sold the Quiznos sub-franchise and I was deciding what to do next, Quiznos called me up and said, why don't you be our director of operations? So then become the director of operations for Quiznos head office. Oh, wow. That's interesting. So you're this lowly franchisee, but you're actually like drafting policy that's getting implemented across this gigantic corporation.

57:00I made a big poster called the life cycle of a J-cloth because people were just using them and throwing them. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It goes from the tables to the back bins to the bleach buckets. Like we have to make them last four days. We can 4X our usage on J-cloth. So yeah, I was doing stuff like that. Then I worked for Quiznos Canada as director of operations. And then, you know, grad school often rich is like, you don't know what you're gonna, you don't know what you want to do. So you may as well delay the decision by going to school. And because I had specialized early and I don't, I wouldn't do that again now, like specializing in a discipline like business from when I was 18 years old, you know, I envy the people that have had like you a wider breadth of learning at that age, but I specialized early.

57:45So in my mind, I was like, well, if I'm going to do a master's, I guess it's got to be business. I can't quite go into astronomy or philosophy from here. and so I you know stirred up all those wacky experiences I had the comedy writing down in New York City the brand marketing for CoverGirl and Max Factor the running of a quiz and it turns out that a lot of business schools base their admissions although it's a black box they base it on you know there are spaces available for like the weird applicant because everyone else is coming from consulting or banking and so if you have just like this Motley Crue type resume, you do stand out.

58:24And so if you can combine that with, at the time for me, it was like, do a good job on the GMAT at the time. It was like a aptitude test like the LSAT or whatever and get some nice references, you're in. And so I was very shocked and surprised when I got a letter saying, you're in. And I was delighted when the letter then said, hey, how much money did you make the last three years? And I was like, none, because I had this bankrupt company and I was in school and stuff like that. And I had this job that I quit really soon. And they're like, congratulations, we have an$18 billion endowment. You're so poor that we're gonna pay for you.

58:58So I also got, and I wasn't expecting that. So then I also got to go there and they covered it because when you go to undergrad, they ask for your parents' tax returns. But when you go to grad school, they ask for your tax returns. Cause now you're an adult. So you got your Harvard graduate school

59:21and then you go, you have that experience and you end up not going to Wall Street or the management consulting route because you end up at Walmart, not in the front of the store greeting people, but in the back office. Because the fellowship I got at Harvard was called the John MacArthur Fellowship, which was the Dean of HBS of Harvard Business School from 19th century to the Harvard School 1918, 1995 was a Canadian guy who set up the scholarship for all Canadians who made less than a certain amount of money to get a free ride. I write a five page thank you letter to this guy telling him, like, thank you so much for paying for me to come here.

59:59He invites me to lunch and he's like, how's it going on campus? And to your point about the Wall Street jobs, the iBanking jobs, I said, it is stressful. Here I am in my third week of a two year program and already every single night is like whining and dining with McKinsey. You know, like we're hanging out with millionaire bankers and consultants with black bags under their eyes, hoping that we can become one of them, too. I'll never forget going out for dinner with McKinsey till two in the morning. Sparking conversations, smart people having great conversations. But when the thing ended at 2 a.m., they were all going back to work.

1:00:32And that's what stuck and lodged in my head the most. It's like at 2 a.m., they're all like jumping on conference calls with Shanghai. And like I was like, oh, my gosh, I cannot do this. And he said to me, Neil, you are like, he said, you were like a horny guy outside a beach and you see those bathing beauties in there and you're at a fence. And there's a thousand people, the class of Harvard Business School, you don't feel special when you get there. There's 900 people. There's 900 people that get in. You're with 900 to a thousand people all trying to get one of those bathing beauties. The bathing beauties were the metaphor for those jobs, those million dollar kind of Wall Street jobs.

1:01:08He's like, but when they open the fence, everybody's gonna run in, chasing those same 10 jobs, chasing the same 10 beauties. And you know what? Even if you land one of them, which you probably won't, you're gonna be looking over your shoulder the whole time. So I was like, what are you trying to tell me? This is the former dean of the place. There's a whole career services department full of dozens of people all orchestrated towards this whole rhythm of career visioning and networking nights, all this stuff. And he's telling me to light a match to it all. He's like, get off the beach. I said, what do you mean?

1:01:40He's like, go to the library. Call up the companies that are broken, have PR problems, that are bankrupt, that aren't flying in jets to Harvard Business School because they don't have the time or money or ability to come here. And you call them up. And then if you get into one of those companies, they give you a job where you have meaningful work. They listen to you. They take your ideas. And you know what? You become a big fish in a small pond. It increases your academic self-concept and you can ride that for years while learning the most. So I never applied to another job from Harvard Business School ever again.

1:02:12Instead, I came up with a spreadsheet of companies that I thought were going through difficult times. At the time, Walmart had a pretty rough reputation and was a sizable enough size to warrant somebody potentially working in there in leadership development, which is the field I was interested in. Right, so you go there and this idea of being a big fish in a small pond becomes another one of your kind of core tenets that you speak about and kind of advocate. And it's interesting because I've had decisions in my life where I had to decide whether I wanted to explore being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond.

1:02:50And I've made the latter on occasion. I've had occasion to make different decisions, but my thinking at the time was, you'll never know unless you put yourself in that position. Like you go and be a small fish in a big pond and you will quickly get feedback as to whether you'll be able to compete at that level or not. But if you don't and you go be a big fish in a small pond, you're robbing yourself of that opportunity to really explore the fullest capacity of your potential. Absolutely, and it's different times and different places and different people. I'll tell you for me as a cracked up, like low self-confidence, 25 year old at Harvard Business School campus.

1:03:36That advice was like a bomb on an itch on my chest because I felt so dumb at all these. I felt so, I'm coming here from a sandwich restaurant that didn't work out very well, teaching people how to use J cloths better. Yeah, but you were probably studying business earlier than a lot of these guys too. You're selling yourself short. Well, whether I was selling myself short or not, I'll tell you my confidence was extremely low. It was extremely low. And the proof of this 1984 paper on, is it better to be a big fish than a small, shows that our academic self-confidence can increase for up to 10 years after we're out of the pond.

1:04:11So for me, it's like, I use this instructional tool of finding small ponds in my life when I find that it's my confidence and my work that I want to start. Flash forward to when I was becoming, when the Book of Awesome came out in 2010, I know we're jumping here, but now I'm in my late 20s. I'm at Walmart. I get married. We buy a house. We're talking about having kids and it doesn't work out. My wife tells me after two years, like, I don't love you anymore. I don't wanna be in a relationship with you. And as that's happening and that marriage is crumbling, I'm having to sell my house. My best friend, Chris, Cam, you know, at the time he's going through severe depression and takes his own life.

1:05:00That's where from those embers, I start up this tiny blog called 1000AwesomeThings.com as a way to try to prime my brain for positivity, okay? But I was telling the Find Small Pond story when that turned into this book called The Book of Awesome, which came out in 2010, I was encouraged to start going on speaking tours to talk about positivity around the world. And they wanted to throw me into a paid speaking category with the amount I was gonna get paid per speech was like, I was like, this, I feel very uncomfortable. This is way too much. Who else is speaking in this category? And they're like, this bestselling author, this Olympian, this.

1:05:37And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like what's the smallest, lowest speaking range you have? And they're like, well, this is the smallest. It was like$5 ,000, I think at the time. They're like, it doesn't make sense for us working on commissions to like do all this work for less than that. It's like, put me there. So I was speaking in boardrooms for 50 people working at my like confidence. You're getting your reps in though. That's what I'm saying. Under a low pressure situation. That's exactly what I'm saying. So I'm saying this fine small ponds adage is helpful when you think you might need it.

1:06:06And so maybe for Rich Roll, the great Stanford swimmer, you might not have felt the same way. And like, look, yeah. So I was like, oh, I can go, should I go to Stanford and be like the tiniest fish in this massive pond? at the time I was like, well, I'll never know if I don't. And I went and, I don't know that it worked out perfectly. Like maybe it would have been much better had I gone in a different direction. I don't know. But I would say to your point, like that's not dissimilar from when I started this podcast 10 years ago and nobody was listening to podcasts and I could put up episodes and there was like very little risk.

1:06:45Like it wasn't, it was like, not really anyone was listening. And I was able to like do it for the love.

1:06:53I don't know, was podcasting like a small pond? I guess it was at the time. I could be not even a big fish, like a small fish in a small pond and work it out and figure out what my thing was. And then it kind of grew around me organically, but I do see the value in of course, like putting yourself in a situation to succeed, especially if you feel vulnerable or whatever to boost your confidence in a real way, not in an artificial or manufactured way. Yeah, yeah. And once again, you've added the layers of complexity and nuance that are really good below my little tri-cuttle. Your zingers? My zingers, I'm like, fine small pond.

1:07:35You got a lot of zingers. But where were we before that? I don't even know. But we were talking about, oh, you going to Walmart, being at Harvard Business School, starting the blog, doing it out of, like when I think about that story of you going through the divorce and suffering the loss of your friend and being in this kind of dark place, having this job and having your kind of needs being met, but having this desire to process these challenging emotions, try to find a way to grasp onto something that had light attached to it. starting a blog and committing to like, I'm gonna put up a blog post every day about one awesome thing.

1:08:24Seems like it's a, it's like a practice. It's like, I'm gonna meditate every day or I'm gonna do this one thing that I have control over. I don't have control over how many people are gonna read this thing, but I can control doing this one thing that actually perhaps could lead me to processing all of this and helping me to feel better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and at the time, you think about it's 2008 here, blogs were - That was the blog era. It was the blog era, but I did a couple of things in the design of that website that maybe are hard to see from now, but at the time they were unique. One was I did it as a countdown, not as a count up.

1:09:03So it was called 1000 Awesome Things, but my first post which was number 1000, broccoflower, the strange mutant hybrid child of nature's ugliest vegetables, then number 999. So I always had this like finite, slow building pressure towards an actual end date. So I had the end date when I started. So I started it June 20th, 2008. I knew the thing was going to end May 15th, 2012. I had that mathematically worked out because it added to me a little bit of forced positive pressure. And in the WordPress blogs at the time, you could, and I typed in how to start a blog into Google. I pressed I'm feeling lucky.

1:09:42WordPress was number one. So it was, I didn't know how to do it. It was just like, okay, I'll start that way. And, um, you know, WordPress, I think you can set a timer. So I set the timer for 12.01 AM every single day. So it was a forced little pressure cooker to be like, okay, one post, it could be a one liner, or it could be, you know, a thousand word essay about the joys of old dangerous playground equipment, burning your legs and hot slides, falling into cigarette butts and milk thistles, like kids with casts. And I was like, you know, I could go on a big long rant or I could give myself an excuse and just say, hey, a post could just be one line.

1:10:17And so, yeah, starting that thing out, it was, nobody was reading it. I always joke that my mom sent it to my dad and the traffic doubled overnight. And eventually, you know, you know this feeling, the moment of truth is when you get a comment from a stranger, you know, the moment, it's like you find out that like someone you don't know is reading this thing. And then it just got, you know, bigger and bigger. I was getting 5 ,000 hits a day, then 10 ,000 hits a day, then 20 ,000 hits a day, then 50 ,000 hits a day. Then I got the, at the time, a big deal. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences had these awards at the time that were quite prominent called the Webby Awards.

1:10:57Now they're not, I don't know if they're really a thing anymore, but at the time I got the award for best blog. I fly down to New York City. I'm walking to red carpet with like, Like there's selfies of me there with like Sarah Silverman, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers. I go on stage, they have a five word maximum for speeches. All speeches have to be five words long. So when Stephen Colbert goes up for his webby, he's like, me, me, me, me, me. And he walks off. It's like a five word speech limit. So I was like, short acceptance speeches are awesome. And I walk off, but I get this big trophy.

1:11:33I come back, 10 literary agents or waiting to turn my website into a book. And so then I signed on with one of these literary agents, Erin Malone, WME. She did Stuff White People Like, which at the time was the biggest blog to book out there. And she took it to publishers and she conducted at the time like a bidding war, if you could believe it, for this guy's blog to turn into a book. And that turned into The Book of Awesome, which came out in 2010. and they printed 6 ,000 copies of it. No one was expecting, it's just the blog stapled together into a book. It's literally just the blog in the book.

1:12:17You could read the whole thing for free on the internet. They printed 6 ,000 copies, but there were a number of fortuitous, once again, looking backwards, things that fell into place. Like Heather Reisman, the CEO and founder of Indigo Books, which at the time had like 70 % market share of books and made it a Heather's pick. And she typically picked like literary fiction. So it was very unusual. So now the book's at the front of all the tables. Then it tips into like the big media. And then I get invited to do a TED talk. And then I'm invited on the Today Show and on the early show and all these, well, they just create their own spiral.

1:12:52Yeah, the energy just escalates. It's the snowball rolling downhill. Exactly. At that point, it's like, you know, everybody wanted to feature a book that was about simple pleasures. And when you open the book and you cracked it open, the very first entry was flipping to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night. And I just wrote an essay about that. That's it, that's the whole thing. But it's kind of amazing, right? And like how many, how long was this thing on these bestseller lists like forever, right? Yeah, it was like, it was years. It was hundreds of weeks. And you do this Ted talk that goes on to be like in the top 10 of all time of TEDx is like, I don't know, three and a half million views or something like that at this point.

1:13:38They had this thing on there, the 10 most inspiring TED talks. And it was, I was like number nine or something like that on that list. But when I think about this, what is most meaningful to me is that when you started, you mentioned like you started in reverse order. So when you started the blog, the first entry was number 1000. It wasn't like number one, So, what I infer from that is you just lower the stakes of the whole thing. There's no pressure. All I have to do is come up with a thousandth kind of awesome thing. So, it doesn't even have to be that awesome. Just has to be kind of awesome.

1:14:18And when you lower the pressure, lower the stakes, deflate all of that pressure that one can put on themselves when they're trying to create something, it gives you space and permission to just be free, right? Back to like freedom. A lot of your rules are about like, how do you create that place where you feel safe and free, right? And I know that in my own work, like I have to do that. I have to find ways of doing that for myself because I'll put all, oh, it has to be perfect. It has to be like this. I suck, I'm terrible. The only way I can kind of do anything is when I find a way to let go of all of that and like be like, it's okay.

1:14:58Like this is your time to suck. You'll edit this a million times before it goes out. Like just be sucky right now. It's cool because everything that I've been able to create has started out as something terrible. And, you know, communicating, which is what you do, you know, communicating to people in a way that allows them to feel empowered, that allows them to feel like they too, you know, can have the capacity to express themselves in their own version of your journey, I think is like a really beautiful thing. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a very, it's been a lucky and wild. Right, and beyond anything that your rules and your spreadsheets could predict, right?

1:15:47This goes back to like the mystery and the magic of all of it. It's like, all I did was like, start this blog and not for nothing, you didn't quit your job. Like you were doing this while you were working. Like you didn't quit your job until like way late into this whole thing, right? As you're having this experience of becoming more and more, you know, well-known for the creative things that you were sharing with the world while having this job at Walmart the whole time. I know. And it was really hard to let go of that job because as we mentioned like a long time ago, it was like the goal was to be a doctor.

1:16:17And if it wasn't gonna be a doctor, it was an engineer, it was a lawyer. And if it wasn't gonna be an engineer, it was at least gonna be like an income. It was a salary. It was like benefits. There's that Nassim Taleb quote that the three most addictive things in life are sugar, heroin, and a monthly salary. I was like, I was not gonna leave that for this. What was this? Like a book on a bestseller list that like, yeah, sure, it pays some royalties today, but like, that's a 15 minutes of fame thing. That's not gonna last. That can't be a viable career. And so for eight years, five books, 200 speeches, I was at Walmart the whole time.

1:16:52And big kudos. You wrote five books before you left Walmart? I didn't know it was that many. Yeah, well this is big. That's kind of insane. Well, it's big kudos to the organization because I went and spoke to the head of legal cause I was like, I think I'm like, am I breaking the rules here? Like I got this thing on the side, I got this blog and this book and they're like, well, what's it about? And I was like, well, it's about like small pleasures like flipping - They didn't even know? Well, because - At some point, like you're on the Today Show. Like they know what's going on. Yeah, they know what's going on.

1:17:30At the same time, it was like, I had to, if anything, Rich, I had to like make sure that I doubled down on how I showed up at work because it would be too easy for the person that's just not there on Fridays to be like off on the TV show. So I had to like double down to work. And by the way, for four of those five years, I was the project manager, the CEO. So for four of those five years, I got a development rotation where I was working for the CEO and there was two different CEOs in that role where I'm like writing CEO speeches. I'm like working on strategy presentations for the CEO. So I like also don't wanna, this is also a hugely formative development role for me inside the organization to see how the leader of the world's largest company like works, how this office works.

1:18:09I'm doing that. It's also based on communication and meeting design and doing all that. So I don't also wanna let go of this career. I really liked it there and they were really good to me and I really enjoyed the company and the culture. I have only positive things to say, but it got to the point where I went, after I crash landed downtown, I'm stark single. Like I'm like, I'm basically like, I'm basically like coming home from work, getting takeout from the vegetarian restaurant that's underneath my downtown Toronto, like, you know, bachelor apartment. And I'm sitting at my computer in front of a glowing screen from 5 p.m.

1:18:47to 2 a.m. every single night doing a second entire job, which is writing this blog, writing the books, answering media inquiries and all that stuff. So when I show up to the dating world, it's not a pretty scene. Like I am showing up to like online dating sites now, like a year into this after the divorce. And I'm like, there's this guy in front of you. Imagine he's lost 40 pounds. He's rail thin. He doesn't know how to talk. Like I'm like doing all this stuff online. I'm basically like an internet hermit, you know, I'm coming out of my shell. So the dates, the dating scene for that first year were just like bad.

1:19:21Like I didn't go on a second date for over a year. And I had a lot of first dates. And I liked a lot of those people. But none of them manifested into anyone ever giving me the three dots back when I texted them after the date. It was like I was ghosted weekly. Like it just never worked out. And then finally, two years after my divorce, I go on a date with a woman named Leslie. She's a teacher at the Toronto District School Board. and she's a kindergarten teacher. So I'm like trying to make plans like late at night. She's like, I go to bed at eight. Like we're gonna have to have like something early.

1:19:54So there's a woman on the floor that I lived in this bachelor apartment, it was her friend. And so we go, we hit it off. There is chemistry and I completely scared. I've never told this story before. I completely scared her off because I flew the next day to go to the Olympics with the CEO of Walmart to like cover, do some stuff we were doing at the Olympics. And I sent her a text message that was like, I really like you. I really think this could be a meaningful long-term relationship. I would like to date you as soon as I get back in a week. And she's like, I am not up for this guy's energy at all.

1:20:28Yeah, that has nothing to do with like, you know, you being a hermit and writing on the internet and being too busy. That's just like poor social skills, dude. Thank you. Well, it takes six months. You're such a good talker and you're so engaging and like charming and charismatic, it's hard for me to imagine such a like a horrific gaffe. There's lots of horrific, but it takes six months so we finally get to the second date and then we're still on that second date now. And now we've been together. How'd you talk into a second date after that text? Like bi-weekly text messages for six months. Like is really chasing, chasing.

1:21:12Well, that's gets into a whole other tenant that is a big thing with you, which is like basically like swings at bat or like, you know, our relationship to failure. We'll park that for now though, continue. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, the pitcher with the most wins, Cy Young has the most losses, Cy Young. This pitcher with the most strike, gets Nolan Ryan has the most walks, Nolan Ryan. So there is something to just the number of times you can take a swing. So Leslie and I, we hit it off on the second date and our hearts connected, you'll be happy to hear. and like I said, it feels like that second date is still going now.

1:21:46I'm very, very, very lucky to be married to an incredible woman. Now, the thing about the wedding, I don't know if you knew this,

1:21:56she basically planned the whole wedding and so I said, I wanna plan the whole honeymoon like it was gonna be like a surprise honeymoon and she's like, I don't know if I trust you to plan an entire honeymoon, but she did. So imagine you're getting married and you don't know where you're going how long you're going for nothing. It's like, this is gonna be the surprise the next day. But I wanted to really plan this honeymoon because she's basically planning the wedding. So we go to Southeast Asia. Neither of us have ever been before. Neither of us have been since, but it was like a real dream destination.

1:22:24And we go through Southeast Asia. On the flight home, she's not feeling well. And we have a six hour layover in Kuala Lumpur. And in that airport, which is like lots of steamy noodles for sale, lots of flashing lights. She's feeling very sick. She's looking for a pharmacy. She's looking for a place to lie down. We find her a pharmacy. We find a place to lie down. We get on a 13-hour flight home to Toronto. On that airplane, she goes up, goes to the bathroom, comes back to her seat. It's like 30 ,000 feet above sea level. And she looks at me and she's like, I'm pregnant. She bought the pregnancy test from the pharmacy in the Kuala Lumpur Airport Pharmacy.

1:23:02She did the pregnancy test in the airplane bathroom at the front of the airplane above the clouds. And she tells me on the flight that she's pregnant. So we land home in Toronto and it's like, Our first child was born nine months to the day after our wedding night. Wow. We're married July 12th, he's born April 12th. I spent those nine months writing my fifth and final book while working at Walmart, which was the happiest equation, which I wrote as a 300 page letter to my unborn child on how to live a happy life. So that is where that book came from. And it was the one that tipped me over into eventually trying to figure out, do I wanna stay at Walmart or do I want to try this writing thing kind of full time?

1:23:40And that question, I've been asked many times, how do you make it? You're a systems guy. How do you decide whether to make the leap between organizations? I called the CEO that I was working for, who is a mentor to me, Dave Cheeswright. And I said, how do I make this decision? And he said, you only got to ask yourself two questions. And I hold onto these two questions, Rich, whenever I'm trying to make a major career decision. And I recommend them for anyone who is listening to this, who's trying to make a major career decision now. The two questions are, number one, you got to do the deathbed test.

1:24:09And number two, you got to do the plan B test. The deathbed test is the simple question you got to ask yourself, which is which of these choices would I regret not doing more from the vantage point of my deathbed? Okay, it sounds simple, but when you really try to internalize and metabolize it, it from the heart becomes clearer which one you naturally would prefer not to miss out on. Right. And for me, that was like becoming an executive inside Walmart or trying to get this writing thing going. Right. The second thing is the plan B test, which is simply the question is, what are you going to do if this doesn't work out?

1:24:47What's your plan B? And when he asked me that, I was like, well, I guess I'll have to shine up the old LinkedIn profile and go knock him back on the door again and sort of get back into the corporate world. He's like, well, do you think you could do that? I was like, well, now I've been working here for quite a long time. I might probably have a decent chance of getting some job. It's like, okay, so you've wrestled with and navigated and most importantly visualize what the plan B looks like for you. Everyone's degree of risk is different. Everyone will have different levels of comfort with like how much you're burning the boats and how much you have something to fall back on.

1:25:16But those two tests, the deathbed test and the plan B test, I still use to illuminate big career decisions. Yeah, that's super interesting and helpful to hear and makes a lot of sense. On the plan B thing, when you were telling that story, I'm thinking about the people, particularly artists who will tell you like, there is no plan B. Like there's just, this is what I'm doing. If I have a plan B that gives me a backdoor exit out of this thing, but I am committed to making this work. I'm in for the whole shebang. And when it gets uncomfortable, I don't want to be able to easily bail. Like how do you think?

1:26:02Burn the boats. Yeah. Yeah, and the thing I would say is that we have a survivor bias on those stories where when you typically hear them. From the people that are successful. Exactly, exactly. There's a lot of - And what about the, yeah, like we live in Los Angeles every day, thousands of people arrive here pursuing a dream. Very few of them actually achieve that dream. And we hear about those amazing stories and we don't hear about the people who end up getting on the bus and going home. That's what I'm saying. And so it's just, again, everyone's got a different level of risk. If you have, there's a lot to be said.

1:26:35Like, you know, you watch that Serena and Venus Williams movie. It has the same kind of vibe of like, you know, this was the, you know, remember the press conference when she's like 13 years old and she's like, I know I'm gonna, I know I'm gonna do this. Like there's an undertone of like, it's this, it's success or bust. And I don't personally subscribe to that as much, perhaps because of my East Indian upbringing and the idea of having like insurances in place on like how you're gonna like structure your life. And like, so for me, thinking about plan B and making that at least palatable, if that's how you say the word, enough so that you know if it fails, you have something to come back on is a little bit more my brain, lower risk.

1:27:14Again, it's all about like what is your, like getting really connected to what your risk tolerance is. Exactly.

1:27:28I wanna shift gears a little bit and pivot more into this whole world of happiness. A lot of conversation around happiness. How do we get it? How do we cultivate it? Where are we thinking about this correctly, incorrectly? Pursuing the art and science of happiness now has become like a career path for many people. Many interesting thought leaders. I'm thinking of Arthur Brooks and many others. You're certainly one of those people. You wrote this amazing book, The Happiness Equation, and you have some interesting thoughts around how we think about practice and try to cultivate happiness into our lives.

1:28:09You're here in part in Los Angeles because you're gonna go give a keynote at Expo West. And I think that the nature of that keynote is around happiness, right? And like how we're thinking about it incorrectly. So I don't know, state your thesis around this. Like, where are we going wrong with our pursuit of happiness? Sure. So just zooming out like a huge level before we get into like my views, let's just remember that 2 ,400 years ago in ancient Athens, Aristotle at the world's first university, Plato's Republic had a very famous quote, happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

1:28:51That, if you wanna talk about people that have made a career out of happiness, there's the OG guy right there. Yeah, he's the original happiness influencer. Well, before that, it was like survival. Like we just gotta make it through this thing. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The whole purpose is also, we gotta enjoy it too. 2 ,400 years ago, they put that down, right? Then flash forward 2 ,000 years, they write the Declaration of Independence. You know the famous phrase they put in there? Everybody gets life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But you're a lawyer, Rich. you know it's the legalese in there.

1:29:21You don't get happiness. You get to pursue it. You get to pursue it. You get the pursuit of it. Life, liberty, you get those for sure, but happiness, you just get to chase it, right? So now we flash forward all the way up to 1998. Let's say Martin Seligman and Michal Csikszentmihalyi are co-founders of a new field that they invent called positive psychology, right? And for a lot of your listeners who have heard that phrase before, positive psychology, we should remember that phrase didn't exist in our culture before 25 years ago. So that's still a relatively new phrase. So from 1998 to today, hundreds and hundreds of studies have been done applying the scientific model to the study of happiness, right?

1:30:02Carol Dweck on growth mindset, Slatcher and Pennebaker on journaling, Emmons and McCullough on gratitude, Zahia Loba-Mirsky at University of California. There's this massive, huge, emerging body of work and literature. So I just use those three points to just say like, just let's look what's happened here. Like 2000, we say this is important. Then we write it into the declaration. We got to chase it. And now we're like starting to actually study it only really 25 years ago. Now, I think that the underpinning of how we think about happiness in our society is totally backwards. Okay. We, when I was a kid, what my parents said to me was, we've already talked about this a few times, but it's like, come on, you know, study hard, get straight A's and you go be a doctor.

1:30:47The model therefore is great work leads to big success, leads to be happy, right? And that model is also, if you're listening to this and you're a parent, it's like, don't you say to your own kid, come on, we want you to get into a good school. Come on, we want you to get a good job. Come on, we just want you to be, that's common parental wisdom and it's totally false. So after combing through all these studies, there's a really formative study done by Sonia Lomirsky with Ed Diener and King, Jane King. And they show that actually that model is totally backwards. It's not great work, big success, be happy.

1:31:25It's the opposite. It's you got to train your brain to be happy first. Then if you can do that, if you can think of happiness, like a practice, like a habit, like something you can invest in. You invest in your physical health so beautifully. We see that. We aspire to it. We see that you're a model. But how many people do you look around and you see them investing in their happiness the same way? We aren't as a culture doing this yet. Then the great work follows. Happy people are 31 % more productive. They have 37 % higher sales. They're 300 % more creative. You can go down the litany of all kinds of things that happy people show up better.

1:31:59They're more connected. And then the big success comes at the end. What kind of success? Two kinds. If you want to go on the career point, which I was on for a second there, happy people are 40 % more likely to get a promotion in the next 12 months, but just zooming up a level, there's this really famous study called the Nun Study that shows, you know what? Happy people also live longer. And if going back to our earlier conversation, you only got 30 ,000 days here. Well, if I told you, if you could get 3 ,000 more, bowls of ice cream, kissing your kids at night, watching the sunset, running on the trails behind this place, wouldn't you do it?

1:32:33So again, it's not great work, big success, be happy. It's the reverse. You've got to train and prime your brain to think of happiness like a practice, like a habit, like something you invest in, then being happy leads to doing great work and the great work leads to having big success. I'm with you, man. I mean, that notion, that false notion is so deeply embedded into my DNA. And the only way that I got to a place of deconstructing it and trying to rewire that was through like personal crisis, right? It's like, I chased that exactly like you. Yeah. Well-intentioned parents who were like, we just want you to be happy.

1:33:15Like we want you to be, like, we just want you to be happy. But implicit in that is like, yeah, but happiness is a product of like, you do all these things and then you go, you have this career and you do all this. And the result, the implied result of all of this effort, all of this endeavor is the happiness. And it is backwards, right? Like it is a choice. happiness is a verb, it's a practice like gratitude, like presence, like mindfulness. And yet you are so correct. Like there is no priority around this notion, let alone some shared idea of what those practices are to cultivate it. And on top of all that, a lot of the practices that turns out that do help you cultivate happiness have got real bad ad campaigns.

1:34:07They don't have the benefit of anyone advertising trees. No one's advertising trees right now. Well, because you can't profit from it. That's exactly what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. The vast majority of things that I'm about to tell you about that can actually imbue our lives with a bit more happiness. They don't have great giant ad campaigns and we aren't talking about them. What our culture is trying to teach us is that you gotta buy more stuff. You gotta click more links, you gotta buy more things. And that path to happiness is, whatever is on a billboard that looks pretty, that someone's smiling, that implicit thing is that that's gonna lead to happiness, it's not.

1:34:47Well, and it's so powerful such that somebody could listen to you and say, Neil is spot on. I totally get that. He's 100 % right. Money doesn't buy happiness. But then in the back of your mind, you're like, yeah, but you know, if I just, if I'm gonna get that job. and then I'm gonna get that new condo and I can like upgrade my Carly. Sure. Then everything's gonna be good. Like somehow we still think that we are exceptions to that notion. And I say about money in particular, because people do ask me all the time, does money buy happiness? And I do say yes. And here's what I say about it. There's a really famous study done by Daniel Kahneman at the Woodruff School in Princeton that shows that above a certain level of baseline income at the time of the study it was done, it was like$75 ,000.

1:35:31which was by the way, is way above, you know, average household income. So it's pretty high amount. Then your happiness diminishes after that. If you put it into today's money, it might be 90 ,000 or 100 ,000 or something like that. Meeting your needs and having some percentage of disposable income to pursue the things that make you happy. Exactly. Now using the research that is money, research studies have been done since, I say money does buy happiness if you buy the three S's. Okay, the three S's are sweat, skill, and social. Okay, if you use your money to buy those three things, it actually buys happiness.

1:36:11So let me take you through each one. Sweat, I suck at baseball. I'm on a softball team. I'm running around. I'm not the kind of, I can't run like you, Rich. I'm not a runner. I'm not a do an exercise that doesn't go. I can play sports. So buying this$200 ticket every summer to join the softball team is like a guaranteed Sunday night sweat. That is really good for my happiness levels. Absolutely, I always feel great at the end of it. And there's a lot of research to support this. Then skill, we are learning animals. Where's this podcast classified? Is it education, self-help? Well, all the categories on Apple or whatever, they're all about self-help.

1:36:51We are learning animals. We crave learning. We want to learn. So if you can invest in a skill, okay, I think this is behind the whole like masterclass phenomenon. If you can invest in taking something you've never taken before, you can take a painting class. If you could take a language course, if you could buy the experience of learning something new, that's also going to pay off in your happiness levels. And the third and final one is probably the biggest, which is social. So the 1938 Harvard Adult Development Study, longest running study on happiness over time, shows that community and connection is one of the biggest drivers of our happiness.

1:37:27If you take the formative 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, he has a phrase in there that says, if I can know everything there was to know about you, your health, your gender, your income, your nationality, all of it would fall away in favor of the strength of your relationships with your friends and family. So what does spending money on social actually turn out to be? Well, it's like going out for dinner. It's going out for dinner. It's leaning into saying yes, when the social opportunities that cost money are encountered by you. And that adage, I know it's simple.

1:38:01I know it's a zinger, but it adds up to a little model that I use when it comes to that specific kind of sub question we were just starting to explore on does money buy happens? I think it does. If you buy sweats, skill or social experiences. But those three S's don't necessarily have to be bought. They can be cultivated. They're not necessarily like financially, you know, like things that cost money. Like you can cultivate community and friendships, you know, outside of that on some level and you can sweat without having to, you know, pay a bunch of money. All of those things are available. The vast majority of things that leads to our happiness are free to your point.

1:38:39I was just, you know, just going down that path of money specifically, but like zooming up a level, look, you're a paragon of this, Rich, but like just getting outside and being in nature. And by the way, I'll just preface this point by saying we have the lowest ever levels of nature exposure in our children in history. According to the American TimeU study, 7 % of a kid's day right now is spent outside. 7%, we'll do the math. Multiply 7 % by seven days in a week, that's 49%. It takes a kid a whole week to get half a day outside now, right? So what's the solution? Michael Babich and a team of researchers have shown that even three 30-minute exercise or outdoor windows a week ultimately results in higher happiness levels than people taking antidepressants or people doing both.

1:39:31They compared it to a subgroup doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants. So this, I said trees have a bad ad campaign. It's like we're missing the amount that we really need to be outside. and one of the biggest ways I tell people to do this is if you have a meeting on your calendar with someone you know that you like already, that you trust already, whether it's your boss, whether it's your direct report, whether it's a weekly meeting that you always have, just say to the person, let's both do it outside. Let's just both do it outside. The average person walks six kilometers an hour.

1:40:02You move one hour meeting a week outside, you get 6K of walking. Move two, you got 12. Move three, you got 18. It's a simple way to just introduce a little bit more outdoor activity in your life. It doesn't cost anything and it has a huge positive disproportionate effect on your happiness. It's hard not to see the kind of tragic aspect of this because on some level we're all victims of modern progress and technological evolution because it wasn't that many decades ago that society was constructed in such a way where it was conducive to these three S's. Just by living your life, you would be kind of engaged with those in a very fundamental way without even trying.

1:40:46And now we have to erect all of these systems and create boundaries and set intentions just to do things that we're kind of naturally wired to do. I know. And short of the way that we've decided to live our lives, we would ordinarily, but as a result of kind of urbanization, et cetera, which has been exacerbated by COVID and all of that. We're really separated from community. We're disconnected. We're living our lives more and more digitally. We're not going outdoors. The skills that we're developing are all digital skills. They're not like tactile skills in the way that we've traditionally thought about them.

1:41:31And these are distancing ourselves from our ability to connect with happiness. And then of course there's the conversation around the relationship between happiness and longevity. It's like, if you're not sweating and you're not learning new skills and kind of like actively engaging your mind and you're not connected to your community, you ain't gonna live that long, right? So you're gonna be unhappy and die early. Yeah, and it's true. We have so much of what is designed in the world today is like the default settings do not naturally allow for us to succeed on our happiness level. I mean, when I got the new iPhone and the first thing I saw when I opened the screen is like it just bombards you with the news.

1:42:13I was like, oh my gosh, they set this thing up so that you now have to like figure out how to like edit the widget, delete them all. I have to clean up my dock. Otherwise it's full of all these notifications. I have to delete all social media. It's like you gotta work really hard to create a space where it allows happiness to kind of come into the picture. And that's just on one thing that we're talking about on exercise. Here's another one that I just wanna give I have a little quick rant on here. It's reading fiction from a real book. We are losing, and I know you've had a great interview with Johan Hari on the show.

1:42:46As have you just had him on. I did. He just went up like this week on your show, right? I just did. Yeah, he's, I got into chasing the screaming. It was really wonderful.

1:42:59And we're losing our capacity to read. and it's horrifying what's happening. So 57 % of Americans read zero books last year, zero, not one. That's the first time it's been in the majority, okay? And why is this an issue? Well, according to the 2011 Annual Review of Psychology, only reading fiction opens up the mirror neurons in our brain responsible for empathy, compassion, and understanding. My job when I was at Walmart was to help grow leaders, managers to directors, directors to VPs, VPs to SVPs. You know what the number one gap was amongst all leaders at all levels? Like what's the derailer?

1:43:33What's going to take you off course? EQ, empathy, compassion, understanding. Tony, you're awesome at your job. Tony, no one likes you in the meeting. Tony's not going to get promoted. And you can't ship that person off to empathy class. It doesn't exist. Reading, actually immersing your mind in another life is one of the very few ways that we can actually grow our empathy, our compassion, understanding. And these are very incalculable skills that are important for a trust-based, cohesive society to exist, right? You have to, there's that George R.R. Martin quote, our reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.

1:44:10The man who never reads lives only one. And we're losing our capacity to engage with books. We're losing our ability to fall into other lives and less able to identify and relate to the people around us. Massive issue. So I am very bullish on books. You know this about me. I am obsessed with reading books. I think it's very important. And we have books all over our house. We have books in every room of our house. We are trying to surround our children's lives with books. I think we're losing our capacity to read books and it scares me so much so that I just yelled about it for a couple minutes.

1:44:49Yeah, and I'm sitting here feeling guilty. Like I do read a lot, but all of my reading is nonfiction and is driven by guests that I host on the podcast. So that monopolizes all of my, I couldn't tell you the last time I read a fiction book. I see lots of movies. Maybe that serves some piece of that, but it's not the same thing. And I would say that, you know, as a parent of older children, it's been like the two older boys, these voracious readers, especially Juan Trapper, just like incredible reader. The younger ones, it's hard, man. Yeah. You know, you're competing against, you know, inputs that are so addictive and you're trying to tell that child like, hey, should read a book.

1:45:36It's like, they're like, they're looking at you like you're a Martian. Like, what are you talking about? I know. I loved your conversation with Casey Neistat. And he said, you know, comparing TikTok to reading a book is like comparing like, It's like eating like a kale sandwich or it's like, it's so difficult to try to wrestle with a book after being - Do you wanna walk on hot coals or ride in a spaceship? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It's very, very difficult. That doesn't mean it's impossible. And the way I encourage people to do it or to get back into it is I say, first off, we gotta start with moving the cell phones out of the bedroom.

1:46:07We have to start with that. Right now, if I go in front of an audience, I say, put your hand up. If you sleep within five feet of your cell phone, guess what? 98, 99 % of hands are up in the air, okay? and I say, what'd you do before bed? People are like, well, I check my cell phone. I gotta see if my boss texts me. I gotta check the markets. I gotta see what's going on Twitter. Somebody comment on my Instagram post. What'd you do when you woke up in the morning? It's back to two minute mornings again. You know, I check my cell phone. It's the first thing we do. It's the last thing we do. We're sleeping beside the thing and it's the first thing we do.

1:46:37I say, listen, everybody stop. If you drank a bottle of wine before bed every night, slept within five feet of a bottle of wine and drank a bottle of wine when you woke up every morning, we'd have no problem calling you an alcoholic. We are phone-aholics now. And when everyone has an addiction, it looks like no one has this addiction. It is a problem. It's a huge problem. And we gotta get the phones out of the bedroom. You know what the number one excuse is I hear when people say that? They say, oh, well, it's my alarm clock. Go to Walmart, it's$10. You can't like buy an alarm clock as permission to get the phone out of the bedroom.

1:47:07Oh, well, I'm very, very important. I get lots of calls at night. No, you don't. You really don't. And if you think you do, get a landline and give it to the three people that you think might call you. And guess what? The permission of thinking, oh, my mom, my sick sister, and my boss, they could call me. That gives you permission to get the phone out of the bedroom. Why is that important? Because when you have the phone out of the bedroom, Rich, you make space in the morning to do two-minute mornings, and you make space before you go to bed to read. And this is what I say to people, two pages of fiction before bed.

1:47:39I say two specifically. I don't say read a book. I don't say read 20 pages. I don't say read 20 minutes. I used to say read 20 minutes and no one did it. Now I've got a new thing and it's really working. Read two pages of fiction before bed as the last thing you do. And you know what? Animal Farm is 96 pages. So in a couple of months, you're ahead of the whole world because 57 % of people are reading nothing. So just getting back into the idea of reading a couple of pages before bed at the end of the night is a way to start back on the trail. And I think we can do it. I know that the, we know how good it feels.

1:48:18How good does it feel when you finish a piece of fiction? Well, it feels good. And also for people that struggle with sleep or insomnia, pick up a book and like read it, start reading a book before you go to bed. Yeah. You're out. Exactly. Like you will like fall asleep. And then beyond that, I saw really, sorry to interrupt, but I saw this like really funny, this is like a post on Instagram or Twitter, but it was like, oh yeah, people, you know, talk shit about reading books. But if you think about it, you're literally like taking a tree and then, you know, like, and then staring at pieces of a tree and hallucinating.

1:48:55Is there anything crazier than that shit? Exactly, exactly. That's some trippy shit, right? It's very trippy. I think you're a fan of On Writing by Stephen King, right? Where he calls, you know, that book On Writing, Stephen King, he calls reading, you know, telekinesis or he calls it ESP. Like he said, basically what you do when you're reading is you're totally transported into another mind. Probably getting the word wrong, but it's the concept of it's real. It's the most AI we have. You're engaging an aspect of your brain to connect with imagination in a way that like watching a movie or TV show.

1:49:34It was not just us saying it here. They've done MRI scans at Emory University, even the morning after people read literary fiction. And guess what? More of the brain has opened up and being used. even the smell centers, even the language centers. If you read the word soap and you read the word leather and you read the word cinnamon, your smell centers are opening up. And when you watch the movie, I'm not crapping on movies here, but you're not, you know, someone else is the director. You watch Big Little Lies, they chose the actresses. They want Reese Witherspoon to wear this. They want Nicole Kim to wear that.

1:50:00They choose this nice, fancy bathroom. This is the way, this is the music in a role. This is the, they're the directors. When you read the book, you are. You have to use more of your brain and it feels good to use it. It feels so good. It really does. It makes you happier. It really does. There's a famous article in the New Yorker called, does reading make you happier? Guess what? The answer is yes.

1:50:27I'm thinking like, this is gonna make for a really good reel on Instagram. Like what you just said, the case for reading books. Another, you know, tenet in your happiness equation is this idea that nobody should retire. And so you have these interesting ideas around the nature of retirement and how this idea of retirement like became a thing. Yeah, this is, remember I said that the dollar, comparing salaries on dollar per hour was like one of my most controversial. To never retire is probably the most controversial chapter I've written in any of my books. And so basically here's the deal. in 1889 in Germany Chancellor Otto von Bismarck coolest head of state name of all time Chancellor Otto von Bismarck he had a problem you know what his problem was Rich?

1:51:21he had youth unemployment in like the 20s and 30s percentage and so he decreed from the state that anybody 65 and older could make a claim to the state and get a little bit of money to bridge them from age 65 to death. This is where the concept of retirement was invented. Okay, late 1800s in Germany. Why is it notable? A couple of things. Average lifespan was 67. So the guy's only providing a little bridge to two years, really. They didn't invent penicillin for 40 more years. Okay, so like we weren't living nearly as long. But what happened was we ended up using this number 65 across the Western world as like, oh, let's just copy that.

1:52:06If you look at the UK, the US Social Security Act, the Canadian Act, 65 became this arbitrary retirement age. Well, if you look through at the 20th century, the percentage of people over 65 that chose to retire after age 65 was extremely low because people thought correctly that it was against activity theory. The idea that like, no, we want people to like be a big part of society. In 1951, the Corning Corporation began an ad campaign together with insurance companies to bill retirement as something that you deserve for years of work and to market like relaxing as this like new concept that was like behind the whole idea of building that retirement communities out in like Florida and Arizona and so on.

1:52:51The percentage of people that chose kind of living a life of pleasure after 65 from that point onwards, skyrocketed through the decades to the point where now we've got lifespans that are way longer. You take that 30 ,000 days, you distill this 83. But a lot of people are living to the 80s, to their 90s. And there's actually downward pressure on the retirement age. The downward pressure on the retirement age is, in Canada where I grew up, it's like freedom 55. Like you want to get off work as soon as possible. and what we're doing is we're killing ourselves. We really are. Fortune Magazine says that the two most dangerous years of your lives are the year you're born and the year you retire.

1:53:29There's a reason that almost everybody I know, probably including you, definitely including me, has a story of someone who retired and then they lights out. My guidance counselor in high school was forced out of work at age 65 because that was the mandatory retirement and he had a heart attack and he died the next week and a lot of people have stories like that. So I say, it's not that we want to retire. You don't wanna do nothing. What we wanna do is find something we love. And so what I actually say to people is, okay, you're looking for the four S's. That's what you're looking for. I know that these are different than the three S's I just talked about on money.

1:54:09They are social, okay, that's the overlapping one, structure, stimulation, and story. It doesn't matter if you get paid. I didn't say one of those S's is salary. What I'm saying is that what we're looking for in life is something that gives us the social connection of being part of a community or a group, right? The structure of getting out of bed in the morning and having an icky guy, okay? Icky guy, that word. You've had Dan Butten around a number of times from the Blue Zones. Okinawan word. They don't have a word for retirement in the language there. They have a word called icky guy, I-K-I-G-A-I, which means the reason you get out of bed in the morning.

1:54:43Structure, simulation. We've already talked about it. We're learning animals. We want to be learning something new every day. And story, the ability to be part of something bigger than yourself. Okay? These are four natural cravings we have. So let's not assess our desire to retire by a certain age and do, quote, unquote, nothing. You know, to pursue a life of leisure. It's going to be like an interminal set of decades. A, we can't afford it. We're way underwater on the financial side of this thing. We can't afford to help other people, to pay for it to be happening in the state. There's all kinds of countries around the world that are like not gonna be able to pay for the people that are about to retire from the number of people that are below them.

1:55:26You know what I mean? The demographic curves don't work very well. And it's a new concept that was just invented over a hundred years ago in the Western world. Like it doesn't exist in a lot of places. So I say retirement is a bunk concept. We should not desire to retire. Instead, we should crave the four S's and we should seek those to the end of our days. And seek those through some kind of profession that will compensate us for pursuing them. Like I'm trying to parse that notion, which I agree with, with this notion of pursue what you love. And then I'm also thinking in the back of my mind, like is retirement even a thing anymore?

1:56:05Like millennials don't think of it. Like retirement is this is relic of like our parents' generation on some level. Like it was all about like, you get the job, you work there for 30 years or whatever, and then you get your retirement. But we're in this kind of digital nomad, you know, dispersed workplace kind of economy now, where it's more project-based and there isn't a transactional cost from kind of switching jobs like there used to be, right? Like it's very different. So I think how we're thinking about retirement is different and perhaps healthier and we're younger yet. So we're not even, these people are not even at the age where that becomes tested.

1:56:47But I agree with you, like this idea, like you've worked the job forever and now you're gonna buy a boat and go fishing. Like we have enough evidence to suggest that that's not the recipe for happiness. Well, you do and you're on board, but it's still, I don't think we're as far along culturally as you think. I think we still have the idea that there is a retirement age and I'll get there and I'll have saved up enough that I will therefore be able to do whatever I want forever after that. But what I'm saying is that what we lose there in terms of social connection, in terms of stimulation, in terms of like having a sense of purpose is actually we're losing a lot more than just the money side of it.

1:57:25So I'm saying it's really freeing, I find. It's another system. It's really freeing, I find, to think of myself, I'm 43, I'm never gonna retire. I find that quite liberating, actually. But you don't work for Walmart anymore and you're a writer and you're kind of, you're dictating the course of your career in a similar way that I am. And these are very privileged positions. Like there's a lot of people who are in kind of gigs where they don't have that kind of agency and autonomy and perhaps their pension or 401k or whatever it is, isn't even gonna be adequate to kind of create that retirement experience that was, something that was achievable 30, 40, 50 years ago.

1:58:12Like the economy has changed as well. Like so - I'm not saying finish 30 years of the meat packing plan, punch in for 30 more. I'm saying just keep chasing the variables that we know actually make you happy as opposed to - And so if somebody is in that type of professional environment and is like, look, I'm just, you know, I work all day long and I contribute to my 401k and maybe my employer, you know, matches that or whatever. and at some point, I am thinking about retirement, but that's 20 years away or 10 years away. Like, what should I be doing now? What should I be thinking about so that I don't become a casualty of what you've just explained?

1:58:51Well, the way I would suggest to those people to think about it, and I think that's a really fair point and I wanna just expand on a little bit. It's like, think about the number of hours in a week. Think about that number. It's a 168. You divide that number by three, it's three buckets of 56. If you sleep eight hours a night, it's 56 hours a week, okay? If you happen to be working at the meatpacking plant for 30 years, maybe you're working 56 hours. Maybe you're working a little bit less. Maybe you're working up to 56. Call the second bucket. Now let's think about that third bucket and the whole time that you're designing yourself towards that pension, that exit, that last day, that party with the gold watch.

1:59:24Let's just cultivate that third bucket. See, my mom, when she retired from her government job, she was working at GM as an accountant and then she went to go work for the Ministry of Finance. She retired. My dad was still working. Me and my sister were out of the house. And she ended up in the swirl of not having the social structure, the stimulation, the story. And that created its own negative problems. So I'm saying is take that third bucket of time. Let's enliven it, grow it, plant seeds, volunteering at the library, starting to do something in your community, taking care of a grandchild. A lot of people's icky guy in Okinawa is like taking care of a great grandchild.

1:59:59Create and cultivate that third bucket so that when you retire from that job that is paying you money, you have the four S's in another way. Really what I'm advocating for is not to, is to retire the idea of doing nothing. That's what I'm really against. Yeah, I get that. It's putting in the lattice work or the structure in your life today and continuously so that through your life till your very last day, you are enriched and fulfilled through doing meaningful work. And also on top of all that, we need it. We need it. Look at the world. We need it. We want input. We want your artistic creations.

2:00:35We want your energy. We want your childcare. We want your connection. We need it. We need it. And what about your wisdom? How about valuing the wisdom of our elders, people who reach that retirement age who have so much lived experience and our culture kind of discards them as opposed to valuing them. I think as a society, we need to find better ways of creating situations in which people who are on that cusp of retirement can plug into meaningful ways of contributing back what they've learned for the younger generations. 100%, you mentioned Arthur Brooks earlier. I love his concept in his book, From Strength to Strength of Going from Dynamic Intelligence to crystallized intelligence and the idea of learning and leaning into roles where mastery and wisdom can be communicated.

2:01:31I will say, when I started at Walmart, there was a lot of people with badges that they turned gold in color. They were like the 30-year badge, the 40-year badge, even sometimes a 50-year badge. It tells you a lot about the culture of an organization on how they value their most senior employees. As I continued over there, over the 10 years that I worked there, they started to prioritize the simpler and easier metrics. The metrics like productivity, right? And those metrics tend to lend themselves towards younger workers. I love it when I walk through a Costco and the badges now say since, and the date is the year that they started.

2:02:10And you walk through a Costco and it's like since 1997, since 1994, since 2001. This is an organization that values and prioritizes education and wisdom to the point where they're bragging about it on their badge because they know that there's an incalculable amount of human knowledge and wisdom that can be passed and traded that isn't just measured in like the number of widgets you can push through the machine per hour. It is measured in the idea that you know what to do, not how to do it faster. And I completely agree with you about the fact that we are generally in society discounting wisdom and intelligence, especially amongst older people.

2:02:47It's a huge issue, massive issue. And so for anyone listening to this as part of an organization, figure out how you value prioritize and broadcast experience internally and do so in a healthy way. There's not enough organizations that are truly valuing mentorship at that level. Yeah, I agree. And then shifting gears, like that's really solid advice for people that are in the kind of twilight of their professional careers. But where is your head and what kind of advice do you give younger people who are embarking at the beginning of their careers? Somebody who's looking to enter the professional marketplace or creators, people who are aspiring writers, bloggers, et cetera, or executives.

2:03:42Yeah, you used a phrase maybe 10 or 15 minutes ago, Rich, that was, I thought interesting where you said, do what you love. I just heard that phrase come out 10 or 15 minutes ago. And that phrase, do what you love, is probably the most common phrase, I would argue, in commencement speeches, right? To pursue your passion, to do what you love. And I think that that phrase in commencement speeches is totally wrong. I think the phrase should actually be amended, extended to, do you love it so much you can take the pain and the punishment too? There's a wonderful anecdote that Mark Manson tells author of the subtle art not giving a fuck ratchet he didn't want to be a writer.

2:04:20He wanted to be a rock star. He actually wanted to be a rock star. But the idea of lugging amps to smoking nightclubs every Tuesday, he couldn't do that. And practicing the same like chord progression like for eight hours, he's like, I'm not into that. But the pain and punishment that goes to becoming a great writer, i.e. sending out like giant responses to Facebook comments and to like three of them, he loved that. And that was the pain and punishment required to get to the job of being a great writer, which he absolutely is. And so what am I saying? It is for the younger people that are thinking about what to do.

2:04:55The question you should ask yourself isn't do what, is it what I love? It's do I love it so much that I can take the long, hard road to getting to the point of success? Meaning, do you enjoy the inevitable and necessary hard years and hard times that go? If someone was listening to this right now and said, I love lugging amps to smoking clubs on Tuesday nights and I'm really into practicing core progression. Well, there you go. You might be the rock star, you might be the rock star, but finding out what pain you like to go with the thing that you're desiring is equally important. What's your preferred mode of suffering?

2:05:29There you go, right? Like, what are you willing to suffer for? Yeah, I like that lens on that. So, my mind turns to the young person who is like, yeah, but I just don't even, I don't have enough life experience yet to even know how to answer that question. Well, and this is where I get back to, I do a lot of things in 10 decade increments because if you're born today, your lifespan is over 100. So if you're born today, your lifespan is over 100, okay? So if you're listening to this right now, it's just a fun number to play with to think of the idea that, you know, knock on wood and barring any sort of, you know, unforeseen terminal illness or crazy accident, let's just think about your life in terms of decades.

2:06:17Let's think of it in terms of 10 decades. Just as a rubric here for a second, hold on with me here. You might say, I'm not gonna live to 100, but just hang on for a second. I like thinking about that because it released me from the obligation of trying to figure out what I need to do today or even this week or even this year in favor of a more decade by decade-like planful schedule. That's why I keep 10 rocks on my dresser beside my bed. And I have four of those rocks, I'm 43, moved forward. And I have six of those rocks moved backwards. I move one rock forward, Rich, every 10 years. Okay, why?

2:06:57Because no matter what ails or stresses or issues I had the day, it falls away in the face of this rock clock. I got the idea from the Jeff Bezos, like rock clock that they're putting in like some rock face, you know, it's gonna dong every 10 ,000 years. You know, that whole thing, the 10 ,000? Yeah, I read something about that. Well, there's something about the idea of conceptualizing time and its longest length that allows you on a more minute-by-minute basis how we live to not feel as worried about it because, hey, it's just one moment in a 10-year span. Why is this important? Because you mentioned younger people who may be at the beginnings of their career, who maybe not know what they're gonna do, who don't know what they love.

2:07:33And I say, there's a decade for that. It's called your 20s, okay? The first two decades are pretty much, for almost everybody, pure learning decades. You're pretty much learning. From zero to five, you're learning at home. Got to flush the toilet. Look before we cross the street. How to pull up your pants. Then from five into how long can you stay, you're in the industrial design educational system, adding in your own creations on top of it. But you're learning. and I will say, yes, a lot of the sort of natural tendencies of humans are delayed. So like people are getting married later, they're having kids later, et cetera.

2:08:13But eventually, if that continues to happen for this population in the face of AI and everything else, it's probably gonna happen in your 30s and beyond, okay? So then you got one beautiful, juicy, right, perfect decade in the middle of your 20s, that third rock where it is truly, I believe, about experimentation. It's about trying the Quiznos sub shop that makes no money. It's about going down to New York and living in a bomber's apartment and taking an F train in a different city. And I'm not saying I did that with the foresight that I now am describing it with. I'm just saying looking back, well, what a great way to spend the decade, trying a whole bunch of different things, trying a job in an office, trying relationships, trying on different identities, trying different communities, trying different cultures, trying different countries that you might want to live in.

2:08:59Your 20s are a decade to play with all the malleable structure in your life. And the byproduct of that is massive amounts of learning. Massive amounts of learning. You've had David Epstein on talking about range. You've had Andrew Huberman on talking about his, you know, remarkable path to becoming where he is now at Huberman Lab. Guess what they have in common? Wild and totally unpredictable paths that ultimately result in a gelling of life's wisdom and learnings that form a person's identity and help them figure out what they wanna do. And that decade is specifically your 20s. It's like - Beautiful, I love it.

2:09:36Like, yeah, you're speaking my love language. Your 20s are for experimentation. It's interesting because when you are in that age group, you think everything is so mission critical. And so it's hard to like inhabit that sensibility that this is the time for trying a million different things and not really worrying about it. but it is that decade where you don't have a lot of responsibilities, you don't have kids, you're probably not married, like live lean and whatever kind of way that you're making money, like try to spend it on experiences and broadening yourself and lower the bar and try all different kinds of things because this is the years where you're figuring it out, right, and you should embrace that.

2:10:20So I had Rainn Wilson on the podcast and he went on a jaunt about like your 20s and we made a reel out of that. And that is like the most viral thing that we've ever shared. I don't know how many millions of people like watch that. And it was controversial too. And the people who don't like it tend to be the people in their 20s who are like, you don't understand. I have it harder than you might imagine. And I'm sympathetic to that, but also that is proving my point that when you are in your 20s, sometimes you can't see that for what it's worth. It's not until you're older and you reflect back and you're like, oh yeah, you're 20s.

2:11:00That's when you're supposed to do all this stuff and like not worry about it. Yeah, and if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, you don't understand, I'm under a mountain of law school debt and I really have - Right, I get it. I get that. And things will become more difficult when and if you have a mortgage and children and things that are like, you know, implanted into, it'll become a little more challenging. And you will have robbed yourself of the opportunity to go on that exploration to really figure out what it is that you wanna do and be. And you're just delaying the existential crisis that will visit you, you know, when you're 39, if you're like me, right?

2:11:38Or whenever it is, like, if you're repressing it and just being like, well, I'm paying the bills and I gotta do this thing, like, you know, nothing goes away. Like whatever it is that you're running from or trying to hide from or pretending doesn't exist will resurface and it will come back stronger than it is when it's in your 20s at a low boil, right? And you have the opportunity to kind of like explore and deal with those things. Absolutely. I love countries that have institutionalized the concept of gap years. We don't have that really in Canada. I don't think in the US. Definitely not in the US.

2:12:14Definitely not, right? but when you hear about Australians and Brits and they're on the gap year. They're not in a rush, yeah. That's a great structural,

2:12:26it's aligned with what we're saying from a structural level. Well, the real insanity is that we're supposed to know when we're 18 years old, what we wanna do with our lives. Like, I don't know who came up with that. You're talking about Bismarck and like coming up with a retirement age, but who decided that between 18 and 21, you gotta sort it out and know exactly who you wanna be, you know, in a professional capacity in the world. Like that's just completely insane. I know, and unfortunately - And the pressure on young people. I know, I know. And when they don't know, they feel bad about themselves.

2:12:58Like it's just, this is like really pernicious. I know, and it's getting worse because the, there's the quote unquote death of liberal arts education, right? Like there's the increased pressure to specialize so that you can produce and have an income at a younger and younger age to sort of pay for the lifestyle that we think we all need. It's rough, man. All right, I wanna switch gears a little bit and talk about balance. Like when I think about you and your life, like you have four young boys, but you've written all these books and you travel and you speak, you're incredibly productive. You're able to be a good dad and be a present partner to your wife.

2:13:40and everything seems to be like in check, right? So when - It's not as simple as that. Yeah, sure on a day-to-day basis, it's not like I'm projecting of course, but how do you think about like balance? Oh, live a balanced life. Everything should be in balance. And how do you practice this notion? How do you challenge traditional notions around like living a balanced life? Like talk about that a little bit. Sure. Three things I'll say, Leslie and I took a marriage course before we got married, okay? we had a non-denominational ceremony and the woman who married us said, I would just like to practice my new course with you.

2:14:17I usually am gonna charge$500, but would you mind just meeting with me for eight Saturdays in a row? And I'm gonna take you through this curriculum that I've developed on practicing for marriage. And one of the exercises that she gave us, which I recommend people do before they're married, is, and there's a lot of good things that came out of this little course that I still think about today. One of them was she said, once we got through the conversation, of whether we wanted to have children. That was an important part of the pre-marriage course because that was not to be determined after the marriage, but before.

2:14:47She then said, write down on a piece of paper, the percentage of the childcare that you believe you will do. And then on the count of three, flip over your papers. And when we flipped over the papers, I had written down 25 % and Leslie had written down 75%. Okay, so I will say it's gonna get me in trouble. It's just because let's just be really clear that a big part of all the stuff you're talking about is I'm doing about 25 % of the parenting. That's because Leslie is the one on call with all the kids during the day, especially as we've had babies at home pretty much the whole time. And in the evenings, she'll pick them up from school.

2:15:27I will reenter the fray around 4 p.m. every single day. And then we're tag teaming it together from then until bedtime. But make no mistake, who's picking out whether someone needs to is figuring out the lunches, like figuring out the quick, it's, she's doing 75%. So that's one thing I'll say on balance is that you have to decide upfront how that is going to work for you. And every single couple or every single person is listening, we'll have a different way of doing it. You know, Leslie and I have friends who are like, the woman says, I'm good with my husband, just doing the three G's, garage, garbage, and garden or whatever it was.

2:16:04Like, like everyone's going to have their own model, but just figure out that model is for you before. Okay. Then on balance in particular, I've got two things to share. Number one is I have a dashboard that I draw for myself on the last day of every single month. I draw it on a piece of paper. Nobody else sees it except for me. And it's a four item dashboard. And I use this dashboard as a way to figure out whether I'm in or out of balance on a monthly basis. The center of the dashboard is my icky guy. It could change, but right now I write down helping people live happy lives, including myself.

2:16:45That's my purpose. That's what I'm trying to do. Then there's four quadrants. The bottom two quadrants are how I do it and the top two are what I do. So think of four quadrants. The top left quadrant is called strong core. Everybody's will be different. For mine, it's writing one article, writing one chapter, giving three speeches or whatever it is, a month. And those things could be colored in, Rich, green, yellow, or red, okay? Then the top right is fastest learning. I wanna read eight books per month. I wanna have one unique experience. I wanna conduct two podcast interviews. And for me, I have to prepare for those podcast interviews as well.

2:17:27Are they green? Are they yellow? Are they red? This is what I do. Strong core, fastest learning. Below that is how I do it. There is what I call best family and best self. Best family is four or more family days per month. These are the things we've talked about before. Four or more families a month, four or more date nights per month. This is really important in our system. If Leslie and I aren't connected, when we miss the date nights, there's fracturing. We're starting to get chirpy at each other. We haven't had time to connect the two of us, right? And there is a third one that I forget, but I color them in yellow, green, or red.

2:18:03Bottom right is best self. Number of workouts, number of meditations, number of runs or whatever. I put in the things that I think will kind of infuse myself. Again, yellow, red, or green. By coloring in this dashboard at the end of my month, I find balance because inevitably on every single month, there's a bunch of red somewhere. Sometimes the red is on personal. I've gone flying around and I've done all the productive stuff on my work and that's all green and I've read a lot of books, but I've missed some family dinners and I haven't been doing my workouts and there's some red at the bottom.

2:18:40That helps me guide the next month to find balance. Now I will invest in the bottom a bit more. I'm back on track with my, they're all systems, but they're just helpful guidelines. Now I'm all green at the bottom. Well, I haven't been writing a chapter on my next book. That's kind of falling off to yellow or maybe that falls off to red. So again, this tool helps me find balance because what I'm doing is I'm drawing it just for myself. It's just a dashboard. I'll send you a picture of it or show it to you after. Yeah, I'm like trying to imagine it, but basically what I gather from this is, it's really an exercise in getting honest with yourself and objective about your, like what your kind of intention is versus the reality of what you actually did, right?

2:19:22So you're very clear like, oh, I said I was gonna do all these things. Like I fell short here and here. and it helps you plan for the next quadrant or period or whatever so that you can kind of course correct or wherever that pendulum is a little bit off in any of those quadrants that are important to you, you can kind of think about and plan to do better next time. Right? And I will never draw a dashboard probably. That's fine, that's fine. But you have your own systems and we talked about in terms of what you eat, we talked about in terms of drinking, we talked about you, We know about your fitness and your action.

2:19:57So you're doing a lot of things like this already baked in, but I need help. And so the dashboard helps illuminate for me how in or out of balance I am. And it also is interesting because, you know, before I had this like four speeches per month or whatever, it was like some months I'd have eight. And I'd be like, wow, eight speeches. Wow, this is like so many, this is so great. And, but then it was so obvious that all kinds of stuff falls off. And so the dashboard is meant to be like the dashboard of a car. Like, you know, it helps you steer. Yeah, which gauges are in the red. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

2:20:30I mean, that was, you know, with the speeches thing, I mean, similar to what Mel shared, like when she was just, you know, in such high demand and they were paying her so much, she couldn't say no. And she was just on the road all the time and just crushing it. But then all these other areas of her life were starting to fall apart because she was never home. And she had to like really kind of reconfigure everything and figure out a new way of like, kind of pursuing her business in order to maintain her marriage and her relationship with her kids and everything. Absolutely. In terms of your relationships also at home, less than I do a quarterly meeting.

2:21:05So I know it sounds like a lot. No, but if you plan - Do you publish a quarterly report also? And like, do you have a deck that you share in advance with each other? I actually stole this idea from Professor David Ulrich. at the University of Michigan. Cause what he does, he told me that every, he meets with his wife once a quarter outside of the home. He said, it must be outside of the home. Cannot be inside the home. This is an important point. It has to be like a neutral territory because there's no, no one's going to yell or scream at a restaurant. Okay. So you start off with a public place.

2:21:36You start off with a public place. This is like a trade craft. It's exactly. And then you, you, you have four headlines. I think he said that the four for him were, you know, money, sex, work, and family. And each person goes down the four items and says, so on money, how are you feeling about money with us? Are you feeling like we're good? Do you wanna revisit any aspect of how we're thinking about money? Let's go through them each one by one. And you meet on a quarterly basis. Oftentimes it helps prevent fights or arguments in the three months up to it because Leslie and I will say to each other, let's just add that one to our quarterly meeting.

2:22:18So keep a note, add the quarterly meeting and then we'll have a topic discussed and then it takes it out of the situations where we're probably gonna have a fight where we're both tired, we're both sleepless. It's right at the end of the night. And if we bring it up, then it's not gonna get resolved and it's gonna be messy and it's gonna be ugly. So we just, the quarterly meeting also acts as a bit of a venting system. And a prophylactic, right? Cause you're kind of like airing it out before it becomes so acute that there's an outburst and a fight. Wow. And a misunderstanding, right? Wow, yeah.

2:22:48But meanwhile, you say you'll never do it. Yeah, I just can't imagine like, I just can't. But you have your wife on your podcast all the time. So you guys are having - You're having a different type of processing. What's hilarious, Neil, is that like in our relationship, I'm like much more of the systems guy than she is. And like, compared to you, like there's no system, right? So Julie is just, she's surfing the waves of the, It's like, it doesn't like, and she's an amazing entrepreneur and like so talented and she gets so much done and she's so good at so many things. And I'm like, I have to do one thing at a time and I have to be like all organized and kind of planning around stuff.

2:23:28It works, we've been together forever. And like we, we're very different people, but there's something about like the differential in our energies and approaches that compliments each other. but I do have a hard time imagining us sitting down and having a quarterly meeting. I mean, she will be like, we need to talk, like let's sit down, like we need, we have to go over this stuff. Like she's pretty good about that. But you do have the podcast. It's just not as like scheduled and we have a podcast. I've listened to your podcast episodes with Julie. I know Julie, I love Julie. And like you are processing things in a different way.

2:24:01It happens to be public, but like those are quite, those are quite rare. We have our private meetings too, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the point being like, find what works for you as a couple, as partners, communication is key, what that looks like. For you, it's very structured. For other people, it might be less so, but prioritizing communication around those important things like finances, sex, et cetera, child rearing, career, and family is like all those things. You gotta be in sync and on the same page on those things or you're gonna have problems. And if you're just kind of like whatever about it, like you're on a crash course with, something's gonna happen.

2:24:50It takes a lot of work. So it is. When I say like weekly date night too, it's like, that sounds like a luxury. Actually, it's a critically important cog because again, when you miss it a week or two in a row, then you're noticing branches start coming up. You forget who you were as a couple before you had kids. And that is an identity that you don't wanna lose since the kids are gonna leave. And I will say also on these models and this idea of balance, one thing that I do think about is, I don't think of it in a stressful way, but I think a timer starts ticking from the moment you have your last child to what from that point to when your first child leaves the house.

2:25:33And I think there is a finite amount of time that most families have when all their nuclear family is under one roof, like to our point earlier about kids having to choose what they wanna do and maybe going off when they're 17, 18 or whatever, 19. And that therefore forces into a macro level system. The idea that this decade that Leslie and I are living right now is one out of 10. Again, that's nice. That's a nice thing to use where we just have to be present and prioritizing of our family. And if there's a decision to be made on X versus Y on traveling versus not, on accepting versus saying no, it has to go towards the thing that is more rare and more sacred and more special and more scarce.

2:26:14And that is the time with the family under one roof, which is a very small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. It's the opposite of the twenties, right? Twenties are about kind of being selfish and investing in yourself and exploration. and that child rearing decade is really about putting your own selfish desires aside and really investing in these young people. Yeah, and what you will gain from doing that, I don't yet know, but I expect it to be a fuller, richer, wiser, more informed worldview that enables again, a wonderful set of decades after that too. Yeah, well, as somebody who's further down the line, I will tell you that it's not gonna pan out the way you've imagined it.

2:27:05And there will be lots of landmines and pitfalls along the way. And that's a nice macro level point about every single thing I've talked about from a system perspective. These are helpful aids. They're not impermeable tools. Like they're meant to enable, not force. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, what I get from what you're saying is a healthy relationship with control. Like if you're setting up these rules because you're trying to control your environment and the people around you and the trajectory of your career, you're in for like a world of hurt and pain, right? And so, but if you're building these systems to create freedom and allow more expansiveness for you to be able to like explore your curiosity and like engage with the things that you love, that's great and very different.

2:28:03But I do think that a lot of the system stuff, it lights up the brains of the people who have an unhealthy relationship with control, right? Including me, yeah, sure. Yeah, and so that's where it can go sideways, I think. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, no, it's figuring out the balance that works for you and thinking of everything that we have talked about so far today as an offering. The goal in general is not to be perfect. It's just to be a little better than before. I think that's something I get from your show. This is my favorite podcast, Rich. I love your show. I listen to it. I think it's wonderful.

2:28:42It's beautiful. And there's different things I take from everything every time. And there's stuff that contradicts and that's okay. It's just figuring out what works for you, carrying it in your pocket, using it for as long as it deserves you and then discarding it as you keep moving. I do, thank you. I appreciate that. And on the subject of podcasts, I did wanna spend a little bit of time talking about your podcast. I gotta get you out of here at some point. We've been here forever, but three books. Yeah. I love the premise of the show. The idea is you sit down with these people and you ask them about, there are three, the three books that impacted them the most.

2:29:20I had the opportunity to be a guest on your show and I loved it. You were so prepared. And I love that it's very focused in that regard. But I think the thing that is so interesting is that this is like a, on some level a side project to your main thing, which is writing books. And yet in a very short period of time, you've been able to book like incredible guests. Like you got Quentin Tarantino and you got David Sedaris and like Malcolm Gladwell and like all these people, like your hustle game is on point. But I also think it is illustrative of this principle that we talked about earlier, like the Cy Young thing of like just, you know, like getting up and taking swings and like lowering the bar and not thinking about these, you know, tries as failures.

2:30:08And I just know in my own case of running this podcast, like I get all up in my head about asking people, I don't wanna ask people to be on the show. I don't wanna be rejected or I feel like I'm bothering them. And like, you're just like, oh, I got, hey, you know, and then you're so generous. Like you're like, I had Daniels on, they're amazing. You should have, you know, like you're trying to help me, like get these people on. I've like been very inspired by like the Daniels, they said no to me, but they did your show, which is cool. And now they're probably gonna win the Oscar for best picture.

2:30:41but I just, I have a lot of respect and admiration for how you kind of have created this cool thing. Thanks Rich, I appreciate it. You know, it's a small podcast compared to the Rich World Podcast. That doesn't matter. Yeah, no, I know. That's not what I'm talking about. But here's what I'm talking about that I think we're both saying is that different is better than better. So if you, when I started three books, it was 2018. At the time there was 2 million podcasts available. Today, as we're speaking in 2023, there are over 5 million. So your only chance is to be different. Your only hope for whatever it is you want to do, it's to be different.

2:31:21Different is better than better. Don't try to compete with like, you know, a deep, intense, video-based, long-form conversational pockets with this show or Tim Ferriss or Joe Rogan. Don't go for that. It was just go for something different. And the reason I point that out is because typically when I'm sending the guests an invitation, they're hearing an invitation that they've never heard before which is hey Dan Kwan and Daniel Shiner would you like to come on three books and talk about your three most formative books there is a huge filter in there right away if the person's not a bookish person and I'll tell you there's been some times where I meet a fascinating person and I get to the point I'm like so do you read books and they're like no I'm like damn it then I can't ask them to come on my show it's a question that a book nerd typically hasn't heard before and then they will love answering because no one's ever asked them before and Daniels being Daniels, of course, picked two formative books together.

2:32:12No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July and Kurt Vonnegut book. And then they each picked a formative book themselves, just breaking the constructs of genre once again. And they were wonderful. And then for me, it's also just like, do you love it so much? You can take the pain and the punishment too. The pain and the punishment that I serve myself in this podcast is crazy. I task myself with reading all the formative books that the guest has provided me. So you give me the war of art and the artist's way and the big book. I actually buy the big book. I buy the war of art. I have them on my bookshelf beside my bed for weeks.

2:32:50I'm paging through them. I'm looking for quotes from this Bill Wilson thing. I'm looking, okay, what's Julia Cameron saying in the interviews? What can I ask? But I set myself up an almost interminable, unreachable goal that's so high. But guess what? I love books. I love finding the books I love flipping through the front and back I like going on Goodreads and finding the most popular quotes I like going into the depth there and then that enables a conversation like we had on free books which is different for you because you've probably been on a lot of conversations where you're like so tell me about when you were going up the stairs when you were 40 Rich and you get that so many times that you don't want to have that conversation anymore so it's just the podcast has the issue of the structure it's back to the refrain in general here, the structure sometimes can disable itself.

2:33:37Like where I have to jump in. Yeah, but it's refreshing for the guests. Like, oh, thank God. Like I can do this cool thing and talk about something that I care about and it doesn't have to be about me. And I have to tell that same story over and over again. Yeah, and like kudos to Tarantino because when he came on. And then you were in his book. You got like, I forgot about that. Like he quoted you in his book. I know it was so, it was so, it was so, but I'm saying kudos to him because he's past the point of, I think, I'm projecting, what I got from that was that he just wanted to do shows where he could just geek out and have fun and have big nerdy conversations.

2:34:15And that's kudos to that guy. Not everybody likes that. Most people, if they start asking me questions about like, okay, so what are the downloads you get and how many followers you have on Instagram? I'm like, this is not gonna work out because I don't have Rich's follower account and stuff like that. I'm not comparing myself to you, but it's just the angle that they're coming in with is not gonna enable where we're gonna go, which is down a really big artistic rabbit hole on what shaped you from a book perspective. And that's just one idea. There's millions of ideas for a podcast, but similar to the Thousand Awesome Things, it's 1 ,000 formative books collected over 333 chapters.

2:34:47It's a finite date. It's got a finite time. I publish it only on the exact minute of every new moon and every full moon. Okay, so this also I don't recommend because it totally screws you up on any algorithmic ranking. Yeah, because you're never on the same day. You're launching like Mondays and Thursdays. Mel's launching like Mondays and Thursdays. How many emails I get Mondays and Thursdays? And then suddenly it's like Saturday night at two in the morning. Neal's on the ringer calendar. Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, just like the blog, like when you get to a thousand books, you're gonna call it a day.

2:35:18I'm done. And so how many books into it are you now? Now I'm about 400 books in. Wow. Yeah. So I started in 2018 and it's been a joyous ride. I've learned a lot along the way. And what a beautiful world we live in. I was lucky enough to interview Dave Eggers on the show. And he said, podcasts are the antithesis of everything wrong with the world today. He said, they are long, they are deep, they are cerebral, they are focus, they are pulling our focus into an area. They are the antidote. He talked about podcasts in such a beautiful way, that made me feel so good. And it's so true. No wonder you're attracted to this medium.

2:36:05No wonder it works for you. No wonder it's the type of conversation that you have over the years, over the guests, over and over again about living an intentional life because the medium serves that. You're not viral on TikTok. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. It's a different kind of engagement, but I think that there is a thirst and a hunger out there for something that feels real. And I think that we're missing, we talked earlier about the kind of fractured urban lifestyle that we live now where our connection to community is not what it used to be. 40 % of us live alone. Surgeon General says loneliness.

2:36:52So we're in this epidemic of loneliness, increased rates in depression and anxiety and suicide, this legitimate mental health crisis that's been exacerbated by COVID of course. And COVID also amplifying our kind of,

2:37:17lack of analog contact with other human beings. Like even though we are on the backside of that, we acclimated to Zoom and all this sort of stuff. And it's like, now I don't even know, like when I try to book podcast guests, they all assume it's a Zoom. And then when I'm like, oh, it's in person, they're like, oh, you know, like that wasn't the case before the pandemic. Hold onto that, please. The norm, yeah, like what's normal now is like our digital interface with other human beings. And I think that's driving people to look for community and connection on these digital platforms. And if there is a silver lining, it's that like we have this like deep seated need for that campfire experience.

2:38:06And on some level podcasts serve that, they are an antidote to the clickbait, soundbite, hot take, you know, kind of media landscape that predominates our, you know, consumption of content. And, you know, it's that, I think that aspect of it is really cool. Well, especially if you're doing what you're doing and actually putting out really long form, long form interviews, because there is a tendency, even within the medium that we're talking about being so bold to be shorter and more produced and more like there is pressures. Well, now podcasting is moving towards that now. Yeah, like these very kind of like highly produced.

2:38:45That's a different thing. And I think there's, look, I still think we're really early on. I think podcasting is still a really new medium. So, I think there's room for that. And I love those kinds of shows as well. Like this is a different kind of thing, but I don't think that this will ever go out of style. I think that we will always have a need to hear two people in a conversation where honesty reigns. I just think that that's part and parcel of what it means to be human. And if we move too far away from that, we'll always find our way back to it somehow. I absolutely agree. I have Echoes of Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff in my ears.

2:39:27I, as you know, when I started three books made it so that I come out of the left ear and the guest comes out of the right ear. I have, like I questioned that decision. You told me correctly to change that. And what I did was using production, We made it sound like the guest was in the front left and I was, you know, we still, but we still, if you listened to three books, I've tried to make you the listener feel like you're literally on the couch between us and for better or for worse, I get a lot of complaints. There is some, yeah, like some distribution from side to side, but not entirely one ear and the other ear, more like a Dolby thing.

2:40:04Like it's like, oh, I can kind of tell this person's on that side of the room. I was doing spatial before Apple kind of do it. Yeah, I got you. That's interesting. Well, I was trying to make that connection. And for me, the podcast is, it's self success. It's not sales success. It's not social success. There's three S's. There's three different kinds of success. You have to choose which one you want and you have to go for it. If I was trying to monetize the podcast, it would flop. I don't have enough downloads on it to make it worth the while of a big advertiser. I don't, Athletic Greens is not banging down my door.

2:40:40And at the same time, I have to keep coming back to my bearings. I don't look at the stats. I do it for myself. I do it for a learning vehicle for people that love books or wanna love books more. It's buying for book lovers, writers, makers, and librarians. And I reason I come up with that triangle is because I have to remember that when I don't have, when I don't have some of the other elements that can be very tantalizing. And I do think for anything in life, we were just talking about Daniels, we're talking about best picture, historically the best picture winner, whether that was the Hurt Locker, whether that was Moonlight is a box office flop and Alvin and Chipmunks, the Squeakwell or Fast and Furious 7 takes home the cake.

2:41:17So decide if you want sales or social or self, they're not the same thing. Right. And it's a good exercise. Like it's a reminder of that, right? And it goes to that intrinsic versus an extrinsic reward system, right? So here you are, you're like, okay, I'm doing this thing. Remember, this is why I'm doing it, not this. All these tantalizing kind of things are out here that could motivate me to make different decisions about how I'm running this show. But I think that's like a really beautiful, kind of pursuit of doing it for the pure, intrinsic value that it's giving you. And of course it's providing you with material that I'm sure is gonna find its way into the books that you're writing.

2:42:01Yeah. Yeah. And on that subject of like kind of community to kind of, we gotta end this thing. We're like three hours in and there's like, oh, by the way, like new book that Neil wrote, our book of awesome, you know, like let's wedge that in.

2:42:19The thing, you know, in this series of awesome books that you've written, like what is different about this is the community thing. Like this is really a book written by your readership, right? And it speaks to that campfire thing. Like you've created a really, you know, beautiful dynamic community of people who love what you do and contributed their stories around like, what they feel is awesome in their lives, these little things that are the big things. And you've kind of compiled this into this book that creates like a connectivity, like this is not analog. These are people who are out in the world who connect with you in different ways.

2:42:57But these are the interesting, cool ways that we're finding to cultivate that kind of connection, the S, the social S that you talk about. Yeah, I'm 43 and I'm a very different head space than I was when I was 28. So after my wife left me, after my best friend took his own life, I had to sell the house, I had to move downtown. I lost 40 pounds to distress. I stopped eating, I stopped sleeping. I had black bags under my eyes. I started wearing makeup to work because I was so embarrassed about how I looked. Well, you got a hookup for that, right? Like if you had cover girl days, It's like, you know, you get the go-to source.

2:43:31You get it wholesale. At least I didn't want to buy, although I couldn't find the stuff to match my skin. I literally was putting makeup under my eyes. And I started writing one awesome thing a day. And like I said, they were bad when they started. Brocco flour, the last crummy triangle on a bag of potato chips, finding$5 in your coat pocket. Here I am 15 years later, I'm still doing it every single night at midnight. Thousands of people around the world get my daily awesome thing email. It comes at 12.01 a.m. every single night, still today, 15 years later. What happened on that website was the comments exploded.

2:44:05So I started using the comments as my ideas and then writing the essay below them. 15 ,000 comments have been received on that website. I put a thing at the back of the first book, the Book of Awesome. Send in your awesome thing. I got thousands of people sending in their suggestions. What happened in my own brain, Rich, was I created a sun-like dent in my universe that created a magnet for awesome things to come to me. If there's something in your life that you want and you're listening to this, start it yourself. Because then people will gravitate towards you when they're looking to do that thing.

2:44:40The pressure and the entries and the submissions created the volumes of this book, which now serve me. I just guide them. I just spirit them. I'll take a page from Julie's book. I'm just now kind of shepherding this thing. And even the awesome thing that probably comes out tonight at midnight, I didn't write it. I put a byline now in the corner of the person that submitted it because I want those names on there and us to realize and hear and feel like there's somebody else out there that also loves the feeling of the snow falling on your eyelashes or somebody else there that loves like hitting that last string of green lights when you're late for work.

2:45:14Or there's somebody else that I love that's walking by on this, the smell of the bakery. It's like, yeah, it can be a little cheesy sometimes or people are like, you know what? Like I'm not really feeling like Pollyanna like this, but you know what? There's something so gratifying about exercising yourself from this pressure and screen and algorithmically fueled existence that we've created and going back to the simple things that connect us because that's what makes us human. And that's what makes us special. And that's what ultimately leads to a rich and fulfilling life. I mean, I can't think of a better way to end this podcast then with that, man.

2:45:46That was beautiful. I love you, Neil. Amazing. I love you too, Rich. Thank you. You are such a wise and thoughtful, caring, compassionate and empathetic human being. Well, I learned more from you than you do for me. It's a real gift to have your show and your art and your beauty out in the world. It's a real pleasure. Thank you so much for your friendship and your love. Thank you. So Neil's latest book is our book of awesome but he's got lots of awesome books out there. The Happiness Equation is the book that goes deeper into the happiness stuff that we talked about. His podcast, three books, you can check that out.

2:46:25Anywhere else you wanna direct people, neil.blog. Yeah, I have newsletters that offer all these things up to people that want them in their inbox. Yeah, and most of your speaking gigs are like corporate stuff. Are there some that are open to the public if you wanna come and see it? There are like sometimes a literary festival or school, those ones will be public or ticketed and then I'll do those. But yeah, it's there's 700 conferences a day in the United States. And so that ends up being the depressed sun in that universe, the corporate world. All right, my friend. Well, until next time, appreciate you.

2:46:59Thanks for doing this. Thanks, Rich. I really appreciate it. Cheers. Peace.

2:47:13That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:48:35Portraits by Davey Greenberg Graphic and social media assets Courtesy of Daniel Solis Dan Drake And AJ Akpodiete Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting And website management And of course our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt And Harry Mathis Appreciate the love, love the support See you back here soon Peace Plants Namaste Thank you.