Travis Hellstrom's Blog, page 6

22 Lessons on Happiness in Five Minutes

I really loved this simple book, Hector and the Search for Happiness, so I thought you might enjoy hearing my favorite parts in a quick review. Here are Hector’s 22 lessons on happiness.

 

 

 

How to Be Apart From Someone You Love

My wife Tunga left this week to visit her friends and family in Mongolia for over two months. I know she’s going to have a wonderful time, but I love her and it’s hard to be apart from people you love.

Reflecting on why it’s hard, I’ve come to think there are two big reasons: we miss being with people we love and it can be lonely being alone.

Luckily, these are both very normal feelings and there are a lot of healthy things we can do to address both concerns. Also, as luck would have it, I’ve been surrounded by people with great suggestions that I would like to share with you here.

Here are six ideas that might help being apart from someone you love.

1. Write to Them

This seems simple but I forgot about it until Evan at en*theos, a great friend and mentor, reminded me. Write to the person right now, before you are even apart. If you send the letter ahead of time it will arrive shortly after they arrive, or perhaps they will find it after you leave if you are the one going somewhere.

When Tunga and I first started dating while I was in Mongolia with the Peace Corps I went back to the U.S. for over a month to be part of my sister’s wedding. I wrote Tunga a letter for every day I was going to be gone, 45 in total, and even had a scavenger hunt, little candy and hand-drawn maps thrown in there. I gave them to her in a big bag with a number on each letter. It took a few hours to do, but she loved it and it was worth every minute.

2.Breathe

The day Tunga left was emotional which, as my best friend Jonathan reminded me, is a really good thing. If I wasn’t emotional something would be amiss. That same day I was greeted by an email from Leo at ZenHabits who wrote about how to be alone. It’s a wonderful post and in it he basically says being alone is a great time to sit back and reflect. Think about your emotions, where you are feeing them, allow yourself to really feel them.

I don’t know about you, but when I am about to cry or I feel like a wave of emotion is coming up through my chest I usually push it down. I hold it back. I sniff, I snort, I open my eyes wider and try to pretend the sun is too bright. This always works wonderfully of course and never backfires, gives me headaches, makes the tears gush even more later, makes me look and sound ridiculous or any of that.

Our emotions are a window into a deeper part of us and an opportunity, not an enemy.

3. Talk to Someone

Friends are a true gift. They understand us, are there to listen to us ramble about whatever, and they are especially helpful at emotional times when we think we might be over-reacting or we feel crazy.

We aren’t crazy. What we are feeling and thinking is normal and something our friends will help us understand and appreciate. When I talk to people I love they not only help me make sense of what is happening, they also help me talk through a way forward.

After taking some time to reflect, breathe and meditate, talking to a friend who makes you feel great can be a perfect thing to do.

4. Think of the Positives

One of my favorite sayings of all-time is this one: what a great opportunity. No matter how good or bad something may seem, there is always a great opportunity in there somewhere. Maybe this is one of the only times in your life you will be free to travel alone again without responsibilities, or perhaps this could be when you finally master that hobby or put the time into that personal goal you’ve had for so long. Being alone can be a blessing if you choose to look at it this way.

If it’s hard for you to see why it is positive, find someone positive you trust and ask them this question: why is this a great opportunity for me? You might be surprised at what you hear.

5. Share Something Small

Writing letters is great, but small acts of connection are wonderful too. Sending photos, emails, texts and making a phone call or Skype call go a long way in letting the other person know how much you love them. Look at old pictures and send them a photo of you together. Share a photo of where you are or something fun that happened today.

Better yet, my friend Jonathan created a shared dropbox folder for he and his wife which allowed them to easily share photos and videos with each other. It’s convenient and also casual. They uploaded things almost every day, at random times of the day, and he says he loved it so much he checked it every morning just to see what she was up to. It’s a sweet and easy way to stay connected together without feeling like you are constantly pinging the other person every hour of the day.

6. Plan Something Fun

Planning can be a lot of fun. This can include making fun plans for you or the person returning with things like a countdown, chocolate, flowers, champagne, renting a place somewhere or a bunch of balloons from the dollar store. It could also include planning a fun trip for yourself with family or friends while someone is away. Personally I’m going to try for all of the above. Adventures for everyone!

I hope these ideas are helpful and make being apart from someone you love even just a little bit easier.

Where Will You Be at 90?

Take a moment with me and imagine your vision for your ideal life.

What year will it be when you turn 90? Insert that year below.

The Exercise

The year is 20_, and on a warm Spring evening you lie down in bed to sleep out one more night of your long and eventful life.

You are 90 years old today.

On this one evening, your mind drifts into a journey across the decades of your life…the 2010’s, 2020’s and beyond…time has flown by faster than you could ever have imagined, but you have reason to be proud and contented with how you lived out each day and each year and each decade, to end up where you are now, in the Spring of 20_. There have been challenges and there have been triumphs, and you weren’t always able to stay tightly directed in your affairs, but you realize now that the broad course of your life, your strivings and your pursuits, have stayed true to your purpose. As sleep slowly envelops your consciousness, you cannot help but smile with satisfaction and gratitude for a life well lived.

Put yourself in that moment… in the twilight years of your life… and write down what you think would be the kind of life you must have led to allow you to conclude that it was, in fact, a life well lived. Try to be as concrete and specific as you can about the kinds of things that would have needed to happen to make it this ideal life for you, as you look back at life on the day you have turned 90 years of age.

 

I will share my answer next week!

How to Be Happier at Work

I’ve taught my third class in the en*theos Academy!

This one is called How to Be Happier at Work and it pulls together 10 strategies based on the years of research I’ve done and dozens of interactions and interviews I have had with some of the best companies in the world. It’s basically a summary of my master’s thesis Leading Happiness.

10 Big Ideas

Here are the 10 Big Ideas I cover in the class:

Wake Up Early
Meditate
Make Exercise Part of Your Day
Don’t Check Email in the Morning
Start with Your Most Important Task
Start with Gratitude
Tame the Email Monster
Work Standing Up
Work Toward Your Ideal Day
Have a Digital Sunset

Tell Me What You Think

I hope you love it and I’d really enjoy hearing what you think about it in the comments at the bottom of the class!

Thanks everyone!

 

How to Live Your Dream

My good friend Matt has a lot of sayings and by far one of the most popular is, “Living the dream.”

He talks about some of his friends who live the dream, like his buddy who has played golf with Obama more times than anyone on the planet. He’s living the dream. He talks about people who travel the world and live in Thailand, owning a place on the beach in some exotic locale. Now, that’s the dream. He also, in a humble way, is a pretty epic guy and lives the dream in a unique and different way every day.

All this begs the question, “What is the dream exactly?”

That’s the tricky part.

The dream is all about you… not me, not him or her or anyone else.

What is your dream?

Living on the beach and making just enough money cleaning the earwax out of tourists and surfers to live there forever?

Sitting around and doing nothing except play World of Warcraft?

Relaxing and fishing all day every day until you die peacefully in your canoe?

Variety

I think any good dream life has a variety of key elements:

Relaxation
Fun
Productivity
Family
Community

Unfortunately, we have a tendency as a society to over-emphasize certain elements: relaxation and fun. Watch any beer commercial to get a taste of that. Kicking off our sandals at the beach until the sun goes down. Watching football and eating pizza all day long. Playing pool, hanging out, drinking, dancing, partying.

Ask anyone who has done those things for an extended period of time. They get old. But you wouldn’t know that by the blissful faces on the commercials.

Productivity gets old too, obviously. We all know what long high school essays feel like, what studying for tests, filling out forms, going to meetings, clocking in, clocking out and sitting in traffic feel like. These things get old too.

And family and community, though wonderful, can become overwhelming and exhausting too. Thanksgiving may start out great, and I hope it does for you this week, but by the end of December I bet you’ll be a bit frazzled. It can all be a bit too much.

So “the dream” can’t be just one thing can it? It’s about variety.

Once we realize that, we’ve unlocked the secret.

How to Create Our Dream Life

We create our dream life by figuring out what real relaxation, fun, productivity, family and community look like for us. We get to decide the ratios and the location. What get to choose what fits best with our spirituality, philosophy and values. And we get to choose who we surround ourselves with as we enjoy every one of these elements.

Do this little activity with me. Take out a piece of paper if it would be helpful.

Imagine yourself 5 years from now. You’re living the dream! You can proudly and peacefully say that you are really living your dream. Imagine the smile on your face. How do you look? Where are you standing? Who is around you?

Now picturing yourself 5 years from now living the dream, answer these five questions by listing a few ideas next to each:

What are you doing to relax?
What are you doing to have fun?
What are you doing that feels productive?
How do you spend time with your family?
How do you take part in your community?

Make The Dream Reality

The beauty of this method is that it helps you realize that you probably aren’t 5 years away.

You’re probably much closer to this dream than you realize.

Look at your list again.

What are some little steps you can take this week to start stepping toward that dream?

Who can you ask for help?

What would you like to do today to get started?

Google’s 8 Innovation Principles

Peter Diamandis shared these principles this week and will be talking about them more in his upcoming book BOLD next year. I love them.

Feel free to write them on your wall or use them as a filter for your next big idea but, above all, don’t ignore them.

Focus on the user: Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and many other successful entrepreneurs speak about the importance of building customer-centric businesses. Everything you do should solve a problem or fill a need for your “user.”
Open will win: In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it’s critical to be open, allow the crowd to help you innovate, and build on each other’s ideas.
Ideas can come from everywhere: Ideas are everywhere these days, and tapping into the power of the crowd is the best way to succeed fast. This is the basis for XPRIZE itself – when you’re looking for a breakthrough, turn to crowdsourcing for incredible ideas, insights, products and services.
Think big, but start small: This is the basis for Singularity University’s 10^9+ thinking. You can start a company on Day 1 that affects a small group (with a minimally viable product), but aim to positively impact a billion people within a decade. As Peter says, the quickest way to be a billionaire is to do something that helps a billion people.
Never fail to fail: The importance of rapid iteration: Fail frequently, fail fast and fail forward.
Spark with imagination, fuel with data: Agility—nimbleness—is a key discriminator against the large and linear. And agility requires lots of access to new and often wild ideas and lots of good data to separate the worthwhile from the wooly. The most successful startups today are data-driven. They measure everything and use machine learning and algorithms to help them analyze that data to make decisions.
Be a platform: Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations — AirBnb, Uber, Instagram, Whatsapp — they are the platform plays. Is yours?
Have a mission that matters. Do you or does your company have a massively transformative purpose (MTP)? Passion is fundamental to forward progress, and having an MTP is absolutely necessary to keep you moving during the most difficult times, keep you focused and attract the best talent to your company.

Google’s MTP is to “organize the world’s information,” Singularity University’s is to “positively impact the lives of a billion people in ten years,” and XPRIZE’s is “Making the impossible possible.” What’s yours?

Why I Love ZenPencils

Quotes! Comics! Inspiration!

What’s not to love?

On my bookshelf I have two (and only two) comics which I love: Calvin & Hobbes and ZenPencils which just came out this week!

If you haven’t seen ZenPencils, do yourself a favor and check out one of my favorite comics here.

The Man Behind the Comics

I’m a huge fan of Gavin, founder of ZenPencils, and I love reading his comics every week. He is destined for incredible things and it’s a pleasure watching him grow and learn as an artist.

If you remember, we were lucky enough to sit down with Gavin this summer in the Everyday Humanitarians conference. He was one of my favorite interviews and if you haven’t seen him yet, you should! Check it out here.

Gavin was also a speaker at the World Domination Summit this summer too. Check out his amazing speech here.

He does a wonderful job of explaining how ZenPencils got started, how he ended up where he is now and even how he conquered his fears and got up on the stage in front of thousands of people to tell his story. I know he was nervous before the talk, but he was fantastic!

What I Love Most

Anyway, I wanted to share a little with you hear about Gav, tell you how incredible he is and why I love his comics so much.

We all need reminders of what matters most in life: love, wisdom, honesty, inspiration, integrity, and a little more love after that. Gavin’s talent as an artist and his willingness to put himself out there so we can enjoy his art and his comics is amazing.

I’m very grateful for it every week and I hope you get a chance to see it for yourself.

Who knows, it might even change your life.

What I Learned From My First Academic Conference

Last week I had the unique opportunity to present at my first academic conference. It was the 11th Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference, which is the largest academic conference on social entrepreneurship in the world, with attendees coming from every corner of the globe.

I was a bit surprised, to be honest, when our paper was chosen for the conference. Almost everyone else attending the conference was either a Ph.D. student or an established professor in the field. With the encouragement of my professor and advisor Dr. Aqeel Tirmizi we prepared and attended the conference together as colleagues. It was a lot of fun, we presented to a packed room with standing room only, and I was able to give away lots of incredible gifts like A Philosopher’s Notes, Optimal Living 101, the B Corps Handbook and more thanks to the generosity of en*theos and B Lab who shared the goodies with me.

I’ve included my presentation below in case you want to check it out. In addition to Suncommon and New Media Group, who I highlighted in my original Leading Happiness research, I also conducted several new interviews for this presentation and added en*theos into the mix. Super exciting!

I loved the experience of the conference, learned a lot and received great feedback and support from professionals in our audience. Here are 5 of my favorite things I learned:

Mentors Can Become Colleagues - It was a lot of fun to work together with my advisor as a colleague. Spending hours together, driving, attending the sessions, preparing for our presentation, and standing up together to talk with the audience was great professional experience. I really admire Aqeel and look forward to working more together.
Give Away Goodies - It was great to be able to offer important books, tools and takeaways to our audience. It took a little planning (I had to request items a few weeks out) but I was amazed at how generous en*theos and B Lab were with supporting me and sharing resources. It felt great to give away such wonderful wisdom. I look forward to doing that again.
Relax and Try to Learn - The presentation before ours was all about why B Corps are not a great idea, which really got my heart racing, but ultimately things worked out great. Going in with an open mind, trying to learn as much as I could and being humble in the presence of such great people, was definitely the right approach.
Focus on Others - I’m so excited to see how much further I can carry this research into the field to make a difference and help improve people’s lives. Through conferences, teaching classes at en*theos and much more, I have a lot I want to share to help people all around the world enjoy their work more, live happier and healthier lives and change the world.
Be Constructive - It’s easy to be critical, especially when you are sitting in presentations or meetings all day. Instead of being critical, be constructive. Try to build something. Try to make something better. As the founders of B Corps said in our retreat last month, we stand for things, not against things. I love that. Be positive, focus on moving forward, and give people suggestions and support for making things better.

All in all I had a wonderful time and I’m very grateful to Aqeel and the conference for the opportunity to share and learn so much. Thank you also to Judy, our wonderful Peace Corps friend, who kindly hosted Tunga and I during our week on the northeastern coast.

I’m excited to see where things will go from here and to share more with you soon!

 

B Corps, What What?!?

As I mentioned in my last post on How Wolves Shape Rivers, I had the pleasure of attending the B Corps Champions Retreat earlier this month, representing New Media Group in Mongolia, as well as Advance Humanity and en*theos here in the U.S.

It is particularly exciting to represent en*theos as we are going through some crazy growth right now and the B Corps community and the B Impact Assessment are very inspiring and helpful as we grow.

I am really honored to be part of the B Corps movement and I thought it would be fun to share a quick presentation with you here if you want to learn more. I shared this presentation with the wonderful en*theos team and it covers a few major topics:

A Quick Overview of B Corps
A Quick Look at the Retreat
The Year Ahead for B Corps

Below is the slide deck and audio to accompany it. Below that I’ve also added two videos from the presentation as well. I hope you enjoy them!

Slide Deck

Audio for Slide Deck

What is the B Corps Movement?

How Wolves Shape Rivers

How Wolves Shape Rivers

I was honored to be able to attend the B Corps Champions Retreat this week here in Vermont and, while I will write a lot more on it in the coming days, I wanted to share this video to start telling you about it.

Jay, one of the three co-founders of B Lab, started out our retreat with this video. It’s a wonderful 4-minute story and an apt metaphor for Certified B Corps who may be small in number but are actively shaping our communities and the ecosystems around us.

How Wolves Shape Rivers