The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

by Neil Pasricha

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

So what’s the first thing you must do before you can be happy? Be happy. Be happy first.

“It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.”

Why is it so hard to be happy? Because life was mostly short, brutal, and highly competitive over the two hundred thousand years our species has existed on this planet. And our brains are trained for this short, brutal, and highly competitive world.

Unhappiness is nature’s way of keeping people on their toes. It’s a crude system, but it has worked for thousands of years.

We scan the world for problems because that led to our survival. And our current design of the world only reinforces and grows these negative-lens feelings.

Rather than find good results and make them better, our brains do this: Look for problem. Find problem. Improve problem.

“I am convinced that life is 10% what happens and 90% how I react to it.”

Writing for twenty minutes about a positive experience dramatically improves happiness.

Carrying out five random acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness.

If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.

Happy people don’t have the best of everything. They make the best of everything. Be happy first.

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

Do it for you. Don’t do it for others.

You have better chances of getting struck by lightning every single day of your life.

While at Brandeis University, Dr. Teresa Amabile performed experiments on elementary school and college students and asked groups to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work and some were not. What happened? Based on independent judges, who didn’t know who was getting paid, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work.

When you’re not doing it for you . . . you’re not doing a good job.

You do it for you.

But often two corners of The Success Triangle actually prevent the third.

You can’t have self, social, and sales success

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”

The three steps are: Hide Apologize Accept

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”

“That with which you have insulted me, who is not insulting, that with which you have taunted me, who is not taunting, that with which you have berated me, who is not berating, that I don’t accept from you. It’s all yours, Brahman. It’s all yours.

Blog counters, score sheets, and job evaluations will always tell you how you’re doing. They will deliver external rewards like money, promotions, or critical praise. But those rewards mask your intrinsic motivators. You go from running down the court to walking. You start focusing on appealing to those judging you. Risk-taking disappears.

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

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

“You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. But if you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you neeeeeeeeeeeeeed.”

It’s time for the three words. Remember The Lottery

Solution for the culture of more

“It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Being alive means you’ve already won the lottery.

“The best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

Instead, they have the word ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly means “the reason you wake up in the morning.”

Why people in Okinawa have long lifespan

Work gives us so much—free and simple gifts we are given every day. These gifts are worth much more than any numbers on a paycheck, because they help us live truly rich lives. The freedom you feel from a satisfying job beats the oppressing ache of emptiness any day.

The human brain is the most complicated object in the entire universe. And it helped us take over the planet.

Our brains were the foundation of our development as the most social species on the planet. Because, to put it simply, if you weren’t social back then . . . you died.

The richest man in the world can’t buy more time. It’s just not for sale.

You have a big third bucket every week! It’s your going-out-for-dinner bucket. Your spending-time-with-friends bucket. This is the bucket where you watch movies with your kids, play in your soccer league, go for jogs and lift weights, phone friends or call home, coach your kid’s baseball team, write in coffee shops, listen to music, stay out late, and make love.

Every day at work, you experience hundreds of tiny joys. They’re easy to overlook. But work exposes us to simple joys every day.

To contribute to human welfare by alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life.

What does retiring do? It chops you out of a productive story. You aren’t part of something bigger than yourself anymore. This hampers your ikigai!

Mr. Wilson taught me that retirement, as we think of it today, isn’t a dream we actually want. We don’t actually want to do nothing. We just want to do something we love.

Because we give away our ikigai and we do it to ourselves, with planning, with purpose.

We don’t earn big fat dollars for years of work. We earn tiny little dollars for hours of work.

Every single job is paid by the hour.

This works because when you overvalue your time you make more money by working less hours and earning more dollars per hour.

My point is that there’s nothing wrong with burning. But there is something wrong with burning out. It feels great to get a lot done, but just be careful you don’t go too hard, too long.

You need space! But let me caution that, just like Burn, the Space box can be toxic in high doses.

The Space Scribble says every single moment you’re in one of four boxes. And every single moment you need to know which one you’re in and which you’re going to next.

“If the answer wasn’t in the part of the brain we were using, it might be in another. If we’re lucky, in the next context we may hear or see something that relates—distantly—to the problem we had temporarily put aside.”

There are less decisions so you feel confident and trust the opinion.