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Best of 2019 Neil Pasricha: Happiness Equation
91 Plays4 years ago
Leadership Keynote Speaker, Bestselling Author, Positive Psychology Researcher. Neil Pasricha helps people live happy lives.
He is a top-rated leadership keynote speaker, New York Times bestselling author, and positive psychology researcher focused on the relationship between happiness and leadership in business.
His work has been featured in hundreds of outlets including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, The Early Show, The Oprah Winfrey Network, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Fortune, and Forbes
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Transcript
Introduction to Neil Pasricha
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to this week's episode of the Art of Authenticity. I'm Laura Coe, your host, and thank you guys for joining in. Once again, we have Neil Pasricha here. Neil, if you haven't heard of him, check him out because he's a five-time New York Times bestselling author. From the book of awesome to awesome is everywhere, the happiness equation. His blog has 50 million hits.
00:00:40
Speaker
He has sold millions of copies and his bestsellers have been on the list for over 200 weeks. Before leading the Institute for Global Happiness and being a keynote speaker, he ran a leadership development for two years with CEOs at Walmart,
00:00:57
Speaker
He was
Exploring Neil's Work and Philosophy
00:00:58
Speaker
responsible for onboarding CEO's executive development. He's been featured in CNN, BBC, The Today Show, The Early Show, The Oprah Winfrey Network, and if it's not enough, he was also in the Harvard Business Review. I could go on and on. I think you get the point. Neil is doing a great job. He's out there spreading the word about how to be happy. We talked about this at length and broke down so many important things. I really took notes while I was listening to him. His book is very informative.
00:01:24
Speaker
the ways that we design our life, how to train yourself to be more happy, the importance of reaction and control, why our dreams of retirement are all wrong. We jump into one thing after the next, and Neil is an encyclopedia of information. So I know you're going to love the show. Check out his books. All the links are on the podcast, on the website as always, and also check out his new podcast. It's called Three Books. If you're interested in
00:01:54
Speaker
learning about what three books very influential people have felt influence them the most. This is what Neil's podcast is all about. Thank you for tuning in. I know you're going to enjoy the show. And as always, hit me up, Laura at lorico.com with questions, or if you'd like to try coaching, you can hit the link there. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, Neil, how are you? I'm great, Laura. Thanks for having me on. Oh my God. I am so excited to have you. Where are you calling in from today?
00:02:21
Speaker
I'm in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, North America, Western Hemisphere.
00:02:28
Speaker
That's an awesome answer. Well, for you guys who haven't checked out Neil's work, you're in for such a treat today on the topic of authenticity and living a life, finding more happiness, figuring out what you love. I feel like literally, Neil, you're like stuff is an encyclopedia of information that's boiled down into just really easy and simple concepts that I know behind it have a ton of deep value, but I really enjoyed researching and checking out all your work. So thank you for being here.
00:02:55
Speaker
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. The happiness equation, for people who haven't checked it out, great, great book. This is based on hundreds of philosophy CEOs, positive psychology, one of my absolute favorites. Your book is really dedicated to this idea of this happiness equation and that you start off by explaining that people want to be more happy, but we really have this idea
00:03:20
Speaker
backwards, right? Can you help us understand and just introduce the audience to this idea of the happiness equation and that we need to be happy first before thinking about success and just catch us up on this idea? Absolutely, Laura. Sure, my pleasure. And by
The 'Happiness First' Approach Explained
00:03:34
Speaker
the way, since it's the art of authenticity, I should tell you authentically that where the book came from, I mean, my wife actually, I don't know if you know this or not, but my wife actually told me she was pregnant on the actual airplane. So she did the pregnancy test in the airplane bathroom.
00:03:50
Speaker
on our flight home from our honeymoon. We had a layover in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and she wasn't feeling well. Then we get back on the plane, and then literally in the clouds, she's like, I'm pregnant. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's like, I bought a pregnancy test in the airport at the pharmacy because I wasn't feeling well, and I just did the pregnancy test in the bathroom. Why don't I tell you that story? Because the happiness equation actually is, it actually is a 300-page letter to my unborn child that I spent the nine months working on.
00:04:17
Speaker
thinking, if anything happens to me, I'm gonna be a dad. Like, if anything happens to me, what would be the sort of most succinct kind of, I say succinct, but I said it was 300 pages. I was like, how could I just, everything I could know about life into one letter? And so that is the letter, that is the book. And the first chapter of the book is, as you called it, the reversing of the happiness equation. I tell him, it turned out to be a boy, a little boy, I tell him that my parents told it to me backwards. Just like all of our parents, they say, you gotta do great work,
00:04:47
Speaker
And that leads to a big success, and that leads to being happy. And the message is study hard, get good grades. If you're East Indian like me, go be a doctor. Or if you are working somewhere, work hard, get promoted, go be happy, right? And if you're Jewish like me, doctor, too. But I'm very narrow. Right. The doctor thing spreads across many cultures, obsessed. Right. So then I say, no, no, the model's backwards. It's not great work, leads to big success, leads to being happy. It's actually being happy leads to great work, leads to big success.
00:05:17
Speaker
Now, I know people listening to us on the podcast are like, wait, wait, wait, I get this. It's kind of going too fast. It's like, no, no. What I'm trying to say is, doing great work doesn't lead to happiness. The opposite is true. If you can train your brain to be happy first, then every single thing we can measure and test for, productivity, creativity, sales results, how you show up at work, all that stuff improves, and then the success follows. You live longer, you get voted, and all that stuff improves later. So the theory of the happiness equation, that's the letter I wrote,
00:05:45
Speaker
was that you actually have to move happiness to the front and
Boosting Happiness Through Exercises
00:05:48
Speaker
focus on that first.
00:06:05
Speaker
You know, nobody teaches you, kids know how to be happy first, by the way, right? We educate that out of them. So, being happy first, right? Easy message, people can understand it, but I'm sure everybody listening right now is going, okay, but how? How do I feel happy? Because the truth is,
00:06:25
Speaker
Nobody wants to talk about it, right, Neil? But the realities is that our minds are so negative and we're so embarrassed about the low quality of thoughts in our mind, right? And we're just in a pretty negative headspace all the time. So how do we start this process? You break it down into a bunch of secrets, but can you kick us off with a couple? Sure. The first thing I want people to do is forgive themselves for thinking negatively. That is very, very
00:06:50
Speaker
Purposeful, if evolutionarily we didn't have negative thoughts, fight or flight, we wouldn't survive. We wouldn't have become this dominant species. We look for problems, find problems, and solve problems. That's what our brains are trained to do. They've been trained to do for 200,000 years. That's actually our design of the world. If you get a blood test back from the doctor, you scan looking for the high cholesterol or the one thing that's wrong. If you get a test back from the teacher, you scan looking for the one mistake you made or two mistakes you made.
00:07:20
Speaker
Like every single thing in our life is oriented towards looking for problems, finding problems and solving problems. So first of all, the first thing I want you to think is if I think negative thoughts all day, that's okay. Like I'm normal. That's, there's a reason why if it bleeds, it leads. Like we are oriented that way.
00:07:37
Speaker
because that's what led to us doing so well. So then you think, well, do we still need to think that way? Well, no. We live in the most abundant time in human civilization. We've never lived longer. We've never been healthier. We've actually never been more educated. There's a fantastic book on this topic that I just read called Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, P-I-N-K-E-R. He basically takes every single measure you could think of.
00:08:03
Speaker
like terrorism and disease and nuclear war. He shows why now is better than any other time in history on every single variable. We don't really need the fight or flight thing to stress. We don't have sabretooth targets anymore.
00:08:18
Speaker
We have traffic jams, you know what I mean? It's not that bad. So then you're like... I don't know. I live in Chicago and sometimes it's really bad. Sorry. You're not going to die. That's my point. Exactly. Yeah. I wanted to pause on that, Neil. I'm making a joke, but it's really real. You have a cute graph in your book where it lays out all the thousands of years where we're living in fear and really how new this concept of living on abundance is relative to our time on the planet.
00:08:48
Speaker
Brand new, just got here. Our biology will not figure that out for like 20,000 more years. So we're not going to do well unless we can do this thing you and I are talking about with just training our brains to be happy. So you asked me a couple minutes ago, how? How do we do that? And so I was saying, first of all, don't worry that you don't like it that way. And second of all, here's how. So first of all, you and I and everyone listening are awake. We are awake about 1000 minutes a day. Okay.
00:09:14
Speaker
that 16 and two-thirds hours, you're awake about 1,000 minutes a day. My argument to answer your question is, could you take 20 minutes from that chunk to make the other 980 minutes more effective, more productive, more creative, and happier? If you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll give you that 20 minutes, then I'll tell you exactly what to do. I could go on a rant about 10 things, but let me just give your listeners three for now.
00:09:41
Speaker
Number one is read 20 pages of literary fiction. I mean, I'm actually serious. Like read 20 pages from a real book of literary fiction, specifically literary fiction. And what does literary fiction mean? It just means the hard stuff, like the stuff that's like using words that challenges you. Turns out, according to the Annual Review of Psychology, that opens up your mirror neurons. You're using all kinds of senses that you don't otherwise use when you consume any other form of media, like music, film, television, art, et cetera. You're the director. You're the playwright. You're coming up with everything in your mind.
00:10:11
Speaker
And that creates inside yourself more empathy, more compassion, more understanding. You become a better leader, better mom, better dad, better sister, better brother because you're reading a real book. So I'm saying cancel the newspaper subscription and the magazine subscription, invest in reading real books, preferably fiction. And I'm not taking my own drugs here. I don't write fiction. So I'm not telling you to read my stuff. I'm saying, you know, read Jonathan Franzen or David Mitchell or
00:10:37
Speaker
the Rosy Project or go read something that just turns you on. And if we want to talk about how to find those books, we can go on that rant because you know I have a podcast all about books where I actually help people find books. But we can talk about that separately. First thing is, read 20 pages of fiction. Number two, go for a 20-minute walk in the woods. Yes, in the woods. Trees release phytotosins. Phytosins, P-H-Y-T-O-C-I-N-S, that is a chemical that trees release
00:11:04
Speaker
that actually reduces your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels. There's a thousand people in the U.S. now trained as forest bathers. You can pay them money and they'll take you on this meditative nature tour guide through the forest. We used to call them hikers. My point is like ... I was just thinking, wow, really, that's a cool name, forest bathers. That's what they're called. Forest bathers came from Japan, but literally a walk through the forest
00:11:30
Speaker
Michael Babiak and a team of researchers down, I think it's Pennsylvania, published a report in the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine that shows doing this three times a week for 20 to 30 minutes a day outperforms a test group on antidepressants and a test group doing both the walking and taking the antidepressants. It's very powerful to go on a 20-minute nature walk. My third and final little prescription here is to do a 20-minute journaling exercise. What do I mean journaling exercise? You got this part of your brain called your visual cortex.
00:12:00
Speaker
Area 17 and it lights up whenever you talk to someone interesting on a cool podcast. Okay. So that's me. But tonight if I spent 20 minutes writing it down, I was like, you know, Laura and I had this great chemistry. I really love this art of authenticity. Like this is what I'm all about. I really enjoyed the pockets and, and you know what? I learned two or three things that I didn't even know because I was forced to articulate them, you know, to her question.
00:12:20
Speaker
And so I grew from this experience and I hope I can go on her show or have her on my show later. The end, point is, area 17 in my visual cortex lights up again when I do it and again if I read it. You get a doubling or tripling effect. To summarize, you said, how do I be happy? I say, take one of these three things. Read 20 pages of fiction from a real book. Go for a 20 minute walk through the forest or the woods or nature. Okay, walk through a forest is better than a mall.
00:12:45
Speaker
or this is a multiple choice question, do a 20 minute journaling exercise where you write down a summary of the highlight of your day.
00:12:52
Speaker
I love it. I love it. These are really, really, really attainable things. People are out there and I know everybody's busy. I know everybody has a ton of things to do. I know it feels like it's hard to add anything more to your day, but we're typically doing all of these things in our life because we want to feel good. We want to enjoy our lives. If 20 minutes gets us there, it's worth carving that out. Absolutely. Use that thousand minute of waking time metaphor to help you. If that doesn't work, then I have another one which is,
00:13:20
Speaker
You're only alive for 1,000 months total. That's the current average world lifespan in the Western world. And the total global world lifespan is much shorter than that. But in the Western world, it's 1,000 months. You live 1,000 months. That's your total life. Right. So how do you want to spend it? Exactly.
00:13:38
Speaker
Yeah. So, Neil, you bring up this really cool statistic that I've checked out as well. And it just, every time I think about it, it blows my mind. So I wanted to spend a minute on it with you. So much of people's happiness, right, we believe is because of the things happening around us, the external world. I woke up this morning and it was raining on my car this and, you know, my spouse and I got into an argument, my children or whatever, my work, there was traffic.
00:14:05
Speaker
But 90 percent of happiness is from perspective and 10 percent is really only about that external thing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think this is one of, to me, one of the most jarring concepts that I ran across. Yeah. So basically, this comes from the work of Sonya Lebomirsky. She's a professor of positive psychology, formerly at Stanford. I think that she's at University of California. And she's written a great book called The How of Happiness, which kind of shows the proposes this model.
00:14:33
Speaker
And it says, I'm going to show you how to get to the 90s. 50% of your happiness is genetic. 40% of your happiness is your intentional activities. And the remaining 10% is your circumstances. And that's why I say 90-10, because 10% Trump tweets, literally only 10% is what's happening outside the world. 90% is how you react to it. Turns out 50 of that 90 is genetic, 40 of that 90 is what you do about it. What do you do in that 40%? That's what I'm talking about.
00:15:01
Speaker
journaling, reading, nature walks. Those are three of many, many more examples. Yeah. So this idea that we really do have much more control over how we perceive things, right, is what you're trying to illustrate in these concepts. Absolutely. 100%. Sometimes when I say, oh, 50% of your happiness is genetic, people say, oh, that's great. I thought it was 100% genetic. And other times people say, oh, no. You mean I can't, you know, half of whatever I do is like just totally like I could be
00:15:30
Speaker
I could be like, you know, I could have clinical depression or I could have severe anxiety or I could have, you know, these, these things are out of my control. I'm like, yeah, that's true. I am saying that, but, but, but what I'm also saying is that 40% is up to you. You get to decide, you know, how you're going to spend your time and if you're going to, as I say, as I call, like prime your brain for positivity each day by doing some of these 20 minute exercises.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, I love it. So we have the dream all wrong as one of your... First of all, your chapter titles, they're so simple and endearing at the same time, I just love them. But anyways, we have the dream all wrong, never retire, right? So again, you were told upfront that success will bring happiness and you're moving on later to talk about how we have this dream all wrong and never retire. Why do we have the dream wrong?
00:16:15
Speaker
Well, I'll tell you why, because according to Fortune magazine, the two most dangerous years of your life are
Rethinking Retirement for Happiness
00:16:21
Speaker
the year you were born and the year you retire. So then you look into the concept of retirement. It turns out it was invented in the late 1800s in Germany by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck when he noticed that youth unemployment was like 20%, 30%. And he said, if you're 65 and older, he made up that number, 65, that's an important number.
00:16:41
Speaker
He said, you're 65 and older and you want to leave the workforce, again, it's not mandatory, it's optional, then we'll pay a little bit of money. Not a lot, but a little bit. That way, he could motivate people to leave and youth unemployment would go down. Okay, do you know what the average lifespan was in Germany in the late 1800s? Yeah, 67, right? 67. So, you know, the only relevance of that number 65 was its proximity to the age of death. Penicillin wasn't invented for 40 years, right?
00:17:11
Speaker
Now, we've taken this number and we've stamped it all around the Western world, United States Social Security Act of 1935. I'm in Canada, 65, same thing here, UK. 65, what the heck? We live till we're 85 now. My thousand month thing is 85. Nobody wants to work till 65 anyway. They're all like, freedom 55. I want to leave early.
00:17:33
Speaker
Because you're nuts, because actually, the problem isn't that we want to do nothing. That's actually a real pathway towards disaster, as Fortune magazine says. Again, everyone knows somebody who retired and their health took a left turn. My guidance counselor in high school, he retired, forced to retire at A65, mandatory retirement where I live at that time, and he had a heart attack and died a couple weeks later. We all know somebody like that. Actually, we don't want to do nothing. What we want are the three S's. We want social fulfillment.
00:18:03
Speaker
We want the stimulation of learning something new, and we want the story of being part of something bigger than ourselves. Social stimulation and story. And if you quit your job at the meat packing plant after 30 years, great, but you still need social stimulation and story from somewhere else.
00:18:19
Speaker
I love it. I love it. And it's really a real thing. I mean, my parents are older and, you
Discovering Authentic Interests
00:18:24
Speaker
know, some of their friends are retiring and, you know, they're not doing as well. And my father just keeps working. And it's, you know, I think being involved and engaged in the world is such an important thing. You move on to talk about can do, want to do, and do. And you move this idea from a straight line to a circle and you talk about the Nike idea of just do it. Can you talk to us a little bit about why
00:18:47
Speaker
this is important and what people get stuck on here? Sure. In the happy equation, I basically say there's another broken model. We grow up thinking that motivation causes action, but actually action causes motivation. We grow up thinking that can do leads to want to do leads to do, which if you're in HR or you speak corporate speak, it's like capability leads to motivation leads to action. Can do leads to want to do leads to do.
00:19:12
Speaker
And people are like, what are you talking about? I'm like, well, don't you hear everyone say like, I want to run a marathon. I just need the perfect shoes. I need a good playlist. I need a running buddy. I want to write a novel, but I need a good Moleskine notebook. I need to have a cool coffee shop with techno and dim lighting. Like everyone wants stuff before they do it.
00:19:29
Speaker
But I'm saying, if you just start with doing it, if you just start writing, if you just start running, then you think and you realize, Oh, I can do this. That's easy. I just run to the corner, the end. And then the next day you think I want to do it. Hey, maybe I should get some better shoes, but I'm a runner now. May as well start. You know, Khaled Hosseini wrote The Kite Runner, one of the most kind of bestselling novels of the last 20 years. He's a doctor. He just wrote a few sentences kind of on his bedside table at night as I understand it.
00:19:57
Speaker
And that's my point. It's not motivation causing action. Actually, it's action causing motivation. Nike may have used the Just Do It slogan for 10 years, but they also tripled their market share and more than 10X the revenue because they, over that 10-year period, because they hit a nerve that we all know to be true. If it just start, then the rest comes.
00:20:17
Speaker
Right. And this leads me into the part that I want to focus on at the end of your book, you start talking about authenticity and a few simple tests we can do and I want to dive into it. But when we start, right, we also want to start and then pay attention to what we enjoy and to follow our hearts because
00:20:34
Speaker
It's not just a matter of starting things and pushing and grinding through it even if we can't stay. If I run and I realize, wow, running is just not my thing. That's okay. We don't have to look at our neighbors or our friends or some standard of what we should do with our life. We want to do what intrinsically feels good to us.
00:20:53
Speaker
So, you talk about this authentic people follow their heart. It's not always comfortable at the beginning, but it's always comfortable at the end. Be you, right? So, talk to me a little bit about how authenticity plays into this and, you know, the importance of that statement. Sure. In 2010, I gave a TED Talk, which got posted on TED.com and kind of went around the internet, and it's called The Three A's of Awesome. Because my first book was called The Book of Awesome. My first blog was called The Thousand Awesome Things.
00:21:22
Speaker
I did this thing called the 3 A's of Awesome. One of the A's was authenticity. For those who are curious, it was attitude, awareness, and authenticity. I tell this story of this guy named Rosie Greer. He's this gigantic NFL football player who played the defensive lines for the LA Rams in the 70s. Huge guy. The crazy thing is, after he retired from the NFL, which usually that's really bad. When you retire from the NFL, it's like you're gone. You're hurt.
00:21:50
Speaker
You might be sick, you might go broke. It doesn't sound good, right? No, no, this guy went into his heart and he followed his heart. He actually really loves knitting. He actually loved kind of macrame and these kind of things. He put out a book called Rosie Greer. Rosie Greer is a needle point for men. You go on Amazon, you look at this book, it's like all these people have commented saying,
00:22:14
Speaker
You know, my son didn't know if it was masculine to be into like needle point, but like the fact that Rosie grew the NFL doing it, you know, my son now is more himself. And that's what I, I don't think the problem is that people want to be authentic. I think the problem is that people don't know how. And so what I do in the happiest question, I say, well, you gotta do two tests, right? You gotta do the Saturday morning test, which is what do you do on a Saturday morning when you have nothing else to do?
00:22:39
Speaker
Like, what is your do-nothing plan? That is your most authentic interest. Someone's like, oh, I don't know, I just play guitar. I'm like, yeah, so why? Why? Well, it's let music. Well, that person I'm talking about is actually like runs like a ukulele importing company now and brings like the ukulele lessons into school. Like he took his authentic passion and made it like his job, you know? And then I also did the bench test because I talk about my friend Fred who got into like every single Ivy League school.
00:23:05
Speaker
And he drove around to every single campus and sat on a bench in the middle for an hour, quietly, listening to every conversation around him. Can you do the bench test in your job application? Sure, it's called the office tour test. But when you're buying a house, sure, it's called the sidewalk test. Put yourself in a unique situation where you test the thing before you buy it, you know, before you go. Try it before you buy. We don't do that enough. People become lawyers and I'm like, oh, why are you a lawyer? They're like, worst mistake I ever made. I got into the office the first day and I hated it.
00:23:34
Speaker
You never went to a law office before. You never like shot the lawyer for like a month or you never like thought you like read what they read on like their email.
00:23:42
Speaker
Nope, nope. Just thought we'd be a lawyer. Man, what a waste of law school. What a waste of time and money. Try it first. Go on vacation before you get engaged. Live together before you get married. Come on. Everything can be tested first. I love it. I tell people this all the time. Break it down. Break it down into the smallest components. I won't have a New York Times bestselling book. Really, can you just write one page before you worry about it at that level?
00:24:06
Speaker
But nobody, again, you know, to your point in this book over and over, we weren't taught these things. And so for people listening out there, such easy things to add into your life, right? Test it, try it, see what it means. When you talk about the Saturday morning test, I do have one question about that. Some people who are so disconnected from their truth and their authentic self are weighed down by their life or what have you.
Lessons on Resilience and Failure
00:24:27
Speaker
Saturday morning, they're like, I don't know. I'm just tired, right? I don't know. How can you jump start what you might want to do on a Saturday morning if you're just in a really difficult place? Well, I get this question a lot because people are like, you know what? Nothing. What's actually clouding their mind is just stress. It's just stress. The metaphor is that what do you do when you don't have any obligations, is what I'm trying to say. People are like, I don't know, play video games. I'm like, what about it? Then you get into it.
00:24:55
Speaker
What about it? I like entertainment. I like learning new things. I like kind of software design. I like graphic. I like graphic artistry. You know what I mean? You go down these paths and you're like, man, you're just uncovering like a hundred things you're interested in because you like video games. You just thought you were a slacker. No, no. Your interests were just kind of under this little umbrella where you told yourself a story that was like, I'm not that good at much or I'm not that interesting at much or whatever.
00:25:21
Speaker
But that's not true. You just never unwrapped all the things you're actually naturally interested in. I love people who are interested in video games. I'm not. But I look at them and I'm like, whoa, those people have amazing, those amazing problem-solving skills. Like, oh, wow, I like how they can focus so deeply. I can't. I'm like a dog with his tongue out. So I'm like, whoa, to get that immersed into a new world, that's amazing. There's so much that I look up to those people for.
00:25:44
Speaker
But they just shoot themselves in the foot if they say, well, I can't do nothing. Right. And I love that answer. I never thought of it that way. But my nephew loved video games, but he's actually really strategic. Behind the video game, right? Of course. He grew up on Zelda, that makes sense. All right. So new book coming out next year. It's an audio book at this point, How to Get Back Up. We all fail. We need to know how to get back up, learn helplessness. Talk to me about what this is. Where did this come from? What inspired you to move into this area?
00:26:14
Speaker
The funny thing about life is that you look at anyone with any form of success, you think that's a success story. That's a person who has had multiple successes. Actually, I'm arguing all that person has is more failures than you. They've simply tried more things. They've played the longest. Yes, it's an Audible original right now. It just came out. I don't know when this will air, but it just came out. It's brand new. It's called How to Get Back Up, a Memoir of Failure and Resilience.
00:26:43
Speaker
And what I'm trying to say is that, you know what? You know who has the, uh, uh, the most wins of any baseball player? Cy Young. Okay. He, that's why they call it the Cy Young award. And you know, who has the most losses? Like no one's lost more games ever. Uh, Cy Young. Okay. Do you know who has the most strikeouts? Nolan Ryan. Do you know, has the most walks? Like strikeouts are like the best thing you can do as a pitcher. Walks are the worst. Okay. The guy who has the most walks, Nolan Ryan. My point is in life, it's not how many kind of hits he gets, how many up bats you take.
00:27:13
Speaker
Right? And you're hearing all these football players like, Oh, he passed the 5,000 yard record. He won the most wins. It's like, they just played the longest. They just played more. So what my memoir is all about is teaching people what lessons we can take from failure. Okay. I talk a lot about finding small ponds where you can be successful. I talk about self contracts, like writing contracts to yourself that actually hold you committed. Bizarrely, I wrote a concept to myself at age 16 that I won't have any alcohol. I won't drink till I was 22 because I read an article in Scientific American at the library.
00:27:43
Speaker
saying alcohol stunts, male brain development under age 22. So I was like, oh, I just ran a contract. And all those times I was tempted, drinking age up here is 19. All those times I was tempted, I was like, I got this contract. I can't violate my contract. And do I drink now? Yes, I do. I totally drink. But that's not the point. The point is the contract. And you can do this in your family and your stuff. So what this book is is a pack of lessons we can learn from failure. It's about resilience. It's called How to Get Back Up in Audible. And then, as you said,
00:28:12
Speaker
the print version is going to come out next year. It takes time to feel true. You got a podcast as well, the Three Books Podcast. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? Sure. I think most good things in life come from selfish means. I know that sounds weird, but I personally, selfishly want to read the 1,000 most formative books in the world. Whenever I go on Amazon,
00:28:34
Speaker
It sucks. It's like the same 25 books are recommended over and over again. I'm like, I already read outliers. Don't tell me to read it again. And here I am talking about why reading is so powerful. And everyone's like, well, what book should I read? I'm like, you know what? I don't know. I want to find the thousand most formative books in the world. Okay? And I'm obsessed with this number of thousands. I do. I'm obsessed with all the thousand awesome things. You live a thousand months. You're awake a thousand minutes a day. A thousand is a really interesting number for me. And so how am I going to do it? Well, I'm going to talk to 333 people.
00:29:04
Speaker
Okay, the most inspiring people I can find. So far I've sat down, and I was in the mid-person, I was in live, I fly to the guests. I flew to Detroit to interview Mitch Alabam, I flew to Key West to interview Judy Blume, I flew to the TED headquarters to interview Chris Anderson, I sat in the back of David Sedaris' limo for two hours, and I say, tell me the three books that changed your life the most. I get the books in advance, so I read them in advance of the interview, and that's why my podcast is called Three Books, because every single chapter of my show, and I'm doing 333 chapters, it's a limited thing,
00:29:35
Speaker
I'm going to ask someone inspiring what three books shaped your life. I've started that on March 31, 2018, and the podcast continues publishing on the exact minute. I'm doing it on the lunar calendar, because I think the lunar calendar has some strengths that we're ignoring these days. Gregorian, fine, 500 years old, but it doesn't really work, because you've got to add a date on February every 40 years. I go with lunar. Lunar is 30,000 years old. You can see what time it is by looking at the sky. It's like a grounded, centered
00:30:04
Speaker
Calendars, so I'm doing my podcast in this grounded centered way because about books on the lunar calendar every single time It's a new moon or a full moon. I release a new chapter So I'm doing that all the way up to September 1st 552 a.m. The year 2031. Oh my god, dude. I love it. That's such a cool idea and what interesting Conversations you must be having so Neil I ask everybody at the end of the show and I want to ask you as well What does an authentic life mean to you?
00:30:33
Speaker
It means the least filter possible between your head and your mouth and your heart. It's a Gandhi quote, what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. If you go to my Twitter profile right now, at Neil Pastorica, it says, right on the sidebar, I didn't change it for the show, it's been saying that for a year, it says,
00:30:49
Speaker
I like radical authenticity and sitting down to pee once in a while. And sometimes people introduce me like that at speeches and stuff like, this guy sits down to pee? I'm like, yes, I do. And you know what, it's very comfortable. The point is, I'm just like, I don't filter it, I don't care. I'm happy to just be myself and I'm still learning how to do that better. But I hope you can tell by chatting with me, I just live my life that way and it's great. You know why? Because you piss off half the people, that's fine. And then 98% don't react and don't respond to you because you're weird.
00:31:16
Speaker
But then the 2% that do, they become so deeply connected and intimate with you that you end up surrounding yourself with incredible lifelong friends through everything. My favorite people in the writing world, in the speaking world, in my personal life, in who I'm married to, they are super like me. They're deeply authentic. They put their heart out there and then as a result, you go super deep, super quickly. It's a risk to do that. It's a huge risk and I embarrass myself daily
00:31:44
Speaker
but when I connect with people, and I hope there's some people listening that will reach out to me after this, they're awesome, because we just get along, right, because we share everything. So if you're listening right now, you're related, just drop me, I'm neilatglobalhappiness.org, that's my email, neilatglobalhappiness.org, just email me, tell me, listen to me, and then we'll talk. I answer every email I get.
00:32:02
Speaker
I love it. I love it. And I also feel when you're willing to stand up in your truth and your authentic self and show up in that vulnerable place, you give people permission to at least consider that if not do it for themselves. So I think it's a beautiful thing to offer to the world. Well, thank you for saying that. I agree. I agree fully.
00:32:20
Speaker
Neil, thank you so much for coming on. This was just such an incredibly cool podcast filled with so many great facts and pieces of information, and you speak so beautifully about it. Everybody out there, this is just Scratching the Surface. Check out his work. He's got several books, podcast, blogs. You're a content machine, my friend. But if people are looking for you, they want to find out more, where can they reach you? Well, I already gave him my email address. There's not really much more to give.
00:32:48
Speaker
your website. Remember I said that TED Talk's not a bad place to start. Just go to check the TED Talk out. That's the beginning. Or if they like the idea of the podcast, check out three books. My podcast is just called Three Books with Neil Passricha. Awesome. And all the links for everything you have will be on my website as always. Neil, thank you so much for coming on today's show. Thank you so much for doing this great work. I love what you're doing and it's my pleasure. Thank you.