Category: Happiness

The Happiness Of Pursuit is a call to take control of your own life by going on a quest, which will fill your life with meaning, purpose, and a whole lot of adventure.

Chris Guillebau is one inspiring dude. He’s written several books that help people break free from conventional jobs and conventional life overall.

The Happiness Of Pursuit was written after he completed visiting every country in the world, along the way of which he met plenty of other people out in the world to do great things. He calls these missions, which people are on to find purpose and meaning in their life, quests.

This book is all about helping you find yours.

The 3 things I learned about quests from this book are:

• When the world calls out to you, listen.
• Adjust your life to accommodate your quest.
• Your quest will give you purpose, because it is a reward initself.

Okay, let’s take a closer look at what quests are all about!

Lesson 1: When the world calls out to you, listen to that call!

Chris says quests often arise from external events, which shake awake an inner calling we carry.

For example, you might have always wanted to be a race car driver (ahem), but you only realize it while sitting in the train to work one day, because it hits you that you never even drive any more.

Maybe you just feel like the king of the world when you find a new way to hack your blog’s HTML code, or suddenly realize your life might be shorter than you think.

Whatever the event is that feels like the wold calling out to you, listen to that feeling!

The idea to go on a quest can arise for the most various reasons, whether that’s passion, discontent, or an awareness of mortality, but the important part is that you don’t play it down.

Trust your gut, because the worst cause of unhappiness is regret.

So you have a crazy idea, and the will to take action, but what now?

Lesson 2: If your quest seems too big, just adjust your life to make it fit.

Yeah, I know, you can’t become a race car driver tomorrow, but there is always something you can do.

For example you could spend 30 minutes a day learning everything there is to know about race cars, while saving up money in order to book a day at a race track where you can drive one.

Going on a quest will often require you to adjust your life, but that doesn’t make your quest any less meaningful.

Sasha Martin wanted to travel the world, but like most people, she didn’t have the money. Instead, she decided to cook a meal from every country in the world and thus, bring the world right into her home.

By documenting her journey she’s inspired thousands of people around the world, probably much more than she had if she had just gone to travel around on her own.

Chris himself had to live a very minimalist life for several years, in order to afford all his travels. After initially calculating, and seeing that a trip around the world would set him back $30,000, which wasn’t as bad as he had thought, he of course didn’t have that money just lying around.

So he decided to cut back on a lot of material possessions, travel lightly and stretch his travels over a few years and voila, he completed his quest.

For Four Minute Books, I had to make some adjustments as well. I’d love to read a book a day, but I have neither the money to buy so many books, nor the hours in the day.

But I can get a Blinkist subscription, read a summary every day, and then write about that.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Lesson 3: Your quest is a reward in itself, which will give your life a purpose.

Now I know what your next objection will be: If I have to play it small, will that really fulfill me?

Yes. A definite yes.

That’s because when you do something you love, doing the thing is a reward in itself. Most of us think we’ll only feel good when we finally reach our goal, but that’s not true.

True happiness comes from the struggle towards your goal, not the goal per se.

This really hit Chris when he listened to a TEDx talk by independent musician Stephen Kellogg. The following quote stuck with him:

It’s better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than the top of the one you don’t. – Stephen Kellogg

When you love your quest, it doesn’t matter how small the steps you take are. You’ll love it so much, you won’t want to let go and you’ll become positively obsessed with your work.

This is important, because not all days will be great. Do I have to drag myself to the computer some mornings at 5:40 AM, because I’d still rather sleep instead of write these summaries?

Sure!

But once I press publish for the day, I always feel good.

Always.

And that’s all you need to be able to tell whether your quest is worth it.

Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2SEOOx6

The Happiness Advantage turns the tables on happiness, by proving it’s a tool for success, instead of the result of it, and gives you 7 actionable principles you can use to increase both.

Since it was the next suggested book after Happiness, and I told you yesterday that after reading that book you can go deeper into specific happiness tools and topics, The Happiness Advantage is a great next step.

Shawn Achor is one of the youngest happiness researchers out there, but his work in positive psychology spreads like wildfire. It’s no coincidence he talks about the butterfly effect, he’s living it – his TED talk is among the 20 most popular TED talks of all time.

Here are the 3 lessons I learned :

• Happiness comes before success, not after it.
• You can train yourself to be optimistic with “The TetrisEffect”.
• Fall up instead of down.

There are 7 principles in the book in total, but these 3 stood out most to me. Let’s take a look.

Lesson 1: Happy people become successful, not the other way around.

This is the core message of the book. The book quotes a study done by Martin Seligman, the “father” of positive psychology, where the happiness of 272 employees was monitored over 18 months. Those who were happier before the study achieved more success later on.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Instead of trying to become successful, so you can finally be happy in the distant future, try to become happy right now, so you’ll be successful later.

Which sounds easier?

Making a million bucks, or increasing your serotonin levels a bit by watching a funny video, so you can score better on a math test later today, since serotonin also improves your memory?

Of course this is oversimplified, but being happy is really all about your mindset. You can’t always influence what happens to you, but you can change your attitude.

For example, research has shown that just anticipating something you’re looking forward to (like that funny video), can boost your endorphin levels by 27%.

Lesson 2: Train your brain to spot positives with “The Tetris Effect”.

I had no clue about this. Really cool.

The Tetris effect is what happens when you spend hours on end doing one particular activity. Your brain becomes so engaged, that the environment of the activity spills over to the rest of your life.

For example, people who played several hours of Tetris per day started seeing the blocks before sleeping, and imagining cereal boxes in the grocery store fall into place.

Shawn Achor says this can be positive or negative. In the case of Tetris, people started optimizing their environment, and became more efficient.

Similarly, you can train your brain to spot the positive things in your life, in order to become more optimistic.

For example you can start a gratitude ritual, where you write down 3 things you’re grateful for each day. I’ve done this for 3 years now and it puts a positive spin on your day, no matter what happened.

Lesson 3: Fall up instead of down, by using failures as a stepping stone.

After each failure, crisis or catastrophe, 3 possible things can happen:

Nothing changes.

You’re caught in a downward spiral, and more bad things follow.

You come back stronger than ever before.

Obviously, you have to shoot for scenario number 3 as often as possible. Speaking of scenarios: Following a bad event, your brain always makes up alternative scenarios. These are called counterfacts and this is where you get to take control.

You have to choose to believe the alternative scenario, that will lead to you working harder, instead of less.

Here’s an example:

When Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, he could have believed that if only he was taller, he’d have been picked.

But he can’t influence his height, so that would not have made him work harder.

Instead, he believed that if only he was better, he’d have been picked. This led him to practice like a madman the next summer and the rest is history.

Final thoughts

This was really cool. I didn’t expect the major insight here, which was that happiness must come before success. The idea is radical and eliminates the common excuses along the lines of “I’ll be happy if X happens”.

Some of the principles felt like additional tips for Learned Optimism, while others draw on the benefits of better habits or your perceived reality.

As a video game nerd, I loved “The Tetris Effect”, and falling up, Achor has a great way of using metaphors and images to make his point. A great follow-up read to falling up instead of down is The Obstacle is The Way by Ryan Holiday.

Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2X0WoR0

The Blue Zones gives you advice on how to live to be 100 years and older by looking at five spots across the planet, where people live the longest, and drawing lessons about what they eat, drink, how they exercise and which habits most shape their lives.

How badly do you want to live forever? Seriously. I’m pretty sure 99.9% of all humans share this one thing: they don’t want to die.

Ever.

The world is already working hard at pills that slow down the aging process, but nobody knows if they’ll live to see the day where average life expectancy crosses into the triple-digits. What we do know is that people already live to be over 100 years old and we sure can learn from them.

Dan Buettner has identified 5 so-called Blue Zones – areas where people live exceptionally long lives – and details what they do to become centenarians (a person who lives to be 100). While some are obvious, like not smoking or exercising regularly, others are far more subtle.

Here are 3 lessons from the book to help you up your life expectancy:

• The right lifestyle can add a decade to your life.
• Drink more, eat less.
• Put your family first.

Prepared to get some extra time on this precious planet? Let’s increase your life expectancy!

Lesson 1: Age is not about genes, it’s about lifestyle – and the right one can add 10 years to your life.

Let me give you the bad news first. Right now, only 1 in 4,000 Americans lives to be 100 years old. That’s 0.025%. The good news is that centenarians are the fastest-growing demographic across the planet, especially in Western areas, like the USA or Europe.

So while living extremely long lives is far from common practice, we’re getting there. One of the first blue zones that was discovered is Sardinia, a small island off the coast of Italy. On average, 1 in 600 humans lives to be 100 or older there.

But is it just their genes? No. According to a Danish study, which looked at over 2,500 twins, genes only account for 25% of how old you become.

What really matters is your behavior. That’s because no matter how great your genes are, you age every single day. Living a long life is predicated on slowing down that aging process, instead of accelerating it – and that’s why your lifestyle has the most significant effect.

The Sardinians, for example, live a very natural life. They’re outside a lot, move and get around naturally (with their feet), and eat a very natural, Mediterranean diet. If you adjust your own lifestyle to be more natural and in line with how people in the blue zones live, you can easily add an extra 10 years to your life.

Worth changing a few habits, don’t you think?

Lesson 2: Drink more, eat less.

“You are what you eat.” You’ve heard that one, right? Of course what you eat and drink makes up a huge part of your health and therefore, your age, so let’s look at what centenarians do.

First, you should drink more. No, not beer and not vodka. Water. At least 5 to 6 glasses each day. That’s what the inhabitants of Loma Linda just outside Los Angeles do (the only American blue zone). Pair it with a bit of red wine each day (as consumed by almost all Sardinians daily) and you’re set.

Forget sodas, heavy alcohol or other, sugar-laden liquids. What you shouldn’t forget about is food.

Centenarians usually eat a low-calorie diet, which is mostly vegetarian, and in some cases, even vegan. Breakfast or lunch should be your main meal of the day, so you can keep dinner light and not fall asleep on a full stomach. A good rule the people of Okinawa (another blue zone in Japan) adopt is to eat only until you’re 80% full.

Lesson 3: Always put your family first, and let it be your life’s purpose.

Living long isn’t just about health, it’s also about your psyche. One of the best things you can do to make sure you stay around is to live a life of purpose. Guess when most healthy Americans die.

In their first year of retirement. Far more people die then than in their last year of work, simply, because they lose their life’s purpose once they stop working.

Centenarians never stop working. The trajectory of their life is as long as their life lasts. This doesn’t mean they slave away at a job until they drop dead, but rather continue building a meaningful life and not just stop at 60, 65 or 70. Most of them choose their families as the center of their lives, and choose to live with them, provide for them and spend lots of time with them.

95 out of 100 centenarians only live to be that old, because they have children or grandchildren who care for them and receive love and sometimes financial aid in return.

Focusing on building a happy and healthy family for the rest of your life also keeps you out of trouble, because you’re too busy to fight and stress about petty conflicts with your neighbors.

My personal take-aways

My roommate has this book and I’ve read several sections of it. It’s just fantastic. Not that anyone had to sell me on moving to Italy before (I’m a huge fan of pizza and all Italian food as is), but now I’m more game than ever.

The cool thing about this book is that the blue zones all lie in the most vastly different countries, which means there are a few lifestyle changes in there for everyone. No matter whether you like Asian food, Italian red wine or Californian sunshine, there are bound to be things in this book that you’ll want to adopt.

Highly recommended read – what better book to pass the time until science catches up on those anti-aging pills could there be?

 Hardwiring Happiness tells you what you can do to overcome your negativity bias of focusing on and exaggerating negative events by relishing, extending and prioritizing the good things in your life to become happier.

Rick Hanson is impressive. I don’t know why, but that word comes to mind, in spite of his very modest, calm and rather introverted nature. He’s not a showman, but there’s something profound about the things he talks about and how he talks about them, which I can’t help but to admit has left a bigger impact on me than I thought it would.

The second darts idea from one of his earlier books, Buddha’s Brain is one of the best practices to control your reactions to bad events I know of. That book was about accepting the things you can’t change. This one, Hardwiring Happiness, is about how to proactively battle negativity and overcome your tendency to exaggerate the negative.

It explains why we obsess about the bad stuff and what we can do to change that.

Here are three lessons to help you kick your negativity bias to the curb:

• The reason you react stronger to bad things is that you(might) have a “sad amygdala.”
• Start a “Good Year Box” to remind yourself of positiveevents all the time.
• Create an infinite stream of positivity from your memories,small details and being generous.

Ready to hardwire happiness into your brain? Let’s do it!

Lesson 1: If you have a “sad amygdala” you react stronger to negative events.

There’s a scene in How I Met Your Mother when Ted sees his ratings as a professor on a website. The words fly across the screen, all compliments across the board – “knowledgeable”, “fun”, “cool guy” – and then it hits “BORING.”

His world is shattered, the day ruined. For the remainder of the episode, he ends up chasing better reviews, trying way too hard, until he eventually realizes it’s stupid to obsess over one bad review in 50 great ones.

I’m sure you know the feeling. Think of the moments in school you remember the most. Are they happy ones? Or the times when you got bullied, when you were hurt, when you got your first F?

The tendency to disproportionately focus on the negative is built into us. It’s a remnant from times when most negative things could kill you. Today most “threats” won’t, but your brain doesn’t know that.

However, there are still differences among us. The fear center of your brain, the amygdala comes in two variants.

A “happy amygdala” will stimulate your nucleus accumbens the goal-fulfilling part of your brain that sparks motivation, ambition and optimism.

A “sad amygdala” will instead base your actions more on fear by releasing cortisol, adrenaline, and other stress-inducing hormones, making you feel rather anxious and worried.

Most of us have a “sad amygdala,” but luckily, it’s not set in stone.

Lesson 2: Keep reminding yourself of positive events with a “Good Year Box.”

Your brain never stops growing, which means it’s never too late to change its structure. By exposing it to more positive experiences and making a conscious effort to do so on a regular basis, you can tone down your sad amygdala and even turn it into a happy one.

A great way to start this practice is to simply remind yourself of the good things in your life more often, for example by starting to use what Rick Hanson calls a “Good Year Box.”

Here’s how it works: Keep a shoe box or other storage container in your bedroom. At the end of each day, before you go to bed, go through everything you’ve done and experienced again, and pull out at least one positive thing that happened. Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in the box.

This way, you’ll acknowledge good things in your life as they happen, while simultaneously training your brain to recognize those things more.

Lesson 3: Create an infinite stream of positivity from your memories, small details and being generous.

Honestly, the supply of happiness you can experience is endless. Just look at these three ways of eliciting positive experiences and I’m sure you’ll agree with me:

Spend some time in a happy memory.

Notice a small, positive detail right in front of you.

Be generous in helping others.

Even if you’re just 15 years old, you already have a lifetime worth of happy memories. Rewiring your brain can be as simple as digging out one of them – a fun afternoon playing in the sand, a beautiful movie, a tasty pizza, a great date or awesome fireworks – and taking a few minutes to dwell in it in your mind.

The laptop I’m typing these words on is nothing short of a miracle. It’s the equivalent of an entire company 50 years ago. How can I not be grateful for it? The beautiful quality of images on the screen. The soft touch of the keys. The magnetic charger that safely unplugs, even if I stumble over the cable. What breathtaking mini miracle can you be grateful for that’s right in front of you this very second?

Lastly, your brain’s reward centers will fire more often if you’re generous. Don’t be cheap. Give awesome gifts. Not just when they’re “required” like on Christmas, but any time of the year. Donate every once in a while. Offer to help your neighbor in the garden. Being generous always leads to a shared moment of happiness. And there’s no limit to how generous you can be.

My personal take-aways

Just reading about this stuff makes me happier already. That’s what I meant by saying Rick Hanson is impressive. He creates an impression that lasts. This book reinforced that. I highly recommend his work.

 Habits Of A Happy Brain explains the four neurotransmitters in your brain that create happiness, why you can’t be happy all the time, and how you can rewire your brain by taking responsibility for your own hormones and thus, happiness.

When you read books about self-improvement topics, like love, productivity or happiness, you’re bound to bump into chemistry at some point. The most diligent researchers are all eventually led deep into the wirings of the human mind, and many of them have uncovered how some of the key chemicals inside our brain work for or against us.

As I kept reading about happiness, I stumbled across the hormones connected with it one by one and over time. For example, I learned about endorphins in school, while James Altucher taught me about oxytocin. Later I found out that dopamine is another happiness hormone, and most recently that serotonin completed the set.

Since these are the four major chemicals in determining our happiness, I was surprised that no one had written a book about all of them yet. Well, this is that book. Loretta Breuning is a former professor from California State University East Bay, writer, researcher and guide at the Oakland Zoo, showing people how to manage their own inner mammal based on social behavior among animals.

Here are 3 lessons from Habits Of A Happy Brain:

• Unhappy chemicals are just as important as happy ones.
• Nothing will make you happy forever.
• To live means to choose constantly, so it’s important that you do.

Want to learn more about the biology of happiness? You’ve come to the right place, let’s go!

Lesson 1: The chemicals that make you unhappy are equally as important as the happy ones.

The four chemicals of happiness serve different purposes, like rewarding you for being social (oxytocin), going after a reward (dopamine) or pushing through physical pain (endorphins) at different times. Naturally, we spend a lot of our waking lives chasing after them in one way or another, whether we’re aware of it or not.

However, in our quest for happiness, we tend to forget that the other side of the coin is equally as important: unhappy chemicals protect us from harm by warning us of potential threats.

For example, when you’re hungry, cortisol is released, a stress hormone which makes you feel uncomfortable and gets you to find food. The reason we often think of these unhappy chemicals as problematic lies not in the basic system that they’re a part of, but in the way our modern brain, the neocortex, breaks that system.

Cortisol is what gives you that “do something” feeling when you feel threatened, but since your neocortex constantly analyzes your surroundings rationally and sees risk around every corner (because true, life-threatening risks have become so rare), you’re in “do something” mode a lot more than is good for you – and that’s why we eat out of boredom, for example.

Lesson 2: There is nothing in this world that will keep making you happy forever.

But even if we could get our hormone system to work perfectly in sync with our rational thinking, that wouldn’t make us permanently happy. Permanent happiness, a continuous state of bliss, is nothing more than a myth.

That’s why constantly chasing happiness is a useless game – even if you won $10 million, that would not be the end of your happiness journey.

Why?

Because of a process called habituation. Every time your happiness chemicals are released, your brain makes a note about the strategy that led you there and files it away under “this makes me happy.” This way, your brain can default to the same strategy next time, but sadly, it won’t bring the same result, due to habituation. An experience makes you most happy when it’s new, so when you go to the same, awesome restaurant the second time, it won’t live up to your high expectations and not be as much fun.

We get used to everything, which is the reason someone who’s paralyzed is as happy as someone who wins the lottery, one year later.

You might think habituation sucks, but it’s what helped us survive. Sitting around and enjoying the stuff we have doesn’t help us grow or get better, and habituation is what gets us up and exploring, instead of falling into a vicious cycle of high expectations and disappointments.

Lesson 3: Life is a series of constant choices, so it’s important to not let others choose for you.

Our brains have become very complex, and because there are so few real risks left out there, it keeps coming up with its own, overblown sense of what’s truly risky and what’s not.

However, being alive means constantly choosing whether it’s worth to give up one thing in favor of another. Right this second, I’m choosing to write this, and postponing going home to cook dinner with my roommate. Every single choice you make comes with some risk and some opportunity cost – so you might as well get used to it.

The only real mistake you can make is to not choose at all. Sure, when you let your boss, your wife, your friends, your parents decide for you, you’ll never have to take any blame and can always point to someone else, who’s at fault.

But out of all decisions, that’s the only one that’ll truly make you unhappy, because you gain a lot from knowing you’re in control, no matter whether the outcome of any given choice you made was a release of happy chemicals, or unhappy ones.

My personal take-aways

This book went deep and at the same time managed to explain everything in a way I could understand – which is rare. Also, since it’s the only book I could find (so far) on all four happiness hormones simultaneously, it really makes it a one-stop-shop for learning about the biology of happiness. Highly recommended!

What makes humans different from every other animal is that we think about the future. However, our brains fall victim to a wide range of biases that cause our predictions of the future (and our memories of the past) to be inaccurate. Because of these mental errors it is remarkably difficult to predict what will make us feel happy.

Read the full book summary »

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