Greetings, SuperFriends!

This episode is brought to you by the all-new online course, Creating a Meaningful Life. Use this link to save 20%

In this episode, we discuss:

• Neil Pasricha's background, and how he got to where he is today
• The two tragic events that changed Neil Pasricha's life forever
• The incredible story of Neil's latest book and why he wrote it after a major surprise
• Is Neil happy? What are his thoughts on his own happiness level?
• What are the 5 things that Neil does when he is unhappy?
• What is the actual “happiness equation?”
• What one thing do young people want to be more than rich?
• What is the role of freedom in happiness?
• Why didn't Neil Pasricha quit his job at Walmart until recently?
• What is the secret to Neil's tremendous success?
• The idea of becoming an “overnight success” and why it's bullshit
• A discussion of the law of attraction
• What's the trick to doubling your rate of success?
• What are the “4 S's” of a good job?
• How is Neil motivating himself now that he's not at a big company?
• The idea of a “7 year itch” and life phases
• Interesting research on how vacation improves productivity and creativity
• What books or thought leaders is Neil Pasricha a fan of?
• What crazy system does Neil use that he borrowed from Ryan Holiday for organization?
• Where can you learn more about Neil?
• What is The Institute for Global Happiness and what do they do?
• What's the biggest takeaway Neil would like you to remember from this interview?
• Neil's personal email, if you listen through to the end of the episode!

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Neil's blog, 1000AwesomeThings.com
• The Institute for Global Happiness
• Neil's first book, The Book of Awesome
• Neil's new book, The Happiness Equation
• Neil's TED Talk
• Our previous episode with Gretchen Rubin
• Headspace app
• TheOnion.com
• WaitButWhy.com
• The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho
• Our previous episode with Jen Sincero
• Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off | TED Talk
• When Breathe Becomes Air
• The Black Swan by Nasim Talib
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
• The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering
• Our previous episode with David Allen

Favorite Quotes from Neil Pasricha:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman podcast, where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host, Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: Before we get started today, I want to let you guys know that this episode is brought to you by the online course, Creating a Meaningful Life. Now, this course is the culmination of 20 years of work and research by my personal mentor and university professor, Linda Levine and myself. Now in it, we teach not only the skills and strategies that we've used and taught and which are being used by life coaches all over the world to create a life of fulfillment and balance. 

But we also go into how you can design your lifestyle, how you can improve in every aspect, all eight of the aspects that make a complete and rich life. And really we share a lot of our wisdom. So if you've been inspired by the show, by some of the guests on here who seem to have these incredibly rich fulfilling lives, I do encourage you to check it out.

And of course it is backed by a 30-day money back guarantee. So to take advantage of a special coupon for listeners of this podcast, visit jle.vi/meaning. All right, here we go with the show. 

Jonathan Levi: Greetings, SuperFriends and welcome to today's show. In this episode, we are joined by a highly esteemed author and public speaker, a Harvard MBA, and former top Walmart executive whose book entitled The Book of Awesome has been a New York Times bestseller for fiveyears straight.

Now, you might've seen his popular Ted Talk. It's garnered, literally millions of views. You might've read his award-winning blog, A Thousand Awesome Things, which by the way, ranks among some of the top blogs on the web, or you might've seen some of his other books, he's published quite a few of them.

And most recently published The Happiness Equation, which is a great book on how to rethink your life, your career, your time, your relationships, you name it. So in this episode, I wanted to get behind the science of happiness and simplicity. And I wanted to talk with someone who's devoted his career to exploring that space.

I've been someone who's in my earlier life, struggled to find happiness as many of you guys know. So I really wanted to see what his approach was. What did he find different? What did he find similar? In the conversations, we talk about the habits of happiness, the law of attraction, the science of success, life satisfaction, motivation, life transition.

We talk about a lot. It's a very broad conversation with a lot of interesting touch points, a lot of brilliant takeaways. And I just know that you're going to find a ton of motivation and inspiration just as I did. So without any further ado, I'm very excited to present to you guys, my new super friend.

Mr. Neil Pasricha.

Neil, welcome to the show, my friend, I am so excited to have you back and I have to admit you are my first human interaction since coming back from 10 days in the desert. I'm a little bit bummed to be back at a computer after spending so much time in the sun. So I think it's fitting that I'm going to talk to someone who's an expert in pointing out awesome things and happy things.

Neil Pasricha: Oh, man, I love that. It's like, my voice must sound like trumpets blaring to you and the music of the ages and the sounds of the universe somehow, because it's, I'm sure you've, all your senses probably are like overly sensitive now. You get like a piece of cheese and you're like this isn't the most incredible piece of cheese I've ever had.

Jonathan Levi: Well, I have to be honest, there was like 10 days of burning man desert. So lots of loud music. I'm just, I'm happy to have like a quiet, calm conversation. 

Neil Pasricha: Oh, I appreciate it. Yeah. I got your out of office saying that you were at that, and that was like, that's the best out-of-office ever. And usually it's like, Hey, I'm busy. I got my head down. It's like, I'm at burning man you know? Great. You kind of like, you're cheering you on. All I was missing was like a picture. Here with your bags packed or something, you know? 

Jonathan Levi: Awesome. And so Neil, I have to ask, you know, it seems like you had an absolutely meteoric rise to the top. We were introduced you and I, by someone who I respect and look up to very much Chris Bailey.

So I wanted to ask you a little bit, you know, tell me about your journey and how it is that you got to where you are today.

Neil Pasricha: Yeah, sure. I'll give you the quick version. I'm 36 years old, born and raised in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada, where I live today. Mom, from Nairobi, Kenya, dad's from Amritsar, India.

They immigrated here in the late 1960s. My dad was a high school physics teacher. My mom was an accountant for general motors. And I was what would the sort of immigrant sense of wonder. My parents saw snow. When I saw snow, they went skiing. When I went skiing, they sort of marveled at the world because it was all new to them.

My dad, I always tell the story of him, like obsessing over the stickers and all the fruits and vegetables saying, you know, can you believe you can get Kiwis from New Zealand? And so I had this like sense of awe and appreciation for life that I think came from my parents, just the classic immigrant sense of wonder. And so very, very normal kind of quiet life

you know, we went to undergrad for business, uh, got married, found a job, and all that sort of changed for me in about 2008. When in a span of a really short time, I got divorced, which wasn't my choice, which made it more difficult. And I lost a really close friend to mental illness, he ended up taking his own life. And it was in that swirl,

and in those months that I started up a blog called 1000awesomethings.com just as a way to put a smile on my face, to cheer myself back up. So I would write about being the first table called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding or flipping to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night, or heading a string green lights on when you're late for work.

And I would not just write the headline, but I would write, you know, take the time that night to try to cheer myself up and write, you know, three, four or 500 words about it. These are the three people that you could get stuck behind at the cash register. That's why it's great when the cashier opens up a new checkout lane, or not only do we want to revel and enjoy old dangerous flavor, and a comment like here are the specifically most dangerous pieces of equipment that used to exist, you know, and that kind of stuff.

And then the blog just took off. It got 50 million hits, one best blog in the world a couple of years in a row. And that took me to doing, a series of books called The Book Of Awesome series, you know, book of awesome, even more awesome, et cetera. The Ted talk, I'm starting to speak about it, but more importantly, like gratitude and appreciation.

And I hope like a sense of wonder that I got from my parents on just how to live life, because we're here a short time. You could come back and the average person lives twenty-five thousand days, you know, that's like world span in days is 25,000. So it's like to me going through the divorce and losing a friend, but I think led to a multiple year kind of depression.

It certainly led to a shorter term one, but the awesome thing saved me. They helped pull me out. I pulled myself out and the community response and the comments and, you know, getting obsessed with things like the Facebook page and the blogs that's like that put me in a different place. So that's really my story.

And then the only new sort of addendum to that is that I stopped writing at the end of that blog when I hit a thousand. So four straight years of writing on awesome thing at night. And, uh, I didn't start it again till I got remarried. And my wife's name is Leslie and she's a teacher here in Toronto and on the flight back home from our honeymoon, which was in Southeast Asia, she went to the airplane bathroom after a layover in Malaysia, and she came back to our seat and said, I'm pregnant, on the plane, on our honeymoon, on the way home. And so we landed home in Toronto, I started running what ended up becoming a 300 page love letter to my unborn child on how to live a happy life because the thing I wanted most for my child was for them to be happy. 

Like it's a very common, everyone wants that for their kids, but because of my experience, you know, with this blog exploding and seeing big CEOs and best-selling authors and speaking to rural families. And by the way, also, I should have mentioned like my day job during all of this was 10 years of working inside Walmart, the world's biggest company as the director of leadership and an assistant to our CEO.

So I was seeing kind of executives real close, and I was like, they are necessarily happy, you know, like there's a lot of unhappiness in these very successful places in the world, but I wanted to give it to my kid. So this 300 page letter was my exploration of happiness in its entirety. And that letter has been published just recently as my new book called The Happiness Equation.

That book is the letter I originally wrote to my son before he was born. 

Jonathan Levi: Wow. So that's an incredible story. And actually, I didn't hear about the Walmart thing until just now in all my research. So I think that's an interesting compare and contrast between working and one of the largest corporates and seeing so much unhappiness and then striking out on your own and really pursuing the habit and practice of happiness.

Just incredible. So I guess the big question everyone asks you is, are you happy?

Neil Pasricha: Yeah. And that's a great question. I really pacefully answer that slowly. I just did a Google Doc and the guy, like first questions, like, are you happy? And I'm like, Oh no, this is going to be recorded on YouTube forever. And so I said to him, and I'll say to you now, is that like, you know what, it's a practice for me.

What I mean to say is it's a place to get to mentally and I get to it, okay. Sometimes on a day, like today, when I had that two hour walk with my son this morning, before I took him to preschool and I was able to have breakfast with my wife, I get a really stimulating conversation with you. And I know I'm going to go to the gym after, you know, like, I feel like, yeah, I'm happy.

I'm going to pick my son up. Like, there we go, like, there's some exercise in there. There's some intimacy with my family. There is some stimulation and I can look back on this day and be like, yeah, it was just felt great to be alive. But of course, like everybody, I have the opposite to, a day where something goes wrong or my son is upset or I'm upset, my wife and I have an argument, something breaks, something's late, something's delayed.

I don't get something I was going for or something I've been trying to write doesn't pan out where I've struggled with it. So it's a practice. The difference between me now and before I wrote this book, The Happiness Equation is like, I now know what to do. I will exercise myself from the house and go for a 20 minute run, or I will simply write three emails to old bosses or coworkers say, hey, I wanted to let you know this tip he gave me in the meeting, it's something I'm still doing. 

And like the practice of trying to change my brain into one of gratitude and positivity is more an exercise now that I know how to flip my mental switch and I can work on happiness, like we work on our physical bodies. I can work on my mental body with a little bit more ease and that practice has helped me get to a place where I'm more happier than I used to be.

Jonathan Levi: Right. So Neil, I think it's actually really interesting what you said, now I know what to do. I have to admit recently I've started writing out my secrets of adulthood. It's kind of an idea I got from Gretchen Rubin, who was on the show. And one of them is that almost all bad moods can be solved by music, exercise, sleep, or things you love.

So I want to know what do you do besides, you know, going out for that run? What are your secrets for turning around a bad day or a bad week or a bad month? 

Neil Pasricha: Sure. I've got five go-to things in my pocket, okay. Each of them takes 20 minutes. And what I tell anyone is you can develop a new happiness habit yourself.

You just do one of these things for 20 minutes. And if you do it for 20 days in a row, that's a new happiness habit. I call it the 20 for 20 challenge. So here's my bag of tricks, number one is a 20 minute walk or run. Okay. So it's a quick physical piece of exercise. We know from research that Michael Babbitt continued to publish in the American Psychosomatics Association that that actually can outperform antidepressants or even the combination of taking two depressants and doing the walking.

So a brisk 20 minute walk is like pays off in spades, especially if it's just a change of scenery or something in nature. Second one is, 20 minute journaling exercise. This is what I was doing on my blog, A Thousand Awesome Things every night, it was literally writing about something positive, forcing yourself to do it.

Or if someone did something for you, it's just journaling and documenting that moment. I had an incredible night last night. I play on a terrible men's softball team. And for the first time ever, my son got to come see me play. And like, if I were to write about that today, I know it would cheer me up if I had a rough patch.

So the reason that works is because our minds have no GPS signal in them. You don't actually know where you are. When you're journaling about something, you think you're there again. And if you read your own journal, you get a tripling effect. So that's number two. Number three is a conscious act of kindness.

This is what I was talking about with a writing an email to a friend or boss or coworker, buying flowers for my wife, you know, literally truck sweeping or shoveling the neighbor's sidewalk. If I just do something like nice for someone else, my happiness level goes up, Sonja Lyubomirsky at Stanford University, California, did this research

and she said that if you do five of these a week, actually your happiness cause up higher than any of the other exercises, like, wow, it's the dividends are massive. Number four is meditation. Yes. Yeah. You know, just, and I know you're a big fan like I typically use Headspace. I've been experimenting with other forms,

TM and so on, but for me, like A Guided Meditation on Headspace, it's just like a pretty quick button push. And less now, although I have no affiliation with Headspace, like particularly, and I know there's lots of alternatives, like calm.com or 10% happier, we took the plunge and like pay the $3 a month like fee, you know, like we actually like subscribe to it so that we can

you know, just have access to a few more of the meditations on there. And then number five is, taking a pen out and a piece of paper and writing down five things I'm grateful for. It's a weird thing to like, it sounds strange to be like, excuse me for a moment. And rather than cry in the bathroom, I like, you know, go write down like at least five things I'm grateful for, but it just works.

And this is Emmons and McCullough, then they had students write down five gratitudes, five hassles, or five events over 10 weeks. And of course you can, as you know, people who wrote down five gratitudes or markedly happier, it's a huge increase in your happiness. So those are my five tricks and you only need to go to one of them.

All the studies are mutually exclusive. So you just pick one, say I'm going to get myself a 20 minute happiness break and it will readjust your day. 

Jonathan Levi: I love that. So why the title Happiness Equation? I mean, if you only need one, it doesn't sound like you need this one plus the other in a certain order. So what is the happiness quote equation?

Neil Pasricha: Yeah, it's a great question. So, first of all, I shared with you that I had written a letter to my child, right? That's literally what I did. I opened Microsoft Word like document one, and I wrote, Dear baby, I wanted you to have this in case I didn't have a chance to tell you. Love, dad. Blank page. You know what I mean?

That was it. And I gave myself a challenge, which was, after a thousand words, as a ticket to go to work in the morning. So, I mean, I just left Walmart about 12 weeks ago. It's fresh for me not to be there, but the whole time I was writing this letter, it was get up at 5:00 AM, try to write a thousand words,

and that was my ticket to go to work. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad, never hit backspace. And sometimes it'd be terrible or research notes but somehow that just worked. The thing about a letter though, of course, is letters don't have titles. Like you don't write a letter to your friend and say like, the title of this letter is like, you know, X or Y you just don't do that.

So the title of this book became a huge conversation amongst my publishing team for like a year. And it was exhausting. I can't say I would wish that upon anyone. People do judge a book by its cover. And so there was a lot of conversation about, should we call it truly rich or how to be truly rich or how to find happiness or a father's guide to his child?

Like, you know, and so the happiness equation was one version of a title we tested and experimented with and it happened to reflect the underlying structure of the book I already had, which was, want nothing plus do anything equals have everything. Those three segments make up the nine secrets in the book and whatnot thing which is about contentment, do anything which is about freedom and have everything which is about happiness are the underpinning of the book, so the equation part kind of grew from there. And so that is The Happiness Equation is the subtitle of the book. 

Jonathan Levi: So walk me through those three pieces in a little more clarity. I think we touched on that kind of very briefly there.

Neil Pasricha: No, no. I'd love to talk about it in detail. So basically there is, um, for lack of better words, like a summer at nerd camper innovation camp that 15 to 17 year old, like high-achievers go to in Canada.

And I was looking at, I went when I was a kid and since then I've been guest speaking for it. So I go back every summer and you know, I do a little lecture and I do a Q&A. And when I used to do it years ago, kind of like when I was going through it, I'm 36 now, this is like, I'm 17, 18. The questions were very simple, Jonathan.

And they were like, how do I become a millionaire? How do I get into Harvard? How do I go to Goldman Sachs and become a banker? You know, it was like questions like that. Now, when I do these lectures, the questions have totally evolved. And anyone who's listening to this podcast who has 15 to 17 year old kids, you will relate to the questions.

They are things like, how do I have less anxiety? How do I have less stress? How do I find more balance? How do I become a better boyfriend or girlfriend? How do I find more happiness? How do I travel the world, but also hold down a job that makes me money? Like, the questions have shifted. I feel strongly to a place where people are actually looking for contentment,

they're looking for freedom, and they're looking for happiness. And certainly Harvard exit surveys confirm this, they show that students want happiness more than wealth for the first time ever. Wow. And the proof point on this is go to Google and you type how to be, you know, just like those three words, how to be, and the drop-downs are happy, then rich, then pretty, and then real estate agent. 

I don't know why those are the ordered four things, but they are briefly how to be signaled as popped to the top because there's a movie with that title, but it literally has a screenshot you know, it's just how to be happy is what we want more than anything else.

In Google Trends, you can kind of look at it. So it's like, we want this thing happiness more than anything else, but we haven't got there. And so for me, the secrets I espouse in the book, and we can get into them a bit later, but there are things about being happy first, investing you're happiness, doing things for you- which is valuing intrinsic motivators, remembering the lottery- which is about appreciation, never retiring- which is always having a purpose, you know, as I go through them and I pull them out, it is that model is want nothing. 

Okay. Contentment to be comfortable with what you have, there's a famous epic t-test quote about the richest man in the world is the one that has the most, but who wants the least than do anything, true freedom. You have it. I feel like I have it, or I'm working towards it.

And that's what I'm hearing people want. They want to overvalue themselves. They want to create space in their lives. They want to, you know, be flexible on their work and their time and their relationships. That space, that's freedom. And finally they want happiness, and that's the last segment of the book.

So that equation isn't, you know, it's not some PhD sort of like, I haven't like done a treatise on like, you know, trying to figure out like the mathematical underpinning of happiness. I've just surmised my own view of what value systems we have today, and here's how to get to those places. Based on all my research, my experiences, and what I wanted to give to my child in terms of, if anything happens to me, she can read this book and it should have everything I've learned in it.

Jonathan Levi: Incredible. And I, you know, I agree with so many of your kind of touch points there, definitely the idea of wanting less of lowering these kinds of expectations of acceptance of presence in your own life. I think, is and was the hugest step in my own personal happiness. And just this idea, you know, I love to tell people that freedom is the new currency, because I know so many MBAs who turned down the $250,000 a year job to have the freedom to live wherever they want for, you know, half that.

And I think our generation and generations to follow are going to heavily weigh freedom, mobility, lifestyle, and things of that nature far over money, because we've kind of learned that money seems like a tool that can buy freedom, but in reality, it kind of can't, it can buy freedom at a certain point, far along the bell curve, but you know, if it's going to work 120 hours a week to make that money, there's no way to exercise it towards freedom.

Neil Pasricha: Exactly. And I mean, I just got back from the grocery store this morning with the prints on all the covers of the newspapers and on the big magazines. And of course, headlines say, what will happen to his $250 million estate or whatever.

And it's like, it reminded me, as I looked at those magazines this morning of an old adage my dad used to say, you know, the Indian immigrant to Canada with eight bucks in his pocket, he used to always tell me you only made what you spent and enjoyed. That was his phrase that you only made what you spend enjoyed.

Like if you die with money in the bank, like, you wasted something. Either wasted that money or you wasted the time spent earning it. Because you only made what you spend enjoyed. And so when I saw the 250 million, I'm like, I hope nowhere in his life and I don't 12,000 degrees removed from, I hope nowhere in his life he didn't sacrifice an hour with, a child or a friend and in honor of making an extra buck because he didn't use it all. 

Right. And then none of us do, it was so how do you end the race with the wheels falling off the car so that, you know, you time it perfectly, I'm really intrigued right now, Jonathan, like these annuities things, you know, like. Yeah.

You know, it's just like, Oh, this can pay me this much my first year. And I just have to train up this, this, this, and that. Cool. Then I can build in freedom backwards. So I don't know. There's a lot of ways to think about it. 

Jonathan Levi: Totally, totally. I think Tim Ferriss has done a lot in that regard like your dream life really only costs X thousand dollars a month.

So set it up so you make that for the rest of your life, and don't worry about stockpiling five or $10 million so that you can then, go do what you want. And that's essentially been my model for the last five or so years is, just set the monthly income enough so that you don't have to work too much. You don't have to do things you don't want to do.

You don't have to sacrifice your soul to a job you hate, which I think is a huge component of happiness you know, are you passionate about the way you spend your days. 

Neil Pasricha: Exactly. And the other thing is, you know, you course correct. You figure things out like if you are, you know, kind of wise enough to listen to Jonathan's podcast, then you know that if you cut down your hours at a job you don't like, somehow a safety net will appear.

Somehow you will have peanut butter sandwiches twice a month, instead of once, like things will just kind of curved into the lifestyle you desire. And I'm wanting to talk because I'm hypocritical on this, my book blew up in 2010. Okay. That means I got a six figure book advance and the speaking circuit lit up and all that stuff,

2010. I didn't quit my job at Walmart to 2016. Okay. Why did I wait six years when I had other books over that time that we're all making money. It's because I grew up with immigrants and like they said to me, like work hard and then you'll have a big success and then you'll be happy. They told me that model.

They said, you study hard, you get good grades, you become a doctor. Right. And it wasn't until I realized through writing this letter for my child, that the model's actually flipped. In fact, it's the opposite. It's be happy first, then you do great work and then you have the big success. And so, it was only because I realized, okay, happiness is an investment at the beginning.

It's not something you get to at the end. And that afforded me the ability to sort of like pull and tease myself away from full hundred, which I enjoyed. It wasn't a negative thing for me. I love really, like, it actually was hard to leave, but I pulled away from it because now I'm like, the creative freedom is it's something that I couldn't have paid for it before.

I didn't have the space to like write whatever I wanted in the morning until whatever a time I wanted to at night. That's like, I couldn't have built that in. And that's something I'm trying to experiment right now. 

Jonathan Levi: That's brilliant. I really love that message. And I think that's a huge takeaway, you know, for anyone looking to kind of quote, do their own thing.

I know you're a Harvard MBA, so you've heard MBAs talk about entrepreneurship and it's never start a company, it's do my own thing. This kind of evasive like I'm going to do my own thing after the MBA, which is just beautifully noncommittal. Neil, I wanted to ask you, as you said, your book blew up in 2010, your blog blew up, all of this was just kind of like took the web by storm. What do you think is the secret to your success? I mean, what made you go viral really with all your projects, despite the fact that you were working on it only part-time. 

Neil Pasricha: Well, I, for a long time really looked up to a newspaper called The Onion, you know, theonion.com, right?

Like it's the satirical rag from University of Wisconsin, I think it is. And I remember reading an interview with the editor. I think Todd Hanson in like one of those comedy writing kind of interview books, like probably sells 12 copies, but like someone like me buys it because I'm interested in what all these funny people have to say.

And someone asked him, how do you make money writing jokes? Like, I'm funny, and I want to write jokes. How do I get paid for that? And his answer is the answer I'll give you, which is do it for free for 10 years first. Like, it was literally that. He's like, I just did it for free for 10 years first, it wasn't because I was trying to make money,

I just enjoyed it. And it's for me, yeah, it just blew up. But if I look back and I've heard, by the way, I'm Tim Urban say the same thing on who's, you know, waitbutwhy.com. Right. He's like, I had a blog for 10 years. I wrote 300 blog posts that no one's ever read, then, waitbutwhy blew up. Me, it's under my high school newspaper, editor of my university newspaper, which is, you know, four years there, four years there.

Written other blogs, turning to writing as a place for me. Like it was, for me when I get under stress, when the marital problems happen, when things like that happen, my instinct isn't to turn to racketball, you know, or to running, which some people is, and that's amazing. My instinct is to turn to Microsoft Word and like, just start writing about what I feel like. You know like, I must've had like a good poetry class when I was six or something like that cause that's where I turned. And so the fact that the blog took off may have been partly just that I, you know, had a worked a lot of kinks out of my writing system and it was a place that was comfortable for me.

And then, you know, the usual luck, chance, randomness, you know, the Black Swan event of fark.com, picking up my 20th post, probably right when I would quit the blog. And then of course, that one went viral, which is all dangerous player equipment. That one went viral and it got me 50,000 hits. So then I was like, well, I can't disappointment that the 50,000 people here tomorrow.

So after my energy level abated for another month, I like then I went to the front page of Reddit on another post. I was like, why can't let so, like, who knows what the randomness kind of cycle is, but I will say just doing something you love for a real long time, cause it's only just because you love it, that might explode later just because you're so good at it after 

Jonathan Levi: that. Right. I thought of a couple of different quotes while you were speaking. One being, you know, very commonly attributed quote to like a hundred different people you know, the old adage that it took me 20 years to become an overnight success.

And then with kind of your story of just the right timing, it reminded me really of the quote from Paulo Coelho in the Alchemist, that where, when you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. I'm a huge believer in the law of attraction and that if you line up your intentions, you put in the work, something magical happens in kind of the fabric of reality to make things happen in just the right order, it just the right time. And almost everyone we talked to on the show is like, I wasn't going to make it to that one match and then suddenly, somehow, you know. 

Neil Pasricha: I totally agree with that too. And I've heard that same quote attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, like a version of that. And I like to believe it too, because it feels good, you know, to be like, when I'm rolling, things will roll with me. Or when like my favorite header and baseball is a hitting the hot streak he's on fire, you know, like we believe in that.

But then I also wrestle with that because, you know, I saw a tweet that's, you know, it's fun around the web, recently it says, um, here's the tweet I'll try and quote it. “Why do birds suddenly appear, whenever you are narrative fallacy.” Or confirmation bias like, it's like, yeah, there's that the law of attraction, as you say, and like the, the things kind of happen when you need them to all at the same time, maybe you're only talking to outliers on your podcast.

Right. And the outliers, like whoever you're interviewing, you mentioned Gretchen Rubin and I listened to your podcast on Jen Sincero and I'm like, maybe there's just random freak luckiness. And the lessons are you know just a simple, basic, you know, do what you love, try really hard. If it happens, great. If it doesn't, quit. Try something new and follow them the same Taleb advice, which is make yourself open for Black Swan events.

Like if the world really is as random as we think, and as chaotic, then just trying 10 new things, maybe one little work and if they don't try 10 new things, and maybe one will work. The Scott Adams principle, the guy who wrote Dilbert, saying I only did Dilbert because I was looking for a way to make money

and like I failed at vacuum salesman and I failed at like, he names like 12 other jobs he tried before cartoonist and it's like, wow, who knew if he was a good vacuum cleaner salesman, he would have made like a hundred grand a year off that and been like the best vacuum cleaner salesman, but like, then Dilbert blew up, you know, and yeah, I'm messy in my response to you because I'm messy mentally, unlike trying to balance those two thoughts, you know. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. I definitely think, you know, I talk about it a lot with friends who are in transition and in, uh, like a free online course I just made about entrepreneurship where, you know, one in 10 startups or business ideas fail so the fastest way to success, try 10 business ideas, like statistically, you will succeed. And if you try 20, you're almost guaranteed to succeed, right? Yeah. 

The numbers and statistics don't lie. And I think also you learn something from every subsequent failure. So when people ask me, like, what's the secret to success in business, I say, just try a lot of stuff and don't be concerned about failing, fail smart, fail effectively, fail in an educational manner.means.

So I definitely agree with you there. Like the law of attraction is not going to make you succeed every time by any.

Neil Pasricha: I love that advice because I totally agree with you that the number of success you have is somewhat correlated to the number of failures. So if you just simply double your rate of failure, you will probably double your rate of success. It might not be then doubling your successes, but you'll rate it a successful go up certainly. 

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. So Neil, tell me a little bit about your inspiration, your motivation right now, what's really driving you, you know now you don't have a manager, you don't have a boss, you don't have to be at work every day.

This is a problem that I sometimes struggle with. What thoughts or what ideas motivate you every day to get out of bed, to do this interview, to write more.

Neil Pasricha: I appreciate you asking because I'm wrestling with this right now. And so I quit Walmart in February and I'd been there 10 years with a structured environment with what I call the four S's of a good job.

Okay. These are what everybody needs. You need social people friends, someone would go running with a lunch, the five people you work around that sort of make you laugh and you need that social fulfilled more than most social mammals on the planet for a reason. You need structure, you know, in 168 hour week, you need the 56 hour work bucket to sort of justify pay for and create the other two buckets.

One of which is sleep, and one of which is question mark, whatever you like. But you need some structure. Third is stimulation, which is alert steep learning curve. I was learning something new and being stimulated. And fourth is story, which is being part of something bigger than yourself, you know, if you work at Google, you're organizing the world's information, or if you're a Wikipedia, you are giving the sum of human knowledge away for free, you know, if you're at Walmart, you were lowering the cost of living around the world, right?

Like you are part of something that you could not do by yourself. Okay. Right. Now that I quit that job, I've given away the four S's and I believe in those four S's. So now, I want to build that back. And so my instinct right away, Jonathan was like, reach out to executive coaches, reach out to, you know, personal therapists, like physical fitness coaches, and like try to get my life all structured around, adding back in

measurements and managements and systems, as you're asking me. But instead, after a month or two of like, kind of going around and that I've actually totally rejected that entire mentality. And I'm now following a new line of thinking. And here I can summarize that new line of thinking into one sentence and those sentence is this: The longer you hold your breath underwater, the more interesting place you come up. 

And, I feel like I'm underwater purposely, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, you know, writing wise, what do I want to write next? I've got 1200 ideas, you know, what do I want to speak about that next? Or is it speaking like, you know, I'm rest of all of that. So I leave it open-ended and the longer I can hold my breath in this underwater state, the more interesting place I will eventually come up. And so when am I coming up? I've decided September 1st, I'll revisit myself. I'll check in. I've actually made an appointment with an executive coach for a few meetings in September purposely, September so that I can have the remainder of June, July, and August to stay under water and to experiment and explore.

That means lots of time in bookstores. That means lots of browser tabs open till two in the morning. That means playing with my kids and like you know, following natural passions that may try to sift away all the kind of presuppositions I have on top of my own thoughts, like it gets like my assumptions, my ideals, my background, my successes, which often can get, uh, get very much get in the way of future successes as you know.

So then, clear the deck so that in September I can recheck in and then follow another passion project, whatever that may be. 

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. You know, I really respect, uh, you being completely candid with us, you know. You are a happiness expert, it would be very easy for you to say, well, I'm just so happy and I'm spending so much time with my kid and you know, I'm not working, but I think it takes a lot of kind of Moxie to be like, well, I don't really know.

I don't know if this is going to be the right thing for me. I'm going to check in and I'm pretty uncertain right now. So I really appreciate that. 

Neil Pasricha: Yeah. The trick is like, there's many times uncertain and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm way too uncertain. And I feel like I quickly need to like make a little temperature chart in my basement of like how many X or Y or Z I'm doing a year, you know?

But instead the mantra of the longer you hold your breath under water, the more interesting place you come up, can become in a healthy day a bit of a resolve to then just do whatever I want and test my natural affinity towards it. Because of course the truth of matters, I'm not going to be successful. Anyway, if I don't have a natural affinity towards it, it's about finding that next thing, and doing that every few years or a few months, or whenever you're able to like kind of cock and kind of throw again, you know, and right now quitting a full-time job I've had for 10 years is a good opportunity to like look around my world again and figure out where I wanted to be.

Jonathan Levi: I love that. You know, and I, I'm going through a kind of similar thing where we're in a bit of a transition period with the courses and how much is the podcast going to take up of my time and how much do I want to speak? You know that resonated with me as well. A thought that really helps me is in my life at least I've noticed that even the most successful ventures, business ideas and whatever only keep me happy and only keep me fed, you know, at, at the level that I want to be fed for about seven years at best. So I say to myself, well, if this whole thing, you know, goes after three or four years, that I've been doing it well, it's not that far off from when it was inevitably probably going to end at seven years, like what's another two or three years early to pivot into something new.

And I kind of look at phases in my life in that regard. I ran my last company for seven years, had a little bit of a transitionary period. Before that I was trying all these different ideas. I was a student for seven years, so, I think of it that way like, it's very hard to look at any career, no matter how successful as like, this is what I'm going to do till the day I die.

Neil Pasricha: I don't think anyone in our generation actually thinks  that way. That is so interesting, you say that for so many reasons. I totally am like smiling, listening to you because I've heard, and these are anecdotal, but I've heard from someone senior in the speaking industry who says the average speaking career is seven years, maybe a six, but like around that time, and then I've heard from someone in the publishing industry someone say, the average successful writing career is about seven years. 

That means there's not even, don't make it to one year, but like if you have something that has a big book or two, like it's about seven years that they kind of like nail it, you know? And then the tripling is, there's a famous Ted Talk where a designer and I'm blanking on his name, preaches this whole seven years on one year off principle.

To do nothing for a year in between the sort of seven success years to then reshift your thinking or, or come back with a new idea. Stefan Sagmeister I'm like blanking on the name. I'm sorry. We can Google it. But then that's all led me to doing a test with a company right now. And I'm in the middle of this test

so I can't comment on the research findings yet, but we're doing a test right now inside this company to say, what happens if you work seven weeks on and then forcibly don't work for one week, like take that seven and one model and the year timeline that you've talked about and that this Ted Talks talk about and actually distill it down to a more micro seven weeks on one week off.

And I'm doing this test in a company that already had the very progressive unlimited vacation policy that like companies like Facebook and so on have, where you can take as much vacation as you want, anytime you want it, but that wasn't working for this company. And then I'll comment on the details yet, because we're still studying in that wasn't work for us coming.

Cause like people kind of didn't take much vacation. And when they did, they kind of felt like they needed to check in. Right? Like they kind of like, they still don't feel the stress of work. It's like not cool to just disappear for the whole summer. Right? You can't just do that. So, we're doing this test and it's early days, but we're already finding is when you actually take someone's computer and their iPhone and all that stuff, they have no way to contact the office for one full week, and then they come back. 

The energy level is at a different scale. People come back with new ideas. They're like, Hey, I actually thought this form we use it should be totally different, while I was away cause I like, you know, I saw a bird flying and it reminded me of something, you know, like whatever it was and so far we're testing productivity before and after creativity before and after all that stuff, it's all part of the health. 

I was showing that it's massive. And that's funny to me because I'm like siblings, I'll only go, that sounds like France. Like that sounds kind of like, like some certain European countries already do.

So anyway, your seven-year thing, like really hits a nerve with me for many reasons. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I think it's the classic seven-year itch. My great uncle who in many ways was like a grandfather to me, always told me, you know, there's never been anything I enjoyed doing enough to do it more than seven years and it really resonated and it's been definitely true for me for most of my life, adult and otherwise. 

So Neil, I want to ask you besides our personal or common mutual friend, I guess Chris Bailey, who I have to thank by the way for introducing us. What other books or thought leaders are you a big fan of? 

Neil Pasricha: Oh my gosh. So many. I couldn't sleep as a child and there was no internet or cell phones. So I used to just bury myself in the books and then lucky and unlucky to live around the corner from a downtown Toronto like giant bookstore that's open till midnight every night. So I oftentimes the 20 minute walks is, ended up me surfing different things.

So here's what I'm reading right now. I'm reading When Breath Becomes Air, which is for those that don't know a doctor in the US who became a cancer doctor, and then sadly found out he had cancer and died. And within, between the time he found out and the months he actually died, he wrote a memoir with his view of life.

So I'm reading that one right now and it's gorgeous and stunning and beautiful. I'm reading the Black Swan, as I was mentioning, Nassim Taleb. I'm reading Black Swan green fiction, David Mitchell. David Mitchell's fiction blows my mind. He's the guy that wrote Cloud Atlas and similar books, it's just the writing that the place you go mentally within those books is like, I can't even just describe the feeling.

It just, blows me away. And it's like the kind of book I'm reading where I'm like, I can't believe I've written a book and this guy's written a book because this book is like 10,000 times better than anything I could ever do. You know, like, all we have in common is the glue that sticks the pages together.

Like it's like blows me away when you read another writer like that, that quality. I'm reading a book on parenting, which I'm really loving called uh, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. It's illustrated with cartoons, it's been out since the eighties and sold millions of copies by like, as a new dad it's very very healthy and helping me with all kinds of ways to like, not say no and like encourage motivation, not praise and like never say good job, but always say like, Oh, you're putting blocks on top of each other, you're trying really hard. Like comment on the effort, not the result. Like I'm just learning stuff.

That's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So these are a few examples, but I'm the guy with like 17 prouder tabs open at all times. Just soaking in whatever newspaper clipping, magazine article or shampoo bottle. I can read it. I just love ingesting stuff. 

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. Let me ask you another kind of tough, tricky question. What's one thing that you regularly do that you think other people might find to be crazy? 

Neil Pasricha: Oh, my gosh, I stole this no car system idea from Ryan Holiday. I've been talking about it a lot lately. And so let me just describe it real quickly. I think people will find this a little bit weird, but like in my wallet at all times, our tiny little cue cards, little yellow cue cards, and I put them sideways

so they fit in my wallet like with the billfold and you don't even notice them. And they're in all kinds of other places. They're in my bedside table, they're in my car. And I keep a certain pen, which has, you know, 0.5 millimeter point, like a really thin pen. It's a V five tech point for any pen freaks like me.

And anytime I get an idea, anytime I can make a connection. Anytime I hear a quote I like, anytime I feel, I see a magazine clipping that I want to rip a little quota out of. I grab it, I stick it to that card, I read it on the car and slowly like a game of Plinko on prices or like the cards sort of collect in like the basement of my house on a table, in this little box.

And then what I do is anytime I'm going on like a long plane ride, I grab a stack of those cards and the box itself that holds them. And I will sift them, sort them, and review them. Chuck out the ones that are garbage because many of them are in retrospect then say like, Hmm, these seven together have a theme that I didn't notice yet.

And maybe that's a new article or a new book, or, Hey, these are all about parenting. And like, I let that organically evolve, and so, like I have one called peanut speech, you know? And so like, that's an idea for a speech or like I could do that in my speech or I have one called like next book question mark.

I have one called parenting, like, but the contents themselves and the sort of subject titles naturally evolve from everything I'm collecting from everywhere, you know. Yeah. And then I've got this little shoe box thing, the box that holds all the cards and this, like, you know, it's wrapped in rubber bands that I'd run out of the house with it first, if my house was on fire, because it's basically a brain dump of everything I've been thinking about or seeing for the last

completers. And so I copied that idea from Ryan Holiday. You could Google Ryan Holiday, no car system to see it. He, I think very graciously credits. I can't remember which former US President that used to do this, a similar nutcase as I guess the rest of us. And it's totally changed my life because you know what,

it's relieved me of the worry that I'll forget something. That's what I don't ever carry around the thought that like, I better write that down. I just do. And then it's put away, you know. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. It reminds me a lot of the getting things done, uh, system, you know, we had David Allen and he was talking about, you know, any capture system works.

It doesn't have to be a fancy app, but it has to be accessible. Has to always be with you. Cause if genius strikes, you don't want to lose out on it. 

Neil Pasricha: I mean, the worst thing I do is in my best the table, like run out of cards and have no pen. And then like 2:00 AM. I'm like, ah, I got to like run to the basement and like, it just wakes me, you know?

Then it's like chaos. Yeah, you need that. Yeah. The system must always be replenished. 

Jonathan Levi: Absolutely. Neil, I have two more questions for you. Second to last one being, if people want to learn more about you check out your work, stuff like that, where would you like us to link them in the blog post?

Neil Pasricha: Sure. A simple place is just globalhappiness.org.

It's the Institute for global happiness. I'm the director. It's got everything there. It's got free resources you can download. Like I mentioned, the 20 for 20 challenge, you can download the free slides and facilitators guide and everything is there, like, could you please put away anything about my books, all that stuff, articles you can read, articles I love. globalhappiness.org. That's kind of like just my home base. 

Jonathan Levi: Oh, wow. So we didn't even talk about that. I didn't even realize you were the director of a nonprofit. What does Global Happiness do? What's their mission? 

Neil Pasricha: Our mission is to increase happiness in organizations because it turns out that the place that we spend the most time is also the place that we are the unhappiest.

This is professor Matt Killingsworth work at Harvard and he did this like incredible graph showing all the places we spend time on a happiness chart. Great tracks people, 15,000 people using cell phones for like, you know, across 150 countries. Oh yeah. I remember this. There's this giant pink circle on the like upper left of the graph, and it was like work. 

And then everything else, listening to music, walking my dog, having sex, cooking, they're all tiny little circles on the right side of the graph. Wow. It's like, we like all that stuff, but we don't spend time doing it. And we don't like work collectively, but it's the place where we are spending a disproportionately large portion of our time.

We do that more than anything, more than anything. And so then I spent 10 years inside the world's biggest company running leadership development. So for me, I think my special sauce and sounds disgusting. But my like thing that I'm working on is like happiness inside organizations, you know, like how do you get to be happier when you're inside a big, gigantic bureaucratic company?

And what does that look like? What can a big company do to make their lives of their employees happier? And what does happiness look like on a minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day basis? Like, how do we make that come to life a little better and you know, cubicle farms, like where does that all come together?

And that's where the free resource is. And, you know, you can go check out the website, but that's where we're coming from. And it's a work in progress. We're figuring that out as we go along. 

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. Sounds like an incredible mission and, and something definitely to be passionate about and be excited about working on.

Neil, I want to ask you the last and possibly toughest question before we close, which is if people take away, you know, we've shared so much wisdom, you shared, especially so much wisdom on this episode. If people tend to forget a lot of it and remember just one very, very important point, one takeaway, what do you hope for that to be? 

Neil Pasricha: Remember the lottery. Those three words.

Remember the lottery. You've already won. There are 110 billion people who have ever lived. Okay. If you're listening to this, you're one of the 7 billion people alive today. That's a 1 in 50 in lottery that you already want, and you don't even realize you want it cause we hardly ever think about the 110 billion people who game kind of before us. Of the 7 billion people, ask yourself, what country do I live on?

Well, the country do I live in, you know, you and I are in different countries right now. But like your listeners, where are you? Are you in a place where you trust the water that comes out of your taps? You know, you feel safe coming out your front door, you can marry who you like and live where you please, like, if you are lucky enough to have those freedoms, you're in the top 5%.

Like there's just not any places you can have all those things. And I would wager that most of your listeners do have most of those freedoms. Then if you go a step further, you're like, well, the average world income is $5,000. Okay. And half the world is unemployed. Okay. Then, the number of people in the world that have post-secondary education is 7%.

If you're lucky to have any post-secondary education, you're in the top 10% of that. So my point is like, remember the lottery. If I could just summarize like one life view and you gave me the opportunity and the last question it's like, you already won. Like you already have it pretty good. You already have it pretty good.

Be appreciative for what you have and like keep moving forward to make the world a better place. 

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. That's a fantastic note to end on. Neil, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you today. We're going to link all the resources and books and everything that you mentioned in the podcast. I want to thank you so much for spending your time

I'm really glad Chris connected us and it's been an absolute pleasure. 

Neil Pasricha: Thanks, Jonathan. Absolutely the same to you and your listeners. Thanks so much for having me on. If anyone's here, you know, like I always like think there's this community around the world of like end of podcast. People like I'm in that group.

So for those here that are listening to us here and want to connect further, I'm just Neil, neil@globalhappiness.org. It's always intriguing to me to hear from someone on the other side of the world who was like, I listened to you from New Zealand on a sheep farm, whatever neil@globalhappiness.org.

I'd love to talk to anyone anytime. 

Jonathan Levi: Love it. All right Neil, let's do keep in touch. And you know, I look forward to sharing the episode with the world. 

Neil Pasricha: Thanks, Jonathan. Take care. 

Jonathan Levi: All right Superfriends, that's it for this week's episode, we hope you really, really enjoyed it and learn a ton of applicable stuff that can help you go out there and overcome the impossible.

If so, please do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or however you found this podcast. In addition to that, we are. Always looking for great guest posts on the blog or awesome guests right here on the podcast. So if you know somebody or you are somebody, or you have thought of somebody who would be a great fit for the show or for our blog, please reach out to us either on Twitter or by email our email is info@becomingasuperhuman.com. Thanks so much. 

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the Becoming Superhuman Podcast. For more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.