The Infinite Loops Guide to... Happiness
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1. Will Schoder | Seek Activities That Enthrall the Heart, Not the Head
“[W]hatever keeps your brain in thrall doesn't necessarily do anything for your heart. I think about that all the time because there are so many things in the modern world that keep our brains in thrall, but our hearts still feel empty. And I think about just seeking the things that make you feel like a fully formed human being, a whole person with full vitality more than following the things that just keep you engaged and absorbed in the bad sense.”
More from Will: On Curation, Consumption & Compression (Ep. 190)2. Derek Sivers | Discard Your Useless Beliefs
“And I think if we let go of this idea of true, saying, "It's just true that this government is bad. It's just true that I would be happier if I lived across the world somewhere," if you let go of all of that and say, "No. No. No. None of that is true. The only thing that's true is..." There, my hands are clapping right now. That's true. Physical, observable things are true. Everything else is just a perspective that you can choose to take. Then the way to judge it, if we let go of the word true is whether this is useful to me or not.”
More from Derek: How to Become a Picasso (Ep. 185) | Just Do The Thing (Ep. 186) | Now Or Never: Why Your Next Action is Everything (Our synthesis)3. Jared Dillian | Stop Worrying About Daily Expenses
“And a lot of the stuff that's focused around cutting expenses puts you in a position where you're thinking about money all the time. Even the decision of whether to go to a soda machine and get a soda for a dollar becomes this complex decision-making process about, "Do I need it? Can I wait until I get home? I'm thirsty," whatever. So it really gets people thinking about money all the time. And I think the ideal state is to get to a point where you don't think about it at all. You never think about it because there's better things to worry about than money. There's a lot better things to worry about than money, like family, kids, job. There's all these other sources of stress and money stress is completely avoidable depending on how you structure your life.”
More from Jared: How To Live a Stress-Free Financial Life (EP.196)4. Anna Gát | Turn Your Attention Outwards
“[T]he outside world is more interesting than you are and you should spend the majority of your time exploring it, and making life beautiful for other people is more important than making it beautiful for yourself. You should devote yourself to it and hope that others will make yours beautiful too.”
More from Anna: We Digress (Ep. 211) | Learning Through Discussion (Ep. 38)5. Todd Goodwin | Take Responsibility
“There's a poem, it's very short poem, "My mind is a Garden, my thoughts are the seeds, my harvest will be either flowers or weeds." Mel Weldon… don't know who he is, but he was the one who wrote that. And I use that a lot as an analogy because our mind is a garden, and what we allow to be planted sometimes it's not our doing. It was planted before we had conscious awareness, hence children who were traumatized by something, but it's our responsibility if we don't play victim and we have self-awareness and the desire to improve our life and take responsibility. It's our responsibility, Jim, to go in there and do some weeding.”
More from Todd: “Revelation is not Resolution” (Ep. 175) | Hypnosis: Separating Myth From Reality (Ep. 164)6. David Pinsof | Stop Trying to Be Happy
“[T]he best way to avoid happiness is to actually pursue it. Or put differently, happiness is impossible to directly pursue. Because if I'm right, that what happiness is, is prediction error minimization, where it only arises when things are unexpectedly good, well, then it's impossible to pursue it because happiness is by definition unexpected. You're happy when things are unexpectedly good and you cannot pursue something if you don't know how to predict it or anticipate it, right? You can only pursue something if you have expectations about where it's going to show up. And so if happiness is all about things being unexpectedly good, then you cannot by definition pursue it. And so if you try to pursue it, you're going to beset with failure time and time again and that's going to ironically make you miserable.”
More from David: Everything is Bullshit (Ep. 161) | Why Everything is Bullshit (Our synthesis)7. Jim O’Shaughnessy | Be Grateful
“[E]very time I take a shower, I say, "You know what? Thank you universe." I'm not a religious person, but I'll thank the universe, thank you universe, that I get to be in a hot shower." Because think of what tiny percentage of all humans who've ever lived have access to a daily hot shower. And when you start thinking in things those ways, you just are much happier.”
More from Jim on happiness: Infinite Loops Hits 200!8. Morgan Housel | Focus on the Fundamentals
“The biggest things that make you happy really have nothing to do with money. It's like, do you get along with your spouse? Are you raising good kids? Are you in a job that gives you the ability to be creative and have fun? Can you spend time with your friends? Are you getting enough sleep? Do you have time to exercise? That's what actually makes you happy, and those things don't make any difference at all whether you've had some windfall or not.”
More from Morgan: The Best Story Wins (Ep. 100) | The Psychology of Money (Ep. 06) 9. William Green | Defer Gratification
“I think it's a good rule to be constantly kind of tying your hands behind your back so that, in a world that's become increasingly short term, you are pushing yourself very consciously in the opposite direction. And I feel like that's one of the great superpowers in life that, the ability when everybody else is getting these dopamine hits from their phones and their Twitter accounts and the extra donut and all of these things, the ability to defer gratification is incredibly powerful […] All of these things that give you a little hit of energy, but you're borrowing from the future.”
More from William: Lessons for Life and Investing (Ep. 102)10. Tom Morgan | Relinquish Control
“[O]ne thing you said is that […] the modern conception of spirituality is like ‘higher consciousness.’ I think that's an awful, awful way of putting it. It's almost lower consciousness. It's more integrated consciousness. Where you’re like, “I'm going to put what I want to one side and let whatever's guiding this entire system take broader control.” Because the only thing that you'll get if you try and make a five-year-plan is anxiety. Because we can't control the world. And you'll notice that the more you try and control it, the unhappier you get.”
More from Tom: All you Need is Love? (Ep. 74) | Intimations of a New Worldview (Ep.139) | Curation in the Age of Information Abundance (Ep. 61) | Tom Morgan (Our synthesis)
Great stuff -- lots of good reminders of things I should do more of! 💚 🥃
Excellent. Thanks so much!