Most Replayed Moment: The Direct Path To Purpose And Happiness! These 2 Decisions Matter Most

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As an example to stick to food, we've evolved the costatory preferences to, as a response to caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods, gorging on a lot of food makes perfect evolutionary sense when we don't know when our next meal is coming from. When we live in an environment of plenty, then that exact phenomenon becomes maladaptive. So, if you look at, for example, I think the top eight or nine killers at the World Health Organization thing, they can all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis.

So, I would tell your son, knowledge is power to our earlier point of view getting that degree, you never lose and knowing more.

You being aware of the mismatch hypothesis, dear son, will allow you to hopefully not fall as easily into behavioral traps. And what are the most important, because you have a book here called Happiness, eight secrets, the leading, the good life.

“If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy life, what are the most important things that I should be aiming at?”

So, I look at both decisions that we can make for happiness and mindsets, so let me discuss a few of each. So, by far the two choices that will either impart upon me the greatest happiness of the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice of profession. And let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go, "Oh God damn, not this one again." I'm not off to a good start.

If I wake up next to this to that person and I go, "Oh my God, how did I pull that off? What a delight to wake up next to this person." Well, that's good. Have they empirically mentioned this?

“Have they not in the way I'm explaining the anecdote?”

Now, if I go off, after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off and do things in my day-to-day activities that make me do existentially. Oh boy, what a great day I have lined up. I'm going to be working on my next book. I've got diary of a sea. Oh, that's going to be super fun.

A lot of new people are going to hear about some ideas that I'm going to maybe have a chat with a graduate student. Some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stress, but it all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning. And then at night, I return to that lovely person. I've cracked the happiness code, right? Now, of course, the question is, the devil's in the details.

What can I do to maximize my chances that I make those right choices? I explain in the book contrary to 99.9% of the quote self-help prescriptive books, where they tell you exactly what guarantee here are the eight steps.

“I explain that life is a statistical game, right?”

There are statistical vagaries, so all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining happiness. I can't guarantee anything, right?

You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly.

So, earlier I mentioned birds of a feather flock together versus opposite trot. Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase your chances of a happy marriage, remember the maximum birds of a feather flock together. Complementarity works really nicely in the short term. It doesn't sustain a long-term marriage.

The butterflies, the hormones don't last when you've been in a marriage. That doesn't mean you're not still sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later, but that's not going to carry the train. Okay, so just to give a little bit more, I guess, specificity and nuance to this. Because my partner, she's really into like spiritual stuff.

She's really into like crystals and lots of things that I'm not into. I think we have a great relationship, we've been together a long time.

She's not into that.

Well, we might have to have you revisit that because I'm a Manchester City guy.

Okay, well, that's the end of the book last year. My apologies. No, look, I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences in it. But if I were to distill, if I were to use statistical terms, if I were to factor analyze your most fundamental life principles between you and your partner, do you think you're more alike or more different?

We're more alike, we're aligned. That's my point. Yeah, and this is why I said, because when people here, they might think of it as like taste. No, it's not about taste. It's not about the same.

Most fundamental, the interlogic, right? I mean, what, you know, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller. My wife loves the fact that I have purity in my right. She appreciates the fact that, you know, and similar with her.

For example, we both have never been the type to seek to trigger jealousy in the other.

Many people will say, oh, you know, if when you trigger jealousy, that spicy things up, right?

“My wife has never a single time done a single thing, right?”

But that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated. Well, can I ask you just willing that, just, are there things about your wife that you don't have as much, but our fundamental values? But you're drawn to because she's kind of giving you them. I call her Magaiver.

Do you remember who Magaiver was? Magaiver was a show in the 1980s, I think, where he was reputed to be able to put things together. He's in a pickle, he's in a cell, so he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar. He, right?

My wife had a complete reversal of the typical stereotypes of male and female. She gave my wife an empty can of tuna and soccer ball. She'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to Mars. She is unbelievably in French. She said, they blew up.

She knows how to put things together and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do it. For me, for all my fancy academic stuff, take a light bulb. Probably take me four weeks before I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket.

She's basically Elon Musk of the Sad Household.

I greatly admire that in her and it's something that I possess very little. I want to ask one of the things you said a second ago was about this the evolutionary basis of, we're talking about happiness and what it's to be happy about the part and the part.

“What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose?”

Why do we need that? Right. So we've got a very big frontal lobe, right? So, remember early, I was talking about exaptation versus adaptation. One argument for why we love literature so much is that

it our brains need nourishment via storytelling. And therefore, that's an exaptation. My brain expects to be fed stuff that keeps me engaged. And therefore, literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment. To use the food analogy, right?

So, I suspect that because we are sentient beings, right? We are not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right? I mean, all animals have to solve two problems. Survive and reproduce, right? That's the entire game of life.

But because we have consciousness, because we have metanology, because we are sentient, there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing. And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning. So, I'm a very happy, I mean, I should mention, though, that happiness

about 50% of individual differences in happiness scores comes from our genes. But the good news is that it leaves 50% up for grabs, right? So, I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than you. So, I'm now winning at the race. But if I don't have make good choices, if I don't adopt good mindsets,

then even though you started lower than me in an inate sense, you might surpass me. And so, it really is an interaction of nature and nurture. Purpose and meaning, so, to that, I may be answering it in a bleak way. I argue, and remember, I said, having a good partner and having a good job

“or the two ways that you can maximize happiness, I argue that the best way”

to achieve occupational happiness is two metrics. One of which is going to relate to Purpose and meaning. Having temporal freedom, all other things equal is better than not having temporal freedom.

A and airplane pilot, once the door shuts, the next 16 hours

from LA to Singapore, it's set.

“I mean, literally temporarily, in terms of time, physically, I'm stuck.”

That to me is unthinkable. I float through life. I work harder than most people, but I do it in my own way. Right now, I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book prospectus. That I'm going to go train for an hour, that I'm going to go read for three hours.

That temporal, I don't have what I call scheduling isphyxia. That helps me. I do. You do. Try to resolve that if you can.

Number two, which is going to speak to Purpose and meaning. I argue that all other things equal, any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse as a direct path to Purpose and Happiness, purpose and meaning. That's what I mean by that. A stand-up comic is creating a routine that until he came along, we didn't have.

A chef is creating a dish out of nothing. An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before. An author, remember, earlier we were talking.

“I think I was off air and you were saying, how long did it take here?”

What was the process? I said, you know, there's something magical about writing a book, right? Because there literally is a day where you open the laptop. You open a word document. That word document, which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind.

Save. Doesn't have a single letter type. It's blank. And then through the magic of creation, creative impulse. A year later, I pressed the send button.

A year later, you're consuming that book. That has to be a direct path to Purpose and meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that the actuarial scientist, your brother, doesn't have a worthy life. But surely a person who wakes up who's an artist, who's an author.

By the nature of him creating says, oh, I can't wait to get to the studio. I doubt that maybe not your brother. I doubt that most actuarial scientists go, I'm going to get into that actuarial table today, like there's no tomorrow. I'm going to spank that actuarial table.

Okay, so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work, then, to arrive at a conclusion that I haven't had you say. I read in the consuming instinct, your other book, chapter four, that youngest siblings like me. Yes, youngest of four, are more likely to be creative.

Oh, you're pulled that one out, okay? So does that mean that if we're more likely to be creative and creative, it is associated with happiness and the way that you just described, that I am happier than all of my siblings.

“Do you want to guess what Dr. Sads sibling order is?”

You're the youngest by five. So let me step before I answer that in the way you frame the question. Let me explain what the mechanism is, okay?

I also just want to add one later, that is what I always sat with at a dinner the other day

with my, with about 10 of our directors, really their founders of companies, essentially. And I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them, because I've started to perform a bit of a picture about this. I'm on the table and asked every single one of them,

where did you rank in order of siblings, and eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling? I love it. It was so crazy. Yeah.

That's psychology. So let me tell you the background to that theory, okay? Which I've done my own research on and published work on it. But the original theory comes from Frank Soloway, who's a historian of science,

who wrote a book which I highly recommend to all your viewers. It's a bit technical, but you can get through it. It's called Born to Rebell. It's a book that explores historically,

the people who've generated the biggest breakthrough

radical scientific innovations and what was their birth order. And it turns out, not unlike how you did it with the ten and eight of them were last born, out of the 28th most radical scientific innovations ever posited. 23 out of the 28th were the last born later born. Now, so then the question is, okay,

well, fine, that's just a phenomenon, but what explains it? Now, the explanation is mind-blowing. You ready? So Frank Soloway argued that typically when we study the psychological effects

of birth order, it's from the perspective of the parent's behavior to the child as a function of their birth order. First child, I'm very strict. Second child, I'm getting tired. Fifth child, run the streets, I don't give a shit.

Okay, so that's the causality of the birth order effect. He flipped the whole thing.

Much of the impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the child, and then he explained how. He said that one of the fundamental survival problems, it's an evolutionary theory. One of the fundamental survival problems that a child faces

is to differentiate itself from all other siblings to etch maximal investment from the parents. How do I do that? So that's called the Darwinian niche partitioning hypothesis.

When you start off your first born,

all of the niches are unoccupied. There is the, I'm a good boy niche. I'm a rebel niche. There are many, many, there's a penalty of niches that are unoccupied.

So I'm first born. I'm going to pick whichever one. The second born is born. There is n minus one niches. One is taken.

So the, I'm a good boy niche. I got to differentiate myself. I'm second. I'm an asshole niche. I'm a, I'm a contrary niche.

Let's keep going down the birth order.

There are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches.

Left for later born. Especially if the ship ship is big. Sullyway argued that that forces the last born

“to score differently on key personality traits.”

One of which is open to experience. So he argued that later borns up to last borns. By virtue of having to solve that original problem. Will end up being much bigger out of the box thinkers, not being stuck on conformity on orthodoxy.

Hence in the context of scientific innovations, the last borns are the ones who say, "No, this is bullshit. I'm going this way." And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting

where I demonstrated that last borns were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters. So I took the exact framework. But instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations, I applied it to radical product innovations and adoptions.

So all that to say that based on that, one could surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness, then the latter borns would score happier. I really wonder which one it is, because I can attest to kind of both being true.

I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also by the time I was 10, the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said, "How many are you? There's four." When you said, "Run the streets." That's the perfect explanation of my childhood.

My oldest, the oldest, which is my sister. Amanda, she, if she wasn't at home by 9pm, she was also a woman, so the rules were slightly different. 9pm, it was hell to pay. If I didn't come home for two to three days,

there was no one there to ground me anyway.

“And I think that opens you up to experimentation.”

You start fiddling with stuff. I was doing all kinds of things in the house, like breaking things apart, looking inside them, start a little business, selling the cigarettes from my mum's room, sorry mother, she really doesn't know that I ever did that.

All these kinds of things, which starts to build this repository of information, but also it built my confidence in a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with risks. It's hard to figure out which one it is, maybe it's both.

It's probably both. I think it's a bit above. But yeah, I haven't been, I know that your team had asked me, "What are some questions that we could ask that know about?" Well, certainly filling up that birth order one, you've succeeded on asking me a question that I certainly haven't been asked

for a long time, so kudos to the team, so it's incredible.

We have a lot of great researchers, so. And by the way, both my wife and I are last born. So to the assertive meeting, and I'm not sure if that's been done, and if it hasn't been done, it'd be very easy to do. Right? So here's an experiment.

If anybody steals it, I better get the credit. You just look at a thousand marriages, calculate their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then see if there is a sort of the meeting on birth order ship. Interesting.

What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode.

“If you want to listen to that full episode,”

I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. The best of luck. The legendary checkout from Shopify, just check the shop on their website, a little social media,

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