Happiness

The quality of our decisions is paramount in the modern age, because we’re all leveraged. You can be leveraged through code, community, media, capital, labor and other ways. If you’re smart, you leverage every decision you make.  If Warren Buffett makes the right decision 85% of the time and his competitors get it right 70% of the time, Buffett will win everything. More

Besides “I’m too smart for it,” the other objection is, “I don’t want it to lower my productivity. I don’t want to have less desire or less work ethic.” Fact check on that is: True. The happier and more peaceful you are, the less likely you are to run out and change the world. More

“Happiness is for stupid people.” That’s a common complaint I hear from smart overachievers. They think only dumb or lazy people can be happy. Entrepreneurs will say, “I don’t want to be happy because I want to be successful.” They worry that if they get too happy they’ll lose their desire and won’t work hard anymore. More

Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want. You become disturbed because you want something. Then you work really hard to get it and are miserable in the meantime. Finally, when you get it, you revert to the state you were in before you had it. More

The first step to increasing your level of happiness is realizing you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. For the vast majority of people, some of their happiness—probably a lot more than they think—is in their control. This step is not easy. You might be stuck on this for a long time. More

Happiness is an extremely loaded term. It means completely different things to different people. Everybody has strong preconceived notions of what happiness is and how they can attain it. More

You can achieve happiness without financial wealth. Most of us recognize you’re not going to buy your way to happiness. But in modern times, you can buy your way out of common causes of unhappiness. Financial wealth can give you freedom and more time. It can give you peace. More

Let’s talk about why we’re doing this podcast. It’s really a discussion of highly practical philosophy. Philosophy, as we normally think of it, is impractical. It’s abstract and obtuse—something written a long time ago in fancy language. We put it on a pedestal and it feels unapproachable. Sometimes it comes across like truisms. More