This is a copy of my tax return from 2010,
just eight short years ago.
And it says that during the course of that year,
I made a grand total $9,226.
Contrast that to last year, 2017
where I made easily more than 10 times that amount
and with that increase in income
came some lifestyle upgrades.
Back then, I lived in a cramped dorm room
and I had to share it with another person
and beyond that, I had to share a bathroom
with 43 other guys in my hall compared to today
where I've got a two bedroom apartment
where I actually got my own bathroom,
it's pretty fancy I know.
And I've got a pretty good view as well.
Also back then, I ate all of my meals in the cafeteria
or I made microwaved chicken nuggets,
yes I know, those are very unhealthy,
whereas today I can actually buy
pretty much whatever I want,
I can cook fancy food, I can go out to eat more often.
So there's been a big improvement
on the dining out front as well.
When I look at my life now versus back then,
there is no question that things
have improved across the board.
Yet in my many ways, I'm no happier now
than I was back then.
I'm certainly a happy person but then again,
I always kinda have been.
So what's the deal here?
I've made all this progress, I've put in all this work
but for what exactly?
This is the question that deserves a closer look.
As my experience is not at all uncommon,
in fact, it's near universal.
In general, people do not find themselves happier
on a day to day basis as a result of getting promoted,
making more money or making other life upgrades
like buying a bigger house or getting a better car.
Instead, we find that as our lives improve,
our desires, tastes, and expectations rise to match.
The result is a sort of happiness equilibrium.
This effect has been called
the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaptation.
And a lot of psychological research
has gone into this concept in the recent past
but it's definitely not a new thing.
As Saint Augustine put it, "A true saying it is,
"desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless,
"and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill."
That quote is over 400 years old
and honestly, we've probably been thinking
about this concept for as long as our brains
have been capable of introspective thought.
Still, it's easy to forget it, to get caught up
dreaming about just how awesome life would be
if we had just a little bit more money
or just a bit more space.
And of course, the modern world is all too eager
to bolster these kinds of thoughts.
As Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral economics
and the author of the book Thinking Fast and Slow puts it,
"People are exposed to many messages
"that encourage them to believe
"that a change of weight, scent, hair color,
"or coverage, car, clothes, or many other aspects
"will produce a market improvement in their happiness.
"Our research suggests a moral and a warning.
"Nothing that you focus on will make
"as much difference as you think."
But what if you actually do want to maximize your happiness?
Or to phrase that question in a way that appeals to me more,
how do you improve your average day?
If getting a bigger house or making more money
or getting more awards and accolades won't do it,
then what will?
Well this is the kind of question
that will get you a million different kinds of answers.
Some will recommend minimalism,
some will recommend different life philosophies
or religious, and some will recommend
spending more time jumping on trampolines
which I hardly agree with.
But here, I simply wanna suggest five changes
that you can start making to your life
that in my experience actually do improve
the average day to day experience and make it a happier one.
First, and I think most importantly,
give yourself time to tinker, explore, and play,
or protect that time if you currently have it.
One thing that a lot of people start losing
as they get older is this unstructured time
where they can tinker and explore,
and this is something that has happened to me
for sure in the past few years.
As I moved further into my career,
become more successful, made more money,
all these kinds of things, I found that my schedule
has a lot less time for this kind of exploration.
I have a lot of things that are pre-planned
that I have to do and there's certainly
lots of external rewards for doing those things
but I found that I don't feel I have the time anymore
to spend an afternoon figuring out how to set up an Arduino
or how to code something just because it seems interesting.
And when your entire daily schedule
is pre-planned and you feel like
you're just some sort of regimented robot,
things can start to get a little bit depressing.
So protect that time.
Actually I read an article in QZ just the other day
saying that doctors are now prescribing play
for children because parents are in this mad dash
to over schedule their kids' lives.
They get them signed up for school,
and music lessons, and sports, and all kinds of stuff
to the point where there's never any moment
where the kid can just go outside and do whatever they want.
And I don't wanna knock the good intentions
of these parents, they think that what they're doing
is going to prepare their children for the future
and give them a leg up.
But as science has found recently, play is very important.
So if you are a parent, give your kid unstructured time
but even if you aren't, protect your own.
Play isn't something that benefits only children,
it also benefits adults, it's useful at any age.
Secondly, make sure that you're staying physically active
and make that physical activity fun.
We are built to move, we are built to exercise,
we have these bodies that are adapted
for working and moving through an environment.
So if you're constantly sitting around,
whether it'd be through work of whether
it'd be coming home and watching Netflix
or playing video games at the end of the night,
you're naturally going to start feeling less and less happy.
Now when people are told to exercise,
their brains usually go to things like
running on a treadmill, or getting a gym membership,
things that feel like an obligation.
So what I'm going to suggest for you here
is to find something that you truly enjoy doing
that's fun but it still gets you heart rate up.
For me right now, that's rock climbing and mountain biking
and I still also love going to the arcades to play DDR.
I found lots of ways to exercise
that I'm truly excited to do every single day
and that makes my day to day experience a much better one.
So you should do the same.
Alright, tip number three is to work to minimize
things in your daily life that you don't like.
Instead of asking yourself how do I get the bigger house,
how do I get the better car?
How do I get that next thing that seems
like it's going to improve my life exponentially?
Ask yourself, what do I have to do everyday
that kind of annoys me?
Now I can probably make an entire video
listing off examples here so I'm just going to give you one.
If you have a long commute and bumper to bumper traffic
that you absolutely hate doing,
then how could you kind of take that out of your life
or at least make it better?
One suggestion would be to actually change
the time at which you make that commute.
A lot of people can meet during rush hour
because they wanna get up at a certain time,
they might wanna workout at home and then go to work
but what if you got up maybe an hour earlier
and then you drove to work at 6AM
when there's nobody else on the road
or maybe instead of driving to work,
you ditched the card altogether and biked to work.
We actually just got an office a couple of weeks ago
and I found that it took me about 15 minutes
to drive to work in regular traffic
but only 17 to ride my bike there
so really just a two-minute difference.
And if you factor in the time it takes me to drive
through the garage and find a parking spot,
biking is actually faster, not to mention more fun.
So whatever it is, analyze the things
that annoy you and start to look for ways
that you can either remove those things from your life
or optimize them and make them a bit more bearable.
Tip number four is to take the occasional big break.
This could be taking a vacation or inviting a friend
to come stay with you and doing some different activities
in your own home but you need to break yourself
out of your routine every once in a while.
And this is something that I am pretty bad at.
I get a lot of things on my plate and I feel like
I don't have time to take a vacation or that I need
to optimize travel by you know,
scheduling a bunch of business trips
instead of just vacations.
But when you actually take a vacation,
you get a mental reset.
And that mental reset sort of revitalizes
your brain's ability to work effectively
and makes you overall happier.
So if you have the time, or even if you don't feel
you have the time, find the time to take these big breaks.
They don't have to take a lot of money,
they don't have to involve a ton of travel,
they just need to get you out of your normal routine
and have you do something different.
Now we've got one more tip that I wanna share with you here
which is really, really important
but before I share it, I do wanna also share an observation
about something that is not going to make you happy.
So if you think about the hedonic treadmill,
if you think about the fact that these increases
in your life and whatever areas they may come from
aren't going to make you happier on a day to day basis,
then it becomes pretty clear that a lot of the reasons
that we use social media for
such as growing our follower account
or getting more retweets or likes,
all these things aren't going to make you happy.
And I think this bears mentioning
because the people, the engineers, the product designers
who are behind these companies are paid huge salaries
to design these apps in a way
that makes them essentially addicting,
that makes them feel like
they are going to make you happier.
But from personal experience,
I can tell you that your average day to day happiness
is not going to change when you go
from two likes per tweet to 100 likes per tweet.
It really doesn't make a difference.
So yes, use social media to bring about certain benefits,
you can make new relationships through it,
you can bolster your career through it,
but don't be chasing those vanity metrics,
the likes and the retweets and the followers,
because they will not make you happy.
But what will make you happy, which is our final tip here
is face to face interaction
with other people on a daily basis.
I really wanna mention this explicitly
because a lot of people are content
to have digital relationships, to IM people,
to talk to people over Skype or play games together,
and these things are all great
and they can forge good friendships
but nothing replaces actually seeing people face to face
and doing things with them in real life.
Now with all this talk about the hedonic treadmill
and how all these progressions aren't going
to necessarily improve your day to day life
in the way that you think they will,
I do think it bears mentioning
that I am not suggesting you abandon all of your goals,
sell your possessions and go live
in a mountain as an ascetic.
Unless you want to, I mean that could be pretty cool.
I think Martin would wanna do it.
But seriously, the fact that increasing your income
or getting a promotion at your job,
or getting a better house won't necessarily
improve your day to day happiness
as much as you think it will,
doesn't mean that these goals aren't worthwhile.
For one, achieving those goals
might lead to opening doors that actually could lead
to day to day happiness improvements.
But a more important point is this,
I believe that an integral part of being happy
is the very process of evolving and progressing.
Humans beings are built to explore,
to test their limits, to constantly try new things.
We are not happy being stagnant.
As Ray Dalio put it, "Evolving is life's greatest
"accomplishment and its greatest reward."
Now one area where progression and evolution
tend to bring pretty quick happiness improvements
is in creative expression.
In fact, I find that I'm much happier
when I figure out how to, say, film something really cool
like this slow mo shot or learn a new editing technique.
And the great thing is these improvements
in creative expression tend to come
a lot more frequently than big career jumps.
So if you wanna further improve your average day,
find a way to get creative.
You could do it the way that I do it
through making videos, or playing music,
or the way that my best friend Martin does it
through macro photography or in many other fields out there
that you probably haven't discovered yet.
And if you wanna accelerate your skill development
in the field that you choose
and master new techniques quickly, check out Skillshare.
Skillshare has an expensive catalog
of over 20,000 courses and tons of different topic areas
like digital animation, video editing,
drawing, and business, and lots more.
Their courses are also hands-on,
almost always including a sample project
that you can sink your teeth into
so you can start learning actively.
Now one course that I wanna highlight for you this week
is the Fundamentals of DSLR Photography by Justin Bridges.
Photography has a ton of disciplines,
yes, there's macro photography,
there's landscapes and portraits,
but all of these disciplines rely
on a fundamental foundation of camera skills,
aperture, lighting, ISO, shutter speed.
And Justin's course goes through all of these
different techniques along with recommendations
of what camera gear you should buy in the first place
and the best settings to use.
So if you wanna start working through Justin's course,
or any of the other courses in Skillshare's catalog,
then click the link in the description
down below and sign up.
And when you do, you're going to get two months
of completely unlimited access
to their entire catalog of courses absolutely free.
After that, Skillshare is still very affordable,
costing about as much as a Netflix subscription
so this is definitely something you should try
if you wanna start improving your skills.
I wanna give a big thanks to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video and being
in support of this channel
and as always guys, thank you so much for watching.
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