Joe Rogan | You Can Learn to be Happy w/Naval Ravikat

One of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn, and then you can teach yourself to be happy, even just by adopting the mindset that you are a happy person and proclaiming that to your friends. And so you've sort of developed a social contract. I'm a happy person. And then, well, I have to live up to that. Yeah, I've got hundreds of techniques. But the more... How did you develop that one? There's social consistency, right? Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements. So the way I started my first tech company was I was working inside a larger organization, and I told everybody that I was going to go start a company. I was like, I hate this place. I'm going to do my own thing. I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur. Six months pass, nine months pass, then people start... You're still here? I thought you were going to go start a company. Were you lying? Right. That was the implication. So we kind of know this, right? Social contracts are very powerful. Like if you want to give up drinking, right, and you're not serious about it, you'll say, I'm going to cut back. I'm going to have only one drink a night. I'm going to only drink on weekends. You tell yourself. But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook. You'll tell all your friends. You'll tell your wife. You'll say, I'm done drinking. I'm throwing everything out of the house. You'll never see me drink again. When you say that, you know you're serious. So I think a lot of these are choices that we make, and happiness is just one of those choices. And this is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you. And there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them. It says, oh, now if I'm, you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice. Health can be a choice. Nutrition can be a choice. Working hard and making money can be a choice. Happiness is also a choice. If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy? How can you haven't figured that out? That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable. If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this? There are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable. There's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits that in their eyes, it is the peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing. It's not a trade off. I would argue that if, now when I say happy, happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things. It's like love, right? What does that mean? Well, I love cheese. Yeah. I'm going to define it a little bit more tightly. So let's go back to desire, right? This is old, old Buddhist wisdom. I'm not saying anything original, but desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I keep that in front of mine. So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay to have desires. You're a biological creature. You're part on this earth. You have to do something. You have to have desires. You have a mission, but don't have too many. Don't pick them up unconsciously. Don't pick them up randomly. Don't have thousands of them. My coffee is too cold. It doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish it were warmer. You know, my dog pooped in the lawn. I didn't like that. Whatever it is. It's not one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one. But on all the others, you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed. And then you'll perform a better job. Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind. They're too busy in their mind. Their sense of self is too strong. They're sitting indoors all the time. Their mind's working, working, working. They're thinking too much. Well, if you want to be a high-performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures, if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control? The same way, if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind. Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun. He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing. We live in an age of infinite leverage. What I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousandfold either by broadcasting at a podcast or by investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code. Because of that, the impacts of good decision-making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code. A clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome. A happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. If you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind just like you have to learn how to tame your body. I love what you're saying. Warren Buffett might not be the best example because he drinks like I think six Coca Colas a day and he eats mostly McDonald's. He's still alive somehow. That's amazing. That shows you that low stress is more important than low stress. He looks like shit. How old is he? I mean, he's a fairly old man. Charlie Munger is, I think, in his 90s, right? He's made it really far. I wonder what Warren's doing. He's got it. No, that's bad for him. It's terrible. But he doesn't care. He doesn't care. I think he's just low stress. Stress is a big killer. Right. So he just enjoys that Coca Cola. Maybe there is a trade-off, right? Maybe him enjoying that junk food and that Coca just, ah, that pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheat grass shots and- Yeah, and being miserable. And being salas and just being, yeah, just super worked up about everything. It's like if you need your glass of red wine to de-stress and calm down, that's probably better than you flying off the rails. Right, right. And I think that that's applicable not just in business, but in probably any pursuit. And I like what you're saying about allow that one thing to be your obsession. But everything else just, you know, learn how to let things go. Pick your battles. And we like to think that we like to view the world as linear, which is I'm going to put in eight hours of work. I'm going to get back eight hours of output. Right. It doesn't work that way. Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me. How much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, how you do it, way more important than how hard you work. Right. Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in. The right way to work is like a lion. You and I are not like cows. We're not meant to graze all day. Right. We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores. Don't tell vegans that. Yeah, sorry. Look, I wish all that stuff worked. I don't want to eat meat. Future generation will look back at us as worse than slavers, you know, because of the Holocaust we're committing with the animals. But they'll have artificial meats that taste in our healthier, better than the real thing. So allegedly. Allegedly. But so as a modern knowledge worker athlete, as an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete, which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess, you get your feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess. This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time, that's machines, you know? Machines should be working nine to five. Machines are not meant to work nine to five. No, I agree wholeheartedly, but for people that are working for someone, there's not really that option. So that's unfortunately the rub, right? That's kind of where my tweet storm starts, which is, first of all, the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting at your time. Even lawyers and doctors who are charging $300, $400, $500 an hour, they're not getting rich because their life starts slowly ramping up along with their income, and they're not saving enough. They just don't have that ability to retire. So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business. You need to have equity, either as an owner, an investor, shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.