You Have to Make Happiness Your Priority - Naval Rakivant

There's also these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind of giving themselves excuses or giving themselves insurmountable obstacles, insurmountable paths and terrain. Victim mentality. Yes. It's somebody else's fault. It's my skin color's fault. It's the system's fault. Yeah, those people are sinking. I feel bad for them. I want to shake them out of it and say, actually, you can get out of it. You just have to stop thinking. It's everybody else's fault. You have to alter the perspective. Yeah. But it's so difficult for people to do. It's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach reality itself. At the end of the day, I do think, even despite what I said earlier, life is really a single player game. It's all going on in your head. Whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just everyday experience of reality. If you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone, you're like, I don't like that person because their skin color. I don't like that. Oh, she's not attractive. That guy's fat. This person's a loser. Oh, who put this in my way? You know, the more you judge, the more you're going to separate yourself. And you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself. I'm better than that. But then you're going to feel lonely. And then you're just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You're born. You have a whole set of sensory experiences and simulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. And how you choose to interpret that is up to you. You do have that choice. So this is what I meant that happiness is a choice. If you believe it's a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can't tell you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. It's just like, I can't fix your eating habits for you. You can give you some general guidelines, but you've got to go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right. But you have to believe it's possible. And it is absolutely possible. I was miserable. I'm happy as a clam. And it's not just the money I got there before the money. You got happy before the money? Mostly, yeah. How did you get happy before the money? I started getting older. I just realized, like, life is short. I'm going to die. Again, trite, right? Trite. In many ways. Yeah, well, Confucius had a great saying that every man has two lives. And the second starts when he realizes he has just one. Wow. And I read that. It was one of those book-dropping lines. It's like mic drop. Confucius had a lot of mic drops. Confucius was a bad motherfucker. He was. That's a crazy one. That was a great one. Or another one is next time you get sick, because everybody gets sick every now and then. It's like a happy person wants 10,000 things. A sick person just wants one thing. So it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have desires. You're a biological creature that stands up and says, I can do something. I move. I resist. I live. But just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest, most trite wisdom. Desire is suffering. That's what it means, right? Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer. So just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it. But everything else, you've got to let go. Did you make a gradual shift to happiness, or was it a radical change? It's ongoing. It's gradual. Every day gets better. So you're happier today than you were a month ago. Yeah. Allegedly. Yeah. Yeah, I'm very happy these days. Deliriously so. It's actually hard for me to hang out with normal people. Really? So you've made a significant shift over the period of like how many years? Probably about eight years. Eight years. Wow. And is this something that you've pursued through certain books, or is it just like you've made an understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started pursuing it based on that understanding? Yeah, it's very, very personal. It's basically you have to decide it's a priority. And then I tried every hack I possibly could. I used to. You know, I tried meditation. I tried witnessing. You know, I even tried a necessary eye just to see what it would feel like. How did it feel? It turned me from a pessimist to an optimist, but I didn't like the physical side effects, nor did I want to be in a drug-first sustained basis. So I dropped it. But did it turn you into an optimist? Yes. Interesting. At the time, I used to be a pessimist, yeah. I started doing things like I would start looking at the, you know, in every moment and everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something, right? And so I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature. So for example, like a friend of my wife's was over, and she, when we were dating, and she took all these photos, she took like hundreds of photos, and then she sends them all to us. And my immediate reaction was like, why are you dumping hundreds of photos of my phone? I don't need hundreds of photos. I have some judgment. That was my immediate reaction. And then I could say, actually, how nice of her. She sent me hundreds of photos. I could pick the one that I like, right? There are two ways of seeing almost everything. There are a few things that are like high suffering, so you can't do that, other than just saying, well, this is a teacher, right? But I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive. Now it's second nature to me. I also realized that like, what you want is you want to clear minds. You want to let go of thoughts. Happy thoughts disappear out of head automatically. Very easy to let go of them. Negative thoughts linger. So if you interpret the positive in everything very quickly, you let it go, right? You let it go much faster. Simple hacks get more sunlight, right? Learn to smile more, learn to hug more. These things actually release serotonin in reverse. They aren't just outward signals of being happy. They're actually feedback loops to being happy. Spend more time in nature. You know, these are obvious. Watch your mind, watch your mind all day long. Watch what it does. Not judge it, not try to control it, but you can meditate 24 seven. Meditation is not a sit down, close your eyes activity. Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say, why am I having that thought? Does that serve me anymore? Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old? Like for example, getting ready for this podcast. You got ready? I didn't. Oh, good. I did, but I did, but I did. I couldn't help it. And what happened was the few days leading up to this, my mind was just running. And normally my mind is pretty calm and it was just running and running and running. And every thought I would have, I would imagine me saying it to you. My brain couldn't help but rehearse what it's doing. It's just rehearsing all the time to talk to you. And then I was even rehearsing, telling you about the rehearsal. So it was all playing all these meta games. And I was just like, shut up, stop it. What is going on? And it took me a while to figure out, oh yeah, you know what it is. When I was a kid in Queens and I had no money and I had nothing and I needed to save myself, the way I got out was by sounding smart, not being smart, sounding smart. That was the skill I perfected. So I am hardwired to always rehearse things so I will sound smart. It's a disease, it keeps me from being happy. But when you see that, when you realize that, when you understand something, then it naturally calms you down. So after that I stopped rehearsing as much. But it's still a train habit. That is a really interesting point that you want to sound smart. That many people do that and especially young people. When you see someone who is smart or someone who appears smart, they say smart things, you kind of want to sound smart. I want people to think about me the same way I think about that person. That is my disease, that is my feeling. It is what clutters my mind. The thing I have to ask myself now is, if I can, would I still be interested in learning this thing if I couldn't ever tell anybody about it? That's how I know it's real. That's how I know it's something I actually want to know. That's a common thing though. I know I suffered from that when I was young, the desire to sound smart. That's, it's very common. All of us start out, everything you're a winner now in your life, you're a, it's because you were a loser at some point. If you had gotten all the girls, if you had all the money, if you had everything you want, you were good looking in junior high or high school, you wouldn't have done anything with your life. And you would have peaked early. It's like the Bruce Springsteen, Glory Days song, right? You would have married your high school sweetheart, you'd be living in your hometown, you'd be a manager at the local McDonald's, whatever the first dream job you had. Thank God we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young, right? Or we would be trapped in that. So you have to be able to break out of where you came from.