So this principle we’re talking about, the principle of happiness, and happiness is sort of like the fundamental thing driving everything we talk about at the end of the day. But again, it’s one of those terms that’s used a lot, so we want to get really specific about what we mean and give some examples in terms of how that might play out in practice. Happiness we see as a function of being happy in life, which is really about the resources we have to support the style of life we want to live. So again, there’s some relativity to that. And there’s also being happy with life. with life is really a function of how much meaning we feel our life has had. And by that we really mean the contribution and the impact that our life has had. So let’s start with the easy one. Let’s start with resources. So what do we mean by resources and our style of life? So really what we mean is how do we like to spend our time, our efforts and our energy? What sort of style of life do we want to lead? Because that’s going to determine the resources we require. And again, once we have sufficient resources sustainably to support that style of life, well then we are as wealthy as we need to be resource-wise and we’re as happy as we’re going to get. Adding additional resources is going to have very minor, if at all, an impact in terms of a slightly faster car or a slightly nicer house isn’t really going to… We sort of move into the law of diminishing returns essentially at that point, right? Whereas our happiness with life is very much that sort of sense of contribution, right? So we get meaning because we feel like we’ve contributed. And most importantly, if we look at the way we kind of, the formula, if you like, we’d apply to that is, meaning is a function of the responsibility we take, right? For the impact we have on people we care about, right? So it feeds back into that connection sort of scenario, right? So we have to have a connection, we have to create an impact, and we have to take some responsibility for the creation of that impact. Does that make sense? So what I mean by that is if the impact we have lands on people we don’t care about, then it doesn’t end up, we don’t tend to derive much meaning from that. Does that make sense? Or if we had an impact, but we weren’t really, we didn’t really take responsibility for it. So people weren’t reliant upon us for that impact. It’s nice that it came along, you know, I was happy that they’re happy that they got it, they’d luck, you know, that luck or whatever came along, but because we never really took responsibility for it, then we don’t get as much meaning for something that we didn’t feel like, well, if we didn’t do this or if we didn’t put our efforts towards something meaningful, right, then these people we care about, they have a connection to, wouldn’t have got that benefit. So it’s really a combination of those three things I find, or we find in terms of, if we want our life to have meaning, we have to have responsibility, that responsibility has to be for something impactful, right, and it has to be for people that we have a real connection to, people we actually care about, right. And it’s why you see, you know, one of the good examples of this I find is like great artists like rock stars or movie stars or whatever who have all these adoring fans who love them and yet they’re often the most depressed people, you know, certainly statistically way more depressed than the average sort of population. And some of that comes from the fact if you delve into their stories, many of them are actually the sort of people that are, they’re not introvert, they’re introverts, not extroverts, they’re more sort of shy and retiring. many of them have in fact created characters as a way of sort of shielding themselves from the world. So they kind of go out on stage and there’s this image of me that I’m portraying to the world, that the world loves and they’re adoring me and I’m filling stadiums and they’re loving everything I do and as soon as they get off stage I realise that I know that’s not me, I’ve created this character to shield the real me from the world and now the whole world’s told me how great that that bloke is, which by contrast means I’m not that great. And so you get that kind of… So again, I’ll be having this massive impact. My number one song is the most played at weddings of all time. I have a huge impact on these people’s life, but I don’t care about any of these people. So it’s not really meaning… Doesn’t create as much meaning for me. Does that make sense? I don’t feel like I’m responsible. If someone else writes a better song or a new song or whatever, I’ll be off the charts and move on. No matter how good that movie was, having done a movie in five years, everyone forgets about me. Does that make sense? So that sense of meaning comes from not just taking responsibility and having an impact, but also for people that we genuinely care about. Now that’s not to say that artists can’t have that and can’t get that meaning from the adoring masses of people. There are certainly people who are like that, but it’s relatively rare in my experience. Most people require a meaningful impact or significant impact in the lives of people that they actually care about, be they spouses, their children, their immediate family, their close friends, etc. Does that make sense? So that’s why we’ve got that kind of functionality in terms of the formula, if you like, because we want to look at what are the causal related mechanisms that might drive this, because at the end of the day, the idea of a principle is things that create predictable outcomes, right? They’re ways of behaving that are proven to work, right? So we know that if we can follow that train, we can take responsibility for something that’s going to have an impact for people we care about, we’re going to get some degree of meaning in our life. Then the other thing we just need is enough resources for the lifestyle so that we can and maintain, you know, work our way through the difficulty of day to day and the constraints that we face along the way naturally in life, right? So both of them are really important, you can’t be happy without both, but there is a bit of a hierarchy to those. We always regard as being happy with life as significantly more important than being happy in life, right? Now again that varies for different people because the style of life people want to lead varies dramatically and the mountain type of resources vary dramatically as a result as well. But there is plenty of examples of people who can live with very modest resources because they’re so happy with their life. There’s very few, if any, examples of people whose life can have no meaning or very little meaning because they have so much resources. In fact, people like Daniel Kahneman and others have done research to show that essentially once you reach a certain level of resource, there’s very little correlation now between increasing resources and increasing total happiness. Does that make sense? And that’s why, right? ‘Cause it becomes much more about the connection. Once you’re far enough up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it becomes much more about that meaning and that comes from that responsibility connection. Does that make sense? – Yeah, that makes sense. – So that’s what we mean by happiness in and with life. And the other thing I’d say about happiness, the other important formula that we often talk about is happiness equals reality minus expectations. All right, so what we mean by that is we have essentially limited influence over reality at best, right? We have the illusion of influence over reality, I’d say probably, right? But we have absolute control over our expectations, okay? People often challenge that to some degree, but in reality, your expectations are yours. You got to decide how to set them in the first place and you can adjust them, right? And so some examples of this I would give is that, you know, we all have that experience where we expected something to be not very good. You know, your partner, your spouses drag you along to a dinner party or an engagement with some friends, you think, you know, I really don’t like these people, there’s no one there I really like, but I’ll go along, you know, ’cause, you know, that’s the thing you do. And you turn up at the party, you meet someone you didn’t know or you never really spent any time with, and you strike up a conversation, and next thing you know you find out you’ve got some really cool interests in it. You know, and next thing you’ve had a really enjoyable evening because, not necessarily because it was the most profound, you know, conversation of your life, but it was way better than you were expecting to have before you went there sort of thing. So it turns out to be a great evening because you went there with really low expectations and they were comfortably exceeded. Does that make sense? The other alternative you see people do is they go to a concert or a fancy restaurant or they go to something. A restaurant’s a good example. You go to this fancy restaurant, you pay a fortune, And the food’s really good and the wine’s okay, whatever, but the waiter’s just not having a good day. So they’re a little bit, not necessarily rude, but they’re not really engaging and they’re a bit short and they sort of leave you alone a bit too often and don’t top up your wine glass. And you’ll come away from that sort of meal going, yeah, it was okay, but my expectations were super high ’cause I’m paying really high prices for this experience. And yet, it might even be just the last interaction with the waiter. You couldn’t get the bill in time or they spilled a drink or it can be a relatively minor thing because your expectations are so high, you can come away from what is in reality a very world-class evening, but with this idea of, yeah, it was okay, or it actually wasn’t that good because the waiter was not very attentive, or kind of whatever. Does that make sense? – Yeah, it makes sense. – And in reality, they did a great job. The rest of the staff were brilliant, the food was great, whatever, but the slightest thing, because your expectations were so high, it’s like winning a silver medal at the Olympics, right? It’s like, how could they be disappointed they won a silver medal? they’ve dreamed their whole life of gold. And if you’ve never done that, you’ve got no idea what it feels like to not get that. So yeah, you should be devastated if your expectation was, “I’ve been the world champion for the last three years in a row and I’m crushing everybody and I get to the Olympics and I don’t win.” You can expect that you’d be a bit disappointed. If you’re Stephen Bradbury and you’re like, “Dude, I’m just happy to make the final and they all fell over in front of me, but I did the work and I got there.” But by the same token, my expectations were, you know, I can’t believe I made the final, come away with the gold medal, it’s a whole different level. Does that make sense? That makes sense. So in and with life have a bit of a priority to them, but happiness equals reality minus expectations is a great, I find a great way of sort of engaging with the world on a regular basis to say, hey, if I’m not happy with stuff, particularly in terms of my resources or my relationships, is it simply because my expectations are unreasonable and can be set at a different level? Yeah. So that’s what we mean by happiness and that happiness principle. It’s quite a complex one, there’s a bit to it, but it’s the fundamental thing at the end of the day, right? So we need to understand that if we’re going to get it right. So that’s what we mean by happiness.