The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

7

The 4 S’s of work

Why work?

Let’s break it down.

Social

Let’s flash back 1.2 million years. Before the Internet, before computers, before TVs, before you, before newspapers, before your parents, before cars, before your grandparents, before buildings, before your great-grandparents, before cities, before bikes, before lights, before clothes, before jewelry, before music, before art, before talking, before marriage, before fire, before weapons, before everything we know.

The Earth was here and it was empty. Trees, water, and dirt.

And then suddenly we appeared on the African plains. But, to be honest, it didn’t look like we would last very long. After all, we couldn’t fly, we couldn’t swim, we didn’t have claws, we didn’t have big teeth, we couldn’t see in the dark, we couldn’t run faster than a rhino, we couldn’t beat up a chimpanzee. We didn’t seem to have much going for us. It looked like we would be lunch meat for giant leopards and saber-toothed tigers with dagger claws and twelve-inch-long curved teeth.

Yet flash-forward 1.2 million years and we’re the most dominant mammal on the planet and many of the other animals around back then are now extinct.

See, we had a secret. And it was hidden between our ears. The human brain is the most complicated object in the entire universe. And it helped us take over the planet.

Over the past 1.2 million years the size of our brains has doubled and we have grown our population to more than seven billion from only a few scattered hundreds.

It was with these brains that we discovered leaving empty ostrich eggs out when it rained and stabbing hollow sticks of grass into the ground allowed us to collect water when there was a drought. It was with these brains that we first developed tools such as hunting spears and daggers to help us kill animals so we could eat. It was with these brains that we first developed language and the ability to communicate with one another. These brains started living in tribes and relying on one another in communities. These brains developed empathy and the desire to take care of other people in the tribe so they would take care of us, too.

Our brains were the foundation of our development as the most social species on the planet. Because, to put it simply, if you weren’t social back then . . . you died.

Today study after study shows that it is our social connections that are the single biggest driver of our happiness.

New York Times–bestselling author Daniel Gilbert writes in Stumbling on Happiness: “If I wanted to predict your happiness and I could only know one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know about your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about the strength of your relationships with your friends and family.”

People always ask me: What do you mean you work at Walmart? Don’t you spend all your time writing books and giving speeches?

No, no way. I tell them if I was sitting at home in a dark room in front of a bright screen all day, I’d go crazy! It would feel lonely. I’d miss the social interaction I get from work.

The number one reason why work is important is because it is social. It’s what adds richness to our days.

Carpooling, mentor sessions, open work settings, team charity drives, conferences, listening groups, appreciation emails, Friday team breakfasts, starting the meeting with recognition, business book clubs, lunchtime running groups, networking dinners, going to the gym together, even figuring out meeting politics.

We need to be social to be happy. Work provides major social stimulation.

Structure

What do Warren Buffett, Jay Z, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Brad Pitt, Mark Zuckerberg, Bono, Ellen DeGeneres, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Gates all have in common?

Sure, they’re famous, they’re rich, but there’s something else.

They all have 168 hours in their weeks. No more, no less.

The richest man in the world can’t buy more time. It’s just not for sale.

So the question isn’t how can we create more time but how can we use our time more effectively? We can’t acquire time. But we can structure our time so we can get more out of our lives.

Work provides this structure.

Let me show you what I mean.

First off, the beautiful thing about 168 hours is that it divides into three very easily:

Congratulations! You have three fifty-six-hour buckets every single week.

Every Monday morning, every single person on Earth is given 168 hours and they have to spend every one of them by the strike of midnight on Sunday. Because time is something we made up, something we placed over the chaos of life to organize our lives, something that is free, easy, and always there . . . we don’t feel the pain of wasting it.

I like sleeping eight hours a night. I can’t always pull it off! But doctors and research keep saying it’s so good for you. Unless you’re taking care of a newborn, most people choose what time they go to bed. Not what time to get up . . . but what time you get down. So what’s seven nights of eight-hour sleep cost?

You got it.

One whole fifty-six-hour bucket.

Me, I also work a full-time job at Walmart. Even though I’m scheduled to do that for forty hours each week, the truth is I include my drive to and from the office as work, too. I’m thinking about work, I’m going to work, I might be on the phone with someone about work. I’m working! And there are times I’m at home that I’m emailing a coworker, emailing my boss, or occasionally doing other work at night. In total, you know how many hours my job costs me?

You got it.

Another whole bucket.

This scribble is similar for most working people. A bucket of sleep. A bucket of work. But here’s the big breakthrough: You have an entire fifty-six-hour bucket left! And if you sleep or work less than fifty-six hours, congrats! Your third bucket is even bigger than mine.

This is your third bucket.

You have a big third bucket every week! It’s your going-out-for-dinner bucket. Your spending-time-with-friends bucket. This is the bucket where you watch movies with your kids, play in your soccer league, go for jogs and lift weights, phone friends or call home, coach your kid’s baseball team, write in coffee shops, listen to music, stay out late, and make love.

Our work bucket earns us our third bucket.

By structuring our time so that we’re focused and investing our energy in a productive way, we earn and justify all the fun we have in our third bucket.

Work provides this structure!

Work pays for this structure.

When the Monday to Friday, nine-to-five lines disappear from our weeks, our lives get blurry. You always feel the drain of wanting to work. You need money. You need social stimulation. And you always want to balance this by spending time with family, friends, and kids.

Think about how you want to spend your third bucket every week.

For me, for nearly the past ten years of my life I’ve spent my third bucket writing 1000awesomethings.com, writing The Book of Awesome and its sequels, doing speeches and workshops, founding the Institute for Global Happiness, and developing the ideas on living a happy life that fill this book you’re reading. While trying to spend my time living them!

It cost me an entire bucket for ten years.

But my point is you need to spend your third bucket on your passion. You deserve to spend that third bucket on your passion. Know what you’re spending your third bucket on.

And make sure it’s something you love.

Stimulation

I love hanging out with three-year-olds. I love the way they see the world, because they’re seeing the world for the first time. A three-year-old can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk for half an hour. Three-year-olds drop their jaws at their first baseball game—soaking in the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of the popcorn. A three-year-old can spend an entire afternoon picking dandelions in the backyard just to drop them into a glass of water as the centerpiece for dinner.

Having a sense of stimulation is about embracing your inner three-year-old!

Every day at work, you experience hundreds of tiny joys. They’re easy to overlook. But work exposes us to simple joys every day.

When everyone nods at the thing you just said in the meeting. The guy who fixes the photocopier for you. Coming back from lunch to a way better parking spot. When the meeting ends early. A coworker showing you a keyboard shortcut on your computer. Leftover cake in the office kitchen. The feeling you get after finishing a big project right at the deadline and knowing you did a great job. When someone decorates your cubicle for your birthday.

When I speak to companies I ask everybody in the audience to spend thirty seconds writing down one awesome thing that happens to them at work. We leave cue cards on their chairs beforehand. Then I ask people to trade their cue card with somebody who they’ve never talked to before. And then we read the cue cards in front of the room. That’s when we realize that in a span of seconds we came up with thousands of awesome things together.

“When there’s hot water left in the kettle so I don’t have to heat any up.”

“When the person you’re meeting is even later than you are.”

“When the boss says thank you.”

The point is that work gives us a place to learn and discover so many new things about our lives and our world. We don’t hire our coworkers! So there are diverse ages, backgrounds, experiences, and thoughts that we don’t always get from friends and family.

Retiring slices off this learning, seeing, and experiencing the stimulation of our world.

Story

The pacemaker was invented in 1899 when J. A. MacWilliam reported in the British Medical Journal the discovery that an electric impulse to the human heart causes a “ventricular contraction”—in other words, you could make a heart beat by zapping it with power! In the 1920s an early version of the pacemaker appeared. It plugged in to your heart . . . and plugged into the wall. Which was great! Except that when the power went out . . . so did you. Still, they used this early version to revive a stillborn infant in 1928 in Sydney, Australia. After ten minutes the baby’s heart beat of its own accord. Suddenly, there was potential. Between the 1930s and World War II pacemaker development went silent. No improvements, no new technologies, no commercialization. Why? They became taboo. People thought pacemakers “revived the dead” and didn’t like the idea of tampering with nature. Must have seen too many zombie movies. Eventually, in the 1960s, fully implantable pacemakers were popularized by a company called Medtronic.

Why do I tell you all this? Because Medtronic has a great story. What’s their mission? What’s their story? What are they trying to do? Here’s an edited version:

To contribute to human welfare by alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life.

Impressive. Beautiful. A great story. If you work at Medtronic, you can probably get behind that. “I help extend life and restore health.” And they make it easy to get behind it, too. The company brings its story to life by printing it on walls throughout the office and having patients read how Medtronic devices touched their lives at big company meetings. Can you imagine how you would feel if an eleven-year-old girl got on stage to read a letter, saying, “Thank you for giving my dad eight extra years to live after his heart attack. I got to take photos and make memories that I wouldn’t have otherwise had”?

I bet the story of your company would really resonate with you.

Every company has a story!

Coke wants to give the world happiness breaks. Harvard Business School is educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Facebook is making the world more connected. Wikipedia is giving the sum of human knowledge to every single person for free. The Red Cross prevents and alleviates human pain and suffering. Google is organizing the world’s information.

Story.

When you’re working you become part of something bigger than yourself. Volunteer at the library and you spread knowledge to the community. Teach at the college and you’re developing productive members of society. Write for the city’s biggest blog and you’re creating community.

What does retiring do?

It chops you out of a productive story. You aren’t part of something bigger than yourself anymore. This hampers your ikigai!

So don’t give up work. You’ll be giving up the Social, Structure, Stimulation, and Story you get every day from being there.

Forget the money.

You’ll lose the 4 S’s, and they are much more important.