Most Replayed Moment: The Direct Path To Purpose And Happiness! These 2 Decisions Matter Most

A huge number of businesses have spent the last few years adopting AI, and my company steven.com

is no different. But here's the thing, most companies actually have no idea whether or not it's

working for them. Their teams might be using AI, they might be spending money on AI,

and their leaders might be telling the board that they are an AI-enabled business,

but they're also likely struggling to explain where in the business AI is helping.

The issue is there's no easy way to see whether it's delivering value or working effectively,

unless you're using our sponsor, Leriden, which runs seamlessly as a browser plug-in or desktop

agent and shows you exactly how AI is being used across your organization, what it's actually

producing and where the real opportunities in your business are. That way, you're able to make

data back decisions instead of just guessing all the time. I love anything that kills the guesswork.

So if you want to be a company that's informed with your use of AI and accelerate your company's

AI transformation, head to Leriden.com and BookerDemo now. That's L-A-R-R-I-D-I-N.com and BookerDemo now.

What do you think I should say to my future son about the world that he's growing up in

in terms of the mismatch between our evolution and his natural hardwiring?

What a great question. There is something called the mismatch hypothesis, an evolutionary theory,

which basically says that many problems that we face today arise out of a mismatch of a phenomenon

that was adaptive in our ancestral past but is no longer adaptive in our contemporary modern world.

Classic example to stick to food. We've evolved the gustatory preferences as a response to

caloric scarcity and caloric uncertainty. Therefore, being attracted to fatty foods,

gorging on a lot of food makes perfect evolutionary sense when we don't know when our next

meal is coming from. When we live in an environment of plentitude, then that exact phenomenon becomes

maladaptive. If you look at, for example, I think the top eight or nine killers at the World

Health Organization thing, they could all be attributed to the mismatch hypothesis. I would tell

your son knowledge's power to our earlier point of view getting that degree. You never lose in

knowing more. You being aware of the mismatch hypothesis, their son will allow you to hopefully

not fall as easily into behavioral traps. What are the most important? You have a book here called

Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life. If I was to give him advice on how to live a happy

life, what are the most important things that I should be aiming at? I look at both decisions that we

can make for happiness and mindsets. Let me discuss a few of each. By far, the two choices that will

either impart upon me the greatest happiness of the greatest misery is choice of spouse and choice

of profession. Let's break it down very simply. If I wake up next to a person in the bed and I go,

oh god damn, not this one again, I'm not off to a good start. If I wake up next to that person and I

go, oh my god, how did I pull that off? What a delight to wake up next to this person? Well,

that's good. Have they empirically measured this? Have they not in the way I'm explaining the

anecdote? Now, if I go off after I woke up to this lovely person, I go off and do things in my

day-to-day activities that make me do existential glee. Oh boy, what a great day I have lined up. I'm

going to be working on my next book. I've got diary of a CEO that's going to be super fun. A lot of

new people are going to hear about some of my ideas that I'm going to maybe have a chat with a

graduate student on some really exciting research I'm doing. So, wow, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of

stress, but it's all gives me a lot of purpose and meaning. And then at night, I return to that

lovely person. I've cracked the happiness code, right? Now, of course, the question is if the devil's

in the details, what can I do to maximize my chances that I make those right choices? I explain

in the book contrary to 99.9% of the quote self-help prescriptive books where they

tell you exactly with guarantee. Here are the eight steps. I explained that life is a statistical

game, right? They are statistical vagaries. So, all I can do is increase your odds of obtaining

happiness. I can't guarantee anything, right? You could never smoke and get lung cancer, but not

smoking certainly reduces your chances of lung cancer greatly. So, earlier, I mentioned birds

of a feather flock together versus opposite track. Overwhelmingly, if you want to increase your

chances of a happy marriage, remember the maxim birds of a feather flock together. Complementarity

works really nicely in the short term. It doesn't sustain a long term marriage. The butterflies,

the hormones don't last when you've been in a marriage. That doesn't mean you're not still

sexually attracted to your partner 25 years later, but that's not going to carry the train.

Okay. So, but just to give a little bit more, I guess, specificity and nuance to this,

because my partner, she's really into spiritual stuff. She's really into crystals and lots of

things that I'm not into. I think we have a great relationship. We've been together a long time.

And she's like, I'm into Manchester United and soccer. She's not into that.

Well, we might have to have you revisit that, because I'm a Manchester City guy.

Well, that's the end of the book. My apologies.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't clear differences. But if I were to distill,

if I were to use the statistical term, if I were to factor, analyze your most fundamental

life principles between you and your partner, do you think you're more alike or more different?

We're more alike. We're aligned. That's my point.

Yeah. And this is why I say it, because when people hear it, they might think of it as like

tastes. No, it's not about taste. It's not about the sense. The most fundamental

de-intelligent, right? I mean, what, you know, my wife loves the fact that I'm a truth teller.

My love, my wife loves the fact that I have purity in my right. She appreciates the fact that,

you know, and similar with her. Like, for example, we both have never been the type to seek

to trigger jealousy in the other. Many people will say, oh, you know, if when you trigger jealousy,

that spices things up, right? My wife has never a single time done a single thing, right?

But that's because she has a standard of personal conduct that's very elevated.

Can I ask you as well in that? Just all the things about your wife that you don't have as much,

but are fundamental values, but you're drawn to because she's kind of giving you them.

I call her McGiver. Do you remember who McGiver was? McGiver was a show in the 1980s, I think,

where he was reputed to be able to put things together. He's in a pickle, he's in a cell,

so he takes soap and cuts it up to cut the bar. He, right? My wife had a complete reversal of the

typical stereotypes of male and female. You give my wife an empty can of tuna and a soccer ball.

She'll make a rocket and she'll fly you to Mars. She is unbelievably, in French, you say,

she knows how to put things together and so on. And I'm just mesmerized by her ability to do it.

For me, for all my fancy academic stuff, take a light bulb or probably take me four weeks before

I figure how it works. She's already built a rocket. She's basically Elon Musk of the

sad household. I greatly admire that in her and it's something that I possess very little.

I want to ask one of the things you said a second ago was about this, the evolutionary basis of,

we're talking about happiness and what it's to be happy when you talked about the partner part.

What is the evolutionary basis of meaning and purpose? Why do we need that?

Right. So we've got a very big frontal lobe, right? So for, remember earlier, I was talking about

exactation versus adaptation. One argument for why we love literature so much is that it, our brains

need nourishment via storytelling. And therefore, that's an adaptation. My brain expects to be fed

stuff that keeps me engaged. And therefore, literature is one way by which I eat that nourishment

to use the food analogy, right? So I suspect that because we are sentient beings,

right, we're not beings that are only driven by instincts of survival and reproduction, right?

I mean, oh, all animals have to solve two problems. Survive and reproduce, right? That's it. That's

the entire game of life. But because we have consciousness, because we have meta knowledge,

because we are sentient, there needs to be more to life than simply having sex and reproducing.

And therefore, the way that you elevate that consciousness is through purpose and meaning.

So I'm a very happy, I mean, I should mention though that happiness, about 50% of individual

differences in happiness scores comes from our genes. But the good news is that it leaves 50%

up for grabs, right? So I may be born with innately a more sunny disposition than you. So I'm now

winning at the race. But if I don't have make good choices, if I don't adopt good mindsets,

then even though you started lower than me in an innate sense, you might surpass me. And so

it really is an interaction of nature and nurture. Purpose and meaning, so to that, I may be

answering it in a bleak way. I argue, and remember, I said, having a good partner and having a good

job are the two ways that you can maximize happiness. I argue that the best way to achieve

occupational happiness is two metrics, one of which is going to relate to purpose and meaning.

Having temporal freedom, all other things equal is better than not having temporal freedom.

Let me explain what I mean by that. An airplane pilot, once the door shuts, the next 16 hours

from LA to Singapore, it's set, right? I mean, literally, temporally, in terms of time,

physically, I'm stuck, right? That to me is unthinkable. I float through life. I work harder than

most people, but I do it in my own way. Right now, I'm going to go to a cafe and work on a book

prospectus. Then I'm going to go train for an hour. Then I'm going to go read for three hours.

And that temporal, I don't have what I call scheduling isphyxia, right? That helps me.

I do. You do. Try to resolve that if you can. Number two, which is going to speak to purpose

and meaning. I argue that all other things equal. Any job that allows you to instantiate your

creative impulse is a direct path to purpose and happiness, purpose and meaning. What do I mean by that?

A stand-up comic is creating a routine that until he came along, we didn't have. A chef is creating

a dish out of nothing. An architect is creating that bridge that didn't exist before. An author,

remember earlier we were talking, I think I think it was off air and you were saying how long

did it take here? What was the process? I said, you know, there's something magical about writing

a book, right? Because there literally is a day where you open the laptop, you open a word document,

that word document, which eventually you're going to call the parasitic mind, save, doesn't have

a single letter typed. It's blank. And then through the magic of creation, creative impulse,

a year later, I pressed the send button. A year later, you're consuming that book.

That has to be a direct path to purpose and meaning. Now, that doesn't mean that the actuarial

scientist, your brother, doesn't have a worthy life, but surely a person who wakes up who's an

artist, who's an author, by the nature of him creating says, oh, I can't wait to get to the studio.

I doubt that maybe not your brother, I doubt that most actuarial scientists go, I'm going to get

into that actuarial table today, like there's no tomorrow. I'm going to spank that actuarial table.

Okay, so putting a bunch of ideas together from your work then to arrive at a conclusion that I

haven't had you say, I read in the consuming instinct, your other book, chapter four, that

youngest siblings like me, yes, youngest of four, are more likely to be creative. Oh, you've

you've pulled that one out. Okay. So does that mean that we're more likely to be creative and

creativity is associated with happiness in the way that you just described that I am happier than

all of my siblings? Do you want to guess what Dr. Sad's sibling orders? You're the youngest by

five. So let me explain, let me step before I answer that and the way you frame the question,

let me explain what the mechanism is. Okay. I also just want to add one later that is what I was

sat with at dinner the other day with my, with about 10 of our directors, the really their founders

of companies essentially. And I thought it would be interesting to go around and ask them because

I've started to perform a bit of a picture about this. I went around the table and asked every single one

of them, where do you rank in order of siblings? And eight of them ranked as the youngest sibling.

Oh, I love it. It was so crazy. Yeah. Yeah. That's psychology. So let me tell you the background

to that theory. Okay. Which I've done my own research on and published work on it. But the

original theory comes from Frank Soloway, who's a historian of science, who wrote a book which I

highly recommend to all your viewers. It's a, it's a bit technical, but you can get through it.

It's called Born to Rebell. It's a book that explores historically the, the, the, the people

who've generated the biggest breakthrough radical scientific innovations. And what was their

birth order? And it turns out, not unlike how you did it with the 10 and eight of them were last

born out of the 28 most radical scientific innovations ever positive. 23 out of the 28 were

the last born later born. Now, so then the question is, okay, well, find that that's just a phenomenon

about what explains it. Now, the explanation is mind blowing. You ready? So Frank Soloway argued

that typically when we study the psychological effects of birth order, it's from the perspective

of the parents behavior to the child as a function of their birth order. First child, I'm very strict.

Second child, I'm getting tired. Fifth child, run the streets. I don't give a shit. Okay. So that's

the causality of the birth order effect. He flipped the whole thing. He said, no, no, no. Much of the

impetus of the birth order effect is coming from the child. And let me explain how. He said that

one of the fundamental survival problems, it's an evolutionary theory. One of the fundamental

survival problems that a child faces is to differentiate itself from all other siblings to,

to etch maximal investment from the parents. How do I do that? So that's called the Darwinian

niche partitioning hypothesis. When you start off your firstborn, all of the niches are unoccupied.

There is the, I'm a good born niche. I'm a rebel niche. There are many, many, there's a penalty of

niches that are unoccupied. So I'm first born. I'm going to pick whichever one. The second born is

born. There is n minus one niches. One is taken. So I'm a good boy niche. I got to differentiate

myself. I'm second, I'm an asshole niche. I'm a, I'm a contrary niche. Let's keep going down the

birth order. There are fewer and fewer unoccupied niches left for later born, especially if the

sipship is big. Sullaway argued that that forces the last born to score differently on key

personality traits, one of which is open to experience. So he argued that later born up to last

born by virtue of having to solve that original problem will end up being much bigger out of the

box thinkers, not being stuck on conformity on orthodoxy. Hence in the context of scientific

innovations, the last born are the ones who say, not this is bullshit, I'm going this way.

Okay. And so I tested that theory in a consumer psychology setting where I demonstrated that last

born were much more likely to be product innovators and early product adopters. So I took the exact

framework, but instead of applying it to radical scientific innovations, I applied it to radical

product innovations and adoptions. So, so all that to say that based on that one could

surmise that if openness to experience is correlated to happiness, then the latter born's

would score happier. I really wonder which one it is because I can attest to kind of both being

true. I probably was a little bit rebellious to get attention, but also by the time I was 10,

the same rules didn't apply to me. When you said, how many are you? There's four. Okay. When you

said, run the streets, that's the perfect explanation of my childhood. My oldest, the oldest,

which is my sister, Amanda, she, if she wasn't at home by 9 p.m., she was also a woman,

so the rules were slightly different from her 9 p.m., it was it was hell to pay. If I didn't come

home for two to three days, there was no one there to ground me anyway. I think that opens you

up to experimentation. You start fiddling with stuff. I was doing all kinds of things in the house,

breaking things apart, looking inside them, starting little businesses, selling the cigarettes from

my mum's room, sorry, mother, she really doesn't know that I ever did that, but all these kinds of

things, which start to build this repository of information, but also it built my confidence

in a way which allowed me to be entrepreneurial and develop this different relationship with

risks. It's hard to figure out which one it is. Maybe it's both. It's probably both. I think it's

a bit of both, but yeah, I haven't been, I know that your team had asked me, what are some

questions that we could ask that no one else? Well, certainly pulling up that birth order one,

you've succeeded on asking me a question that I certainly haven't been asked in a long time,

so kudos to. Well, yeah, it's an incredible, we have a lot of great researches. By the way,

both my wife and I are lastborns, so to the assortative mating, and I'm not sure if that's

been done, and if it hasn't been done, it'll be very easy to do, right? So here's an experiment. If

anybody steals it, I better get the credit. You just look at a thousand marriages, calculate

their satisfaction score, their happiness score, and then see if there is assortative mating on

birth audorship. Interesting. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous

episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below, check the description.

Thank you. A huge number of businesses have spent the last few years adopting AI, and my company

Stephen.com is no different. But here's the thing, most companies actually have no idea whether or

not it's working for them. Their teams might be using AI, they might be spending money on AI,

and their leaders might be telling the board that they are an AI-enabled business, but they're

also likely struggle to explain where in the business AI is helping. The issue is there's no

easy way to see whether it's delivering value or working effectively, unless you're using

our sponsor, Leriden, which runs seamlessly as a browser plug-in or desktop agent and shows you

exactly how AI is being used across your organization. What it's actually producing and where the

real opportunities in your business are, that way you're able to make data back decisions instead

of just guessing all the time. I love anything that kills the guesswork. So if you want to be a

company that's informed with your use of AI and accelerate your company's AI transformation,

head to Leriden.com and Book of Demo now. That's L-A-R-R-I-D-I-N.com and Book of Demo now. This year,

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