 And this is part of the secret. So who do we know? Who is someone that we can look to? Who is a role model that we can say, wow, this guy, he's pursuing what he wants, okay? Well, one of my heroes. Some of you recognize him and write it, some of you don't, okay? Hello, clicker, Richard Branson. This guy does things because he loves them, because they intrigue him. He has this compass that he follows, something that I talked to you about. This guy knows, and he follows it. And would we call him happy or unhappy? From everything we've read, from everything we've experienced about Richard Branson's life. Of course, absolutely, right? And it doesn't mean that he doesn't have a little bit of hedonia in his life. He has, yeah, he has no women everywhere, but he's got his wife, he's got his family. He's got Nekkar Island, this enormous, freaking beautiful island, right? Of course, he buys himself these things, okay? But his life, what drives him on a day-to-day basis? Richard Branson is faced with a life decision. Do you think he goes, hmm, hmm. This totally runs contrary to what I want to achieve in life, but yeah, whatever, it'll make me happy for a short while. So I have a decision-making process works, okay? Success in anything, to be successful. Anything that you're gonna be here talking about today, all the talkers, you're going to need to what? Be happy, if you're not happy about it. It's gonna be tough, it's gonna be tough. You just heard of Flo before. Couple of you, couple of you. Flo was this concept that was first started by a Hungarian researcher, by the name of, anyone want to tell me how to pronounce that? Yeah, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, right? It's a complicated name, it's a complicated guy. He had an amazing life through his family running away from World War II and all this crap going on and he really had a tough childhood. His research led to this concept called Flo. What is Flo? Flo is, how about I use the definition, the mental state of operation in which a person is performing an activity fully and is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity, Flo. Now what he found was that when someone's in this magical state, I'll talk a bit more about it, and say when you're in this magical state, your creativity is off the charts. Your productivity is off the charts and your ability to learn is off the charts and it is one of the most pleasurable feelings and there's no come down. So when will you get a state of Flo? Who here has found that they sit down to do a task? And maybe the task is writing a letter, for me it might be writing an article, for you it might be starting to write something, it could be an essay for something, it could be an email to someone and you start writing it and you're not necessarily that engaged, you start, and after a while it just kind of, you become totally locked in. And you're in this do state and this is one of the beauties of being a man by the way, is that while we have a very undeveloped corpus callosum that is the part that joins the left and right hemispheres and we're not very good at multitasking, boy can we focus. We love our do state as men and when we're locked into this state, we don't want anything to distract us, do we? We know it. Sometimes we get it when we're running, when sometimes we get it at the gym, sometimes we get it, sometimes we get it in an interaction with a woman, we're just in this state where everything fades away and just locked in that moment, okay? And when that happens, we learn the quickest, we feel the happiest, we feel this unimonic happiness state, okay? Video games, you probably might not know this, are built around this concept of flow. So when does flow occur? Flow occurs guys, when you're engaged in something, that's tricky, that's hard, that requires attention, but not so hard that it frustrates you. It's a magical state and video games are all designed to keep you at just that level, just that level. They're designed every time, you know it starts easy and then it gets harder and harder and harder and ideally the perfect video game gets harder at exactly the same rate that you learn. So it stays a little bit difficult but not too difficult because what happens if you're playing a video game guys and it gets just too tough? Yeah, whatever, I'm gonna go get something to eat, I'm gonna leave this for another day, blah, blah, blah, but if you're just in that point where you're like totally, oh I can totally do this, I can totally do this, what happens is you lock in, right? I'm a kid, right? Mom comes in, Damien you should have lunch, she goes, oh I go, I'm gonna do this. You don't want anything, you don't want food, you don't want women, you don't want anything because you're in that state of flow. That's exactly the way you wanna be, that's the only place you wanna be. Businesses around the world are starting to adopt this idea of flow, okay? Because if they can get their work people into this state more often, they're gonna be more productive and they're gonna be happier and they're not gonna leave the job, it wins on all fronts. Flow is a perfect example of a eudaimonic happiness state. It's a perfect example of it. Guys, we have studied extensively, exhaustively, put a lot of people through these MRI machines, who wants to guess who would be the happiest people we've ever recorded? Ever, who might that be? And I'm not just talking happier, like an average person scores like a seven out of 10, this person's like an eight out of 10, okay? When we put the right people through these machines, they're scoring like well off the charts compared to the average. Ridiculous, who are they guys? Meditative monks. When we put them through these MRI machines, these guys get off the charts. What does that mean? It means that when we look at their brains, when something bad happens, okay? The amount of glucocorticoids, stress hormones, that course through their bodies is so much lower, so much lower than the average person. So they're straight away, they're feel less reactive, right off the bat. And then the amount of adorphins, the amount of counter-gluedicoid breakdown products that they create, off the charts. So not only do they not get really bugged by things when things go wrong, when things don't go the way they want, none of that, but it lasts like five seconds. Bam, problem solved, yeah, okay. Had a little bit of knowing for whatever. Ah, wouldn't be great if we could go through life like that. Okay, if things could go totally wrong and we can just be like, oh man, that's a shame. Okay, anyway. Wouldn't that be amazing, wouldn't that be, that's what these people do. And there's a book that I recommend you guys read, by the way, called The Happiest Man Alive. The Happiest Man Alive, okay, it's about a, it's about, I think it's a French microbiologist who actually leaves his life to become a monk. And he's the man, he's the head man that they were testing doing a lot of these tests with. Okay, and it was completely off the charts and he's written a book about this concept of happiness as well. So how does a Buddhist monk live their lives? I'm sure some of you guys know, okay. First thing they do is they forego any ownership. Okay, ownership, monks can't own anything, right. They live their lives from donation, but they're not allowed to own. The other thing they do is their whole lives are about pursuit. What pursuit of being present, okay. Pursuit of understanding the philosophy that is Buddhism. Pursuit of trying to spread and trying to make the world a better place. It's pursuit, there's no end point goal in their lives. Okay, they're not allowed to go, oh, I want to get that car, I want to get that mobile phone. Their lives are locked down. You don't want your lives to be locked down. But it's a case in point. It's an extreme example. It's an extreme example of how this all fits together. These happiest people in the world. We can move in this direction without having to forego everything in the world, but I'll tell you what, that's the easiest way to do it. But I like sex way too much to become a monk. I consider it for about five seconds. So guys, here's the thing, how do we go about, it's all great, there's all this theory I've shared with you. How does this come together in a way that we can go, okay, this sounds interesting. I want to be happier. How are you going to put that into your lives in some sort of a way that makes some sort of, god damn sense. Okay, first things first.