 to talk, a fantastic talk for you on the topic of being more productive at work since we're talking about the future of work. And then it was also Thanksgiving and we have three children and they wanted to watch a movie. We were at our summer cottage which doesn't have internet and only very few DVDs and the only one we could find was 2001 Space Odyssey. Now you may recall that there's a very prominent actor in in the movie who's non-human, Hal 9000, the artificial intelligence which turns out to create a lot of problems for the for the characters in the film. And the next morning I was preparing my talk on being more productive at work while the children were watching the movie and I was kind of eyeing them and I was surprised that they were able to watch it all the way through because it's a very long film and the next morning my daughter who's nine had woken up early and at breakfast we noticed she had made a drawing and there's foxes in the woods where we live and and she likes to draw the foxes doing various things except this time there was something different about the drawing there were the foxes but the foxes had a machine called Fox Finder 900 was an AI and I don't really know the relationship between the foxes and the AI but it didn't seem like things were we're going well for the foxes and it got me thinking about my talk because what I suddenly realized was that much of and we like to talk about humanizing technology I like to talk about humanizing technology and artificial intelligence and these things but actually a lot of what goes on in reality under that moniker of humanizing technology really isn't about making technology more human I think it's about making us more mechanical we're learning to think like computers our children are learning to interact and be more like machines and I decided to change the title of my talk and instead I'd like to invite you to consider how to be more human for the next 10 minutes and about your own goals in life and one way to address this that I found very useful was to actually look at what people who are at the very end of their lives have to say when they look back on their own lives and here are some things that that they say I wish I'd had the courage to live a life that was true to myself not the life that was expected of me I wish I didn't work so hard I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends and I wish that I had let myself be happier now when I read these results from this research paper this one puzzled me the most what does it really mean to let yourself be happier and I've been thinking about that for a while and by the way interestingly enough what was curiously absent was that no one wished they had worked more and so I'll give you 10 things that I've found from research that will help you be happier should you choose and I ask you to think about yourself now and specifically one thing that you know you're good at I don't know what it maybe it's washing dishes maybe it's or cooking in our family I'm excellent at tidying up while my partner is better at actually doing the creative work of the food something that you get satisfaction out of and then how often do you actually get to do that another thing that I love doing is skateboarding actually I love to skateboard and I didn't realize how I had missed that until my my son who's now 10 started skateboarding and now I get to go with him and suddenly I'm having a lot of fun I'm not as good as I used to be but it's still something that I realized I loved and had kind of forgotten about because I've been so involved in my work for many years so it's something that I have to thank my my son for is for reminding me of that forgotten skill that I had here's another one think about one person who you love and like and then how much time are you spending with them is there a way that you could perhaps spend less time with the people that you feel like you have to spend time with and more time with the people who you'd actually like to spend time with this one's curious don't take on other people's problems I don't think this is a problem for everyone but is there someone or something in your life that's troubling you that you're spending a lot of time on that really perhaps isn't your problem at all and then one of the most powerful and rather obvious things that correlates with happiness is the time it takes you to travel to work just that commute is there a way that you could walk or at least take public transit because it has a strong correlation with your overall happiness and well-being here in Finland I think it's a privileged place because many people can actually do this whereas especially in the US and Bay Area where I spend most of my time this is a constant sore spot for almost everyone people spending incredible amounts of time commuting and then paying favors forward helping other people reach their goals is one of the most powerful ways to actually make yourself feel satisfied and give you that idea that your life is actually meaningful what can you do today is there something some email you can send take 20 seconds to help someone else it's actually what this conference should be all about right so perhaps before leaving the conference area today make do that one thing for someone else and then this one particularly for I'm someone who I am kind of brewed you know I it's hard for me to always live in the moment because I'm always worried about what's gonna happen in the future and I was very surprised when I read the study that said actually one of the best things you can do when your mind is wondering and you can't really help it and it feels kind of overpowering nowadays because everyone's meditating and seems to be very in the present and if I'm one of those people who really has trouble with that because my mind just keeps wondering but this idea that you can actually look for do something good which I've started consciously doing sometimes it's a family trip or some other thing that I know is coming up that I can or that I can arrange for myself I'll give you one example it's every Wednesdays now in San Francisco there aren't very many good sonnets obviously there's a wealth of good sonnets even here just in Mexico there's probably more sonnets than in all of San Francisco but every Wednesday I go to the gym and then there's a place where there's a Finnish sauna it's not a good sauna on Finnish standards but it's more like a kerrostalo sauna we'd say but it's the best one I've found in San Francisco and every Wednesday I go there and I look forward to that and then this other thing it's like actually thinking about your own going away is turns out makes you makes you feel better about yourself thinking about death of all things makes you happier now this one's rather obvious but I kind of belaboring the point more money will not improve your moment-to-moment mood it's more likely that after there's a curve you know if you know after you make a certain amount of money no matter how much more you make it doesn't really seem to affect your happiness your time and energy are probably better spent elsewhere avoid doing something that's easy and strive to do something that's ambitious now this is again something that seems rather obvious to a group of entrepreneurs like yourselves but is it really are you really working on something ambitious a little while ago I met someone who actually visited Finland to a young guy who's working on a project to clean up all the plastic in the world's oceans and after having dinner with him a lion bed thinking wow that he's he's really ambitious he's 23 years old and he wants to clean up all the plastic in the world's oceans hmm can I do something as as ambitious as that could I you know and even if he only gets 10% of the way there he's cleaned up 10% of the plastic in all of the world's oceans that in itself would be a huge thing so working on a project that has that kind of ambition gives you that drive that motivation because it feels meaningful and I noticed this especially in medicine where having worked specifically with issues related to cancer it's a very dark world for cancer patients but at the same time for the people who are working on helping patients and it always strikes me that they don't have to get up in the morning and wonder if what they're spending their day on is actually going to be useful which is what some of my friends in Silicon Valley who are these high-flying technology executives with fantastic salaries and kind of all the you know widgets and gadgets in the world I feel sometimes secretly worry about this that they're not actually working on anything that matters and then this one is my favorite having those positive illusions about how awesome your romantic partner is and is this we spend so much of our times on screens and then you all know this and and I've talked about this before too with some of you is you know even in bed we lie there and we're on our screens you know we're touching each other less it's kind of a crazy thing to say right but we should be touching each other more our romantic partners so just that touch it's one of the most powerful things that we have at our disposal and it's completely free and so easy and yet we're choosing our devices over that that that power we have just as humans so be conscious about choosing sometimes often more often to reach out to the other your partner rather than reach out to your device and then this is something that's interesting I have been recently studying storytelling with our daughter who's 10 she writes stories of her own and one of the things she asked me that I thought was a very good question was after watching a particularly sad story or I was a you know a book and a movie said why do why do people make tragedies we were talking about what are tragedies because they're so sad there's it's tragic and I thought about the Greek and how that form came about and I was reminded of a study I once read about people who were interviewed after watching a happy movie and then you know wait a little bit and you would see how happy they felt about themselves and then people who watch the sad movie and it turned out that immediately after watching a happy movie everybody felt great they felt fantastic but a little while later when they were comparing themselves with the people in this movie they actually felt worse about themselves in comparison and in the opposite way watching someone have a tragic time in a movie actually make you feel better about yourself in relation to them a little bit later so only compare yourself to those worse off than you if you must compare so I think it's a great advice and then lastly and this it may involve adopting or fostering but having children you know provenly and I know this I'm you know I have experienced this kind of the deep end myself of the years will be tough but then you will grow old feeling that your life is full of meaning and having said all these things it feels like here we are and we're supposed to be talking about success and making it at work making it in tech what can we say about success and I'm just going to leave you with this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson except it turns out it wasn't Emerson it was a woman as it often happens who wrote this in and everyone thought it was Emerson and this is what she wrote to laugh often and much to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends to appreciate beauty to find the best in others to leave the world a little bit better whether by a healthy child a garden patch or a redeemed social condition to know even one life has breathed easier because you've lived this is to have succeeded thank you