 Now, the reality is I am at an epigenetic disadvantage, you could say, but today I'm a very happy person. My grandmother died four years ago, a very, very happy lady. You see, my grandmother used to go around doing talks on how to be happy as well. She actually learned a few tricks along the way about how to work with what your body's got, how to work with what your body's given you, and not actually go, oh, well, you know, I inherited this, so this is just who I am, because it's not like that. What I inherited, guys, is something that a lot of you have, even if you don't know, it's called neuroticism. It's an actual personality trait represented by, among a few other things, an overactive amygdala, the amygdala is a part of the brain that looks for danger in the environment, and it makes it very hard to be happy. This is a straight definition, okay? Pneumatism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology manifested by characteristics of anxiety, moodiness, worry, envy, and jealousy. I know, statistically, there's a far higher proportion of people in this audience right now who can identify with this than the standard population. But I also know part of the human condition, part of the human condition is never to feel satisfied, and at no point in the history of humanity that we have documented has there been such an epic problem with a difficulty in being happy, okay? Suicide is higher than it's ever been. The more Western you go into the Western world, the higher it gets with a few rare exceptions of island chain groups and things like that, copycat suicides. Western world, Australia, America, London, we're screwed when it comes to depression and suicide. So what, what is this? Right, so I want to talk about what is happiness. And the first thing I want to kind of bring up is a mistake that we all make. It's a mistake and logic about what it is to be happy that we're all, we all get stuck in. I'm not sure where we pick it up, but we pick it up from our society. We pick it up from marketing on TV. We pick it up from our family. We pick it up from our friends. And this is essentially, guys, it's the happiness fallacy, okay? What is this? So it's this idea that I want to be happy. We all want to be happy. Actually, we're wide that way. I'm not special. We all want to be happy. And what we do is we say, well, here are a whole range of things that I know make me happy, right? There's a whole bunch of things that make us happy. Chocolate cake, hot women, right? A night out at a strip club, drinking with the boys, whatever it is, right? There are all sorts of things that bring happiness into our lives. And we go, okay, well, there's this bucket. And in this bucket, if I can fill this bucket and keep it relatively full, I'll feel like I'm happy. I'll feel like I've got a happy, privileged life going on here. And I guarantee you, this is what you've all been doing. You've all been going through your lives with this image in your head of a happiness bucket and you've been trying to keep it full. You've been doing all these things, trying to learn new facts that are going to make some sort of a difference in your life. And you're trying to throw them into this happiness bucket to keep it full. If it's full, you're happy. Ah, that makes sense, right? To some degree, I mean, more happy events that happen in our lives. The happy we're going to feel. So by that rationale, I should end this talk and say, let's all go home and do a few lines of Coke every day for now. Why won't that work? Why just someone just tell me, why is it no good to do a few lines of Coke every day? That was expensive, sure. Right, okay, why else? Why else would Coke just not be the solution to this problem? Every day your body needs, every day, your body needs more. I usually when I do these talks, although I have these chocolates that I throw around the audience, but I figured with a room this size, I'm going to hit someone in the head and get sued, so I didn't. But I would give you a chocolate, so. Yes, absolutely, okay. And it's more than that, guys, it's, I mean, look, I've been told that if you do cocaine, there's a massive come down. Okay, there's a massive come down. I'm sure if you haven't tried it yourself, you've seen someone who's done it and they do the cocaine, like, woo-hoo, yeah, a life rocks, woo. And they're like, oh, fuck man, get away from me, man. Man, I'm angry. That happens, right, that happens. So cocaine's a bad example. But cocaine isn't actually that different from a lot of the other forms of happiness we try to bring into our lives. Let me demonstrate why this is. Let me demonstrate why, no matter what it is most of us is doing to pursue happiness. We're not doing much better than doing lines of cocaine every day. You see, in the brain, when we actually take someone and we put them into a machine called a functional resonance imaging machine, okay? And what actually happens is we can view different areas of the brain and watch them light up as they activate. And so what we can do is we can put people into this machine and we can actually identify when they're feeling happy what parts of the brain light up. And what we found, we found this quite a while ago already, is that happiness actually occurs in two completely different varieties. There are two completely different ways that we can experience happiness in the brain. Two completely different, but in the English language you really only have one word. Are you happy? And we can give an answer, yes or no. And that's why so often someone says to you, are you happy? Like you'll go, yeah, I guess, kind of. Because there's actually an ambiguity and whether we're aware of it or not is because there's these two totally different varieties. So what are these guys? Okay, the first you may well have heard of, okay? It's called, hello? Hadonia. Hadonia, of which of course derives from hedonistic. Hedonistic pleasures. And it's what most of us follow one way or another whether we're aware of it or not. What are we talking about guys? Okay, we're talking about a piece of chocolate cake. Oh, by the way, I love chocolate cake. Ah, God damn it. Okay, we're talking about boobs. I love boobs, I love boobs. We're talking about attractive women, right? Sexual pursuit, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's a form of hedonistic happiness when we're talking about sex. A new car, a shiny new toy, okay? Don't get me wrong, I like my toys, being the geek that I am, I actually budget a portion of my income, partial portion of what I pay myself every month to buy toys, gadgets, little things, like I'm watching the tech blog, something new comes up, I'm gonna have that, that's me. So yeah, these things are forms of hedonistic pleasure. Fantastic. Now there is a dangerous side to this hedonistic pleasure. Let me give you an example with something that happens to me a lot. So what I'm coaching guys, I'm doing dating and coaching, right? I take guys out, they're out in a club, they're first night out, and of course they're really nervous. You can imagine, they're out with me, they know they're gonna have their asses kicked, they know they're gonna have to talk to women, this is totally crazy, totally scary, and I say to them, one of the things I say is, look, what do you wanna get out of tonight? What, just one thing, like what are you just hoping to get out? So night number one, you got like nine nights to go, what do you want out of tonight? Now, you know, as you just say, oh look, hey, Damien, if I could have a conversation with a girl for two minutes, just a random girl I don't know, and actually staying there for two minutes, that would be epic because I've never done this before, and if I could just do that, that'd be so cool. Okay, so 45 minutes into our first night, they come to me, they're like, Damien, this is so frustrating, this is killing me. Every time I'm in the conversation, around about five or 10 minutes and they're knocking me out of the interaction. Wait a minute, wait a minute, you just wanted two minutes. Now, hey, come to me, you're upset because you're only getting five to 10 minutes. Mm-hmm, part of the human condition. Remember I talked about the whole cocaine problem, there's a come down, there is a come down with any hedonistic pleasure. With any hedonistic pursuit, there is a come down. Why, because it's a goal oriented thing, we achieve it and then what does the brain do? Finds 15 other things we want. So before we attain the goal, we want a one thing after we attain the goal, we want 15, I'll give you a better example. When I started School of Attraction, when I started as my first company that I got rolling off the ground, when I started this company, what did I want? I just wanted, I didn't need to be rich, this wasn't about money, all I wanted was a job that I enjoyed, that I was really passionate about, okay, that would make enough that I could just live on it. That was what I wanted, that was all. It wasn't about being big, it wasn't about anything, but just being able to do what I love doing and make enough money doing it, just enough. Just enough to get by.