 And it's actually fun and if you were refreshing right now to actually talk about happiness because the world is crazy and depressing and upsetting and maddening and it's not just in Israel, but it's in Ukraine and it's in everywhere. There's just bad things happening all over the world. And in that sense, I can't say I have much joy in my life, but I can say that I'm a happy person and that happiness is something that pervades my life in spite of all the ups and downs and the horror and the frustration and the madness that goes on around. And I think it's a really, really important idea that we need to dig into. So I want to start with this. I think the most important thing when considering happiness, and I consider happiness the state of a being, this long-term state of being, Aristotle said in a sense that you couldn't actually know if you're happy until the very moment before you died because it's like looking back and seeing what kind of life have I lived. Now, I don't think that, I think you can tell at every point, but it's about a state, it's not about a momentary experience. So you might be able to have fun at a party, but that doesn't mean that it's going to add to your happiness. You know, the happiness is the state in which you live on a long-term basis. So if you let me, we can do questions afterwards. Okay, thanks. I think the most important thing about happiness is, the most important thing, is to want it. Now, we all say we want it. Everybody says it. I mean, you ask them and nobody raised their hand about not wanting happiness. Everybody says they want it. But are we really committed to it? And I think people all say we want it, but are they willing to do what is necessary for it? And as a culture, as a world, are we oriented towards happiness? Do we orient the way we think about the world and we think about life towards achieving our personal happiness? And I think the world is aligned against us. I think our educational institutions are aligned against us. That's why I like the idea of having something at a university talking about happiness. And I think most importantly our moral code is often aligned against us. Our ethics are often aligned against us. Because most ethics, most moral codes, morality, good, evil, right? What is the good? The good is almost always defined as something outside of us. Something to be done to other people. How you relate to other people. And morality today gives us almost no guidance in terms of how to live our own life. How to live our life as individuals. I agree completely you will find happiness for purpose. But what is purpose? How do we define purpose? How do you discover your purpose? We get very little guidance in the culture. We get very little guidance from our morality about that. We're told by morality, what's the most important thing in morality today in our moral code tells us? What's the most important thing you should do or not do? It's all about how you do what? How you treat other people. But I think, and this is Inran's kind of revolution, and this is going back to Aristotle. I mentioned Aristotle earlier. I think the most important thing about morality is how you treat yourself. It's what you choose to do with your own life. And it's how you think about doing with your own life. Imagine if one of the principles of morality was find a purpose. For Inran, there are three cardinal values in morality. Three main values in morality. Reason, which is our tool for knowing. Our tool for knowing the world, knowing reality, understanding it, and evaluating it. Purpose. And the third, which I think is fundamentally crucial to happiness is self-esteem. And I'll talk about self-esteem in a minute. So reason, purpose, self-esteem. Those are her three cardinal values in morality. And they're all focused on how you can make your life the best life that it can be. How you can live the best possible life in this world. And the goal of morality, according to Aristotle, what is the goal, anybody read Aristotle? The goal of morality, according to Aristotle, is achieving what he called eudaumonia in Greek. I'm mispronouncing it because in Greek it sounds completely different. It means flourishing. It means success. It means happiness. Conventional morality, as we have it today in our world, doesn't talk about morality and happiness in the same sentence. Indeed, morality is often the opposite of happiness. Don't do what's good for you. Don't pursue your purpose if, I don't know, somebody else has a claim on your time. Don't be self-interested. Don't do what you think is good for you. Do what other people, what's good for other people. Focus all your efforts on that. Now, maybe other people become part of your purpose, but then it's your purpose. It's your chosen purpose. Morality doesn't tell us you need that choice. Morality tells us your focus, your orientation should be external, should be on the other people rather than on you on what's good for you and what will lead to your happiness. So I think the first thing about happiness is that you need to want it, which means you need to want your own well-being. You need to want your own happiness. That needs to be a priority for you. It needs to be something you really are seeking. Now, seeking happiness, you don't go directly from here to happiness. Happiness is an outcome. It's a consequence of certain actions that you take, of the values that you choose, and of achieving those values. So let's talk about the three values that I mentioned, the three cardinal values that I mentioned, as I think is most important. First I said is reason. Why reason? Why reason? Why do you think reason is an important value? It's a tool to explain the world objectively. Exactly. But it's the only tool we have. The only tool we have to know the world out there is to use our senses and to use our mind and understand it, figure it out and understand it. There is no other way to know the world. Everything that we have around us at the end of the day is a product of human reason. Somebody had to invent a light bulb. Somebody had to figure out electricity. Somebody had to figure out how to build a building. None of us have the gene for that. It's not instinctual. And through emotions, you will not discover how to build a building. Even when they went from caves, our ancestors went from caves to building little huts, somebody had to figure out how a hut would stand. Experiment, test, do what we do with reason. This is our tool. It's what makes us human. What makes us human, what makes us different than animals is our capacity to think. It's our capacity to observe the world, integrate its information, come up with new ideas, test them out in reality, figure out what works and what fails. There is no other way to discover the world out there. And you're not going to be happy if you fight the world. If you say, I don't care what reality is, I don't believe in gravity. I don't like gravity. So I'm going to jump up the building and fly. That will end your life very quickly, not a path for happiness. The first thing you have to do to be successful in life is recognize reality, recognize facts, recognize what is true. If you can't recognize reality, you can't deal with the world. You can't function in the world. You're just going to constantly jump off of buildings and expect to fly. And guess what? As much as you expect to fly, you won't, unless you invent a flying machine. But then again, you're going to have to use reason to invent that machine, and you're going to have to take reality into account. So a commitment to reality, a commitment to facts, a commitment to what is, one of the ways to deal with the stuff that's going on in the world, the horrible stuff that's going on in the world is to recognize that you have no control of it. It is what it is. You have control over your life. And one of the important things in life to do is to be able to identify that which you control and that which you do not. It doesn't mean you don't get angry with it. It doesn't mean you don't get mad, particularly when it's human beings doing this stuff. But I can't control it. I've got my life to live. I can't completely obsess about this. I tell people one way to move towards happiness is to stop watching the news. You can't change the world in that sense anyway. Listen to newsmen just a little bit. We become consumed. Our social media feeds are constantly bad news. And news is always going to tell you all the bad stuff that's going on in the world. It's drama. They're not going to tell you about the good stuff that's going on in the world. There's wonderful things going on in the world. But we're not going to get that in our social media feed. Only hear the bad stuff. So reason, reality, facts are so that's the beginning point. That's the start. Purpose. You've got to know where you're going in life. You've got to have an idea of what your goals are, of where you're heading. And happiness comes from achieving those goals, from moving in a particular direction. Whatever that purpose you have chosen, you are going to take steps in order to get there. And the purpose is typically not an automobile or a bank account or something like that. It's typically some kind of achievement that is always going to be further ahead of you. You're always going to be striving. But as you attain the goals, as you attain the values in the direction, you gain that kind of satisfaction. You gain that sense of I can achieve things in the world. I can be successful. And from that I think ultimately comes this sense of happiness. So purpose, purpose is crucial. Most of us, our purpose, and this is an ideal, is our career, is the work that we do. You know, everybody says the most important thing in life is family. And family is important, right? But you know, I always judge what people actually think is important and what's not by how they spend their time. Most people spend most of their time at work, not with family. And we're rich enough that if we wanted to, we could work a little less and spend more time with family, but we don't because it's not about the money. So why are we at work all the time? What is it about a career that provides us with so much satisfaction? It's the... What's that? It's not the outcome in terms of money. It's the fact that at work, we set goals. We move towards achieving those goals. We push ourselves. We try it. We use our minds to continuously further who we are as human beings. And that process, that growth that we get in our career is where we are going to achieve the kind of sense of satisfaction and happiness. So career and taking that career seriously and taking your work seriously when you see people who are really happy, it's people who've chosen careers and work that they really love that they really care about that they're having fun they're achieving joy while they're achieving happiness, right? They're moments of joy. It's hard. The work is hard. But the happiness comes from the satisfaction of knowing you're achieving things and knowing you're moving in a particular direction for a particular goal. And that happens to us primarily again in our careers. Now, I don't want to scare young people because particularly in the modern world it's not like you're going to have one career and it's not like right now you have to choose what that career is going to be and if not, life is a failure. It turns out particularly today that you can have a purpose and you can change purposes and you can change careers and you can change your work and you can adapt and you know one of the things that's successful in life and to be happy in life is to learn how to deal with failure. You're all going to fail. At some point in your life you will fail. You'll fail in relationships. You'll fail at work. Your purpose might be wrong. You might think you want to do this but I've had five careers I think or five different things. I've loved all of them. Not the same. It's like everybody says they love their kids the same not exactly the same but everything was a step forward. Everything was growth and that's what you want. You want to live a life where you're constantly growing where you're constantly doing something that's even better that's even in a sense more fun that's even more interesting that's more challenging. You don't get to be happy unless you challenge yourself unless you push yourself unless you try really really hard you know in exercise they say no pain no gain from not it's not quite with happiness you don't have to suffer in order to be happy but you have to work in order to be happy you have to put in the effort in achieving your purpose to be able to attain happiness and finally I'd say self-esteem now what do I mean by self-esteem self-esteem is not somebody from the outside patting you on the back and saying good guy in America there's all self-esteem movement we give titles to everybody and we treat everybody really really nicely and we think they're going to get self-esteem you cannot get self-esteem from other people you have to give self-esteem to yourself it's self-esteem esteem means valuing yourself it's really really really important to value yourself you're all you have in a sense you are what you are you're one of a kind and you're inside your head you're not outside so valuing yourself is the beginning of any process towards happiness and what valuing yourself means is knowing that or knowing that you deserve to be happy that happiness is something that's okay for you to be that you deserve it and that you'll do the work necessary to achieve it it's knowing the world that we live this crazy, nutty, insane in some places and sometimes even bad world that we live you can't survive you have that confidence I can do it, I can achieve I can pursue values and I can attain values I'm not horrible, I'm not dreadful I'm not committed to a sinful life I'm not committed to unhappiness I can actually attain stuff I can achieve my purpose I can pursue values in this life having that confidence having that sense of yourself is going to be so I think without it you can't have a good purpose it's very difficult to attain it because again to have a purpose to achieve something you need to be acting you need to be confident you need to be willing to challenge yourself and to do that you have to have that confidence that you can actually achieve it again the confidence doesn't come in a day it's something you build up over life it's something you build up by challenging yourself succeeding and in a sense patting yourself on the back don't be afraid to say to yourself even though I know there are a lot of people out there who say this is not good don't be afraid to say to yourself you did a good job good for you, you succeeded but on the back I'm going to eat an ice cream today to celebrate my own achievement so achieve, recognize the achievement I know a lot of people out there who achieve great things and then they go yeah it wasn't me it was luck it was this, it was that they'll never take credit for themselves not only in public but in their own mind they will never take credit for themselves let me tell you those people will never be happy excuses always to be unhappy because they'll always deny themselves and they don't take in that sense their own life and their own progress and their own growth seriously they're rejecting and denying it and putting it to the side I think one of the ways in which we attain happiness is by recognizing our own achievement recognizing our own goals recognizing our own abilities so reason this is our tool purpose we want to have something we're striving towards in every action in life you want to have a something you're going a direction a purpose, a reason why you're doing it a lot of people out there are drifting drifting is the person with no purpose they just, one day they do this, one day they do that they do whatever feels good you know it's a maybe they even take drugs they make you feel good they don't need happiness though but they make you feel good so they're drifting, they're all over the place there's no focus, focus doesn't mean that's the only thing you can do in life but at least at every given moment focus on something something is the goal and then have the confidence, have the self-esteem have value yourself enough to want to be happy to want to be successful, to want to achieve that to me is at the highest level the formula for happiness those are the kind of things you should be thinking about and we can get into some of the details and of course answer your questions so thank you