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Time and How to Spend it

By James Wallman

The 7 rules for richer, happier days

  • Finding more happiness and sucess starts with choosing better experiences
  • For enduring happiness, choose experiences that add to your own heroic story
    • STORIES - Story, Transformation, Outside & Offline, Relationships, Intensity, Extraordinary, Status & Significance
    • The Man in a Hole Story - every hero in a narrative starts out in a good place, then gradually sinks into a hole of misfortune before being restored to good fortune by the end of the story
    • The Hero's Journey - It starts out in the ordinary world, where the hero accepts a "call to action" that require perseverance through many trials and tribulations. Through this process, the hero learns new skills, overcomes the supreme ordeal, receives a reward and returns home. In the end, he shares the gifts and wisdom he acquired, and in doing so forever changes the ordinary world into a new world.
  • Events that provide change and transformation are key to finding fulfillment
    • end of history illusion - we tend to think of change as something happening in the past, not the future. As a result significant changes are often unplanned.
  • Vacationing
    • fly and flop - personal development not on the menu. involve going to a resort and engaging in passive experiences like lying in the sun, eating familiar foods and reading books and magazines that require very little effort on your part
    • find and seek - invoves more active engagement. You travel to new places with the intent to explore, or maybe attend a music festival like Burning Man.
    • go and become - offers a real chance for tranformation. Your vacation would come with a purposeful intent to learn inspirations things about different cultures and customs, or new skills like painting, boating or traditional sushi techniques. Might involve a spiritual retreat of some kind.
  • Being outside and offline has been shown to improve people's mood directly
  • Engage in activities that connect you with others to avoid the potentially fatal effects of loneliness
  • We're at our happiest when engaged in intense, immersive activities that allow for good flow
    • real flow vs fake flow - good flow requires you to put in true, intense effort in order to receive the reward at the end
  • How we remember activities has a lot to do with beginnings, peaks and ends
    • Peak moments, as well as endings, have a disproportionate amount of influence on how we experience things. peak-end rule - it means that you can wait in line for an annoying length of time, but if the line speeds up in the last moments, you'll likely look back at the experince as not that annoying
  • Activities that boost our status can lead to happier lives
    • 3 things lead to flourish in life - control, capabilities and social participation. Can be increase by attaining more education, money and power
  • Actionable advice - Go offline this weekend and get wild