Why?

This week I was in Finse, Norway training for an upcoming polar expedition. The training involved skiing up to 25 km per day while pulling a 130-pound sled in blizzard conditions, sleeping in freezing tents, eating dehydrated food with only a shovel as a restroom. It was painful, cold, and difficult, and yet I loved it.

I have often pondered why many entrepreneurs like myself love adventure travel and extreme sports. It’s seemingly ironic because we have everything we could ever hope for. This is doubly ironic as I am built grateful and optimistic. Not a day goes by that I am not thankful for everything life has given me: an amazing family, lots of close friends, health, the opportunity to pursue my purpose, the freedom to explore, and an aptitude for happiness.

So why do we put ourselves in situations where we deprive ourselves of the very things we are thankful for and risk losing it all?

I remember vividly driving a Formula 1 car back in 2000. As I pushed it to its limits, time slowed down. I never felt as alive as I was in that moment where I knew if I went any faster, I would lose control. After a lifetime of professional and personal risk taking, as a tech founder and investor who loves to heli ski, kitesurf and do many types of adventure travel, I have a few insights.

1. A love for flow states

Flow states are magical. They are these moments where everything else disappears and you become in sync with your surroundings, at one with your environment operating at the highest level. Yet they are fleeting and are not the norm of the human condition.

As I will detail in my upcoming review of Stealing Fire, extreme sports are an amazing way to harness flow states because they require focus and concentration. The risk of death seemingly quiets the monkey mind. In my case, my mind is rather quiet to begin with, possibly because I suffer from aphantasia. However, I still love that meditative state that I enter in when skiing in deep powder, taking in the scenery and weaving through the trees in a flowy dance. Likewise, I love flying above the waves while kitesurfing or kitefoiling, feeling the sun on my face, the wind in my hair and the smell of the ocean around me, experiencing the contour of the waves under my feet.

And so it was last week. I was exhausted, pulling my sled in a white-out blizzard where I could not see if I was going up or down. My entire field of vision was 100% white. All I did was focus on my breath, gliding one foot, then the next in a rhythmic way: one, two, one, two, over and over again.  I entered into a trance-like state where I felt at one with the elements. Our minds must not like blank canvases because I started hallucinating that we were in a valley with a refuge offering hope of shelter in the distance. In that moment I understood how travelers lost in the desert can see the mirage of an oasis. (To be clear, I was not on any substance, psychedelic or otherwise.)

This is not to say that extreme sports and adventure travel are the only way of achieving flow states. Quite the contrary, I experience them through meditation, psychedelics, tantric sex, or when in the zone while playing padel or tennis. Those are all different modalities we can use to reach the same state.

In the West, the most common way people use to reach a flow state is through mastery of a skill. It’s always wondrous to witness these displays of magic. We can always tell when we are witnessing it. This is why we are in such awe of the prowess of Federer, Messi or Jordan and reward them accordingly.  I have experienced watching this in so many contexts: watching Steve Jobs on stage, attending Derren Brown’s magic show, listening to Hamilton on Broadway, but also in countless other moments from “normal” individuals who had mastered a skill.

The one requirement for using a skill as a means of entering a flow state is mastery. While I was learning skiing, tennis, or kite surfing, I was never in a flow state. I was focused on technique and repetition. It’s only once you master something enough that the process can disappear in the background that you can be in the zone. You will be well rewarded, but you must put in the hours.

That is why I recommend extreme sports and adventure travel. They are a shortcut. You do not need mastery. Let me attest to how few skills I truly have when it comes to surviving in the cold and cross-country skiing, but the dangers involved focus your attention and act as a flow state generating machine.

2. A sense of meaning ingrained in the human condition

Humans seem to have this ingrained need for feeling danger and thrill. It was probably built in our psyche because for most of homo-sapiens’ existence we faced death from other humans, wildlife, and nature itself.

This is why many of my friends in the military often have trouble adjusting when they come home from active duty. The mundanity of modern-day life seems dull relative to the life and death situations they face daily. Shallower traditional friendships pale in comparison with the bond they have with their brothers in arms.

We feel there is something somewhat empty and unsatisfying about the nature of modern life where everything is safe, sanitized, and superficial. Perhaps what we all need is a bit of danger and risk to remind ourselves what we are living for.

Extreme sports and adventure travel are such a form of synthetic risk. We face risk, but in a measured and controlled environment. We do not want to experience the sufferings and deprivations of real war, but our psyche needs to feel the thrill and possibility of risk.

It’s worth noting that many “risky” things are less risky than they may appear at first glance. When I told my parents I left McKinsey when I was 23, they were horrified. I had just been promoted to associate. I was making nearly two hundred thousand dollars a year. To this point I had never really failed at anything I tried. Beyond leaving the safety and prestige of the job, they worried that a failure would crush me.

In a way they were right. With my first startup, I went from zero to hero. I grew it to over $10M per month in gross merchandise sales with over 100 employees in two years. I made the cover of every magazine and was a hero of the Internet revolution in France. Then it all came crashing down. The Internet bubble burst and I went from hero to zero and lost it all. My parents’ worst fears had been realized.

However, what I had really lost? I had confidence in my abilities. Even if I had to crash on their couch for a while, I did not worry I would starve. Worse comes to worse, I could always go back to McKinsey or take a regular job. I knew my skills were valuable and valued. In return I lived a life of purpose. I had a clarity of focus and sense of mission. That’s why in the end I chose to remain an Internet entrepreneur. I had not gone into it to make money anyway. I just wanted to build something out of nothing and use technology to help make the world a better place. As the bubble had burst, I thought that whatever I would build would not necessarily be very large, but it did not bother me. In the end, I was wrong in that assessment and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. 

The same is true of the risks involved in adventure travel. The risks of death are extremely small. I think what people really fear is the discomfort they will face. It is true, you will face discomfort, but in return you will get a sense of accomplishment through grit and tenacity that is unparalleled in modern-day life.

3. Gratitude practice

People appreciate most what they have when they are at risk of losing it. I am built profoundly grateful, but every time I come back from a week of camping, I become so appreciative of all the little things we take for granted. I am truly in awe of the magic of modern life. I marvel at a light turning on at the flick of a button, at the ability to have hot water come out of a tap, not to mention the convenience of indoor plumbing. I also become infinitely grateful for the culinary delights available in modern society where every combination of flavor and taste is seemingly possible.

And do not get me started on the magic of modern-day communications and travel. We essentially all have access to the sum total of humanity’s knowledge in our pockets in a device that doubles as a free wireless video communications system. We can be in touch with countless people from all around the world. On top of that we have the means to go see them on the other side of the world in less than 24 hours. Those are feats that would have been not only impossible, but essentially inconceivable in the past. They are so extraordinary that they feel like actual magic!

4. An openness to serendipity

On my polar expedition training, I ended up sharing a tent Dr. Jack Kreindler for several nights. That magical combination of both spending an extended period of time and facing adversity together, where we truly depended on each other for survival, led us to become fast friends. I came to love his intellect, personal mission, directness, foul-mouthed sense of humor, and lust for adventure.

However, the true magic was that this was completely unplanned. Had he reached out to me saying that I sounded interesting, and we should go camping together to get to know each other, I would have said no. I lead a busy life. However, such is the serendipity that happens when you say yes to the opportunities that present themselves to you and I am sure we will be friends for years to come.

5. New learnings

There is something beautiful about learning something new. Putting yourself in new, unfamiliar environments is an amazing way to learn new skills, create new neural connections and keep yourself young.

I have done a lot of warm weather camping in my life but had never done cold weather camping other than the night I was accidentally caught in a freak August blizzard in Yellowstone utterly unprepared and improperly equipped. Likewise, while I am a great downhill skier, I had never cross country skied.

I had to learn so many things during the last week: how to set the tent in a way that it’s not blown away by the Antarctic winds; how to cross-country ski pulling a 130-pound pulk; how to melt snow for water and cooking inside a tent; how to stay warm throughout it all; and so much more.

I also discovered that Finse is the snow kiting capital of the world, so I decided to extend my stay to learn snow kiting. As a result, I am thinking of extending my Antarctic trip. I am supposed to ski the last degree to the South Pole next January. Now, I am thinking I should kite back from the South Pole to Hercules station as well.

6. Clarity of thought

Taking yourself out of your daily routine is an amazing way to be thoughtful and reflective. We often have thoughts weighing on us which warrant a decision. However, the busyness of modern-day life and the emotions of being caught in the moment make it difficult to go beyond our reptilian brain and to activate clear, dispassionate thinking.

Adventure travel takes you out of your normal environment, and the seeming risks involved help you enter a hypnogenic state where solutions seemingly come out of nowhere. You can see problems in a new light and find the rational solution to the problems you are facing providing you with a plan of action and course to take.  

7. Staying Grounded

Achieving success can sometimes mean losing sight of the difference between needs and wants. Experiences like polar arctic training can recrystallize the difference and remind us that we really have very few needs — health, water, food, basic shelter, and companionship.

Conclusion

This is what life is. A patchwork quilt of experiences that we curate or fall into with our family and friends, and relive with the broader community in our retelling, the memories of which keeps our hearts and minds alive.

The biggest risk is not taking one. Provided you have the basics covered in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, say yes to adventure, opportunities and seemingly risky endeavors. They are less risky than they appear, and you will feel more alive, enter magical flow states, get a profound sense of purpose, learn gratitude, and have new magical encounters and learnings while clearing your mind.

As a new parent, I am already encouraging positive risk taking in my son. He loves being taken on all the adventures. I put him in a sling, and he screams in delight as the world flies by while we are biking, skiing and generally running around like crazy. As we speak, I am holding him by his fingers as he attempts to take his first steps.

Go out there and live!

Fun interview in Le Monde

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Benoit Hopquin from Le Monde last June while I was passing through Paris. He was interviewing a variety of people, Buddhist monks, retirees, etc., for a series on happiness. He had come across my interest on the topic and reached out to me.

We had a really fun conversation and I ended up embodying “happiness in motion”. I have to admit it was a real pleasure to partake in the project as France needs dreams, optimism and happiness more than anything right now.

You can read an extract of the interview at:
http://www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/article/2013/07/29/vivre-vite_3454996_3208.html

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Happiness is not contagious after all :)

An article on the Freakonomics blog repudiates the notion that happiness is contagious. While an increase in your friend’s happiness statistically significantly increases your happiness level, Justin Wolfers contends that the cause is the shared emotional experiences and environments that friends share.

There is no good way to differentiate in the data whether an individual’s increase in happiness is due to his friend’s increase in happiness or to some shared external event that increased both your happiness levels (e.g.; your favorite baseball team just won the World Series).

However, now that I think about it, Justin Wolfer’s explanation seems more probable. Amusingly in the same British Medical Journal where the James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis released their happiness is contagious article, Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher setup an experiment which “proved” that height, headaches and acne are contagious in order to prove that silly experimental setups lead to silly conclusions 🙂

Read the article at:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/is-happiness-contagious/?emc=eta1

Happiness Summarized

As a supposed “expert on happiness” (try googling expert on happiness for fun), I am often asked to summarize what I have learned from the books and articles I have read and have written about. For all you lazy bums out there, here is the condensed version 🙂

Most people, through a combination of education and genes, have a set level of happiness. While circumstances may change that level, we usually revert back to our mean.

Despite that, there are 10 things you can do to improve your mean level of happiness. They sound artificial, but they work.

So the 10 things are:

1. Be grateful for what you have – as bad as you may think you have it, by the very fact you are reading this you are better off than 95% of the population of the world – if not more. You are likely healthy and have great opportunities. Try the following: every night before you go to sleep write down 3 good things that happened to you that day. It’s artificial but it works. You will sleep better and be happier.

2. Be optimistic. Even if slightly delusional, you will lead a happier life. Optimism breeds confidence.

3. Maintain a few close and meaningful friendships. We only exist to the extent that we exist in the eyes of the people we care about. Have acquaintances (after all we human are social animals). Invest the time you need to have deep friendships with your family, friends, etc.

4. Minimize your commute. It’s a variable out of your control (traffic, strikes, etc.) and it can take time away from personal time and/or work. If you do commute, use it as an opportunity to indulge your interests, for example listen to NPR, read the economist, learn a language … sing.

5. Give your body the sleep it needs: you will function better, think better, be happier. Of note: some sleep studies suggest people feel better rested when they wake up at the same time every morning.

6. Have dreams and aspirations. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination. Dreams provide direction. They can be as big or small as you want. If you achieve them, get new ones.

7. Don’t confuse money with happiness. Contrary to popular belief, we adjust very well to a lower standard of living. However, as we adapt to our current comfort level we may become materialistic and more risk adverse. Money is like pancakes – one tenth of a pancake leaves you starving, but after 4 or 5 you do not crave more.

8. Find love – from your puppies, friends, family, and/or significant other.

9. Exercise a lot: the adrenaline, endorphins and opiates released are great for you.

10. Have lots of sex. You will be happier for longer than you anticipate. Happiness extends beyond the coital period to the next day.

One last point: You might think that being happy makes you smile but reverse causality holds too: smiling makes you happy. Individuals receiving botox report improvements in self esteem, and happiness. Because they cannot frown- even subconsciously, they are perceived differently by others and unlearn frowning for months beyond the effect of the drug.

That’s it 🙂 It’s now in your hands so go ahead and be happy!

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): Positive Psychology in Action

The advent of positive psychology, as mentioned in my recent posts on happiness, is leading to a revolution in psychological counseling. As depression, anxiety and other ills seem to be largely caused by negative thoughts, psychologists have turned to cognitive behavioral therapy to teach patients how to focus on the positive and prevent negative thoughts from creeping into their minds.

Even better, patients rapidly show dramatic improvement and sessions typically end after 10 to 25 visits. CBT has been shown to work, often better than drugs, for depression, anxiety, insomnia and hypochondria. It seems to quell insomnia better than Ambien over the long term. It is as effective as Paxil for moderate to severe depression. Moreover, only 31% of CBT patients had a relapse versus 76% who stopped taking Paxil.

Happiness and the dangers of belief in the written word :)

It’s interesting how gullible we humans are. If we read something or watch it in a documentary, we are more likely to believe it. Then there is the magic of Google. If you write enough on a topic, you start showing up in search results on the topic – regardless of how much you really know. Soon enough someone comes along taking you for an expert in the field and asks to interview you.

And so I was pleasantly surprised to be mistaken for an “International Expert on Happiness” and asked to answer a few questions. I started by telling my interviewer that she was up for a big disappointment if she thought I was an expert on happiness, but decided to play along.

I reproduce some of my answers below for your reading pleasure 🙂

How would you define happiness?

Happiness is an emotional or affective state that is characterized by feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction. As such, like being in love, you are either happy or not, but don’t necessarily know why – you just are. As a result, many people define happiness as things they do or have, as Charlie Brown does below:

HAPPINESS
From You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
(Clark Gesner)

Happiness is finding a pencil.
Sleeping in moon light.
Telling the time.
Happiness is learning to whistle.
Tying your shoe
For the very first time.
Happiness is playing the drum
In your own school band.
And happiness is walking hand in hand.

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream.
Knowing a secret.
Climbing a tree.
Happiness is five different crayons.
Catching a firefly.
Setting him free.
And happiness is being alone every now and then.
And happiness is coming home again.

Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and nighttime too.
For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That’s loved by you.

Happiness is having a sister.
Sharing a sandwich.
Getting along.
Happiness is singing together
When day is through,
And happiness is those who sing with you.

Happiness is morning and evening,
Daytime and nighttime too.
For happiness is anyone and anything at all
That’s loved by you.

However, while doing those things makes Charlie Brown happy – sometimes – they may not work for you.

What do you consider to be an important step toward happiness?

Despite what I said above there are clear deliberate steps you can take towards being happy.

Specifically:

  1. Don’t equate happiness with money.
  2. Don’t commute.
  3. Exercise regularly.
  4. Have lots of sex.
  5. Devote time and effort to close relationships.
  6. Pause for reflection, meditate on the good things in life (in other words be grateful).
  7. Seek work that engages your skills, look to enjoy your job.
  8. Give your body the sleep it needs.
  9. Don’t pursue happiness for its own sake, enjoy the moment.
  10. Take control of your life, set yourself achievable goals (in other words have goals).
  11. Have an optimistic attitude and outlook on life.

You might argue that things like “being grateful” are not easy to do, but even something as artificial as writing three good things that happened to you today in a notebook every day has been proven to work extremely well!

Do you believe it is possible for an individual to be truly content most of the time?

Absolutely! Many people are generally happy just because – based on a combination of their upbringing and genes. However, even if by default you were only of average happiness, you can take the 11 deliberate steps mentioned above to make you significantly happier.

Non-sequiturish conclusion: The average academic journal article is read by 7 people, including the author’s mom. Maybe the real experts should be writing blogs 🙂

The Science of Happiness

I recently came across an interesting article on the science of happiness in Harvard Magazine recounting the emergence of “positive psychology” as a field of study, its findings and the emergence of new research areas such as the study of joy instead of happiness.

Many of the findings will be familiar to the readers of my previous posts on happiness. However, a few of the research results were surprising such as the fact that having kids tends to slightly decrease happiness.

Here are two interesting paragraphs:

“Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton (see “The Marketplace of Perceptions,” March-April 2006, page 50) asked thousands of subjects to keep diaries of episodes during a day—including feelings, activities, companions, and places—and then identified some correlates of happiness. “Commuting to work was way down there—people are in a terrible mood when they commute,” Etcoff says. “Sleep has an enormous effect. If you don’t sleep well, you feel bad. TV watching is just OK, and time spent with the kids is actually low on the mood chart.” Having intimate relations topped the list of positives, followed by socializing—testimony to how important the “need to belong” is to human satisfaction.”

“Gilbert reconsiders his grandmother’s advice on how to live happily ever after: “Find a nice girl, have children, settle down.” Research shows, he says, that the first idea works: married people are happier, healthier, live longer, are richer per capita, and have more sex than single people. But having children “has only a small effect on happiness, and it is a negative one,” he explains. “People report being least happy when their children are toddlers and adolescents, the ages when kids require the most from the parents.” As far as settling down to make a living—well, if money moves you into the middle class, buying food, warmth, and dental treatment—yes, it makes you happier. “The difference between an annual income of $5,000 and one of $50,000 is dramatic,” Gilbert says. “But going from $50,000 to $50 million will not dramatically affect happiness. It’s like eating pancakes: the first one is delicious, the second one is good, the third OK. By the fifth pancake, you’re at a point where an infinite number more pancakes will not satisfy you to any greater degree. But no one stops earning money or striving for more money after they reach $50,000.”

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