Transcription
Over the last two years, I've interviewed more than a thousand older people in 35 countries, asking them about their secrets to living a more fulfilling life. Now, I've shared brief snippets of some of those interviews with you, but I have personally listened to every single second of every interview. So today, I want to share three things that these thousand-plus interviews have taught me about what it takes to live a more fulfilling life. Okay, lesson one.
One of the greatest questions that I've been able to learn from gets almost exactly the same answer from people of all ages all over the world. In fact, 85% of people that I ask this question—what is one thing that when you were younger you put a lot of importance on but as we get older you realize wasn't that important—respond with this answer: caring too much about what other people think. Care a little less about what other people think of you; that was a lot more important to me when I was younger. Stop giving a what people think, stop giving a what you drive, stop giving about how other people make you feel. It actually happens so often now that I start giving my team a specific look whenever we both hear it. There's the look. Let's imagine this as a study: statistics from over a thousand interviews show that 85% of respondents believe that the greatest thing we worry about too much is the opinion of others. Now let's listen to some of their reasons as to why they say this is true. Pleasing other people—I did put importance on it when I was younger, just because it was a psychological kind of embedded way of being—and I realized that's not really a satisfying way to live. Like I was on The Joe Rogan podcast, one of my sisters said to me, "Do not read the comments," and they were thousands of comments; people were saying like, "I want her dead. Can somebody kill her please? I want her dead," or they said everything, and they said, "Oh, I love her. I hate her," and everything in between, and I laughed at it. This is ridiculous. I was really straight talking about business and the restaurant business, and people want me dead and they have a lot of opinions—good, bad, and the ugly—but Joe Rogan will say this: you don't see LeBron James in the comment section making comments. Let me see your life. It's obvious that just about everyone, to some extent, cares about what others think. This is why we're so careful about our dating profiles, our social media profiles, what we say, and how we say things. But the truth is that the opinions of others are nothing more than an obstacle that impedes you from becoming the person that you want to be. You may think that so many people spend time thinking about you and judging your every action, but the truth is that no, nobody likes you more than they like themselves; they'd rather spend time worrying about their own problems than worrying about yours.
Now, once I heard these answers enough and I understood this, I asked myself, what would my life look like if I eliminated my concern for what people think of me? Would I be happier? Now I'm 25 years old, so imagine if I just say it and do what I want regardless of people's opinions at this age. What would my life look like when I'm 50? How would I feel? And I encourage you to ask the same thing to yourself. Lesson number two.
Let's start with these reflections that I personally will never forget. A lot of people my age feel very lost in life; they feel like it's very hard to navigate their life, to figure out what they want to do. What would be your advice to those people? How do they figure their life out or piece it together? "Wow, I'm Saon, and I'm uh, I feel very much like you do. I never really had any uh, major goal; never really had uh, that kind of a priori list." Do you regret that, not having a specific Big Goal? "At times, I I I I felt I I should have had some goals, you know, that were more explicit, because then you can, you know, put your efforts at achieving it. Sort of think like, well, maybe if I if I had had them I might have actually achieved them, which it is what it is. Goals are incredibly underrated." Now what I've discovered is that people who wind up growing old and happy are people who have a clear direction with their decisions in life. Those who didn't take the time to figure out their direction ended up with regrets and a lot of "I wish I would have…" Is there something specific—a big mistake you've made or a big regret you have that you learned a valuable lesson from? "No, no, nothing. Everything was perfect the way it was, because it took me to this moment." No? "Is there something specific?" "No." "Didn't worry about money, health, women, anything?" "No." "You didn't worry about anything?" "No." "Are you the most Zen person in the world?" "Well, I'm I'm happy whatever I did in my life, and I'm very very happy." So I took the advice from these peaceful interviewees and decided to start journaling about my life, asking questions like: Who am I? What do I want? How do I get what I want? Am I doing the right thing? What should I stop doing? Recently, I've taken all of the knowledge and advice I've learned in these interviews and created a goal-setting journal. This journal has four sections: self-analysis, goal setting, goal tracking, and daily journaling. Every page in it is unique and based on years of research in the real world with older people who know the secrets to living a more fulfilling life. Now we've only made a limited batch of these and don't intend to sell it again. I really made it for those of you who want to explore goal setting and the questions that will guide you towards living your most fulfilling life. So get yours before they run out by clicking the link below. Okay, let's go into lesson number three.
So based on a thousand interviews that I've done with older people, I've discovered there's actually a pattern that explains why most of us are unhappy. So as it turns out, there are really two moments in life when we happen to be the happiest: the first is in our very early 20s. Life is good, responsibilities are low, and the world is there for the taking. But the second period is actually in your early 60s. Your kids get older, you start giving up control over things that used to mess with you mentally, like caring about what other people think about you, and you realize that the end is closer than the beginning. But in the middle, from your mid-20s to your early 60s, your levels of happiness drop significantly, and this is primarily because of work, your career, responsibilities, relationships, and I think most of all, reality setting in. Those dreams that you had when you were younger don't seem so feasible anymore, and because of that, life gets quite hard. Now I want to emphasize this because there needs to be a reform on the way that we think about our capabilities. Schools have been pressuring us into jumping into jobs we know we won't like because they're socially acceptable, but is it worth spending your entire life doing something that makes you unhappy? I was working a 9-to-5, well more like a 7-to-3, when I first stepped into that job. Three weeks later, a coworker had passed away, and that coworker had been working there their entire life. They were a handful of years away from retirement; they'd accumulated all their sick days, all of their vacation days; they were ready, ready to claim that pension of theirs that they worked so hard for, and then when they passed away, they didn't cash out on any of that; they didn't take the time away; they didn't travel with their partner or their family, and I just thought, what was that all for? There isn't anything necessarily wrong with having a 9-to-5 if that's for you, but if you're not actually enjoying the very finite moments you have on this planet—which I promise you are very finite and are even more finite than you think they are—then what's it all for? This point brings me back to the first point, where understanding that what society thinks or says about you has absolutely no relevance—that is a paramount fact you have to understand to live a more fulfilling life. And the connection is my way of telling you that after listening to a thousand-plus interviews, if I've learned anything, it has helped me realize that we're all the same. It doesn't matter where we're from, what language we speak, how old we are; everybody wants to have more time to do things that they love with people that they love, and the way we think of ourselves is a direct result of the way we will end up caring about how the world sees us. So if you have one takeaway from this video, it's to do the thing. Time will pass; the sun will rise and the sun will set every single day, regardless of if you're doing the things you want to be doing or not, so just do it. Nobody really cares, and you only have one chance to seize this life. Thanks for watching, and make sure to grab your copy of our goal-setting journal before they run out by clicking the link below. See you next week.