You Have to Make Happiness Your Priority - Naval Rakivant

the Joe Rogan experience there's also these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind of giving

themselves excuses or giving themselves in unsurmountable obstacles insurmountable victim mentality yeah somebody else's fault it's my sellers

fault it's the system's fault yeah those people are sinking I feel bad for them I want to shake them out of it and say actually you can get out of it you just have to stop thinking it's everybody's alter the perspective yeah it's so

difficult for people to do it's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach approach reality itself at the end of the day I do think even despite what I said earlier life is really a

single-player game it's all going on in your head you know whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality both from what risks you take and what actions you perform but also

just everyday experience of reality if you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone you're like I don't like that person because their skin color I don't like that she's she's not attractive that guy's fat this

person's a loser oh who put this in my way you know the more you judge the more you're gonna separate yourself and you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself I'm better than that but then you're gonna

feel lonely and then you're just gonna see negativity everywhere the world just reflects your own feelings back at you reality is neutral reality has no judgments to a tree there's no concept

of right or wrong or good or bad right you're born you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds and then you die yeah and how you choose to interpret that is up to you you do have

that choice so this is what I meant that happiness is a choice if you believe it's the choice then you can start working on it and I can't tell you how to find it because use your own conditionings that are making you

unhappy so you have to uncondition yourself it's just like I can't fix your eating habits for you can give some general guidelines but you got to go through the hard habit-forming of how to eat right but you have to believe it's

possible and it is absolutely possible I was miserable I'm happy as a clam it's not just the money I got there before the money you got happy before the money mostly yeah how did you get happy before the money I started getting older you

know I just realized like life is short I'm gonna die again try right right in my ways yeah well Confucius had a great saying that you know every man has two lives and the

second starts when he realizes he has just one Wow and I read that it was one of those book dropping lines you know it's like mic drop Confucius had a lot

of mic drops that's a crazy one that was a great one or another one is next time you get sick you know because everybody gets sick every now and then it's like a happy person once ten thousand things a

sick person just wants one thing right so it's your it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace your happiness have desires you're a biological creature that stands

up and says I can do something I I move I resist I live but just be very careful of your desires this is the oldest most trite wisdom desire is suffering that's

what it means right every desire you have is an access where you will suffer so just don't focus on more than one desire at a time the universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one

thing and you focus on that you'll get it but everything else you gotta let go did you make a gradual shift to happiness or was it a radical change it's ongoing its gradual every day

you're happier today than you were a month ago yeah allegedly yeah yeah I'm very happy these days deliriously so it's actually hard for me to hang out

with normal people oh really so you you've made a significant shift over the period of like how many years about eight years eight years

yeah Wow and is this something that you've pursued through certain books or is it just like you you've made an understanding or gained an understanding in your own mind and then started

pursuing it based on that understanding yeah it's very very personal it's basically you have to decide it's a priority and then I tried every hack I possibly could I used to you know I

tried all the I tried meditation I tried witnessing you know I even tried a missus all right just to see what it would feel like how did it feel it was it turned me from a pessimist to an optimist but I didn't like the physical

side effects nor did I want to be in a drug for sustained basis mmm so I dropped it and I thought it'd turn you into an opt yes at the time I used to be a pessimist yeah I started doing things like I would

start looking at the you know in every moment and everything that happens you can look on the bright side of something right and so I used to do that forcibly and then I trained it until I became second nature so for example like a

friend of my wife's was over and she when we were dating and she did all these photos she took like hundreds of photos and then she sends them all to us and my immediate reaction was like why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my

phone I don't need hundreds of photos have some judgment that's my immediate reaction and then I could say actually how nice of her she sent me hundreds of photos I can pick the one that I like right there are two ways of seeing

almost everything there are few things that are like high suffering so you can't do that other than just saying well this is a teacher right but I slowly work through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the

positive and not second nature to me I also realized that like what you want is you want to clear minds you want to let go of thoughts happy thoughts disappear out ahead automatically very easy to let

go of them negative thoughts linger so if you interpret the negative the positive and everything very quickly you let it go right you let it go much faster okay simple hacks get more

sunlight right learn to smile more learn to hug more these things actually released serotonin in Reverse they aren't just outward signals of being happy they're actually feedback loops to being happy spend more time in nature

you know these are obvious watch your mind watch your mind all day long watch what it does not judge it and I try to control it but you can meditate 24/7 meditation is not a sit down close your

eyes activity meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and say why am I having that thought does that serve me anymore is that conditioning from when I

was 10 years old like for example I'm getting ready for this podcast you got ready I didn't all right good I did but I did I did I couldn't help it and what

happened was the few days leading up to this my mind was just running and normally my mind is pretty calm it was just running and running and running and every thought I would have I would imagine me saying it to you my

brain couldn't help but rehearse what what is doing is just rehearsing all the time to talk to you and I was even rehearsing rehearsed telling you about the rehearsal mmm is all play

better games and I was just like shut up stop it what is going on and it took me a while to figure out oh yeah you know what it is when I was a kid in Queens and I had no money and I had nothing and

I needed to save myself the way I got out was by sounding smart not being smart sounding smart that was the skill I perfected so I am hardwired

to always rehearse things so I will sound smart it's a disease it keeps me from being happy so but when you see that when you realize that when you understand something then it naturally

calms you down so after that I stopped rehearsing as much Wow but it's still a trained habit that is a really interesting point that you want to sound

smart that that many people do that and especially young people when you see someone who is smart or someone who appears smart they say smart things you kind of want to sound smart I want

people to think about me the same way I think about that person that is my disease that isn't my feeling is what clutters my mind I the thing I have to ask myself now is if I can would I still

be interested in learning this thing if I couldn't ever tell anybody about it that's how I know it's real that's how I know it's something I actually want that's a common thing though I know I

suffered from that when I was young the desire to sound smart that's it's very it's very common well all of us start

out you know every everything you're the winner now in your life you were to lose it's because you were a loser at some point right if if you had gotten all the girls if you had all the money if you

had everything you want you were good-looking and in junior high or high school you wouldn't have done anything with your life mm-hmm and you would have peaked early it's like the Bruce Springsteen glory days song right you're too married your high school sweetheart

you'd be living in your hometown you know you'd be a manager at the local McDonald's whatever the dream job you had thank God we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young right or we would be trapped in that so you have to

be able to break out of where you came from