Moment 93 - A Happiness Secret You Need To Know: Scott Galloway

00:02there was a big smile on the front of your book yeah part of the reason why you put that what looks like a smiley face on it is because because of this arc of happiness that you describe yeah that was quite surprising to me what would you mean by an arc of happiness well across across almost every culture the correlation between age and happiness is a smile So zero to kind of 25 is beer, Star Wars, making out, prom, college football or Premier League football.

00:33Zero to 25 is usually pretty happy. 25 to 45 is what I call the shit gets real years. You realize that distinct to what your parents or your uni told you, you're not going to have a fragrance named after you or be a member of parliament. You have kids. You have economic stress. Someone you love a great deal gets sick and dies. your parents, right? Life gets very hard, very fast, 25 to 45. And generally speaking, these are the least happy years. And then something wonderful happens, usually in your late 40s or early 50s. And that is you start recognizing the finite nature of life. Maybe you have some economic security, maybe you've established relationships, maybe you have these really wonderful things that are less awful, that look, smell, and feel like you called kids.

01:18You realize that life is short. You start finding appreciation. I don't know if you remember this, Steve. Do you remember going out with your parents and your mom and your mom would like, a salad would come and she'd stop the table and say, look at how beautiful the salad is. Or just admire the flowers. And you used to think as a kid, like, what the fuck? And when you realize it's so weird when you turn into your, I stopped outside my house, there's a garden and I just couldn't stop marveling at the garden.

01:45The garden's here. I've never seen anything like it. We have this garden across from us in the park. And I'm like, who are the gnomes that come out at night and manicure this thing so perfectly? And I'm not into botany or horticulture. And I can't stop marveling. I wouldn't have done that in my 27-year-old self. But I do it at my 57. I find you find joy in new things. You find joy in the mundane as you get older. And you get happier. And the happiest generation, the happiest age cohort is the cohort that should be the least happy because they're not healthy is old people.

02:19So the learning here is that if you wake up at 35 and you have a couple of kids and you have a spouse or you have a job, you think, shit, this is hard. I'm not that happy. Recognize that's part of the journey and just keep on keeping on. Happiness waits for you in most instances. So happiness is absolutely a smile. And so I think it's helpful just to know that, That as you move into your income earning years, as you move into your mating and child rearing years and the depth of work and your parents start aging, it's stressful and it's hard.

02:55And if you're unhappy or feel unhappy at times, that is normal. That's part of the journey. And for me, it was helpful to read that because I'm looking forward to all the happiness that's kind of coming my way and I can feel it as you get older. You just start finding joy in weird places. When was the pits of your arc? in your life? When were your hardest years as it relates to happiness? Well, losing my mom was tough for me. But I think that the pit for me, you're an entrepreneur, the highs are really high and the lows are really low. The closest I can equate it to is having a business like having a kid. You conceive the thing, it looks, smells and feels like you.

03:40and when it does well, it's just like when your kid scores a goal or is doing great or seems happy, there's just no joy like that. When something comes, you have your world of work, you have your world of friends and you have kids, you don't have kids, you don't have to sleep, but you'll find this out. When something goes wrong with one of your kids, the whole universe shrinks to what is wrong with your kid. I mean, nothing else matters and you just can't sleep.

04:01You're stressed, you're upset, you feel failure on a cosmic level because this instinct that pours over us is if your kid is failing, you have failed on a more cosmic level because you haven't been able to protect that kid. It's the same way with a business. So when your business fails, it's impossible to remove yourself from that failure. My lowest moment probably professionally was in the Great Financial Recession of 2008. In 99, I was a young man and was wealthy on paper. I'd started several e-commerce companies. I didn't realize most of it was not my fault, that it was the market.

04:36and by the end of 2000, I was broke. I lost everything through the dot-com crash. Clawed my way back to some level of economic security in 2007, smacked again in 2008, lost almost everything. And then my young son or my oldest had the poor judgment to come marching out on my girlfriend. So I was broke and I had a son, a newborn. And a combination of the disappointment professionally where I was now 40 years old and wasn't economically where I thought it would be was really upsetting and disappointing. And then the stress, when you're a dude with no spouse or kids, you can kind of dance between the raindrops. If you need to, you can sleep on a couch. I always knew I could make a living. I could support myself. But living in New York, having what felt like economic failure, business failure, and a kid, and it's like, okay, my failures are now this kid's failures. That was really stressful. It was also very motivating.

05:36You know, I'd made some money. So I had made enough money to live kind of a fake wealthy life. I had nice clothes, a nice apartment. I could go to St. Bart's. I had just enough money to give the illusion of success. But there's no faking it when you have kids. This person's dependent upon you. I was living in New York. It's impossible not to make a good living. in New York with kids. And so that was wildly stressful. It was like, okay, this is no longer about me. When I fail economically, I'm failing as a species. I'm failing as a dad. That was a rough time. 2008, 2009 was rough, but it was also very motivating because I got very serious and started working very hard. And again, I didn't see my kids. We had another kid two and a half years later, I didn't see much of my kids until the age of five. I, you know, I try and get home for bath time, but I was very focused on getting my household back on economic firm footing again.

06:35But that was very stressful. That's your biggest sort of professional failure. What about your biggest personal pit? Pit. And what did it teach you? Oh, I don't know. I think, are both your parents still alive? Yeah. Okay. So one of them will get sick and die. And that is the two things I found that kind of turn you into an adult are when you lose one of your parents. It's just the harshness of it is so unthinkable. As a species, we have an inability to wrap our head around death for good reason.

07:12Otherwise, we'd all just be freaked out and not willing to take risks and not hunt animals for fear they might kill us, not take risks, never go outside. So we purposely can't understand it. We can't imagine it. You can't imagine that this person is gonna be gone and it is over. That is devastating. And it also just brings this harshness of life, like really present in front of you. But at the same time, it creates tremendous perspective that, wow, the mortality rate's 100%.

07:43My kids are gonna have the same tragedy when I die. And I think it can't liberate you and realize that, okay, if I feel embarrassed, if I feel scared about risks, if I'm beating myself up over a mistake I made, you know what? It really doesn't matter that much. You should be kinder to yourself. You should be more forgiving. There's great work by my colleague at NYU, Adam Alter, on palliative carry, where he surveys people who are weeks from the end.

08:10And they have a lot of regrets. They wish they'd lived the life they want to live, whether it was being more open about their sexuality, being who they wanted to be with, going to the career they wanted to go with. They were living their lives for other people is a huge regret or society. They wish they'd stayed in better contact with friends. But more than anything, their number one regret is they wish they'd been less harsh on themselves. And that is, again, life isn't about what happens to you.

08:36It's how you respond to what happens to you. And when someone dies and you realize the finite nature of life and that we all have the same incoming, I think it's liberating. Because what you realize is when you say something stupid at a board meeting, even when you have a business fail, when you pick a stock and it gets cut in half in two weeks and you're just hating on yourself. When you say something stupid at a party, when you say something unkind, unwittingly, and you're just like, Jesus, what was I thinking?

09:00And you're just beating yourself up. Realize it's the person you're worried about, what they think of you, your situation, it's gonna go really fast and it's gonna be over. And all you're gonna have is the people that miss you. So you need to forgive yourself and you need to realize what feels important in the moment isn't that important. And I found it very liberating. I was devastated losing a parent and it was really my only parent. But at the same time, it just gave me a lot of perspective.

09:32And then I think the second moment in your life where you start to grow up is when you have a kid. Because up until that moment, and I'm naturally a selfish person, it comes very easily to me, but it's the first time in your life you're more concerned with someone else's wellbeing. and it's a strange sense to want someone else, to be more concerned about someone else's well-being than yours, I mean, truly more concerned. And it's somewhat liberating.

09:59When I was your age, on Friday, I'd start getting stressed like, what fabulous people am I hanging out with? What amazing thing am I doing? How can I hang around more interesting and hotter people? How can I have better experiences, sex, more sex with hotter people, make more money, make more money? Now it's like, okay, we got soccer practice Saturday morning. We got a play date. It's all of a sudden just about them. I mean, it's literally just about them.

10:24And for the first few years, that takes some adapting. But what you find, I find it's relaxing now to be more focused on someone else. I find is relaxing and rewarding instead of just all you all the time, right? Right. So losing someone and gaining someone, I think, are the kind of key moments where you sort of grow up. I mean, losing your parent is something that happens to everybody. The economic strain I have, most people would pray for. But personal troughs, I've been really blessed so far.