Have you ever wondered if what you think you know could actually be hindering your happiness? In our enlightening conversation, we discover the dangers of intellectual arrogance and how an obsession with being right can stifle personal growth and joy. We dive into why embracing a broader spectrum of understanding, particularly in the realm of human kindness, could be your ticket to a more fulfilled life.
Imagine transforming your workplace into a hub of positivity simply by altering the way we communicate with each other. This episode is not just talk; we share moving personal experiences and the remarkable effects of assuming positive intent in professional and personal interactions. It's an insightful look into how the choice of our words can either build barriers or bridges to happiness, inspired by the profound lessons from "Solve for Happy." Get ready to walk away with practical tips for fostering a more compassionate and satisfying work environment.
Finally, we take stock of the roots of unhappiness in our daily grind. Is it the environment, or is it our perception? We dissect this question with anecdotes and client stories that reveal the power of perspective in shaping our contentment. There's a duality of choice here—altering our surroundings or altering our mindset towards them. Embrace the unexpected benefits hidden within life's disruptions, and join us as we commit to a journey of wisdom-seeking for a happier existence. Let's move beyond the podcast, applying these insights to our lives, and continue the conversation together.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Have you ever wondered if what you think you know could actually be hindering your happiness? In our enlightening conversation, we discover the dangers of intellectual arrogance and how an obsession with being right can stifle personal growth and joy. We dive into why embracing a broader spectrum of understanding, particularly in the realm of human kindness, could be your ticket to a more fulfilled life.
Imagine transforming your workplace into a hub of positivity simply by altering the way we communicate with each other. This episode is not just talk; we share moving personal experiences and the remarkable effects of assuming positive intent in professional and personal interactions. It's an insightful look into how the choice of our words can either build barriers or bridges to happiness, inspired by the profound lessons from "Solve for Happy." Get ready to walk away with practical tips for fostering a more compassionate and satisfying work environment.
Finally, we take stock of the roots of unhappiness in our daily grind. Is it the environment, or is it our perception? We dissect this question with anecdotes and client stories that reveal the power of perspective in shaping our contentment. There's a duality of choice here—altering our surroundings or altering our mindset towards them. Embrace the unexpected benefits hidden within life's disruptions, and join us as we commit to a journey of wisdom-seeking for a happier existence. Let's move beyond the podcast, applying these insights to our lives, and continue the conversation together.
Connect with us on our LinkedIn page School of Thoughts . We also value your reviews, subscribing, and sharing our podcast "What's On Your Bookshelf?" on Apple and Spotify.
Welcome to what's on your Bookshelf, with your hosts Denise Russo and Samantha Powell.
Speaker 2:
Hi everybody, welcome back. It's another episode of what's on your Bookshelf. This is a life and leadership podcast where we are living out loud the pages of the books on our shelves. My name is Denise Russo, I'm here with my co-host and friend, sam Powell, and we are in the midst of, yet again, another really great book about this quest for living a life of happiness, and the book that we're exploring right now is called Solve for Happy by Mo Gaudet, and we're about five chapters in or so. So we're going to talk today about one five chapters in or so. So we're going to talk today about one of the grand illusions. There are six of them. That's the first part of this book. But before we do that, let me check in with you, sam, today and see how you're doing.
Speaker 1:
I'm doing good yes, I'm happy to be here talking about this. This was an interesting chapter. I feel like every time I read one of these grand illusions, I'm like, oh right, there's just this. I don't have thoughts. This was a really, a really good one, so I'm excited to be talking about it today with you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely so. This, this chapter, is called what you Know, but it's about the illusion that we have of knowledge and so sort of a summary as we get into this. It's about what is truly known, which is the depths of our knowledge. So the deep going, let's say, north to south, the breadth of our knowledge, maybe going east to west, and then what's missing in the middle and why it's important to be happy, and how to stay on track, and what knowledge has to do with happiness. So, if you were to think of some of the things that stood out for you in this chapter, sam, what would you say was a highlight for you?
Speaker 1:
I have a lot of, I have a lot of highlight marks in this book, just because there's, I think, a lot of a lot of good quotes. But I think the way he starts this chapter is a good I don't know. It sets the stage really well. He just says if I had the power to make one change that would leave the most profound and long lasting impact on humankind, I would choose to eliminate arrogance. Specifically, I would remove our obsession with being right, I would erase the illusion of knowledge, which I just like.
Speaker 1:
I read that and I was like, yep, I'm hooked on this chapter because I mean, I think we all go through this journey. I think to me, this is one of those like plateaus you've got to level up. Like if you're working towards I don't know any kind of like life fulfillment, life enlightenment, right, if you're trying to just get to growth, this is a crest you have to peak. You have to let go of the concept, the idea of being right, and I've seen so much suffering in my life because people are so obsessed with being right, like we argue about stuff, we, you know, like we'll damage relationships just because we want to have this security of being right. When it. What does it get you right, like, what's the point of it?
Speaker 1:
I mean, I know I've struggled with this as somebody who just I don't know Like, I can remember multiple instances in my life where this just got shattered and shattered and shattered for me, got shattered and shattered and shattered for me, and it's still. I still get humbled all the time from you know, thinking, I know something and then learning that I don't, you know, and all of that. So I think this is one of those. If you are on a journey of personal growth, if you are on a journey of, like I said enlightenment's the word I'm thinking of but really just improving yourself as a person, this is just to me, this is like one of those plateaus you got to get to and you got to conquer, to really, you know, to really move forward. And I mean that's what these grand illusions really are. Right, it's about busting the grand illusions. You have to do that in order to get happy and don't know this.
Speaker 2:
Just this one really resonated with me it's funny because this episode is probably going to come out, I'm guessing, in the fall ish time frame of the year, maybe, so give or take summer.
Speaker 2:
So that means that when you're listening to this episode, friends, we record these in advance, before they come out.
Speaker 2:
My guess is this is going to be coming out in the hot and heated parts of debates of upcoming elections, and so, for me, when I read this chapter, I started to think about how there is a grand illusion of knowledge of people that are running for office, whether it's in your local community, at the state level or even at the national level, and so one of the things that stood out for me in the chapter was that Mo talks about how imagine if you were having an interview with somebody.
Speaker 2:
So if you were interviewing somebody who claims to be knowledgeable let's say it's a doctor or a professor or some sort of specialist of some sort you would want to be asking them questions to understand, the north to the south and the east to the west, the depth and the breadth of their knowledge, because then you would assess how accurate they were, if they were responsible with their knowledge, if they had more knowledge than somebody else. Like I, think about if you were given a medical diagnosis. Wouldn't you want to make sure that the person you're talking to, as far as your medical team is, has the depth and the breadth? But what he goes on to say is why then do we not interview people about human and kindness? So humankind, or kindness and happiness, and that's what's missing, mm hmm.
Speaker 1:
You know, I think that that's that's. That's absolutely spot on, Right, Like what? What does that really look like? And I love his. He's got a quote in here that says like our conviction that we truly know causes us to suffer. It's the ultimate ignorance, and I love that you know the conviction that we truly know is the ultimate ignorance. Like that to me is. I love that. I want to think that that's so true, right, and are we looking at the right level of knowledge? Are we understanding that in the right way?
Speaker 1:
It's funny that I use the insight timer app, which is just like meditations and things.
Speaker 1:
It's a great like little quick way to do a 30 second meditation or five minute, whatever you want, but the widget on the phone throws like a quote of the day up, and the one today is the highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. And so I think about that, right, Like it's that it's really going beyond a hey, I know these facts, I know this information to truly understanding something like to me, that's the depth and the breadth and looking at the right things. Right, Like looking beyond the hey, this is the limited scope of knowledge that we have in this box of just what we know, yeah, but really looking beyond that to this deeper level of like understanding, getting out of knowledge that we have in this box of just what we know, yeah, but really looking beyond that to this deeper level of like understanding, getting out of knowledge and into understanding, and you know, I thought that was interesting. I laughed that. I saw that today and I was like oh hey that's the quote.
Speaker 2:
That's perfect. And you know, when you think about this part of the chapter which talks about the depth first, I can't get out of my mind, sam, that when we did the episodes on the Coach Wooden book, the one principle that stands out the most for me was to dive deeply into great books. Over all the other principles, that's one that stood out to me because I love to read. I have hundreds of books on the shelf. This entire podcast was built because I recommend books to other people. But what I have found over the year that we've had this blessing and time to be together is that it's in the going deeper that we get the understanding. It's not about the words, it's not about understanding a sentence structure, it's not even just even grasping a paragraph or two. It's about the depth of understanding, how this book can actually be absorbed into your own life and what you can do about it.
Speaker 2:
And so he talks about that in this part of the chapter on the depth of knowledge, where he says there's three kinds of things. One is known knowns, so those are things that you know are true or no exist, or it's things that are in your conscious mind. Then he says there's something called known unknowns things that you know, that you don't know. So maybe like how deep really is the ocean or how far is the farthest star in the sky? I don't know. These are things we know that we don't know. And then there's this tricky one the unknown unknowns the things that are outside of our conscious mind, because we can't even think about it, fathom it, understand it. But that's to show how deep your knowledge could go if you started to discover more than you know today?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, exactly, and he uses this great analogy to talk about, like um, you know newton's laws, for you know motion and you know, like thinking about gravity, like we thought we know how gravity worked and then, as we discovered unknown, unknowns, then we realized, actually, it's not that right, we had this knowledge that we thought for hundreds of years, hey, this is how this works. And then the more we expand, the more we search, the more we look, we realize there's this whole world of stuff we don't even remotely understand, right, like to me. That's why science is fascinating, because we're constantly, constantly discovering unknown, unknowns. And that's the coolest part, it's like who we had no idea, right, this is right here. And and he also uses the like the um, the analogy of like the ocean. The ocean is so big, it's so deep, it's so dark, there's places that, like you know, we just don't know.
Speaker 1:
We don't know what we don't know, and so there's this like arrogance to knowledge and thinking that you know right, and so you kind of have to sit if you really truly want to get into happiness, right, remember that's what we're working towards here, is that you have to get to this level of acceptance that there is a lot more that you don't know than you do know, and you're allowed to learn and to change. And I was watching this TikTok the other day and the guy said that what he thinks is the most powerful words in the English language is I changed my mind. You know somebody who's willing to look at new information, to look at a deeper depth, you know wider breadth, and say, yeah, you know what? Nope, I didn't know that. So now I changed my mind, now I changed my opinion, now I changed my thought process.
Speaker 2:
And that's where happiness lies is being able to sit in that space yeah, yeah, you have to almost have an awakening to understand the breath and what happens throughout this book, and we encourage you to read this book. Scott will put a link for you to be able to buy this book. This guy had to have an awakening to happiness, despite some circumstances and things that were outside of his realm of understanding and knowledge and that illusion of knowledge. And so when he was talking about breath, I like facts and data and little trivia things, and so he was talking about how 96 percent dark matter and dark energy is what this universe is made up of. So, in other words, we only know 4% of the universe, and that's almost incomprehensible to think that outside of the 4% is beyond what we don't know. And then he said even just on Earth alone, 90% of the ocean's volume remains unexplored.
Speaker 2:
And I think I was watching something on maybe history channel or some kind of documentary even about how they're continually finding what they believe are new species of animals. Well, they're probably not new, it's just new to us, right? Just they were unexplored before. And then he said that even inside our own bodies so we went from the universe to the ocean to now just our own human body, ourself is that we only understand the purpose of about three percent of our dna. And he says the rest we call it basically junk. But I think what was interesting about that concept which means that if you're exploring happiness and you don't think you have it, you maybe already do, but it's just unexplored or it's covered up or it's outside of your conscious mind and he even goes on to say that this breadth challenge isn't limited just to science. You know, those are some scientific facts and you were talking about you like science and I like science.
Speaker 2:
But he said what about the emotional side? So, for example, before I talked to you today, you knew that I was out of town and I, but you didn't know what I did, you didn't know who I was with, you didn't know the experience I had, you didn't taste the food that I tasted, you didn't see the culture I was a part of. Nor did I know that, while I was out of town, that you were experiencing things in your own personal body that were changing. And he talks about how, what is going on in the life of somebody else. We sometimes neglect that, and it started to get me thinking about times, sam, that I've had where I've had a challenging conversation with a manager, or maybe even just a co-worker, and if we don't think about the fact that it isn't about us, it's about that person, and we don't know what somebody else may be going through that presents them a certain way that day.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it reminds me of that visual that goes around on the internet where it's like this little tiny dot in this giant sea and it's like what you know about somebody's life versus somebody's whole life. And, yeah, I think that, if you can, you know, if you can accept the fact that you don't know right, you really don't know, and there's so much that you don't know and if you're willing to let go of that and even the things that you might hold as absolute fact, you could learn something tomorrow. We could collectively learn something in that space and allow for that, then you can.
Speaker 1:
You can meet someone with so much more compassion of like, oh my gosh, like I can't believe this person's doing this and behaving this way and saying these things and doing whatever. And it's like what's going on? Like you don't know what's going on in their life. You don't know. You know what's happening. They could be dealing with tragedy and stress and things and odds are. They are right. Like you know, and especially like, if you look at the argument in this book, like you know, he says our default state is happy, but so many things happen around us that cause that to get out of balance. And so, like, if I don't know like, I think if I could come to the table with compassion for people, that just I'm gonna accept.
Speaker 1:
I don't know what's really going on in somebody's life and even if somebody were to sit down, like, right, you sat down and you explained to me all these things are going on in your life. I still don't know I don't walk that. Walk with you, I don't. You know I don't talk that talk with you, you know, I just don't. So I can get closer to understanding because you let me in and you told me, but like I can't get all the way there, and knowing that I can sit in, I think greater compassion for you know the people around me because it's like, yeah, I'm just going to give them the benefit of the doubt I had. It reminds me of gosh, when I was a manager years ago. So it was like probably the first time I was a manager of managers and one of the managers on my team, she it might've been before she became it was like when she was an individual contributor, you contributor becoming a manager or whatever, but she carried this training through our team.
Speaker 1:
We were, we managed, um, like customer success managers, essentially, right, like you know, people who are assigned to customers, supporting customers. And she was like sam, I want to give people a training on assuming positive intent. Right, like so it was for customers. It was, like you know, dealing with people is hard. Dealing with customers is hard, right, because they're bringing all their stuff to your table and you're like fix it, deal with it, make it go away right, there's a thousand things that you're doing. But then that gets really challenging. But she put together this training and I loved it and we used it for years when we would, we trained the whole team on it and then it was part of our onboarding after that.
Speaker 1:
But it was this whole exercise in just assuming that someone has positive intent until all the facts prove to you they don't Right. And it was amazing the shift I saw in the team as we one had that language with each other and two were able to kind of talk about that. It's like, oh, I'm so frustrated this customer's doing this or this person on the team's doing this or whatever. And it's like, well, let's assume they actually are trying to do the right thing. Like what could that look like Right, and reframing that up and changing that? Oh, all they. You know the person knows the person's being a jerk.
Speaker 1:
But it's like, are they right? Like if we, if we challenge that assumption and we say actually they're just trying to do the right thing. It just might not come across that way to you, right, like it really changed the game. It made people a lot happier, in their role too, I think because they were able to I don't know sit in a little more I don't know positive of a space, rather than just assuming every person who called them or sent them an email was like out to get them and make their day terrible. It's like no, they just, they just need help, that's it. Right, like they're just a person with a lot of stress on their plate, you know needing something, and it was one of my favorite trainings and eventually, like as we changed orgs, like somebody got rid of it at some point. But you know, I I thought it was a game changer.
Speaker 2:
I really like what you're sharing about it, because you're talking about language and this word help. I would tell my teams in support across all the different companies I've ever worked for that remember that that is what your role is. People are not just calling you to say, hey, the weather's great today. They're calling you because they have a challenge and they're believing that you have the knowledge the depth and the breadth of the knowledge, to solve their problem. This book is called Solve for Happy, so it's intending that there's a problem with people needing to find happiness. But one of the things that the author even shares is that sometimes we create our own barriers or obstacles to happiness simply by the words that we use to describe something. And he even says things like, for example, if you said to me I'm having a hard day, how do I know what hard means to you? I'm giving the impression in my own brain about, well, hard, hard day to me means this. So I wonder if Sam is experiencing this thing that I call hard. Or if you said you know, oh, this customer is being a jerk, well, my mind would default to say when did I have a call with a customer who was frustrated or angry or belligerent or whatever. Or on the flip side, how many times have we been on the call where the customer says I was dealing with the person that reports to you and they're dumb and they don't know what they're talking about? And actually they do know what they're talking about. Was something missed in the communication?
Speaker 2:
Because words can sometimes cripple our way towards being able to have this illusion that we have knowledge or that we assume people have all the knowledge that they need, but then he goes on to talk about real knowledge. So he uses many examples in the book from his son. So remember, if you, if you've been following along, you know that the whole point of this book was that this man is on a quest to solve for happy, based on a really tragic situation where his son, at the age of 21, was taken from him in a tragic accident, inside of a hospital actually and yet his happiness came through the experiences of him thinking about the life his son lived up until the point where he was taken from the earth. And so he talks about this one story where, when his son was little maybe around 11, he would bring in this useless facts kind of book, and Vincent used to love these kinds of books. Every year he'd asked for them for Christmas, and I don't know if he actually ever read all the way through.
Speaker 2:
But there was just something fascinating about these useless facts that you could just maybe laugh about or think, oh wow, I didn't really ever know about that. But the author goes on to say that wasn't it interesting for him at the older age, when his son passed away, for him to think of how important that knowledge was for him as a young man? And he said luckily, my eagerness to learn overpowered my ego's desire to be right. And he was talking about in that part of the chapter that his son, learning these facts and what real knowledge was about at the young age, made him become the young adult that he became before he passed away. And that was a lesson his father was, of course, many years older than him ended up learning just by looking back at what his son went through at a young age.
Speaker 1:
And I love that quote. I highlighted that one too because I think that that's that's really the key in this chapter is that if your eagerness to learn can overpower your ego's desire to be right like, therein lies happiness. Right, therein lies one of the big barriers to happy. If you sit in that ego we talked about ego in a previous chapter right Like we talked about self and letting go of that illusion. So if you can let that go and if you can let go of this need to be right and sit into curiosity and sit into I just want to learn, you know you've taken down a huge, huge barrier to success because, yeah, we just don't know a lot of times and the things we think we know we really don't. We sit down and sit down and really look at it. And I love the thing you said about words too.
Speaker 1:
That part was really interesting to me because he's talking about how we're limited by our language and you know, for anybody that's studied multiple languages, you'll run into words. Or if anybody who's you know multilingual, you run into words. That a think about that like we're limited to perspective we grew up and we're limited to the language we grew the languages we grew up with. Right, because you're limited to the perception of all the people that created that language and why they did and what they did.
Speaker 1:
And there are just some work, like there are some things you try to describe in english, for example, that like you can't, but maybe there's a word in japanese or in german, or in you in Spanish or you know some language that is fits that perfectly. It's one word that describes the whole sensation and things like that. And so there's just all this, there's so much limiting stuff, and so I think that if you can understand that, then you can get to that place where, like, you can let it go right, Like just let go of the ego, let go of that desire to be right, because the amount that you don't know so much, so much bigger than what you than what you do.
Speaker 2:
I had a manager once I think I said this on a different episode, and the manager this was from a job I had years ago he said your only job is to make people happy. That's your job. How do you measure that? And he couldn't. And I thought to myself I can't make somebody else be happy. And yet that was his thought about what my job was supposed to be. And I led a group that was like they had direct line managers, but I was the manager of the programs and the process, and so somehow my job was, if they're happy, that they'd be productive. And so the manager was equating their happiness to their productivity. I suppose I don't think that's how that works.
Speaker 1:
I don't think so either, because I can be super productive, and that doesn't necessarily make me happy.
Speaker 2:
Well, here's the funny thing, too. Like that manager sometimes was a pretty unhappy person, so I was thinking to myself well then, how productive are you? But that's another, maybe different topic, a different podcast for a different day, so, but it goes along with this chapter as well, which is about the difference between knowledge and wisdom, the thought forms that cause you to be unhappy. Then you'll realize they mostly stem from attachments to illusions and false beliefs, which I thought was super interesting, because I've been having a lot of calls with people lately clients, and I think you have as well with people that are very unhappy. The people are unhappy with circumstances, or they're unhappy with their surroundings, or they're unhappy with their situations. Or they're unhappy with their surroundings, or they're unhappy with their situations, or they're unhappy with their jobs, or their spouse, or their managers, or their friends, or their kids, or whatever. They're unhappy.
Speaker 2:
The question, though, that he talks about here, though, is is that an illusion? Are you unhappy with your job? And if you are, if you really are, then why are you staying there? I remember talking to a client just recently, sam, where the person was so unhappy, and the person was telling me that they had to go through this exercise every day to prep themselves mentally to have a conversation with their manager without bursting into tears. So I asked the person what is keeping you in that environment? And is the environment truly an unhappy environment? Because maybe it isn't. That's what challenged me in this particular chapter. It got me even thinking about my own personal experiences when I think back to my career, that you can instantly think of either the polar spectrums of both sides right, the very best people you've ever worked with and the very worst people you've ever worked around. But it's somewhere in the middle. That's the truth, right?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, definitely, Definitely. That's an interesting thought process around the questioning the is the environment really the problem? Right, Because sometimes that's what you know, we do, like, we think, and I, you know, when I coach people, I tell people you can, either you can do one of two things. You can change the environment, right, get out, do something that makes it different, whatever, right, change the environment. Or you can change your relationship with the environment. Those are your only two options, always, so you know. And then what you're talking about is really that second thing, right, Like, does the environment actually change? And sometimes, yes, and I think in today's world, especially in today's corporate world, there's a lot of yes, the environment needs changed, but sometimes, right, like, we can't control all of that all the time, but we can't control our relationship with it.
Speaker 1:
You know, I was just talking with a client yesterday who is in a bad environment and probably, you know, needs to get out of that environment, and so the question that I asked that person was what can you do while you're still here to change and take control of your relationship with this environment? Right, what are you going to do to protect yourself while you're working, like, while we're working on that resume while we're getting everything ready for you to make pivots, make moves, because you can't write changes in an instant, right Like I know. I know somebody who did quit on the spot and walk out the door, but I know one person who did that right Like that's the dream we all dream up sometimes in these situations. But most people can't do, you know, can't afford to do something like that right. There's not enough privilege there to be able to do that, and so it's what are you gonna do while you're in the environment? But questioning that, is it really the environment or is it you is an important question, really important question.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
And in the book he talks about how, maybe, just maybe, you need a nudge, or, I think, a shove, and so, um, a nudge. What he's talking about is that if you know you need some sort of a change, but you don't put yourself in a situation where you have the time to think, to process, this is why coaching is so important. This is why everyone listening to this podcast if you don't already have a coach, I strongly invite you, encourage you, implore you to find a coach that is qualified, that can help you. We'll help you. If we can't help you, we know hundreds of coaches around the world We'll find somebody to help you because maybe you just need a nudge.
Speaker 2:
And so he tells the story how there was a situation one time where there was a woman who was 25 years old at the time and she was on a train and she was delayed for hours. And you can imagine the scenario. You're probably frustrated. It's maybe hot. She was trying to get somewhere and now the place she was going, it was going to be delayed it. It was frustrating. It wasn't part of her plan. She probably had a plan. She got on that train thinking she was going somewhere, only to know that things were being disrupted, but it was during that delay that she ended up coming up with a story and while she was on the plane, this store, this train, excuse me the story came to life. She wrote it down. She waited for years to write more than even three chapters of this story, but it started to then be put into the back burner. She had life take over. Her job was back to normal, she wasn't on a delayed train anymore. She was getting caught up in the things that were maybe causing unhappiness. She ended up doing some other things and moving around, but she then got nudged and it turns out the lady was the woman that wrote Harry Potter. Yeah, and she wouldn't. That would have never happened. And I can't say that it was only the train ride Right, like there's probably multiple things that led up to the train ride, but it was that train ride of being delayed that caused her to have the space, outside of the whirlwind of busyness, for her to write it.
Speaker 2:
The same thing I can't say the same thing exactly happened to me, because I have not nearly sold clearly not even one iota of what she sold in her books with my own book, but the same thing happened to me, sam, you know my story. I wrote my book 12 days for four years, didn't do anything about it. And my friend kept saying to me year after year Denise, when are you going to publish the book, denise? When is the book coming out? Denise, when are you going to take some action and put this book into the hands of people that need to read it? I didn't do anything about it.
Speaker 2:
But then I had a nudge, and the nudge for me was when my friend Wendy was diagnosed with cancer. And I thought you know what, if my friend Wendy is looking at life through the positive lens of happiness, despite her circumstances, then what am I doing? Just sitting around and doing nothing? And so what the book says is that sometimes, when you stray off your track, which is your track of purpose, perhaps maybe you just need a little nudge, and a nudge doesn't feel good, right, like I said, I call it a shove. A shove doesn't feel good, but maybe you need that to be able to get back on track, to figure out what you actually need to do, whether it means you need to erase something from your life and the book talks about that or whether you need to have something new come into your life, or whether you need to look at what you just said, which is not looking at things as what we call bad or good. There just is, life just is.
Speaker 1:
Yep, exactly. And you know he says pay attention to those nudges, right, those things that feel like setbacks that you know to be bad things, because maybe they're pushing you like setbacks that you know to be bad things, because maybe they're pushing you in a direction that you need to go right, like that's. That's, I mean my, my grandmother talks about that all the time. She and I were just talking on the phone earlier this week and she, um, she was talking about that. She was like, oh, you know, I really feel like, you know, you're being nudged in this direction, you're being pushed for something great. And she talked about how she had girlfriends of hers have done the same thing. She's talking about a cousin of mine, she's talking about whatever. And she was like you know that I think it's paying attention to those, you know, those little pushes that we get and really understanding that. And you know.
Speaker 1:
So this, this chapter, was super interesting. We've been talking here for a while about. I think we went a little over on our normal time we try to do because there just there was so much goodness in this. But I think, like, right to me, the thing that I walk away from this chapter with is the, the idea that we know and that we are right, is an illusion that stands in the way of our happiness. So if you can let go of being right, if you can let go of I know something absolutely, then you can balance out this. You know equation for happiness, you can get to a place where you have space for happiness. Because when you, when you know something absolutely and you have no room to learn or to think or to you know, move around that and you've got this ego around being correct. Move around that and you've got this ego around being correct. You're blocking your own space, you're blocking the whole path towards happiness. And so, for me, I think that's the big thing I'll carry out of this chapter.
Speaker 2:
What about for you, denise? I think the thing that I take away mostly from this chapter is the fact that it's called the illusion of knowledge, and so we put these definitions around, what we think will make us happy, based on something we know. But how much could we learn about our lives by kind of releasing that? And maybe there's something that brings about this sense of happiness that isn't just an elusive thing you chase after, it's inside of you, but you have to get rid of any race, all that junk that's around it, so that you can get to the core of it. So I think for me, what I took away was the fact that when I maybe I'm sensing consciously a moment where I feel what I would define as unhappy, that maybe it's not really real, and to go back to the source of what that experience is like and to remember that happiness is within and that you can find that. And I know you mentioned about being out of time. So I'll sum it up by just saying that next week is probably my favorite chapter, because it is about the grand illusion of time and about how time works.
Speaker 2:
So I hope you've enjoyed your time with us today. I have always enjoyed every conversation I've had with you, sam. I always learn so much. I'm so glad we went into the depths of not only knowledge but wisdom today, so I'm looking forward to next week. Friends, if you're listening to the show, it would really help us if you would not only subscribe, but if you are listening on a platform where you'd be willing to give us some feedback, that'd be wonderful. And if you'd be willing to share it with friends that could benefit from this. We're only not even halfway through this book, yet almost halfway through this book, and we're maybe halfway through the year. This entire year is dedicated to happiness, so I hope for you, only happiness, and we'd like to thank you once again for being here with us today on another episode of what's on your bookshelf.