The key ideas

The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

Neil Pasricha, 2016

We're used to thinking happiness comes after success: after the degree, the promotion or buying a house. Neil Pasricha spent years training the leaders of big companies, saw that hardly any of them were happy, and decided the usual pattern was upside down. He boils a happy life down to the equation "want nothing + do anything = have everything" and unpacks it in nine simple secrets.

Who it is for

For anyone who achieves a lot but doesn't get any happier for it. And for everyone tired of the endless race towards the next goal who wants simple rules for every day.

The problem isn't that we have negative thoughts. The problem is that we think we shouldn't have them.

A letter to a child not yet born

When Neil Pasricha found out he was going to be a father, he sat down to write a letter. He wanted to leave his future child everything he had understood about living a happy life, in case he didn't get the chance to tell them himself. The book grew out of that letter, and its dedication says just that: "To my baby. I wanted you to have this, in case I don't get the chance to tell you myself."

Before that, Pasricha spent more than ten years teaching leaders. He graduated from Harvard Business School, was in charge of leadership development at Walmart, interviewed billionaires and worked directly with the leaders of the largest company in the world. And gradually he noticed something strange: hardly any of them were happy. They all complained that there wasn't enough time, that stress was weighing on them, and that other people's advice pulled them in different directions. And then he admitted to himself that he wasn't happy either.

Pasricha boiled everything he had learned down to an equation: want nothing, do anything, and you'll have everything. "Want nothing" here doesn't mean laziness but being content with what you already have. "Do anything" means the freedom to do what matters to you. And "have everything" means being happy. Each part of the equation has three secrets, nine in all.

Ahead are a blog that turned joy into a chase for numbers, an old man who cured schoolkids of teasing him, the Harvard arithmetic of salaries, and a simple question about Saturday morning. Pasricha explains his ideas with hand-drawn diagrams, and you can put each idea to use this very week.

A happiness diagram drawn backwards

From childhood we're shown the same diagram: study hard, get great grades, and happiness will come. Later the same thing is said about work and promotions. Pasricha notes that nobody ever gets to happiness this way. Once we reach a goal, we simply set the next one: after a degree you need a master's, after the director's job you need the vice president's. Happiness keeps moving further away.

Pasricha's advice sounds like a reshuffle of the same diagram: happiness comes first. When you feel good, you move more and connect with people more often. Your work gets better as a result, and success follows.

So why is this so hard? Pasricha suggests a thought experiment. Imagine standing in the middle of empty land with no houses, no hospitals, not even clothes. Our species lived like that for almost its entire history, and all that time the brain was fighting to survive. It hasn't changed since, and it still looks for threats. We still run on that program: the doctor says your blood sugar is fine but your iron is a bit low, and the whole conversation is about the iron.

Everyone has bad thoughts, and Pasricha considers that normal. What matters more is this. The psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky calculated that life circumstances, meaning work, health and income, account for only about 10% of our happiness. The rest depends on how we look at the world and what we do.

So Pasricha gathered seven simple habits and promises that any one of them, kept up for two weeks in a row, will make a person happier. For example, three brisk half-hour walks a week, or a short list of three to five good things that happened during the week.

Read in Livria

About the author

Neil Pasricha was born in Canada, graduated from Harvard Business School and led leadership development at Walmart Canada. He is known for 1000 Awesome Things, his blog about small joys, and for his books on happiness. He founded the Institute for Global Happiness.

All books by this author: Neil Pasricha

Terms from the book

  • Ikigai
  • Okinawa
  • Wilson
  • Walmart
  • Lyubomirsky
  • Harvard
  • Bismarck
  • Epictetus
  • Intrinsic motivation
  • Seinfeld
  • Ware
  • Extrinsic motivation: The desire to do something for an outside reward: money, grades, praise or a place in a ranking.
  • Amabile: Teresa Amabile, an American psychologist. She studies how rewards and working conditions affect creativity.
  • Wimbledon: The oldest tennis tournament in the world, held in London. Centre Court is its main arena.
  • Kipling: Rudyard Kipling, an English writer and poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The lines at Wimbledon come from his poem "If".
  • Saturday morning test: A technique from the book: asking what you do on a Saturday morning when you have nothing scheduled. It is the author's technique, not a psychological test.
  • Bench test: A technique from the book: before choosing a new place, sit on a bench there and see how you feel in those surroundings.
  • Five people test: A technique from the book: think of the five people you spend the most time with, since the people close to us strongly shape how we live.

All terms

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