7 Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned From Mel Robbins

I met Mel Robbins at the Caesars Palace pool in Vegas.

It was a few years back and we were speaking at the same conference. I flew in the day before my speech and she was staying the day after hers so we had a bit of overlap.

I managed to catch the end of her speech and watched as she turned an entire audience just electric. People were laughing like they were at a standup show, crying like it was the end of The Shawshank Redemption, and you could just feel something special was bubbling up inside everyone. She did the hardest thing to do as a speaker – completely shift the energy in the room. At the end everybody rose up into one of the longest standing ovations I’d seen. I decided to join the scrum waiting to talk to Mel afterwards and then we exchanged phone numbers and vaguely agreed to meet by the pool later. I said I was going to the gym, she said they had dinner plans with a friend and their daughters, and the pool is like a thousand people anyway, so who knew if it would really happen.

But a few minutes later a picture of an icy pina colada with a chunk of pineapple in a plastic Caesars Palace cup arrived by text message saying “This is waiting for you.”

It was the first text I ever got from Mel. I learned pretty quickly she doesn’t do anything half-assed. Since then I’ve watched as Mel has become the most-booked female speaker in the world, sold more books through Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone, and is now about to launch The Mel Robbins Show on daytime TV this September 16th.

But more than all the accolades is the person underneath. As I’ve gotten to know Mel I’ve found her so dynamic, magnetic, and endlessly captivating. She connects with people, very quickly, on their deepest level. When she starts talking you can’t stop listening because her words feels like a little hammer pinging at the nerves in your heart. She’s like a wise old Ivy League academic but gabbing with you like your mom at the kitchen table at two in the morning.

And since I don’t go very often from sipping pina coladas by a pool with someone to watching them launch their own national TV show I thought it would be worth looking back and reflecting on seven things I’ve learned from Mel Robbins over the past few years.

Here they are:

7. Don’t say you’re authentic. Be authentic.

A few times I’ve forwarded Mel’s weekly newsletter over to my wife Leslie. The first time I did so she wrote “Wow, she wrote you such a long note!” I said “No, that’s her newsletter. It goes out to like half a million people.” She couldn’t believe it because the writeup was so personal. She was talking about “leaking” after having three kids and recommending people check out pelvic physio and, larger scale, confront the little things they’ve been putting off because they’re too worried or embarrassed to address them. She was pinching her stomach fat rolls and making a hashtag for them while encouraging everyone to love their bodies and do the same.

I wrote a list of my favorite newsletters and for Mel’s I wrote that it feels like I’m hanging out behind the scenes with an A-list celebrity who’s somehow radically self-aware, authentic, and even self-critical.

A good example is how she’s been sharing the news about her new TV show. The common trope when something huge happens is to be all humble-braggy about it. You know, “I can’t believe this is even happening!!!”, “I am so surprised and humbled by this!!!”, and hashtag blessed and all.

Mel’s approach has been so different, so authentic.

She’s been talking about having dreams when you were a kid that are almost so ambitious you don’t want to admit them to yourself or others. Becoming an astronaut! Working for Disney! Headlining a concert! And then she shares that having a TV show has been one of those dreams for her and then she openly shares how she got there.

She never spoke about her TV show with lines like “OMG I GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING IT’S CRAY CRAY!” That angle has never resonated with me because we all know you killed for it so why not just tell us you killed for it?

It’s the truth. It’s refreshing. It’s authentic.

6. It’s okay to cry.

Have you ever cried at work?

Or seen someone cry at work?

What does almost everyone do when that happens?

Urgently grab for tissues. Shake their head and wipe them away. Say “Ugh, I’m so sorry.” Head to the bathroom. We try to cover it up. Of course we do. We have spent decades preaching stoic virtues of keeping it all together and even shaming our more natural human tendencies in professional settings. No intimacy! No hugs! No tears!

But not Mel! I have seen her crying a dozen times and her reaction always surprises me.

What does she do?

First, she doesn’t hold back the tears. They don’t come with that usual embarrassment or silly attempt to cover them up. They just come. And then, even more surprising, she announces it!

“I’m tearing up right now” or “Oh my gosh, I am crying” or something similar. It’s incredibly humanizing and gives permission to those around her who are also feeling big emotions … to feel it, too.

I have been in so many work meetings or company conferences over the years where something profound has been said, a really touching service story has been shared, or maybe an emotional video has just played. And whenever I look around the room in these moments most people are blinking really fast or quietly dabbing the corners of their eyes. A normal reaction! We try to cover it up.

But lately when these moments have happened and I have found myself on stage or with the mic I have tried channeling Mel and simply saying “That was beautiful … I’m tearing up.” And then what happens? You can feel the giant emotion in the room just release. Everyone blossoms. People smile, let tears flow, and ditch the embarrassment.

In many ways Mel taught me how to give space for deep emotions in group settings.

In a world where “holding it together” is more typically praised, but where we all feel things all the time, this is a huge gift.

It’s okay to cry.

5. Screw the script.

Mel has sold more books off Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone. (I just checked and she has over 50,000 reviews on there across her books.) The book that launched her on the platform was The 5-Second Rule.

But here’s the funny thing.

If you download and listen to The 5-Second Rule it doesn’t sound like an audiobook. You hear papers ruffling, you hear her messing up and swearing afterwards, you hear her going on wild tangents way off script.

When I asked her about it she said “We hired a producer off Craigslist and he had never submitted a recording to Audible before. I don’t think we paid him for post-production. We didn’t think to. He didn’t think to. So he just uploaded the whole file without taking out all the mistakes. Like he didn’t edit it at all.”

Well, turns out the “mistakes” are what’s popular. From a few of the top reviews:

• I felt like she was in the car with me. I appreciated the mistakes that were left in, rather than edited out.

• It's refreshing how Mel Robbins doesn't sugar coat anything. She says it exactly how it is, no BS. On a side note, there are parts of the recording where Mel obviously screws up and has to repeat herself and start sentences over. She could've edited that out but she didn't and I feel there is something so raw and authentic about that.

• I felt more like I was speaking with Mel as opposed to her speaking at me… fantastic, transformational wisdom…

Audiobooks sound so polished and professional. Big name actors! Perfect voices. But is that what we want? Think of the feeling you get when you pick up an expensive and fancy real estate agent brochure in your mailbox with a glossy sheen and full color pictures on cardstock … compared to the little handwritten note. Think of the big chain with a thirty-foot tall neon sign out front, uniformed teenage employees, and scripted questions… compared to the mom and pop shop on the side of the road.

Which do you prefer?

I gave a speech called “Building Trust in Distrustful Times” at SXSW this year and one of my arguments was that “In an era of bots we trust brains.”

The world we are designing for ourselves is so… perfect now. We actually crave more human experiences. With flaws. And mistakes. And no makeup. (As a side note, Mel once told me the most common note she gets on her YouTube videos is “I’m glad you don’t wear makeup in them”)

There’s a huge lesson here.

Mel has sold thousands of books on Audible. This is a book that was self-published. No publisher! No one who knew what was going on was involved! She booked a booth. She hired a producer. Entrepreneurial, sure! But then when you listen you hear her ruffling the papers, getting lost in the script and saying “Oh, fuck”, her laughing at herself when she screws up. And all these other million tiny pieces of humanity.

What’s the lesson? Have a script. Then screw the script.

4. Shout your flaws.

Mel has ADD.

No, not in the way people say it when they lose their keys or while giggling at a party after forgetting the name of the person they just met. I mean Mel has clinical ADD and takes medication for it.

She can’t remember chunks of her twenties because her severe anxiety at that age was so debilitating.

She also spent a lot of years on Zoloft.

How do I know all this?

Because she talks about it openly. And by sharing the challenges she’s faced, and is facing, she makes it easy for people to open up to her.

I think that’s part of the reason why podcasts are growing so rapidly. The big name podcast hosts sound so human. They shout their flaws! Rich Roll talking about his alcoholism, Pete Holmes talking about his sex life. What used to be TMI can now be the most vulnerable and human way to connect.

What’s another benefit of shouting your flaws? I interviewed famed restaurateur Jen Agg on my podcast 3 Books and asked her why she posted on Instagram a long and radically self-aware list of her flaws. What did she say? “In a weird way, it’s a defense strategy. Because it’s like ‘here they all are.’ Now what are you going to say about me? Or do to me? You got nothing. I already said them for you.”

Shout your flaws.

Disempower your flaws.

3. Don’t pay for accolades.

Did you know accolades are for sale?

They absolutely are.

For example, if you have $50,000 you can get an accolade which says you went to Stanford and brandish it all over your resume and LinkedIn profile … even though you really just bought a 5-day executive session they sell to anyone who can write the check. Do you want to be a New York Times bestseller? It’s for sale. According to Wikipedia, it costs about $200,000. Do you want your YouTube video to have a million views? Need your podcast to have a million downloads? It’s for sale. Absolutely for sale. As long as you don’t mind blasting people with ads and have a few hundred thousand dollars handy you can have it all!

Everyone knows money talks in our world today.

And if you want it, they’ll sell it to you.

Demand creates supply.

But here’s the thing about Mel: even though she has a crapload of videos that have gone viral with millions of views … she’s never paid for it. I can’t think of many others who can say this. She doesn’t feed Google or YouTube with endless thousands of dollars to prop up her ego and view counts.

Oh, and the New York Times bestseller tag? She doesn’t have it. Maybe she never will! But she doesn’t care. She’s too busy changing the world with her ideas to spend time and energy caring about whoever is busy counting how many books she sold in certain bookstores or whatever. She can’t be bothered.

In his 1974 Caltech Commencement speech Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.”

One problem with paying for accolades, of course, is you always know you paid for them. So if you embed a tiny little lie inside you that means you’re going to have to spit gloss that turd forever as you show it off to people or your cover’s completely blown.

You can do it if you want to, of course.

It’s just not a pleasant way to live.

What’s one solution?

Don’t pay for accolades.

2. Ambition is beautiful

Are you ambitious?

If so, do you admit it to yourself? Do you declare it about yourself or share it with others? Or is it one of those rougher-edged aspects of your personality that you sort of cover up or feel a bit embarrassed about … like I did for years?

One part of my story very quickly: My wife told me she didn’t love me anymore when I was 28 years old. We had been married two years. We had just bought a house. It broke my heart. I moved into a small downtown apartment. I was blogging till 3:00am every night. I had huge bags under my eyes. I had pounding headaches every day.

My worried mom suggested a therapist and helped me find one. When I met him we connected right away. I really liked the idea of spending an hour focused entirely on moving my thoughts forward. I had never done that! And one of the exercises my therapist had me do was begin to slowly articulate a series of words that I was looking for in platonic and romantic relationships. It took me the better part of a year to do it. With a lot of thought I found my four words: curious, creative, romantic, optimistic. I dated for a year but never quite clicked with anyone. And then I realized! There was a word missing. A word I had never even admitted to myself. What was it? Ambitious.

I was ambitious.

In my case, it would be a better fit if I was with someone ambitious. And today I am.

I’m not sure if growing up in the suburbs and going to a great public school with great teachers just meant that my ambition was never stoked. Nobody blew billows on it telling me I need to go to enrichment camps and write standardized tests to study internationally or whatever.

But ambition, if you got it, isn’t ugly. It’s beautiful. Finding a great partner is ambition. Raising wonderful children is ambition. Doing passionate work is ambition. Ambition helps us live our deepest and most intentional lives.

Mel Robbins may be the most ambitious person I know. There’s a reason she flew around giving 500 speeches in the past three years, is managing a team of 75 people, and is shooting a full new hour of television every single day.

She isn’t afraid of her ambition. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t apologize for it. She rides it, she corrals it, she wields it.

And the world benefits.

1. People want to hear what they don’t want to hear

We want to be our best.

We want to live our best lives.

But it’s hard to change. Very hard. Incredibly hard. We want to, though! It’s why Self-Help is the largest section in the bookstore and why straight-talking tough love books are at the top of the charts. It’s why /getmotivated is one of the world’s largest subreddits with over 15,000,000 members. It’s why I spend my time thinking and writing about how to improve my own life and why (I think) you spend time reading them.

We want to get better.

We want to live our best lives.

But to do that we often need to hear what we don’t want to hear. We have to be told to cut ties with the relative who’s negatively affected our family for years. We need to be pushed to quit the job with the abusive boss. We have to make a giant leap to leave the romantic relationship that’s making us feel worse about ourselves.

Why are there so few signals in this world helping us make those big decisions? Well, many reasons, but a big one is because most of our friends don’t have the courage to give us the tough love. There’s so much downside. They could hurt their relationship with us. We may reject them or get into a fight. Honesty and blunt feedback are in short supply.

Enter Mel Robbins.

She plays the role of the friend who loves you but who also will smack you over the head with what you should do. Time and time again, in the most velvet-hammery way possible, I’ve witnessed Mel give tough love to people who just need that push. Like here. Or here. Or here.

She’s done it for me, too.

When I’m sweating some random numbers (“number of followers”, “bestseller list rankings”, etc) she gives me a big verbal slap telling me I’m an artist who shouldn’t care. I should just make art. And that resonates with me … because she’s right, of course. And I move forward in my thinking.

The truth is people want to hear what they don’t want to hear.

Mel is just one of the bravest people telling us the truth.

I’m so proud of Mel.

We need her voice in the world right now.

And I can’t wait to hear it every single day.

Click “Find Your Station” on MelRobbinsShow.com to find her show in your city…

You Need To Take More Vacation … And Here’s How To Do It

Mandatory vacation is the way of the future

Have you ever felt burned out after a vacation?

I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Disney World all week. I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return.

Our vacation systems are completely broken.

They don’t work.

The classic corporate vacation system goes something like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year (often only two to three weeks), you fill out some 1996-era form to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature, and then you file it with a team assistant or log it in some terrible database. It’s an admin headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the weeks before they leave for vacation in order to actually extract themselves from the office. By the time we finally turn on our out-of-office messages, we’re beyond stressed, and we know that we’ll have an even bigger pile of work waiting for us when we return.

What a nightmare.

For most of us, it’s hard to actually use vacation time to recharge.

So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves.

In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions says that absenteeism costs the country’s economy more than £100 billion per year. A white paper published by the Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solutions company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year. It doesn’t help that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the United States is the only country out of 21 wealthy countries that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time. (Check out this world map on Wikipedia to see where your country stacks up. We love you, Enlightened Swedes!)

Now.

Let’s solve this problem.

First question is this big one.

Would it help if we got more paid vacation?

No, not necessarily.

According to a study from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, just over 40% of Americans plan not to use all their paid time off anyway. It’s not the amount we’re given then, it’s the amount we’re taking, or feel able to take.

So what’s the progressive approach?

Is it the Netflix or Twitter policies that say take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it? Open-ended, unlimited vacation sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, that approach is broken too.

What happens in practice with unlimited vacation time? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office. Mathias Meyer, the CEO of German tech company Travis CI, wrote a blog post about his company abandoning its unlimited vacation policy:

“When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.”

The point is that in unlimited vacation time systems, you probably won’t actually take a few weeks to travel through South America after your wedding, because there’s too much social pressure against going away for so long. Work objectives, goals, and deadlines are demanding. You look at your peers and see that nobody is backpacking through China this summer, so you don’t go either. You don’t want to let your team down, so your dream of visiting Machu Picchu sits on the shelf forever.

What’s the solution?

Recurring, scheduled mandatory vacation.

Yes, that’s right — an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years he takes one year off. He said:

“In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.”

He does warn that the sabbaticals take a lot of planning, and that you get the most benefit from them after you’ve worked for a significant amount of time.

Why does he do this? He says:

“Right now we spend about the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that are really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years.”

As he says, that one year is the source of his creativity, inspiration, and ideas for the next seven years.

I wanted to test this theory so I collaborated with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, to ask a simple question:

“What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?”

The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one year off every seven years. And it was entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contacted the office while you were on vacation — whether through email, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else — you didn’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working, in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office.

The system is designed so that you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s a downside, but for this experiment, we believed that putting a structure in place would be a significant benefit. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office.

With this 12 week experiment we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after the mandatory time off. (We used a five-point Likert scale, using simple statements such as “Ravi is demonstrating creativity in his work,” with the options ranging from one, Strongly Disagree, to five, Strongly Agree.)

And what did we find out?

Creativity went up 33%, happiness levels rose 25%, and productivity increased 13%. It’s a small sample, sure, but there’s a meaningful story here. When we dive deeper on creativity, the average employee score was 3.0 before time off and 4.0 after time off. For happiness, the average employee score was 3.2 before time off and 4.0 afterward. And for productivity, the average employee score was 3.2 before and rose to 3.6.

This complements the feedback we got from employees who, upon their return, wrote blog posts about their experiences with the process and what they did with their time. Many talked about how people finally found time to cross things off of their bucket lists — finally holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or traveling somewhere they’d never been before.

Now, this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace? Are you the leader in charge of a team who could try this? Do you run a company where you want to give it a shot?

Let me share two pieces of constructive feedback that came back:

• Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company like SimpliFlying. Its competitive advantage is agility, and having staff take time off too often upset the work rhythm. Nigam proposed adjusting it to every twelve weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks.

• Staggering was important. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take time off back-to-back. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. The high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.

This is early research, but it confirms something we said at the beginning: Vacation systems are broken and aren’t actually doing what they’re advertised to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space.

Why is creating space so important?

Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” for the New York Times:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Vacations systems are broken.

But early results say that mandatory vacation could fix them.

Life is short so the earlier we get cracking the more time we’ll be spending doing better and more important work.

Check out the video version of this article below:

An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review

Here's Why You Need A Family Contract (And What To Put In It)

“Congratulations, Neil!”

I was sitting across from the SVP of HR at Walmart when he offered me his hand and a sheet of paper with all the terms of my new promotion spelled out. I shook his hand and left his office doing mental cartwheels down the hall.

This was it!

The dream job.

More money, bigger team, fancier title, more interesting work.

And more actual work, too.

Because isn’t that how promotions usually work?

A few more meetings. A few more hours. A few more business trips. A bigger job isn’t just a bigger paycheck. It’s got more responsibility, too.

With the job offer in hand I popped my head into the office of one of my mentors at the company and said:

“Guess what! I got the big promotion.”

“Congratulations!” he said. “Are you going to accept it?”

His simple question caught me off guard.

“Well, it feels like a slam dunk,” I replied, with a bit of a confused look in my eyes, wondering what he was getting at. “Everything improves here — salary, benefits, title. Great for future employability, too. If I get turfed I have a nice ‘top line’ on my resumé. A good benchmark for going somewhere else. I feel like I should sign this right now and head straight back to the SVP’s office.”

“Go ahead and sign it,” he said with smile. “But it’s a big job! You’ll be leading a large team and on the road a lot. So, before you hand it back in, make sure you take the contract home, share it with your wife, and write up another contract, too. A family contract. One between you and your partner. The company is changing all your terms, aren’t they? So make sure you revisit all your home terms, too.”

His message rang a bell.

All of us have contracts with our employers.

Very few of us have contracts with our families.

We have detailed sheets of paper spelling out exactly what we’re supposed to do on the job. But we have no similar piece of paper for our families, do we?

That night I went home and sat down with my wife Leslie and we thought writing up a family contract was a good idea. We spent a long time that night discussing and writing out the terms of the contract and it has four bullet points that we still use today.

Number of nights away

It breaks my heart to miss bath time. Combing my son’s wet hair. Reading books under the covers. Goodnight kisses. There are a finite number of these nights in our lives so it should hurt to miss them. The biggest thing for Leslie and I to discuss was how many nights I was going to be away per year. We came up with a number that worked for us and began tracking it. As my work migrated from Walmart over the years into travelling to give speeches we held onto this number. (The number itself is up to you but for us it was 4 overnights per month during the school year and 0 during the summer which also held with it the sum total of 40 nights away per year. Still a lot! And painful in many ways. But, to our mind, about 10% of the total year.) What’s important I think is choosing a number that’s relatively easy to break down per month so if you have a really busy month (say, a big conference out of town or across-the-world trip or something) then you know you have to say no to a business trip next month to make up for it. Can doing this hamper your career? Sure. But can trips away hamper your family? Absolutely. Let’s not pretend you can have everything. Come up with a number that works for your family and stick with it.

Family Day

We decided it was important for us to have one Family Day every week. Normally these are on the weekend but if I’m away during the weekend we’ll get a ‘make up date’ during the week. Anyway: what’s a Family Day? A full day with no cellphones, no extended family, no friends, nothing. Just me, my wife, our little kids and zero interruptions all day. We had so many weekends blurring by in a smear of gymnastics, birthday parties, and extended family dinners. Fun weekends! But no deep family time. Is this tough to do? Of course! Think about how many days you have with a sports practice or somebody’s big birthday. Those are beautiful things. But prioritizing one Family Day a week creates energy, helps you be choosy about what activities you’re signing up for, and helps avoid saying a passive yes to every invitation.

NNO/LNO

This is a fun one. Once a week I get an NNO. Neil’s Night Out. Watch out, town! Seriously though, whatever I want to do that night, I do it. Dinner with a friend, live music by myself, spinning in circles in empty parking lots. It’s my night off. I can do whatever I want. What’s an LNO? That would be Leslie’s Night Out. She gets one a week, too. Energy is the priceless commodity here. It’s too easy to crash into Netflix comas on the couch once the kids are in bed. “Oh, look, we have only three Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts left!” NNO/LNO helps us plan and prioritize ourselves and our other relationships, too. I feel like a great father and husband before and after I go away because I get energy from those nights. Plus, I get my own stories and experiences to bring back into the home while continuing to develop my life as an individual. The best part is there’s no guilt, since my wife has a night off, too. So in a way these two nights “pay for” each other. She can go to a yoga class, work on her pictures in a coffee shop, try my spinning parking lot thing, whatever. The two nights end up feeling like a gift to each other, which helps, though sometimes we do find we need to push each other to take them.

Special time

As our family expanded the number of relationship permutations expanded exponentially. With one partner there were two possible relationship permutations (me solo, me and Leslie), with one kid there were four (me solo, me and Leslie, me and my kid, all of us), with two kids there were suddenly eight (me solo, me and Leslie, me and kid one, me and kid two, me and both kids, me with Leslie and kid one, me with Leslie and kid two, all of us). You get the idea. The point here isn’t to fastidiously ensure we have time with every combination but we do think about every 1 on 1 combination having some ‘special time’ each week. And yes, this includes me and Leslie. Getting a weekly date night in as our family has expanded has been vital to showing up as the partners and parents we want to be.

So: That’s the contract I have with my partner.

We printed it up, signed it (actually signed it!), and keep it in a file.

The goal is to have a contract in a desk at home that creates a healthy tension with the contract you have in a desk at work.

Everybody will have different terms, of course. Maybe you include points about school drop-off and pickup, whether or not you work from home on weekends, or who does the garbage. Again, it’s whatever works for you.

And I will add: I didn’t tell my employer I had this contract. I didn’t wave it in their face and say, “Sorry, I can’t travel next week.” But the home contract helped me articulate my values, which enabled speedier decision-making, and a better acceptance of the decisions I did make later on in my new role. I didn’t sweat every business trip. I simply counted them towards an annual number. Plus, if I cheated on one of the bullet points, I knew I had to make it up. Missed Family Day one week because I was in China? Well that means two the next week.

Now, as you think about a contract that works with you and your partner, let’s make sure we remember that the goal is never to be perfect.

It’s simply to be a little better than before.

I’d love to see your contract if you’re willing to share at neil@globalhappiness.org 

Too hardcore? Check out this video on the power of the ‘quarterly relationship meeting’ instead:

An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company

6 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction

A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night to go pee and subconsciously grabbed my leg looking for my cellphone.

And that’s when I knew.

It’s getting worse.

But it’s not just me.

It’s us.

Three University of Bologna professors published a report in the Sloan Management Review which showed that anxiety spikes when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day. Another study found when cellphone users couldn’t answer their phones while those phones were ringing, they experienced increased heart rate, blood pressure and anxiety. And adolescents who spend more time on phones are more likely to report mental health issues.

Can you relate to these feelings?

I absolutely can.

So what do we do about it?

Here are six ways we need to start fighting the fight:

1. Download the Forest app 

Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” You know what we need to start measuring? Not time on our cell phones, but time off them. You click open Forest, enter 15 minutes (or the amount of time you want to stay off your phone for) and then hit the button. What happens? A tiny little seed starts to grow. Oh, look, it’s a sapling now! And here come cute little branches! What happens if you use your phone before the 15 minutes run out? Simple: You kill the tree. You’re an axe-wielding murderer. You feel bad! And that’s the point. In order to grow a forest you need to practice growing the muscle of staying off your phone. It hurts. It’s painful. But it’s important. Give it a shot. (Note: Yes, it costs $1.99. But I feel it’s worth it. And no, I get nothing for telling you about it. This page is, and always will be, no ads all the way.)

2. Add extra swipes before work 

So many of us are merging our lives into one phone. Do you have your work email on the same phone you want to take out on Friday night? If so, my suggestion is to first separate the accounts (i.e., use the built-in Mail app for your personal email and download the Gmail app for work, etc.) and then move the work app a few screens away. Maybe with a few empty screens with just one dusty app in the middle. What do the extra three or four thumb swipes do? They give your brain an important one-second pause to ask yourself “Do I want to do this?” before checking work email on your ride home from the bars.

3. Go black and white

Have you ever walked into a casino and been dazzled into a jaw-dropping stupor from all the whizzing colours, flashing slots and ringing bells? Does that remind you of anything rectangular in your pocket, by chance? Casinos know bright colours and flashing lights attract your eyes. Same with phones. So, turn your phone to black and white. All functionality is still there! You just aren’t attracted to it anymore. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings – General – Accessibility — Display Accommodations — Colour Filters — Grayscale. Yes, conveniently buried under six menu options! But you can do it.

PS. Too hardcore? If you like the idea of going black and white, but want to keep color handy for occasional use, then here’s a setting to help. Go Settings — Accessibility — Accessibility Shortcut — Color Filters. What’s that do? It lets you triple-click the side button on your phone to swap between settings. Pa-zam!

4. Night Shift mode

Recent research from Australia shows that exposing our brains to bright screens before bed reduces melatonin production — the sleep hormone. Bummer! What helps? Well, if you can’t stay off your phone then at least enable Night Shift mode. Mine is on from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It dims the screen and reduces that blinding brightness which makes your evolutionarily slow brain think it’s morning time. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Display & Brightness – Night Shift.

5. Buy an alarm clock

Old school, I know. Why is this important? Because we are sleeping with our phones these days. And we need to stop. Get them out of the bed… and the bedroom. Of course, when I tell people this they usually say “Oh, but my phone’s my alarm clock! I will hibernate like a grizzly if nothing wakes me up.” So what’s the solution? Drive to Giga-Mart and fork over ten dollars for a cheapo clock. Then plug your phone in the basement.

6. Disable notifications

What’s the first thing every app asks you when you download it? “EatMoreDonuts would like to send you Notifications. OK?” And you click OK because, well, you would like to eat more donuts. And you just downloaded it. And the app never lets you forget it. So, get intentional. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Notifications and scroll down your list of apps. Start by turning them all off and then cruise the list again combing for anything that might be crucial.

Those six things will get you going.

And this cuss-filled page (NSFW) will give you buckets more.

The issue is that when everybody has an addiction it sort of looks like nobody has one. We get in line for coffee … so it looks kind of normal. We keep our heads locked on our cellphones … so it looks kind of normal.

But is it?

Adam Alter, New York University business professor and author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, explained: “You only develop an addiction when there is some psychological motive that hasn’t been fulfilled for you: loneliness, that you’ve been bullied, or you can’t make good things happen in your life. It doesn’t actually matter what you use to soothe that addiction, whether it’s playing a particular game that lulls you into a distracted state or whether it’s taking a drug. In terms of soothing those psychological ills, behaviour and substance addictions are very, very similar.”

I’ve listed six tactical ideas above that are slowly helping me, but the longer-term solution may be latching our minds onto something else.

Like what?

Buy some hiking boots and commit to a new uphill hobby. Check out my 3 Books podcast to get back into reading. Grab fresh trunks and sign up for swimming.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know it’s time for an intervention.

What helps you fight back?

Drop me a line and let me know.

Power to the people!

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Toronto Star.

Why You Should Never, Ever Retire

“He’s dead.”

Staring in shock at my high school Guidance Department secretary, I thought that it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t be true, it couldn’t be true. I’d just talked to him last week.

“It happened so suddenly,” she whispered, tears shining through thick glasses, glossy red lips quivering silently in slow motion. “I am so sorry.”

Mr. Wilson was my guidance counselor. He had a shiny head holding two fluffy-cloud patches of gray hair on the sides and wore thick glasses and loose-fitting gray T-shirts while helping students with timetables, college applications, and personal problems.

Everybody loved Mr. Wilson.

I talked to him about summer jobs and he calmed me down during exams. He had a quiet, big-picture worldview that helped us get above ourselves and see beyond life in our hometown.

You could tell Mr. Wilson loved his job by the way his eyes twinkled as he bounced through the halls, spouting hellos and high-fiving students, calling everybody by name. He was always smiling, and our school was his home.

Back when I was in high school, the government had mandatory retirement. You turned sixty-five and poof! The government yanked you out of the workforce in a cloud of smoke and moved you straight on to old-age pension. You had no choice. And let’s face it — almost everybody wanted to retire way before sixty-five, anyway. TV ads preached “Freedom 55” with gray-haired couples skipping town to swim at the cottage, play golf, and sail into the sunset.

Retirement is a good thing. A great thing! What everybody wants, dreams about, wishes for, over and over and over and over . . . until it finally comes.

Do whatever, whenever, wherever . . . forever?

Sounds like a good deal!

The funny thing is that when Mr. Wilson retired . . . he didn’t look happy. None of us did. We had the big celebration with cake, music from the band, and teary speeches from former students. It was like the final scene in Mr. Holland’s Opus. Mr. Wilson said he was excited to be retiring, but his thin smile and wet eyes said the opposite.

But mandatory retirement came at age sixty-five . . . and so he retired.

The next week he had a heart attack and died.

The horrible idea the Germans had that ruined things for everybody

Every day there’s another article about how all of our retirements are doomed. Public pension promises in the U.S. vastly exceed their ability to pay. We now need nearly $400,000 at age 65 just to cover health care costs. And retirement itself increases your risk of depression by 40%.

For many of us, it’s starting to feel like the light at the end of the tunnel of life has been blocked by a triple-bolted steel door. Who’s to blame for this mess?

The Germans.

Yes, back in 1889, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck invented the idea of retirement, establishing the concept for the rest of us. “Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state,” he said at the time. He wanted to address high youth unemployment by paying those 70 and older to leave the workforce, and other countries followed suit with retirement ages around 65 or 70.

But there is one big difference between 1889 Germany and the world we live in today: The average lifespan then was 70 years. Penicillin wasn’t discovered for forty years! Now we’re all living much, much longer. And many of us would like to retire much earlier. But the scary headlines — and the realities that we see around us — cast doubt on our ability to ever retire. The entire concept of retirement is starting to feel flimsy at best.

So what are we to do, short of working the rest of our days away?

What can we learn from the healthiest 100-year-olds in the world?

To get to the root of the issue, let’s look past the North American shorelines (where I live) all the way to the beautiful sandy islands of Okinawa, in the East China Sea. According to the Okinawa Centenarian Study, men and women in Okinawa live an average of seven years longer than Americans and have one of the longest disability-free life expectancies in the world.

Dan Buettner and fellow researchers from National Geographic studied why Okinawans live so long. What did they find out? Among other things, Okinawans eat off of smaller plates, stop eating when they’re 80% full, and have a beautiful setup wherein they’re put into social groups as babies to slowly grow old together.

But they also have an outlook on life that is very different from those in the West. While we think of retirement as the golden age of golf greens and cottage docks, guess what they call retirement in Okinawa?

They don’t. They don’t even have a word for it. Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely. Instead, one of the healthiest societies in the world has the word ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly translates to “the reason you wake up in the morning.”

It’s the thing that drives you most.

Toshimasa Sone and his colleagues at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine wondered whether having an ikigai could actually help extend longevity, health, and late-life stability, so they put the concept to a test. They spent seven years in Sendai, Japan, studying the longevity of more than 43,000 Japanese adults with regard to age, gender, education, body mass index, cigarette use, alcohol consumption, exercise, employment, perceived stress, history of disease, and even subjects’ self-rated scores of how healthy they were. Then they asked every single one of these 43,000 people, “Do you have an ikigai in your life?”

Participants reporting an ikigai at the beginning of the study were more likely to be married, educated, and employed. They had higher levels of self-rated health and lower levels of stress. At the end of the seven-year study, 95% of the folks with an ikigai were alive.
 Only 83% of those without an ikigai made it that long.

The 4 S’s

To put it another way: We don’t actually want to retire and do nothing. We just want to do something we love. And I’m not talking about endless days of back nines, fishing, and sailing into the sunset. While we might want some time to do those things, you’d be surprised to learn how quickly the bloom can come off of that type of rosy retirement. I believe that we’d all be better served by taking the concept of ikigai and distilling it into what I call the 4 S’s:

Social: Friends, peers, and coworkers who brighten our days and fulfill our social needs.

Structure: The alarm clock ringing because you have a reason to get up in the morning, and the resulting satisfaction you get from earned time off.

Stimulation: Keeping our minds challenged by learning something new each day.

Story: Being part of something bigger than ourselves by joining a group whose high-level purpose is something you couldn’t accomplish on your own.

Now, am I saying that if you’re six weeks away from your final punch-out after 30 years at the meatpacking plant, you should suddenly skewer your dreams and ramp up for 30 more? Of course not. What I’m saying is that retirement is a Western invention from days gone by that’s based on broken assumptions that we want — and can afford — to do nothing.

If you’re already struggling to pay bills and your career’s sitting on tectonic plates that are threatening to shift below the labor market, my recommendation is to dig deep into your natural passions to find a second act that aligns with your values.

There are far more problems and opportunities on this spinning planet than there are people to help with them so if you feel lost, follow your heart, find your ikigai, and remember the 4 S’s.

And stop worrying that you won’t ever be able to retire.

You’ll be far better off if you don’t.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review

I expand on this idea in The Happiness Equation

Neil Pasricha’s Unconventional Christmas Gift Guide

Christmas is messed up.  

Most years lots are jammed, malls are rammed, and we race around in giant plastic cars to fill giant plastic bags with giant plastic toys to set under giant plastic trees. Can a pandemic slow us down? Of course not! Our clicker fingers get blisters as cardboard boxes pile up at the front door. What do we all want? More! More, more, more!

I’ve been talking to my wife Leslie about ways to pull back, pare back, and get intentional about what we’re giving. We are very, very, very far from perfect (I did write this, after all), but here is my best shot at nine unconventional gifts to dial down the insanity and dial up the intimacy: 

9. Old jewelry. Most things in your grandma’s closet don’t age well. Pantyhose. Pink track pants. 20-Minute Workout VHS tapes. But jewelry is the exception. The story of a specific bracelet or pair of earrings only deepens, lengthens, and intensifies with time. “It’s the ring you grandfather bought me on our tenth anniversary” or “I bought these earrings for my prom back when I lived up north.” The story of old jewelry is the story of the milestones in your life. Also applies to hoodies, watches, or anything worn and loved which someone else could wear and love, too.

8. A birdfeeder and a bag of bird food. Who else has become crazy about birds during the pandemic? (I absolutely have!) Has your friend or loved one been going on and on about the Merlin ID app or asking if you want to traipse out to some forest at daybreak to spy on kinglets or owls? That person needs a bird feeder! And a bag of bird food! Bonus points if you include installation.

7. A batch of your homemade spaghetti sauce. Spend a day simmering a pot of the good stuff and pour it into jars for all your loved ones. Also works with salsa, jam, or granola. For bonus points cut out some little checkered cloths with pinking shears and wrap them around the lids with string. For double bonus points, cater to their unique allergy or dietary constraint. Nothing says love like keto carbonara.

6. A different version of their favorite book. When I interviewed my favorite bookseller on 3 Books she told me she had four copies of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume. Four? What? Why? Well, it’s her favorite book, they have different covers, one of them is signed, you get the idea. Why is this such a brilliant move? Because you already know they love it. Now they get an edition that’s different because of the cover or format or signature inside. You win points for fishing through used bookstore bins and if those are closed up try special autographed sites at Abe Books or Books-A-Million.

5. An outdoor hot chocolate carafe. Who else is doing a lot of cold weather distanced visits? If it’s freezing but you want some six foot love then get an outdoor carafe for coffee, tea, or hot chocolate and heat up everybody’s heart. (Here’s an example.)

4. A mix tape or personalized playlist with the track listing printed inside the card. Every single Christmas I eagerly look forward to my friend Mike’s “Best Of This Year” CD he painstakingly curates, produces, burns, and mails to me. Does anyone still have CD players? Yes, most of us do. In the basement! In the car! Somewhere! Mike loads the playlist onto Spotify too (here’s last years) so I can listen to it wherever. Music says what words can’t. And, in an era of infinite choice, the value of curation skyrockets. If you want to get hardcore you can record it on a cassette and pair it with an old Walkman to play it on. And, if not, then making a custom playlist and writing up a pretty track listing in the card also works wonders. 

3. A gift certificate to your favorite independent bookstore. The pandemic has hurt independent bookstores badly. Many are shuttered and doing some crazy factory operations inside. But bookshops are one of the most vital members of our local cultural community and a gift certificate from a local shop is a stocking stuffer of love. Do you want more reasons? Here’s an article I wrote on why you should spend more time in bookstores. Do you want something to wrap with the gift certificate? Pick something from the 3 Books 1000 most formative books in the world.

2. A hand-written love letter. Sounds daunting! That’s why it sticks out. A few things up front: Paper doesn’t matter, pen doesn’t matter, crossing things off and rewriting them again and again doesn’t matter. No need for rhymes. No need for anything fancy. The goal is to remove all the hesitation between your heart and fingers and let it flow. What you remember about how we met, a few favorite memories from this year, and how you make me feel. That’s it! The letter is hardest before it’s written and easiest after you start. Leslie and I write one to each other every Christmas and it’s one of our fondest traditions. She even photographs them in case of tornado or typhoon. Again, length, style, format – none of it matters. According to a study published in the Journal of Psychological Science, when we express gratitude for others by writing them a handwritten letter, we underestimate how grateful recipients feel, overestimate how ‘awkward’ it is, and underestimate how positive they’ll feel. If you need a more detailed primer, here’s one to check out. But basically: Don’t think about it. Just go for it. 

1. A homemade coupon booklet. I know you remember giving these to your mom when you were six and couldn’t afford to get her a sweater. “This coupon entitles the bearer to 1 free hug.” And those coupons were beautiful and sweet and I bet they made your mom cry and I bet she kept them. But then what happened? You started getting her can openers and blenders. Lame! Bring back the homemade coupon. But now, as an adult, you can make it a whole booklet. We know experiences make us happier than things and the homemade coupon brings experiences to life. Foot massages! Homemade lasagna! Watching the kids! Two weeks of laundry! Make out sessions! Wait, I’m talking about your partner not your mom now. I should clarify. (Hey, if you take the advice of bestselling author Kelly Oxford in GQ, then sexual favors in committed relationships are fair game, too.) Spicing up marriages, strengthening relationships, getting right to the nucleosis of generosity, and saving money. Is there anything homemade coupons can’t do? 

Christmas, Christmas, long grown from its religious roots straight and into our increasingly secular world. But how do we escape our own itchy clicker fingers and the endless boxes piling up on the front porch?

We do it by preserving the magical reminder of generosity and togetherness by choosing gifts easy on the environment, easy on the wallet, and extra on the intimacy … whenever we can.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

The Power of 1000

Hey everyone,

Last week I suddenly gave my 600th speech.

I went back and pulled up the ​first 10 speeches I ever gave​ -- in my hometown library, at the local book festival, on the stage at ​TEDx Toronto​. In the last couple weeks I spoke at Coca-Cola's head office in Atlanta, to all global tax partners at the world's biggest accounting firm ​on trust​, and then to the CEO and his top 300 leaders down at The Cleveland Clinic. That's a lot of speeches so how do we balance things out? Leslie and I pull out our ​family contract​ each year and one very important number on there is nights away. Everybody is different but we've decided I will travel for a max of 10% of the year. That way I'm home 90% of the time. But yet: 600 speeches! How did that happen? Well, it's because my goal is 1000. And as you'll see in my post below I feel like 1000 is the absolute perfect moonshot number. It's a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race number that's big and challenging ... while also reachable.

I feel the number 1000 can be a useful pull for all of us. Ask yourself: "What can I do 1000 of?"

As you'll see below I came about this thought slowly and through a number of projects over the past 16 years. I hope you like my post below on The Power of 1000.

What will you do 1000 of?

Neil

---

I didn’t realize it at the time, but something special happened to me on June 20, 2008.

I was in a pretty depressive state with my marriage heading the wrong direction and my best friend suffering from severe mental illness. I needed an escape. An outlet. A place to go. A place to vent.

So, I typed “How to start a blog” into Google and pressed that “I’m feeling lucky” button, which no one ever presses. And 10 minutes later, I started up a tiny website called ​1000 Awesome Things​.

My idea was to write down 1000 awesome things for 1000 straight weekdays to cheer myself up.

Why 1000?

Well, 100 awesome things sounded too low. Too easy! I could whip that off in a few months and I’d be finished. I didn’t expect I’d have things figured out in my own head that quickly.

And one million awesome things sounded like too much. A million! How many years would that take? Oh, just a couple thousand. Since I’m not Gandalf, I knew I was aiming too high.

1000 became my baby bear bowl of porridge.

It sounded jussssssssst right.

For the next four years, for the next 1000 straight weekdays, I really did write 1000 awesome things on my blog. And while ​my marriage fell apart​ and ​my best friend sadly took his own life​, that tiny blog became a salvation, a place to escape to, a place to disappear to.

On April 19, 2012, 1000 weekdays after I launched it, I announced the No. 1 awesome thing in a downtown bookstore beamed live to the CBC National News.

And then … that was it. I hit 1000. The project finished. The blog ended. And I moved on.

But something happened to me over the years.

And it’s something I never put a finger on until more recently.

The number 1000 kept popping up in my life.

I thought maybe it was just the famous ​Baader-Meinhof phenomenon​. You know, when you keep seeing the same obscure word jump out at you after hearing about it for the first time. Does that happen to you, too? In 1994, a commenter on the St. Paul Pioneer Press’s online discussion board came up with that strange term after hearing the name of the ultra-left-wing German terrorist group twice in one day.

But the number 1000 felt deeper than that.

When researching ​The Happiness Equation​,I looked at lifespans around the world. I was trying to understand why people in Okinawa, Japan, for example, live seven more years than North Americans and have no word for retiring.

So, guess what our average lifespan is? Here’s the interesting thing. It’s 1000 months. Or just over 83 years.

“There’s that number again,” I thought to myself.

A year later, I was working on my journal ​Two-Minute Mornings​. I found I was stressed out so I came up with a routine to help me chill. Each morning, I would wake up and answer three research-backed prompts to both clear and focus my mind:

1. “I will let go of …”

2. “I am grateful for …”

3. “I will focus on …”

When part of your life is doing interviews with media, you get good insights from journalists. And that’s what happened. I was doing the TV, radio, and podcast circuit on this journal and a host said something that struck me. She said:

“Today, we welcome Neil Pasricha on the show. His challenge? You’re awake 1000 minutes every day. Could you take two of them to make the other 998 even better?”

Wait a minute.

You’re alive 1000 months.

You’re awake 1000 minutes a day.

What an incredibly helpful way to measure what you’re doing in life in the broadest possible sense.

Renovating your fixer-upper for three months? Feels awful. But maybe small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. After all, it’s only 3 of your 1000 months. Hate your 100-minute commute? That makes sense! You’re only awake 1000 minutes a day, so you’re burning 200 or 20% of them in the car.

What’s another reason 1000 is such a powerful number?

Because it’s a moon shot number that’s actually realistic.

When you’re only alive for 1000 months (or roughly 30000 days), then doing something for 1000 of them is a massive commitment … that you can actually do.

Can you do 1000 morning runs?

Can you cook 1000 homemade dinners?

Can you teach 1000 students?

Can you help 1000 people?

Yes, you can. It will take you a while.

But you can.

Why 1000?

Because it is clear and measurable and big and daunting … but reachable. I wanted to quit so many times while writing ​1000 Awesome Things​. But I had that number, that commitment, those three big zeros staring me in the face.

Once I’d spent a year writing a few hundred awesome things, could I look at myself in the mirror if I quit? I decided I couldn’t, which is where duds like, say, ​#806 Ducks​ came from on my blog.

How do I use it in my life today?

I decided I wanted to try and read the 1000 most formative books in the world before I die. Easy math. About a book a month. I realized there was no list of 1000 books I could trust and no algorithm that could feed me these 1000 important, life-changing books.

So, I made my own. I decided to interview 333 people who I find inspiring and ask each of them for the three books which most changed their lives. Who? Authors like ​Judy Blume​, ​George Saunders​, and ​David Sedaris​. Artists like ​Sarah Andersen​, ​Daniels​, and ​Quentin Tarantino​. And inspiring people I stumble upon like ​Vishwas Aggrawal​, ​Rebecca S. Kaye​, or ​Elder Cox and Elder Corona​.

I record these conversations in a podcast called ​3 Books with Neil Pasricha​ and I release one chapter on the exact minute of every full moon up to 2040.

2040? Yes! That’s the magic of 1000.

It’s a moon shot — I may never make it. I started the project at 38 years old and I’ll be 60 when it’s over. It's 1000 books so it will take a long time. But I now know, and I now believe, in the power of 1000 to lead me there.

As George R.R. Martin wrote: “A reader lives 1000 lives before he dies … the man who never reads lives only one.”

There it is again.

A one with three zeros.

What can you do a thousand times?

Just sign up for doing 1000 of something and then get ready to drop your jaw and stare back at yourself as you accomplish your massive goal.

Good luck!

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared in the Toronto Star

Avoid Burnout By Asking This Question

In the late 1990s I began an undergrad business degree program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After nearly flunking Economics 101 and striking out with a majority of sports and teams, I finally found my home among a group of interfaculty misfits at the Golden Words comedy newspaper.

Golden Words was the largest weekly humor newspaper in the country, an Onion-esque paper publishing 25 issues per year, with a new issue every Wednesday during the school year. For the next four years, I spent every Sunday hanging out with a group of people writing articles that made us all laugh. We got together around noon and wrote until the wee hours of Monday morning. I didn’t get paid a cent, but the thrill of creating, laughing, and seeing my work published gave me a great high.

I loved it so much that I took a job working at a New York City comedy writing startup during my last summer of college. I rented an apartment on the Lower East Side and started working in a Brooklyn loft with writers from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do what I love.”

But it was the worst job of my life.

Instead of having creative freedom to write whatever I wanted, I had to write, say, “800 words about getting dumped” for a client like Cosmopolitan. Instead of joking with friends naturally and finding chemistry writing with certain people, I was scheduled to write with others. Eventually my interest in comedy writing faded, and I decided I would never do it for money again.

When I started writing my blog, 1000 Awesome Things, in 2008, I said I’d never put ads on the website. I knew the ads would feel like work to me, and I worried that I might self-censor or try to appeal to advertisers. No income from the blog meant less time trying to manage the ads and more time focused on the writing, I figured.

I was smart about that…but not smart enough to ignore the other extrinsic motivators that kept showing up: stat counters, website awards, best-seller lists. It was all so visible, so measurable, and so tempting. Over time I found myself obsessing about stat counters breaking 1 million, 10 million, 50 million; about the book based on my blog staying on the best-seller lists for 10 weeks, 100 weeks, 200 weeks; about book sales breaking five figures, six figures, seven figures. The extrinsic motivators never ended, and I was slow to realize that I was burning myself out. I was eating poorly, sleeping rarely, and obsessing about whatever next number there was to obsess about.

I started worrying that the cycle — set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal — would never end. And I started forgetting why I started writing my blog in the first place. I was shaken by how quickly I had gotten caught up in the achievement trap.

Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. The interest we have becomes lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.

Keep in mind that there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal — you’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external — you’re doing it because you get something for it. Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has performed some experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators with college students. She asked the students to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work, and some were not. What happened? Based on scores from independent judges, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”

And it’s not just getting rewards that hurts quality.
 In another study conducted by Amabile, 72 creative writers at Brandeis University and Boston University were split into three groups of 24 and asked to write poetry. The first group was given extrinsic reasons for doing so — impressing teachers, making money, getting into fancy grad schools. The second group was given a list of intrinsic reasons — enjoying the feeling of expressing themselves, the fun of playing with words. The third group wasn’t given any reason. On the sidelines, Amabile put together a group of a dozen poet-judges, mixed up all the poems, and had the judges evaluate the work. Far and away, the lowest-quality poems were from those who had the list of extrinsic motivators.

James Garbarino, former president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development, was curious about this phenomenon. He conducted a studyof fifth- and sixth-grade girls hired to tutor younger children. Some of the tutors were offered free movie tickets for doing a good job. What happened? The girls who were offered free movie tickets took longer to communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a worse job than the girls who were given nothing except the feeling of helping someone else.

The Garbarino study raises the question: Do extrinsic motivators affect us differently depending on age? Do we grow into this pattern — and can we grow out of it? According to a recent study by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, we may be hardwired to behave this way. Their work found that if infants as young as 20 months are extrinsically rewarded after helping another infant, they are less likely to help again than infants who received either no reward or simple social praise.

I was surprised by the studies, but they made sense to me. I loved writing for Golden Words. It was a joy, a thrill, a true love. With the paid writing startup in New York City, I lost all my energy and drive.

When you’re doing something for your own reasons, you do more, go further, and perform better. When you don’t feel like you’re competing with others, you compete only with yourself. For example, Professor Edward Deci of the University of Rochester conducted a study where he asked students to solve a puzzle. Some were told they were competing with other students and some were not. You can probably guess what happened. The students who were told they were competing with others simply stopped working once the other kids finished their puzzles, believing themselves to be out of the race. They ran out of reasons to do the puzzle. But those who weren’t told they were competing with others kept going once their peers finished.

Does all this mean you should just rip up your paycheck and work only on things you’re intrinsically motivated to do? No. But you should ask yourself, “Would I do this for free?” If your answer is yes, you’ve found something worth working on. If the answer is no, let paid work remain paid work and keep asking yourself what you would do simply for the pleasure you derive from doing it. Chances are, if you’re working solely for extrinsic reasons such as money, you’re bound to burn out sooner or later.

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review.